Lies Absurd, and Telling

Posted on Tuesday 10 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The latest absurd Republican lie is about cat-eating Haitians, and they don’t care whether it’s true or not, they know it will rile up their base;
  • A Republican suggests that the Great Depression was planned;
  • An article that quotes Republican politicians about Trump, then and now, reveals cognitive dissonance.

Today’s Republican lie is surely one of the most absurd yet.

Vox, Ian Millhiser, 9 Sep 2024: JD Vance’s racist, cat-eating conspiracy theory, explained as best we can, subtitled “Apparently, when you are a Republican political candidate you can say literally anything.”

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About Bureaucracy and the Real World

Posted on Monday 9 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How bureaucracy is evidence of the complexity of the real world, and the only way to solve global problems;
  • Notes from the fringe: How Tennessee prevents people voting; Trump’s niece on Trump’s dementia; USA Today about covering Trump’s dementia; Candace Owens is preoccupied with homosexuals; and Anderson Cooper challenges Trump’s claims.

Salon, Matthew Rozsa, 6 Sep 2024: Bureaucracy is despised for inefficiency and waste. But it might just save us from climate change, subtitled “Despite attacks on bureaucracies, experts agree such organizations are more important than ever”

My take, before reading this: If you have no idea what all those people are doing, it’s easy to think they’re inefficient and wasting their time and our money. But the real world is always more complex than most people think. And the inevitability of bureaucracies is the evidence.

Government bureaucrats are often depicted as wasteful and inefficient bleeding hearts with secret, sinister and sometimes “socialist” agendas. Former president Ronald Reagan famously denounced bureaucrats throughout his political career — and, four decades later, Donald Trump and his acolytes did so in their own way by decrying a supposed “Deep State.”

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How Beliefs Prevail over Evidence and Reality

Posted on Sunday 8 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Democrats have fixed the economy, but many people don’t “believe” it;
  • CBS News’ Ted Koppel visits a Wisconsin State Fair;
  • The crowd cheers Trump’s latest word salad;
  • How conservatives actually hate American values;
  • And how the mainstream press in America is failing — by not calling out Trump.

Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria [whose book I quite liked], 6 Sep 2024: Opinion | Democrats have fixed the economy. But that won’t be enough to defeat populism., subtitled “Without addressing immigration, Trump-style populism is likely here to stay.”

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Cheating and Lying

Posted on Saturday 7 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

To me, all of these undermine the Conservative project as a legitimate intellectual discourse.

  • How new local news sources are not what they appear to be; Epoch Times; my rule of thumb about reliable news sources;
  • How the Heritage Foundation is spreading deceptive videos;
  • How YouTubers are easy to dupe;
  • How right-wing social media stars are unwitting mouthpieces of Russian propaganda;
  • How Trump uses the Gish Gallop;
  • How Republicans are fine with election intimidation, in Florida.

If there are no rational arguments for your side of a political issue, what do you do? And if you did have rational arguments, why would you do these things? (Let me guess: because the people don’t realize what danger they’re in, and must be roused into action by a little exaggeration… by the people who Know Better.)

The first item two days ago in this post would be our first example.

Then this:

NY Times, 4 Sep 2024: Iran Emerges as a Top Disinformation Threat in U.S. Presidential Race, subtitled “With a flurry of hacks and fake websites, Iran has intensified its efforts to discredit American democracy and possibly tip the race against former President Donald Trump.”

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Plot Armor

Posted on Friday 6 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Beginning with this unusual topic. Not about Trump per se; more a general principle of story-telling. And faith.

OnlySky, Dale McGowan, 6 Sep 2024: For the Trump faithful, it comes down to plot armor, subtitled “It’s no surprise that Trump benefits from a feature you’ve seen on bad television.”

Did a brief skim; this seems to be related to the kind of plot device on TV where you know the heroes will survive because they have to be back for next week’s episode.

The writer begins by recalling comments from way back in 2004 from a Bush aide who contrasted the “reality-based community” with their own take: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

It was a simpler time. We thought we had reached our presidential nadir. The reaction from those of us in the reality-based community (RBC) to the statement by the aide—now believed to have been Karl Rove—was utter disbelief that such gibberish could emanate from the White House.

Like I said, a simpler time.

Then came Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and everything since.  Continue reading →

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Alternative Political Realities

Posted on Thursday 5 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I continue to find examples like these fascinating. I know they are extreme examples, and not representative of conservatives in general. But that these claims and attitudes still exist, and are widely circulated, suggests to me that, in the big picture, that while humans like to think they have “evolved,” many have not, and retain tribalistic thinking. And how this is entirely understandable.

  • Republican false theories abut immigrant voting;
  • Musicians who’ve demanded that Trump stop using their songs;
  • In an alternative world, JD Vance is popular;
  • Brief items about milkshakes, not the time to talk about gun control, why women shouldn’t be in government, scandal machine Mark Robinson, accusations of “communist” and “Marxist” by people who don’t know what those words mean, Moms for Liberty, and a “terrible” film about Ronald Reagan;
  • How Trump talks constantly about “the likes of which nobody has ever seen”

NY Times, Alexandra Berzon, 5 Sep 2024: Republicans Seize on False Theories About Immigrant Voting, subtitled “Activists, party lawyers and state officials are mobilizing behind a crackdown on a supposed scourge of noncitizens’ casting ballots. Voting rights advocates say the effort is spreading misinformation.”

One woman wants to scrutinize the voting rolls of people with “ethnic names.”

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Essays by Harari and Chiang

Posted on Wednesday 4 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Both about technology, about AI.

The Sapiens author has a new book out next week: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. This is an excerpt.

NY Times, Yuval Noah Harari, 4 Sep 2024: Yuval Noah Harari: What Happens When the Bots Compete for Your Love? [gift link]

As always, Harari does 30,000-foot overviews really well. The excerpt begins:

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Borders and the Fringe

Posted on Tuesday 3 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A speculation by Adam Lee about what will happen when we give up national borders;
  • Items from the fringe about Trump’s three rules; Musk’s preference for high status males; Christian nonsense about evolution; simply lying about the Arlington story; and Musk’s infantile response to Robert Reich’s criticism.

Today’s thought piece.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 3 Sep 2024: When we abolished borders, subtitled “After a while, it was hard to remember why we’d drawn the lines to begin with.”

Offhand, I’d say borders, especially between nations, were created and became established as those nations grew from town to cities and eventually nations derived from different ‘tribes’ started bumping into one another. And so clear boundaries were necessary to establish territory. Similarly, formal passports were only established in 1920.

Let’s see what Adam Lee says. It quickly becomes clear (though I’m only quoting excerpts) that this is a fictional scenario.

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Cory Doctorow on Marshmallow Longtermism

Posted on Monday 2 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I read Cory Doctorow’s latest column for Locus Magazine last week, when I browsed through my advance PDF copy of the September issue. It’s a fascinating piece that considers the difference between the political left and the political right in terms of a classic experiment in child psychology. The column has now been posted on the Locus website, so I can link to it, and discuss it.

(photo copyright Julia Galdo & Cody Cloud)

Locus Magazine, Cory Doctorow, September issue, posted 2 Sep 2024: Cory Doctorow: Marshmallow Longtermism

The classic experience is the Stanford marshmallow experiment, and is about delayed gratification.

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Lukianoff & Haidt, THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND

Posted on Sunday 1 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a book that was published six years ago this month, and which I read one year ago last month.

Subtitle: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”

(Penguin Press, Sept. 2018, 338pp, including 70p of acknowledgements, appendices, notes, references, and index.)

In a structure similar to Robert Reich’s book just discussed, this one identifies a problem, explores how we got here, then provides suggested correctives.

By “coddling” the authors mean that Americans, students in particular, are over-protected. The problem, especially on college campuses, consists of three Great Untruths. These are discussed in the first three chapters.

1, The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker;

2, The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings;

3, The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People.

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