NY Times, Paul Krugman, 18 Sep 2023: The Road From Mitt Romney to MAGA
OnlySky, Jonathan MS Pearce, 18 Sep 2023: We are becoming more moral, not less. So why all the moaning to the contrary?
My interest here is how he claims we are becoming more moral. By what criteria?
Nothing has caught my eye this weekend in the papers or on the websites to blog about. So let’s look at a couple recent essays by Adam Lee, who’s blogged for years and self-published one book collecting some of his work, Daylight Atheism, which I reviewed here back in 2014. His essays are currently appearing at OnlySky. Otherwise he hasn’t much of a profile; he has no entry at Wikipedia.
Yet I find him a straightforward, clear-thinking, nonapologetic thinker about religious and social matters. Here is a pair of essays from recent weeks characterizing (from his perspective) Red and Blue America. I’ll cover them in the order posted.
Adam Lee, OnlySky, 31 Aug 2023: The lights are flickering in Red America
When you’re retired, not working or going to school or driven by any particular schedule, as I’ve been more or less for a decade now, you tend to mark the passage of time by the holidays or vacations or family gatherings. Or periodic doctor visits. How does one manage one’s time to get anything done, rather than just sit back in retirement, relax, and do nothing? I have *many* things I’d still like to accomplish in my life, and sometimes I struggle with how to plan and close out plans and finish things.
(What I have done since my retirement in late 2012 is virtually all of sfadb.com, daily posts on Locus Online from mid-2010 through late 2017 until Locus HQ decided they no longer needed my services, nearly thirty lengthy review-essays for Black Gate in 2020 and 2021, and of course this entire blog, since 2013. And read many many books, which have informed my worldview and has motivated me to work on my own essays, and book.)
Here’s an idea that’s similar to what I’ve done, or have tried to do.
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Greta Christina on how some religious believers, oddly, seek an atheist seal of approval. It makes a weird sort of sense.
Greta Christina, AlterNet, 14 Sep 2023: Opinion | Why religious believers are so desperate for the atheist seal of approval
Today, let’s mull on this piece by astronomer Phil Plait from his current gig as a columnist for Scientific American.
At least back in the 1970s you didn’t have politicians spouting conspiracy theories like this one.
Phil Plait, Scientific American, 14 Sep 2023: Moon Landing Denial Fired an Early Antiscience Conspiracy Theory Shot, subtitled “Apollo moon landing conspiracy theories were early hints of the dangerous anti-vax, antiscience beliefs backed by politicians today”
If you believe in a mythical past golden age, then you have to occasionally tweak real history to support the notion that there ever was a past golden age. Conservatives are good at this.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 13 Sep 2023: PragerU’s Confederate classroom propaganda: Co-opting history to prop up modern insurrectionists, subtitled “Abraham Lincoln is portrayed making arguments that sound like modern Proud Boys begging a judge for forgiveness.”
Noted especially for the first sentence. Continue reading
Two items today.
Ideology is easy; drawing conclusions from evidence is hard. Politics is easy; solving problems is hard. Religion is easy; science is hard. Fantasy is easy; (honest) science fiction is hard. (By “hard” I mean difficult, but of course that word has a particular meaning when discussing science fiction.)
NY Times, David French, 12 Sep 2023: Where Is the Evidence, Speaker McCarthy?
Today I’m catching up on numerous items from recent weeks that I want to note even though I haven’t had time to thoroughly read or comment about them. A couple of them, at least, I will revisit, because I need to understand what they say.
Seventeen items: about Chris Rufo, varieties of socialism, the ‘X-Files’, vanilla, MAGA from a black perspective, geo-engineering, why liberalism is hard, “antiprocess” as the flip side of motivated reasoning, Marxism, civics, getting along, MAGA vigilantism, ideology in China, the dumbing of America, how conservatives impoverish people, building meaning and purpose, and the truth of art vs. science.
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Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 10 Sep 2023: Chris Rufo’s dangerous fictions, subtitled “The right’s leading culture warrior has invented a leftist takeover of America to justify his very real power grabs.”
Today — yet another pleasant day in the Bay Area, sunny and 74 degrees Fahrenheit — we went for a hike in the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, an area in the hills north of us where an actual volcano erupted some 10 million years ago. More photos in my Facebook post today.
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From a few days ago, two takes about a newly published book about the “Doctrine of Discovery” — the Catholic Church’s presumption, in the 1500s, that it could claim for itself any previously undiscovered (by Europeans) lands outside Europe, no matter who else might already be living there.
