Marriage, and Women

Posted on Thursday 11 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Adam Lee on whether marriage can survive the continued emancipation of women;
  • Thought of the day about who’s making progress and who are against it;
  • Short takes on a Republican loonie; on a Christian who advises calling gay men a slur; how Republicans reflexively opposite everything Democrats implement to help people as being “woke”; and how Republicans favor business over public safely, every time.
– – –

Today’s think piece.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 10 Dec 2025: The end of marriage?, subtitled “If marriage goes extinct, it will be because it deserves to.”

Haven’t read it yet. Why would this be? Among some progressives there’s an idealistic notion that human nature can somehow be overcome. I’m less sanguine about that.

OK then. The article is about the roles of women (and not whether some institution will remain necessary for the raising of children). I’ll sample:

In the traditional picture, men work and earn the income while women manage the household and raise the children. Even though this mythologized scenario lacked equality, at least it had a clear expectation of what each partner is—and isn’t—responsible for doing.

But this white-picket-fence scenario was never a universal reality, even in the postwar era. Today, it’s less realistic than ever. Jobs are more precarious, workers’ rights are under relentless attack, and the price of essential goods like housing, health care and education is ballooning. With America squeezed in the vise of inflation, a stay-at-home spouse is a luxury that increasingly few couples can afford. More and more middle-class families need two working adults just to survive.

In fact, since women are now more educated than men, often it’s women who are the breadwinners in their marriages. They bring in the income that keeps their families afloat.

And yet men still expect the wives to do all the housework; thus marriage is becoming less attractive to women.

And on top of that, there’s the widening political divide between men and women. As women become more educated and independent, they’re becoming sharply more liberal. They want to have their own careers, earn their own money, and be in control of their own lives without having to depend on anyone else or ask anyone else’s permission for the things they want to do.

At the same time, more men, including young men, are being drawn to conservative ideologies that demand their wives submit to them, and that seek to ban abortion, outlaw contraception, even restrict divorce. In short, ideologies whose main goal is to deprive women of autonomy over their bodies and lives.

All these factors converge on one result: increasingly, women are finding marriage unappealing. They see it as a ticket to second-class status where they’re expected to subordinate their own lives and dreams to the desires of men.

Then considering the red states.

The fact that women are becoming less religious is almost certainly another force driving this trend. In the past, religion was the main force smoothing over the mismatched expectations and entrenched inequalities of marriage. Religious beliefs conditioned women to accept subordination as their God-given role. No surprise that, as more women see through these patriarchal lies, they’re less willing to be subjugated to men’s desires.

And how the propagandists are freaking out.

One obvious way to fix the problem would be to urge men to be better partners. After all, it’s rational for women to reject marriage when they perceive it as a bad bargain. You could imagine that religious conservatives, who claim to be pro-marriage and pro-family above all else, would want to redress this imbalance. You could imagine church leaders and cultural authorities telling men that, if they want to get married and have a family, they have to be good husbands and fathers. They have to make their wives’ lives better, rather than dragging them down.

But, of course, they’re not doing any of that.

Instead, they’re intensifying the propaganda. They’re doubling down on their insistence that women don’t need education or careers, and that getting married, ideally young, is the sole path to fulfillment.

The most rabidly misogynist are loudly insisting that giving women political power and economic freedom was a mistake. As disgusting as it is, this is a telling admission: they know the life they’re offering is so miserable that people won’t choose it if given the choice, so the only thing to do is to take away that choice.

So, is marriage doomed?, the writer asks. Not if men can fix the problems with it.

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Related, which I haven’t read:

NY Times, opinion by Michelle Goldberg, 9 Dec 2025: Republican Women Suddenly Realize They’re Surrounded by Misogynists

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Thought of the day, somehow inspired by Trump’s latest speech:

I’m thinking that human progress, in the broadest sense, has been the result of a very tiny fraction of the population, no more than 1% (if not quite the lone genius theory of human history), who make the discoveries and dare to challenge the status quo, while the rest of humanity has trailed along, using those discoveries without understanding them, or actively resisting new ideas and such progress. Currently, those resisting would be the entire Republican party, and all religions. To simplify grossly. They are coat-tailing off the progress that others, the scientists and progressives, have made.

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Short takes.

  • Republicans seem to have no policy except for opposing everything Democrats do.
  • If changing a typeface makes it easier for some people to read, Republicans are against it as being “woke”.
  • NY Times, 9 Dec 2025: At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke, subtitled “Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Biden-era move to the sans serif typeface ‘wasteful,” casting the return to Times New Roman as part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts.
Posted in Culture, Human Nature | Comments Off on Marriage, and Women

Steven Pinker: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, post 1

Posted on Thursday 11 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
(Viking, Feb. 2018, xix+556pp, including 102pp of notes, references, and index.)

This is the last of the ‘big’ Steven Pinker books that I’ve read but not yet written up here. Though there was one book in between them (THE SENSE OF STYLE, 2014) and though the connection isn’t explicit, this book is a companion, perhaps even a spiritual sequel, to THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE. (And RATIONALITY, 2021, is in a sense third in a trilogy.) I read this one when it came out, in early 2018. Upon reviewing it and my notes just now, this one strikes me as perhaps the single-most core volume in my library that summarizes my own worldview, one aligned with liberalism, aligned with science fiction, and describing how to approach the world objectively and not via the filters and biases of tradition or received religious ideology. And how that approach, unlike those of tradition and religion, has brought about great improvement in the world.

Since this book was published in 2018, it covers relatively ‘current events’ like the Trump administration in a way that BETTER ANGELS, published seven years earlier, did not. Let’s start by quoting the first two long paragraphs of the Preface.

The second half of the second decade of the third millennium would not seem to be an auspicious time to publish a book on the historical sweep of progress and its causes. At the time of this writing, my country is led by people with a dark vision of the current moment: “mothers and children trapped in poverty … an education system which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge … and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives.” We are in an “outright war” that is “expanding and metastasizing.” The blame for this nightmare may be placed on a “global power structure” that has eroded “the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity.”

In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong — wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn’t-be-more-wrong. But this book is not about the forty-fifth president of the United States and his advisors. It was conceived some years before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, and I hope it will outlast his administration by many more. The ideas that prepared the ground for his election are in fact widely shared among intellectuals and laypeople, on both the left and the right. They include pessimism about the way the world is heading, cynicism about the institutions of modernity, and an inability to conceive of a higher purpose in anything other than religion. I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideal of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Enlightenment ideals, I hope to show, are timeless, but they have never been more relevant than they are right now.

Posted in Book Notes, Steven Pinker | Comments Off on Steven Pinker: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, post 1

Human Happiness, and Fonts

Posted on Wednesday 10 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Sean Illing and Brad DeLong wonder why, with all humanity’s progress, aren’t we happier? An eternal question;
  • Paul Krugman on how Trump thinks people aren’t properly grateful for his perfect economy;
  • Marco Rubio defeats a woke font;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how ChatGPT finds that modern America contains “multiple factual impossibilities”;
  • John Pavlovitz on how we can’t change these hateful people, we have to outnumber them.
– – –

Today’s think piece.

Is this a hedonic treadmill matter? Or something else?

Vox, Sean Illing, Dec 2025: The world has gotten richer — so, why aren’t we happier?, subtitled “Technological progress and economic growth are preconditions for human happiness, not a guarantee.”

Perhaps something else. The article here is an interview with Brad DeLong, author of a 2022 book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, which I didn’t notice at the time; it asks the same question as the article title here. This is a central question: what is this “meaning” humans seem to need, that is something more than an intuitive application of cause and effect for explaining human existence? (And personally I don’t find the standard religious claim of needing to worship a creator any more plausible or appealing than a slave/master relationship.)

I’ll quote this:

Key takeaways:

• Growth has allowed humanity to conquer privation and disease – but discontent remains, and prosperity hasn’t solved the deeper question of what progress is for.
• Abundance doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of agency; many people still feel that impersonal systems shape their lives without their consent.
• The 21st century will continue to be defined by growth and prosperity, but the center of gravity will shift to the developing world.
• The defining question of our era may well be whether humans can direct their attention toward what truly matters in an era when there are increasingly competing claims to it.

And the last exchange in the interview:

Give me a word or two that might come to define the 21st century in the way the word “growth” defined the 20th century.

I’ll give you two.

First, growth, but growth centered in what used to be called the developing world rather than in the old industrial core. The 21st century will still be a century of rising prosperity, but its center of gravity is shifting.

Second, attention. The defining question of our era is whether human beings can learn to direct their attention toward what truly matters rather than toward whatever powerful actors want them to look at. Reliable information used to be scarce. Now, claims to reliability are so abundant that they overwhelm us.

Whether we learn to navigate that environment may be the most important story of the century.

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About the fringe.

Paul Krugman, 10 Dec 2025: Trump Says That You Are the Problem, subtitled “Everything is perfect. Why aren’t you grateful?”

Last night Donald Trump gave an important speech on the economy in Pennsylvania — supposedly in a working-class area, although the actual venue was a luxury casino resort. The event was initially touted as the start of an “affordability tour,” the first of a series of speeches intended to reverse Trump’s cratering approval on his handling of inflation and the economy. A number of news analyses suggested that he would use the occasion to blame Democrats for the economy’s troubles.

That was never going to happen. Trump did, of course, take many swipes at Joe Biden, as well as attacking immigrants, women and windmills. But to blame Democrats for the economy’s problems he would have to admit that the Trump economy has problems. And the speech was important because it revealed that he won’t make any such admission, and will continue to gaslight the public.

On Monday Politico interviewed Trump, asking him, among other things, what grade he would give the current economy. His answer: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

In fact, until very recently Trump wouldn’t even accept the reality that ordinary Americans don’t share his triumphalism. When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him a month ago why people are anxious about the economy, Trump replied

I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.

Since then Trump and his minions seem to have come around to admitting that Americans are, in fact, unhappy with the state of the economy. But if the economy is A+++++, why don’t people see it? The problem can’t possibly lie with him — so it must lie with you. “The American people don’t know how good they have it.”

In fact, economists like Krugman repeatedly noticed how well the economy was doing under Biden, and in fact, the actual statistics don’t show much improvement of the economy under Trump. But never let facts get in the way of ideology.

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Searching out and defeating woke: anything that makes life better for some people. Because some people find sans-serif fonts easier to read.

NY Times, 9 Dec 2025: At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke, subtitled “Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Biden-era move to the sans serif typeface ‘wasteful,’ casting the return to Times New Roman as part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts.”

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Maybe ChatGPT is pretty smart after all.

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American: December 9, 2025

When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.

No comment.

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Some of us are getting tired of trying to understand, trying to be nice. (My take: it’s about a base part of human nature that we can never overcome, despite the institutions set up in recent centuries to overcome it. Including the US Constitution.)

John Pavlovitz, 8 Dec 2025: We Can’t Change These Hateful People, America. We Have to Outnumber Them.

I’ll quote about the first third:

These people cannot be helped.

We’ve tried for ten years now.
We’ve tried to understand them.
We’ve tried to listen to them.
We’ve given them the benefit of the doubt.
We’ve tried not to assign motive to them, not to speculate as to why they voted the way they voted, not to believe they consented to every cruel thing their vote birthed and has enabled.
We’ve tried not to caricaturize them; not to make them into one-dimensional stereotypes, not to treat them as some fictional other whose presence posed a threat.
We’ve tried appealing to their sense of decency, to their capacity for compassion, to their faith in Jesus.
We’ve quietly endured thousands of their racist outbursts and homophobic rants on social media and at neighborhood picnics and across the Thanksgiving dinner table, in the hopes that I could find some vulnerable place beneath their fear to access later.
We’ve tried buoying pep talks and firm tough love and expressions of kindness and straight-talking challenge and attempts at affirmation.
We’ve tried discussing theology, sharing stories of oppressed communities, offering facts in the face of a million lies generated by their President, and reminding them of the lessons History has already taught us about the steep slope we’re currently sliding precipitously down.

They have all failed to reach fertile ground.
Nothing has worked.
It’s all been fruitless.

And I saw another brilliant take on the Trump administration on Facebook this morning, from someone I’ve never heard of but who seems to have a following… but neglected to save it. And of course I can’t find it again. That’s how Facebook works.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Nature, Politics, progress | Comments Off on Human Happiness, and Fonts

Most People Are Nice; Scientific Truths

Posted on Tuesday 9 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Hannah Seo at Vox: people are nicer than you think;
  • Ethan Siegel at Big Think: 10 scientific truths that became unpopular in 2025;
  • Briefly noted: the Texas governor wants to install Turning Point USA chapters in every high school; Trump’s idea of culture is hosting UFC cage matches; Trump critics are to be identified as “domestic terrorists”; and apparently it’s religious discrimination to punish students for harassing trans kids.
– – –

Here’s an idea with broad applicability.

Vox, Hannah Seo, 9 Dec 2025: People are nicer than you think, subtitled “We consistently underestimate how much other people like us, and it may be hurting our social lives.”

It’s an idea I don’t necessarily endorse in full, partly because I haven’t yet read the essay. But it’s a take on an eternal question: are people generally good, or generally bad? The answer, of course, is neither completely; we’re mixes, and each of us behaves differently depending on circumstances. Further: modern civilization has only become possible by cooperation, which entails trusting other people. But many make claims on a definitive answer. There’s the Hobbes vs. Rousseau debate, addressed by Pinker (who’s generally on Hobbes’ side, but recognizes our “better angels” too; see the book) and others, including a book by Rutger Bregman I haven’t written up here yet (he’s on Rousseau’s side). Christianity and conservatives seems to assume everyone is bad (unless they are “saved”). Then there’s the way people behave in disasters. Hollywood would have you believe that life returns the savagery, the law of the jungle, as the kids do in LORD OF THE FLIES; actual evidence shows that in crises people are almost always helpful to their neighbors and even strangers. Just think of the news stories about car wrecks in which passers-by leap in to help a victim get out of an overturned vehicle — as opposed to taking advantage of the situation and robbing him.

But let’s read the article. It doesn’t give any background on the writer, but the web does, here. The article begins:

It’s probably happened to you: A stranger starts talking to you at a party. In this moment, you’re not nearly as clever or charming as you hoped you’d be, and you struggle to volley with the anecdotes, opinions, and witticisms lobbed your way. At the end of it, you come away thinking, “They totally thought I was a complete idiot.”

But research shows, they probably didn’t. In a phenomenon dubbed the “liking gap,” people consistently tend to like you better than you think they do. All sorts of other “gaps” — or “social prediction errors,” as experts would call them — govern our social lives. We consistently underestimate everything from people’s empathy toward us to how willing they are to help us. These patterns are strongest when we interact with strangers or acquaintances but can persist for many months into a friendship. They permeate relationships with all kinds of people, from classmates to roommates and coworkers. This pessimism about other people’s attitudes toward us also has consequences, like undercutting our own willingness to connect with others.

She describes the famous dropped-wallet experiment, in which wallets “are returned way more than people expect.”

We misjudge not only other people’s altruism or empathy, but also how they’ll react to our overtures. Other research shows that people consistently underestimate how happy someone will feel after we show them a random act of kindness, pay them a compliment, or shoot a message just to get in touch. This all starts at a pretty young age, too. One 2021 paper found that the liking gap begins appearing in children as young as 5, and research from 2023 showed that children as young as four underestimate how much another person will appreciate an act of kindness.

And then she discusses the social consequences of misjudging people. Then considers more broadly.

One theory behind these persistent underestimations is that people are “naturally super driven to stay connected to the group, and super vigilant for signs of rejection,” says Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. “We get super cautious about putting ourselves out there because we don’t want to take social risks,” she says. “But we forget that other people are also driven by those same concerns.”

This touches on my own take: it’s not whether people are good or bad, it’s that some people treat others with provisional trust, and some people treat others with uniform distrust. It’s the tribal mentality again; the divide between those who think small, and those who think big.

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Some of these are very pertinent, others rather esoteric.

Big Think, Ethan Siegel, 9 Dec 2025: 10 scientific truths that somehow became unpopular in 2025, subtitled “Scientific truths remain true regardless of belief. These 10, despite contrary claims, remain vitally important as 2025 draws to a close.”

Key Takeaways

• Our scientific picture of reality has been constructed painstakingly, over centuries and millennia, by gathering enormous suites of evidence and rejecting all theories that fail to explain what we observe. • Through this, we’ve learned about the laws that govern the Earth, fundamental particles, atoms and molecules, our environment, the Universe, and more, refining and enhancing them, over time, wherever possible. • But here in 2025, many of the lessons we’ve learned, although still true, have fallen out of favor, having been replaced by untrue sentiments that now dominate public discourse. Still, the truth remains true, and everyone should know what it is.

There *is* a scientific reality, even if many conservatives deny it in favor of ancient myths.

No matter what it is that humans do — what we think, feel, accomplish, believe, or vote for — our shared scientific reality is the one thing that unites us all. The same laws and rules govern everything within this cosmos.

…

However, many scientific truths have fallen out of public favor in recent times. Now, in 2025, some of the misinformation that’s replaced those truths has been elevated to prominence, and many cannot tell fact from fiction any longer. Whether you believe them or not, here are 10 scientific truths that remain true, even though you might not realize it here in the final month of 2025.

These include:

  • 2024, the latest full year on record, saw the highest CO2 levels and the highest average temperatures since we first began tracking them;
  • The germ theory of disease is real, and vaccination is the safest, most effective strategy to combat these deadly pathogens.
  • SARS-CoV-2 led to COVID-19 in humans as the result of a natural, zoonotic spillover event, not as the result of a leaked pathogen from a Wuhan Lab in China.
  • You still need to know science in order to do it; “vibe science” is nothing more than AI slop.

The other six concern interstellar interlopers, distant galaxies, the finite capacity of Earth’s satellites, the universe’s expansion, what peer reviews mean, and evidence for organics on Mars.

With lots of illustrations and graphs.

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From the peanut gallery, briefly noted.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Nature, Science | Comments Off on Most People Are Nice; Scientific Truths

Retreat and Hypocrisy

Posted on Monday 8 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why does Trump promote AI, while cutting funding for science and medicine?
  • Why does Trump pardon drug traffickers, while shooting boats in the Caribbean that are supposedly, without evidence, trafficking drugs?
  • Paul Krugman on the end of the free world;
  • Robert Reich on the last person in the world who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize;
  • John Pavlovitz on how if you support ICE, you shouldn’t be celebrating Christmas;
  • Brief items about Trump’s phony peace prize; the right-wing media grift; how Hegseth and Bondi have responded about illegal orders to the military; and how Trump has committed the same mortgage fraud that he now accuses of others.
– – –

Why is Trump so obsessed with AI…

Axios, 8 Dec 2025: Trump says AI executive order targeting state laws coming this week (Via)

Trump:

“There must be only One Rulebook if we are going to continue to lead in AI. We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS. …”

Axios:

The executive order isn’t likely to try to block state AI laws outright. Instead, it’s expected to attempt to gut state AI laws by launching legal challenges and conditioning federal grants on compliance. … some Republicans, like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), are sounding alarms about high AI risk for kids, jobs and safety. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) have pushed language to preempt state action …

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…when he is gutting American leadership in every field of science and medicine?

NY Times, 2 Dec 2025 (in today’s print paper): The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine, subtitled “A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.” (gift link)

Very long piece with lots of animated graphics as you scroll down.

In the past decade, the National Institutes of Health awarded top scientists $9 billion in competitive grants each year, to find cures for diseases and improve public health.

This year, something unusual happened. Starting in January, the Trump administration stalled that funding. By summer, funding lagged by over $2 billion, or 41 percent below average.

Sample chart:

I have no idea. I can only speculate that Trump thinks AI is a “thing” that he has some crude conception of, while all that research in science medicine is far too abstract for him to begin to understand.

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And again. What is Trump thinking?

Washington Post, 8 Dec 2025: Trump pardons major drug traffickers despite his anti-drug rhetoric, subtitled “The president has granted clemency to about 100 people accused of drug-related crimes during his time in office, a Post analysis shows.”

On President Donald Trump’s first full day in office this year, he pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted of creating the largest online black market for illegal drugs and other illicit goods of its time.

In the months since, he has granted clemency to others, including Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover and Baltimore drug kingpin Garnett Gilbert Smith. And last week, he pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for running his country as a vast “narco-state” that helped to move at least 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Meanwhile,

At the same time, Trump has threatened military action against Venezuela over accusations that the country’s government is supporting the drug trade and has pushed the Pentagon to conduct targeted strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean. The contrasting actions have come under fire from Democrats and other critics, who say Trump’s broad use of clemency contradicts promises to get tough on drugs.

Again, I have no idea. There was the suggestion with the pardoning of Hernández that he was a Trump supporter, and of course Trump will forgive *anything* of his supporters, but that surely can’t be true of all the others he’s pardoned. A backup explanation is that he thinks anyone convicted of anything is somehow illegitimate, since Trump was convicted of a bunch of felonies, and therefore the legal system is corrupt; and if there’s a drug problem, he’ll just solve it by blowing up boats or invading Venezuela.

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More on America’s retreat from the world stage.

Paul Krugman, 8 Dec 2025: Is This The End of the Free World?, subtitled “Trump wants to MAGAfy Europe, too”

There was a time, not so long ago, when America was the leader of the free world. It was the first among equals within an alliance of nations bound together by shared values — above all a commitment to democracy and civil liberties. From London to Berlin to Tokyo, in the aftermath of genocide and the utter devastation of World War II, America – as Ronald Reagan put it – was the shining city on the hill. We should never forget that Americans played the pivotal roles in the Nuremberg trials, upholding the rule of law in an impartial and transparent manner in the trials of those who had committed unspeakable atrocities and acts of war. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” declared John F. Kennedy in Berlin, as East Germany tried to trap its own people behind the Berlin Wall.

MAGA, however, doesn’t want to be part of that world. In fact, it doesn’t want a world of democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law to exist. The Trump administration has become especially hostile to Europe, precisely because the Europeans are trying to hold on to the values MAGA is trying to destroy at home.

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Robert Reich, 8 Dec 2025: Who’s the Last Person in the World to Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

Subtitled “The person who’s been waging illegal wars”

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John Pavlovitz, 7 Dec 2025: Christian, If You’re Celebrating ICE, You Shouldn’t Be Celebrating Christmas

Sample:

If you’re celebrating the mass deportations of distraught, exhausted human beings seeking refuge, you probably shouldn’t be singing sweet songs about a baby with “no crib for a bed.”

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Briefly noted.

  • Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 5 Dec 2025: Dan Bongino lays bare the right-wing media grift
  • “[P]eople like Bongino — and by extension, Hannity — make their money by tossing off reckless speculations that confirm their right-wing audience’s biases, and face no perceptible consequences if their claims turn out to be false.”
  • And one more about Trump’s hypocrisy.
  • ProPublica, 8 Dec 2025: Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal
  • Subtitled “The Trump administration has argued that Fed board member Lisa Cook may have committed mortgage fraud by declaring more than one primary residence on her loans. We found Trump once did the very thing he called ‘deceitful and potentially criminal.'”
  • It’s curious how Trump accuses others of the very things he’s done.
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Science, Technology | Comments Off on Retreat and Hypocrisy

Detached from Reality

Posted on Monday 8 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Would conservatives insist that student papers defending creationism or flat eartherism qualify in science classes, if citing the Bible as evidence?
  • More about Trump’s white supremacist policies;
  • Brief items about Russia, Masculine public hangings, Trump’s “library,” and AI sermons.
– – –

More about that student paper.

NY Times, opinion by Jessica Grose, 6 Dec 2025: How One Student’s Failing Grade Became a Cause Célèbre on the Right

In November, a University of Oklahoma student named Samantha Fulnecky received a zero for a psychology paper. The assignment was a 650-word response to a study of middle school students, which found that students that were “high in gender typicality” — think, athletic boys and well-dressed, attractive girls — were described as more popular by their peers, and that this effect was particularly pronounced for boys. Students, the study revealed, who were less gender typical tended to be teased and bullied more.

…

The original study assigned to Fulnecky is not specifically about transgender youth, but a sample passage of her paper reads: “My prayer for the world and specifically for American society and youth is that they would not believe the lies being spread from Satan that make them believe they are better off as another gender than what God made them.”

What’s new here is this:

But what makes this example different is the way Fulnecky went directly to the media and conservative organizations to publicize her case. When Ryan Walters, one of the people she emailed, was Oklahoma’s state schools superintendent, he demanded that all schools teach the Bible, and that teachers not from Oklahoma pass a screening test to ward off “woke indoctrination.” He told Fox News earlier this year, about his new job at the conservative Teacher Freedom Alliance, “We’re going to destroy the teachers’ unions.”

And the trend…

Students think they are customers who deserve to be catered to, rather than curious humans who might have something to learn.

But a larger point still isn’t addressed here. Do religious conservatives really think a thesis based solely on the Bible has any educational merit at all (outside of religious studies)? Don’t they have the slightest concern with how the real world actually works? Based on this example, presumably a geology student could write a paper citing the Bible as evidence that the Earth is 6000 years old, and flat, and be expected to be taken seriously and get a passing grade. How would conservatives feel if their doctor succeeded in getting through medical school by insisting that Bible-based medicine (whatever that might be) was valid, ignoring the entirety of modern evidence-based medicine? The way they talk, apparently many in the MAGA crowd would be fine with that, given their embrace of RFK Jr. and his ilk. Further retreat.

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And another piece about this topic.

Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 7 Dec 2025: Trump’s foreign policy vision: Make Europe white again, subtitled “Trump’s global ‘strategy’ is grandiose, racist, and alarmingly dumb: Tyranny is cool, bro! But democracy sucks”

To say that Donald Trump’s political movement is built on contradiction is an understatement. Trump’s entire movement is a contradiction: The promise to make America “great again” has always referred simultaneously to an imaginary past that never existed and an imaginary future that can never be achieved, not even under the totalitarian dictatorship of Stephen Miller’s late-night fantasies.

Am I offering false hope if I say that the unsustainable contradictions within the Trump regime are beginning to pull it apart? Maybe, but I’m not promising that will happen tomorrow, or that it will be painless. We’ve finally reached the point when even most mainstream American liberals understand that there’s no going back to the arc-of-progress upward narrative of the Obama era, which was itself imaginary and damaging, largely because the massive hubris of those years is what brought us here.

It’s a side point, perhaps, that the writer blames the (to him) unreasonably optimistic Obama era narrative of progress for the backlash by Trump voters. It’s the same “human struggle” I’ve been referring to, from a different angle.

\\\

Briefly noted.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Detached from Reality

Retreat from Civilization

Posted on Saturday 6 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump worries about “civilizational erasure” but only in a white supremacist sense;
  • And contrasting his motives with those described by Pinker that brought about modern civilization;
  • Heather Cox Richardson describes the retreat from the global stage;
  • Bryan Walsh at Vox on zero-sum thinking, suggesting that growth is the answer;
  • Connie Willis quotes John Pavlovitz, who has a post about empaths and sociopaths.
– – –

The essence of conservative fear of change. Yet things always change.

NY Times, 5 Dec 2025: Trump Administration Says Europe Faces ‘Civilizational Erasure’, subtitled “America’s goal should be ‘to help Europe correct its current trajectory,’ the administration said in its new National Security Strategy.”
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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Progress | Comments Off on Retreat from Civilization

Strategies of Reality Denial

Posted on Friday 5 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s basic strategy is “deny deny deny”;
  • Why young men turn to Nick Fuentes’ neo-Nazi movement;
  • How Trump is dragging the White House press corps, and perhaps all modern civilization, down into his gutter;
  • How Trump is reviving rules about immigration based on nationality;
  • Short takes on Dan Bongino admitting he has lied for money; and a religious zealot claiming Democrats are full of the devil.
– – –

All Trump news can be filtered through one basic strategy, that he admits to.

Salon, Sophia Tesfaye, 4 Dec 2025: Boat strikes: War crime or “fake news” hoax?, subtitle “Even as some Republicans turn on the ghastly Pete Hegseth, right-wing media can’t handle the truth”
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Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Philosophy, Politics | Comments Off on Strategies of Reality Denial

Steven Pinker, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, post 7

Posted on Friday 5 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Why Violence Has Declined”
(Viking, Oct. 2011, xxvii + 802pp, including 106pp of notes, references, and index.)

Summary:

Chapter 9 concerns four ways in which humanity’s “better angels” turn people away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism. These are empathy and the circle of moral concern (with caution that empathy can subvert fairness, as when concern fora personal story distracts from the larger issue); self-control (with evidence that children who exhibit greater self-control becomes smarter and more successful in life); our moral sense (with the author favoring a set of four ‘relational models’ for talking about morality: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing; how political ideologies favor one or more of these; how the historical trend is away from the first two in favor of the latter two, i.e. toward social liberalism; and how these intuitions of community, authority, sacredness, and taboo and part of human nature and will always be with us);

And reason, denigrated by pop culture, yet with evidence that humanity is getting smarter as the moral circle has expanded, along with evidence that intelligence is correlated with classical liberalism. And what are the exogenous causes of these shifts? Geographical and social mobility, open societies, an objective study of history, and moral quandaries in fiction as books have become more widely read over the centuries.

Finally Chapter 10 notes that some forces have not worked to reduce violence, including weaponry, resources and power, wealth, and religion. Forces that *have* reduced violence can be assessed a “Pacifist’s Dilemma” chart: The Leviathan; gentle commerce; feminization; and expanding circle of moral concern; and the escalator of reason. Finally the author reflects on how the decline of violence may be the most significant event in the history of our species. People yearn for a simpler, peaceful past, but that past did not exist. Ending with two quotes, one about how limited in scope the lives of our ancestors were, the other about how those who think morality must be grounded in religious faith are mistaken.

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Posted in Book Notes, Human Nature, Morality, Science, Steven Pinker | Comments Off on Steven Pinker, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, post 7

The Trembling Present

Posted on Thursday 4 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Are we on the verge of societal collapse in the US, back into totalitarianism or feudalism, or will this current era pass?

  • Ilhan Omar on Trump’s naked bigotry;
  • Robert Reich on Trump’s mental decline, and the relaxing of inhibitions in people in their 80s and 90s;
  • How anti-science cynics like RFK Jr. have always been around;
  • Adam Serwer wonders why Trump’s racism isn’t a problem for his fans;
  • Short items about lame ICE recruits, LGBTQ safety standards, and Kennedy Center artists who’ve been stiffed.
– – –

Because there was some sort of tax-fraud scheme among Somali immigrants in Minnesota, Trump now trashes the entire nation, its people, and US citizens who immigrated from there. As racist conservatives do.

NY Times, guest essay by Ilhan Omar, 4 Dec 2025: Ilhan Omar: Trump Knows He’s Failing. Cue the Bigotry.
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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on The Trembling Present