And Now We Have Linus

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Education, science fiction | Comments Off on Viewpoint Diversity and Consensus

Musk, History, Science, Education

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

NY Times, Adam Grant, 13 Apr 2025: America Is Learning the Wrong Lesson From Elon Musk’s Success
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Posted in conservatives, History, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on Musk, History, Science, Education

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.

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

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

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

Andrew Sullivan on Substack, yesterday (via Carl Freedman)
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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.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on We’re Becoming an Authoritarian, Theocratic, Police State

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.

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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.”

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Lunacy, Politics, Psychology, Science | Comments Off on In a Sense, It’s All About Tribal Conformity

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.

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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.

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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? Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Human Nature, Psychology | Comments Off on Dan Ariely, MISBELIEF

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.
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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.
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