The Myths Americans Live By

Posted on Saturday 5 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

A person’s history affects how he views the world; so too does a nation’s history affects its perceived position in the world, and its place in history. And every nation, or at least most nations, think it is very special, in some way or another. In ways that wouldn’t matter to some other nation. Everyone needs to feel special. Problems begin when people insist those reasons to feel special are somehow built into the natural order of things, and must be institutionalized.

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NY Times, guest essay by Richard Slotkin, 5 Oct 2024: To Understand Trump vs. Harris, You Must Know These American Myths

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Further Notes from Our Report on the Third Planet

Posted on Friday 4 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

What would alien spectators taking notes on modern American society observe?

  • Society is unsettled, and political compromises are fragile; yet those advocating actual violence are a minority (Adam Lee)
  • Society has developed high principles to overcome tribal conflicts, but while many claim fidelity to those principles, they ignore them in practice, and rather outright lie to preserve their tribal identities. (Adam Serwer on “freedom of speech”; Trump and his supporters support violence; right wing media pushes lies about non-citizen voting; Paul Krugman on why Trump lies about disaster relief; MAGA influences lie about Buttigieg; Trump lies about his JPMorgan endorsement)
  • Despite the scientific and technological progress of the species, many in the population reject such thinking and prefer intuitive, fantastical, conspiratorial thinking. (MTG on how “they” control the weather; a GOP conspiracy theorist who thinks her opposition are driven by demons)

And what would they conclude?

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Those who would wreck society

Some of them, though perhaps only a very few of them, would wreck society if they cannot have their way. This appears to be some kind of base, animalistic response, as if every member of the species were driven simply by animalistic motivations to survive and reproduce; a disavowment of the capability of advanced creatures to diversify and learn to get along with others unlike themselves.

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Monochrome and One-Dimensional and Upside Down

Posted on Thursday 3 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Items from Facebook about MAGA conflation; John Kenneth Galbraith; and conservatives’ lack of a sense of humor;
  • How legislators in North Carolina left homes vulnerable;
  • Fact-checking the debate, Vance’s irritation that he was fact-checked, and how Republicans consistently lie and misrepresent more than the Democrats;
  • Vance wrong on climate change, and conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene;
  • Yet another example of Fox News doing what it does best.

Three items from Facebook.

Public post by Don D’Ammassa, 30 Sep 2024:

A year or so back, I mentioned that various things we take for granted – social security, disaster relief, roads, etc. – were actually socialist. Our society is a mixture of socialist, capitalist, libertarian, and other concepts. A fairly well respected writer whose background is in the sciences objected that these were not socialist because they were good things. I can’t even begin to explain how sad that is.

Comments to this echo my thoughts about how most people don’t actually know what these words mean and conflate them all as ‘bad’:

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Skiffy Flix: When Worlds Collide

Posted on Wednesday 2 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Next of up my intermittent revisiting of 1950s science fiction movies is this one, one of the more popular and well-regarded of its era. It was produced by George Pal, who also did Destination Moon the previous year, and his touch is evident in the high-end production values, i.e. special effects, which won an Academy Award.

This is the movie in which people escape the Earth, as it’s threatened by destruction from a passing star, using a spaceship that launches on a big ramp, as in this photo, which I’m going to link from IMDb:

It resembles Destination Moon somewhat in its story line concerning scientists, their discoveries, and the engineers and entrepreneurs who put ambitious plans into place.

Gist

An approaching star and its planet foretell the imminent destruction of Earth. After some debate, a rocket ship is built to carry a select crew of refugees to the new planet, in hopes of survival there. Its mission succeeds.

Take

It’s ambitious for its time, with big special effects and a big cast, but like virtually all the other movies of its time is undermined by scientific and technical implausibilities.

Summary

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Changing the Subject

Posted on Wednesday 2 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • About last night’s Vice Presidential debate, and how Vance kept changing the subject;
  • How Vance’s contempt for climate change science belies his purported concern for children, and reflects this recent Cory Doctorow column about marshmallow longtermism;
  • How Vance’s conversion to a specific kind of Catholicism reveals his longing for a simpler, more structured past — in defiance of the classic liberal ideas of equality, personal liberty, and individual rights;
  • And a final thought about how conservatism in general is about trying to change the subject, from the present to the past.
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Last night was the Vice Presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. I thought it went well only in the sense that both men spoke fluently. I kept noticing the tendency by Vance to change the subject. He would be asked a question about, say, war in the middle east, and JD would say, It’s more important to talk about why Kamala Harris is responsible for all the spoiled food in your fridge, or something equally absurd. Kamala is to blame for everything, never mind she’s only vice president; whereas Trump for some reason isn’t responsible for all the things he promised (like the Wall) and didn’t get done *as president*. The most telling example of this, and the critical point of the debate, was this.

NY Times, Matt Flegenheimer: The Moment When Vance Dodged a Jan. 6 Question but Said Plenty, subtitled “JD Vance sailed fairly smoothly through some 90 minutes of Tuesday’s debate with Tim Walz. Then the subject turned to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”

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Cynicism, Lies, Incompetence

Posted on Tuesday 1 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Recalling Reagan and his cynicism about the government;
  • And lies about Hurricane Helene response, climate change, and about everything over one 24-hour period;
  • My anticipation of how long it will take for Trump fans to realize how incompetent and moronic he’s become, especially if he wins again; ever?
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Salon, Lucian K. Truscott IV: When natural disaster strikes, the legacy of Ronald Reagan haunts, subtitled “Reagan’s nine most ‘terrifying’ words in the English language: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help'”

I’ve never understood the veneration of Ronald Reagan (either). In 2020, in this post, I copied a section of my journal from 1980 about seeing Reagan at a rally at Cal State Northridge. He confirmed my impression of him: a kindly old man who was not too bright yet who reassured his audience that what they felt was true (never mind what was actually true). He was an actor who wanted to play the president, and that’s what he did.

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Chemophobia

Posted on Monday 30 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring led to fixing the environment, but also led to an irrational fear of “chemicals” and then the anti-vax movement;
  • Short items about Vance and Wallnau, Trump’s threats of a violent purge of society, how Mark Robinson fits in to the Republican freak show, more Trump lies about criminal migrants, and another Republican taking credit for a bill he voted against.

Slate, Katie MacBride, 29 Sep 2024: This Book Helped Save the Planet—but Created a Very Harmful Myth, subtitled “It radically shifted the way the world looked at the environment, but created a wave of misinformation we’re still dealing with today.”

The unintended consequence of Rachel Carson’s SILENT SPRING was that uninformed or easily frightened people came to think that everything “chemical” is bad.

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Changing Minds

Posted on Sunday 29 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Today’s theme: a couple items that illustrate when and how people have changed their minds. Erwin Chemerinsky, and Malcolm Gladwell.

First, another piece about the new book by Erwin Chemerinsky (last discussed on 31 Aug), this time a review by the esteemed Louis Menand.

The New Yorker, Louis Menand, 23 Sep 2024: Is It Time to Torch the Constitution?, subtitled “Some scholars say that it’s to blame for our political dysfunction—and that we need to start over.”

What struck me most about this review were the opening paragraphs, which summarize matters that justify the Constitution and the government that has grown to enforce it. Here again, as I’ve been saying: the Constitution was an attempt to install lofty ideals to override instinctive tribal morality. Actually, as Menand explains, to override two opposing forces: mob rule, and the authoritarian threat.

All republican governments live in fear of the man on the white horse. Continue reading →

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Three Weeks: Leaving My Life Up to Me

Posted on Saturday 28 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

My partner Y left late last night (I had to drive him to SFO well past our usual bedtime) for a three-week trip to China. (Partly business, partly family.) We’ve been together some 23 years, and this will be the longest time he’s been away, leaving me alone in the house with the cats. I like being alone, but will never have been home alone in quite such circumstances ever before. So I’m wondering what I will do, or should do.

He’s been gone for a couple weeks at a time, several times. Including a couple times in the past decade, since I’d ‘retired’ from the job and spent time at home, even if some of the time I was working remotely as a contractor, not to mention continued incidental support for Locus every week. His trips earlier than that, one 17 days, weren’t quite the same, because I still had work to go to every day.

So now I will be alone for three weeks, without having to go to work, or do much of anything. Continue reading →

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The Real Trump Mystery, and My Explanation

Posted on Friday 27 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Thomas B. Edsall on The Real Trump Mystery, and how base human nature explains this;
  • Fareed Zakaria on how Trump’s economic ideas would stunt growth and spur inflation;
  • Because Trump doesn’t understand money;
  • Short items about Roseanne Barr accusing Democrats of eating babies; how Mike Johnson claims that God endorses Trump… this time; how Elon Musk and others are fighting to restore old sexual hierarchies; how JD Vance once told the truth, about Trump; and how it’s up to us, not God, to fight disease and war.

NY Times, Thomas B. Edsall, 25 Sep 2024: The Real Trump Mystery

The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?

Another Edsall collection of quotes and links from many sources. Subjects include conspiracy-theorists, denials of truth, some who need to unleash chaos, and so on.

My big picture take: Continue reading →

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