MAGA taste in art, and a new exhibit in Washington DC;
More Republican destruction: the US Census, and monitoring the Arctic;
Maybe they don’t believe they’re lying, they just don’t know the difference between lies and truth;
Robert Reich on why MAGA wants children to get sick and die of measles;
Aliens stole a Christian televangelist’s eggs and made a hybrid baby;
Pettersson #6
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I don’t know why it should necessarily be that conservatives have lousy tastes in art, but it does seem to be so. On one level it’s understandable that conservatives should like ‘representational’ art, e.g. painting of actual things, or music that is lyrical, and reject anything else, such as any kind of abstraction. There’s that cognitive limitation thing again.
And we could discuss Trump, who likes nothing so much as gilt on everything. And lowbrow music for his Kennedy Center and rallies. And wrestling as 4th of July entertainment. Perhaps he has paintings of tigers on black velvet somewhere; surely his MAGA fans do. But let’s look at this:
Subtitled: “How Enemies Become Friends” (Bright Matter Books, February 2026, xxi + 181pp)
Here is the third of Harari’s world’s-history-for-children books, taking a 30,000-foot view of the big changes over the millennia of human history. Each book has four chapters. I’ll recall the first two volumes…
Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World
Humans are animals; there were once different kinds of humans, but only our branch, Sapiens, is still alive;
The superpower of Sapiens is the ability to cooperate in large numbers, with the ability to tell imaginary stories and to invent stories about corporations, money, and religion, which work so long as everyone agrees to them;
Early humans lived in tribes that grew and split into smaller tribes, were experts about their environment, believed in ghosts and spirits;
Over the past 50,000 years humans spread across the globe and killed off all the big animals, especially in Australia and the Americas, without realizing what they were doing.
Volume 2: Why the World Isn’t Fair
The agricultural revolution led hunter-gatherers to settle into villages and tend animals; problems of pests and droughts gave opportunities to chiefs and priests and sacrifices to appease the gods;
As villages grew, diseases spread, people acquired more possessions, villages fought; farmers and gatherers learned to think differently;
Larger communities led to problems, requiring leaders to make decisions, tax collectors, punishments for rule-breakers, and slavery; then writing, numbers, documents, and bureaucracy to keep track of all the documents.
You get people to follow the rules by inventing stories about the gods who made the rules; stories weren’t about truth, but were necessary for society to function; and stories can change: part of growing up is learning which stories to keep, and which to change.
Here’s a summary of this third book on four points. (Though this book is a bit lop-sided, the early part consisting of stories about fictional characters discovering the world, the latter part being more substantive.)
Volume 3: How Enemies Become Friends
Recalling the stories of Gilgamesh, Jason, Zeus, Jonah, Romulus and Remus; people in different cities worry about monsters, and strange ways in other cities;
The secret that brought people together was the market. And that became possible with the invention of money. The most successful story ever told. Though it can be dangerous if people love it too much.
History is full of wars, and empires. Empires are unfair, except when it’s your own. And conquered peoples forget their past; societies gradually become mixed. Author tells the story of the Romans, its playwrights, its emperors; its gods and the gods of others gave way to the Jewish god, called here Sky Father, who sent Jesus to tell stories of heaven and Hell. There were so many stories about Jesus a council met to decide which were true, and called that collection “the Bible.” Gradually stories about the old gods were forgotten. Still, people have multiple ancestors. History is complicated; we don’t belong to just one country, and we’re all descended from good guys and bad guys.
Is there one true story? Everyone believes in their own. But they can’t all be right. What about those who don’t believe in the Sky Father? Christians gradually destroyed the temples of other gods, insisting those gods were just stories. Their Inquisition killed nonbelievers. Yet different versions of Sky Father said different things about wine and other things. Questions about Sky Father led to the idea of a second god: good and evil, God and the Devil. Questions remain: why do we suffer? A man in India, who came to be known as Buddha, decided instead of arguing about gods, we should look for ways to stop suffering. Sometimes we make ourselves miserable. So put these things out of your mind, said Buddha. Don’t worry about the gods; do your best to help others instead of harming them. Yet people still argue about how to live. Over thousands of years people came up with lots of different rules and stories. The biggest discovery in history helped people decide which stories to believe. That discovery was science.
(The subject of the next book.)
How mathematics is behind the things we perceive as beautiful, via Marcus du Sautoy;
What is Trump trying to accomplish by reducing the number of diseases medicine can prevent children from getting?;
Several items show confusion on the right between concepts of communism and socialism;
Pettersson #8.
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The deep picture. Humans invoke God for things they find beautiful, without understand why they find certain things beautiful, and other things not. (Whereas God must surely be responsible for everything, including the ugly and disgusting.)
The answer, rather, is that humans have evolved to be pattern-seeking creatures, and see complex mathematical patterns as beauty. And why are we drawn to the beautiful? Perhaps because the order or beauty we perceive in mathematical structures are signs of structure, and health.
Plagiarism perhaps. Racism perhaps. Academic obfuscation, perhaps. I’m not going to figure it out. But Coyne’s piece ends with some comments from Richard Dawkins that speak directly to one of my themes.
My point in quoting this is in the third and following sentences (highlighted):
Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects travelling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language? Look, for example, at the following passage from Arday’s thesis:
“An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognised that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”
I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination.
At the same time, there are apparently other crises in academic publishing — the need to publish at all, to gain tenure; the replicability crisis especially in the ‘soft’ sciences; this notion of “physics-envy,” and so on. And now the infection of AI, as signaled by the apostrophe issue cited in the third paragraph above.
If there’s a solution, it has to lie with the application of rigorous standards and processes as I suggested in yesterday’s post, the “Capability Maturity Models” of engineering. As Dawkins suggests, those are the only things that work when dealing with reality outside our local experience. The very opposite of the way our current government is working, where loyalty, nepotism, and arbitrary timelines overrule any standards of integrity or experience.
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The more I think about it, the more I think the great left/right divide is analogous to objectivity vs subjectivity. Examples today.
If you have “faith,” anything can mean whatever you want. Don’t they realize this? The entire random world is all about them.
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This is also about social responsibility vs individual freedom. Left/right. The right doesn’t care that they’re spreading deadly viruses by refusing to wear masks; it’s about their freedom!
I think I predicted once that eventually they would go after seat belts in cars as being too much a part of the nanny state.
You can try to explain to these people that society is better off, overall, when certain restrictions are put in place to save reckless people from themselves. It’s not just about them. It’s about everyone’s healthcare costs; it’s about the wise precautionary folks having to pay for the damage caused by the reckless.
But, they don’t care. Freedom!
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Once again, people use “faith” to excuse anything.
Subtitled: “Brittany Boltinhouse says her conservative Christianity cost her the title. Screenshots of her own social media posts tell a very different story.”
What did she actually do? She posted a bunch of social media posts about “n*ggas.”
Defending them as her faith.
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And a longer piece.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: MAGA has pandemic nostalgia, subtitled “Renewed harassment of Dr. Anthony Fauci is a sad attempt to reclaim a Covid-era victim narrative”
For people outside of Donald Trump‘s MAGA coalition, the renewed Republican harassment campaign of Dr. Anthony Fauci makes no sense. It’s been more than five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns ended. With the November midterms looming, most Americans are far more focused on present-day concerns, such as the high cost of living and a tough job market, than a disease that has faded from a “mortal threat” to a “minor annoyance” for the vast majority of people. But that didn’t stop Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky’s Rand Paul, to haul the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before a Senate committee in late July to be harangued with coronavirus conspiracy theories — even though Fauci’s tenure ended four years ago.
…
But the social media response to the Fauci hearing showed that one group of people wishes it could be 2020 all over again: MAGA diehards. Right-wing accounts went buck wild with posts reviving all their favorite lies from the pandemic, from claiming vaccines don’t work to insisting that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon.
This is an ongoing theme, but I haven’t quite boiled it down yet. Just collected lots of examples.
Yet there’s a certain victim narrative running through so many stories about Christians these days.
Why? Is it because their religious narratives are increasingly under assault by the evidence of the real world, and the victory of science and technology in having built our modern world?
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Currently my huge monitor is down, and I’ve been working from my laptop. The arrangement on my desk therefore makes it more difficult to use my CD player, which I do everyday while writing up my blogpost. Instead I’ve resorted to YouTube.
There are several videos of Allan Pettersson symphonies, including this one of the 9th.
Comments indicate this is a slower performance than usual; certainly, 1hr 25m it’s longer than my CD with conductor Alun Francis, at 69:52.
It’s slower, though only in a few selected passages. Alas, the video shows only landscapes, not the playing orchestra.
Posted inMusic, Religion, Science|Comments Off on Faith Excuses Everything; Process Models Accomplish Things
Jim Palmer on the assumptions we make in trying to understand reality;
Science academy axes climate section from manual for federal judges;
About a “capability model” for immaturity.
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Let’s return to one of Jim Palmer’s long essays that I noted some three weeks ago and put off. It seems to go my theme about layers of reality… Humans tend to ‘flatten’ reality and ask questions about the ‘meaning of life’ that simply don’t have answers in the cosmic realm. Only in the local mundane realm. We are like fish who don’t understand all the realms above the surface of the water.
Desconstructionaology, Jim Palmer, 13 Jul 2026: Before We Explain Reality, subtitled “The First Question”
Conservatives attacking Fauci aren’t interested in learning;
Paul Krugman on how a bad-faith government is also an incompetent government;
MAGA prophet is sure God is going to start killing people he doesn’t like;
Democratic policy goals are hard sells against the GOP’s need for instant gratification.
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Two items on the Senate hearings with Anthony Fauci. Needless to say, conservatives are not interested in learning, just in accusing.
Washington Post, Editorial Board, 6 Aug 2026: The contempt vote against Fauci was a stunt, subtitled “Congress could learn many lessons from the pandemic response, but Thursday’s vote doesn’t help.”
Posted inconservatives, Politics, Science|Comments Off on Understanding vs. Blaming, Bad-Faith Arguments, Religion as Rank Tribalism, and Short-term vs Long-Term Thinking
Short items: GOP melts down over Abdul El-Sayed; Trump is learning to be embarrassed; MSM covers heat events without mentioning climate change; Heritage Foundation thinks Fauci proves we should ignore experts; an Alabama senator wants to discriminate against LGBTQ students; Trump thinks drivers of electric cars have a disease; Eric Metaxas has no reason Christians should support Trump other than the “Satanic wickedness of the Democrats”.
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We saw the final episode of this new version of Little House on the Prairie last night. The first season arc ends with the Ingalls being driven out of their initial house by a prairie fire. Meanwhile their town has dealt with a government contract to take over the land once owned by the Osage Nation.
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.
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.
