Views from Crestmont Drive

• First, a quote about progressives and conservatives, the future and the past;
• Then more about the conspiracy thinking about the Baltimore bridge collapse, with examples from PolitiFact, CNN, and CFI (Center for Inquiry);
• And how the construction workers who fell from the bridge were immigrants, whom many Americans demonize, yet like the ones who have built America.

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Saw this quote on Facebook, and verified it (never trust any quote on Facebook) to the extent of finding it on one of those websites that collects quotes.

For progressive people the present is the beginning of the future. For conservative people the present is the end of the past.

— Karl Mannheim

This is consistent with the MAGA crowd yearning to return to a (mythical) lost golden age, on the one hand, and on the other, that saying “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation” — long an epigraph on Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light blog — which it turns out (Google!) was said by Alasdair Gray, Scottish author of, among other things, Poor Things, basis for the recent film. Coincidence!

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• How the first scene in Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” is seen differently by conservatives and progressives;
• Daniel Kahneman, RIP, who realized that people are not rational;
• More right-wing conspiracy theories about the Baltimore bridge collapse;
• And items about an earthquake, crime and drugs, and banning abortion pills.

CNN, Harmeet Kaur, 27 Mar 2024: Conservatives and liberals alike can’t stop talking about this scene in ‘3 Body Problem’

I’ve only watched the first episode of “3 Body Problem” (as Netflix stylizes the adaptation of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem — a novel I reviewed here back in 2015), but it’s been enough for me to recognize the scene at issue in this article.

That first episode

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