AI Is Telling People What They Want to Hear?

Posted on Saturday 16 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Tom Tomorrow on “defunding the police”;
  • The unreliability of AI, with an example of John Scalzi;
  • An essay about how the future will be mundane;
  • Several links on Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska;
  • Slate’s handy summary of people in the news this week (Antoni, Putin, Big Balls, et al.).
– – –

 

Curiously, given my mention two days ago of what “defunding the police” actually means, this 11-year-old cartoon by Tom Tomorrow popped up in my Facebook feed today. I’ll “quote” just the first two panels; the rest is at the link. Again, this is from 2014.

The Nib, Tom Tomorrow, 14 Aug 2014: Officer Friendly, subtitled “He’s just a good guy with a gun”

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The Fringe Is Becoming Mainstream

Posted on Friday 15 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump threatens to attack Mexico, ho hum;
  • South Koreans think electric fans are deadly;
  • A GOP rep claims evidence of “interdimensional beings”;
  • Hegseth’s pastor claims “gay marriage doesn’t exist” because he doesn’t like it;
  • Lance Wallnau thinks his god wants him to impose his religion on all of society;
  • With brief thoughts about what the world would be like if an intercessory god actually existed;
  • Pentagon uses AI pics to claim recruitment success — of women;
  • How Donald Trump makes America worse than tacky.
– – –

Sure, if you look, you can find a new alarming thing every day.

The New Republic, 15 Aug 2025: Trump Is Ready to Invade U.S. Ally if It Doesn’t Cave to His Demands, subtitled “Donald Trump has drawn up attack plans for Mexico.”
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Why Totalitarians Prefer Crackpots and Fools, as We Are Seeing Under Trump

Posted on Thursday 14 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Lesson for today, from Paul Krugman, from Hannah Arendt: “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
  • With examples of E.J. Antoni, and Stephen Miller;
  • Facts: crime is down. NYT Editorial Board explains why, with my comments about “defunding the police” actually means.
– – –

Beginning with two from Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman, 13 Aug 2025: Hackification, subtitled “Arendt’s Law comes for economic data”

Hannah Arendt was a writer and political theorist famous for works on totalitarianism. She’s noted for the phrase “the banality of evil.”

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Nostalgia Bias, and Christian Intolerance and Hypocrisy

Posted on Wednesday 13 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s worldview is stuck in 1989;
  • Thinking the 1990s were better than today is nostalgia bias;
  • D.C. is not the hellscape Trump claims it is (of course);
  • More about that annoying busybody who opposes gay marriage and has nothing better to do than to try to impose her religious scruples on the entire nation;
  • More about the Christian nationalist who thinks women shouldn’t have a right to vote, with perspective from Heather Cox Richardson;
  • How the leader of the Family Research Council thinks we will be fine, fine, under a [Christian] dictatorship;
  • And an essay at The Atlantic suggests Trump fans might eventually rebel against his incompetence.
– – –

Trump seems stuck in 1989. (Is that when America was last Great?)

Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 12 Aug 2025: Man Whose Mind Is Trapped in 1989 Orders Military to Crush the Concept of Homelessness, subtitled “What is the National Guard supposed to do here? Shoot the zoning laws?”
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Music as Language

Posted on Tuesday 12 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • John McWhorter on Bruce Springsteen, and my own takes;
  • About modern music.

I mentioned that I had a couple thoughts about music recently. The first is inspired by this piece:

NY Times, John McWhorter, 7 Aug 2025: Springsteen Isn’t Who I Thought He Was [gift link]

McWhorter is a Columbia University linguist, who often writes about trends in English language usage. Here he admits that he only recently got around to listening to Bruce Springsteen, really listening. He begins:

From a distance I have always found Bruce Springsteen interesting, especially in his current incarnation as a committed populist straddling the line between his own politics and those of his many MAGA fans. But his set-to last spring with President Trump, who called him “overrated” and “not a talented guy,” made me realize how very little of Springsteen’s music I have ever really engaged. I must come clean and say that I just never got it.

Continue reading →

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Short-Term Thinking As the Problem, As I’ve Been Saying

Posted on Monday 11 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Ben Rhodes at NYT on the perils of short-term thinking;
  • A Facebook comment about intellectual loneliness;
  • And how Trump is lying about crime in DC in order to, what? distract from the Epstein crisis? Or show random totalitarian power?
– – –

Another big substantial piece, like yesterday’s about stagnation, that speaks to one of my recurring themes.

NY Times, guest essay by Ben Rhodes, 11 August 2025: How Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying America [gift link]

(Title at homepage link: “We’re Trapped in Trump’s Reality. This Is How We Escape it.”)

The writer begins by discussing the new film “Eddington,” and how it “captures the American tendency to live obsessively in the present.” I haven’t seen the film, so I’ll skip his discussion of it, and cut to the chase.
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Nevil Shute: ON THE BEACH

Posted on Monday 11 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(First published 1957. Edition here: Vintage International, trade paperback, February 2010, 312pp)

And here’s the next in a group of apocalyptic novels I read in June, following Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER and Frank’s ALAS, BABYLON (review review here.) This is the most famous of the three, mainly because there was a fairly high-end 1959 movie based on it, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire, among others. I saw that movie long ago, though not recently; we couldn’t find it streaming anywhere (though we watched a more recent, 2000, TV version instead, which was OK.)

This has some similarities with the Frank novel, though its setting and timeline are different. Continue reading →

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MAGA and Cultural Stagnation

Posted on Sunday 10 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Long piece by Mike Lofgren at Salon about how we got from the 1960s to here; how we’re in an era of stagnation;
  • My brief thoughts about how this might apply to science fiction;
  • Tim Callahan at Skeptic spells out why holy relics and holy places are fiction;
  • With comments about how many many people reached his conclusion early on, and my wondering if we’ll ever get beyond this.
  • And a teaser about the nature of music, items to be posted tomorrow.
– – –

This is more than another piece about Trump’s gold kitsch White House. The writer is looking for a deep explanation of how we got to this state, saying there have been “surprisingly few retrospective analyses that seek to describe how and why our country lurched into its present state.” Actually I think I’ve seen quite a few, it’s just that there’s no consensus among them.

Salon, Mike Lofgren, 9 Aug 2025: How did we get from the ’60s to Trump’s kitsch White House?, subtitled “Our culture turned on itself, stagnated and went rancid — that’s how”

Quite apart from the fact that 20 years ago, almost none of our supposed thought leaders foresaw that the United States would slide into a fascist-style dictatorship by 2025, there have been surprisingly few retrospective analyses that seek to describe how and why our country lurched into its present state.

Endemic racism is often put forward as a rationale. …

Long piece. Continue reading →

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Trump the Bully Seems to Be What Many People Want

Posted on Saturday 9 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • David Remnick of The New Yorker on Trump the Bully;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on Trump promises not kept;
  • Trump’s escalating racist attacks on Black Americans;
  • How Fox News feeds anti-immigrant propaganda to its audience;
  • Trump’s gold kitsch White House;
  • More about that pastor, praised by Hegseth, who thinks women shouldn’t have the right to vote.
– – –

 

The New Yorker, David Remnick, 3 Aug 2025: The Politics of Fear, subtitled “As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump made his world view plain: there was “us” and there was “them.” Once he was in the White House, the fear factor would prevail.”

(Which is to say, the most simplistic kind of tribal morality.)

Trump was, from his formative years, a spoiled bully. Continue reading →

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No Policies, No Principles, Just “Deals”

Posted on Friday 8 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

And Threats. And Extortion. And Lies.

  • A quote from Bertrand Russell;
  • Trump wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize, while making wars worse and threatening countries around the world;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the motives behind the idea of changing how the census works;
  • Hegseth promotes a pastor who would criminalize gay sex, end voting by women, and ban non-Christian faiths;
  • Changing minds: Hundreds of weather service employees hired back; Trump fires the IRS chief he just hired 2 months ago;
  • Backing off: Smithsonian restores language about impeachments, mostly;
  • Trump took credit for “Operation Warp Speed,” which involved mRNA vaccines against Covid, and now shrugs as RFK Jr. shuts down research on mRNA vaccines;
  • Extortion against UCLA;
  • America is now the outlier in the world recognizing the danger of climate change;
  • No one is claiming that America has the best health-care system in the world anymore.
– – –

 

Let’s begin with this quote from Bertrand Russell

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries, education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit, and men who refuse to profess belief in some system of unfounded dogmas are not considered suitable as teachers of the young.

\\

Then we can pivot to the daily news, full of more evidence that the current party in power ignores evidence, defies education, and clings not so much to dogma (e.g. from the Constitution or the Bible) as the raw pursuit of power and the tribalistic demonization of people they don’t like.

Continue reading →

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