Summer Solstice; Reality and Illusions

• The summer solstice is a consequence of basic facts about the Earth and the solar system, which apparently few people understand;
• Another example of how debates are usually pointless, including political debates;
• Another take on the false idea that people were better in the past;
• And how the MAGA movement’s doomsday fears may simply anticipate its own demise.

The Summer Solstice as an example of how some people understand reality, and others simply ignore it.

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Vox, Brian Resnick, 20 Jun 2023: The summer solstice is Wednesday: 7 things to know about the longest day of the year, subtitled “Why do we have a summer solstice, anyway?”

This piece, in Vox’s familiar “explainer” mode, has some nice diagrams illustrating concepts I’d have thought most people would have understood by the time they graduated high school. Why there are seasons. Why there’s more daylight (relative to nighttime, in the 24 hours of a day) in the summer than in the winter. How the spot on the horizon where the sun sets shifts, back and forth, over the course of a year.

But there are some people who apparently have no clue about these things. Or simply don’t notice, or don’t care.

They would be like Sherlock Holmes not caring whether the Earth went around the sun, or vice versa. (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/26509290-sherlock-holmes-the-ultimate-collection); such matters simply aren’t relevant to their daily lives. This studied ignorance extends to many things. Some people don’t realize that the Moon is in the sky half the time (more or less), independently of whether the sun is in the sky, for the same reason; that is, they’re astonished when it’s pointed out to them that the Moon is often visible in the daytime sky. They fall back on naive, primitive notions that the sun is to light the day, the moon to light the night. (And that the world is flat, because it looks that way out the window.)

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Astronomy Picture of the Day, 21 Jun 2023: Three Sun Paths

The photo on the site is overlain with additional info.

Related: there was an item about a woman who believed that the mere existence of globes, in classrooms and libraries everywhere, was indicative of a conspiracy theory to hide the truth of the flat earth.

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Some items extending themes of previous posts.

Another example of why “debate” is nonproductive.

NY Times, Farhad Manjoo, 23 Jun 2023: It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Manjoo tried it once. (In defending Bush’s win in 2004 against accusations by RFKJr and others that the election had been stolen from Kerry — a reversal of the traditional positions of conspiracy theorists and their debunkers.)

My mistake was attempting to debate and debunk Kennedy in the first place. At best, the effort was a waste of time and energy; at worst, a big bow-wrapped gift of the thing a conspiracy theorist desires most — recognition that his arguments are important enough to merit serious debate.

…You can come armed with all the facts in the world, but when you’re dealing with a conspiracist, there’s no real way to “win” an argument. For people whose views aren’t anchored to facts, winning is simply getting attention — and when you publicly argue with someone like Kennedy, you’ve already lost.

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Similarly, I wonder what the point is of political ‘debate’ in the House or Senate. Congressmen come to Washington with fully prepared ideas of the positions they plan to argue, then stand in congress and make speeches to those effects. Even when witnesses are brought in for hearings, they’re to support the pre-determined position of someone. The only thing accomplished, I suspect, is that congressmen can hope for snippets of their talks on TV news, or in recordings they can take home to their constituents to show how hard they’re working on their behalf. Do these ‘debates’ really sway anyone?

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And another item about the persistence of the idea that everything was better in the old days.

Vox, Sigal Samuel, 19 Jun 2023: Why every generation thinks people were nicer in the past, subtitled “Reports that we’re becoming crappier humans over time are greatly exaggerated.”

Actually, this keys off the very Mastroianni paper that I discussed three days ago. So this is a take on him by Sigal Samuel, one of Vox’s senior reporters.

And in this century, surveys have shown that people in at least 60 countries around the globe believe that morality is declining.

But that idea is just an illusion, according to a new paper published in Nature.

Its lead author, the psychologist Adam Mastroianni, says the paper was born out of his own emotional reaction to constantly hearing people grumble about how humanity is going downhill — “Back in the day, you could leave your door unlocked at night,” “Used to be you could trust someone’s word,” “Kids these days!” — without any real evidence for thinking that.

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When Mastroianni and Gilbert asked respondents what was causing the supposed moral decline, they didn’t attribute it all to “kids these days!” It’s not just that old nice people are dying and being replaced by young selfish people — it’s also that humans in general are becoming less nice in everyday interactions, they said.

But is that true?

The answer, as best we can tell, is no.

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And:

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 15 Jun 2023: The doomsday cult whose doomsday fears are true

Beginning with the latest indictment of Donald Trump, and the MAGA response threatening violence, even civil war.

The panic, the fever pitch of hysteria, the berserk fury: In all respects, these MAGA Republicans are acting like a doomsday cult whose prophesied End of Days is approaching.

But one crucial fact separates them from all the failed apocalyptic sects throughout history: There’s good reason to believe that their doomsday fears are going to come true.

Because:

The GOP’s fanatical devotion to Trump is best understood not as a new development, but as the culmination of something that has been building for years. Their entire philosophy looks backward to a golden era that never was. Every social and political change that’s taken place over the last several decades they view as evidence of American corruption and decline.

We can sketch the outlines of this mythical era. It’s a white-dominated society where other races are inconsequential. It’s a patriarchy where men have the power and the income and women are mothers and homemakers. It’s a Christian theocracy where conservative churches define what morality is and enjoy government favor and special privileges. It’s a laissez-faire, Ayn Randian capitalist economy where big business writes the law to suit itself and where the rich are free to do as they wish.

This Republican utopia is an obvious myth. The world was never exactly like this, and to the degree it did resemble their vision, it wasn’t pleasant, fair, or peaceful. But that doesn’t stop modern conservatives from believing they can restore this fantasy world.

Then came Obama, who freaked them out. And the gradual decline of Christians as a majority population. Lee gets to this point:

As their voters age and die off, the religious right is staring down the barrel of demographic annihilation. America is becoming more liberal, more diverse, and more secular. We welcome these trends, but religious conservatives see them as the ultimate defeat and the destruction of everything they care about. They feel like they’re under a death sentence and they’re counting down the days until it’s carried out.

This is why I say MAGA Republicans are a doomsday cult whose doomsday beliefs are true. Whether they admit it or not, they’re dimly aware that their time is indeed running out. That’s what fuels their rage and desperation.

The Republicans’ ugly turn can be understood in this light. Attempts at persuasion having failed, they’re now trying to impose their ideas on the rest of us by force, regardless of how unpopular those ideas are. It’s a spiteful tantrum, lashing out against a future that doesn’t include them.

Concluding,

The grand irony is that this doomsday cult, unlike all others in history, is bringing about the very doomsday they fear.