DNC and Late August Goings-On

Posted on Friday 23 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Last night was the end of the Democratic National Convention, with Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech as nominee for president, and it’s been well-covered in all the news media. Most of us thought Harris did quite well, as she bridged from her personal history to issues of the day and finally took on Trump directly. The MAGA media took issue, of course; whatever she could have said would have been bad. Trump, reflexively, calls her a disaster and a bringer of death to the United States — but he would say that whatever Harris said, or whomever else was the Democratic nominee giving any kind of speech. He’s a joke.

A sidebar issue Continue reading →

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Friends and Neighbors, Conformity vs. Liberty

Posted on Thursday 22 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the Walz/Vance debate revealed two different views of America: conformity v liberty;
  • How we depend on friends and neighbors, and Oprah’s DNC speech;
  • How morality evolved, and religion merely captured it;
  • Brief items about crowd sizes and looks; taking credit; the Gish Gallop; Christian Nationalist lies; and how some Christians would ban other religions.

The most striking item I saw today is this, which goes to the heart of the distinction between conservatives and liberals.

Washington Post, Matt Bai, 22 Aug 2024: Opinion | Tim Walz and JD Vance are having the argument that matters, subtitled “In his convention speech, Tim Walz articulated a view of America sharply contrasting with JD Vance’s.”

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Sebastian Junger: FREEDOM

Posted on Wednesday 21 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Then I looked over my shelves to see if there was some other memoir type book, preferably short, that I could read before returning to another big science tome. I found this, by the same author as TRIBE, which I read and reviewed some five years ago. This book is less a personal memoir than a meditation on a theme, that of the title. As in that earlier book, this one considers its titular idea from different perspectives, three in this case.

It’s a memoir to the extent that Junger, with a small group of friends, spent a considerable amount of time walking the railroad lines in Pennsylvania. (Not consecutively, he mentions.) They’re hobos of a sort, sleeping outside, avoiding towns, avoiding the security police that monitor the tracks. It’s an experiment in freedom, in a sense; the book is a meditation about the tension between community and freedom.

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Neopatriarchy, Tax Cuts, Conflict Entrepreneurs, and How the Nonreligious Might Save Humanity

Posted on Tuesday 20 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Catching up on odds and ends today.

  • The Right’s “neopatricarchy” is nothing but a prioritization of tribal morality — that nothing matters than having more children;
  • Republicans are famous for bribing voters with tax cuts; now Democrats are doing it too, sigh;
  • Another item about “violent crime dropping sharply”;
  • Congress is dysfunctional because of “conflict entrepreneurs,” most of them Republican, of course;
  • How the nonreligious, given that they reproduce less than the religious, might be key to saving the race.

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Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 13 Aug 2024: The right’s plan to fix America: Patriarchy 2.0, subtitled “JD Vance and like-minded conservatives are theorizing a kind of ‘neopatriarchy.'”

Once again: an obsession with tribal morality. To conservatives, nothing else matters than having more children, apparently.

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Tara Westover: EDUCATED: A MEMOIR

Posted on Monday 19 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

And here’s a third memoir I read recently, inspired by that NYT list — though in this case, the book didn’t place on the final list, though it was nominated by a couple of the 500 contributors who revealed their personal votes. And I had a copy — again, as with Coates, bought sometime after first publication. I have the 19th printing.

What attracted me to this was its story about growing up in rural Idaho, in a survivalist family, and then breaking out and discovering the real world. Just up my alley, right? Knowledge wins out? As it turned out, that’s only part of the story, and not even the main point.

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Things That Don’t Change

Posted on Sunday 18 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

In particular, the reactions by conservatives to things that do change. Topics today:

  1. Illegals and the military;
  2. How poor poll results must be fake;
  3. The American struggle between reason and ignorance;
  4. How one small town is indeed deeply conservative;
  5. Considering the assumption that people become more conservative as they grow older;
  6. When you have no substantive arguments, resort to the trivial: Doritos!

1, Scaring Conservatives with Lies

Salon, Kelly McClure, 17 Aug 2024: Trump scares his followers with talk of “illegals,” but border crossings are lowest in four years, subtitled “A new tally by border agents shows that illegal crossings are at a steady decline, down 32 percent since June”

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

Posted on Saturday 17 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here is the next memoir I read, after Joan Didion’s, as inspired by that NYT list. This is a statement by a black intellectual to his 15-year-old son, about life as a black person and the struggles and dangers he faces in the world. It’s heartfelt and moving and grim and blunt. Its function to readers like me is to reveal perspectives I’ve never had, and couldn’t even imagine.

The book came out in 2015 and I have the 20th printing — with blurbs on the cover about it being a bestseller, and a National Book Award winner. So I didn’t buy it when first published. Its subject is nothing obviously up my alley. Presumably after a year of acclaim, and since frankly that it was short!, I did buy a copy, in April 2016.

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Preferred Relativism

Posted on Friday 16 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A story about the right’s “50-year-plot” to wreck democracy, and attendant thoughts about how conservatives reject one kind of relativism, and embrace another;
  • The credulousness of conservatives;
  • Notes from the fringe: vaccines; rationalizing Hannibal Lecter; Democrats are wolves; wives afraid of husbands seeing their votes; Trump’s endless false claims.
– – –

Here’s a piece today that caught my eye because I wondered if it aligns with other recent pieces about the history of the past few decades — the conservative swing into existential panic ever since civil rights movement in the 1960s; yesterday’s piece about the rise of the “nones,” itself a reaction to conservative extremism. As it turned out, it’s interesting as much for prompting thoughts about ‘relativism.’

Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 16 Aug 2024: Unpacking the right’s “50-year plot” to wreck democracy — and why it might work, subtitled “Author David Daley on the far right’s long-term “Antidemocratic” strategy, and how we just might beat it”

This is an interview with David Daley, author of a new book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, just published on August 6th.

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Nones, and Genre

Posted on Thursday 15 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why did the rise of the “nones” begin in the 1990s?
  • Thoughts about how science fiction is, or is not, a “genre”.

Here’s an article I stumbled upon today, from 2019 in The Atlantic, by a writer I’ve see a lot of lately but apparently had not noticed back then. And this relates to yesterday’s lead item.

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Seculars, Human Nature, Abstraction

Posted on Wednesday 14 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Some more abstract, intellectual topics for today.

  • As the rise of ‘nones’ increases, what will society look like in a hundred years?
  • How people are instinctively nice, more often than religions give them credit;
  • An idea from S.I. Hayakawa about a ‘ladder of abstraction’ for communication skills.

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 14 Aug 2024: From secular society to secular civilization, subtitled “In a hundred years, the Nones will likely be a majority of the US population. What will that secular society be like?”

OnlySky is back, but only publishing one new item every day or two. My initial reaction to this piece, at least the subtitle, Continue reading →

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