The War Against Intelligence

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s rage against smart people;
  • Defunding Harvard will hobble medical research that would benefit people like us;
  • Historian Lauren Thompson compares the Gilded Age to the Trump Age;
  • Trump and Vance praised b conservatives for lying about abortion; Hegseth purges books based on word searches; Hegseth, one of Trump’s “best people,” keeps blundering; and how a former beauty pageant contestant is in charge of removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian.
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Trump’s war against war against intelligence and expertise isn’t strategic; it’s personal.

Paul Krugman, 21 Apr 2025: Trump’s Cultural Revolution, subtitled “The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry”

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Civic Uprising?

Posted on Sunday 20 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservative David Brooks calls for a civic uprising against the Trump administration;
  • How Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir reacts to this;
  • How psychopaths and financial services seem to go together;
  • The extent to which JD Vance lies;
  • Aid to foreign children has ended; many of them will die; the administration doesn’t care;
  • The office on foreign disinformation has been shuttered;
  • And the CDC will cease collecting consumer safety data;
  • There’s a pattern here, as identified in the Brooks piece.
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I neglected to note this latest David Brooks piece that appeared in Friday’s New York Times, or Thursday when it appeared online. It’s getting attention.

NY Times, David Brooks, 17 Apr 2025 online: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
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The Most Sublime Moment in Classical Music

Posted on Saturday 19 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Asimov on Heinlein, about libertarianism;
  • More about “viewpoint diversity” in science, and how scientists react;
  • About another stupidly doctored photo by Trump, to prove something to his dimwitted followers;
  • How the history Trump wants to erase hold the answer to his future;
  • How elections seem to swing back and forth parties, and whether this will continue;
  • And Bruckner 8, movement 3, and the history of classical music.
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Another item seen in passing on Facebook today, from more than one person. I’ll save the image rather than linking it.

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Today’s Notes on the Destruction of America

Posted on Friday 18 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the quality of American life depends on the regulations that Trump and his vandals are discarding;
  • Paul Krugman on Trump’s trade war and how they don’t know what they’re doing;
  • Dana Milbank on how Trump’s first 100 days are an historic failure;
  • Slate’s Fred Kaplan on how “Trump’s Delusional Belief in Himself Has Become the World’s Problem”.
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People who don’t understand what we have will miss it when it’s gone. Trump and DOGE are vandals that are ravishing the library and discarding any book that’s too heavy, or too ugly.

NY Times, Coral Davenport, 15 Apr 2025 (in the print paper 17 Apr 2025): Inside Trump’s Plan to Halt Hundreds of Regulations, subtitled “The White House will soon move to rapidly repeal or freeze rules that affect health, food, workplace safety, transportation and more.”

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The Future is Coal Mining? Really?

Posted on Thursday 17 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Thomas L. Friedman has never been more afraid for our country’s future;
  • How RFK Jr.’s claims about autism are nonsense;
  • And a deep piece at NYT about migration patterns around the world.
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As with the manufacturing jobs item yesterday, Trump wants to bring back *coal mining*.

NY Times, Opinion by Thomas L. Friedman, 15 Apr 2025: I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future
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And Now We Have Linus

Posted on Wednesday 16 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why manufacturing jobs are never coming back to America;
  • Heather Cox Richardson records Steven Inskeep’s quip;
  • And How JD Vance is fine with abandoning due process;
  • About Linus, our fourth cat.
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I keep thinking: we’re living in history, that is, we’re living in a period of rapid change that historians will record, yet that most people living right now are not noticing. (I think this is the way history has always happened.) Basic institutions are being undermined. The ideals of the American form of government are being undermined. This seems to be an era in which the ideals of American gave way to fascist or tribal thinking. Without most people noticing.

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This has been common knowledge for years, for decades. For many reasons. I’ll resist spelling out my own understanding of this, and let the article speak for itself.

Vox, Dylan Matthews, 16 Apr 2025: Manufacturing jobs are never coming back, subtitled “Putting Americans back to work in factories isn’t just hard. It’s impossible.”
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Viewpoint Diversity and Consensus

Posted on Wednesday 16 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jerry Coyne on Harvard vs the US government and the idea of “viewpoint diversity,” with a response by Steven Pinker;
  • Why do conservatives think themselves under-represented in academia? Because they promote ideas that are not true;
  • Will there ever be a new consensus? History is moving in a very different way from the standard science fiction vision.
  • Robert Reich on the two tipping points for becoming a dictatorship;
  • Short takes about federal employees being told to snitch on people with Pride flags; yet another Christian wanting to impose “don’t say gay” on every classroom in America; how “Made in America” dreams are a fantasy; and a ludicrous conservative claim that fluoridated water causes autism.
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A long-running theme here, and in American politics, is that conservatives think themselves under-represented in academia. Don’t send your kids to college, the MAGA folks especially say, or they will be become “indoctrinated” [meaning educated] and become lefties. My short explanation of this was at the end of yesterday’s post. Today, Jerry Coyne covers the recent kerfuffle between the Trump Administration and Harvard. The former wants to impose — on a private university — all sorts of ideological guidelines, or else lose government funding for research. This isn’t about the nature of the research, it’s about ideological indoctrination. Harvard must think proper thoughts, and conduct themselves in a way the government approves of, or else. Harvard responded admirably.

Jerry Coyne, 15 Apr 2025: Administration to Harvard: Fix yourself; Harvard to Administration: STFU

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Musk, History, Science, Education

Posted on Monday 14 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Adam Grant on the wrong lesson to take from Elon Musk;
  • David Remnick on the conservative urge to rewrite the past in simplistic terms;
  • RFK Jr.’s contempt of science;
  • And the conservative war against education.
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Adam Grant is a university psychologist and author of THINK AGAIN (review here). This aligns with those stories about how many who claim to be Christians are now certain about their hostility to empathy.

NY Times, Adam Grant, 13 Apr 2025: America Is Learning the Wrong Lesson From Elon Musk’s Success
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Perhaps Humanity Has Hit a Conceptual Ceiling

Posted on Sunday 13 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Alternate title: America was supposed to be better than this.

  • Perhaps MAGA is about making America *simpler* again; perhaps what we’re seeing is a rejection of the complexity of the modern world;
  • Why is it Americans love watching crime shows?
  • Franklin Foer on how Trump’s class enemy is the intelligentsia;
  • How the Trump administration classifies immigrants as dead;
  • How MAGA/DOGE is not Christian, but xenophobically tribal;
  • How Trump threatens anyone who dissents;
  • More about the State Department’s witch-hunt against anti-Christian bias;
  • Yet if they have to rely on Prayer Warriors, the rest of us have nothing to worry about.
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Perhaps, I’m thinking, MAGA is really about making America *simple* again. That’s the conservative project: remove ambiguities, reduce everything to binaries, our side good everyone else bad, and so on. That’s the motive for MAGA and DOGE. The Nichols insight is (as I would put it) that our minds are wired for the danger-fraught ancestral environment, and so we feel ill-at-ease in the relatively safe modern environment. Another piece of evidence: how TV shows (in America at least) are still dominated by crime and calamity. There are far more spectacular violent events on TV shows than happen in real life. Why do people crave watching them? Because for most of us modern life is too safe, and thus boring, and that primitive mindset needs stimulation.

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“An arbitrary, corrupt, mendacious, and utterly incompetent king”

Posted on Saturday 12 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Andrew Sullivan on Trump;
  • How Trump supporters rationalize whatever crazy things he does, from Charlie Warzel and Molly Olmstead;
  • Trying to understand what Trump’s crackdown on science will accomplish;
  • Another item about the Christian right’s war on empathy; have I misunderstood Christianity all this time?;
  • And items about how books removed from the Naval Academy Library reveal the administration’s racism and defense of white supremacy.
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Some of us call out the emperor’s new clothes.

Andrew Sullivan on Substack, yesterday (via Carl Freedman)
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