Conservatives and Empathy

Posted on Wednesday 30 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservatives against empathy: excuses for selfishness;
  • Another piece about boarding houses, once banned, perhaps now more appropriate than ever;
  • Recalling a 50-year-old thesis about how human stupidity drags societies down;
  • Quotes from Thomas L. Friedman and Paul Krugman about Donald Trump;
  • Reading the Jared Huffman book.
– – –

What does it say about conservatives that lately they’re against empathy?

The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig, 27 Sep 2026: Why Empathy Is Now ‘Toxic,’ ‘Suicidal,’ and a ‘Sin’, subtitled “According to Gad Saad and his powerful acolytes, compassion is a recipe for ‘the collective suicide of the West.'”
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A World We Can’t Trust

Posted on Tuesday 29 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Bill McKibben on how we weren’t built for a world like this;
  • Locus server issues today;
  • More destruction: Trump scales back fuel emission standards, and removes supports for LGBTQ+ folks;
  • How Trump’s new AI-powered America.gov tells truths that counter Trump’s lies.
– – –

NY Times, Bill McKibben, today: I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This.

Opening:

Psychologists have claimed that evolutionary biology leaves humans ill-equipped to deal with giant, slow-moving problems.

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Attending the Ballet

Posted on Monday 28 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

No post yesterday; we were busy attending a concert, with dinner afterwards.

Yesterday we attended Oscar, a ballet at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, staged by The Australian Ballet, on tour, with the local Berkeley Symphony playing the score, with conductor Jonathan Lo. Choreography by Christopher Weldon; score by Joby Talbot, whom I’d never heard of before.

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Dicey Claims

Posted on Saturday 26 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • No, Noah’s Ark has not been found, again;
  • Evidence suggests Trump wanted the Kennedy Center to fall into ruin;
  • Lenders around the world don’t trust the US;
  • An example of how AI is making things worse, by claiming credit for mathematical results that cannot be easily confirmed;
  • Thoughts about mathematics, AI, and the limits of human cognition.
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This kind of story pops up every few years, and it’s no truer now than it has ever been. The searchers have had 2000 years. But gullible people feel confirmed by it every time.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: Scientists have not “100% confirmed” the resting place of Noah’s Ark, subtitled “The Daily Mail turned a Christian company’s dubious claims about Turkey’s Durupınar Formation into a wildly misleading story”

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There Is Only So Much Land

Posted on Friday 25 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jerry Coyne on why neither Israel nor Palestine wants a two-state solution;
  • Fareed Zakaria claims the US and China must eventually adapt, even cooperate;
  • Robert Reich on what he’s heard from foreign leaders about America and Trump;
– – –

A similar broad theme today. This goes along with the item two days ago about J.D. Vance’s notion of “Heritage Americans” who, in his fascist, hierarchical mindset, are more deserving to run America than others.

Jerry Coyne, yesterday: The two-state delusion

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Abdication

Posted on Thursday 24 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump abdicates as leader of the free world;
  • Or maybe of the entire world, in favor of China;
  • How failure to address existential threats is costing America and the world;
  • Brief items: A nation should be run like a household, not a business; a new way to disappear ICE detainees; some want martial declared for the midterms; a Christian evangelist won’t explain why he needs so much money; Jim Palmer on existential realities we can’t escape.
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History runs in cycles, sorta. The US has gone through isolationist periods before. Though this time it may be part of general reaction against modernity and complexity.

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, today: Donald Trump abdicates as leader of the free world, subtitled “The president’s UN address showed he has ceded that position to Canada’s Mark Carney”
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Ian Stewart: NATURE’S NUMBERS

Posted on Thursday 24 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics
(Basic Books, 1995, x + 164pp, including 14pp of further reading and index)

One more in this series for now. Despite the title, this books’ topic is not that that of Martin Rees in JUST SIX NUMBERS. This is rather an introduction to various basic ideas of mathematics, and how math is about more than numbers.

Moreover, it builds to an introduction of the new concepts of math and physics that began to emerge in the 1980s and continued for a couple decades. Chaos, fractals, Fibonacci numbers, complexity, emergence, and so on. Stewart also co-wrote two larger books with Jack Cohen exploring these concepts in greater detail: THE COLLAPSE OF CHAOS in 1994, and FIGMENTS OF REALITY in 1997. Stewart and Cohen later teamed up with fantasy writer Terry Pratchett to write a series of four books called THE MAGIC OF DISCWORLD, contrasting how physics supposedly works in that universe with the new ideas about our own universe. I reviewed the first of them way back in 2015, here.

I have a bookshelf of a couple dozen titles on these various concepts, including James Gleick’s relatively well-known CHAOS (1987) and others by John L. Casti, Stuart A. Kauffman, Murray Gell-Mann, et al.

Key Ideas

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What Is It Conservatives Want to Conserve?

Posted on Wednesday 23 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The worst of the past? The protocols of primitive human nature? That’s what it seems like. Are they aware of this?
  • Trump wants to make America 1988 again;
  • Trump got played on the Greenland deal;
  • The superficiality of Fox news hosts;
  • A Republican who supports science and medical research (!);
  • David French on Vance’s ideas about Heritage Americans;
  • Links about Trump’s claimed victories for people of faith; Russian election interference; how conservatives argue for yes/no answers; how right-wing media promised gas and diesel prices wouldn’t soar.
– – –

Washington Post, opinion by Theodore R. Johnson, today: Trump wants to make America 1988 again, subtitled “Four decades after Willie Horton, the president still invokes the politics of the past.”

On a North Carolina tarmac last week, President Donald Trump reminded the country that MAGA’s preferred version of America is one from a bygone era.

… Rather than outline a vision for tomorrow, Trump’s pitch leaned on the party’s most shopworn frameworks: law and order’s tough-on-crime posturing, the Southern strategy’s exploitation of racial division, and the infamous intersection of the two — the Willie Horton ad, which first aired 38 years ago this week.

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Richard Dawkins: RIVER OUT OF EDEN

Posted on Wednesday 23 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: A Darwinian View of Life
(Basic Books, March 1995, xiii + 172pp, including 11pp Bibliography and further reading, and index.)

By the time Dawkins wrote this short book for the publisher’s Science Masters series, he had already published three foundational books: THE SELFISH GENE, THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE, and THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. (The first one I reviewed here; the second I haven’t yet read; the third I reviewed here.) This book doesn’t try to replicate the breadth or depth of those books. Rather, it could be described as ‘topics in evolution,’ especially topics of interest to general readers, including how science is not faith, creationism, and purpose.

Key Themes

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Cognitive Abilities and Limitations

Posted on Tuesday 22 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How AI is being used to solve math problems that humans have been unable to;
  • How anti-vaxxers are at core angry, fearful, and despairing;
  • NYT’s Brett Stephens complains that none of the National Book Award finalists are by or about people like him.
  • Beck’s new album Ride Lonesome.
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On the general theme of humanity’s cognitive ability. I’ve mentioned before that, as with morality, there’s a wide range of positions. At the high end, we know of prodigies like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who had preternatural mathematical skills; we know of Savants who can tell you what day of the week a particular date falls (and oddly these are associated with autistic people); and so on.

The AI revolution is revealing that there are things that can be known that even smart humans figure can’t out.

Scientific American, Lyndie Chiou, today: Mathematicians use AI to find mysterious symmetries, solving decades-old problem

Subtitled: In parallel, a race by amateurs and mathematicians has found all 25,000 cases of one “inverse Galois problem”

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