Catching up on unused links from the past three weeks. A couple of these I’ll return to in detail.
Salon, Nicole Karlis, 23 Nov 2023: The case for bringing a dish of gossip to Thanksgiving this year
(In recent years I’ve seen increasing evolutionary understanding of how gossip functions, especially in small communities, to police members of the group; it’s about reputation and shame and handling interpersonal issues without getting ‘authorities’ involved.)
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Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 22 Nov 2023: The simple reason why Donald Trump is escalating his Hitlerian rhetoric: MAGA demands more, subtitled “Many of Trump’s diehard followers are White Christians who have found a role model and outlet for their desires”
The article begins: “Hillary Clinton was right — again.”
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OnlySky, Captain Cassidy, 21 Nov 2023: The Remnant: That evangelical need to feel picked-on and special, subtitled “Funny how the remnant looks just like all the other power-hungry, privilege-grabbing hypocrites we’ve ever seen in evangelicalism”
The taste for feeling victimized does seem to be a recurring theme.
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The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 22 Nov 2023: Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?, subtitled “He is becoming frighteningly clear about what he wants.”
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LA Times, Jackie Calmes, 21 Nov 2023: Column: Can’t convince Uncle MAGA he’s wrong? This Thanksgiving, let Trump’s ‘best people’ do the arguing
A litany of the many people Trump has hired who leave their positions and then express, to one degree or another, what a moron he is. Pence, Barr, Kelly, Mattis, Esper, Tillerson, Cohn, McMaster, Bolton, Spencer, Bossert, Griffin. Is Trump a poor judge of character? Or perhaps they’re all right?
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NY Times, guest essay by Cass R. Sunstein, 20 Nov 2023: Why I Am a Liberal
Long piece with 34 points. I’ll revisit it later.
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NY Times, guest essay by Kate Marvel, 18 Nov 2023: I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.
Will also return to this.
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Quanta Magazine, Alex Stone, 16 Nov 2023: The Astonishing Behavior of Recursive Sequences, subtitled “Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians.”
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Joe.My.God, 17 Nov 2023: Fox Sports Reporter: I’ve Invented Quotes Many Times
No comment necessary.
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Quanta Magazine, Yasemin Saplakoglu, 9 Nov 2023: Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better, subtitled “The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new questions about memory, attention and mathematics.”
This is one of those cognitive flaws that leads to bad/dishonest science fiction. As I discussed in my essay.
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The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 3 Nov 2023: The Great Social Media–News Collapse, subtitled “Big Tech’s relationship with journalism is much more complicated than it appears.”
I think this is about mainstream media is withdrawing from social media, but I’ll return to this later.
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Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 6 Nov 2023: The “Nietzsche Thesis”: Why we don’t really care about truth, subtitled “Your BS detector might not be as accurate as you think.”
Well, yes. Well-established. Will return to this.
