The Drones! The Drones!

Posted on Monday 16 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

First let’s finish the second Robert Reich item we began yesterday. Then the drones.

Robert Reich, 13 Dec 2024: America’s four stories (Part 2)
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Fear, Outrage, and Paranoia

Posted on Sunday 15 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve been curious, but have never been sufficiently tempted, to watch or listen to right-wing media for any period of time. These two pieces confirm my impression that most of its content is about fear and outrage. Fear of a complex world conservatives don’t understand, outrage that nobody does anything about it. They just want to make it all go away, and presumably are pleased that Trump seems intent on dismantling most of the government, and making all those icky immigrants disappear. (Which of course he won’t be able to do.)

This short AlterNet piece, ‘Alternate reality’: What happened when an NYT reporter immersed himself in far-right media, posted Dec 13, summarizes this much longer NYT piece:

NY Times, Stuart A. Thompson, 13 Dec 2024: I Traded My News Apps for Rumble, the Right-Wing YouTube. Here’s What I Saw.

The writer watched 47 hours of video on Rumble for this article, beginning two weeks after the election
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American Narratives

Posted on Saturday 14 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Infrastructure note;
  • Robert Reich on America’s four stories;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how Trump has no apparent plan for governance.

Infrastructure note. I’ve installed an initial set of theme pages under the “NF Reviews” menu item above, which appear as items in a drop down menu. All the titles on the main page are on one (and only one) of the theme pages, though many of them straddle one or more of the nominal ten themes. I’ll figure out some way of cross-referencing them.

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Robert Reich has a couple long posts this week titled “America’s four stories” and how Republicans have done better aligning themselves with them than the Democrats have. Haven’t read them yet. But at a glance I’m fascinated in that the four stories represent a kind of American mythology of how the world is and how Americans are supposed to behave. American behave as if these stories are truths handed down from on high, but of course they’re only *stories*, narratives, derived from the circumstances of where Americans came from and what they did when they got here — and other nations and cultures surely have different stories.

Robert Reich, 12 Dec 2024: America’s four stories (Part 1), subtitled “Trump has offered extreme versions. The Democrats stopped offering them at all.”

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Pretty to Think So

Posted on Friday 13 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

One of my running themes — here on this blog, in the reviews I’ve written of SF novels and stories in recent years, in my essay for Gary Westfahl awaiting publication, and in my book if I manage to write it — is that some of the ideals and presumptions of even the best science fiction of the 20th century are turning out to be totally wrong. The standard examples are: there are plenty of reasons to think that ESP, telepathy, precognition, all of that, is bunk, mere wishful thinking based on infantile perceptions of the world; and notions of easy interstellar travel that beg questions about how such travel will take place (given physics), and whether there are actually habitable planets out there we can just drop in on and build a colony. The principle reason here is that science has advanced greatly over the past century. Some of what science fiction might have legitimately speculated about 70 years ago is now out of bounds, if we’re being honest. (An earlier example: hollow Earth.) These presumptions persist in pop sci-fi — TV and movies, especially including Trek and Wars — and of course they appeal to the popular imagination in exactly the same way all those psychological biases do, that lure us into magical thinking and conspiracy theories. It’s fun to watch spaceships zooming from planet to planet in 5 minutes, and pretty to think it might be possible with technology advanced enough, but it’s unlikely to ever happen.

A few science fiction writers have realized this, the standard example, again, being Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel AURORA. But pop sci-fi, and even many published works, still attract more readers by appealing to intuitively thrilling but discredited notions.

Here’s an example of a scientist pointing out problems with one traditional science fiction, and pop sci-fi, presumption.

Big Think, Adam Frank, 11 Dec 2024: Galactic civilizations may be impossible. Here’s why., subtitled “The problem for galactic-scale civilizations comes down to two numbers.”

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Or for Worse

Posted on Thursday 12 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

We took both our cars into the indie BMW shop we’ve been going to, for routine maintenance. In my case, I needed my car to be ship-shape before driving down to LA in a couple weeks.

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Infrastructure note. In parallel with similar tasks on sfadb, I’ve spent some time in the past couple weeks updating and databasing my Nonfiction Reviews page, what you get when you click on “NF Reviews” in the menu bar above. I’ve added a couple three dozen descriptions for books I’ve blogged about the past couple years, and added stubs for other titles I’ve read but not yet blogged about. Next, I think, I’ll create subpages by theme (like the one for Math that’s already there), maybe a page listing recently read books chronologically, and maybe a listing just the highest rated (five *) books. And then, similar overhaul of the SF Reviews and other reviews pages. This is quite research; it’s more like, organizing my notes as part of research…

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Time, Sam Jacobs, 12 Dec 2024: 2024: The Choice: Donald Trump

For 97 years, the editors of TIME have been picking the Person of the Year: the individual who, for better or for worse, Continue reading →

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Human Rights, and Those Who Would Restrict Them

Posted on Wednesday 11 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • It’s been 76 years since the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in America, conservatives prevent or keep trying to reverse many of those rights;
  • Example of their latest bugaboo: transgenders;
  • How Trump’s cabinet picks would please Putin, whose ambition is to sow distrust within Western democracies;
  • And why so many voters think Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats, despite all the evidence.

Last night’s column by Heather Cox Richardson reminds us about Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally since the United Nations, 76 years ago, announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the years just after World War II. (Which can be found here.) Richardson sketches the state of the world at the time. Many principles of the UDHR are familiar from American’s own Bill of Rights and various amendments, but we don’t have many of them — notably not “equal rights of men and women” since American conservatives, essentially tribal in their thinking, do not actually approve of rights for those beyond their immediate kind. Sad but true.

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What If We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know?

Posted on Tuesday 10 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Plato’s cave and what we don’t know, or don’t know that we don’t know;
  • David Gerrold on “woke” and why I think citing “woke” (or religion) dismisses one from any serious conversation;
  • Short items about how a third of the public sat the election out; the MAGA jailhouse to White House pipeline; how MAGA attorneys plan to run the US government like a mob organization; and how 75 Nobel Laureates object to RFK Jr.

I’ve had a couple items in the last couple weeks about how people prefer ignorance and belief to knowledge, even when knowledge is readily available. But suppose we’re not even aware of being ignorant?

Big Think, Daniel R. DeNicola, 8 Dec 2024 (from The MIT Press Reader): Plato’s cave and the stubborn persistence of ignorance, subtitled “Plato’s cave metaphor illustrates the cognitive trap of ignorance, where we may be unaware of the limitations of our understanding.”

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Institutions, Tribes, and Faith

Posted on Monday 9 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman’s last NYT column, in part about what has changed in the past 25 years, including the collapse of trust in the elites;
  • Helen Lewis echoes Fareed Zakaria yesterday: the mainstream media is part of the “elite” system that has given way to podcasters like Joe Rogan, institutions giving way to tribal leaders;
  • Americans are less happier than other nations, especially the Nordic ones, because of Americans’ antipathy to anything perceived as socialist, like national health care;
  • And a problematic OnlySky piece that begs the question of what “faith” entails.

Two items today relate the Zakaria piece noted yesterday, about the collapse of trust in institutions in preference to individuals. First is this, relevant somewhat indirectly, but important journalistically.

NY Times, Paul Krugman, 9 Dec 2024: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment [gift link]

Paul Krugman is retiring from writing his column for the NY Times, which he’s been doing since January 2000! So what does he have to say about what’s changed in 25 years?

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Institutions and Indoctrination

Posted on Sunday 8 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
    • Today’s neighborhood cookies party.
    • Fareed Zakaria how democracy depends on its institutions;
    • The Trump administration will indoctrinate Federal employees with MAGA training;
    • A West Virginia mayor reject a Pagan float in a Christmas Parade;
    • How Trump is stocking his cabinet with criminals, and plans to pardon other criminals.

Today we attended a neighborhood “Holiday Cookies” part, around the corner and down Crestmont from our place. I made “Mexican Wedding Cookies,” which used to be called “Mexican Wedding Cakes” in my family cookbook. It’s odd how in the first five years we lived here (we’ve been here almost 10 years!, since Feb 2015), we barely met any of our neighbors. Now, gradually, we’re meeting more and more. Of course it’s helped that since the pandemic, and everyone working from home, and my exercise (walking) requirements, we go for walks virtually every day, and have more opportunity to run into our neighbors.

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Opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria, whose 2020 book I quite admired.

Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, 6 Dec 2024: Why democracies, from South Korea to France to the U.S., are in crisis, subtitled “To save liberal democracy, save its institutions.”

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Economics vs. Intuition and Common Sense

Posted on Saturday 7 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I missed posting yesterday because there was a Locus Foundation meeting (via Zoom) that began at 3pm my time and ran until 5:30pm, right through my blogging hour. At 5:30 it was time to get ready for dinner with my partner. The meeting was mostly a presentation by two consultants Liza had hired to provide a vision of how Locus might continue and thrive. Many things might change in the next year; I can say no more.

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Let’s see what I can choose from, among the links I’ve compiled from the past two days.

LA Times, Aine Seitz McCarthy, 5 Dec 2024: Opinion: America needs to retake Econ 101

If they ever took it at all, is my thought. I never took an econ course, but I read the news and follow economists like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman and have gathered that many things most people think are obvious about the economy simply aren’t true.

Politicians of all stripes need to move away from selling voters the false promise that they have control over inflation and globalization. … As voters, it is also our job to learn some basic economics, at least enough to understand supply and demand for housing; the effect of tariffs, taxes and subsidies as tools; and the causes of inflation.

With a list of economic policies that might actually work to do what Americans want: expand the earned income tax credit; expand the child tax credit; build more housing; subsidize child care.

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