The Upside-Down World of Conservative Values

  • They’re for discrimination against some (gays and lesbians) against discrimination against others (religious conscientious objectors)
  • Their ideas of freedom involve the freedom to discriminate against people they don’t like (even if that infringes on *their* freedom)
  • Their belief in capitalism and the free market seems to have morphed into their role as “Soviet economic planners” (according to a piece I just read today)
  • The post finishes with some personal thoughts about character, and its relation to the understanding of the world

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In the upside-down world of religious privilege in Florida these days, doctors *can* discriminate against gays and lesbians, but *not* against those who refuse to take vaccines. Whereas generally the latter is of more concern to the medical community than the former. (Cue Hippocratic Oath.)

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False Ideas of Human Nature

Just one topic for today.

Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 12 May 2023: It’s bigger than guns: Why the right does little to stop violence, subtitled “Conservatives have cultivated a negative and hyper-individualistic view of human nature”

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The Town Hall, and the Core Issue

The political news today is about the “Town Hall” on CNN last night that gave Donald Trump a full hour to spew his usual shtick of lies and insults, before an audience of his fans, and the commentary in the news media today about the ever-despicable Trump, his ever-despicable fans, and why on earth CNN broadcast such a thing.

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Biblical Ignorance and Climate Change

One of my emerging themes on this blog is my gradual, belated, realization of how many people believe so many things that simply aren’t true. Here’s an example in a religious vein: Bible believers who misunderstand their Bible, with potentially drastic consequences.

LA Times, Bart D. Ehrman, 3 May 2023: Opinion: How a misreading of the Bible fuels many Americans’ apathy about climate change

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A Slow American Civil War?

Items today about

  • The debt ceiling crisis and the deficit scolds
  • This Modern World on teacher bots and the debt ceiling, among other things
  • How the latest mass shooting suggests an American ‘slow civil war’

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Mental Illness, Gun Violence, and Lying

It’s hard to get through a week without more incidents of gun violence in the US, and Republican claims that they’re all due to mental illness. So why is the US an extreme outlier in gun violence? Why would more people per capita in the US be mentally ill? The Repubicans can’t explain that. (My explanation, a few posts ago, is that there are mentally ill people in every nation, but the the US gives easy access to the mentally ill to assault weapons; that is, those most attracted to assault weapons whose purpose is to kill masses of people, are by definition mentally ill.)

I’ve missed a couple of days of blogging here, laid low with another cold, this one sniffly, coughy, and chest congested. But no temperature; not COVID. I think my partner picked this bug up somewhere (because he had it first), and brought it home to me. It’s curious that I’ve had two colds now, in two months (the previous one was in early March), after some three years of none at all, because of mostly staying at home due to COVID threats. I suppose I’m back to normal; for my entire life, since I was a schoolchild, I’ve *always* had two or three colds every year. Though rarely flus, with temperatures, chills and being laid up in bed for a week or more. With a cold, it’s downtime for three or four days. And I’m getting better. And being laid up gives you time to think, and… make decisions.

For today, a couple takes on the weird political situation in the US.

Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 7 May 2023: Undoing Undue Hate: The corrosive role of common false beliefs, subtitled “Author of ‘Undue Hate’ on how a handful of universal cognitive biases exacerbate perceived divisions” Continue reading

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This Week’s Political and Cultural Items

  • Why Republicans can no longer be called the party of “family values”
  • How Republicans are obsessed by the woke mind virus
  • More reasons why the US needs more immigrants, not fewer
  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Tucker Carlson
  • Jerry Coyne on another wokeism issue, and his take on sex and gender

Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 3 May 2023: How to weaponize Republicans’ words, subtitled “It’s far past time to stop calling the GOP the party of ‘family values'”

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Social Pressures that Subvert Objective Knowledge

Two items today:

  • How conservatives are steering education to the classics of the ancient Greeks, as if only ancient “knowledge” is valid
  • How some modern institutions prioritize identity and D.E.I. over objective science

NY Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, 4 May 2023: Why Conservatives Can’t Stop Talking About Aristotle, subtitled “The 2,500-year-old roots of Ron DeSantis’s education plan.”

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Addicts and Free Will

Today, an interesting article about whether addicts have free will.

Here’s a piece that’s interesting for its take on a still contentious philosophical issue. Do humans have free will? Intuitively virtually everyone would agree that we do. People “make decisions” all the time, as if they could have decided otherwise. Yet most modern philosophers will explain that, in some fundamental sense, free will is an illusion. I will not attempt to summarize their arguments. See Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett. Some, like Dennett, will allow that we may as well *think* we have free will, because that’s how our minds have developed to function, via evolution. Otherwise you might sit there catatonic, unable to move. The biggest issue with understanding that free will is an illusion is the problem of personal responsibility, especially in criminal matters. And attorneys have used such defenses, about the “criminally insane,” in the past.

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Book Censorship, Swivel-Eyed Loons, and Declining Millennial Religion

Three items today.

  • Why book censorship doesn’t work, and how conservatives don’t learn this.
  • Cory Doctorow on how the objections to the “15-minute city” reflect a genuine concern about corporate influence over the government.
  • How the current generation (unlike past generations) is not becoming more conservative as it ages, and why.

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