How It Works. How They Work.

Posted on Thursday 3 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How it works: Republican megadonors get megacontracts to run ICE concentration camps;
  • How they work:
    • Republicans are even less pluralistic than they’ve ever been;
    • Robert Reich on the familiar reasons authoritarians suppress education, and what “conservative ideas” might possibly be;
    • Short items about prison costs, Christians who want to execute gays, and the White House invoking Satan.
– – –

See how this works? (As usual, follow the money.)

JMG, 3 Jul 2025: Republican Megadonors To Get Tens Of Millions In Federal Contracts To Run Florida’s Concentration Camp

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Now It’s Concentration Camps

Posted on Wednesday 2 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Concentration Camps, and Republican salivation to send 65 million immigrants to the alligators;
  • Trump thinks brain scans measure IQ;
  • American science’s brain drain;
  • How societies maintain national myths to survive.
– – –

What’s next? Dungeons and shackles? Do Trump voters know what they’ve done? Are they really fine with this? I fear that some of them are.

The New Republic, Melissa Gira Gant, 2 Jul 2025: The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp, subtitled “The Republicans are proudly calling it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Let’s call it what it is.”

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Implications

Posted on Tuesday 1 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Do justices not foresee consequences?
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the big beautiful bill;
  • How JD Vance reveals the administration’s true motivations; cruelty is the thing;
  • Jonathan Chait on Republicans’ “incomprehensibly reckless plan”;
  • Robert Reich on conservatives’ animosity to empathy (never mind Jesus Christ);
  • Initial thoughts about Springsteen’s “Western Stars”.
– – –

Sometimes you wonder if lawyers, judges, and justices are so focused on the validity of a particular law that they don’t consider the implications of their ruling. Obsessed with the technical details and missing the big picture.

Slate, Heidi Feldman, 30 Jun 2025: Supreme Court Rules Some Americans Have a Constitutional Right to Insist on Theocracy

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Octavia E. Butler, PARABLE OF THE SOWER

Posted on Tuesday 1 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Four Walls Eight Windows, October 1993, 299pp)

In June I focused on reading classic science fiction novels, partly to see how many I could get through in one month, considering other obligations (answer: 6 and a bit), and partly to revisit two novels that have, in the past couple three years, become semi-permanent residents on extended bestseller lists, just as Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHT-FOUR and Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 have been for decades.

The first of these is Octavia Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER, from 1993. I read it shortly after it came out (that’s the first edition shown above), and thought it a perfectly decent novel, if not especially outstanding. There have been plenty of other near-future novels about the collapse of society, the survivors having to fend off criminals and live off the land. What made it distinctive, perhaps, is that it was apparently set in Altadena CA, where the author lived at the time, and involved a female black main character. (And that the author was a female black author.)

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Stories, Archetypes, Morality

Posted on Monday 30 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Does anyone take Jung or Freud seriously any more?
  • OnlySky’s Bruce Ledewitz on the contemporary idea of “evil”;
  • Robert Reich on “the worst bill in history” and fact-checking claims about tax cuts;
  • How local communities fight back against ICE;
  • Republicans about cuts to services: “They’ll get over it”;
  • Paul Krugman on Republicans’ racist claims about Zohran Mamdani;
  • Springsteen’s “Down in the Hole”.
– – –

I saw a Fb post a day or two ago — here it is, but it’s not public — that began:

My sister, who has a somewhat sentimental attachment to Jung, sent me a youtube video of a Jungian therapist explaining the rise of MAGA as a collective embrace of the American Shadow and trump as an expression of the archetype of The Fool. It makes sense, but I don’t consider it particularly useful. …

Setting aside the Trump angle, my thought was, Jung? Does anyone take his archetypes any more seriously than they do Freud’s psychoanalytic theories (id, ego, superego)? I took a psych course at UCLA and these things were discussed, but that was 50 years ago.

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Can You Hear Me?

Posted on Sunday 29 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich reminds us of the three branches of American government, and how, in plain site, Trump is attacking two of them;
  • How Donald Trump doesn’t align with William McKinley so much as William Jennings Bryan.
  • Bruce Springsteen’s “Outlaw Pete”.
– – –

Robert Reich puts the latest Supreme Court decision into perspective. There used to be a “civics” class in 6th grade, or junior high school, and I gather there isn’t any more.

Robert Reich, 29 Jun 2025: Sunday Thought: The One Branch of Government that Trump Wants to Keep Alive, subtitled “While eviscerating the two others”

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Morality Is Relative; Reality Is Not

Posted on Saturday 28 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • An undistorted map of the world;
  • Jesse Being on “commonsense”;
  • How morality is circumstantial, e.g. in Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE, which I just reread this week;
  • Website matters involving drop-down menu bars, here and on sfadb.com;
  • Short items about Christian panic that did not come true; Kari Lake’s ad hominem tactic; how Anderson Cooper fact-checks Pete Hegseth’s claims; and how the slogan “Peace through Strength” was not invented by Trump, despite Karoline Leavitt.
– – –

From X via Facebook: Actual size of countries on the world map, without the Mercator projection distortion.

Alas, there’s no provenance (reliable source) indicated, and I don’t have an X account to read comments there. But this looks about right. The problem with all the Mercator map projections everywhere (even on the backdrop of the Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” news segments!) is that they imply areas to the north and to the south are far larger than they actually are. Continue reading →

Posted in Morality, Politics, Psychology, reality, Website Issues | Comments Off on Morality Is Relative; Reality Is Not

Progress, and the Forces Against It

Posted on Friday 27 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • We have been here before: comparing 1940 to 2025;
  • Steven Novella assesses whether skepticism has made any progress in recent decades;
  • The irony of MAGA being outraged by a Muslim candidate for New York City’s mayor;
  • Conservative presumption and arrogance in RFK Jr.’s new advisory vaccine board;
  • Heather Cox Richardson undermines Pete Hegseth’s claim about “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”
– – –

This too shall pass.

OnlySky, Katie Malone, 27 Jun 2025: Do not despair, subtitled “For we have walked this path before.”

The darkness of fascism was gathering on the horizon. Politicians rose to prominence by demonizing the alien and the other, spreading fear of imaginary enemies within as they grasped for dictatorial power. Violent, cultish political movements banned books, scorned intellectuals and rejected tolerance, worshipping the leader and promising to restore lost greatness. The rule of law was under siege, and fear stalked the streets. The drums of war beat in the distance.

Some people saw the threat clearly, but many more dismissed it.

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This Is What Will Be

Posted on Thursday 26 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How right-wing violence has become normalized;
  • How perhaps “totalitarianism” is better word than “authoritarianism” for what is going on;
  • How Republicans trying to roll back same-sex marriage are fighting a losing battle, cf. that Stephen Prothero book;
  • A psychiatrist explains how changes in definitions of autism resulted in the apparent increase in autism rates;
  • Bruce Springsteen’s “Magic.”
– – –

Saying violence on the right is “extremist” isn’t correct; violence on the right has become normalized.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 21 Jun 2025: Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue [gift link]

It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century, with particular emphasis on the past 10 years of American political life.

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Paths Away From and To Reality

Posted on Wednesday 25 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • “Doing your own research” mostly leads to false conclusions, unless you’ve done your “homework” — i.e. have an education in the subject matter;
  • Example of a claim about Sodom and Gomorrah and an asteroid or comet airburst;
  • How simpletons think they can cut costs to “overhead” without realizing what overhead costs do;
  • A philosophy graduate explains why it’s better to doubt than to know;
  • With thoughts about whether philosophy is useless, as some scientists say, and how religions establish arbitrary certainty, despite the evidence of the real world.
– – –

Variation on another recurring theme of this blog: the world is more complex than most people think; and most people know less than they think they do. And so draw wrong conclusions.

Big Think, Ethan Siegel, 24 Jun 2025: You can’t do your own research without doing your homework first, subtitled “Here in 2025, many of us claim to come to our own conclusions by doing our own research. Here’s why we’re mostly deluding ourselves.”

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Posted in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Social Progress | Comments Off on Paths Away From and To Reality