Feudalism, Suicide, Ignorance, Disease, Conservative DEI

Posted on Tuesday 3 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Quite a round of doom and gloom essays today. This is where we are.

  • The drive toward privatization will lead to feudalism;
  • Max Boot on the suicide of a superpower;
  • Paul Krugman on how we’re no longer a serious country, as the world is noticing;
  • Robert Reich on ignorance and tyranny;
  • Jonah Goldberg on how loyalty to Trump is all that matters;
  • Two pieces about Elon Musk: “a legacy of disease, starvation and death”;
  • Jerry Coyne on how the call for conservative balance in academia is just another version of DEI;
  • And the irony of denouncing antisemitism from an administration driven by white supremacy.
– – –

This is what those who want the shrink the government by privatizing everything would lead to.

The Atlantic, Cullen Murphy, 3 Jun 2025: Feudalism Is Our Future, subtitled “What the next Dark Ages could look like”

[T]he Middle Ages were supposed to stay where they were. But they have not. With the accelerating advance of privatization, they seem to be moving our way in the form of something that resembles feudalism. Medievalists argue over what that word really means, parsing it with contentious refinement. Was it even understood at the time? Stripped bare, though, the idea is simple enough.

In Europe, as imperial power receded, a new system of organization took hold, one in which power, governance, law, security, rights, and wealth were decentralized and held in private hands. Those who possessed this private power were linked to one another, from highest to lowest, in tiers of vassalage. The people above also had obligations to the people below—administering justice, providing protection. Think of the system, perhaps, as a nesting doll of oligarchs presiding over a great mass of people who subsisted as villeins and serfs.

(After this, in my big picture scheme, came principles of the Enlightenment, including American Revolution and Constitution, designed to overcome the worst aspects of authoritarian human nature.)

The idea of governments as public ventures with a public purpose and some degree of public voice—what the Mayflower Compact called a “civill Body Politick”—took a long time to claw its way back into existence. Most people in the developed world have been living in a civill Body Politick, or something that aspires to be one, for several centuries. I won’t overstate how successful this experiment has been, but it’s the reason we have police forces rather than vigilantes, and safety nets rather than alms thrown haphazardly from horseback by men in tights.

(It worked for quite a while. Now we’re slipping back.)

In the 1980s and ’90s, privatization started gaining traction again, and it had plenty of help. Anti-government sentiment created opportunities, and entrepreneurs seized them. Privatization was also pushed by policy makers who saw outsourcing as inherently more efficient. And besides, the public sector can’t do everything. Case by case, privatization of this or that may well make sense. The problem comes in the sheer accumulation. In the U.S., even before Trump took office a second time, there were roughly twice as many people employed by private contractors to do the federal government’s business as there were federal employees.

And now the current administration is undoing public control and enriching private entrepreneurs.

Oversight more broadly—of the environment, food, drugs, finance—has been drifting for decades into the hands of those being overseen. In their 2021 book, The Privatization of Everything, Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian documented the loss of public control over water, roads, welfare, parks, and much else. The deliberate dismantling of government in America in recent months, and its replacement with something built on privatized power and networks of personal allegiance, accelerates what was long under way. Its spirit was captured decades ago in a maxim of Ronald Reagan’s economic adviser Murray Weidenbaum: “Don’t just stand there— undo something!”

Concluding:

Is feudalism our future? There is no “must” in history, and the present is as much a riddle as anything that lies ahead. A privatized world may be a temporary aberration, a new stage of development, or just the default setting of human society. Our own era doesn’t have a name yet, and it won’t be up to us to give it one. From the perspective of some far-distant vantage point, the age we inhabit may even come to seem “Middle.” With contentious refinement, historians will parse what “privatization” might have meant, and wonder whether we understood it at the time.

It’s been said that one reason Americans are reluctant to tax the wealthy is because every American secretly hopes he’ll be wealthy one day too. And that is a consequence, ironically, of American’s freedom. Unlike the ancient feudal societies, in American society one *can* change one’s social position, and everyone dreams of it. Yet it doesn’t happen as often as people think. The billionaires mostly inherited their wealth. If it were so easy to work really hard and become a billionaire, why haven’t more people done it?

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Suicide of a superpower.

Washington Post, Max Boot, 3 Jun 2025: We are witnessing the suicide of a superpower, subtitled “The president’s assault on science dangerously undermines America’s superpower status.”

On June 14 — the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army and, not so coincidentally, the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump — a gaudy display of U.S. military power will parade through Washington. No doubt Trump thinks that all of the tanks and soldiers on display will make America, and its president, look tough and strong.

But the planned spectacle is laughably hollow. Even as the president wants to showcase U.S. military power, he is doing grave and possibly irreparable damage to the real sources of U.S. strength, including its long-term investment in scientific research. Trump is declaring war on science, and the casualty will be the U.S. economy.

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Paul Krugman, 3 Jun 2025: We Are No Longer a Serious Country, subtitled “And the world is starting to notice”

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” This line is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan. Whoever said it definitely had a point, and not just about politics. If you’re trying to explain to people, be they voters or bond investors, that you aren’t really as bad or untrustworthy as you seem, you’re already in deep trouble.

So when I saw Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, declaring Sunday that “The United States of America is never going to default, that is never going to happen,” my reaction was, “Uh-oh.”

And it’s not just me. For generations investors have treated U.S. government debt as the ultimate safe asset. Whenever disaster strikes — even if it’s disaster largely made in America, like the 2008 subprime crisis — bond buyers pile into U.S. Treasuries, because America is a serious country, and the idea that we would fail to honor our debts was unthinkable.

But are we still that country? Markets seem to have doubts.

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A point made time and again.

Robert Reich, 3 Jun 2025: Trump’s Vicious Attack on the American Mind, subtitled “He wants America to be ignorant because ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny”

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated public. Slaveholders prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. The Third Reich burned books. The Khmer Rouge banned music. Stalin and Pinochet censored the media.

And Trump, like past authoritarians, wants to control not just what we do, but also how and what we think.

With five facets of attack:

1. Rewrite history
2. Gut education
3. Dismantle science
4. Suppress the media
5. Attack the arts

Do his fans not care? Or (I suspect) they are simply unaware.

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It’s only about loyalty.

LA Times, Jonah Goldberg, 2 Jun 2025: Trump shows that loyalty is all that matters to him

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For once, an honest headline.

NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 30 May 2025: Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death [gift link]

And another. I won’t quote; links are free.

NY Times, Louise Perry, 3 Jun 2025: How History Will Remember Elon Musk

Summary: not good. Hubris

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Jerry Coyne on how the call for diversity in academia, i.e. that more conservatives should be represented in academia, is “DEI.” That is, conservatives are against DEI when it involves people other than white Christians, but support it to promote themselves.

Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 3 Jun 2025: Should academia practice “political DEI” and hire more conservatives?

Pointing to this Atlantic article from a few days ago:

The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch, 27 May 2025: The Era of DEI for Conservatives Has Begun, subtitled “In an effort to attract more right-leaning faculty, some elite universities are borrowing tactics long used to promote racial diversity.”

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One more irony, or hypocrisy.

NY Times, Peter Baker, 3 Jun 2025: Denouncing Antisemitism, Trump Also Fans Its Flames, subtitled “President Trump’s effort to punish Harvard over antisemitism is complicated by his extensive history of amplifying white supremacist figures and symbols.”

Posted in History, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on Feudalism, Suicide, Ignorance, Disease, Conservative DEI

MAGA Stereotypes, Whataboutism, Monarchy

Posted on Monday 2 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on MAGA hate on New York, and the reality;
  • Beware “whataboutism,” which is easy and wrong;
  • Long New Yorker piece about a reactionary blogger’s call for an American monarchy.
– – –

Let’s see…. is it fair to say that conservatives in general, and MAGA types in particular, are more given to stereotypes, especially mean-spirited ones about how awful other people and other places are, than more enlightened people? That’s certainly consistent with simple-minded black-and-white thinking.

Somebody said recently that the US should be more like Florida and less like New York. This is someone in the MAGA-inspired Trump administration, of course, where MAGA seems to define itself by what it hates.

Paul Krugman, 2 Jun 2025: Hating New York, subtitled “What we can learn from a MAGA obsession”

MAGA and MAGA-adjacent types are very good at finding things and people to hate. They hate immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans), LGBTQ people and wokeness. They hate universities and are doing their best to destroy American science. The New York Times reports that they hate Europe. And they very much hate New York City.

OK, I’m not impartial on this issue. I grew up on Long Island and still think of NYC proper as “the city.” I live in Manhattan now, and my experience is that if you can afford housing — which is admittedly a huge problem — it’s actually a very good life, with an incredible range of things to do either in walking distance or a short subway ride away. Not everyone wants to live this way, but nobody is saying they should. All we ask is that some Americans be allowed to have favorable views of a place that provides the advantages density and, yes, diversity can offer.

But that, of course, is exactly what the U.S. right refuses to accept. New York is one of the safest places in America, yet much of the country insists on seeing it as a terrifying urban hellscape. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, insists that everyone is afraid to ride the subway:

If you want people to take the train, to take transit, then make it safe, make it clean, make it beautiful, make it wonderful, don’t make it a shithole.

Indeed, the subway is such an intolerable shithole that more than 4 million people ride it every day, myself among them.

These are stereotypes of people who’ve never actually been to these places. MAGA politicians hate on San Francisco too, based on reports about a few blocks (the ‘Tenderloin’ district near City Hall) in a 49-square mile city.

As an aside, it’s remarkable that federal officials — who are supposed to work for all of us — feel free to trash-talk major American cities, as long as the cities in question vote Democratic.

Then we get to treasury secretary Scott Bessent:”We want the U.S. to be more like Florida and less like New York.” Why? What does he mean? Then Krugman lays out some numbers, as shown in the chart linked above.

Krugman goes on to discuss several of the points in that chart, e.g.

Start at the top. In my opinion, one important aspect of the quality of life is not being dead, and New Yorkers on average live three years longer than Floridians. Life expectancy is even higher, 81.5 years, in New York City.

Why do New Yorkers live longer? One answer is that city life — which involves a lot more walking than suburban life — is generally good for you.

Another is that New Yorkers are considerably less likely than Floridians to be murdered. In my experience many Americans simply refuse to believe that New York in 2025 isn’t what it was in 1975, that it’s actually a low-crime city. But it is.

And New Yorkers are much less likely than most Americans to die in traffic accidents. Why? In the city and surrounding areas, one main answer has to be that so many people take public transit rather than driving.

And other items about how conservatives, and MAGA in particular, are an incurious bunch, easily comforted by thoughts of how morally superior they are in confusing world full of strange people and places.

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Themes of this blog: beware “common sense.” Avoid black and white thinking, which is what “whataboutism” is about. The world is complex.

The Bulwark, Mona Charen, 1 Jun 2025: Whataboutism Is Rotting Our Brains, Our Consciences, and Our Politics, subtitled “It’s easy, reassuring, and wrong.”

Before we can adequately respond to the frontal assault Donald Trump has launched on our way of life, we need to grapple with whataboutism. It is destroying our capacity to make rational judgments. In the face of an unprecedented defiance of law, tradition, and the Constitution, too many of us find ourselves so mired in polarized thinking that we can’t see straight.

Humans have always been beguiled by black-and-white thinking. Something is either good or bad. You are either with us or against us. Greek or barbarian. Saved or damned. Sigmund Freud coined the term “Madonna/whore complex” to describe the mindset of men who relegate women into one of two categories: pure or sullied. A related error in logic is called “tu quoque” (you too), a form of the ad hominem fallacy because it attacks the person rather than disproving their argument—which should sound familiar to anyone who’s lived through the past few years of American politics.

With some examples.

It’s perfectly clear why Trump and his many enablers rely on whataboutism. It’s the easiest deflection. What is the proper response to Trump’s iniquitous treatment of women? What about Bill Clinton? How can one evaluate his pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists? What about all those who rioted in protest of George Floyd’s murder and were never prosecuted? (They were.) Was Trump’s refusal to return highly classified documents a serious breach? What about Joe Biden keeping files in his garage? (Biden returned them when asked.) Is Trump corrupting the rule of law with his pardons of friends, donors, and political allies? What about Joe Biden’s pardons of Hunter and his entire family?

Here again, you can understand this as simple-minded thinking that disregards proportion. No grays. Black or white.

This game can be played endlessly, and it has been played aggressively for the past decade. It’s important to dwell on the consequences. Some people who are caught in a lie, betrayal, or other transgression admit their guilt and seek to repair the damage. That’s how mature people and societies stay civilized.

Truly depraved people don’t take that route. Trump uses whataboutism not just to change the subject or disarm the accuser (“tu quoque” was pretty much the theme of the 2016 presidential race) but also to breed cynicism. If “everybody does it” then it’s unfair to hold him accountable. And because people who constantly transgress can’t function with the knowledge that they are immoral, they must believe—and teach—that everyone is just as corrupt as they are; that the standards themselves are flawed or at least universally flouted. Does a mafia don tell his daughter that he’s a criminal, or does he explain that the world is composed of killers and losers and that you must choose one or the other?

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Long piece, which I haven’t read, but noted as evidence. Some on the right really do want a monarch to run the country. Which is to say, they reject the principles of American government.

The New Yorker, Ava Kofman, 2 Jun 2025: Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America, subtitled “The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.”

In the big picture, this is retrogression to a more primitive form of government than our democracy, easily understood as a resurgence of the tribal instinct.

Let’s quote a bit:

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

It’s a very long piece. But even this opening raises the question: what is government *for*? Again see George Lakoff. This guy thinks the government is a business, out to make money. And that’s the least of it.

The alternative is the modern conception of a government as an enabling one, per Lakoff.

Is this just all a matter of taste? Suppose different nations chose their own paths, among the alternatives represented by Lakoff’s opposing ideas. Why not?

And the answer is that most of these people are not thinking globally. Or long-term. This guy, “Moldbug,” is thinking tribally. His solution denies progress and the ability to respond to global threats. And I could go on about this, but I’ve discussed it many times before.

Posted in conservatives, longtermism, Politics | Comments Off on MAGA Stereotypes, Whataboutism, Monarchy

Rubber-Stamps, Clones, Conformity, and Fate

Posted on Sunday 1 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Republicans loyal to Trump want Congress to rubber-stamp his every proposal, never mind America’s system of government;
  • Trump thinks Biden was executed in 2020 and was replaced by a robotic clone;
  • Trump has great ambitions to carve up the world, but he’s too dumb (why don’t his fans realize this?);
  • Republicans would ban student clubs, to enforce conformity to the tribe;
  • More about Joni Ernst and “we all are going to die”.
– – –

Following up on yesterday’s item by Peter Wehner about how Republicans no longer believe in the rule of law. (These examples come along every day. This one, though posted a couple days ago, is on the front page of today’s paper.)

NY Times, Anne Karni, 29 May 2025: For These Trump Voters, a Rubber-Stamp Congress Is a Key Demand, subtitled “In a recent pair of focus groups, voters loyal to President Trump judged members of Congress almost entirely according to whether they backed him — and rejected lawmakers who dared to dissent.”

Congress is a coequal branch of government empowered to make laws, control government spending and declare war. But according to Trump voters, the role of the legislative branch is to rubber-stamp the president’s agenda — and they don’t appreciate Republicans who deviate from the party line.

In two recent focus groups that quizzed older Trump voters from across the country about their views of Congress and congressional leaders, participants consistently praised lawmakers who displayed “loyalty” to President Trump and disparaged those whom they viewed as failing to fall in line behind him.

And

Their perspectives offered a striking contrast to the reception that many Republican lawmakers have confronted at raucous town halls throughout the country in recent months. The lawmakers have been grilled and booed by constituents at these events for supporting Mr. Trump’s policies on tariffs, immigration and, most recently, the sprawling domestic policy bill that the G.O.P. pushed through the House last week.

And they help explain why most Republican lawmakers have put aside any reservations they may have on key issues and backed the president — because a critical portion of their party’s base is still demanding that they do so.

“For loyal Trump voters, they’re loving what they see as him ‘doing something’ and don’t want congressional Republicans getting in the way of his agenda,” said Sarah Longwell, the anti-Trump Republican strategist who conducted the focus groups. “And members of Congress have gotten that message loud and clear.”

The trouble is they don’t realize the ‘something’ that Trump is ‘doing’. They don’t understand that he’s tearing down American achievements and infrastructure and its place in the world; or perhaps they do, and approve of his actions against brown people and eggheads.

This is your base human nature, tribal allegiance, “loyalty.” A surrender of thinking to a leader they mindlessly follow. They don’t deserve to be living in a country based on principles they deny.

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This story has been going around today.

Salon, Alex Galbraith, 1 Jun 2025: “Soulless, mindless entities”: Trump shares QAnon conspiracy theory suggesting Biden is a clone, subtitled “The president shared a post late Saturday night suggesting Biden had been ‘executed’ and replaced”

“There is no #JoeBiden – executed in 2020,” the reshared post reads. “#Biden clones, doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. #Democrats don’t know the difference.”

And

NY Times, 1 Jun 2025: Trump amplified an outlandish Biden conspiracy theory.

President Trump shared an outlandish conspiracy theory on social media on Saturday night saying former President Joseph R. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, the latest example of the president amplifying dark, false material to his millions of followers.

The people who would believe this are simply unhinged from reality. It’s not about politics; it’s about the apprehension of reality. There are no robots capable of replicating a person. Even a biological clone is, at best, a belated twin. Admittedly, a lot of bad science fiction, virtually all in movies and TV, promulgate incorrect, simplistic ideas like this, especially the idea that a “clone” reproduces an adult person complete with memories. It doesn’t work this way.

If for no other reason, among the thousands of reasons we’ve had over the past decade, this completely discredits Donald Trump. What could be worse? Claiming the Earth is flat?

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More evidence?

Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 1 Jun 2025: Does Donald Trump want to carve up the world — or keep it all for himself?, subtitled “Trump longs to revive the imperialist ‘Great Game’ alongside Xi and Putin. There’s a problem: He’s too dumb”

Foreign policy experts have struggled to make sense of the second Trump administration’s incoherent and contradictory approach to world affairs — which in itself ought to serve as a clue. First of all, it suggests that the Trump team is operating without a recognizable or familiar playbook, driven partly by the Great Leader’s famous whims and fancies and partly by competing streams of ideology. Secondly, it illustrates that the generations of think-tankers churned out by the graduate programs of elite Anglo-American institutions are completely at sea in this bizarre historical moment, whether in foreign policy or any other supposed discipline of governance.

I don’t understand why Trump fans don’t listen to this guy and realize how *dumb* he is. Is it because they’re dumb too? Or because they don’t care and support Trump as long as he supports their animosity against brown people and egg-heads?

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More about how conservatives reflect base human nature: suppress differences in favor of conformity to the tribe.

JMG, 1 Jun 2025: Texas Governor Gets Bill Banning LGBTQ Student Clubs

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More about Joni Ernst and “We all are going to die”.

Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 1 Jun 2025: Sen. Joni Ernst defends “we all are going to die” comment with pitch to embrace Jesus, subtitled “Instead of addressing fears of preventable deaths caused by GOP policies, Senator Ernst offered nothing but religion and ridicule”

Hemant comments,

Yes, we’re all going to die. The difference is that (decent) Democrats want to make your life worth living and make sure you have access to free or affordable care, while Republicans like Ernst want to hasten the deaths of those they believe deserve it.

The tone of her voice, though, said even more than that. It suggested that she didn’t give a damn about her own constituents who might die sooner than they might otherwise because she personally helped kick them off Medicaid, leaving them without any kind of social safety net.

Sure, people will die, she said, with the subtext being but isn’t that worth it to make rich people even richer?

The post here doesn’t address this, but I’ve never quite figured out the religious policy about death. On the one hand, death, if you’ve been a good person, leads to paradise. On the other hand, even Christians believe in medicine to prolong life. Why not just let good people die and get to heaven as soon as possible? I’ve no doubt there are numerous casuistic explanations for this. 

Posted in conservatives, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Rubber-Stamps, Clones, Conformity, and Fate

Fareed Zakaria, Peter Wehner, Brian Tyler Cohen, and Anton Bruckner

Posted on Saturday 31 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Fareed Zakaria on Trump vs. Harvard;
  • Peter Wehner on how Republican principles gave way to Trump;
  • And so now there is justice for Trump supporters, and justice for others;
  • “Happy Memorial Day”
  • Brian Tyler Cohen about Trump’s confusion about “asylum”;
  • And an anecdote about the MAGA thought process;
  • And Bruckner 4, movement 2. The slow movements are the best.
– – –

Fareed Zakaria (whose book I admired here) on the Trump/Harvard situation.

Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, 30 May 2025: Trump’s war on Harvard is bizarre — and incredibly damaging, subtitled “He is wrecking American competitiveness.”

When historians write about the challenges to America’s global hegemony, they will point to the rise of China, the first full-fledged peer competitor to the United States in decades. They will also note the return of Russia and its efforts to disrupt the American-led security order in Europe. These are familiar patterns in the rise and fall of world powers. What is new and surprising is that these challenges, far from uniting America, have turned it on itself, with its government tearing down many of the crucial elements of its extraordinary success.

Consider the Nature Index, perhaps the most comprehensive guide to high-quality research in the sciences. It tracks contributions to the world’s leading academic journals. Its newest rankings show what scientists already know: China is leaping ahead. Of the top 10 academic institutions in the Nature Index, nine are Chinese. But still sitting in the topmost position on that list is an American institution: Harvard. And it is this university that President Donald Trump is trying to destroy.

… The Trump administration’s main weapon — the withdrawal of federal research funds to Harvard — is aimed at the parts of the university that have virtually nothing to do with the “woke ideology” to which Trump objects. More than 90 percent of the funds that the government has threatened to deny Harvard are for research in the life sciences, studying diseases, medicines and other such topics. Denying funding for cancer research will not affect people protesting for Palestinians. It will almost certainly knock Harvard off that Nature Index list.

Mentioning this:

America continues to lead the world in its ability to attract the best students from across the globe. China draws mainly on the talents of the brightest of its 1.4 billion people. But America has had its pick of the best of the world’s 8 billion people.

And concluding on a personal note:

Around four decades ago, when I thought about applying to American universities from India, I was impressed by their reputation in research and teaching. But I was also attracted by the idea of America, a truly free and open society, one that welcomed people from around the world and where, in Ronald Reagan’s words, “our origins matter less than our destinations.” In a competitive world, where other countries have caught up in so many ways, this is still America’s unique advantage — if we can cherish rather than destroy it.

But see my post yesterday. My very provisional conclusion — which I hope will not play out — is that the MAGA forces in America resent the hoity-toity eggheads at universities and would be content to stay within their monocultural communities and let the rest of the world do whatever it wants, never mind America’s reputation and which other nations are setting the way to the future.

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Continuing on a similar note. Republican principles are a thin veneer, it seems, easily overridden authoritarian leaders that play to deep tribalistic human nature. Did conservatives ever really accept Constitutional principles? Perhaps only as long as it gave them an advantage in society.

The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 31 May 2025: The Unconstitutional Conservatives, subtitled “Not too long ago, Republicans believed in the rule of law, limiting the power of government, and protecting individual liberty. Then came Donald Trump.”

Not too long ago, many Republicans proudly referred to themselves as “constitutional conservatives.” They believed in the rule of law; in limiting the power of government, especially the federal government; in protecting individual liberty; and in checks and balances and the separation of powers. They opposed central planning and warned about emotions stirred up by the mob and the moment, believing, as the Founders did, that the role of government was to mediate rather than mirror popular passions. They recognized the importance of self-restraint and the need to cultivate public and private virtues. And they had reverence for the Constitution, less as a philosophical document than a procedural one, which articulated the rules of the road for American democracy.

…One of the reasons Roe v. Wade was viewed as a travesty by conservatives is that they believed the 1973 Supreme Court decision twisted the Constitution to invent a “right to privacy” in order to legalize abortion. The decision, they felt, was driven by a desired outcome rather than a rigorous analysis of legal precedent or constitutional text.

Which is why it’s hard to think of a more anti-conservative figure than President Donald Trump or a more anti-conservative movement than MAGA. Trump and his supporters evince a disdain for laws, procedures, and the Constitution. They want to empower the federal government in order to turn it into an instrument of brute force that can be used to reward allies and destroy opponents.

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Which leads neatly to the next two items, a theme in recent days.

Washington Post, Editorial Board, 31 May 2025: ‘No MAGA left behind’: The trouble with Trump’s pardons, subtitled “This week’s outburst suggests that America now has a two-tiered justice system.”

A jury convicted Scott Jenkins, the disgraced ex-sheriff of Culpeper County in Virginia, of taking more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for deputizing rich businessmen so they could get out of speeding tickets and carry guns without permits. Two undercover FBI agents who gave him envelopes of cash after he gave them badges testified at his trial. Luckily for Jenkins, he has long been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump. On Monday, the day before he was due to report for his 10-year prison sentence, Trump pardoned him.

“No MAGA left behind,” tweeted Ed Martin, Trump’s new pardon attorney at the Justice Department, about Jenkins.

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And — “Happy Memorial Day!” —

LA Times, Jackie Calmes, 30 May 2025: In Trump’s version of law and order, judges are demonized, criminals released

You’d think a president who’d endured two assassination attempts would be especially sensitive to the potential threats that other public officials face. Not Donald Trump. Worse, he stokes threats against others.

So it was that, just after 7 a.m. on Monday, Memorial Day, the commander in chief thumbed out 174 words on his cellphone, not one of which paid tribute to Americans who lost their lives in service to the nation. No, Trump addressed his “Happy Memorial Day” greeting (who says that?) “to all, including the scum … trying to destroy our country.” His all-capitalized screed (I’m dispensing with the caps) made clear whom he meant: as usual, predecessor and punching bag Joe Biden (“an incompetent president”), but mainly federal judges — including some of his own appointees — who’ve overwhelming been ruling against his power grabs in numerous lawsuits involving tariffs, federal spending, appointments, retribution against law firms and universities and migrant deportations.

Referring specifically to judges who’ve put the brakes on his lawless efforts to disappear untold noncitizens to foreign prisons and detention centers, Trump wrote that these “USA hating judges” “are on a mission to keep murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members, and released prisoners from all over the world, in our country so they can rob, murder, and rape again.” They’re “monsters who want our country to go to hell.”

And we’re debating Biden’s stability and mental acuity?

Where was that item about how Republican women have a certain look, entailing surgically puffed lips? I can’t help but noticing this guy too. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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Trump is a paranoid fantasist, but perhaps so are many MAGA folks. All brown-skinned people are suspect. And Trump is confused about the multiple meanings of “asylum”.

Facebook, Brian Tyler Cohen, 31 May 2025: That’s crazy

Not only is the president of the United States convinced that people claiming political asylum are coming from mental asylums (!) But he is also convinced that ‘millions’ of them have come in.

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One more Facebook post. It’s only an anecdote, but it strikes true.

Facebook, Marty Halpern, today: I was teaching my friend’s daughter…

I was teaching my friend’s daughter that antibiotics don’t work on viruses. Someone next to us said ivermectin works. I politely informed them that it doesn’t and they proceeded to tell me it also works on cancer. I proceeded to tell them that I am a doctor with degrees in cellular physiology and public health and that ivermectin does not do this. Their response? “I bet you have pronouns too.” This is the thought process we are dealing with.

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This past week, I’ve cycled back to Bruckner. The common impression is that the best symphonies are the 4th, 7th, 8th, and maybe the unfinished 9th. But this is the problem with all common impressions; this may be true in a sense, but there are still riches to be found in, in this case, the 3rd and 5th and 6th. Bruckner is best in his slow movements, as, arguably, Mahler is. Here’s the slow movement of the 4th. This YouTube clip is scaled low; you’ll have to turn up the volume to full. And there’s an annoying ad at the end.

Or, just listen to the entire symphony. It’s over an hour, as most Bruckner (and Mahler) symphonies are.

Posted in Lunacy, Music, Politics | Comments Off on Fareed Zakaria, Peter Wehner, Brian Tyler Cohen, and Anton Bruckner

MAGA and human nature; How Trump thinks everything is about loyalty to him

Posted on Friday 30 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Reconsidering the definition of MAGA, and how it relates to base human nature;
  • Recalling the David Brooks essay from yesterday;
  • Trump thinks an honest economic forecast is “unpatriotic”;
  • A Christian boy band preaches to public school students, and denies it;
  • How RFK Jr.’s battle against autism reveals simple-minded thinking;
  • We’re all going to die anyway, says a Republican defending Medicaid cuts;
  • How Trump makes the immigrant crisis worse by simply redefining legal immigrants into illegal ones;
  • And about that Facebook guy Justin, who asks basic questions of people on the street who cannot answer.
– – –

So perhaps we can refine the working definition of MAGA. It’s coming clearer into focus, though it should have been obvious all along.

What MAGA folks are yearning for is a return to small town life where everyone is like they are, the same race, more or less the same religion. They don’t want to deal with people unlike themselves. And their working view of reality is comprised of myths from one holy book. They don’t want to be bothered with what people from other places tell them about how reality really works. Thus flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers and anti-intellectuals in general. And never mind the internal contradictions of their favorite holy book. They make it that much more useful.

MAGA is about loyalty to an authoritarian leader. They prattle about meritocracy, but don’t mean it for a moment; look at Trump’s cabinet. And it’s about purity of the tribe (of America Christian whites). Look at them flouting the law at every opportunity to get brown-skinned “foreigners” out of the country. It’s *so* obvious, that few state it that plainly. They regard the Constitution with veneration similar to that for their Bible, but don’t follow the principles of either; veneration doesn’t entail understanding. Both documents are just markers of tribal bonds. Icons to wave over the crowds.

So this is not, I think, strictly an American yearning. It’s American only to the extent that, by virtue of being an expansionist nation over the past few centuries, that has spread out across a largely empty continent (except for the natives, of course), they have recreated a small town, frontier existence that much the rest of the Western world had already been through, and settled down from.

It’s all about base human nature as evolved over a million years, and the way it struggles to live in the modern environment, which is so different from where that human nature arose.

The Brooks essay I linked yesterday goes into this in analogous detail. Which I’ll quote a bit more of.

If America is built around a universalist ideal, then there is no room for the kind of white identity politics that Trump and Stephen Miller practice every day. There is no room for the othering, zero-sum, us/them thinking, which is the only kind of thinking Trump is capable of. There’s no room for Trump’s immigration policy, which is hostile to Latin Americans but hospitable to the Afrikaners whose ancestors invented apartheid. There’s no room for Tucker Carlson’s replacement theory. …

And:

Last, there are at least two kinds of morality. There is a kind of morality based on universal moral ideals, and then there is tribal morality. Deneen and Vance say they don’t think people are motivated by abstractions. They might try reading the Bible. The Bible is built on abstractions: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Sermon on the Mount contains a bunch of abstractions: blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the merciful. Believe it or not, down through the centuries, billions of people have dedicated their lives to these abstractions.

What Deneen and Vance said about men in combat is a manifestation of tribal morality. They take a sentiment that is noble in time of war — we take care of our own — and apply it in general to mean that we don’t have to take care of the starving children in Africa; we can be cruel to those we don’t like. Trumpism is a giant effort to narrow the circle of concern to people just like us.

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Trump, as we see daily, filters everything through a lens of loyalty.

\

The economists do their thing and make projections of growth over coming years. They do this all the time.

JMG, 30 May 2025: Trump Rages Over “Unpatriotic” US Growth Forecast

“The Democrat inspired and ‘controlled’ Congressional Budget Office (CBO) purposefully gave us an EXTREMELY LOW level of Growth, 1.8% over 10 years. How ridiculous and unpatriotic is that!

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This big theme explains the self-righteousness of Christians too. Support for the tribe is more important than those wishy-washy ‘woke’ laws meant for other people.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 30 May 2025: A Christian boy band denies trying to win converts at a public elementary school assembly, subtitled “The Davidson County Schools superintendent says he was “hoodwinked” by the 3 Heath Brothers”

Members of a Christian boy band insist they didn’t preach to children during a daytime assembly at a public school even though the district’s superintendent and everything the band has ever said publicly suggest otherwise.

One side is clearly lying and it’s the one that believes you need God to be a moral person.

\

Primitive thinking is simplistic thinking, as I’ve discussed time and again. To MAGA conservatives, the world is black and white, and every complex problem has a simple (simplex) answer.

Vox, Dylan Scott, 30 May 2025: RFK Jr. is looking in the wrong place for autism’s cause, subtitled “The autism commission is doomed to fail.”

“Genes don’t cause epidemics. You need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy said in April when announcing his department’s new autism research project. He argued that too much money had been put into genetic research — “a dead end,” in his words — and his project would be a correction to focus on environmental causes. “That’s where we’re going to find an answer.”

But according to many autism scientists I spoke to for this story, Kennedy is looking in exactly the wrong place.

Surely it’s been explained to him that there is no “epidemic” of autism. The rise in numbers of diagnoses is a matter of changing definitions and changing methods of diagnosis. The article goes on and on about them; nothing new. Conservatives think there is a simple answer for every problem; there isn’t.

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In Lakoff’s take, recall, progressives are about empathy and government as about protection and empowerment, while conservatism is about obedience and discipline (and not empathy).

This has been widely reported.

NY Times, 30 May 2025: Defending Medicaid Cuts, Ernst Tells Iowans, ‘We All Are Going to Die’, subtitled “Senator Joni Ernst’s flip response in an exchange with constituents about the effects of Trump’s domestic policy bill spread quickly online.”

The point being–? Why not spend *nothing* on health care and let everyone die as early as they would have millennia ago? That’s the traditional way.

This reminds me of some of the conservative response to the COVID crisis. Just let grandma die! So the rest of us don’t have to wear masks!

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Once again, MAGA is about white tribalism, white supremacy. “Alas, to Trump, every (non-White) immigrant is a threat.”

Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 30 May 2025: Trump might become the most pro-illegal immigration president ever, subtitled “The president is rapidly turning legal immigrants into illegal ones.”

You might not have noticed it, but last week the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States surged by 350,000.

Don’t worry, an army of gangbangers and other criminals didn’t charge the border. Rather, President Donald Trump simply decided to turn 350,000 legal immigrants into illegal ones.

Trump has been fearmongering about an “invasion” of unauthorized immigrants for years. Since retaking the White House, he has attempted to manifest those fever dreams into reality through a “de-documentation” campaign. This is not an immigration agenda that targets criminals; it’s one that criminalizes immigrants who have followed the law, by stripping them of their existing visas and work permits.

The 350,000 people de-documented last week are Venezuelans who had permission to live and work in the United States — subject to screening and other conditions — under a program known as temporary protected status. TPS was created in 1990 to shield immigrants from countries experiencing war or other catastrophes that make it unsafe for them to return home.

Given the tribalistic thinking of base human nature… most of MAGA probably agrees that anything that can be done cleanse white settlements of brown people is worth doing. They may not even realize what their motivation; like Trump, they rationalize this by supposing all those brown people are criminals, despite all the evidence otherwise over decades.

And:

Alas, to Trump, every (non-White) immigrant is a threat. He first tried to cancel protections for Venezuelans in February, and last week the Supreme Court gave him the green light. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called this development “the single largest mass-illegalization event in U.S. history.”

But racist whites from South Africa are welcome immigrants! Because they support Trump. Here we are again.

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I may have mentioned this Facebook guy before, without having a link. Here’s a link.

Facebook, Justin Interview

Justin is a guy who does live interviews in shopping malls, in Times Square, on city streets. He asks people questions with very obvious answers. Their answers are always wrong, and not trying to disabuse them, he always responds “yes!” The significance here is that so many people on the street can’t answer very basic questions. “How many states are there in the United States?” “In what country is the Great Wall of China?” “What language to people in Montana speak?”

It verges on cruelty, to expose these peoples’ ignorance (though they’re all anonymous). And I’m sure that Justin must do hundreds of such person-on-the-street interviews and selects only the very few that reveal their ignorance. So there’s a huge selection bias here. Still: why are there *any* such people? How did they glide through high school and get on in modern life without being aware of such basic things? “Who did we fight in the war of independence?” The lady in the supermarket suggests “…Vietnam?”

And these people vote.

Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on MAGA and human nature; How Trump thinks everything is about loyalty to him

Four Years; and Primitive, Atavistic Tendencies

Posted on Thursday 29 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Four years since my heart transplant;
  • David Brooks on loyalty to home vs loyalty to abstractions; human nature; and how Trumpism is an attempt “to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.”;
  • Thus: Trump fired the historians whose job was to oversee an unbiased account of US foreign policy;
  • RFK Jr defends his report via fabricated studies;
  • And how even some Trump supporters are realizing that Trump is losing it (and Elon seeing his DOGE efforts undercut by the massive new GOP budget);
– – –

Four years since heart and kidney transplants, so another round of annual tests this week, including blood draws. Everything’s fine. The cardiologist says, he loves seeing us guys (my partner Y always goes with me), because you have so few problems! We sit in the office and chat about where the kids are going or have gone to college… This time’s most alarming incident: I got a bruise on my left arm a few weeks ago. They did a scan. It’s fine.

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What is the difference between tribal and advanced morality? Loyalty vs. principles, I’d say.

NY Times, opinion by David Brooks, 29 May 2025: I’m Normally a Mild Guy. Here’s What’s Pushed Me Over the Edge. [gift link]

When I was a baby pundit, my mentor, Bill Buckley, told me to write about whatever made me angriest that week. I don’t often do that, mostly because I don’t get angry that much — it’s not how I’m wired. But this week I’m going with Bill’s advice.

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

In fact, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance used his precious time to make a point similar to Deneen’s. Vance said, “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”

But, ya know, the whole Constitution is a set of abstractions. About life, liberty, and so on. About rule of law. About balance of powers. It’s not about Mafia-style politics, and it’s not about defending your neighbors against the evil tribe one town over. That said, this essay is another example of my running theme contrasting the moral sensibilities of our ancestors, who lived for hundreds of thousands of years on the Savannah, in small tribes… and the moral sensibilities that work best in the modern world full of interconnected tribes and involving issues that must be solved globally.

So: yes in fact most people do think tribalistically, and of course you’re loyal to your family and your comrades. But modern societies were designed to achieve something higher and greater: to build nations that institutionalized abstractions and to overcome the selfish. Yet human nature remains. So the examples that made Brooks upset are not entirely wrong. As Brooks acknowledges and pushes back against. They’re just incomplete.

Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.

But that’s not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

And the last sentence there is the point.

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Thus most of what the Trump administration does.

Washington Post, Petula Dvorak, 29 May 2025: These historians oversee unbiased accounts of U.S. foreign policy. Trump fired them all., subtitled “The volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States have been written since Abraham Lincoln’s time.”

Huge volumes, bound in the timeless, red buckram linen of legacy books, are historians’ gold — and crucial to the nation’s understanding of how U.S. foreign policy is made.

There is a dispatch from Japan to President Abraham Lincoln’s administration describing the “bloody affair” of July 1861, the “daring and murderous attacks” by samurai warriors on British diplomats stationed in Edo, now known as Tokyo.

There is the top-secret report that pushed President Harry S. Truman to authorize covert actions in peacetime in 1947 to counter the “vicious psychological efforts” by the Soviet Union.

And then there’s the telegram handed over at 12:15 p.m. on April 18, 1961, from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy hours after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, warning that the action endangers peace “for the whole world. … It is a secret to no one that the armed bands invading this country were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.”

An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough.

President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee.

Because authoritarian tribal leaders want to rewrite history in their favor. To protect their tribe. It’s happened over and over, throughout history. See Orwell. An honest civilization would acknowledge its failings and work toward avoiding them, as some science fiction imagines. Conservatives dismiss such attempts as “woke.”

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And

Salon, Blaise Malley, 29 May 2025: Source? I made it up: RFK Jr.’s MAHA report cites fabricated studies, subtitled “An analysis of the report found falsified studies, broken links and mischaracterizations of conclusions”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again commission released its first report last week, which it called a “groundbreaking assessment” of the drivers of childhood chronic diseases. Close study of the publication found one little problem in MAHA’s analysis, however: several of the studies it cited do not exist.

A report from the political news site NOTUS found that MAHA misrepresented findings of existing reports and outright fabricated several others. NOTUS found multiple instances of named reports that contained links that did not work, were not findable through online searches, and were not published in the issues of the journals listed in the MAHA report. In some cases, the listed authors or the institutions for which they work said that they had never written the cited studies.

Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes was cited by the MAHA Report to back up claims of widespread anxiety and depression among adolescents. When reached by the outlet, she said she’d never authored the study.

“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes shared..

Once again, science does not work by formulating your conclusions first — this is another way of the tribal mind working to enforce its worldview, despite actual evidence — and misrepresenting actual evidence to support it. Even such an incident at this would be supremely embarrassing to any government that has not committed so many similar infractions.

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Are more and more people realizing this, which many of us have seen all along? Or is this wishful thinking? This relates to the story today about Elon Musk thinks his DOGE efforts have been completely undercut by the massive budget the Republicans are now trying to pass. (It was never about saving money. It was about cutting government programs that interfered with the rich getting richer.)

Salon, Brian Karem, 29 May 2025: Trump 2.0 falls apart before our eyes, subtitled “The president is losing it”

On Wednesday, Donald Trump went nuts when a reporter asked him about a Wall Street acronym mentioning him and his tariff policy: “TACO” or “Trump always chickens out.”

The president had threatened to raise tariffs on European goods last Friday, but later backed off. “It’s called negotiations,” Trump hissed at a reporter who asked him about it Wednesday. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question.” Those who witnessed Trump’s meltdown were not overly impressed. His past behavior is filled with worse tantrums in front of reporters.

“I really think he lost it a long time ago,” a pool reporter said.

Apparently, it only took Elon Musk, who officially left the Trump administration on Wednesday, 128 days with the president to come to that same conclusion. A true genius. 

Posted in Human Nature, Personal history | Comments Off on Four Years; and Primitive, Atavistic Tendencies

Self-destruction, Mafia Politics, TACO, What Aligns the Right, Bread and Circuses

Posted on Wednesday 28 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on the economic damage of America’s withdrawal from the world;
  • You can get away with anything if you donate enough to Trump;
  • TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out;
  • Zack Beauchamp on how the right isn’t driven by materialism, but by their culture;
  • And how billion-dollar Sports Stadiums seem to be the best American can do.
– – –

Another round.

Paul Krugman, 28 My 2025: America Turns Its Back on the World subtitled “Blocking foreign students is an act of self-destruction — and self-betrayal”

Beginning with an anecdote:

My wife and I are co-authors of a widely used textbook on the principles of economics, which is revised on a three-year cycle. When a new edition comes out, I normally visit a number of schools that might adopt it, usually giving a big public talk, a smaller technical seminar, and spending some time with students and faculty. I enjoy it, by the way; there are a lot of good, interesting people in U.S. education, and not just in the high-prestige schools.

So it was that at one point I found myself visiting Texas Tech in Lubbock. Yes, it seemed pretty remote to someone who has spent almost his whole life in the Northeast Corridor, but as usual the overall experience was very positive. And it was also surprisingly cosmopolitan: there were students from many nations. I just checked the numbers, and currently 30 percent of Texas Tech’s graduate students are international.

So it is all across America. Our nation’s ability to attract foreigners to study here is one of our great strengths. Or maybe I should say was one of our strengths.

And then concerning Trump’s directive to prevent Harvard from admitting foreign students.

It’s hard to overstate the self-destructiveness of this move, and the war on higher education in general. This is madness even in purely economic terms.

We don’t often think of education as a major U.S. export, but it is. International students typically pay full tuition and require little or no financial aid. Here’s “education-related travel,” basically international students, compared with some other major U.S. exports:

(see chart above)

There’s more…

[I]nternational students often get something important from the experience of studying in America that goes beyond what they learn in classrooms and labs. They learn what it means to live in an open society, and bring that knowledge home. We talk about “soft power,” which is very real. But this actually goes beyond that. Educating students from abroad helps to disseminate fundamental American values around the world.

Of course, the people now running things do not themselves accept what people like me consider fundamental American values. They may insist that they’re pro-American, but what they mean by “America” is a land of bigotry where your identity is determined by blood and soil, a land of closed borders and closed minds.

To trim David Brin’s comment in yesterday’s post: “Maga hates all fact professions as smartypants know-it-alls.” So many of them, including Trump, are perfect Dunning-Krugers: they are so dumb, they don’t know how dumb they are.

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Or perhaps Trump and his fans work on a different plane. Front page of today’s NYT:

NY Times, Kenneth P. Vogel, 27 May 2025: Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner, subtitled “Paul Walczak’s pardon application cited his mother’s support for the president, including raising millions of dollars and a connection to a plot to publicize a Biden family diary.”

Trump doesn’t believe in America as a liberal democracy (in the general meaning of “liberal”), or even as a business; he’s running it like a Mafia outfit. Pay enough tribute to the boss, and you get away with anything. Never mind law and order.

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Trump has acquired a new nickname.

Politico, Ali Bianco, 28 May 2025: Trump’s not happy about Wall Street’s name for tariff flip-flops, subtitled “He bristles at the acronym TACO, which stands for ‘Trump always chickens out.’”

No one can be confidant about his threats, because he changes his mind twice a week.

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What is the base motivation of the far right? Certainly not the “material,” since they vote against their own interests in material terms, as observers have noted for years.

Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 28 May 2025: Why the left gets the far right wrong, subtitled “The left’s attachment to thinking of politics in ‘material’ terms is causing it to misread the moment.”

Long analysis. For example,

In the United States, mainstream media and cultural figures were overwhelmingly hostile to Donald Trump all three times that he ran for president. They provided no end of information about how his policy proposals would harm the working class, and how his opponents’ ideas would benefit them. He won two out of three times anyway, with an increasing percentage of votes among lower-income and non-college voters.

And so on. The left continues to believe that “the roots of political behavior can ultimately trace back to material interests.”

Across the world, an egalitarian vision of democracy and social order has beaten its competitors — leading to the decline of formal hierarchies along racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and caste lines. This manifested in concrete social changes, like the entry of women into the workforce or the end of racially discriminatory immigration regimes, that profoundly unsettled certain traditionally-minded segments of the global population. Far-right parties became their champions.

This is a fundamentally postmaterial account of far-right politics. It argues that the right wins not by channeling people’s displaced economic anger, but by articulating ideas that match their deeply held beliefs, values, and identities.

Well yes, of course. It’s not just about making money in a capitalist society; it’s about the deeper (what I would call tribalistic) values.

They did not arrive at said beliefs because of their place in the class structure or assessment of self-interest, but rather because ideas and identity are social facts in their own right. When people go to church or talk to their parents about culture, they listen. And that defines who they are as human beings every bit as much as their role as economic producers, especially in a world where the average voter in a wealthy democracy is orders of magnitude more materially secure than the workers of Marx’s day.

So what should the left do, to appeal to these values voters?

Adopting a postmaterial analytic framework does not require abandoning left-wing politics. You can see voters as driven on ideas without abandoning normative commitments to improving the lot of workers, to bolstering the too-weak welfare state, or even to seeing the existence of billionaires as a crime against democracy and human decency.

In fact, I’d argue, doing so is essential for the left to succeed.

Well, OK. It’s also been long known that the wealthy Republican class are taking advantage of working class voters, by appealing to their religious priorities, while in the background passing legislation that benefits the wealthy. This has been happening for decades, and it’s happening again right now. Maybe the liberal platform should be to expose *this*. The writer concludes:

As long as the left insists on materialism as its most fundamental theory of politics, not just one possible account of human behavior but always the primary one, it will continue to misunderstand the sources of its far-right enemy’s power. It will continue proposing the same old slogans, regardless of their political efficacy, because to do otherwise would be to admit that materialism is in some important political sense no longer true.

So, can I boil this down? The right isn’t so much concerned with their own prosperity as they are preserving their values. And they don’t realize they’re being played by the Republicans, who reliably violate those values. (See above.) Because they’re not paying attention? Because…?

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Trumpist Americans resent $100 million paid to Harvard eggheads, to fulfill government contracts, but they’re happy to spend billions on sports stadiums. Americans are no different than the Romans, with their bread and circuses.

 

NY Times, opinion by Binyamin Appelbaum, 28 May 2025: Sports Stadiums Are Monuments to the Poverty of Our Ambitions

People who say that the United States can’t build anything anymore must not be sports fans. Barely a year goes by without the debut of a sparkling new stadium or arena, often in the very cities where it’s most difficult to build almost anything else. A $2.3 billion baseball stadium in the Bronx. A 70,000-seat football stadium in the middle of Los Angeles County. A basketball arena on the San Francisco waterfront.

The latest example, announced last month by the mayor of Washington, D.C., is a $3.8 billion plan to build a stadium for the local football team, the Washington Commanders, on 180 acres of public land just two miles from the Capitol.

Washington is not an easy place to build housing, but no one should doubt the capital city’s capacity to build a stadium. The city opened a basketball arena in 1997, a baseball stadium in 2008 and a soccer stadium in 2018. In Washington, as in other American cities, homes for sports teams are the only kinds of homes that still get built.

The obvious reason is that sports are popular. Especially the N.F.L. When the Commanders win, Washington wakes up in a better mood. It doesn’t require a political science degree to understand why the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, is eager to persuade the team to return to Washington after a few decades in the Maryland suburbs. She wants to be popular, too.

Well, obviously, but why? Once again I invoke one of my recurrent themes: human nature evolved in an ancient, tribal environment, where warfare between rival tribes was routine — see OT. Over that long history, humans became primed for battle, for zero-sum games in which one side won and the other lost. In the modern environment, those battle impulses have become channeled into sports: mock warfare, where one side wins, and the other must lose. This is how Trump thinks about the world in general. But it’s not the way of the world, over millennia; humans have built a worldwide civilization by learning to cooperate with one another and promote non-zero-sum games. But the deep passions for battle among tribes lingers among most of us.

The article notes how little those stadiums are actually used. They sit empty most of the time. And what if society had such ambition to build better things? Concluding:

Academic studies have repeatedly concluded that public spending on stadiums is a bad investment. Indeed, one of the leading authorities on the subject has memorably described that conclusion as one of the rare subjects on which economists have approached unanimity.

Better investments would yield bigger returns. One can only imagine a world in which the mayors of American cities were equally motivated by the economic benefits of public transit. But it’s much less expensive, much easier and much more fun to build a gussied-up grandstand than to invest in faster commutes or high-quality public education. The $3.8 billion price for the Commanders stadium is a lot of money, but it is a small fraction of what it would cost to build a neighborhood on the same land.

Our stadiums are monuments to the poverty of our civic ambitions and our inability to summon the collective will to use the land we have for the things we need. They are distractions from our inability to build anything else.

Posted in conservatives, Culture, Economics, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Self-destruction, Mafia Politics, TACO, What Aligns the Right, Bread and Circuses

America, increasingly anti-science and anti-intellectual, was founded by religious fanatics, as perhaps most Americans do not realize

Posted on Tuesday 27 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How America is becoming anti-science and anti-intellectual, with a comment by David Brin;
  • Adam Serwer on Trump’s attack on knowledge itself, with my comments about how most people won’t notice, but the world and history will;
  • How Americans venerate ancestors who were, in fact, religious fanatics, with seven Puritan credos that reflect base human nature;
  • And ideas for a secular story of existence, which, I suspect is probably not possible.
– – –

NY Times, TheUpshot, 22 May 2025: Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades [gift link]

The National Science Foundation, which funds much of the fundamental scientific research at American universities, is awarding new grants at the slowest pace in at least 35 years.

The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs and other “woke” targets that the Trump administration says it wants to cut.

That is, the administration isn’t bothering to use wokeness as an excuse — they’re cutting science anyway. Why would that be?

Saw this via David Brin on Facebook, who comments:

Nothing more purely describes what unites the MAGA/confederate masses with their oligarch overlords. The former hate all fact professions as smartypants know-it-alls. Especially science but also civil servants, FBI/intel and even the US military officer corps. The latter (oligarchs) know that fact people are the only clades left, standing in the way of a return to 6000 years of feudalism.

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And this.

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 27 May 2025: The New Dark Age, subtitled “The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.”

From the author of The Cruelty Is the Point.

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.

Long essay, each paragraph somehow more grim than the previous.

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.

Going on with attacks against institutions of higher education.

I’m of two minds about these matters. One is that, as I’ve said about broad historical changes, *most people won’t notice.* They will carry on their day-to-day lives and they don’t pay attention the accumulated knowledge of humankind over the past hundreds or thousands of years. If challenged, most would dismiss such knowledge in favor of their religion, or whatever else makes them feel comfortable. They use the technology that’s resulted from this accumulated knowledge by rote, as if it were magic.

On the other hand, these matters will change America’s status in the world. Other nations, especially China, *will* keep investing in science, and they will make the breakthrough discoveries in, say, cancer prevention, that the US might have made. But, as a secondary effect, most Americans will not understand or appreciate this. The US scientists who fled to Europe, or even China, will.

And furthermore on this other hand — history will be the judge. It will record the deliberate self-sabotage of American science, and its surrender to the base tribal forces that gave its license to our moron authoritarian president.

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Americans, all peoples I suppose, venerate their ancestors, or founders, whether or not those old folks were crazy by modern standards. Pilgrims and Puritans. But if you look back honestly, America was founded by religious fanatics. And perhaps this explains America’s current culture.

Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 26 May 2025: How America got so weird: The Pilgrims made us do it, subtitled “Those guys who landed at Plymouth Rock were a doomsday cult, says Jane Borden — and we’ve emulated them ever since”

This is an interview…

Jane Borden’s “Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America” develops a simple thesis: The English Pilgrims who famously landed at Plymouth Rock were essentially a doomsday cult — even if they lacked a charismatic leader — and together with the Puritans who followed them passed on seven key elements of belief that have shaped America ever since. Even as some aspects of their beliefs have faded, these key elements survive in multiple different forms and settings, from pop culture to multilevel marketing schemes and a wide range of spiritual practices and beliefs that migh otherwise seem to have little in common.

I’m going to skim through and compile those seven key elements, but first, the interview begins this way:

You begin your book with a brief description of the Pilgrims as a doomsday cult, and go on to say, “We’ve been iterating on its prototype since. We can’t stop re-creating our first trauma,” although it remains “largely unacknowledged.” What led you to see the Pilgrims as America’s foundational cult?

Well, around 2018 I became very preoccupied by the division in our nation, the cultural and political division. I’d been reporting on cults at the time, and I knew that cults feed off division and that division is fueled by cults in turn. I started to see cultic thinking in America everywhere in pop culture, entertainment and politics, and I just started pulling on the thread. How long have we had this knee-jerk anti-intellectualism? Why are we so obsessed with the illusion of perfection? I just kept pulling that thread and it took me all the way back to the 1620s and 1630s.

The interview questions then follow those seven key elements, or Puritan credos, which I will bullet list:

  1. our innate desire for a strongman to fix our problems and punish those who aggrieve us
  2. the temptation to feel chosen, which justifies acting on our base desires
  3. knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism
  4. our impulse to buy and sell salvation on the open market
  5. hard work is holy, while idleness is a sin
  6. how quickly and easily we fall into us-versus-them thinking
  7. an innate need for order, which makes us vulnerable to anyone screaming, ‘Chaos!’ and then offering control

Each of these points leads to examples from history.

On the fifth point, Brownoski identified this as a key element of the industrial revolution…

On the sixth point, the interviewer says this:

But this chapter seems to get at the underlying dynamic behind the whole book: That thinking has origins in our evolutionary past, but our cultural evolution has produced a distinctive Western mindset, expressed most fully in America, which is in tension with that past, and the inclination to join cults reflects a reaction to that. I think that sums it up, but I’d like to hear you elaborate on that.

And there’s a recommendation of that Henrich book, which I have but have not yet read.

And the interview ends:

Cults are situations where there are no checks on power. The reason America has been so successful is because of checks and balances. We learn that in second grade. When you don’t have checks on power, that’s when everything goes to s**t. Whether you’re talking about corporate governance or our current flirtation with autocracy or about a cult who have moved off the radar onto an island somewhere, what you’re dealing with is the danger of unchecked power.

Comments: These are all elements of base human nature, a running theme here, just not expressed in those terms. Also: this fits neatly into the stories about suppression of education.

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Finally for today, an essay about understanding existence that does not rely on the ancient, supernatural, religions. Is such a thing possible?

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 26 May 2025: Seeking a secular story of existence, subtitled “All worldviews need to address the deepest questions.”

Offhand, I would say, of course it’s possible. But not for most people. It takes some education to understand that humans do not live at the center of creation. That our drives for beliefs in an afterlife are driven by wishful thinking, and are not consistent with humanity’s understanding of the actual world as built up over the past few centuries. The “deepest questions” are the wrong questions.

In the early years of the 21st century, the New Atheist wave, headed by Christopher Hitchens, gleefully anticipated the decline of religion, which they considered a malign influence in the world. While they were not uniformly anti-spiritual—Sam Harris was especially spiritually oriented—they were largely cheerful materialists. Undirected forces and matter were the stuff of existence. Mark Lilla described this materialist orientation in political terms: secularists had no truths worth killing over, unlike religious believers.

Only one member of the New Atheist wave—Philip Kitcher in Living with Darwin—expressed the concern that this materialist worldview might prove demoralizing for ordinary people.

How do things look now, approaching 20 years later?

In America and much of the West, the decline in religious affiliation accelerated in the new century. Today, approximately 30% of American adults identify themselves as “nones”—reporting that they are unaffiliated with any religious tradition. Many former houses of worship stand empty. No American religious figure today captures the attention of the culture the way that Reinhold Niebuhr did in the 1950s and Billy Graham did in the 1960s.

Religion is definitely in decline.

And this:

The materialist story favored by the New Atheists asserts that the universe is a dark and lonely place. Random forces and matter lead to unpredictable outcomes, like the emergence of life, but do not yield any meaningful pattern. Humans have evolved a need for meaning and purpose and a fundamentally moral orientation to existence. But these feelings do not reflect anything in reality. They are an evolutionary spandrel, arising out of the need for social organization without constant coercion. In other words, our feelings are illusory.

This story is brisk, a little tragic, but it is bracing. Science has certainly advanced following it.

Well, yes. This is what systematic investigation of reality (i.e. science) has revealed about the world.

The other story is more difficult to describe but it better coheres with human yearning. In this story, the universe is ordered and rational and can be said to lead naturally to complex organization, life, consciousness, self-consciousness, empathy, generosity and love. This is the universe as understood by Alfred North Whitehead, classically, and recently by Bobby Azarian in his book, The Romance of Reality. In this story, human needs reflect reality.

I have that Azarian book, have read 75 pages, and decided to backtrack to some earlier books before returning. I’ll get back to it.

Posted in Human Progress, Lunacy, Religion | Comments Off on America, increasingly anti-science and anti-intellectual, was founded by religious fanatics, as perhaps most Americans do not realize

Education, Religion, Policies that Don’t Work, the Revolt Against Expertise

Posted on Sunday 25 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Heather Cox Richard on the history of government suppression of education, especially as inspired by religion;
  • The GOP keeps promoting policies that history has shown don’t work;
  • The revolt against expertise, yet again.
– – –

Heather Cox Richardson reviews the history of government suppression of education.

Letters from an American: May 24, 2025

Beginning with the Trump administration telling Harvard this past week that it can no longer enroll foreign students, which are about a quarter of the student body there. (Why does the government think it can tell a private university what it can and cannot do?)

While President Donald J. Trump might well have his own reasons for hating a university famous for its brain power, the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump’s attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States.

Beginning,

That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s, when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies complained that men in the eastern districts, who monopolized wealth and political power, were ignoring the needs of westerners. This opposition often took the form of a religious revolt as westerners turned against the carefully reasoned sermons of the deeply educated and politically powerful ministers in the East and followed preachers who claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God’s inspiration.

Then, 100 years ago,

On May 25, 1925, a grand jury in Tennessee indicted 24-year-old football coach and science teacher John T. Scopes for violating Tennessee’s law, passed in March of that year, that made it “unlawful…to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” In other words, Tennessee had banned the teaching of human evolution.

Later the New Deal and the Church League of America which aligned with businessmen against it. Then:

William F. Buckley Jr. applied this line of thinking to higher education in his 1951 God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. In it, Buckley argued that Yale University was corrupted by “atheism” and “collectivism” not because its faculty actually called for atheism and collectivism, but because their embrace of fact-based argument supported the government that had grown out of the New Deal.

This kind of thinking by the religious baffles me, but you hear it all the time. Don’t think! Suppress the facts! Because they would undermine religion. Their own, of course. As Richardson puts it:

Modern universities embraced the Enlightenment tradition of a free search for knowledge in the belief that informed discussion fed by a wide range of ideas was the best way to reach toward truth. As ideas were tested in public debate, people would be able to choose the best of them. This was the basis of academic freedom.

Buckley denied this “superstition.” Truth would not win out in a free contest of ideas, he said; students would simply be led astray. For proof, he offered the fact that most Americans had chosen the New Deal and continued to support its extension. He called for Yale to replace faculty that believed in academic freedom with those who would advance the causes of Christianity and free enterprise.

Buckley, for all that he was regarded as one of the nation’s leading intellectuals, was actually an ideological zealot. (Just as with Ross Douthat today, Buckley believed that *his* religion was the one true one, and so had no qualms about forcing it upon everyone.)

America’s post–World War II university system was the envy of the world, driving innovation and medical and scientific research that made the U.S. economy boom and raised standards of living around the world.

…

As Republicans embraced economic individualism and religion, they also embraced anti-intellectualism. Their version was not unlike that of the early colonists, in which rural Americans, especially those in the West, claimed their evangelical religion made them more worthy than the urban Americans in the East who far outnumbered them.

To the modern day.

Increasingly, far-right activists insisted that all of the pillars of society, including universities, had been corrupted by the liberal ideas behind the modern government and that those pillars must be destroyed. In 2012, college dropout Charlie Kirk and Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery formed Turning Point USA to purge college campuses of those faculty members they saw as purveyors of dangerous ideas. After Trump’s election in 2016, the organization launched the “Professor Watchlist,” which listed faculty members it claimed—without evidence—“discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” (I was one of the first on the list.)

Then JD Vance prattling on about losing “every major powerful institution in the country…”

“We live in a world that has been made effectively by university knowledge” and to rebuild the nation along the lines of white Christian nationalism, the universities must be destroyed. Vance told the audience, “the professors are the enemy.”

No. Intellectuals are too polite to say this but: It’s the liberal ideas that have built modern society and improved the human condition. It’s the religious right, in their zeal to force their antiquated supernatural worldview on the rest of us, who will destroy modern American society, and let the world be run by China, and perhaps Europe. I think the intellectuals are too polite to say this because they believe the religious right is a bunch of loonies who will never actually prevail; they are at odds with reality. Look how incompetent the Trump administration is. Like other cults, they will pass into history, and those who understand the work with reality will prevail. Would that be so.

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Examples include the many things Republicans keep pushing that have been tried before and failed. They don’t learn. They are *certain* they have to work.

The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, 20 May 2025: The GOP’s Big Medicaid Idea Was Tried Before—And Failed Badly, subtitled “Arkansas and Georgia tried work requirements, and the results were not pretty.”

Republican thinking is always so simple-minded; what could be wrong with asking welfare recipients to work? Seems plausible, right? But reality is complicated. Statistics (I think Paul Krugman compiled some) show that there are many different categories of people who receive Medicaid, and only a small per cent are people who might be able to work, and usually there are reasons that are preventing them from working. The article here discusses some of them.

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Another visit to a recurring theme.

The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr, 19 May 2025: R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise, subtitled “It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened?”

Noted in particular for the last lines of this opening paragraph:

The Cabinet confirmation hearings have been agonizing for congressional Democrats, who have watched in horror as Donald Trump has pushed through one outlandish candidate after another. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vaccine skeptic nominated for Secretary of Health and Human Services, was among the most hair-raising. “Vaccinating children is unethical,” he has written. Unable to prevent Kennedy from becoming the country’s top health official, Democrats could only use his hearing to showcase their values. Liberals stand for science. The G.O.P. stands for drinking bleach, freaking out about Satanist pedophiles, and blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers.

But when was it that progressives distrusted science? I realize that if you go back decades enough, before the current left/right split, everyone loved science and technology because they helped the US win World War II.

The article here goes on to point out that RFK Jr was on the side of progressive causes, and even espouses belief in principles that sound very scientific (“evidence, ignoring appeals to authority, reserving judgment, demanding more research…”) The writer thinks Kennedy may have a point about “the power long held by scientific insiders like Fauci.”

There’s a whiff of deep epistemology here. How do we know what we know? But it can’t go on forever.

Drawing a line is necessary: at some point, you have to declare that the Holocaust happened, that vaccines don’t cause autism, and that climate change is real. The philosopher Bernard Williams noted that science isn’t a free market of ideas but a managed one; without filters against cranks, trolls, and merchants of doubt, knowledge production “would grind to a halt.” But in science, and in intellectual inquiry more broadly, where you draw the line matters enormously. Keep things too open and you’re endlessly debating whether Bush did 9/11. Close them too quickly, though, and you turn hasty, uncertain conclusions into orthodoxies. You also marginalize too many intelligent people, who will be strongly encouraged to challenge your legitimacy by seizing on your missteps, broadcasting your hypocrisies, and waving counter-evidence in your face.

It’s a long article that I haven’t fully read. Next time.

Posted in conservatives, Human Progress, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Education, Religion, Policies that Don’t Work, the Revolt Against Expertise

Nicholas Humphrey, LEAPS OF FAITH

Posted on Saturday 24 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitle: “Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation”

(Basic Books, Jan. 1996, 244pp, including 20pp notes and index)
(Chatto & Windus, 1995, as Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief)

Here’s a book I read when it came out, back in 1996 — I think I was intrigued by the “search for supernatural consolation” part, which appealed to my impression that religion is more about psychological need that consideration of what is actually true — and picked up again last week to reconsider in light my current ideas of how basic human nature is reacting to the modern world, an environment so different from the one our minds evolved in.

I’ll summarize the key themes here:

  • First, Humphrey proposes that interest in paranormal phenomena — which can be grouped as either psychokinesis (PK) or extra-sensory perception (ESP) — is driven by the need to replace the comforts of traditional religious beliefs, which have been discredited by science. Thus the paranormal ‘project,’ as it were, is about trying to discredit the materialist view of the world. People want the consolations of their religions back, with their assurance that the future holds something to look forward to.
  • Second, this project has failed. It *could* have worked, but the evidence is too scattershot. A key argument against is that “from unwarranted design,” i.e. why paranormal phenomena only occur in circumstances that seem restricted in ways not required but their premise. (E.g. why telepathy or telekinesis aren’t used in daily life — only for shows.) And how this argument applies to the miracles of the Bible.
  • Third, so why does the public still believe? A mixture of personal experience, external authority, and a priori reasoning. But there are logical reasons why these explanations fail, namely “prescriptive inefficiency,” that too little information is present for such large effects.
  • Finally, there’s a larger reason a world infused with paranormal phenomena would not exist — they would short-circuit evolution, and the very forces that brought about our species. (And how Asimov explained this in 1982.)

My observation, considering my big theme, is that these ideas undermine one of the key premises of traditional science fiction. All the notions of telepathy and premonition and telekinesis. They are taken for granted in modern media “sci-fi”, but they have gradually fallen away from consideration by the more honest sf writers.

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Isaac Asimov, MInd, Religion | Comments Off on Nicholas Humphrey, LEAPS OF FAITH