Views from Crestmont Drive

Conservatives, especially religious extremists, seem given over to paranoia and prophecies of doom, and they never learn.

10 Right-Wing Predictions About Obama That Never Came True

Among those implicated: Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin, Joseph Farah, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Larry Klayman, Janet Porter, Wayne LaPierre, Rafael Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones. These people never lose their audiences, no matter how repeatedly wrong they are.

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On the more cerebral topic of belief in ‘god’.

A post by Robert V.S. Redick:

And a comment by Jesse Bering to one of his own posts, yesterday:

From an atheist’s perspective informed by psychological science, it’s not simply an absence of evidence for God. There is a plethora of evidence of innate cognitive biases that generate the sort of recalcitrant illusions (misattributions of agency, intentions, continuity of mind after death, etc) underlying the commonsense belief in God and the afterlife.

Bering wrote a whole book about this — The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life — one of the best books on reasons to set religious faith aside as a kind mental illusion.

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And from Connor Wood’s “Science on Religion” blog: Trump shows why Rationalia would fail. I haven’t read this completely yet, but it seems to dovetail with a recurring theme in some of my reading, including having just finished Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, where he emphasizes the human need for “imagined orders” including religions, political systems, and money, systems of shared trust among large groups of people, without which large societies could not function. Culture based on purely rationalistic terms (Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s “Rationalia”) would never work, Wood says. Will pursue.

I keep ‘saving’ links or posts on Facebook that I don’t get around to right away, to read or post. Here are a few from the dozen I’ve saved in the past month or so.

NPR: Adopting a Sci-Fi Way of Thinking About the Future.

Posted on January 2nd, on what has apparently become National Science Fiction Day as it correponds with Isaac Asimov’s birthday. The piece quotes a key excerpt from a 1978 Asimov essay:

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be — and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our Everyman, must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved.

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On California, perhaps a refuge from Trumplandia, on Tim Rutten’s site: The Right’s Hatred of California Is Really Fear of a Future that Already Is Working.

What’s really at work in the right-wing’s demonization of California is not really loyalty to Trumpism or traditionalist devotion to the Electoral College. It’s fear of the future. When Trump vowed to “make America great again” the right read his rhetoric as a promise to take us back in time—to the years when white men went off to work and white women stayed home with the kids and minority races were just that, minorities who kept to themselves.

California, by contrast, already is what more of America will look like in the years to come. No single race is in the majority or enjoys a lock on political or economic power. Seventeen percent of all Americans live in California and 38% of them are non-Hispanic whites, 38.8% are Latinos, 14.7% are Asians, 6.5% are African American, 1.7% are Native Americans—numerically, the country’s largest concentration of indigenous people—and 3.8% describe themselves as of mixed race. More Californians—43%–speak a language other than English in their homes, though it will confound Trump supporters to know that immigration from Mexico slowed long ago and the majority of new immigrants come from Asia, mainly China.

And despite conversative fears of how the country is changing, it hasn’t harmed California:

If the Golden State were an independent country, according to the most recent World Bank ratings, it would have the globe’s sixth largest economy.

So there.

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Via David Brin: Google Sky

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Wall Street Journal: Jonathan Haidt (one of my favorite authors, based on the one book of his I’ve read) and Ravi Iyer on How to Get Beyond Our Tribal Politics. Have not read this, but I presume in condenses the lessons of his singular book.

I’ve built a page here for reviews, books and films, that I’ve posted here since mid-2013, when the “Views from..” blog was established, succeeding the earlier Locus Online editorial blog. The link is in the header above. I’ll go through the earlier blog eventually, though I don’t think there are nearly so many substantial reviews there. Also, I occasionally post film reviews on Facebook that aren’t always copied here; I’ll track those down too.

I might also add, for anyone who cares, that I read many more books than ever get written up here. I almost always take notes as I read, and type them up into a Word file (I’ve been doing this for 20 years), but I less often go the next step and condense my notes into any sort of posted review. (At the moment, I do intend a post or two about Robert Silverberg’s short fiction through 1975, which I read late last year, and which covered many books; and James Gleick’s recent nonfiction Time Travel, which I finished last week; and Hugo Gernsback’s notorious ‘classic’ SF novel Ralph 124C 41+, which I finished yesterday.)

I spent a couple three hours this afternoon — as a storm moved in over the Bay Area — compiling my own Table of Contents to this blog, and updating that page. I thought I had not posted so much this past year, compared to earlier years, but that turns out only to be true through mid-year, when I got distracted from blogging, and reading, for several months by those video games The Witness and Obduction.

Everything on this blog is a draft for my imagined book — about reality v fantasy, narrative v reality, the human perception of the world v its reality, and how science fiction informs and explores that dissonance.