Views from Crestmont Drive

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.

– – –

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

What caught my eye was this one point, in the government’s list of demands, as summarized by Coyne.

• Harvard is to commission an external body to audit the university for viewpoint diversity. Though they’re not clear what “viewpoint diversity” means, it’s obvious that they want more conservative points of view and fewer professors pushing pro-Palestinian points of view

Viewpoint diversity sounds harmless enough, but only at first glance. In fact, there are things that are true, and things that are not. Conservatives usually want, in the name of “viewpoint diversity,” to promote things, in the name of ideology or religion, that are not in fact objectively true. (Like intelligent design, or trickle-down economics.) And so Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, has this pithy response:

Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.

“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.

Once you start, where do you stop? Should flat-earthers teach geology? Or do you just let universities do what they do without dumb government officials thinking they know better? Because America is becoming an authoritarian police state.

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Stepping out toward the bigger picture. (The image is deliberately faded.)

OnlySky, Jonathan Kassel, 15 Apr 2025: MAGA and the questionable judgment of history, subtitled “Even on the rosy assumption that this era ends, we will never see the return to relative consensus that was once possible.”

Once again, history is moving toward a future very different from the idealistic science fiction futures of a unified planet, never mind a planet unified with those of other intelligent civilizations in some kind of Federation. (Of course an obvious observation is that consensus isn’t possible where “viewpoint diversity” is imposed in the way described above.)

The writer begins:

There is a dream, now resident in many blue heads, of a time in the future when the current insanity is fading in the rear view. The verdict of history is in. Donald Trump and his populist movement are recognized by an overwhelming supermajority of Americans as a cancer and a cautionary tale. It has happened to other toxic political figures and cultural moments, like Nixon and Watergate, brought into clear focus by the passage of time.

That isn’t going to happen this time, at least not in the same way.

The dream has less to do with Trump himself than with those around us—the fathers and sisters and friends and neighbors body-snatched by this virus, people we thought we knew. We want to hear them say they were wrong, that they don’t know why they didn’t see it before, but they’re back.

When a few of these are amplified in the media: [ video inserted here ] ……accompanied by comments about face-eating leopards, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve had a taste of our future.

Probably not.

Don’t expect the MAGA folks to realize they were wrong and apologize. Here we go again:

Social identity theory notes that individuals derive part of their self-concept from the groups they are part of. Very strong identification with a group can lead to favoring in-group members and discriminating against out-group members. In political contexts, this can result in polarization, where individuals adopt the norms and values of their political group, leading to deep divisions and resistance to opposing viewpoints. This generates a deep revulsion to the idea of leaving, what psychologist and deprogrammer Steven Hassan calls “phobia indoctrination.” Months or years spent defining yourself as a member of the group and learning to revile and pity those on the outside makes it painful to exit. Those who manage it tend to do so quietly.

Same ideas as in Ariely’s MISBELIEF, reviewed here.

The article goes on to recall Nixon, discuss the media, politics, and the questionable judgment of history. And here’s the lesson of this piece.

[H]istorical consensus depends on institutional trust and shared facts. In an era where universities, journalists, and historians are dismissed as ideologically compromised by wide swaths of the population, no such consensus is possible. Trump’s presidency — and post-presidency — will be remembered in fundamentally different ways depending on which epistemic community one belongs to. For some, he is a would-be authoritarian who attacked democratic norms and tried to overturn an election. For others, he is a persecuted outsider fighting a corrupt system. These two narratives are mutually exclusive and yet coexisting.

Of course this begs the question: was there *ever* an era of relative consensus? Arguably no, and arguably there’s one now more than ever before. It’s just not as unified as some had always imagined. Arguably no, because throughout most of human history, we were divided into isolated social groups, whether tribes or nations, and have only recently become a global culture. And arguably yes, because today, virtually all nations trade in American dollars, and speak English, and share to some extent a common culture.

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How do we tell when if we’ve become a dictatorship?

Robert Reich, 14 Apr 2025: The two tipping points for when we officially become a dictatorship could occur this week

1. The first way the Trump regime clearly becomes a dictatorship is by directly defying a Supreme Court order.

…

2. The second way we officially become a dictatorship is if the Trump regime can accuse any American citizen of being so dangerous as to justify being sent to a foreign prison, without any independent court review of the regime’s evidence.

Here we are.

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Quick takes.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 15 Apr 2025: Marco Rubio’s hunt for “anti-Christian bias” is creeping theocracy, subtitled “In a new war on federal workers, State Department employees are told to snitch on people with Pride flags”

Subtitle is the point here.

Vox, Ian Millhiser, 15 Apr 2025: The Supreme Court threatens to bring “Don’t Say Gay” to every classroom in America, subtitled “An influential Christian right law firm asks the justices to impose an impossible burden on teachers.”

Again, Christians imposing their tribal “values” on the entire population.

Boing Boing, Ellsworth Toohey, 15 Apr 2025: Why “Made in America” dreams are a galaxy-brain-stupid fantasy

Manufacturing veteran Molson Hart just dropped a 14-point manifesto explaining why America’s latest “bring the jobs home” scheme is economic suicide dressed up as patriotism.

The problems? Pour yourself something strong — there are fourteen of them. America’s supply chains are weaker than a gas station coffee, our workforce can’t do basic math, and our infrastructure makes a Jenga tower look stable. That’s three down, eleven more problems to go.

The 14 points are at the link in the excerpt. Basic issue: the world has changed, times have changed, and you can’t go back.

Unless we change course pronto, we’re about to discover what happens when magical thinking meets economic reality. Spoiler alert: Reality wins every time.

One more, which is example of how conservatives, without any evidence whatsoever, relying on personal anecdotes, or *a* personal anecdote, claim nonsensical conclusions about things they don’t like (and don’t understand).

JMG, 15 Apr 2025: GOP Rep Blames Autism On Fluoridated Water

They live in a fact-free, delusional world.

Listening to Shostakovich the past two weeks.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Education, science fiction | Comments Off

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.

– – –

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

As an organizational psychologist, I’ve long admired the boldness of Mr. Musk’s vision, the intensity of his drive and the impact of his innovations in cars and rockets. But the way he deals with people would fail the leadership class I teach at his alma mater. For more than a century, my field has studied how leaders achieve great things. The evidence is clear: Leadership by intimidation and insult is a bad strategy. Belittling people doesn’t boost their productivity but diminishes it.

Examples from sports and medicine and academic studies. The lesson:

Now comes the inevitable question: How then do you explain Mr. Musk’s success? With Tesla and SpaceX, he’s built two wildly prosperous companies, disrupting one industry and supercharging another. But those results have come in spite of the way he treats people, not because of it.

Why is it so easy to miss that point? The answer gets at a bigger truth about the way human beings think. Psychologists call it idiosyncrasy credit: As people accumulate status, we grant them more permission to deviate from social norms. So when we see leaders being uncivil, we often get cause and effect backward. We assume that being unkind makes them successful. In truth, however, success can give them a license to be unkind. Engineers at Tesla and SpaceX tolerate abuse from Mr. Hyde because they admire the vision of Dr. Jekyll.

Then about his DOGE strategy and its mistakes.

But if his goal is to discredit government and demoralize workers, then his strategy may be working.

And how Steve Jobs did this, and learned his lesson.

It’s a pattern I’ve seen time and again in my research: Givers add more value than takers. Studies show that tech companies are more profitable when servant leaders are at the helm. The competitive advantage comes from treating people better than they expect and earning their trust, which makes it easier to attract, motivate and retain talent. That doesn’t mean being soft on people. Servant leaders aren’t shy about dishing out tough love. But they put their mission above their ego, and they care about people as much as performance.

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More about the conservative urge to rewrite the past in simple terms.

The New Yorker, David Remnick 6 Apr 2025: At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History, subtitled “The urge to police the past is hardly an invention of the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere.”

As is true of autocracies everywhere, this Administration demands a mystical view of an imagined past. In late March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its diagnosis is that there has long been among professors and curators “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Naturally, Trump has this upside down. American history has been written by those in power, and in recent decades history is being amended to tell the stories of those who haven’t been in power. They’ve created the culture, and *are* the history of the country, as much as anyone. And again:

But in a culture war that demands that political opponents be branded, en masse, as “woke revolutionaries,” there can be no complexity. And it will be the job, according to the executive order, of Vice-President J. D. Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board, to make matters simple. Vance is charged with leading the effort to remove from the museum what is called, in exquisite Orwellese, “improper ideology.”

With examples of similar urges to police the past in the Soviet Union. With a primary motive being a positive, simplistic view of history. Re: Putin:

His culture-war commissars took the cue, and approved a textbook filled with unquestioned assertions of official history: “Russia is a country of heroes.” And “Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state.” In the same spirit, according to Foreign Policy, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping oversaw the establishment a few years ago of a “historical nihilism” hotline so that citizens could rat out anyone who shared “wrong ideas and viewpoints.”

Now we have such a hotline in the US, to protect the embattled Christians. Concluding:

Trump’s executive order on history does not repeat precisely the tactics of Putin or Xi. But it rhymes.

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Contempt for science. Which derives from misunderstanding it.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 14 Apr 2025: RFK’s pledge to discover the “cause” of autism isn’t just a ploy — it’s a war on children’s health, subtitled “The head of this ‘research’ is no doctor — and has a history of torturing kids with fake autism ‘cures'”

Marcotte opens with how he misunderstands science.

Robert Kennedy can’t be bothered to hide his thorough contempt for science. “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic,” the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared on Thursday, when announcing a supposed “massive testing and research effort.” Even a person with only a fifth-grade understanding of science can see the problem: no scientist can promise a definitive “answer” to a complex biological question at the beginning of a study. Nor can anyone confidently declare they’ll have that inquiry wrapped up in a few short months, as if they’re writing a summer book report instead of conducting a scientific investigation.

And Marcotte predicts his conclusions.

In the spirit of common sense, however, there is no point in playing dumb. Kennedy has already indicated what he expects the “findings” to be: that vaccines did it, even though all legitimate science shows that is false. To make sure no real science accidentally happens, he has put a non-scientist/non-doctor in charge of this non-study: David Geier, a man who has been fined for practicing medicine without a license. Worse, his “treatments” of children are better described as pointless torture.

With background about Kennedy’s fondness for quacks. And:

Kennedy exploits the language of the “wellness” industry, with its misleading emphasis on “natural” health care and “letting” your body heal itself. What’s ironic is that’s what vaccines do. Vaccines work by stimulating the body’s natural immune response, so that it prevents infection using the body’s own resources. All these “treatments” Kennedy touts aren’t just ineffective, they’re not “natural.” They’re blitzing a child with often overwhelming amounts of medication, which won’t work but could make the kid even sicker.

And concluding:

Kennedy’s claim that his team of non-scientists and quacks will discover the “cause” of autism in a few short months is preposterous on its face. It’s worse because scientists already know why autism rates have risen. As public health specialist Dr. Atul Gawande told Pod Save America last week, the main reason is “we have become much more liberal about diagnosing people on the spectrum.” There is no concurrent rise, he noted, in the number of cases of severe autism.

This is a good thing. It means more kids have more health care access at younger ages, so they grow into happy, functioning adults. But Kennedy doesn’t like that answer, so he ignores the facts. This history suggests one reason why. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, Kennedy does not want American kids to be healthier. He instead seems determined to bring back horrific diseases that do nothing but hurt or even kill children.

Marcotte may be overreaching here. Could Kennedy truly, consciously, want to harm children? I doubt it. He’s basically a contrarian lured along by too many quacks, and unable to understand scientific evidence and conclusions. A dimwit. His concerns are above any concerns about harming children.

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Yet another piece about the conservative war against education. I have a fairly basic explanation for this.

NY Times, Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder and Jonathan Swan, 14 Apr 2025: Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities, subtitled “The opaque process, part of a strategy by conservatives to realign the liberal tilt of elite universities, has upended higher education.”

Mr. Trump and his top aides are exerting control of huge sums of federal research money to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.

With much detail about funding Harvard, and so on. Long piece. Here’s a revealing bit:

In the long run, the goal of Mr. Trump and his allies is to permanently disrupt the elite world of higher education.

“We want to set them back a generation or two,” Mr. Rufo said.

This is very simple. Conservatives want to maintain the status quo. Education is about learning new things… that might challenge the status quo. And that’s why conservatives are against education. This is the history of humanity. And yet, humanity has progressed.

Posted in conservatives, History, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off

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.

– – –

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.

Another way of putting this is: the world has gotten more complex, both as once isolated peoples have come into contact necessarily creating a global society, and as technology has become so complex no one can understand it all, there’s a rejection of all these things in favor of a simpler life. If I don’t understand it, it can’t be important, so fire ’em all, says DOGE. Which is to say: perhaps as a species humanity as reached a conceptual ceiling. Most of us simply cannot comprehend the kinds of things that would enable us to become a truly global, and then multi-planetary, species. No matter how much the few very smart of us can accomplish, there will always be religious and social zealots who would tear that progress down.

The classic science fiction authors saw this — Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. I can think of specific examples. And the later ones, who’ve taken this split for granted. Perhaps science fiction has been self-indulgent, for nearly a century, in thinking that the drags on progress can be overcome. But maybe they can’t.

Thus.

The Atlantic, Franklin Foer, 13 Apr 2025: Trump Has Found His Class Enemy, subtitled “The president unleashes a Marxist theory of power—but against knowledge workers, not billionaires.”

Even the educated mind, or perhaps especially the educated mind, is skilled at deflecting harsh realities. That’s why so many white-shoe lawyers have failed to publicly support their colleagues in firms that President Donald Trump has targeted. It’s why universities have barely fought him in court, even as he has butchered their funding. Law partners and university presidents like to talk their way out of problems, and they apparently believe that they can ultimately evade the fate that befalls those who resist Trump. They assume that he merely craves gestures of submission—and that once obeisance has been paid, he will move on to his next target.

The evidence is clear: Trump wants to bring back big factories, with their factory workers, to America as it was a century ago. He thinks American can seal itself off from the rest of the world, and consume only things built in America, never mind economic or supply issues. And his plan to do this is… extremely simple-minded. His MAGA followers who support him are… simple-minded. (Every state grows bananas! said one MAGA-ite, on Fb, shrugging off tariff threats on produce.)

That, however, underestimates the social revolution that the Trump administration is trying to unleash. Its goal isn’t just to shatter a few institutions. It intends to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.

The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age. Back in the 1990s, as the group began to emerge in its current form, the liberal economics commentator Robert Reich hailed its members as “symbolic analysts”—people who identify and solve problems by thinking through ideas rather than via physical labor. A decade later, the urbanist Richard Florida put forth an even more triumphalist term: the “creative class.” That is, its members had the academic training to master the complexities of a globalized economy, the intellectual skills to conquer the digital world.

Life was so much simpler, and easier, when we knew less, and lived by our religions and ideologies.

Not so long ago, the upper-middle-class Americans who exemplify the PMC would have filled the ranks of both parties. But beginning in the 1990s, professionals began migrating in large numbers to the Democrats. Many affluent people with a cosmopolitan outlook were repelled by the GOP’s social stances and drawn to the economic moderation of politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

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These people are despicable.

Washington Post, 12 Apr 2025: Trump administration overrode Social Security staff to list immigrants as dead, subtitled “A senior executive who objected was marched out of his office and put on leave, while earlier warnings about the agency’s deaths database were ignored.”

The MAGA/DOGE movement is not Christian. It is xenophobically tribal.

Salon, Serene Jones, 13 Apr 2025: And then Jesus said, “America First”, subtitled “How would Jesus have responded if one of the most powerful nations in the world decided to cut off aid?”

Long before Jesus ever knew of the existence of America, as he wandered through different lands preaching the word of God, he proclaimed, “America First!”

At least, this is what right-wing Christian forces want you to believe. In one breath, they claim to be guided by their core faith values. But in the next breath, these same voices purport that we need to prioritize Americans and forget about people in other countries.

Totalitarian? Dictatorship? Fascist? Orwellian? I’m not sure which words apply anymore. But this is not good, and it’s not about freedom or liberty.

CNN analysis by Zachary B. Wolfe, 12 Apr 2025: Trump’s retribution sends a chilling message to dissenters

Donald Trump’s White House has a threatening message for anyone who might even be perceived to disagree with the president: Don’t. Or else.

The rest is details and examples.

Similarly. Wrong-thinkers will be severely punished!

Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 12 Apr 2025: See something, snitch something: The State Department’s “anti-Christian bias” witch hunt begins, subtitled “Under Republican leadership, Christians are the only ones worth protecting”

It’s not as if this kind of thing hasn’t happened before, in many cultures throughout history. It’s that America was supposed to be better than this.

On the other hand, if they really think prayer will accomplish anything, the rest of us have nothing to worry about. This is just evidence of their zeal, and irrationality.

Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 11 Apr 2025: Paula White’s Prayer Warriors Target Supreme Court and Federal Judges

I have one more long piece by Adam Grant that I’ll look at tomorrow.

Posted in authoritarianism, Human Progress, Politics, Religion, science fiction | Comments Off

“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.

– – –

Some of us call out the emperor’s new clothes.

Andrew Sullivan on Substack, yesterday (via Carl Freedman)

“Once you grasp Trump as an elected monarch, his full rebuke to the very idea of America comes into clearer view. He is precisely — almost uncannily — what this country was founded to oppose: an arbitrary, corrupt, mendacious, and utterly incompetent king.”

While members of cult are sure the leader is always right. Whatever crazy thing he’s just done, it must be part of a master plan.

Three days ago.

The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 9 Apr 2025: There Was Never a Master Plan, subtitled “Trump backed down on tariffs. His supporters think that was the idea all along.”

Beginning:

To plainly state what is going on right now would make you sound delusional.

The president of the United States has essentially been holding the global financial system hostage. He’s done so by threatening massive tariffs on nearly 100 countries and territories, including one that is unpopulated. These tariffs, which were set to go into effect today but have now been put on a 90-day pause for every country except for China, which will see a 125 percent tax on exports, seem to have been calculated using a blanket formula that some economists and trade experts find almost nonsensical. (Many have speculated that the math was done by a chatbot.) The administration’s supporters do not have a coherent message about why any of this is happening; before President Donald Trump announced the pause, they’d argued simultaneously that the tariffs were a temporary negotiating tactic but also that they might be durable enough to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

Going on and on in this vein. He concludes with my thought that eventually reality strikes back.

That sufficiently motivated people might break with reality is by now somewhat predictable in American politics. But what’s far more uncertain is what happens when reality punctures the protective bubble of cognitive dissonance. QAnon devotees and MAGA die-hards were certain that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. When reality became impossible to ignore, we got January 6. Few events have the power to pierce the veil, but a global financial crisis could be one of them. What happens if the true believers are confronted with a truth they can’t look away from? History suggests it won’t go well.

More about MAGA spinning.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, 9 Apr 2025: “Email Jobs” and iPads subtitled “What a week of furious MAGA spin on tariffs can tell us.”

It’s rare, these days, for a decision by President Donald Trump to evince anything but a unified reaction from his die-hard supporters. But this week’s experiment with reciprocal tariffs—carrying promises of disaster for small businesses and American consumers and based on incoherent models and a bizarrely simplistic understanding of global trade and supply chains—forced the MAGA influencers to think more creatively. As the spin turns again after Wednesday afternoon’s maybe-reversal from Trump (followed by a definite reversal from the Nasdaq), pro-Trump voices’ reaction over the past week gives them a durable road map for another reversal—or for whenever Trump, almost inevitably, does something like this again.

Both of these articles mention a term I had not seen before.

It’s always hard to know how much the brash posts mocking Democrats and, in this case, “panicans”—a term that some influencers have been trying to make happen since Trump coined the term for tariff-worried Republicans in a Truth Social post on Monday—represent genuine positions, rather than just trolling. At this point in modern conservative politics, the difference doesn’t really matter.

…

“You do NOT need the new iPad,” one notable far-right commentator wrote. “You do NOT need the new video game console. You WANT them. There is a big difference and if you look at the people whining about the tariffs I challenge you to ask them how their lives have been affected in any way.”

Sour grapes? This is flabbergasting given conservatives’ traditional support for capitalism. People are *supposed* to buy new things to keep the economy going!

The piece goes on with further rationales and claims that the pain of these tariffs is to be endured in order to ‘save the country’. From what? Something other than a white nationalist theocracy? That seems to be what the cultists want.

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Another piece from three days ago.

Vox, Bryan Walsh, 9 Apr 2025: The self-inflicted death of American science has already begun, subtitled “Trump’s crackdown on foreign students and scientists will do irreparable harm to the country.”

I’ll comment, rather than quote. Has it been unfair of America to gain worldwide scientific supremacy in part via foreign students and foreign scientists who’ve been allowed to come to our country? (As part of the centuries-long ‘melting pot’ of immigrants, many of whom escaped oppressive foreign regimes.) I doubt MAGA/DOGE has thought this through. On the one hand, you could argue that xenophobic Americans, who think for some reason that they are the cream of the human race, don’t need any ‘furriners’ to help them (ignoring history); on the other hand, it’s obvious that as America steps down from leadership in science, other countries will fill the gap. Currently, China is the best candidate.

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A piece that confounds my understanding of what Christianity was supposedly all about.

The Guardian, Julia Carrie Wong, 8 Apr 2025: Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy, subtitled “Trump’s actions are irreconcilable with Christian compassion. But an unholy alliance seeks to cast empathy as a parasitic plague”

Long piece, worth another visit, but for now I’ll quote the opening:

Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”

The idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right. Musk learned about “suicidal empathy” through his “public bromance” with Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable social media following. By Saad’s accounting – and this is not dissimilar from the white nationalist “great replacement theory” – western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries.

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

No. This is the is/ought fallacy. Empathy might have been a weakness in the ancestral environment, in which tribe fought against tribe for limited resources and thus survival; but the world has changed. We’re a global society now, like it or not.

Shorter items.

This was on the front page of the New York Times today.

NY Times, 11 Apr 2025: Who’s In and Who’s Out at the Naval Academy’s Library?, subtitled “An order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office resulted in a purge of books critical of racism but preserved volumes defending white power.”

The article cites only three examples:

Gone is “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou’s transformative best-selling 1970 memoir chronicling her struggles with racism and trauma.

Two copies of “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler are still on the shelves.

Gone is “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s 2010 examination of how female victims of the Holocaust have been portrayed and remembered.

“The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail is still on the shelves. The 1973 novel, which envisions a takeover of the Western world by immigrants from developing countries, has been embraced by white supremacists and promoted by Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser.

“The Bell Curve,” which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled.

But that they used certain “key words” to search their database of books is by itself evidence of bias, of racism and xenophobia.

Locus Online has this piece about the matter, noting books by genre authors removed from the library because they were implicated for “promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Posted in authoritarianism, Conservative Resistance, conservatives | Comments Off

We’re Becoming an Authoritarian, Theocratic, Police State

Posted on Friday 11 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Anne Applebaum on why dictatorships fail;
David Brooks on how Americans can’t think anymore;
Amanda Marcotte on Elon Musk’s and MAGA’s misogyny, via their war on empathy;
Morons: A GOP Rep about how climate change is a sham because God controls the sun; and the current U.S. Secretary of Education who thinks AI is pronounced “A-one”.
And how the State Department is now monitoring employees for “anti-Christian bias”.

– – –

The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, 10 Apr 2025: This Is Why Dictatorships Fail, subtitled “The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason.”

He blinked. But we don’t really know why.

Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it.

…

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

So, what’s the lesson here?

From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions.

The subject of a couple books recently covered here. She concludes:

But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.

\\\

Again, thinking about the Nichols book: society actually takes care of people pretty well — the average person is *much* better off than the average person of a century ago, let alone a millennium ago — to the extent they don’t have to *think* much about anything.

NY Times, David Brooks, 10 Apr 2025: Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime [gift link] (title in today’s print paper: “We’re Just Not as Good at Thinking Anymore”)

You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.

The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.

More statistics.

This kind of literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. As the retired general Jim Mattis and [his coauthor] Bing West once wrote, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”

Why? Are we back to Jonathan Haidt’s theme?

…these declines started earlier, around 2012, so the main cause is probably screen time. And not just any screen time. Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills. But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.

With more statistics from studies.

Older people have always complained about “kids these days,” but this time we have empirical data to show that the observations are true.

Bottom line, and concluding:

What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.

Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.

Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.

\\\

One more think piece.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 11 Apr 2025: MAGA’s war on empathy exposes misogynist fears, subtitled “Elon Musk and the Christian right call empathy ‘toxic’ and ‘suicidal’ — blame their shared misogyny”

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don’t bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him. The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a “predator” in 2016 to being one of Trump’s loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is “an artificial virtue,” calling empathy “destructive and manipulative.”

“Empathy means never having to say no,” Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen.

(Misogyny being an essential tribal value. Empathy an essential progressive, cosmopolitan value. Again, Lakoff, Greene, and all the others.)

Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk’s crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as “suicidal” and the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Musk is an atheist, but in this attitude, he is increasingly joined by the Christian right, as Julia Carrie Wong documented at the Guardian this week. A growing chorus of evangelical leaders has taken to calling empathy “sinful,” “toxic,” and “satanic.” Right-wing Catholics are going there, too, with Vice President JD Vance rejecting Jesus’s exhortations to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger, drawing a rebuke from the Pope.

It goes on.

\\\

A couple examples of morons today. They seem uneducated; I’m guessing they have not read books, maybe not even the Bible.

JMG, 11 Apr 2025: GOP Rep: “Climate Change Is A Sham Because God Controls The Climate Because He Controls The Sun”

Is religion a mental illness? At least a disability; it interferes with the ability to think and understand the real world.

JMG, 11 Apr 2025: A1 Steak Sauce Seizes Opportunity After Education Secretary Repeatedly Calls Artificial Intelligence “A1”

She thinks AI, for Artificial Intelligence, is pronounced “A-one”, like the steak sauce. And this is U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, once the CEO of WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment. Because Trump always hires the best people.

\\\

If I disappear, this might be why. We’re turning into an authoritarian, theocratic, police state.

JMG, 11 Apr 2025: State Dept Launches “Anti-Christian Bias” Snitch Line

We’ve already seen examples of this. Those who do not think correctly will be deported to banana republic nations, or simply “disappeared.” This used to happen only in other, we thought less-enlightened, nations. Now it’s us. (It’s the re-emergence of base human nature, which will never go away.)

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Politics, Religion | Comments Off

In a Sense, It’s All About Tribal Conformity

Posted on Thursday 10 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Today’s deep thought about religion and conformity;
How US scientists have withdrawn their names from a scientific paper about evolution, for fear of reprisal — one of them coincidentally mentioned in a piece posted yesterday;
Short items about Trump’s lapel pins, how colleges are being forced to rewrite history, how sending education back to the states doesn’t include DEI options, how some Republicans think elections are so inconvenient, Trump’s misunderstanding of trade deficits, how Trump displaces more than he projects, Arthur C. Brooks about challenging DARVO; and Jonathan Chait on how MAGA supporters take Trump’s infallibility as a given.

– – –

Today’s deep thought: religion isn’t about faith; it’s about conformity.

This piece is quite a coincidence, aside from it being politically pertinent.

Washington Post, Mark Johnson, 10 Apr 2025: Fearing paper on evolution might get them deported, scientists withdrew it, subtitled “President Donald Trump’s orders haven’t targeted research involving evolution, but the authors’ unease about publishing reflects uncertainty in the science world.”

The coincidence: this seems to be about the same Michael Wong as the one cited in the piece discussed yesterday, about the inevitable complexity of the universe. The paper referred to in this WaPo piece concerns that idea in the context of biological evolution.

A few days before they were to submit a scientific paper together, an evolutionary biologist in Europe received an unexpected request from two co-authors in the United States.

After much thought, the co-authors said they preferred not to risk publishing at this time. One had just lost a job because of a canceled government grant; the other feared a similar fate if they went ahead with the paper. Although both were legally in the U.S., they worried they might lose their residency if their names appeared on a potentially controversial article.

The subject: evolution.

The political pertinence:

Almost a century after a Tennessee schoolteacher named John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution, the theory proposed by the British naturalist Charles Darwin has become one of the foundational principles of modern science. But the past few months have proved a difficult time for science. The National Institutes of Health has targeted research in many areas, terminating $2.4 billion in grants on projects examining HIV, covid-19, gender identity, racial health disparities and vaccine hesitancy, among other subjects, according to a lawsuit filed last week against the NIH by the American Civil Liberties Union. Layoffs across the nation’s health and science agencies have disrupted research. And universities have scaled back hiring graduate and doctoral students in response to massive cuts in federal funding to their campuses.

Although President Donald Trump’s executive orders have not targeted research involving evolution, the authors’ unease about publishing on the subject reflects the fear and uncertainty now rippling through the science world.

Because anti-intellectualism is in the air. No doubt there are lots of Michael Wongs in the world, but:

The withheld paper described ways in which evolution unfolds in both living and nonliving systems, a subject relevant to the search for life elsewhere in the universe. The authors included measurements and genomic data on different species. An example of evolution in the nonliving world would be the growth of the universe after the Big Bang, as new minerals and elements came into being, the European scientists said.

Which seems to establish the link to the Michael Wong in yesterday’s article.

\\\

Short items.

Boing Boing, Jason Weisberger, 9 Apr 2025: Trump’s new loyalty test: “golden Trump bust lapel pins”

Another cult signifier.

Texas Tribune, via JMG, 10 Apr 2025: Texas Bill Would Force Colleges To Rewrite History

Of course all cultures rewrite history to their own benefit. In this case, I’d guess it’s something like this: white=good, throughout history; everyone else=bad, and should be deported. Their xenophobia is obvious.

Washington Post, Editorial Board, 10 Apr 2025: What happened to sending education ‘back to the states’?, subtitled “The Trump administration’s anti-DEI policies are an attempt to micromanage local schools.”

They’re happy to send education “back to the states” except where it comes to anti-DEI policies, which must be enforced from above.

Media Matters, 9 Apr 2025: Newsmax host says US elections are “a huge liability. It weakens our country in a lot of ways because we’re always thinking about the next election”

Democracy is so inconvenient!

Vox, Andrew Prokop, 9 Apr 2025: The misunderstanding breaking the global economy, subtitled “Trump believes that if the US has a trade deficit with a country, they’re ‘beating’ us. Huh?”

He’s a dolt. He doesn’t understand trade deficits. Many anecdotes on Fb today. (E.g., I buy pizzas from the place around the corner, and they buy nothing from me. Therefore, trade deficit! I should raise the prices on their pizza to encourage myself to make pizza at home?!)

Timothy Snyder on Substack, 10 Apr 2025: Trump’s Psychological Vulnerability

Not projection. Displacement.

All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off.

Long piece worth reading in detail, for now noted briefly.

The Atlantic, Arthur C. Brooks, 10 Apr 2025: A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths, subtitled “If you can recognize their signature move, then forewarned is forearmed.”

The signature move is DARVO, which I’ve posted about before. “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.”

Last one for now.

The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 8 Apr 2025: Trump World Makes the Case Against Trump, subtitled “MAGA supporters are attempting to understand Trump’s catastrophic decision making, while accepting Trump’s infallibility as a given.”

The key here is that Trump’s infallibility is taken as a given, so that whatever crazy things he does *has* to make sense, right, right? This is the essence of cultism.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Lunacy, Politics, Psychology, Science | Comments Off

Daughter of Dispatches from Reality

Posted on Wednesday 9 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Two pieces today: about the complexity of the universe, and the current cosmological crisis.

– – –

Quanta is one of those magazine/websites that, like Big Think and Nautilus and perhaps Noema and no doubt others, cover general concepts in current science rather than specific science news.

Here’s an essay at Quanta that summarizes a growing understanding, since at least the 1990s, that the universe has become more complex automatically, so to speak. We’ve seen this in books by Carroll and Hidalgo and others; complexity, the growth of ‘information,’ apparently in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, does not need explaining; it happens through the evolutionary growth of increasingly complex systems (and the entropy borrowed will be paid back eventually). And we’ve seen this in topics of complexity and emergence.

Quanta Magazine, Philip Ball, 2 Apr 2025: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex, subtitled “A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.”

New suggestion? Let’s see what he says.

A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.

In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function.

Well, isn’t this what Hidalgo said?

This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen and the astrobiologist Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not “complete” in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution — biological or otherwise — introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone. “I’m so glad they’ve done what they’ve done,” said Stuart Kauffman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’ve made these questions legitimate.”

Of course, the hypothesis might very well be ‘new’ in some abstruse sense, perhaps with a different rational, or more data, than others who’ve put forth ideas like this abstractly. The ideas have been around a while.

The long article goes on about Jack Szostak in 2003, Robert Hazen in 2007 and 2021, and so on. A quote from Michael Wong: “Information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge and energy.” Well, Hidalgo said this, too, writing in 2015. But my point isn’t to worry about credit. (There are also namechecks of Paul Davies and Lee Cronin and something called assembly theory.) My point is, as the essay concludes:

But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It’s hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. There are echoes of the early days of thermodynamics, which began with humble questions about how machines work and ended up speaking to the arrow of time, the peculiarities of living matter, and the fate of the universe.

Again my point is that there are lots of smart people around the world studying how the universe works, and discovering nonintuitive things about how it works that counter the naive presumptions of most people. Including the “argument from design” for the existence of God, that someone’s personal incredulity about how something could have come into being must prove the existence of some higher, supernatural intelligence that deliberately set everything up (and answers your prayers). Nonsense; in fact, if credit to a god must be given, then the idea that the universe was initialized with properties that would *automatically* without micro-interventions generate the vast cosmos and all the life and other complexity in it, is surely more impressive that the micro-managing god who moment by moment must be guiding everything.

\\\

And from Big Think.

Big Think, Ethan Siegel, 8 Apr 2025: How has cosmology changed from 2000 to 2025?, subtitled “25 years ago, our concordance picture of cosmology, also known as ΛCDM, came into focus. 25 years later, are we about to break that model?”

I can anticipate some of this. The discoveries of “dark matter” and “dark energy” date from the 1990s or before. The issue now is that different methods of measuring a key cosmological rate are getting different answers. This suggests that perhaps our assumptions of what dark matter and dark energy, or something else, are, must be wrong.

Yes, this is a “problem” in science, but it’s also a thrilling opportunity. Whoever figures this out will win a Nobel Prize, and more importantly go down in history. Scientists are thrilled by problems like this; it means there’s something new to discover. It’s only cynics who thinks that not having all the answers (as the religious think they already do) somehow undermines the project of science.

Key Takeaways
• Back in the late 1990s, evidence began emerging for our Universe being dominated by dark matter and dark energy, with normal matter making up only 5% of the cosmic energy budget. • Then a number of amazing results came out: the Hubble key project, WMAP and Planck data for the CMB, enhanced supernova and large-scale structure surveys, and more. Things looked great, but not everything lined up. • Today, those three types of data sets: supernova data, CMB data, and large-scale structure data, aren’t all mutually compatible. Here’s why cosmology may be ready for a breakthrough.

Longish article with lots of graphics. I’ll indulge myself by quoting quite a bit of it, partly to demonstrate the point made in the above piece.

25 years ago, we were just assembling our modern picture of the Universe. We had:

CMB measurements from COBE, BOOMERanG and Maxima, which indicated that the Universe was flat, or that the total sum of all the different types of energy within it equaled ~100%, with no spatial curvature.

Large-scale structure data from surveys like PSCz and the 2dF galaxy redshift survey, which taught us that there is a large amount of cold mass/matter in the Universe, but only around ~30% of the total energy present.

And supernova data from the High-z supernova search team and the supernova cosmology project, which — unlike matter — would cause the Universe’s expansion to speed up, rather than slow down, over time.

We also had data about neutrinos, showing there were three species and that those species oscillated into one another, indicating their massive nature. However, they couldn’t be the dark matter, as it would be hot, not cold. We knew how much total normal matter was present in the Universe from Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the abundance of the light elements: around 5% of the total, maybe a little more or less, but nowhere near the 30% that large-scale structure showed.

The writer recalls the modern picture of the Universe, as of 25 years ago. Then Hubble Space Telescope measurements came in, which showed that the universe was *expanding*. Then supernova data. Another graphic:

Caption: The fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background were first measured accurately by COBE in the 1990s, then more accurately by WMAP in the 2000s and Planck (above) in the 2010s. This image encodes a huge amount of information about the early Universe, including its composition, age, and history. The fluctuations are only tens to hundreds of microkelvin in magnitude. On large cosmic scales, the error bars are very large, as only a few data points exist, highlighting a large inherent uncertainty.

More data and more graphics. Here’s a key paragraph about how scientists work:

But there’s an important caveat here: as scientists, we cannot assume we know what the end result, or the conclusion, is going to be before we make the critical measurements. We have to perform our analyses honestly and in an unbiased fashion, irrespective of our preconceived prejudices about whatever outcome(s) we might expect or anticipate. Put more generally, if you want to know something about the Universe, you have to ask the Universe questions about itself in a way that will compel it to give up its answers, and then you, the scientist, have to listen to what those answers are and interpret it, as best you can, in the context of everything else we’ve already learned.

One more graphic:

Captioned: The construction of the cosmic distance ladder involves going from our Solar System to the stars to nearby galaxies to distant ones. Each “step” carries along its own uncertainties, especially the steps where the different “rungs” of the ladder connect. However, recent improvements in the SH0ES distance ladder (parallax + Cepheids + type Ia supernovae) have demonstrated how robust its results are.

Final para:

The most exciting aspect of the story is that these are all possibilities, and that there are many others that haven’t even been fully explored at present. We have a hint that something is wrong with our standard picture, and the next step will be acquiring more and better data to help us pin down precisely where our standard picture fails and by how much. With ESA’s Euclid, the NSF’s Vera Rubin Observatory, and NASA’s Nancy Roman Telescope (plus Caltech’s SphereX mission), we’re going to measure baryon acoustic oscillations, and acquire new type Ia supernovae, as never before. Perhaps we’ll gain new insights into refining our standard ΛCDM picture, or perhaps we’ll find out exactly how and where it fails. Either way, noticing these cracks in our consensus picture is potentially a harbinger of a new scientific revolution. The only way we’ll find out is to look, with better tools, techniques, and data than ever before.

My point is that humans are capable of examining the universe objectively, in great detail, to try to understand reality. Which is far more complex than the simple stories people tell themselves to enforce tribal solidarity.

The people who can do this live in an opposite realm from the tribalists who currently run American politics, who have no clue.

Posted in Cosmology, Science | Comments Off

Dan Ariely, MISBELIEF

Posted on Wednesday 9 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things”
(Harper, September 2023, 311pp, including 21pp of acknowledgements, references, and index.)

Here’s the latest book by Dan Ariely, author of one of the earliest books I read about psychological biases and human irrationality, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, published back in 2008 (review here). Since then he’s become a minor celebrity with a TV show, The Irrational, based on his life and that book. (I’ve only seen it a couple times, despite its just finishing its second season; it’s not on at a convenient time.)

So how is this new book different from the older one? Or the many other books about biases and conspiracy theories? Well, while the older book detailed many examples of ‘irrational behavior’, this one focuses on the process of forming false beliefs, which can include conspiracy theories but which Ariely prefers to call “misbeliefs.”

Two things in particular stand out about this book. First, Ariely wrote it in response to people forming misbeliefs about *him,* accusing him of colluding in the Covid pandemic, base on selective editing of dicey videos, and attacking and threatening him online (much as Anthony Fauci was). Second, he describes the process of a person ‘falls’ for a conspiracy theory, or misbelief, in broader detail than other books, with the key point that it often starts out of feelings of stress and uncertainty.

For this book, I’m not going to summarize it in detail, but expand on these points and couple of others.

Introduction: Demonized.
In July 2020, Ariely discovered people were saying crazy things about him online and accusing him of being part of the “Covid-19 fraud” and something called the Agenda 21 plot. None of it was true of course, but posts about this were getting lots of comments. He decided to contact one of the commenters, Sara, who had said she wanted him put on trial. He calls her and she pounds him with questions and accusations. He hangs up. She posts about their conversation, how his denials seemed suspicious — there must be something going on beneath the surface! Already, she’s twisting his words into something that fits her narrative. Author tries posting videos of his own (on Telegram) defending himself, and is attacked, again by people twisting his words. He gets more attacks, even death threats.

Why him? He realizes that the “evidence” against him came from a video of a talk he gave in 2017 in which he jokingly suggested (in the manner of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”) ways to decrease the population in order to reduce demands on health care. His detractors took his comments out of context to imply evil intentions. Another clip was edited to imply he said something he didn’t. And so on. Who was doing this? Not someone evil; just people who thought they were exposing a fraud. They weren’t “doing their own research,” they were watching heavily edited videos. But was there a deeper explanation? Thus he wrote this book.

Rest of the book.
He develops a framework for how people arrive at misbeliefs, what he calls a ‘funnel’ of misbeliefs, with four basic parts:

1, Emotional elements
2, Cognitive elements
3, Personality elements
4, Social elements

The cognitive elements are the familiar ones from other books: the psychological biases and errors of perception, and especially motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.

The emotional elements are what struck me: how, according to Ariely, the trip down the tunnel is triggered by stress and uncertainty — as for example what happened when the pandemic broke out — which in turn creates a need to identify a villain, as a way to regain control, and to reduce a complex, ambiguous world into a simple, comforting story. (Thus, Anthony Fauci, for many; the author, for a few.) Then the cognitive elements kick in — motivated thinking and so on — to interpret all evidence as against the chosen villain.

Certain personality elements are more prone to this kind of thinking. Those prone to misremembering, those who see patterns where none exist, those who over-trust their intuitions.

And then the social elements are what have come up in a couple other recently read books. Those who go down this tunnel may be ostracized by family and friends, but — via social media! — they quickly find a new community to provide a sense of belonging, one that will reinforce their beliefs, and create a loyalty to the group. Loyalty is ‘proved’ by pushing beliefs to the absurd. And fear of losing status and those new relationships makes it hard for people to leave.

Author concludes the book that he’s not confident that things will get better. Trust is necessary for society to run, e.g. belief in money [[ one of Harari’s key points ]], trust in doctors, car mechanics, police. What would happen should all that trust be lost? Buy guns.

Still, he ponders, the deniers are still out there. Over the past 300 years, humanity has gotten much closer to superman, by creating an envelope of technology around us. So we’re taxing our cognitive systems to a greater degree than humans have ever done before. [[ This is essentially Nichols’ key claim. ]] Perhaps we need to invent technologies to help us counteract our mental limitations — like all those safety functions in our card. And so — despite everything — the author is optimistic about the future.

Posted in Book Notes, Human Nature, Psychology | Comments Off

Is There a Big Picture to Make Sense of All This?

Posted on Tuesday 8 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Adam Lee on our current age of “stupidity” and whether or not the stupid can bring down society;
The commentariat: Catherine Rampell on the naked Trump; Robert Reich on Trump’s “national emergencies”; Paul Krugman on Trump’s war on American greatness;
Short items: JD Vance and Chinese “peasants”; censoring black history; Elon Musk calls out Peter Navarro; Vance perpetuates a discredited claim about Social Security fraud; Trump defies a law meant to rein in his first-term abuses; and how Republicans want to fool you into thinking tax cuts are free.

– – –

Here’s a piece that might provide one. A big picture.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 7 Apr 2025: The coming dark age of stupidity, subtitled “The future is not so bright.”

He begins by setting the stage.

The 2024 election damaged America in ways that will reverberate for generations to come. While every American will feel the pain, the targeting of scientists and intellectuals points in a direction reminiscent of China’s Cultural Revolution — a self-inflicted lobotomy on a national scale.

Elon Musk and his gang of frattish techbros are purging federal employees on a massive scale, with all the care and caution of a ketamine addict waving a chainsaw over his head. They’re decimating the specialists who safeguard us and keep society running smoothly, from park rangers to meteorologists to cancer researchers to public health experts, with no concern for the damage they inflict. If anything, they’ve shown a sadistic glee in firing people who’ve devoted their lives to public service.

Trump’s administration is choking off federal funding for science, arbitrarily banning whole categories of research, and withholding grants across the board to punish universities that don’t bow to his whims.

And so on. ICE, an anti-vaccine crackpot, and now an economic war against the world.

I use the term “stupidity” advisedly. It’s the only word that adequately captures the scope of what’s happening in America.

Not ignorance, he decides; not poor judgment.

The mindset I’m referring to is more malicious than either of these. It encompasses both ignorance and poor judgment, but also an aggressive disdain for the very concept of expertise. It’s a mindset which refuses to admit that some people can know more than others. It refuses to admit that reason and evidence should guide our decisions, or that there are facts which don’t bend to political ideology.

Here we are back to conservative, tribal ideology.

Instead, this mindset holds that inconvenient facts can be dismissed by sheer force of will. It holds that those who have the power can do as they like, have no need to study the problem or consult with anyone, and will never have to worry about the consequences. “Stupidity” is the term that best connotes this arrogant and willful rejection of reality.

This poses real questions about the survival of the human race. It seems less and less likely that we can achieve a global culture that will reach out to the stars, as much of science fiction has assumed will happen eventually.

All this poses the question: Has intelligence become a suboptimal survival strategy? Are we entering a new dark age where smart people will be persecuted and hunted?

No; intelligence still pays dividends.

The good news, such as it is, is that the economy runs on science and technology, and that’s not going to change. We’re not going back to a society based on rural agrarian labor and animal husbandry, or on people toiling in coal mines and sweatshops. Those eras are gone for good. No president can undo that, any more than he can give orders to the tide.

Then several examples of what may seem to be merely looking on the bright side. But if I think about it, I’m pretty sure this is where I end up. The “stupid” can hurt themselves, but they can’t bring down all of society.

This means that economic rewards will still accrue to those who value knowledge, education, and the scientific method. In fact, the more that stupidity dominates our politics, the greater the advantages will be for those who choose a better path.

On the other hand “the foolish will feel the full weight of their folly.” Example, and conclusion:

When education budgets are slashed, libraries are hobbled by book bans, and teachers are barred from teaching American history, science, and other ideologically inconvenient subjects, the result will be an education system that’s scarcely better than no education at all. It will leave its graduates totally unequipped to compete in a modern economy. Those who vote for this degraded system and send their kids through it are dooming them to a hardscrabble future. Meanwhile, people who still value education enough to seek it out will have a massive advantage when competing for high-paying jobs.

Obviously, this strategy won’t shield us from every danger. When society makes awful decisions, we all pay a collective price. No single person can turn back that tide. But no matter how chaotic the world becomes, we have the power to make choices about how to respond. For as long as stupidity reigns supreme, it’s even more crucial to make the best choices possible for you.

The commentariat:

Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 8 Apr 2025: Who will tell Trump he’s naked?, subtitled “The president’s advisers are falling over themselves trying to excuse tariffmageddon.”

Who will tell the emperor he’s buck naked? Not his Cabinet. Not his donors or corporate executives. And certainly not Congress.

After President Donald Trump launched his multifront trade war — leading to one of the worst market massacres since World War II — his closest confidants and aides have been unwilling to call him out or rein him in.

Worse, some have egged him on.

During media appearances, every Trump underling agreed that his “Liberation Day” rollout was brilliant — even as they offered contradictory stories about the supposed purpose of the tariffs or the administration’s plan.

On Sunday, economic adviser Kevin Hassett said the tariffs were a temporary negotiating ploy, to be lifted as soon as countries acceded to Trump’s (unspecified) demands. “More than 50 countries have reached out to the president to begin a negotiation,” he said. On another network, at virtually the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested the tariffs would be permanent, because Trump needs them to revive U.S. manufacturing.

She goes on, with different stories from Peter Navarro (him again!), Brooke Rollins, and Scott Bessent.

Emboldened by the sycophants and cowards who refuse to speak the truth, Trump insists Americans should “hang tough,” swallow his “medicine” and stoically endure the pain he is inflicting. But calls for collective sacrifice ring hollow when voiced by a guy who went golfing as the economy melted down.

On this last point.

Robert Reich, 7 Apr 2025: The real reason we’re in a national emergency, subtitled “Trump is creating national emergencies to gain more power. In the process, he’s subjecting millions to real harm.”

It’s hard to remember that only 10 weeks ago, the American economy was quite good, our foreign relations were on the whole positive, we were on the way to dealing with climate change with subsidies for wind and solar energy, and we still lived in a democracy.

Today, all that is disappearing. The economy is in acute danger, our relationships with traditional allies are collapsing, we’re subsidizing fossil fuel polluters, and we’re turning into a dictatorship.

This has happened in part because of Trump’s continuing creation of fake national emergencies.

[ … ]

All told, since taking office on January 20, 2025, Trump has declared six national emergencies, including a “National Energy Emergency” and an emergency declaration against Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

He has also in effect declared an emergency to justify his wholesale leveling of significant portions of the federal government and civil service and his virulent attacks on the pillars of civil society — our universities, the media, science, law, and the arts.

And he’s terminating government agencies, like a portion of FEMA, that would mitigate real disasters.

\\\

Paul Krugman, 8 Apr 2025: Attack of the Quack-Industrial Complex, subtitled “Another front in the war on American greatness”

Another litany of the damage the Trump and his administration are doing.

By now it’s obvious to anyone willing to see — which many people still aren’t — that Donald Trump is, in practice, waging war against American greatness. And the attack is taking place on multiple fronts.

For the past few days everyone has understandably been focused on tariffs and the destruction of the world trading system. But in the long run, and maybe much sooner than that, the dire impacts of tariffs may be matched by the havoc Trumpism is wreaking in other areas.

DOGE and SSA. RFK Jr.

We don’t know how many Americans will die prematurely because public health is now being run by a man who rejects medical science, but it’s likely that the number will eventually run into the millions. As the chart at the top of this post shows, America had substantially lower life expectancy than other advanced countries even before Covid, and the gap widened when Republican hostility to vaccines led many Americans to refuse Covid shots.

With other examples. Then:

Why is this happening? Is it about anti-science ideology, or is it about greed?

Yes.

Two months ago I wrote about how the partisan divide had become a divide between people who focus on facts and reason, on one side, and those who prefer to rely on feelings, on the other. At that point layoffs of scientists were just getting started, but I predicted that

the current purge of language will eventually turn into a purge of people, with the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.

Alas, I was right.

There’s more. Medical snake oil; Dr. Oz; cod liver oil. Concluding:

I’d like to offer some reassurance that we will eventually recover from this self-inflicted calamity. But I can’t. Even if research funding is restored, even if NIH and other agencies try to rebuild, U.S. science will have suffered huge long-term damage. So will the world trading system, which will never be the same even if the Trump tariffs are reversed, and the effectiveness of the federal bureaucracy, which will be impaired for many years even if DOGE’s depredations stop.

So much wreckage, achieved in so little time.

\\\

Short items.

NY Times, 8 Apr 2025: China Criticizes JD Vance for Calling Its People ‘Peasants’, subtitled “A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry denounced the vice president’s comments as ‘ignorant and impolite.'” (via JMG)

Not racism or xenophobia, I think, so much as ignorance and arrogance.

Salon, Tatyana Tandanpolie, 8 Apr 2025: “It’s sickening”: Trump order censoring Black history displays a “fundamental misunderstanding”, subtitled “‘You can’t make America great again if you don’t acknowledge all the things that America is'”

This, on the other hand, *is* racism.

Even Elon Musk calls out that Trump advisor who cites a fake expert and inspired Trump’s tariffs.

Mediaite, 8 Apr 2025: Elon Musk Escalates Feud With Trump Adviser Peter Navarro in Scorched Earth Rant: ‘Dumber Than a Sack of Bricks’

Washington Post, 8 Apr 2025: Vance’s whopper on alleged Social Security fraud, subtitled “The vice president falsely claims that 40 percent of calls to a retirement program involve fraud.”

No, it was this: “Approximately 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information.” When Vance’s original claim was debunked, he kept repeating it, again and again. Can he not tell the difference? Or is the claim simply an excuse to cut Social Security? Is that why they’re so obsessed with fraud, everywhere and in every direction? Or is it standard conservative thinking that most people are bad? Provisional conclusion: these false claims of fraud are made as excuses to cut programs Trump and MAGA don’t like.

Washington Post, 8 Apr 2025: Trump is openly defying a law created to rein in his first-term abuses, subtitled “Withholding congressional funding led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Now the White House won’t post their spending moves.”

Of course he is.

LA Times, Thomas Kahn, 7 Apr 2025: Republicans want to fool you into thinking a massive tax cut has zero costs

This is why the wealthy contribute to Republicans.

Music. Listening to Sibelius #2. It’s very nice… but I still think the final movement is overwrought. I’ll find a version on YouTube to link tomorrow.

Posted in authoritarianism, Conservative Resistance, Politics | Comments Off

How Trump and MAGA illustrate Fundamental Principles

Posted on Monday 7 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

How my posts about current politics, including Trump and Musk, are about illustrating fundamental principles;
Trump simply doesn’t understand trade;
David Brooks on how conservatives have changed;
A Christian law-maker who thinks “critical thinking” includes teaching about God;
Short items about cherry-picking the Bible to justify tariffs; how an expert on tariffs claims Trump got his research all wrong; how DOGE has defunded a program to boost American manufacturing; how Trump channels Lee Iacocca; and how a MAGA prophetess claims everything bad is because of Satan.
Music: Sibelius #1

– – –

Virtually all of the items I post here are meant to illustrate some of the fundamental principles, or provisional conclusions, that I’ve developed over the past decade. And one of the most fundamental is this idea of a range of human perception and understanding: that some people simply aren’t very bright and/or cling to a tribal mindset, while other people can take long-term consequences into account, and appreciate a broader cosmopolitan or species perspective, and/or are smart enough to perceive the world in other than the black and white terms and/or short-term thinking. And how this has consequences as explored in science fiction, because short-term, tribal, dim-witted thinking will doom the species, as problems like climate change occur that cannot be solved without global cooperation. The oligarchs will milk the system, denying or ignoring long-term consequences, as long as they think they can get away with it until the world burns (after they die), perhaps literally. Their followers will repeat their religious reassurances back and forth amongst themselves, because that’s what their ancestors have always done, and they survived! Humans are not good at understanding change, or perceiving long-term consequences.

So then. Trump simply is not very bright. But he possesses lots of “emotional intelligence,” which is a nice way of saying he’s a brilliant con man who has convinced many people (who are style-oligarch or style-not-very-educated-or-worldly themselves) that they should believe everything he says.

(I’ll note that, ironically, Trump claims his tariffs, despite their short-term pain, will lead to long-term gains. But it’s obvious in so many ways that he has no idea what he’s talking about.)

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 7 Apr 2025: Trump’s tariffs are the ultimate MAGA loyalty test, subtitled “Self-preservation may start to look a little different to Republicans if the country is mired in a recession”

Trump simply doesn’t understand trade. Republicans used to believe in free trade — with no tariffs without very good reasons — because done rightly trade is a win-win situation. Trump doesn’t believe in that; to him, life is a zero-sum game (as in sports): for someone to win, the other(s) must lose.

Parton:

On Friday, I wrote about President Trump’s motivation for this daft tariff scheme. It has almost nothing to do with trade, which he doesn’t understand. He’s running a protection racket, shaking down other countries (as well as universities, law firms and corporations) to force them to do his bidding. If you want more proof of that, listen to him on Sunday night talking about holding up Europe for “a lot of money on a yearly basis but also for past.”

…

His belief that other nations have been “ripping off” America for decades and that global leaders are laughing at us is sincere. He’s been pounding that drum for 40 years. But he’s wrong. Of course, the world has not been ripping “us” off or laughing at “us.” America is the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth and has been since at least the turn of the 20th century. We created the rules under which the global economy operates, the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency and we are the world’s only military superpower.

We have problems, naturally, not the least of which is the massive wealth inequality that distorts our economy, our culture and our politics so much that we are now perilously close to full-on oligarchy. But to characterize America as a poor, downtrodden nation exploited by the rest of the world is fantasy.

And she quotes The Economist:

IF YOU failed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.

So the real question is: how did a moron like Trump get elected president? Well, I’ve collected evidence, in the form of links and quotes on this blog, about that too. But I’ll refrain from summarizing that at the moment.

\\\

At the same time, there are social trends. As explored in a couple books I’ve posted about here recently, many people think only as their community does.

The Atlantic, David Brooks, 7 Apr 2025: I Should Have Seen This Coming

Subtitle: “When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.”

A typically-long Atlantic piece. Brooks is a conservative idealist (not a MAGA folk) and resents the loss of what used to be conservative principles. I’ll quote a bit.

If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any institution or arrangement that might check the strongman’s power. The rule of law, domestic or international, restrains power, so it must be eviscerated. Inspectors general, judge advocate general officers, oversight mechanisms, and watchdog agencies are a potential restraint on power, so they must be fired or neutered. The truth itself is a restraint on power, so it must be abandoned. Lying becomes the language of the state.

This, of course, is pure strong-man, authoritarian, tribal thinking. It’s the antithesis of democracy, or the fundamental idea that America was built on the proposition that “all men are created equal” which though not literally true, and not even metaphorically true at the time (women and blacks), has grown into the idea that “all people are equal before the law.”

Long piece which I have not read entirely, but will try to capture a bit more.

The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.

There was a time when it was possible to respect conservatives, intellectually. For the vast majority of them, that time is long past.

\\\

Here’s an example of clinging to the tribal mindset, in denial of what humanity has learned about the real world.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 7 Apr 2025: Minnesota lawmaker’s bill to “advance critical thinking” actually pushes Christian mythology, subtitled “State Senator Glenn Gruenhagen wants schools to teach disease as divine punishment”

This is another example of using words to mean the opposite of what they actually mean. (As in “Christian Scientist.”) Mehta quotes the text of the bill, in two parts:

To advance critical thinking skills in history and science, a school district must provide instruction to students in grades 9 to 12 exploring the contrast between the scientific facts on how sickness, disease, pain, suffering, and death relate to the existence of complex living organisms…

… and how sickness, disease, pain, suffering, and death are a consequence imposed by the Creator of complex living organisms.

And there’s a running sub-theme here: How Christians (in particular) think their religion is privileged, and/or do not understand the establishment clause. They are either dim, simply not understanding these things, or arrogant, in thinking they can get away with ignoring that clause.

The idea that diseases were imposed by gods was abandoned centuries ago. Because scientists explored the real world and discovered the actual, biological, causes of diseases. This Minnesota lawmaker is expressing deep superstition.

Shorter items.

People for the American Way, Kyle Mantyla, 3 Apr 2025: Tim Barton Attempts To Make The Biblical Case For Trump’s Tariffs. Comment: because you can justify *anything* by cherry-picking the Bible.
NY Times, guest essay by Brent Neiman, 7 Apr 2025: The Trump White House Cited My Research to Justify Tariffs. It Got It All Wrong. Comment: the Trump administration does not do expertise.
More Keystone Kops behavior: Wired, 2 Apr 2025: Trump and DOGE Defund Program That Boosted American Manufacturing for Decades, subtitled “President Donald Trump says taxing imports will strengthen domestic manufacturing. Hours before announcing new tariffs, his administration cut support for centers that help US firms do just that.”
Apparently Trump channeled Lee Iacocca, dead these 25 years, in one of his speeches. Washington Post, opinion by Karen Tumulty, 7 Apr 2025: How Trump’s economic thinking got stuck in the 1980s, subtitled “It goes back to Chrysler Corp. CEO Lee Iacocca.”
Primitive thinking. JMG, 7 Apr 2025: Eric Trump’s MAGA Prophetess: God Told Me Satan Will Tank Stock Markets To “Make Our President Look Bad” Comment: anything bad can be blamed on Satan.

\\\

Sibelius, Symphony #1

This is one of my favorite symphonies of all time, possibly because I first heard it in a particular circumstance that I now can’t remember. It’s a classical sort of symphony, in the standard four movements. In contrast, I’ve never warmed to all the other Sibelius symphonies, a couple of which strike me as bombastic. What I love here is the opening phrases, on a clarinet; several magical moments that remind me of Mahler; and the final phrases of the first and last movements — those soft “plump plumps” on the violins which you won’t hear if your sound isn’t turned up.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Lunacy, Music, Religion | Comments Off

Viewpoint Diversity and Consensus

Musk, History, Science, Education

Perhaps Humanity Has Hit a Conceptual Ceiling

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

We’re Becoming an Authoritarian, Theocratic, Police State

In a Sense, It’s All About Tribal Conformity

Daughter of Dispatches from Reality

Dan Ariely, MISBELIEF

Is There a Big Picture to Make Sense of All This?

How Trump and MAGA illustrate Fundamental Principles

Mark R. Kelly

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