Links and Comments: Election Reform; Social Change; Insurrectionist Victimhood; Republican Entitlement

Posted on Tuesday 12 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT Sunday Review, Beverly Gage and Emily Bazelon: How to Ensure This Never Happens Again, subtitled “The election and its aftermath have revealed weaknesses in our democracy. Here’s how we can fix some of them.”

The article reviews how we got here, and then lists specific suggestions.

  • Fix the electoral college process [i.e. make corrections to the existing process]
  • Establish national best practices for voting and election security
  • Register voters automatically
  • Turn D.C. and Puerto Rico into states
  • End gerrymandering
  • Make People Vote
  • Shorten the Transition
  • Eliminate the Electoral College

At least two of these, ending gerrymandering and the electoral college, are key points of Ezra Klein in his book Why We’re Polarized. Of course, these are not new ideas, and they are predictably opposed by Republicans — you’d think they are not interested in fairness of voting, but in currying favor to their shrinking base of, among others, white supremacists and religious fundamentalists, at the behest of billionaires like Sheldon Adelson (who died yesterday) who count on Republicans for tax cuts and deregulation. (That’s my potted summary of Republican politics; it plays to two different constituencies.)

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In fact, here’s Ezra Klein right here! NYT: Trump Has Always Been a Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing, subtitled “By enabling the president anyway, Republican elites helped make the storming of the Capitol possible.”

It begins by recalling a 2016 article that

complained that the press took Trump “literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Then walks us through various examples of Trump lying to his base (that the election had been stolen; that Pence could fix it all by himself), and concludes

The problem isn’t those who took Trump at his word from the start. It’s the many, many elected Republicans who took him neither seriously nor literally, but cynically. They have brought this upon themselves — and us.

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On a broader issue, here’s NYT columnist David Brooks, who likes to think about the big issues (though in a deeply conservative way, always bemoaning the loss of a better past): 2020 Taught Us How to Fix This, subtitled “Our current model of social change isn’t working.”

His point is the familiar one that you can’t argue, or train, someone into changing their thinking. “It turns out that if you tell someone their facts are wrong, you don’t usually win them over; you just entrench false belief.” With examples of racial bias training, that turn out not to do much good. So what does work?

People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan. Decades ago, the social psychologist Gordon Allport wrote about the contact hypothesis, that doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds. It’s how new emotional bonds are formed, how new conceptions of who is “us” and who is “them” come into being.

This seems plausible to me.

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The Atlantic, David A. Graham: The Insurrectionists Would Like You to Know That They’re the Real Victims, subtitled “The perpetrators of the assault on the Capitol and their sympathizers in the media and Congress lost little time in claiming the mantle of victimhood.”

History is rewritten by the self-styled victims.

Even after more than four years of rationalizing and excusing every violation by the president, Donald Trump’s enablers have their work cut out for them this week, after a mob incited by Trump sacked the U.S. Capitol, disrupted constitutional order, and killed a police officer. But, undeterred, they are still energetically devoted to the task.

…
The more common argument on the mainstream Trump-friendly right is simpler: It contends that what happened wasn’t so bad, and anyway it was someone else’s fault. The real victims, it turns out, are Trump and his supporters.

Cue Marco Rubio.

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NYT: Trump’s Legacy: Voters Who Reject Democracy and Any Politics but Their Own, subtitled “The mob attack on the Capitol, and interviews with Trump voters this week, show that the president’s subversion of democratic values will have enduring influence within the Republican Party.”

Interviews with Trump supporters, with the recurrent theme that Republicans think only they deserve to win and if they don’t, it must be fraud.

For these voters, the lack of allegiance to small “d” democratic values seemed to stem, in part, from the shift among many Republicans to imbibing information from sources that offer propaganda rather than news and facts. The share of Republicans who trust the mass media has plunged in the Trump years to 10 percent, according to Gallup. A majority of Republicans believe Mr. Trump was robbed of the election.

Mr. Hoyt praised The Epoch Times, a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation, because “they just give you the facts of what’s happening.” For Ms. Grossi, One America News Network, the far-right channel that spreads conspiracy theories, is the only information source she trusts. She also follows QAnon, the baseless conspiracy movement that links top Democrats to child sex trafficking.

So here’s another notion that the internet is a big part of the problem, because it allows, even encourages, people to live in silos or echo chambers with others of similar views; there’s no larger consensus reality.

I wonder if another part of the reason is that, before the internet, many people simply didn’t pay attention to the news at all (the way I did growing up, reading the newspaper and watching the evening network news every day, reading a weekly magazine every week). And now that the internet is in everyone’s pocket, and social media sites becoming ubiquitous, news, which gets highly selected for them, filters onto the sites whether they ask for it or not… in ways that reinforce their biases.

And as for the apocalyptic predictions of Trump voters fearing Biden’s win: when none of those things happen (confiscation of guns, outlawing the Bible, yadda yadda), what will they do?

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Washington Post: This is what it looks like when the mob turns on you.

The mob looks like America. Because it is America.

I don’t think there’s anything special, or especially corrosive, about Americans. This is a reflection of human nature, across all times and cultures. Democracy tries to counter this authoritarian mob-rules, but has had only partial success.

Posted in Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Election Reform; Social Change; Insurrectionist Victimhood; Republican Entitlement

Links and Comments: Yet more about conspiracy theories, since they never go away

Posted on Monday 11 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

First at Slate, an efficient recounting of the psychological reasons behind the attraction to conspiracy theories.

John Ehrenreich: Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories, subtitled “They’re not stupid.”

Long quote with links to references left intact:

What does predict belief in conspiracy theories? A cocktail of personality traits. Those who believe these theories typically show high levels of anxiety independent of external sources of stress, a high need for control over environment, and a high need for subjective certainty and, conversely, a low tolerance for ambiguity. They tend to have negative attitudes to authority, to feel alienated from the political system, and to see the modern world as unintelligible. Conspiracy theory believers are often suspicious and untrusting, and see others as plotting against them. They struggle with anger, resentment, and other hostile feelings as well as with fear. They have lower self-esteem than nonbelievers and have a need for external validation to maintain their self-esteem. They may have a strong desire to feel unique and special, and an exaggerated need to be in an exclusive in-group. Belief in conspiracy theories often also goes along with belief in paranormal phenomena, skepticism of scientific knowledge, and weaknesses in analytic thinking. Proneness to belief in conspiracy theories is also associated with religiosity, especially with people for whom a religious worldview is especially important. These traits are hardly universal among or exclusive to conspiracy theorists, but they help create a vulnerability to belief.

The articles goes on to discuss the psychological biases everyone is prone to: motivated reasoning, fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance. And how Trump and other conservatives foster mistrust of instituions, including of mainstream mass media, and scientists.

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Second, a long piece by Joe Forrest, on his “Progressive Christian’s Blog”:

Why Your Christian Friends and Family Members Are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories.

TLDR, but scanning it reveals (of course) many of the same points, with longer examples:

  1. Conspiracy Theories Make Us Feel Special.
  2. Conspiracy Theories Help Us Make Sense of a Chaotic and Complicated World.
  3. Conspiracy Theories Make Our Reality Seem More Exciting.

And then a section about “The Christian Problem” and then an: “Addendum: How to Not Be Fooled by a Conspiracy Theory.”

Posted in Lunacy, Psychology | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Yet more about conspiracy theories, since they never go away

Links and Comments: Not Who We Are; Christians and Trump

Posted on Monday 11 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

First, those of my Facebook friends who have the fortitude to read right-wing sites indeed confirm my suspicion that insurrectionists are planning more violence, against all the state capitals, and on inauguration day.

So then.

Two articles about the claim that the insurrectionists on the Capitol are “not who we are,” both from The Atlantic:

Ibram X. Kendi: Denial Is the Heartbeat of America, subtitled “When have Americans been willing to admit who we are?”

David Frum: The Conservative Cult of Victimhood, subtitled “Trump was a perpetrator who thought himself a victim, and American society has indulged that same illusion among Trump supporters.”

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And then two about the link between Trumpian politics and Christian evangelicals.

The Atlantic, Emma Green: A Christian Insurrection, subtitled “Many of those who mobbed the Capitol on Wednesday claimed to be enacting God’s will.”

The name of God was everywhere during Wednesday’s insurrection against the American government. The mob carried signs and flag declaring Jesus saves! and God, Guns & Guts Made America, Let’s Keep All Three. Some were participants in the Jericho March, a gathering of Christians to “pray, march, fast, and rally for election integrity.” After calling on God to “save the republic” during rallies at state capitols and in D.C. over the past two months, the marchers returned to Washington with flourish. On the National Mall, one man waved the flag of Israel above a sign begging passersby to Say Yes to Jesus. “Shout if you love Jesus!” someone yelled, and the crowd cheered. “Shout if you love Trump!” The crowd cheered louder. The group’s name is drawn from the biblical story of Jericho, “a city of false gods and corruption,” the march’s website says. Just as God instructed Joshua to march around Jericho seven times with priests blowing trumpets, Christians gathered in D.C., blowing shofars, the ram’s horn typically used in Jewish worship, to banish the “darkness of election fraud” and ensure that “the walls of corruption crumble.”

NYT, Katherine Stewart: The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage, subtitled, “Why do so many Republicans appear to be at war with both truth and democracy?”

(My short answer, as expressed before in this blog: because religious zealots *know* are right and so ordinary secular rules don’t matter.)

In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at The King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.

The most eloquent summary of the Pelagian vision, Mr. Hawley went on to say, can be found in the Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Mr. Hawley specifically cited Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words reprovingly: “At the heart of liberty,” Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The fifth century church fathers were right to condemn this terrifying variety of heresy, Mr. Hawley argued: “Replacing it and repairing the harm it has caused is one of the challenges of our day.”

Scary stuff. And conservatives worry about Sharia (law)!. To my mind there’s no difference between Sharia and likes of Hawley and Rubio.

Posted in Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Not Who We Are; Christians and Trump

Links and Comments: It Could Have Been Worse; It Might Get Worse; Lessons

Posted on Saturday 9 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

I don’t pretend to have any special insight into current events, but for the sake of perspective, of checking back from the future to see where we were at on this day, I will briefly summarize.

(Similarly, it would be interesting to have had day by day accounts of past events that have jolted the nation, to see how the stories unfolded and how various players reacted to them at the time, day by day.)

On Wednesday, the day Congress was scheduled to acknowledge the various certified state votes with the result that Joe Biden was confirmed as the next president, Trump egged on a crowd of supporters, or “protestors,” on the grounds that the election had been stolen from him (despite all the actual evidence) and to march on the Capitol, where the mob broke police barriers, invaded the building, and ransacked it. Five people died.

Three days later, Trump has not backed down, though Twitter has *finally* deleted his incendiary account(s) and Congress is considering a second impeachment, even if he is due to leave office in less than two weeks.

And people are beginning to worry that there will be a second siege by Trump cultists on inauguration day. (I will be surprised if the inauguration is held outdoors, as it traditionally is. That’s asking for trouble.)

Today news is emerging that it could have been worse, and that the rioters were not all just hooligans, but that some had murderous intent.

Washington Post: A mob insurrection stoked by false claims of election fraud and promises of violent restoration

CNN: Now it’s sinking in: Wednesday’s Capitol Hill riot was even more violent than it first appeared

Slate: They Were Out for Blood, subtitled, The men who carried zip ties as they stormed the Capitol weren’t clowning around.

The zip-tie guys apparently wanted to round up Pelosi and Schumer and execute them. And Mike Pence was to be hanged (thus a noose was mounted near the Capitol) for having subverted Trump’s election win.

Apparently the ‘protestors’ who converged on Washington really did believe that Trump had won in a landslide, and the election was stolen from him, because that’s what Trump told them, and some people (70 million) don’t notice or don’t care that Trump lies all the time, with his personal interests always top priority.

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I do have an original thought (at least something I’ve not seen anyone else express). That Trump’s self-styled revolutionaries are obviously loony-bins on many levels, divorced from reality and committed to fantastic, nonsensical conspiracy theories (QAnon, covid denialism, etc.), is it possible that revolutionaries in past era – even if they won – were similarly looney? Just because you win your war, or your revolution, doesn’t mean you were right.

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Next, two essays making the same point as I made yesterday: the idea that we can claim “this is not who we are”…

The New Yorker, David Remnick: The Inciter-in-Chief, subtitle, How surprising can Donald Trump’s recent provocation be when for years he has served as an inspiration to bigots everywhere?

Once the Capitol was cleared, the solemn assurances that “this is not who we are” began. The attempt at self-soothing after such a traumatic event is understandable, but it is delusional. Was Charlottesville not who we are? Did more than seventy million people not vote for the Inciter-in-Chief? Surely, these events are part of who we are, part of the American picture. To ignore those parts, those features of our national landscape, is to fail to confront them.

New York Times, Brent Staples: The Myth of American Innocence, subtitled, The Capitol attack shows the danger of forgetting America’s history.

…Talking heads queued up to tell the country again and again that the carnage was an aberration and “not who we are” as a people.
This willful act of forgetting — compounded by the myth of American innocence — has shown itself to be dangerous on a variety of counts. For starters, it allowed many Americans to view the president’s insistence that he had won an election in which he was actually trounced, and his simultaneous embrace of right-wing extremism, as political theater that will pass uneventfully from the stage when Joe Biden is inaugurated.

With a historical summary of past examples. Ending:

The mob assault on the Capitol was an outgrowth of what came before. It followed a heavily racialized campaign by a president who falsely portrayed African-American cities as hot spots of voting fraud, while endearing himself to white supremacists. Republicans who subscribe to this toxic strategy deserve to be held responsible for the chaos it reaps. For shades of things to come, they need look no further than the damaged Capitol and the dead and injured who were hauled away on gurneys.

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Stepping back for a take on Republicans and conservatism in general, here is Andrew Sullivan, from his latest weekly newsletter:

This Is The Face Of The GOP Now, subtitled, The descent from conservatism to nihilism is now complete.

It pains me to say it, but this week was, in many ways, the essence of American “conservatism” in 2021. It has morphed from a politics to a theological movement to a personality cult. It is a threat to the very foundations of liberal democracy. It is nihilist, performative, incoherent and bristling with the certainty of fundamentalists and the corruption of grifters. It has destroyed this country’s fiscal standing, wrecked this country’s international reputation, trashed the norms and practices of liberal democracy, perverted the rule of law, accelerated climate change, and now physically vandalized the most sacred civil place in America.

And for what? Ratings? Soaring and destabilizing inequality? A national debt previously unthinkable in peacetime? Thousands and thousands of viral deaths that might have been prevented by the simple act of a president wearing a mask in public and urging others to do the same? The eradication of a shared concept of truth? The embrace of Kim Jong Un? The delegitimization of the entire press? The rehabilitation of Putin? The wet dreams of Netanyahu? Or the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear bomb? Pick one or all of them. The last two Republican presidents have ended their terms with the country in ruins. We cannot afford another one until the GOP is razed and rebuilt as a viable, democratic party.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: It Could Have Been Worse; It Might Get Worse; Lessons

Links and Comments: The Coup Attempt; Human Nature; Republican Fantasies

Posted on Friday 8 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s hard to know where to start given events of the past few days. The general consensus among the pundits and sites that I read is that we knew this was coming all along, that this particular event (the seditious coup attempt, by hooligans and morons, on the nation’s Capitol) was easily foreseen, given chatter on right-wing websites, and that DC police should have been better prepared. (And why weren’t they?, is increasingly being asked. Why did some of those police seem to let the hooligans through?) And that Trump is the authoritarian, without concern for country or anything besides himself, that we saw him to be when he first announced he was running for office.

Let’s look at just a few headlines.

Vox: Republicans own this, subtitled, The Capitol Hill mob was the logical culmination of years of mainstream Republican politics.

Salon: The dangerous mind of Donald Trump has been exposed.

Washington Post: Trump’s evangelicals were complicit in the desecration of our democracy.

Examples of the last item at Slate: “God Have Mercy on and Help Us All”, subtitle: How prominent evangelicals reacted to the storming of the U.S. Capitol. With some of them simply denying what was plain to everyone else: that the seditionists were Trump supporters. No, some of them, say, they were “antifa” in disguise. They live in a fantasy alternate reality.

And this, which appeals to my sense that what is playing out is an expression of human traits that will always be with us. Democracy is an attempt to quell such tendencies, and in all of history, it hasn’t lasted for long.

NYT: Stop Pretending ‘This Is Not Who We Are’, subtitled, Electoral violence is in our DNA. The very paintings in the Rotunda of the Capital depict episode of violence as we saw this week.

This is an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy: “This is not who we are”; yes it is. And recognizing this truth, alas, undermines most of science fiction’s visions of techno-socialist utopias, from Arthur C. Clarke’s to Star Trek TOS’s.

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It’s not just Trump; it’s the entire conservative Republican establishment, which appeals to the paranoid and ignorant.

NPR: 1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says (Oops, this is from 2014 (I saved the link from Fb), but there’s no reason why this would have changed.)

CBS News: 50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down, economics study says. Cutting taxes for the wealthy is an article of faith for Republicans, and one of the few things Trump accomplished was passing a tax cut for the wealthy. But conservatives are apparently immune to evidence. Paul Krugman has discussed this topic endlessly, and characterized these kind of argument in his latest book called Arguing with Zombies.

Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on Links and Comments: The Coup Attempt; Human Nature; Republican Fantasies

Links and Comments: The Good Old Days; Accusations of Moral Decline

Posted on Sunday 3 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Wall Street Journal (via a ‘sponsored’ post in my Fb feed!): Why We Can’t Stop Longing for the Good Old Days, subtitled, “Neurology and nostalgia help explain why people have always worried that the world is going downhill.”

It’s an excerpt from a book by Johan Norberg called Open: The Story of Human Progress. His first point is something I had never heard of before.

Building ruins from scratch was the height of fashion for European aristocrats at the time, using shattered castles and crumbling abbeys to create an imaginary, romantic past. Hagley Park is a selective, artificial version of history—just like the politics of nostalgia that is so popular today.

People in many countries are longing for the good old days. When asked if life in their country is better or worse today than 50 years ago, 31% of Britons, 41% of Americans and 46% of the French say it’s worse.

Psychologists say that this kind of nostalgia is natural and sometimes even useful: Anchoring our identity in the past helps give us a sense of stability and predictability. For individuals, nostalgia is especially common when we experience rapid transitions like puberty, retirement or moving to a new country. Similarly, collective nostalgia—a longing for the good old days when life was simpler and people behaved better—can also be a source of communal strength in difficult times.

This is of course the narrative of what conservatism is about (cf. Haidt) — a longing to restore a golden age past (which didn’t actually exist).

The article goes on. Many think the 1950s was when America was last great. They didn’t think so in the ‘50s; then they thought it was the 1920s that were great. But no: in the ‘20s it was the Victorian era that was great. And so on.

People have been longing for the good old days at least since the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists have discovered Sumerian cuneiform tablets which complain that family life isn’t what it used to be. One tablet frets about “the son who spoke hatefully to his mother, the younger brother who defied his older brother, who talked back to the father.”

This psychological truth is partly about selective memory, a kind of biased thinking related to superstitions: we remember the hits and disregard the misses. We remember the nice things about the past, and forget or disregard and bad things (especially if those bad things affected others). More to the point, this is something that can be learned and understood. The entire MAGA movement is misguided on this ground, not to mention others. Can this be learned and understood? Not by most.

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Closely aligned with this idea is the constant fretting by religious leaders that the country is in a “moral decline.” And think that said moral decline is the cause of various disasters and calamities, or any trend these leaders disapprove of. And religious leaders who claim this tend to presume that only *his* version of God, or the savior, whatever, can possibly save America.

It’s superstition, presumption, and arrogance of the highest order. (And a failure of imagination.)

Patheos: Franklin Graham: We Will Have a “Dark Winter” Due to Immorality, Not COVID.

Nonsense, on several grounds.

Posted in Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on Links and Comments: The Good Old Days; Accusations of Moral Decline

Projects Status and Prospects

Posted on Saturday 2 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

From Facebook, on Thursday 31 Dec 2020:

After years of compiling data, refining scoring schemes, and experimenting with very wide html pages, I’ve begun filling the last two menu tabs at sfadb.com — the one for Rankings (so far just the Short Stories page) and the one for Timeline. There’s also a page for the Scoring Methodology, linked from those. There will eventually be pages for four other categories (novelettes, novellas, SF novels, and F/H novels). In trying to make the rankings pages more interesting that numbered lists of titles, I’ve added cover images and annotations that are like miniatures of the essays I was doing for Black Gate earlier this year, except here I’m trying to avoid spoilers. Only 20 are written so far; more will be added.

http://www.sfadb.com/TopShortStories

http://www.sfadb.com/Timeline

I wrote three drafts of this because this update is significant but I didn’t want to oversell it or sound like I was promoting myself excessively. But in truth, this is something of a milestone. It’s the first part of a project I’ve been contemplating for fully 20 years.

I even remember — or remember remembering — the occasion when I conceived of the project. I was jogging around the indoor running track at the North Hollywood Bally’s (formerly Holiday Spa). I was just getting my awards database posted, and reflected on how simple tallies of how many awards this story or that novel had won or been nominated for were very poor guides to overall quality, mainly because the number of awards had been growing from year to year, and many of the “classic” works of SF dated from decades before there were *any* awards.

There were two further influences. Locus, or rather Bill Contento, a friend of Charles Brown’s, had compiled annual indexes of books and anthologies and their contents for over a decade, and had combined them all into a single index that he sold on CD ROM. There he had a tally of the most reprinted stories, with IIRC something by Harlan Ellison leading the list. Second, somewhere in the mid 1990s, even at the dawning of the internet age, some guy (his name was Aurel Guillemette, who so far as I know has never published anything before or since) had published a hardcover book called The Best in Science Fiction: Winners and Nominees of the Major Awards in Science Fiction, which title, it seemed to me, begged the issue I just described: it assumed tallies of awards were guides to the “best.”

So as I set up an online index to SF awards, I thought, I can improve on that idea by combining awards with anthology reprints (and later “citations” from expert books and all-time polls), that with appropriate weighting, could identify the best, or “most significant” is probably a more accurate descriptor, novels and stories of all times.

And it’s taken me 20 years to finish. Only near the end did I decide to write glosses on the top ranking stories, and include cover images, and so finishing the rest of the lists will take a few more weeks, perhaps two or three months. But the ranking scheme, and the rankings, are done. And soon I will be rereading all the top ranked novelettes to write glosses on the top ranking of those.

The irony is… gathering so much data, tweaking the scoring algorithm over the years, hasn’t substantially changed the results of simple tallies of reprints, or even of awards within a limited range. Guillemette’s results put “Bears Discover Fire” at the top; so do mine. Contento’s ranking put Harlan Ellison at the top; his story is very near the top of mine. And my highest ranking novels are familiar to anyone who has seen similar rankings, by whatever methods.

But I think my Timeline is really cool, and no one has done anything like it before.

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Meanwhile. The hospital stay and recovery both interrupted my progress on that and other projects, but then spurred me to apply myself to finishing arguably the most important one.

I think sfadb.com, with its pages of awards listings and indexes by author, will be my legacy, as long as I leave behind instructions for its maintenance. Everyone will forget my role in Locus Online. Reviews in Locus or at Black Gate are fleeting. My notion for a book would at best draw interest for a season, then be forgotten, or at worst never sell or be noticed at all.

In the middle is my personal project of writing family history and memoirs. I made a lot of progress in 2020, in part due to the pandemic shut-in. I think I’d finished perhaps 80%. I have a couple more memoir essays to write, and more family photos to post.

My current plan is to take a break of just a couple weeks from reading for the sfadb rankings, to polish and finish the family history and memoir posts. I started that today. (And I’ve written a 6000 word memoir post about my heart attack and hospital stay, first posted back on November 24th.)

Then I return to finishing the sfadb rankings and annotations, which I would think won’t take more than a couple months.

And then… I will return to reading of general nonfiction. Reading of classic SF novels. I’ll consider resuming some kind of reviews for Black Gate. I’ll start writing more drafts for what might be my book.

And hope that I stay alive long enough to finish all these projects.

Posted in Personal history | Comments Off on Projects Status and Prospects

Links and Comments: The Game of Life; Authoritarianism; Conservatives and the Feudal System

Posted on Saturday 2 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT, from last week’s Tuesday Science section: The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life. (Print title: “Life, In All Its Glory” with subtitle “Fifty year on, a game still offers lessons about simplicity, complexity and uncertain.”)

The article marks the passing of mathematician John Conway, who famously developed the “game of life” way back in 1970. I’ve heard about it for years, and consider it exhibit A in any matter in which someone claims, for example, I can’t imagine how the eye could have evolved on its own, therefore God.

The game of life shows how very simple iterative rules can quickly give rise to impressively complex results… results that give the impression of being… designed.

The game is played on a grid on which squares can be black or white. I’ll just copy from this NYT article:

The game was simple: Place any configuration of cells on a grid, then watch what transpires according to three rules that dictate how the system plays out.

Birth rule: An empty, or “dead,” cell with precisely three “live” neighbors (full cells) becomes live.

Death rule: A live cell with zero or one neighbors dies of isolation; a live cell with four or more neighbors dies of overcrowding.

Survival rule: A live cell with two or three neighbors remains alive.

With each iteration, some cells live, some die and “Life-forms” evolve, one generation to the next.

Starting with simple configurations one can quickly develop patterns that seem to move, intact, across the screen, or playing board, patterns that give the impression of life, of birth and death. And that’s just from three rules.

The article has testimonials about the game’s impact the implications from Brian Eno, Daniel Dennett, Rudy Rucker, Stephen Wolfram, and others.

(And of course this theme is explored in detail in a couple of Richard Dawkins’ books, The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable.)

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Not coincidentally, this New Yorker article, Three Mathematicians We Lost in 2020, has more about Conway (and about Ronald Graham and Freeman Dyson).

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In the current New Yorker (the Jan 4 & 11 issue) the lead “Talk of the Town” piece, is “Fault Lines” by Alan Gopnik. A Google search turns it up as What We Get Wrong About America’s Crisis of Democracy, subtitled “The interesting question is not what causes authoritarianism but what has ever suspended it.”

The gist of his essay is that American’s current slide towards authoritarianism isn’t an exceptional circumstance that needs to be explained. It’s democracy that’s the exceptional circumstance.

Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise—that the descent into authoritarianism is what needs to be explained, when the reality is that . . . it always happens. The default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them. The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy.

With discussion of past episodes in American history about Goldwater, the crazy things people have believed, conspiracy thinking, and so on.

The way to shore up American democracy is to shore up American democracy — that is, to strengthen liberal institutions, in ways that are unglamorously specific and discouragingly minute. The task here is not so much to peer into our souls as to reduce the enormous democratic deficits under which the country labors, most notably an electoral landscape in which farmland tilts to power while city blocks are flattened. This means remedying manipulative redistricting while reforming the Electoral College and the Senate. …

Ezra Klein makes very similar points (about how the electoral college favors farmland states, about redistricting) in his Why We’re Polarized.

The irony is that all the MAGA cultists are pining for the opposite of what the founders thought they were creating in America. Trump’s supporters don’t want democracy (increasingly this seems to be true for the Republican establishment as well) they want to win, at any cost, never mind hum-drum democracy.

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This resonates with some very high-level observations about science fiction and fantasy. It’s been noted many times how most fantasy is set in an imaginary past that is more feudal than republican or democratic. Even in much of science fiction, imagining future societies in which iniquities have been eliminated and some kind of social utopia has been achieved (as in, say, Star Trek TOS) is rare.

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So this connects with some passages I copied out of a Fb post a while back… well, five weeks back. They’re talking about Gene Wolfe, one of most literary and complex of fantasy (and science fiction) writers, who was also a devout Catholic, and (so), was conservative. The point here is the claim about how conservatives love the feudal system (which dovetails with the discussion about about the continual slide to authoritarianism).

Rick Norwood
Gene Wolfe was a conservative. I don’t remember him writing about C. S. Lewis, but I’ll bet he read and approved of Lewis’s views on The Great Chain of Being. I love Lewis’s fantasy, but what I can accept in fantasy I cannot accept in reality. Lewis, for example, rejected Einstein’s theory of relativity on the grounds that a being light years tall could wiggle his little toe by an effort of will, and human will was not limited by the speed of light.

…

James Pepe
Much as I love Gene Wolfe’s fiction, the quote above is utter bollocks. Conservatives love the feudal system because everybody knew their place. And, of course, Tolkien, Lewis, and Wolfe all imagined that their place would be higher than surf. The big problem with all hierarchies is that people who could make great mathematicians or poets or philosophers were, if born a serf, doomed to illiteracy, and never able to make a contribution. The huge progress of the human race in the age of enlightenment is due in large part because enlightenment allow people of “low” birth to contribute to progress. Of course, what I see as progress, Wolfe would not.

…
Micah Ingle
Plenty of criticism of the enlightenment/modernity to be made from a non-conservative POV of course

Rick Norwood
Hard to see how. We live longer, healthier lives, have far more freedom, have access to all human art and knowledge in a way undreamed of in the Good Old Days. What are your criticism of modernity?

I think I missed something between the first two quotes. I’m on Norwood’s side, about modernity. And all those feudal fantasy novels are about wizard and knights, not the ignorant who drudged in the fields and lived short lives, and knew their place.

Posted in Evolution, Mathematics, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: The Game of Life; Authoritarianism; Conservatives and the Feudal System

Links and Comments: Gift-Giving; Australia is Fake; Facebook as Doomsday Machine

Posted on Thursday 24 December 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT: You’re Choosing a Gift. Here’s What Not to Do., subtitled “Many of our natural impulses turn out to be wrong. Psychological research can help us choose wisely.”

Another essay about how intuition and “common sense” can seem appropriate for an individual, but are dysfunctional in the bigger picture. Here applied to the mundane task of buying gifts for others.

There are five main points in the essay:

  1. Ignore price. “When researchers asked people to recall a gift they gave and then to rate how much they thought recipients liked it, higher prices went with higher ratings. But when people made the same ratings for a gift they had received, price was completely unrelated to enjoyment.”
  2. Give gifts that are actually usable. “Indeed, a study examined the prices that resold gift cards commanded on eBay, and showed that people were willing to pay around $77 for a $100 gift card to a more expensive store (for example, Bloomingdale’s), but would pay around $89 for a $100 gift card to an everyday establishment (for example, Lowe’s).”
  3. Don’t worry if your gift isn’t immediately usable. “Givers didn’t like the idea of giving someone half the money to buy a high-end blender, preferring to give a medium-priced model outright. Recipients showed the opposite preference.”
  4. Give people what they ask for. “…But recipients actually think it’s more thoughtful to give a gift that they requested. They see it as showing that the giver attended to and honored their wishes.
  5. Give experiences, not things. “…But givers are leery of experiences because they worry it’s more likely they’ll pick something the recipient doesn’t want. It’s a valid concern, but there’s an easy fix: Make sure there are choices. Instead of giving a massage, give a gift certificate to a spa that offers a range of services.”

I’ve been thinking about this last one for some time, even though arranging “experiences” can be more complicated than just buying something. But at a certain point in your life, you realize you have enough *stuff*, and don’t really need anything more, except perhaps replacements of things like clothes that wear out.

Also, I’ve tried to pay more attention to the fourth item, by being alert for a month or two before the holidays what people (well, my partner), wish they could have. Of four gifts this year, two will be fulfillments of such casual remarks.

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Via Facebook, a link from an Australian news source about the latest conspiracy theory from the Flat Earthers: Move over Atlantis – is Australia geography’s greatest fiction?.

A map of Australia is stamped with big red letters: FAKE. The text underneath reads: “Australia isn’t real. The people are either paid actors or robots.”

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Finally for today, a topic increasingly being discussed.

The Atlantic: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine, subtitled “The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s not too late to save ourselves.”

Long essay which I haven’t read entirely, but the general thesis is that Facebook (and other social media) play off people’s worst instincts and provides aggressive feedback to everything you click on, no matter how paranoid or bizarre. (Don’t get your news from Facebook!) And how therefor it’s a kind of “doomsday machine,” a kind of automatic feedback mechanism designed to take any small violation (of international nuclear treaties, say), and respond so overwhelmingly that it leads to doomsday.

Related, an op-ed from a few weeks ago — What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers, subtitled “Many Americans’ feeds are nightmares. I know because I spent weeks living inside two of them.” — about the vile content of two older Americans who rely on Facebook feeds for their news. How did all this propaganda and fake news get on their feeds? Because they clicked on one, presumably, and so Fb fed them more. (Just like if I watch an airplane video of 747s taking off from JFK or Hong Kong, Fb feeds me more such videos in my news feed.)

I have a notion to examine that op-ed and then reproduce my own Fb feed, on some random day. I never see any of the garbage the examples in the op-ed see.

(This was drafted last Thursday and posted only tonight.)

Posted in Lunacy, Psychology | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Gift-Giving; Australia is Fake; Facebook as Doomsday Machine

Links and Comments: The American Divide

Posted on Tuesday 22 December 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Washington Post, Max Boot (a conservative who’s left the Republican party): No vaccine can end America’s pandemic of ignorance and irrationality

But the biggest divide in modern America, I would argue, is between those who are rational and those who aren’t.

…
The good news is that roughly two-thirds of the country inhabits the land of facts, where information comes from mainstream media. The bad news is that at least one-third live in a la-la-land of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” where the most trusted sources of information are Fox News and Facebook — or, heaven help us, Newsmax and OAN. There is plenty of irrationality on the left, to be sure, but it now appears much more prevalent on the political right, where so many deny both climate change and the coming change of administrations.

There is a vast, unbridgeable chasm that separates the brilliant scientists who came up with the coronavirus vaccines and the ignoramuses who believe that the coronavirus was engineered by Bill Gates to profit from vaccinations, or that it was created as a bioweapon by China, or that it is spread by 5G cell towers, or that it doesn’t actually exist, or that its dangers are vastly exaggerated, or that masks are either useless or harmful in stopping its spread. This pandemic of misinformation helps explain why the United States is among the countries with the highest covid death rates in the world despite having the most sophisticated medical sector.

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Recently in the news: right-wing “news” organizations have been obliged, under threat of lawsuit from voting machine manufacturers, to disavow their conspiracy-theory-mongering about the election. Truth will out, maybe.

CNN: After legal threat, Fox airs news package debunking election fraud claims made by its own hosts

Slate: Fox Airs Segment Debunking Voter Fraud Claims After Legal Threat From Smartmatic

But wait–! A case of voter fraud has been found!

The Hill: Pennsylvania Trump supporter charged with voter fraud

…But it’s about a man who used his deceased mother’s name to cast another vote for Trump.

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Some things never change. Except that, despite misinformation campaigns, certain diseases *have* been eradicated because of vaccines.

The Atlantic: Anti-vaxxers Think This Is Their Moment, subtitled, Society’s well-being depends on how well public-health officials and average internet users combat misinformation.

Social-media takedowns are not the right approach to addressing this content because they turn the propaganda into forbidden knowledge, often increasing the demand. Down-ranking and deprecating anti-vaccine content can minimize some of its reach, but it doesn’t address the underlying lack of trust in institutions, pharmaceutical products, or government. Restoring that trust requires far more work, but time has run out.

This reflects my conclusion, or change of mind, in recent years, that you can’t explain or reveal the facts to someone and expect them to change their mind. Humans rationalize away what conflicts with their emotional persuasions.

More to the point of these links: If the MAGA cultists think America needs to return to, or be kept at, greatness, why do they think nothing about America, its science, its government, its elections, can be trusted and must be corrupt or fraudulent?

Is it because their idea of greatness is to be belligerent, racist, and dumb as a sack of rocks, like Trump?

Posted in Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: The American Divide