Third Birthday

Posted on Wednesday 29 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Third ‘birthday’;
  • Why American Christians support Israel;
  • More polarities and correlations for my chart;
  • Examples, just from recent days, about Republican ambitions to turn back history;
  • More examples of Christian indoctrination.

This week is the third anniversary of my heart and kidney transplants. May 26th, actually, which quite coincidentally was the 20th anniversary of when I met my partner Y. (Who prefers I not spell out his name on social media.) And so this week I am enduring another battery of tests and blood draws, for the cardiologists at CMPC. So far so good; I’m fine, doing well. Today’s visit with the cardiologist, Dr. Ray, mentioned this third anniversary as my “third birthday,” which in a sense is true. I would have died without the transplants, and it’s only because I live with a partner, who saved me each time I had a heart attack, that I’m still alive. Unlike my late friend Larry Kramer, who lived alone for the past 15+ years near Austin TX, and had no one to save him when he fell, and died in his house, alone. I am still dealing with his estate; we will be back in Austin the weekend of June 7th.

\\

Moving on. I monitor these things because they’re scary, and threatening. Existentially threatening.

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Floating

Posted on Tuesday 28 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

After three days summarizing recently read nonfiction books, today let’s capture recent items from the news.

  • A conservative blames the unpopularity of an ice cream flavor on Biden;
  • Conservatives are eager to impose Christian indoctrination in Florida and Texas;
  • Paul Krugman identifies overflowing septic tanks as another unanticipated effect of climate change;
  • Two pieces about how and why so many people believe wrong things about the economy, and how the blue vs. red divide is about more than race and education; with charts;
  • Listening again to Enya, with two tracks from her first album… floating in her ethereal realm.

*

First up: an absurd example of how conservatives blame everything they perceive as negative on people they don’t like.

Joe.My.God, 28 May 2024: Newsmax: Biden Made Ice Cream Flavor Unpopular

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Jonathan Gottschall, THE STORY PARADOX

Posted on Monday 27 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a nonfiction book from 2021 that I read just a couple weeks ago. It’s similar in heft to the two books just discussed, in terms of length and conceptual depth, perhaps somewhere in the middle below Wilson and above Ahn. This is the book I noted a while back because it got a killer review in the NY Times a couple years ago, noted here. I’m not going reread that review; just respond to the book myself. Mostly.

Subtitled “How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down” (Basic Books, Nov. 2021, 258pp, including 64p of acknowledgements, references, notes, and index.)

It seems to be a rule these days — though it’s easy to think of similar examples from decades ago — that nonfiction writers leaven their serious messages with anecdotes not just about others, but from their own personal lives. Wilson did; Ahn did; and here Gottschalk does. (Actually, that’s one thing Snyder complained about; oops.) In terms of conceptual value for the reading effort, this one is closer to Wilson than to Ahn.

This is a companion to the author’s earlier book, THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL (2012), which I reviewed here.

Rather than summarizing chapter by chapter, I’m going to reread my notes and just compile key points. As always, personal asides are noted in [[ double brackets ]].

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Woo-Kyoung Ahn, THINKING 101

Posted on Sunday 26 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: “How to Reason Better and Live Better” (Flatiron Books, Sept 2022, 276pp, including 21p of acknowledgements, notes, and index)

Here’s another short book, read the same month as yesterday’s Robert Charles Wilson book though it was published a year earlier, that needs only a brief summary. It’s the latest in a long line of books occupying the boundaries between psychology and self-help that identify our various cognitive biases, and in this case supplies suggestions for overcoming or avoiding them. It’s heavily laden with anecdotes and summaries of studies, many familiar from other books on these topics. I’ll focus on her suggested remedies, and a couple cautionary notes.

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Robert Charles Wilson, OWNING THE UNKNOWN

Posted on Saturday 25 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a book about theology, atheism and the idea of God, from the perspective of a science fiction writer. Wilson is a significant contemporary SF writer whose fiction output has slowed in recent years; I reviewed his 2015 novel The Affinities here but for some reason didn’t read his 2016 novel Last Year, and there’s been nothing since then. (See SFE for background; earlier great novels by Wilson include Spin, Darwinia, and Julian: A Christmas Story.)

Except this short nonfiction book, published last year. It’s only 146 pages long, though the volume includes two short stories as appendices filling out another 45 pages. I heard about this book almost a year in advance, when the author announced it on Facebook, and I looked forward to it in part because of the inherent fascination of its topic, but also because I wondered how it might compare to my own approach in comparing science fiction, science, and even philosophy in the essay I was just completing… I read the book shortly after it was published, but being distracted by trying to figure out what to do following the death of my friend Larry Kramer the previous month, did not get around to writing my notes up here.

Subtitled: “A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God”. (Pitchstone Publishing, Sep. 2023, 205pp, including 47p of two short stories, 12p of notes and bibliography; no index.)

Having reread my notes on the book just now, for this book I’m going to copy them relatively complete into this post, but precede the long summary with some points I found especially interesting.

So first some key ideas and takeaways…. Continue reading →

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More Panic, Projection, Nonsense, and Superstition

Posted on Friday 24 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Takes on the “Biden assassination plot” fantasy, and projection;
  • Why would DeSantis think the Founding Fathers would hate sociology?
  • Tribal mentality from Royce White and Bryce Mitchell;
  • And Christian rejection of the nature of the real world.

First for today, two takes on the Republican panic in recent days about the ludicrous, alleged assassination plot by Biden against Trump.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 24 May 2024: Trump’s “Biden the assassin” fantasy is pure projection, subtitled “With Trump, every accusation is a confession”:

No one thinks President Joe Biden tried to assassinate Donald Trump.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy | Comments Off on More Panic, Projection, Nonsense, and Superstition

Idiots, Disingenuous, or Both?

Posted on Thursday 23 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Republicans misinterpret, either naively or maliciously, boilerplate language about use of force by the FBI as a plot by Biden to assassinate Trump;
  • Thoughts about accountability;
  • Testimony from Stew Peters and Steve Bannon, both presumably self-proclaimed Christians, about their plans to take over America.

This week’s faux outrage on the Right.

The outrage:

And

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Idiots, Disingenuous, or Both?

For Certain Values of Natural

Posted on Wednesday 22 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Conservatives are obsessed over things that are allegedly “unnatural” (especially homosexuality), when what they are really concerned about is any behavior unsuitable to tribal morality, in particular the expansion and growth of the human tribe, for which any sexual behavior that cannot lead to reproduction must be banished. (As is the traditional position of the Catholic Church.) And yet, in the real, natural world, there are behaviors that defy those human notions of “natural.”

Joe.My.God, 21 May 2024: Cultists Melt Down Over “Queer Planet” Animal Series

And

LGBTQNation, 20 May 2024: Conservatives are freaking out because they learned that some animals are gay, subtitled “The animal kingdom isn’t exactly like Noah’s Ark, after all.”

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Living By Stories, Not Reality, Part 2

Posted on Tuesday 21 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A New Yorker review of a new book about human origins;
  • Robert Reich on how Americans don’t understand the reality of Trump and Biden;
  • Short items about the Pope, and fundamentalists beliefs in the evil nature of human beings; how conservatives praise foreign autocrats; and how Trump floats bans on birth control, then walks them back.

Continuing yesterday’s theme, with a couple substantial items. First, that New Yorker piece I wasn’t able to access yesterday.

The New Yorker, Maya Jasanoff, 6 May 2024: What the Origins of Humanity Can and Can’t Tell Us, subtitled “There’s still much to be learned about our prehistory. But we can’t help using it to explain the societies we have or to justify the ones we want.”

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Most Humans Live by Stories, Not Reality

Posted on Monday 20 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Books by Gottschall and Rosenberg, and how history is just a bunch of stories;
  • A couple notes from the fringe;
  • Beck’s “We Live Again”.

I’ve mentioned more than once the truism that “history is written by the winners.” I just finished reading Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down from 2021 (which got a killer review by Timothy Snyder in the NYTBR, that I discussed here). One thing that occurred to me as I read the book is: the losers also tell history, from their own perspective. Both the winners’ narrative and the losers’ narrative are stories, told to justify and flatter themselves. (I’ve occasionally wondered what the history books in England say about the American Revolution, for example, but I don’t know any easy way of finding that out. Order a history textbook from Amazon UK? What do Russian history books say about the United States? Is there a book somewhere that has compiled these issues?) Yet again, I suspect this is something obvious to everyone that I have only just realized for myself… or realized it in the sense that I’m trying to integrate it into my theory of science fiction.

Again, Gottschall reminded me of the 2018 book by Alex Rosenberg, How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, which I’ve put off reading (though it’s right up my alley) since I had some issues with Rosenberg’s earlier book, yet whose point apparently is that all historical narratives are just stories, and therefore wrong, in a fundamental sense.

I’ll write up my reactions to the Gottschall book later this week. Meanwhile, here’s a new item that fit this into narrative about narratives.

The Atlantic, Annie Lawrey, 20 May 2024: The Worst Best Economy Ever, subtitled “Why Biden is getting no credit for the boom”

Note this first paragraph: “the strongest economy the United States has ever experienced.” And yet many people don’t believe it. Is this a prime example of the power of stories over reality?

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