Partly because I’ve had a cold, or a couple different colds, for much of the past month, I’m behind on links and comments. So relatively briefly, here’s what I’ve collected. In reverse order, from most recent date.
\\
Slate: “How Trump Happened: It’s not just anger over jobs and immigration. White voters hope Trump will restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama.”
I think this is a large part of it. As the US, as throughout its history, attracts immigrants from many nations, the ‘white’ immigrants that for a while held majority status are getting sore that their privilege is being lost. (Recall that for a while that majority did not include the Irish.) At the same time, Trump is tapping into a base that is present in every population: the ‘authoritarian’ element that is paranoid and assigns blame to everything wrong to outsiders, those nameless ‘other’, whom Trump promises to get tough with.
\\
Triggered by this book: The Last Days of Magic, by Mark Tompkins. I compile new books listings every week, and for years have been struck with how fantasies, of one sort or another, far outnumber SF. This book asks, what became of magic in the world? A perennial theme. Answer: there never was magic in the world. There was human misunderstanding, and the projection of human protocols and values onto the inanimate world. There is an analog here to the Trump theme above.
\\
Jerry Coyne, among others, took note of a law clerk’s recollection of the late Antonin Scalia: A former law clerk: Antonin Scalia “generally detested science”.
Not surprising. Scalia was a Biblical literalist who actually believed in the devil. It’s my observation that the thinking behind Biblical literalism is rather the same as that of Constitutional originalism, the idea that the words of the Constitution need to be taken at face value, without any effort to understand the context in which it was written, or how words have changed. Coyne quotes:
Antonin Scalia generally detested science. It threatened everything he believed in. He refused to join a recent Supreme Court opinion about DNA testing because it presented the details of textbook molecular biology as fact. He could not join because he did not know such things to be true, he said. (On the other hand, he knew all about the eighteenth century. History books were trustworthy; science books were not.) Scientists should be listened to only if they supported conservative causes, for example dubious studies purporting to demonstrate that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Scientists were also good if they helped create technologies he liked, such as oil drills and deadly weapons.
\\
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Cruz’s last stand: Ted Cruz thinks he’s a messiah, but he’s a pathetic dunce about to fall on his face.
One of many, many articles about Cruz and his father, who are as certain of themselves as the Biblical prophets were about themselves (I say, as having been catching up on the Bible recently), and no more plausible, and just as scary, as they were.
\\
Connor Wood’s Science on Religion: No Space for God of the Gaps. A nice explanation for how whatever science can’t at the moment explain (like, I will add, the extraordinary series of steps needed for the process of blood coagulation) doesn’t justify belief in a god to do it. Appeals to this argument have fallen again and again over the past centuries, and will continue to fall, as more and more abstruse issues become explained by science. More at Wikipedia: God of the gaps.
\\
Another example of using familiar scales to visualize unfamiliar scales: Our Solar System: Scale Model in a City | Brain Candy TV
\\
No, the two parties are not equally bad. Sean Illing on a David Brooks column: Delusional David Brooks: His blind spot for Republican nihilism has become pathological
\\
Slate’s Phil Plait on Sean Carroll about the beginning of the universe, i.e., that there may not have been one. With a link to Closer to Truth.
\\
Thought during the night, three weeks ago: You have to leave the comfort of the light for the danger of the dark before you can see the stars.
