Tearing Down, and Tricksters

Posted on Wednesday 5 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Big Business is abandoning climate commitments;
  • Attacks on the Endangered Species Act, and critical thinking;
  • Trump thinks blue states are a threat to the nation; and about his irrationality;
  • How to deal with uncertainty (and the conservatives who refuse to);
  • More from Ezra Klein about The Odyssey: how Nolan’s Odysseus isn’t a trickster, but a man living with the consequences of tricksters;
  • David Brin on why salty-Earth folks hate science.
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More tearing down by MAGA and the current administration.

  • NY Times, 17 Jul 2026: How to Abandon Your Climate Commitments and Get Away With It
  • Subtitled “Big business made big promises about saving the planet. Following through hasn’t been easy.”
  • A follow-up article yesterday gives the earlier article’s original title: “Big Businesses Quietly Desert Climate Goals”
  • Because big business doesn’t care about doing the right thing; it cares about making money (that is the essence of capitalism), and so thinks in the short-term, and cares about public relations only until they don’t have to.

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Can People Out-Think Human Nature?

Posted on Tuesday 4 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Two items from Steven Pinker: One about modernism and beauty;
  • The other about a Thomas Sowell book about human nature and human reason.
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Yes, we’ve been doing it for some time.

Two items today via Steven Pinker on Facebook.

Facebook, today, Steven Pinker’s post

Pinker writes:

In The Blank Slate, I suggested another cause: the denial of human nature, including appreciation of beauty. Elites assumed that human tastes are infinitely malleable and so the masses would learn to overcome their bourgeois prejudices and appreciate brutalism, authoritarian high modernism, & other flauntings of ugliness. The idea has recently been elaborated by the MIT linguist Samuel Jay Keyser in The Mental Life of Modernism.

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All Stories Change

Posted on Monday 3 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Before it was called the Civil War, it was called the Slaveholders’ Rebellion, until apologists got the name changed;
  • Trump and rewriting American history;
  • Perhaps knowing less makes you happier;
  • Religious folks who see data centers as signs of the apocalypse;
  • Trump insists his polling number are high, even as they hit a new low;
  • More about the Texas reading list.
– – –

I saw comments today about how Homer’s Odyssey was, of course, tinkered with by the later Greeks, then by the Romans, and so on, as stories always are altered to suit the thematic needs of later cultures who repeat those stories. So Christopher Nolan’s foregrounding the idea of Zeus’ law isn’t so unusual.

Running theme: history is stories, and stories always change, accidentally or deliberately.

NY Times, guest essay by Anthony Conwright, yesterday: It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.

Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.

As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?

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Zeus’ Law

Posted on Sunday 2 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The Odyssey and Zeus’ Law;
  • Trump doubles down on reflecting pool vandals;
  • Christian sky evangelist kicked off plane;
  • Headlines from JMG about AI slop, Burgum also doubles down, bullying, executing women who get abortions, criminally charging librarians, permitting ex-gay torture, and about USAID and rap music.
– – –

We saw “The Odyssey” yesterday and I’m catching up on some of the commentaries. The right-wing is outraged by the casting of non-whites, as if the Greeks of 3000 years ago must have looked like modern-day Europeans. And, I realized as I saw the film, for its outright invocation of something called Zeus’ law, which is about treating strangers kindly because, in those days with dozens of gods running around micromanaging human affairs, any stranger might be a god. And if you offend a god, you risk its wrath.

(I last read The Odyssey in the 9th grade or so, and remembered the broad outline of the story, and its many incidents. But not Zeus’ Law.)

Let’s just note this one piece for now.

NY Times, opinion by Ezra Klein, today: Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse

Among other points, Klein says that Nolan’s Trojan Horse was to cite Zeus’ Law only superficially.

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An SF/F/H Venn Diagram

Posted on Sunday 2 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Further thoughts on the topic of Friday’s post. (Busy weekend.)

The first thing to understand about the very broad generalizations I made there is that there is no one type of “science fiction,” no one “fantasy” genre, no one idea of “horror.” In the essay I got published last year I made an attempt to describe a “hierarchy” of science fiction — in fact, an early version of that hierarchy was post back in 2020, here. The key difference is between the crude ‘popular’ idea of science fiction — spaceships, aliens, robots, and so on — and the more refined examples that take reality into account and speculate honestly about the nature of the unknown.

There is a similar range in horror. The crude ‘popular’ example of horror emphasize fear and disgust — monsters, gore, threats to existence. The subtler examples of horror focus more in creepiness and unease, even cosmic unease.

The notion of cosmic, or existential, horror, is captured fairly well by the Copilot summary I get when using Google:

Existential horror is a subgenre that explores themes of insignificance, isolation, and the unsettling realization that humanity is merely a speck in a vast, uncaring universe. It delves into the fear and anxiety stemming from the human condition and the search for meaning in a seemingly indifferent world. This genre often evokes feelings of dread and existential dread, making it a profound source of horror in literature and film.

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Science Fiction and Horror: New Thoughts

Posted on Friday 31 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • There is an overlap between science fiction and horror I just realized today;
  • On its 250th anniversary, America looks backward and forward;
  • Brief items about Head Start, Trump the Mafia Boss, Anthony Fauci’s mortal sin (challenging Trump), the new pro-teen pregnancy movement, and the triumph of girls in Boy Scouts.
– – –

I came across this same quote from H.P. Lovecraft twice today. A coincidence. Meaningful? No. But coincidences can make one pause and think about something you might otherwise pass over.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

According to Google this is the opening line from one of HPL’s earliest stories, “The Call of Cthulhu,” from 1928. And the whole opening is this:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Lovecraft wrote what some have called ‘cosmic horror’ and what occurred to me today after seeing this quote is that it fits right into my recent thinking about different ‘levels’ of reality, and how many questions make sense at some levels and not others. Humanity tends to project human values on the entire universe, unable or unwilling to think outside the box of human experience (as science fiction tries to explore).

Which is to say, perhaps there is a connection between certain kinds of science fiction and certain kinds of horror, which I have not until now considered.

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Reality is a Communist Plot, says MAGA

Posted on Thursday 30 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich lists items in MAGA’s totalitarian mindset;
  • Short items on religious discrimination, Trumponomics, and new 60 Minutes correspondents, no experience required.
– – –

Robert Reich, today: Reality is a Communist Plot, subtitled “Of MAGA and the totalitarian mindset”

As always, this isn’t about MAGA in particular. It’s about the lingering of the atavistic part of human nature that sees everything tribally, and doesn’t understand and rejects change. Reich summarizes the MAGA fantasies:

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

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Thinking for yourself; Suicidal empathy

Posted on Wednesday 29 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conditions for stupidity: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity;
  • No, ‘suicidal empathy’ is not destroying the West;
  • Short items on Bari Weiss, windmills, blaming Canada, how Trump pled the fifth too, how Christians preach to captive audience on airplanes.
– – –

Big Think, Jonny Thomson, yesterday: A philosopher’s guide to thinking for yourself in an age built to think for you

Subtitled: Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 3 conditions for stupidity that destroys societies: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity.

Which is to say, the conservative mindset.

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Of course this is bunk. Modern civilizations rests on the ability of people to empathize with foreign tribes.

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Vox, Zaid Jilani, yesterday: The right says “suicidal empathy” is destroying the West. Here’s the truth., subtitled “A new study debunks a popular conservative meme.”

I think the right wants an excuse not to care about anyone outside their own tribe.
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Religion, Mythology, Reality

Posted on Tuesday 28 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Sure, teach the Bible in school, alongside Greek mythology;
  • How Anthony Fauci was an early MAGA success at tearing things down;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how the Trump administration is trying to rewrite American history;
  • Jim Palmer on religious ideas that don’t fit reality;
  • How and why Trump is making the government worse, on purpose;
  • And a suite of Hans Zimmer music for The Thin Red Line, including music that didn’t appear in the final score.

**

OK, sure.

The Atlantic, Adam Kirsch, yesterday: The Bible Belongs in the Classroom, subtitled “Everywhere you look in American history, you will find the language, stories, and concepts from the Old and New Testaments.”

I would agree. When I was in the 8th grade, we learned Greek Mythology. We read Edith Hamilton. We read — maybe that was in the 10th grade — The Odyssey.

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Nothing Is Evenly Distributed, Ever

Posted on Monday 27 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

The great science fiction writer William Gibson famously said:

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Thought for today: The same could be said of the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution. Not only do many people not know many many things, some people deny those things, actively resisting modernity, preferring a tribal insularity of life. And tribal, religious stories, to ‘explain’ life, in spite of all the evidence of the reality of the world. I’ve posted many, many posts on this theme.

The progress of the human species is due to a very small minority of people. While the large majority resist.

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Busy over the weekend; see Facebook. My big monitor is still screwed; I’m working on my laptop.

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