Nicholas Humphrey, LEAPS OF FAITH

Posted on Saturday 24 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitle: “Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation”

(Basic Books, Jan. 1996, 244pp, including 20pp notes and index)
(Chatto & Windus, 1995, as Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief)

Here’s a book I read when it came out, back in 1996 — I think I was intrigued by the “search for supernatural consolation” part, which appealed to my impression that religion is more about psychological need that consideration of what is actually true — and picked up again last week to reconsider in light my current ideas of how basic human nature is reacting to the modern world, an environment so different from the one our minds evolved in.

I’ll summarize the key themes here:

  • First, Humphrey proposes that interest in paranormal phenomena — which can be grouped as either psychokinesis (PK) or extra-sensory perception (ESP) — is driven by the need to replace the comforts of traditional religious beliefs, which have been discredited by science. Thus the paranormal ‘project,’ as it were, is about trying to discredit the materialist view of the world. People want the consolations of their religions back, with their assurance that the future holds something to look forward to.
  • Second, this project has failed. It *could* have worked, but the evidence is too scattershot. A key argument against is that “from unwarranted design,” i.e. why paranormal phenomena only occur in circumstances that seem restricted in ways not required but their premise. (E.g. why telepathy or telekinesis aren’t used in daily life — only for shows.) And how this argument applies to the miracles of the Bible.
  • Third, so why does the public still believe? A mixture of personal experience, external authority, and a priori reasoning. But there are logical reasons why these explanations fail, namely “prescriptive inefficiency,” that too little information is present for such large effects.
  • Finally, there’s a larger reason a world infused with paranormal phenomena would not exist — they would short-circuit evolution, and the very forces that brought about our species. (And how Asimov explained this in 1982.)

My observation, considering my big theme, is that these ideas undermine one of the key premises of traditional science fiction. All the notions of telepathy and premonition and telekinesis. They are taken for granted in modern media “sci-fi”, but they have gradually fallen away from consideration by the more honest sf writers.

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Isaac Asimov, MInd, Religion | Comments Off on Nicholas Humphrey, LEAPS OF FAITH

Crime, Hypocrisy, Fraud & Abuse, Doing Your Own Research, Cafeteria Religion, and Christian Presumption

Posted on Saturday 24 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Crime rates are falling; crime is not a national emergency; Why do people think otherwise?
  • Republicans criticize Democrats for what they are doing now;
  • Why do Republicans think there is so much fraud and abuse everywhere?
  • Why “doing your own research” is not plausible;
  • JD Vance and cafeteria religion;
  • Why do Christians presume they have the advantage in the Supreme Court?
– – –

Once again people, crime rates are *falling*. They’ve been falling since the 1990s, except for a blip aligned with the pandemic. There is no emergency in the way conservatives insist.

Vox, Bryan Walsh 24 May 2025: Something remarkable is happening with violent crime rates in the US, subtitled “Americans remained scared of violent crime. The numbers tell a different story.”

The astounding drop in violent crime that began in the 1990s and extended through the mid-2010s is one of the most important — and most underappreciated — good news stories of recent memory. That made its reversal during the pandemic so worrying.

So yes, it rose during the pandemic. Then…

By the 2024 election, for the first time in awhile, violent crime was a major political issue in the US. A Pew survey that year found that 58 percent of Americans believed crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress, up from 47 percent in 2021.

And yet even as the presidential campaign was unfolding, the violent crime spike of the pandemic had already subsided — and crime rates have kept dropping. The FBI’s 2023 crime report found that murder was down nearly 12 percent year over year, and in 2024 it kept falling to roughly 16,700 murders, on par with pre-pandemic levels. The early numbers for 2025 are so promising that Jeff Asher, one of the best independent analysts on crime, recently asked in a piece whether this year could have the lowest murder rate in US history.

All of which raises two questions: What’s driving a decrease in crime every bit as sharp as the pandemic-era increase? And why do so many of us find it so hard to believe?

Well, the answer to this is the same as the answer to why so many people believe false things.

One of the most reliable results in polling is that if you ask Americans whether crime is rising, they’ll say yes. Astonishingly, in 23 of 27 national surveys done by Gallup since 1993, Americans reported that they thought crime nationwide was rising — even though most of those surveys were done during the long crime decline.

Crime is one of the best examples we have of bad news bias. By definition, a murder is an outlier event that grabs our attention, inevitably leading the nightly local news. Sometimes, as during the pandemic, that bias can match reality. But if we fail to adjust to what is actually happening around us — not just what we think is happening — it won’t just make us think our cities are more dangerous than they really are. It’ll sap energy for the reforms that can really make a difference.

Misinformation, conspiracy thinking, and the attitude of base human nature to be always alert to danger, never mind reality as it actually is.

\\\

More projection, and hypocrisy.

The Atlantic, Russell Berman, 24 May 2025: The Big, Beautiful Republican Shrug, subtitled “Republicans routinely criticized Democrats for rushing bills through Congress. Now that they’re in power, they don’t seem to mind.”

When Democrats reshaped the American health-insurance system in 2010, Republicans accused them of all manner of legislative foul play: Middle-of-the-night votes. Backroom deals. An enormous, partisan bill jammed through Congress before anyone could find out what was in it. “Have you read the bill? Hell no you haven’t!” an indignant then-House Minority Leader John Boehner thundered on the House floor.

The GOP’s claims were exaggerated. But as Republicans rushed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the House this week, they committed just about every procedural misdeed they had ascribed to Democrats back then—and more. The final text of a 1,100-page bill that Speaker Mike Johnson described as “the most consequential legislation that any party has ever passed” became public just hours before Republicans approved it on a party-line vote. They scheduled a pivotal hearing to begin at 1 a.m. and waived their own rules meant to give lawmakers at least three days to review legislation before a vote. One Republican even missed the climactic roll call because, the speaker explained, he fell asleep.

The conclusion to be drawn here is very simple.

\\\

What does it say about Republicans/conservatives that they think there is so much fraud and abuse under every stone, around every corner? Do they think Americans are the greatest people on Earth, or do they think Americans are the greatest liars and cheaters on the face of the planet? The latter is what their accusations imply. (And what does that imply about Christians, who presume to be the moral guardians of society?)

PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson, 22 May 2025: Trump said a GOP bill doesn’t change Medicaid, only targets ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ That’s False

Answer: they’re using such accusations to target government programs they don’t like. Actual rates of fraud and abuse, from reliable sources, are minuscule compared to their accusations.

\\

Either dumb, or short-sighted.

NPR, 22 May 2025: Congress moves to loosen toxic air pollution rules (via)

Congress has voted to undo a Clean Air Act regulation that strictly controls the amount of toxic air pollutants emitted by many industrial facilities like oil refineries, chemical plants, and steel mills.

The decision represents the first time since the creation of the landmark environmental law that Congress has rolled back its environmental protections.

Prioritize the now, never mind the future, is the conservative philosophy.

\\

Sure, do your own research, create an alternative to humanity’s scientific understanding of the world built over centuries by your few Google searches and social media threads. Realize that all those experts who’ve spend entire careers researching these things are all conspiring against the actual truth that is to be found via some media personality.

MSNBC, Steve Benen, 23 May 2025: RFK Jr. pushes a misguided ‘do your own research’ line as he unveils MAHA report, subtitled “The more Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks about people doing their own research, the more important it is to explain why he’s wrong.”

Actually, this links to a piece I already posted about on May 2nd, and quotes the same para that I did. Then:

When the United States has a health secretary who talks about public health issues as if they’re “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, it’s a reminder that the country has the wrong health secretary.

…

In other words, I can’t do my own research, because I’m not qualified to do that research. People who know what they’re talking about can do their own research, at which point the scientific canon takes shape.

RFK Jr. appears to approach these issues with the assumption that the scientific canon is inherently suspect because it’s crafted by those who reject his conspiratorial and unscientific perspective. When he advises Americans to “do their own research,” it’s a recommendation rooted in the idea that people should poke around the internet until they find sites that give them information that seems true — or that they want to be true.

But that’s not a responsible approach to public health. On the contrary, it’s madness.

The world is complex. It is not understandable through a few Google searches. It is only *partially* understandable through a few college degrees, because it’s only possible to understand a small portion of reality at a time. Experts are expert in only their particular subject… and, alas, can be just as ignorant, and even given to conspiracy theories, about other subjects as the general population is. Linus Pauling and Vitamin C comes to mind.

\\\

Cafeteria religion.

Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams, 23 May 2025: JD Vance isn’t even trying to align his politics with the Catholicism he chose, subtitled “JD Vance rationalizes his anti-Catholic positions — he should negotiate them instead”

Google AI:

“Cafeteria religion” refers to a practice where individuals pick and choose which religious beliefs, practices, or doctrines they adhere to, similar to how one selects items from a cafeteria line. This term is often used to describe individuals who identify with a specific religion but only embrace certain aspects of its teachings while rejecting others.

The Salon piece has many examples of Vance doing this with Catholicism — which as I recall he converted to relatively late in life because he admired its majesty, all those cathedrals and vestments. Concluding:

JD Vance, in contrast, wants to take communion on Sunday and separate families on Monday, because there’s no sincere recognition in there of the teachings of Christ. He may have gone to catechism class, but he hasn’t done his homework. And he hasn’t brought his Catholicism and his political ambition to the table to hash out their differences in a meaningful way. Rationalization is not negotiation, and I can promise that you can’t get into Catholic heaven disrespecting its fundamental rules.

\\

One more.

Vox, Ian Millhiser, 22 May 2025: The religious right just suffered a rare setback in the Supreme Court, subtitled “One of the GOP justices must have defected in a case about religious schools, but the Court didn’t reveal who it was.”

The details of this case aren’t of interest to me so much as the presumption that the topic is worthy of consideration because it’s about Christians. Would the same arguments work if this were about a charter school for Muslims? I suspect not. They’re missing the point about separate of church and state. Christians presume the separation doesn’t apply to them, because they’re in the majority.

Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Crime, Hypocrisy, Fraud & Abuse, Doing Your Own Research, Cafeteria Religion, and Christian Presumption

How to Fix the Budget; MAGA; Steven Pinker

Posted on Friday 23 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman’s constructive suggestions for fixing the budget;
  • While Trump’s allegiances lie with lower taxes for the rich and cuts to the social safety net for the poor;
  • How MAGA is about bimbos, like Kristi Noem and Sarah Palin, who play dumb;
  • Steven Pinker, in a long essay, defends Harvard against “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” how some ideas are true that are nevertheless politically incorrect, how federal grants work, and how Harvard and other universities have made the world a better place.
– – –

Let’s start with something positive and productive. Instead of talking about Republicans.

Paul Krugman,23 May 2025: What a Decent Budget Would Look Like, subtitled “Imagining a Congress that was neither cruel nor irresponsible”

OK, I was wrong. I thought House Republicans would pass their surpassingly cruel, utterly irresponsible budget in the dead of night, hoping nobody would notice. And they tried! Debate began at 1 A.M., and if you think that bizarre timing reflected real urgency, I have some $Melania coins you might want to buy.

(The title of the novel shown above alludes to this timing, presumably.)

Setting criticism aside, Krugman opts for constructive comments. I’ll bold the key points.

You don’t have to be a deficit fetishist, a fiscal scold — which I definitely am not — to realize that even before the Budget of Abominations America was on an unsustainable fiscal path. So what will it take to get back to a tolerable fiscal position?

… What strikes me about where we are now, however, is that we could vastly improve our fiscal position with a series of easy choices — actions that would mainly spare the middle class and only hurt people most Americans probably believe deserve to feel a bit of pain. So here are four things we could and should be doing.

First, get Americans — mainly wealthy Americans — to pay the taxes they owe. The net tax gap — taxes Americans are legally obliged to pay but don’t — is simply huge, on the order of $600 billion a year. We can never get all of that money back, but giving the IRS enough resources to crack down on wealthy tax cheats would be both fiscally and morally responsible, since letting people get away with cheating on their taxes rewards bad behavior and makes law-abiding taxpayers look and feel like chumps.

Republicans are, of course, doing the opposite: They’re starving the IRS of resources and trying to make tax evasion great again. Why, it’s almost as if cheats and grifters are their sort of people.

Second, crack down on Medicare Advantage overpayments. Currently, much of Medicare is run through insurance companies whose payments from the government are based on the health status of their clients — the sicker the people they cover, and hence the higher their likely medical bills, the more the insurance companies receive. Unfortunately, insurers game the system, finding ways to make their clients look less healthy than they really are, and thereby get overpaid.

…

Third, go after corporate tax avoidance. Much of this involves multinational firms using strategies that are shady and dishonest but legal to make profits actually earned in the United States disappear and reappear in low-tax nations like Ireland.

…

Finally, we should just get rid of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut. That tax cut wasn’t a response to any economic needs, and there’s not a shred of evidence that it did the economy any good. All it did was transfer a lot of money to corporations and the wealthy. Let’s end those giveaways.

Concluding,

I know, the usual suspects will come up with all kinds of reasons we can’t do obvious things to save money and increase revenue without hurting ordinary Americans. But politicians who aren’t even willing to do these things have no business lecturing anyone about fiscal responsibility.

\\\

Why aren’t Republicans doing this? (Indeed, why didn’t Democrats, when they were in power? At least they weren’t making things *worse.*) We’ve seen the answer almost every day.

Washington Post, Eduardo Porter, 23 May 2025: What Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ budget reveals about MAGA, subtitled “If you’ve ever wondered whether Trump really cares for the little guy, wonder no more.”

Where do Donald Trump’s allegiances lie? The question has swirled around American politics ever since the president consolidated the MAGA coalition — a patchwork of angry, White, working-class voters wooed with promises to crush trade, revive manufacturing, bash coastal elites and halt immigration — and attached it to a Republican Party that has usually stood for the interests of corporations and the well-to-do.

The result is an improbable, bicephalous beast, its two heads facing opposite directions. One is Stephen K. Bannon, representing MAGA’s red-meat populism, wary of corporations and the elites who run them. The other is his multibillionaire techno-nemesis Elon Musk, interested above all in low taxes, less regulations, and hopefully federal contracts and other deals for the corporations he owns. On what end, we wondered, was its heart?

The answer:

Trump’s “big beautiful” budget, which sparked internecine warfare in the GOP before passing in the House on Thursday morning by one single vote, offers a solid clue as to the president’s true predilections: Bannon lost. The overpowering Republican lust for lower taxes funded by cuts to the social safety net cut through the president’s facade of being a champion for the working Joe.

But we knew that.

\\\

That’s what MAGA wants. This piece is about who MAGA is.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 23 May 2025: Kristi Noem’s proud MAGA bimbo act builds on the legacy of Sarah Palin, subtitled “The GOP adores a woman who plays dumb to build up the man she’s serving”

In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty. Book learning, in MAGA-land, is for lesbians and cat ladies. Intelligence gets in the way of the true duties of MAGA womanhood: keeping up your highly artificial appearance and, crucially, defending the man you serve with your whole heart and soul. Especially if said man, in this case Donald Trump, is himself dumber than a box of rocks. It’s so much easier to be a yes-woman for such a man if you turn your own brain off completely.

Fascinating article that goes on with examples, and a counter-example in Marilyn Monroe.

\\\

Harvard prof Steven Pinker writes.

NY Times, guest essay by Steven Pinker, 23 May 2025: Harvard Derangement Syndrome [gift link]

Pinker has criticized Harvard before, including about its implementation of DEI. (He gives examples.) Now he is defending it. He details the recent criticism against Harvard.

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

And, another warning against black and white thinking.

Call it Harvard Derangement Syndrome. As the country’s oldest, richest and most famous university, Harvard has always attracted outsize attention. In the public imagination the university is both the epitome of higher learning and a natural magnet for grievances against elites.

Psychologists have identified a symptom called “splitting,” a form of black-and-white thinking in which patients cannot conceive of a person in their lives other than as either an exalted angel or an odious evildoer. They generally treat it with dialectical behavior therapy, advising something like: Most people are a mix of strengths and flaws. Seeing them as all bad might not help in the long run. It’s uncomfortable when others disappoint us. How could you make space for the discomfort without letting it define your whole view of them?

He goes on about some of the legitimate criticisms, and his own behavior, and how some things are true that are nevertheless politically incorrect.

I’ll start with myself. During my decades at the university I’ve taught many controversial ideas, including the reality of sex differences, the heritability of intelligence and the evolutionary roots of violence (while inviting my students to disagree, as long as they provide reasons). I claim no courage: The result has been zero protests, several university honors and warm relations with every chair, dean and president.

Most of my colleagues, too, follow the data and report what their findings indicate or show, however politically incorrect. A few examples: Race has some biological reality. Marriage reduces crime. So does hot-spot policing. Racism has been in decline. Phonics is essential to reading instruction. Trigger warnings can do more harm than good. Africans were active in the slave trade. Educational attainment is partly in the genes. Cracking down on drugs has benefits, and legalizing them has harms. Markets can make people fairer and more generous. For all the headlines, day-to-day life at Harvard consists of publishing ideas without fear or favor.

And he goes on about the alleged antisemitism. And to clarify about those government grants, that Trump is canceling:

Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

Many more points. How Harvard matters.

For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel Prizes, and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration therapy (a cheap treatment that has saved tens of millions of lives). They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon. They invented the golf tee and the catcher’s mask. Harvard spawned “Sesame Street,” The National Lampoon, “The Simpsons,” Microsoft and Facebook.

And concludes, quoting the David Deutsch book I’m only part way through.

And if you’re still skeptical that universities are worth supporting, consider these questions: Do you think that the number of children who die every year from cancer is just about right? Are you content with your current chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease? Do you feel our current understanding of which government policies are effective and which ones are wasteful is perfect? Are you happy with the way the climate is going, given our current energy technology?

In his manifesto for progress, “The Beginning of Infinity,” the physicist David Deutsch wrote, “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.” To cripple the institutions that acquire and transmit knowledge is a tragic blunder and a crime against future generations.

And from this piece I learned that Pinker has a new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, coming out in September.

Posted in Economics, Politics, Steven Pinker | Comments Off on How to Fix the Budget; MAGA; Steven Pinker

Taxes and Benefits, Empathy, Genocide

Posted on Thursday 22 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Republicans, predictably, cut taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor. Because the poor deserve their station, apparently (and the rich fund Republicans);
  • Now among Christians empathy is a sin! (Do they actually read their Bibles?);
  • Trump is obsessed with “genocide” of whites in South Africa, and displays phony evidence to prove it.
– – –

This is what Republicans do. You can count on it every time.

(And it’s not only due to their discredited ‘trickle-down economics’ claims. It’s to their peculiarly un-Christian belief that poor people are that way because they’re bad people, or somehow deserve to be poor, and therefore don’t merit government “welfare.”)

The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 22 May 2025: The Largest Upward Transfer of Wealth in American History, subtitled “House Republicans voted to advance a bill that would offer lavish tax cuts for the rich while slashing benefits for the poor.”

House Republicans worked through the night to advance a massive piece of legislation that might, if enacted, carry out the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.

That is not a side effect of the legislation, but its central purpose. The “big, beautiful bill” would pair huge cuts to food assistance and health insurance for low-income Americans with even larger tax cuts for affluent ones.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, warned that the bill’s passage, by a 215–214 margin, would mark the moment the Republicans ensured the loss of their majority in the midterm elections. That may be so. But the Republicans have not pursued this bill for political reasons. They are employing a majority that they suspect is temporary to enact deep changes to the social compact.

(This “social compact” would be what Robert Reich calls the “common good” and Heather Cox Richardson calls the “liberal consensus” of both parties following World War II. It’s what made America great for most of the 20th century.)

The heedlessness of the process is an indication of its underlying fanaticism. The members of the Republican majority are behaving not like traditional conservatives but like revolutionaries who, having seized power, believe they must smash up the old order as quickly as possible before the country recognizes what is happening.

Yet cutting taxes for the wealthy is unpopular, as is cutting Medicaid. They risk losing the midterms. So what’s going on? Chait concludes:

Congressional Republicans are willing to endanger their hold on power to enact policy changes they believe in. And what they believe—what has been the party’s core moral foundation for decades—is that the government takes too much from the rich, and gives too much to the poor.

Here’s an idea: compare other successful, prosperous nations.

\\\

This is related. Do these people read their own Bibles?

Vox, Aja Romano, 22 May 2025: Christian nationalists decided empathy is a sin. Now it’s gone mainstream., subtitled “What wouldn’t Jesus do?”

It’s a provocative idea: that empathy — that is, putting yourself in another person’s proverbial shoes, and feeling what they feel — is a sin.

The Bible contains repeated invocations from Jesus to show deep empathy and compassion for others, including complete strangers. He’s very clear on this point. Moreover, Christianity is built around a fundamental act of empathy so radical — Jesus dying for our sins — that it’s difficult to spin as harmful.

Yet as stunning as it may sound, “empathy is a sin” is a claim that’s been growing in recent years across the Christian right. It was first articulated six years ago by controversial pastor and theologian Joe Rigney, now author of the recently published book, The Sin of Empathy, which has drawn plenty of debate among religious commentators.

In this construction, empathy is a cudgel that progressives and liberals use to berate and/or guilt-trip Christians into showing empathy to the “wrong” people.

The piece goes on, with invocations by those opposed to empathy of Satan and justification of slavery as “a genuine affection between the races…” I am not inclined to read this any more closely.

My take is that conservatives follow the OT, and play lip service to Jesus and the NT. They fall back on tribal rules over compassion for others. Thus posting the Ten Commandments in schools, but not anything Jesus said. And they don’t realize what they’re revealing by doing this.

\\\

Gosh, it seems that those stories about the genocide of whites in South Africa aren’t true!

PolitiFact, Amy Sherman, 20 May 2025: Trump’s Afrikaner refugee policy based on unfounded claims about land, white farmer ‘genocide’

\

But in a meeting with the South African president in the Oval Office yesterday, Trump doubled down, displaying phony evidence.

The Week, Morning Report, 22 May 2025: Trump lectures South Africa president on ‘white genocide’

“Death of people, death, death, death,” Trump said as he flipped through his papers, one of which was a “months-old blog post featuring a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Barron’s said. Video of what he said were “burial sites” of “over 1,000” white South African farmers turned out to be crosses set up in 2020 by activists as symbols of farmers killed over the years.

Did it not occur to Trump to wonder why victims of genocides would have buried alongside a road?? No; he’s a dimwit.

\

Very similar picture above this article.

Washington Post, Monica Hesse, 22 May 2025: Unpacking Trump’s obsession with ‘dead White farmers’, subtitled “In which the president invents a genocide.”

“Dead White farmers.”

If you watched the White House meeting between President Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, you already know what these words refer to, and if you didn’t, well, I’m frankly not sure that any amount of column inches can fully explain them.

With some description about the meeting. Then:

I mean, is there a mass execution involving White farmers in South Africa? Ramaphosa [the president], who is Black, suggested that Trump hear from other members of his delegation, including Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, who is White. Steenhuisen explained that … You know what? We don’t even need to get into what he explained. Every South African who spoke in that meeting said a variation of the same thing: There is no genocide. There is only a country struggling with an incredibly tragic past informing a sometimes-volatile present in which, yes, attacks on farms happen, but the victims of that violence are both White and Black. Or, as PolitiFact put it succinctly in a fact-check: “White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1% of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide.” Though killing for any reason is tragic, PolitiFact noted that most farm-related murders were due to robberies and not racially motivated.

It goes on. By insisting mainstream journalism wasn’t covering this “genocide” he sowed more distrust in journalism… among the credulous MAGA cultists who believe everything he says. And perhaps that was part of the point. The article concludes:

So if you came to this column because you Googled “dead White farmers,” here is your mainstream media coverage of the issue. I’m so sorry.

Posted in conservatives, Human Nature | Comments Off on Taxes and Benefits, Empathy, Genocide

Substack as the new Royal Society, vs MAGA waging war on the future

Posted on Wednesday 21 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Will Substack be the Royal Society of the 21st century?
  • While Trump and MAGA wage war on the future;
  • Robert Reich on *why* Trump and his regime want to destroy every institution in America;
  • And my running theme about the conflict between human nature and the modern world.
– – –

The ongoing story about science fiction is how it’s a vehicle for understanding humanity in a changed environment. As I’ve been saying recently… And so I find this kind of thing interesting.

Big Think, Peter Leyden, 21 May 2025: Why Substack will be the intellectual engine of the 21st century, subtitled “The platform is a digital Royal Society for today’s greatest minds — and it could play an essential role in shaping the next civilization.”

Key Takeaways

• The following is an installment from Peter Leyden’s “The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050,” an essay series published on Substack and Freethink. • The series roughs out a new grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world. • In this op-ed, Leyden argues that Substack, like the Royal Society during the Enlightenment, could become the hub where a new generation of independent thinkers helps design the future.

Beginning:

The last time humans created a new civilization was during The Enlightenment, the period of time from about 1680 to 1800 that gave birth to many of the core technologies, economic systems, and government institutions that led to the modern world.

My last essay laid out how the people of that time created six mega-inventions that changed the world in fundamental ways: mechanical engines, carbon energies, the Industrial Revolution, financial capitalism, representative democracy, and nation states.

Each of those mega-inventions has a direct parallel that has emerged or is emerging in our world today, as you can see in the graphic below. They are artificial intelligence, clean energies, the biological revolution, and what might soon come to be known as sustainable capitalism, digital democracy, and global governance.

I’m going to treat this like the blurb of a book that sounds interesting but which I’m not inclined to read at the moment. A lot of other books in the queue.

The coincidence is that I have, in fact, begun to follow more and more people — let’s say, intellectuals, from Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman, to recently Richard Dawkins and Jesse Bering — on Substack. You can read most of their posts for free, though posters usually offer subscriber-only content, and in fact some of them make a significant income from such subscribers. (We mentioned that about Heather.) And in fact I just subscribed to Robert Reich’s Substack, to read one particular post today (linked below). $30/year.

I’d rather read books, though, rather than daily sound-bites, which are harder to keep track of. But it can take a couple years for a writer to put out a book, while they can post their very latest thoughts on a Substack every single day. And I think that’s what the allusion to the Royal Society (or a literary salon) is about.

\\\

Meanwhile, of course, Trump and MAGA are waging war on the future. Stop the world and return me to my childhood!

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 21 May 2025: The MAGA Movement’s Empty Vision of the Future [gift link]

It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward-looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.

This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full-spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.

In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service-sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry.

Third: “against a sustainable climate future.” …

The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.

With details and examples.

One war, four fronts. The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it and as they might have anticipated it.

In service of what, exactly? What vision does the MAGA movement have instead?

Here, an interesting debate has unfolded.

Citing discussions by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (it’s about “monstrous, supremacist survivalism”), Adam Tooze (on Substack), and John Ganz.

With this summary part-way through.

Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and, in particular, on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.

I find that last sentence fascinating, and revealing. (“Energies”?) It’s significant to me that virtually none of these political commentators invoke evolution, or even human nature in the modern environment, as a deep cause. And that’s a testament, I think, to the American rejection of science in favor of religion, that continues to hobble even thinkers like these.

To say again: The thing is, there will *always* be people like this. It’s part of human nature, it’s part of the range of human sensibilities and intelligence. (Diversity.)  Every century or two an enlightened minority builds a structure to overcome the prejudices of the masses, and that structure lasts for a while… until it’s eroded or deliberately brought down in a return to tribal authoritarianism or autarchy, which most people actually prefer. As is happening now.

\\\

Here is Robert Reich responding to the Thomas Edsall piece I discussed yesterday.

Robert Reich, 21 May 2025: [gift link, I think]

Reich quotes Luttig.

I’m not questioning Luttig’s conclusion. There’s far too much evidence for it. But the deeper question remains: Why do Trump and his regime — and Republicans in Congress who are complicit with them — want to destroy every institution in America?

Tempted to quote it all, but I shouldn’t. Just the first line or two of each item, perhaps…

  1. Personal demons are driving this. Trump is a pathological narcissist who doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. His only goals are money and power. …
  2. Trump and his inner circle believe it’s necessary. A second possibility is that they genuinely believe that the nation is so corrupt, ossified, stagnant, and incapable of being reformed that every major American institution must be destroyed in order to make way for a wholly new and superior system. …
  3. Russia and/or other foreign powers are behind this. Vladimir Putin must be jubilant about the destruction of America. Xi Jinping is likely to be no less pleased. Add in Kim Jong Un, Ali Khamenei, and other global thugs and you have a plethora of forces that could be behind this. …
  4. The oligarchic titans of corporate America and the super-wealthy are behind this. As wealth and power have moved to the top of America, the corporate titans and super wealthy who have been aggregating them don’t want to lose them to a majority of Americans who could — if given the chance — take them away. …

\\\

There’s always more. Linus is playing with his toy.

Posted in authoritarianism, Conservative Resistance, Evolution, Human Nature, Politics, science fiction | Comments Off on Substack as the new Royal Society, vs MAGA waging war on the future

Taker States and Desi Arnaz

Posted on Tuesday 20 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Thomas Edsall on the destructiveness of the Trump presidency;
  • As the US discounts investments in the future, China is taking the lead;
  • How Trump World clings to conspiracy theories;
  • And how Trump folks simply stop enforcing rules they don’t like, misunderstand basic legal principles, and prioritize red “taker” states;
  • A remembrance of Desi Arnaz and “I Love Lucy”.
– – –

The simpletons are destroying what they do not understand. The barbarians are at the gates.

NY Times, guest essay by Thomas B. Edsall, 20 May 2025: ‘I Even Believe He Is Destroying the American Presidency’

As usual Esdall quotes and corresponds with numerous others. I’ll cover just the first.

One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.

The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never

been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.

…

Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.

\

Which dovetails with this piece.

NY Times, Kyle Chan, 19 May 2025: In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant.

As I’ve wondered before, I don’t understand why conservatives, supposedly being supportive of business, don’t understand the value of investing in the future. But Trump and MAGA and Musk and DOGE, claiming a mandate to cut government spending, are cutting the investments! The warning systems to avoid catastrophes from weather events! And previous agencies and commissioners whose job was to ferret out government fraud!

Mr. Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the pillars of American power and innovation. His tariffs are endangering U.S. companies’ access to global markets and supply chains. He is slashing public research funding and gutting our universities, pushing talented researchers to consider leaving for other countries. He wants to roll back programs for technologies like clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing and is wiping out American soft power in large swaths of the globe.

China’s trajectory couldn’t be more different.

It already leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45 percent — nearly half — of global manufacturing by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future: In March it announced a $138 billion national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development.

With many details and examples.

\\\

Once again: Conservatives are those who live by basic, intuitive human nature, and reject principles designed to overcome how that human nature becomes destructive when people live in larger and larger groups. And reject findings (science) that contradict their intuitive ‘common sense’ about how the world works. The result is clinging to religion, finding refuge in pseudo-science, and retreat into the comforting illusions of conspiracy theories.

The Bulwark, Will Sommer, 20 May 2025: The Real Reason Trump World Just Can’t Quit Conspiracy Theories

I link this as evidence without being able to provide Sommer’s explanation; I’m not a paid subscriber and so can see only the top of the article. But the opening is about Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton murdered Jeffrey Epstein, and lack of actual evidence that she did.

Bongino has pleaded with them for patience and repeatedly insisted that he and Patel are doing behind-the-scenes work that would satiate their frustrations. But that work has not materialized. And on Sunday, he seemed almost distraught in trying to explain why. “In some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there,” he said in talking about the theory that Trump assassination attempts were actually attempted hits by Deep State actors.

And the irony:

To some extent, Bongino himself is to blame for his predicament. That it is an article of faith for the right that Trump’s assassination attempts were part of a nefarious plot or that Epstein was murdered—presumably by Democrats—is owed in part to people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino suggesting as much prior to joining the administration.

But instead of being given a degree of credibility and trust from the conspiracists, Bongino is now being treated as a “deep state traitor” for telling them that the wild theories he used to preach and they still collectively believe in aren’t true. It’s a plight facing the broader administration, and really, the whole country.

The world is complicated, and full of random events, which humans, with their pattern-seeking minds, want to make sense of. When they can’t, they make things up.

\\

…And so conservatives prefer authoritarian strong men and disregard for ‘norms’ and ‘rules.’ This is how the entire Trump administration is working.

\\

The headline will do.

Washington Post, 18 May 2025: Trump orders the government to stop enforcing rules he doesn’t like, subtitled “Critics say the administration is breaking the law and sidestepping the rulemaking process that presidents of both parties have routinely followed.”

\

Meanwhile, Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, defines a key legal term to mean the opposite of what it actually means, because that’s the meaning Trump wants.

NY Times, 20 May 2025: Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People, subtitled “The right allows people to legally challenge their detentions by the government and is guaranteed in the Constitution.”

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president’s “constitutional right” to deport people.

All the reports of this incident (such as this one at Boing Boing) include this exchange.

At a Senate hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, asked Ms. Noem about the issue. “Secretary Noem,” she asked, “what is habeas corpus?”

“Well,” Ms. Noem said, “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—”

“No,” Ms. Hassan interjected. “Let me stop you, ma’am. Excuse me, that’s incorrect.”

Ms. Noem’s answer, which echoed the Trump administration’s expansive view of presidential power, flipped the legal right on its head, turning a constitutional shield against unlawful detention into broad presidential authority.

This administration doesn’t understand the Constitution, let alone care about it. They think they have a mandate to make America white again, and ignore any laws that would get in their way.

\\

A cogent observation.

JMG, 20 May 2025: Jeffries: I Won’t Be Lectured By “Taker” Red States

I floated this notion once before. If Trump and MAGA are so intent on sealing the US off from world trade, insisting that everything be made in the US, wouldn’t the next step be some kind of ‘civil war’ or ‘divorce’ in which red states trade only with other red states? Maybe install tariffs on products from blue states? Well, because they likely realize it simply wouldn’t work.

“States like New York and New Jersey and Connecticut and Illinois and California, are donor states, we regularly send billions of dollars more to the federal government than we get back in return. We are donor states! So we’re not going to be lectured by people who are actually in what has sometimes been referred to as taker states, who actually receive more money every year from the federal government. Than they send in terms of taxpayer dollars as to what is fair and what is right.”

Once again: the blue states are more cosmopolitan, more inclusive, and more productive. They welcome the scientists that the Trump administration is firing and sending to other countries. A coincidence? It’s the trend of history.

\\\

On a completely different note.

NY Times, Todd S. Purdom, 18 May 2025 (though in today’s print paper): Hollywood Couldn’t Imagine a Star Like This One [gift link]

This is about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and their TV show “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s, near the dawn of broadcast television. This is prehistory for most people alive these days, and it’s almost prehistory for me. I never saw this show except in a few reruns. The fact that I *could* see such reruns is part of the point here.

Seventy-five years ago, a fading redheaded movie star and her itinerant bandleader husband were searching desperately for a way to save their careers — and their marriage. She was starring in a network radio show in Hollywood, and he was a musician on the road all the time, so they rarely saw each other. In their 10 years together, she’d already filed for divorce once and was nearing her wits’ end.

Two key issues here. Lucille Ball agreed to a TV show, but only if her husband, the Cuban-immigrant Desi Arnaz, could play the TV husband. The network was skeptical (they always are), but Lucy and Desi did a road tour to demonstrate the couple’s audience appeal. (Imagine what MAGA and the anti-DEI folks would say now.) Second, and even more ground-breaking:

Before “I Love Lucy,” television was largely a live medium in which programs ran once, then disappeared. Arnaz assembled a team that arranged to film their show in front of a live audience so that it could be preserved pristinely on 35-millimeter film.

This production method was more costly, so the network insisted that Ball and Arnaz take a weekly pay cut. They agreed — if they could own the negatives of the show. The eventual multimillion-dollar value of the approximately 180 half-hours they produced provided the capital that made Desilu Productions the largest studio in Los Angeles, and the biggest producer of television content in the world. Arnaz’s technical innovations also made it possible for the show to be repeated (thus giving birth to the rerun) and resold (thus creating the syndication market). His refusal to be shut out of television led to the birth of a business model that persisted for seven decades.

The article doesn’t mention this, but Star Trek, its original series that began production in 1964, was produced at Desilu Studios (named after Desi and Lucy) and Lucy was instrumental in talking people into financing it, as is well-known in Trek lore. The other larger story here is, as I’ve written about before, when Trek was broadcast, TV shows were made to be seen once, maybe a second time in a Summer rerun, and were thought to then disappear forever. This explains so much… which I think I’ve written about before.

Posted in Human Nature, Politics, TV Sci Fi | Comments Off on Taker States and Desi Arnaz

The Daily News

Posted on Tuesday 20 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The range of politics reflects the range of human nature;
  • Posts without much comments about military tribunals, hacking the economy, Jeanine Pirro’s black and white worldview, how the Qatar jet deal is Biden’s fault, Paul Krugman on sadistic zombies, and how China will dominate.
– – –

Most of the news on a day to day basis consists of illustrations of how politics works, and how politics reflects the conflicts between different kinds of thinking. Political conflicts are seldom rational disputes about the effects of this or that policy; they’re conflicts between fundamentally different views of the world, and how it should work. These views in turn reflect the range of human nature, which at one end is anchored into the tribal, hierarchical, intuitive way of life that humans existed in for hundreds of thousands of years, and on the other is anchored by the (relatively) cosmopolitan, egalitarian, rational approach to life that has enabled humanity’s expansion across the globe, and which is increasingly necessary for the world’s peoples to get along, not to mention being honest about our apprehension of the real world, apart from superstitions and religion.

Actually, a fair portion of the news on a day to day basis is about catastrophes and crime, incidents that in the big picture are irrelevant, but which people love to hear about. This, I’ve come to conclude, is another reflection of base human nature, which is primed to detect threats and to respond to tribal violence. Even in the modern world, they are itches that humans need to have scratched, if only vicariously. Thus the prevalence of violence and crime in movies and TV; thus the existence of organized sports, as sublimated warfare, as the persistence of a zero-sum game mindset. In sports, one team wins, the other loses. In human history, that can’t have been true, or we’d all still be living in caves.

Progress, the expansion of options, is by definition the triumph of non-zero sum games throughout human history.

\

With these high thoughts in mind, I will only link a few of today’s interesting articles, without pondering through them too much.

JMG, 19 May 2025 (from The Daily Beast): Trump Posts Call For Obama To Face “Military Tribunal”

\

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 19 May 2025: Trump is trying to COVID hack the economy, subtitled “The White House prepares to falsify data and cook the books in order to sell their schemes to the American people”

\

Washington Post, Erik Wemple, 19 May 2025: Jeanine Pirro’s 10 most astounding quotes, subtitled “By the unique standards of Trump’s merit system, the former Fox News commentator has paid her dues.”

I.e., about her black and white worldview.

\

New Republic, Edith Olmsted, 19 May 2025: Trump’s Qatar Private Jet Is Now Somehow Biden’s Fault, subtitled “Donald Trump’s treasury secretary managed to rope Joe Biden into a wild new theory.”

It’s always the other guy’s fault.

\

Paul Krugman, 19 May 2025: Attack of the Sadistic Zombies, subtitled “The GOP budget is incredibly cruel — and that’s the point”

Krugman published a book, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future, back in 2020, and he’s used the term “zombies” to refer to Republican policies that evidence have shown don’t work. Like trickle-down economics.

This post is just the latest example.

\

And this is becoming increasingly clear. Do most Americans notice? Or care?

NY Times, Kyle Chan, 19 May 2025: In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant. [gift link]

Posted in Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on The Daily News

GOP/conservatives and the Rich; and the Countryside; and Star Wars

Posted on Sunday 18 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The GOP tax bill will hurt lowest earners and help the rich (of course!);
  • NYT’s Jamelle Bouie on Republican hypocrisy and the countryside;
  • Trek v. Wars, and how Wars reveals conservatives’ authoritarian fantasies.
– – –

NY Times, Tony Romm, 16 May 2025: G.O.P. Tax Bill May Hurt the Lowest Earners and Help the Richest, subtitled “Even though most Americans may see lower taxes, Republicans’ spending cuts could outweigh those benefits and leave some worse off.”

May? May? It’s always happened like that in the past. That’s why some from the left criticize NYT for being too accommodating.

As Representative Jason Smith commenced a marathon session this week to consider a sprawling and expensive Republican tax package, he took special care to emphasize his party’s commitment to “hard-working Americans.”

“Pro-growth tax policy will shift our economy toward one that serves them, not the wealthy and well-connected,” Mr. Smith, the Missouri lawmaker who leads the House’s top tax panel, proclaimed.

But the proposal he is trying to get to President Trump’s desk ultimately tells a more complicated story. The Republican tax plan may offer only modest gains to everyday workers, according to a wide range of tax experts, and some taxpayers may actually be left in worse financial shape if the bill becomes law.

\\\

For example.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 17 May 2025: Republican Hypocrisy Reaches Into the Countryside

President Trump won his second term in office with the overwhelming support of rural America.

Not only was overall turnout up in the nation’s rural counties, but Trump won many of those areas by more than two-to-one. And while it is a little too much to say that Trump’s dominance with rural voters delivered him the White House, it is true that without this over-performance, his path to victory would have been harder.

Given the importance of rural voters to his political coalition — and that of any Republican who hopes to follow in his footsteps — you might assume that Trump would prioritize the interests of rural voters. This is, after all, what you’re supposed to do in a democracy: reward your supporters for their support.

Not so for Trump and his Republican allies in Congress. If anything, their agenda is calibrated to devastate rural America.

Consider the budget proposal now making its way through the House of Representatives. To pay for their $3.8 trillion tax plan, which includes possibly trillions in tax cuts and extensions for the wealthiest Americans, Republicans want to cut $700 billion from Medicaid and other federal health programs. If passed into law, these cuts — some which come in the form of work requirements for Medicaid — could cause as many as 8.6 million Americans to lose their health insurance.

\\\

And this. I’ve never been a Star Wars fan — it struck me as juvenile space opera, from the first time I watched the first film — while Trek instilled in me an idealism about the future at an early age, and which I’ve never abandoned. In both cases, I have not followed up on the subsequent TV series and movies. Especially since Trek has veered away from the point of the original series. (There’s a narrative pattern here: adaptations usually dilute the premise of the original in favor of themes more palatable to the masses. Just consider the original novel FRANKENSTEIN compared to the many, many adaptations and sequels by others.

Mother Jones, Sam Van Pykeren, 16 May 2025: How Star Wars Reveals Conservatives’ Authoritarian Fantasies, subtitle: “Republicans are gunning for their own galactic empire. And they’d blow up a planet—or this country—to make it happen.”

Running late this afternoon, or I’d explore this in detail.

Posted in conservatives, Culture, science fiction | Comments Off on GOP/conservatives and the Rich; and the Countryside; and Star Wars

86 Hypocrisy, Our Puritan Legacy, and Belief in God

Posted on Saturday 17 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • 86 47, and 86 46;
  • The GOP’s new anti-porn bill, and the US’s puritan legacy;
  • Richard Dawkins on belief in god.
– – –

I almost thought this would be too trivial to mention, except that Heather leads last night’s column with it, and there’s a further salient point she doesn’t mention.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: May 16, 2025.

MAGA world is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump: “86”—slang for tossing something away—followed by “47”, a reference to Trump’s presidency.

Using “eighty-six” as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock. It is a common term, used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody…until now.

MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey’s threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game, telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel: “that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear…. [H]e’s calling for the assassination of the president…that’s gonna be up to Pam and all of the great people…. He’s a dirty cop.” Trump’s reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off: yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., today for an interview.

I’ve heard ’86’ before as slang for throw away or toss out, but never as ‘assassinate.’ But the ironic, hypocritical thing here — that further salient point — is that there’s been a market for “86 46” merchandise, like shirts, for years:

Were those assassination threats too?

\\

What are these people thinking?

Slate, Luke Winkie, 17 May 2025: What’s the Deal With the GOP’s Bizarre New Anti-Porn Bill?

You may have heard that earlier this week, the Republican-controlled Congress floated a piece of legislation that would effectively ban all pornography in the country. That would be a significant incursion on the First Amendment, and a mammoth victory for America’s freshly emboldened Christofascist front. But what does this bill really argue? Is a full-blown porn ban legally feasible? And most important, how did we end up in a place where such a regressive policy is culturally palatable? Let’s break it down.

Questions and answers. For example:

I still feel a little queasy about it though, given how the country is backsliding on all sorts of personal liberties.

Fair enough. I definitely can understand why the bill is making headlines: MAGAdom has made a sharp prudish turn over the past few years, itself informed by a larger anti-sex, anti-pleasure current across party lines. While Mike Lee is not the shrewdest operator in his caucus, it isn’t hard to imagine the Republican Party someday taking up a more serious federal fight against porn. (After all, a comprehensive ban on adult material was a fixture of Project 2025, which, so far, has been the core schematic of the second Trump administration.) We’ve already seen the opening salvos of this struggle: 17 states have blocked porn browsers, and most of them are in the South.

One thing mainstream media almost never does (and right-wing media *never* does) is wonder if there are movements like this in other countries, especially other Western liberal nations, those who’ve been the US’s allies for decades. My explanation for this, in the US, is our prudish, puritan legacy, grounded in the Old Testament. Which forbids any number of activities that would not lead to reproduction in the ancestral environment, at a time when infant mortality was high. And so the existential dread of parents learning their child is gay: because that would foreclose grandchildren. (Even though that’s not strictly true anymore.)

\\\

Today on Richard Dawkins’ Substack.

The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins, 16 May 2025: Do you believe in God?

Subtitled “This article is an excerpt from Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (2019) where Richard Dawkins explores the foundations of religious belief, particularly focusing on whether religion is necessary for morality and understanding the world.” (I summarized the book here.)

It begins with the correct response.

Do you believe in God?

Which god?

Because only the extremely homebound or naive person is unaware that there are other religions and other gods; that these religions and gods are all mutually inconsistent; and only the presumptuous or arrogant person believes that the religion they grew up with is the correct one because it is theirs. Few people, it seems, are smarter than that, and reach the correct conclusion.

Thousands of gods have been worshipped throughout the world, throughout history. Polytheists believe in lots of gods all at the same time (theos is Greek for ‘god’ and poly is Greek for ‘many’). Wotan (or Odin) was the chief god of the Vikings. Other Viking gods were Baldr (god of beauty), Thor (the thunder god with his mighty hammer) and his daughter Throd. There were goddesses like Snotra (goddess of wisdom), Frigg (goddess of motherhood) and Ran (goddess of the sea).

It goes on and on.

For those of us not homebound or naive or arrogant, we tend to dismiss the religious believers in a couple ways. One is that religion is a cultural tradition, like cuisine, and is mostly harmless, just as flat-earthers are. (They are *not* harmless when they begin imposing their scruples on all of society, like MAGA current is trying to do, wanting to forbid books and behaviors they think their God disapproves of. This has been a theme of history.) And the other is that most religious people these days don’t actually believe all the supernatural claims of their religious books; they just need that communal identity of like-minded believers as a kind of group solidarity. This is not intellectually honest, but it’s understandable, given human nature. Only a few us can think past the protocols of human nature, to understand why religious beliefs came to exist, to understand why discoveries in recent centuries about the objective world show those beliefs to be false, and why believers refuse to accept them.

My summary of the book on this page included this:

For anyone open to rethinking their childhood beliefs in the light of humanity’s centuries-long examination of the real world, of the universe, this is a good starting point.

Of course, this applies only to people who actually care about the real world; most don’t, and are happy to conform to their communities.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on 86 Hypocrisy, Our Puritan Legacy, and Belief in God

Supreme Court, Christian Nationalists, Afrikaners

Posted on Friday 16 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Amanda Marcotte on how the Supreme Court has been captured by far-right conspiracy theories;
  • How the simplest explanation for what’s going on, on several fronts, is basic white supremacy;
  • About Russell Vought;
  • Trump’s morality and his rationale for accepting Afrikaner “refugees”.
– – –

Once again: ideology vs. reality.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 26 May 2025: “A court captured by far-right conspiracy theories”: How the GOP drove the Supreme Court off a cliff, subtitled “In her new book ‘Lawless,’ law professor Leah Litman chronicles the collapse of reason at the highest court”

An interview, with this intro by Marcotte:

“Strict Scrutiny” co-host Leah Litman has the profile of a person who, in previous eras, would seem like a defender of the Supreme Court. She’s a law professor at the University of Michigan and once worked as a law clerk for former Justice Anthony Kennedy. In recent years, she’s become one of the most outspoken critics of how the current iteration of the nation’s highest court has abandoned good faith readings of the law, basic legal reasoning, and even facts in pursuit of a far-right agenda. In her new book, “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes,” Litman chronicles the decline of this once-venerated institution. She spoke with Salon about her book and how recent cases suggest the court is getting even more unhinged in this second Donald Trump administration.

They discuss the case in which Sam Alito felt he was oppressed by a children’s book called UNCLE BOBBY’S WEDDING. We mentioned this back on April 23rd.

Litman:

I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The justices keep providing me with so much content and so much material after I finished the manuscript. It perfectly reflects this notion of conservative grievance: the idea that social conservatives, religious conservatives, all the core parts of the Republican constituency, are the real victims. And there’s no discrimination except against white evangelical Christians. That worldview was on display.

…

During the same oral argument, you had Neil Gorsuch insisting that the book “Pride Puppy” involved a sex worker who was into bondage. If you read the book, there is a woman wearing a leather jacket, and she’s at a Pride parade. Neil Gorsuch took from that and insisted, no, the book actually involves bondage and sex workers.

They are addled by their prejudices.

The Supreme Court has been running on these fast and loose characterizations of the facts for a while. We all can have a good laugh at the idea that “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” is a personal attack on people who don’t believe in marriage equality. But the uncomfortable reality is that a conspiracy theory-laden universe is in full swing at the Supreme Court. It’s a court captured by far-right conspiracy theories. That worldview interferes with their assessment of the law, their assessment of the facts, and their ability to engage with reality.

Is this about the Christian nationalist agenda? Or is it larger than that?

I think it is larger than that. I agree that one of the ideas they are most committed to is that conservative Christians are the victims of a society that doesn’t share their views. But they are also very committed to the idea that white conservatives accused of racial discrimination are very put upon. That idea has inflected a lot of their jurisprudence on voting rights. This term, they are hearing another Voting Rights Act case that asks them to say it’s actually unconstitutional racial discrimination for states to try to ensure that black voters are represented in districting. It’s super transparent in the cases of religion, but it’s definitely present in other areas of law as well.

\

Sometimes these things are simpler than the lawyers make them out to be. In the past few days, we’ve had a Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, and we’ve had Afrikaner “refugees” welcomed into the United States, whose views sound just like MAGA. The simple underlying truth is that white people are refugees and should be welcomed into the country, while brown people are illegal immigrants or criminals or terrorists and should be deported, without due process. It’s a white supremacist agenda.

\\\

Russell Vought. What is his agenda exactly? It seems that a democracy with separation of powers is interfering with his authoritarian goals. Which happen to include Christian nationalist goals.

The Atlantic, McKay Coppins, 16 May 2025: The Visionary of Trump 2.0, subtitled “Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making.”

Opening para’s:

The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed “Big Balls” whom he’d hired to help slash the government. The performance had a certain improvised quality—pink slips dispersed and then hastily withdrawn, entire agencies mothballed overnight—and after a while, it started to feel like a torqued-up sequel to Trump’s first term: governance replaced by chaos and trolling.

But that version of the story misses a key character: Russell Vought.

Then:

Vought’s agenda includes shrinking the government, but it goes deeper than that. His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it. A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicized or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.

It’s no surprise that

He grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut, with a devout family who sent him to a private Christian school and Bible camp in the summers.

And:

Vought has expressed pride in his record of pushing boundaries in ways that unsettle less dogmatic Republicans. Whereas many religious conservatives distance themselves from the “Christian nationalist” label, Vought wears it proudly. At a Heritage event, he sarcastically derided some of the Cabinet officials in Trump’s first term, whom he described as “a bunch of people around him who were constantly sitting on eggs and saying, Oh my gosh, he’s getting me to violate the law.”

\\\

What is the Trump’s morality? A pointless question; he has no morality beyond self-interest. This is about the Afrikaner “refugees.”

Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 16 May 2025: This is what happens when we have a morally lost president, subtitled “What’s needed more than anything at this moment is to make our leaders moral again.”

The Trump administration showed the world its true colors this week. Or, more accurately, its true color.

The president has halted the admission of refugees, including those who helped the U.S. military in Afghanistan and those fleeing war in Sudan and Congo. But he has made one exception: White South Africans.

With details. In fact:

But under the country’s “expropriation” law, no land has actually been taken from the Afrikaners, who are 7 percent of the population but own most of South Africa’s farmland. They face high levels of violence, but Black South Africans face even higher levels in what has been one of the world’s most violent countries for some time.

It’s hard to see this refugee policy, and the exception for Afrikaners, as anything but an assertion of white supremacy.

Posted in conservatives, Morality, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Supreme Court, Christian Nationalists, Afrikaners