MAGA Delusions About Health

Posted on Tuesday 14 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Just finished a book write-up, so a relatively short post today about current events.

  • MAGA delusions about health;
  • How Republican policies will make things worse, and how they don’t realize this.

If it’s Tuesday, there’s a Science Section of the NY Times. Here’s the lead piece today. As about so many other things, many people (but in particular conservatives and MAGAfolk) live with the fantasy that the past was somehow better than the present. It’s selective memory and the glow of childhood, perhaps. It doesn’t stand up to evidence. Everyone smoked in the old days — my parents chain-smoked throughout my childhood. And even doctors smoked, in TV commercials — see here. People forget.

NY Times, Gina Kolata, 13 Jan 2025: Have Americans Ever Really Been Healthy?, subtitled “Medical historians say that the phrase ‘Make America Healthy Again’ obscures a past during which this country’s people ate, smoked and drank things that mostly left them unwell.” [gift link]
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Zack Beauchamp, THE REACTIONARY SPIRIT

Posted on Tuesday 14 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How American’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World”
(PublicAffairs, July 2024, 262pp including 16pp of acknowledgements, selected bibliography, and index.)

Here’s another recent book, which I bought mainly because I’ve seen the author’s name quite a number of times in recent years attached to articles I found astute enough to quote here. And, it addresses a key question that I have ideas about but no firm conclusion: what does the apparent retreat in America and other nations from democracy and toward authoritarianism mean? Continue reading →

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Human Nature and Existential Crises

Posted on Monday 13 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Yesterday I had an item and some comments about how the inability of many people to recognize existential dangers like climate change may in fact doom the species. (And explain the Fermi Paradox.) Too many people live in fantasy cultural and religious bubbles, focused on near-term thinking and resistant to understanding evidence of the world, and how the world is changing. Gradually, they may die out, leaving the world to those who *can* understand and adjust accordingly. Those will be the progressives and ‘globalists’ that the conservatives despise. Or, the conservatives will resist taking any action against such threats, turning every try into petty partisan bickering, and bring all of us down with them.

Salon, Brian Karem, 13 Jan 2025: The LA conflagration: It is now painfully clear what matters, subtitled “The wildfires in Los Angeles are a harbinger of our doom — yet ultimately leave me with hope”

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The California Fires and What They Reveal

Posted on Sunday 12 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The despicable Donald Trump ignorantly criticizes California politicians, rather than offering any sympathy for the victims of the recent fires;
  • How well-intentioned policies from decades ago are partly responsible for the fires;
  • How humans might be doomed by their own human nature;
  • Another Mel Gibson screed;
  • And my take on the real reason behind why so many people want to think evolution, or climate change, is false.
– – –

What a despicable person.

NY Times, 12 Jan 2025: Trump Calls Officials Handling Los Angeles Wildfires ‘Incompetent’

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Clearly, We’re Seeing an Infestation of Alien Mind Parasites

Posted on Saturday 11 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

This infestation is growing. The symptoms include paranoia, megalomania, delusions, and the perception of demons and/or global conspirators around every corner. The interpretation of extraordinary events (that have rational causes that they do not believe in), but rather see as evidence of a paranoid, fantastical, irrational worldview.

Salon, Matthew Rozsa, 11 Jan 2025: Los Angeles wildfires have become perfect fuel for Trump and climate denial, subtitled “Misinformation is spreading rapidly as experts say climate change is the likely accelerant for California’s crisis”

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Bill Adair, BEYOND THE BIG LIE

Posted on Saturday 11 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy”
(Atria, Oct 2024, xxiii + 273pp, including 55pp of acknowledgements, sources, notes, and index.)

This is a recent book, just published in October, on a very timely subject. The author, I didn’t realize when I bought the book, created the PoliFact website, already my personal go-to source for fact-checking. The second phrase in the subtitle is what drew me in; do Republicans really lie more (though that’s certainly my impression), and if so, *why* do they lie more? Continue reading →

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Conservative Reactions to the Los Angeles Fires

Posted on Friday 10 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

The past few days have been fodder for examples of (conservative) lies, evasions, and misrepresentations, as they react to the fires in Southern California.

  • Conservatives blame the LA fires on the vast world-wide conspiracy theories they are obsessed with;
  • Two examples from Facebook about naive half-baked ideas about how the fires were a conspiracy, or could have been avoided;
  • NYT on how the intensity of these fires is actually (of course) the result of climate change, as well as bad urban planning decades ago;
  • Salon’s Amanda Marcotte on Fox News’ incoherent spin on the California fires;
  • Short items about how Trump lies, and the upside-down thinking of Newsmax;
  • And a quote from Bertrand Russell.
– – –

 

We should have seen this one coming. Not the fires —  the conservative reactions. Especially about the one thing they seem most afraid of.

Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 9 Jan 2025: Elon Musk Endorses Alex Jones’ Claim That the Los Angeles Fires Were Set Intentionally, subtitled “Big if true.”

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So Predictable

Posted on Thursday 9 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trumps lies, or evades, or misrepresents;
  • Conservatives blame everyone they don’t like for the California wildfires;
  • Anita Bryant dies; she was an outlier in her time, but now typical of MAGA;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the California fires;
  • How Jimmy Carter lost evangelical support for his anti-racism and support of gays;
  • How perhaps some US states should join Canada.
– – –

CNN, 9 Jan 2025: Fact check: As wildfires rage, Trump lashes out with false claims about FEMA and California water policy

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A New Jack Smith Rule

Posted on Wednesday 8 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The southern California wildfires, and Will Rogers Ranch;
  • How conservatives blame people they don’t like for everything;
  • Perhaps I should create a new “Jack Smith” rule to dismiss claims by conservatives, since they always seem to be wrong;
  • Lagniappes about Trump, the Mercator Projection of the globe, and his admiration for Putin.

News today is dominated by the wildfires in the Los Angeles area, beginning with the one that broke out yesterday in Pacific Palisades, an area of canyons right along the coast and between Santa Monica and Malibu. That’s not too far from where my partner’s son and his wife live in West L.A., so we texted them to ask their status. They weren’t in an evacuation zone, but they evacuated anyway, driving some 45 miles to Brea, east of L.A., to stay at his mother’s place. We watched CNN news about the fires last night, and again this morning.

Having lived both in So- and NoCal all my life, I’m familiar with the perpetual threat of big fires. I’ve never been near enough to be threatened by one. But I remember, vaguely, the 1961 Bel Air fire, partly through my father’s photos, a couple of which are posted on this page of my family history.

I have found a place that has burned down in the Palisades fire that we knew in particular, because we took a hike there in our December 2023 trip to LA to see partner’s son and wife — via this — the Will Rogers Ranch. I mentioned the hike in my post about that trip. The WRR folks have already posted before and after pics of the ranch house.

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Conservative Reality, and Reality

Posted on Tuesday 7 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The state of the American economy, vs. conservative dystopian fantasies;
  • How conservatives whitewash the events of January 6th, 2021;
  • How Meta is obeying in advance by removing fact-checkers, and wondering why conservatives object to fact-checkers (where the answer is obvious);
  • How the conservative notion of serving a higher cause excuses, in their minds, blatant lying, as with Mike Johnson’s recitation of a fake “Jefferson prayer”.
– – –

 

The question keeps coming up, does it matter if human perceptions have little do with reality? Is there a problem if humans live by made-up stories even when they’re obviously untrue? At what point does this behavior so collide with reality that it will cause real harm?

First of all, an example, yet again, of how the economy that Biden is leaving behind is not as bad as most conservative voters think. They are either being disingenuous, or short-sighted. From yesterday’s print edition.

NY Times, news analysis by Peter Baker, 5 Jan 2025: Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story., subtitled “President Biden is bequeathing his successor a nation that by many measures is in good shape, even if voters remain unconvinced.” [gift link]

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