Self-destruction, Mafia Politics, TACO, What Aligns the Right, Bread and Circuses

Posted on Wednesday 28 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on the economic damage of America’s withdrawal from the world;
  • You can get away with anything if you donate enough to Trump;
  • TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out;
  • Zack Beauchamp on how the right isn’t driven by materialism, but by their culture;
  • And how billion-dollar Sports Stadiums seem to be the best American can do.
– – –

Another round.

Paul Krugman, 28 My 2025: America Turns Its Back on the World subtitled “Blocking foreign students is an act of self-destruction — and self-betrayal”

Beginning with an anecdote:

My wife and I are co-authors of a widely used textbook on the principles of economics, which is revised on a three-year cycle. When a new edition comes out, I normally visit a number of schools that might adopt it, usually giving a big public talk, a smaller technical seminar, and spending some time with students and faculty. I enjoy it, by the way; there are a lot of good, interesting people in U.S. education, and not just in the high-prestige schools.

So it was that at one point I found myself visiting Texas Tech in Lubbock. Yes, it seemed pretty remote to someone who has spent almost his whole life in the Northeast Corridor, but as usual the overall experience was very positive. And it was also surprisingly cosmopolitan: there were students from many nations. I just checked the numbers, and currently 30 percent of Texas Tech’s graduate students are international.

So it is all across America. Our nation’s ability to attract foreigners to study here is one of our great strengths. Or maybe I should say was one of our strengths.

And then concerning Trump’s directive to prevent Harvard from admitting foreign students.

It’s hard to overstate the self-destructiveness of this move, and the war on higher education in general. This is madness even in purely economic terms.

We don’t often think of education as a major U.S. export, but it is. International students typically pay full tuition and require little or no financial aid. Here’s “education-related travel,” basically international students, compared with some other major U.S. exports:

(see chart above)

There’s more…

[I]nternational students often get something important from the experience of studying in America that goes beyond what they learn in classrooms and labs. They learn what it means to live in an open society, and bring that knowledge home. We talk about “soft power,” which is very real. But this actually goes beyond that. Educating students from abroad helps to disseminate fundamental American values around the world.

Of course, the people now running things do not themselves accept what people like me consider fundamental American values. They may insist that they’re pro-American, but what they mean by “America” is a land of bigotry where your identity is determined by blood and soil, a land of closed borders and closed minds.

To trim David Brin’s comment in yesterday’s post: “Maga hates all fact professions as smartypants know-it-alls.” So many of them, including Trump, are perfect Dunning-Krugers: they are so dumb, they don’t know how dumb they are.

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Or perhaps Trump and his fans work on a different plane. Front page of today’s NYT:

NY Times, Kenneth P. Vogel, 27 May 2025: Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner, subtitled “Paul Walczak’s pardon application cited his mother’s support for the president, including raising millions of dollars and a connection to a plot to publicize a Biden family diary.”

Trump doesn’t believe in America as a liberal democracy (in the general meaning of “liberal”), or even as a business; he’s running it like a Mafia outfit. Pay enough tribute to the boss, and you get away with anything. Never mind law and order.

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Trump has acquired a new nickname.

Politico, Ali Bianco, 28 May 2025: Trump’s not happy about Wall Street’s name for tariff flip-flops, subtitled “He bristles at the acronym TACO, which stands for ‘Trump always chickens out.’”

No one can be confidant about his threats, because he changes his mind twice a week.

\\\

What is the base motivation of the far right? Certainly not the “material,” since they vote against their own interests in material terms, as observers have noted for years.

Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 28 May 2025: Why the left gets the far right wrong, subtitled “The left’s attachment to thinking of politics in ‘material’ terms is causing it to misread the moment.”

Long analysis. For example,

In the United States, mainstream media and cultural figures were overwhelmingly hostile to Donald Trump all three times that he ran for president. They provided no end of information about how his policy proposals would harm the working class, and how his opponents’ ideas would benefit them. He won two out of three times anyway, with an increasing percentage of votes among lower-income and non-college voters.

And so on. The left continues to believe that “the roots of political behavior can ultimately trace back to material interests.”

Across the world, an egalitarian vision of democracy and social order has beaten its competitors — leading to the decline of formal hierarchies along racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and caste lines. This manifested in concrete social changes, like the entry of women into the workforce or the end of racially discriminatory immigration regimes, that profoundly unsettled certain traditionally-minded segments of the global population. Far-right parties became their champions.

This is a fundamentally postmaterial account of far-right politics. It argues that the right wins not by channeling people’s displaced economic anger, but by articulating ideas that match their deeply held beliefs, values, and identities.

Well yes, of course. It’s not just about making money in a capitalist society; it’s about the deeper (what I would call tribalistic) values.

They did not arrive at said beliefs because of their place in the class structure or assessment of self-interest, but rather because ideas and identity are social facts in their own right. When people go to church or talk to their parents about culture, they listen. And that defines who they are as human beings every bit as much as their role as economic producers, especially in a world where the average voter in a wealthy democracy is orders of magnitude more materially secure than the workers of Marx’s day.

So what should the left do, to appeal to these values voters?

Adopting a postmaterial analytic framework does not require abandoning left-wing politics. You can see voters as driven on ideas without abandoning normative commitments to improving the lot of workers, to bolstering the too-weak welfare state, or even to seeing the existence of billionaires as a crime against democracy and human decency.

In fact, I’d argue, doing so is essential for the left to succeed.

Well, OK. It’s also been long known that the wealthy Republican class are taking advantage of working class voters, by appealing to their religious priorities, while in the background passing legislation that benefits the wealthy. This has been happening for decades, and it’s happening again right now. Maybe the liberal platform should be to expose *this*. The writer concludes:

As long as the left insists on materialism as its most fundamental theory of politics, not just one possible account of human behavior but always the primary one, it will continue to misunderstand the sources of its far-right enemy’s power. It will continue proposing the same old slogans, regardless of their political efficacy, because to do otherwise would be to admit that materialism is in some important political sense no longer true.

So, can I boil this down? The right isn’t so much concerned with their own prosperity as they are preserving their values. And they don’t realize they’re being played by the Republicans, who reliably violate those values. (See above.) Because they’re not paying attention? Because…?

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Trumpist Americans resent $100 million paid to Harvard eggheads, to fulfill government contracts, but they’re happy to spend billions on sports stadiums. Americans are no different than the Romans, with their bread and circuses.

 

NY Times, opinion by Binyamin Appelbaum, 28 May 2025: Sports Stadiums Are Monuments to the Poverty of Our Ambitions

People who say that the United States can’t build anything anymore must not be sports fans. Barely a year goes by without the debut of a sparkling new stadium or arena, often in the very cities where it’s most difficult to build almost anything else. A $2.3 billion baseball stadium in the Bronx. A 70,000-seat football stadium in the middle of Los Angeles County. A basketball arena on the San Francisco waterfront.

The latest example, announced last month by the mayor of Washington, D.C., is a $3.8 billion plan to build a stadium for the local football team, the Washington Commanders, on 180 acres of public land just two miles from the Capitol.

Washington is not an easy place to build housing, but no one should doubt the capital city’s capacity to build a stadium. The city opened a basketball arena in 1997, a baseball stadium in 2008 and a soccer stadium in 2018. In Washington, as in other American cities, homes for sports teams are the only kinds of homes that still get built.

The obvious reason is that sports are popular. Especially the N.F.L. When the Commanders win, Washington wakes up in a better mood. It doesn’t require a political science degree to understand why the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, is eager to persuade the team to return to Washington after a few decades in the Maryland suburbs. She wants to be popular, too.

Well, obviously, but why? Once again I invoke one of my recurrent themes: human nature evolved in an ancient, tribal environment, where warfare between rival tribes was routine — see OT. Over that long history, humans became primed for battle, for zero-sum games in which one side won and the other lost. In the modern environment, those battle impulses have become channeled into sports: mock warfare, where one side wins, and the other must lose. This is how Trump thinks about the world in general. But it’s not the way of the world, over millennia; humans have built a worldwide civilization by learning to cooperate with one another and promote non-zero-sum games. But the deep passions for battle among tribes lingers among most of us.

The article notes how little those stadiums are actually used. They sit empty most of the time. And what if society had such ambition to build better things? Concluding:

Academic studies have repeatedly concluded that public spending on stadiums is a bad investment. Indeed, one of the leading authorities on the subject has memorably described that conclusion as one of the rare subjects on which economists have approached unanimity.

Better investments would yield bigger returns. One can only imagine a world in which the mayors of American cities were equally motivated by the economic benefits of public transit. But it’s much less expensive, much easier and much more fun to build a gussied-up grandstand than to invest in faster commutes or high-quality public education. The $3.8 billion price for the Commanders stadium is a lot of money, but it is a small fraction of what it would cost to build a neighborhood on the same land.

Our stadiums are monuments to the poverty of our civic ambitions and our inability to summon the collective will to use the land we have for the things we need. They are distractions from our inability to build anything else.

Posted in conservatives, Culture, Economics, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Self-destruction, Mafia Politics, TACO, What Aligns the Right, Bread and Circuses

America, increasingly anti-science and anti-intellectual, was founded by religious fanatics, as perhaps most Americans do not realize

Posted on Tuesday 27 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How America is becoming anti-science and anti-intellectual, with a comment by David Brin;
  • Adam Serwer on Trump’s attack on knowledge itself, with my comments about how most people won’t notice, but the world and history will;
  • How Americans venerate ancestors who were, in fact, religious fanatics, with seven Puritan credos that reflect base human nature;
  • And ideas for a secular story of existence, which, I suspect is probably not possible.
– – –

NY Times, TheUpshot, 22 May 2025: Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades [gift link]

The National Science Foundation, which funds much of the fundamental scientific research at American universities, is awarding new grants at the slowest pace in at least 35 years.

The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs and other “woke” targets that the Trump administration says it wants to cut.

That is, the administration isn’t bothering to use wokeness as an excuse — they’re cutting science anyway. Why would that be?

Saw this via David Brin on Facebook, who comments:

Nothing more purely describes what unites the MAGA/confederate masses with their oligarch overlords. The former hate all fact professions as smartypants know-it-alls. Especially science but also civil servants, FBI/intel and even the US military officer corps. The latter (oligarchs) know that fact people are the only clades left, standing in the way of a return to 6000 years of feudalism.

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And this.

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 27 May 2025: The New Dark Age, subtitled “The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.”

From the author of The Cruelty Is the Point.

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.

Long essay, each paragraph somehow more grim than the previous.

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.

Going on with attacks against institutions of higher education.

I’m of two minds about these matters. One is that, as I’ve said about broad historical changes, *most people won’t notice.* They will carry on their day-to-day lives and they don’t pay attention the accumulated knowledge of humankind over the past hundreds or thousands of years. If challenged, most would dismiss such knowledge in favor of their religion, or whatever else makes them feel comfortable. They use the technology that’s resulted from this accumulated knowledge by rote, as if it were magic.

On the other hand, these matters will change America’s status in the world. Other nations, especially China, *will* keep investing in science, and they will make the breakthrough discoveries in, say, cancer prevention, that the US might have made. But, as a secondary effect, most Americans will not understand or appreciate this. The US scientists who fled to Europe, or even China, will.

And furthermore on this other hand — history will be the judge. It will record the deliberate self-sabotage of American science, and its surrender to the base tribal forces that gave its license to our moron authoritarian president.

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Americans, all peoples I suppose, venerate their ancestors, or founders, whether or not those old folks were crazy by modern standards. Pilgrims and Puritans. But if you look back honestly, America was founded by religious fanatics. And perhaps this explains America’s current culture.

Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 26 May 2025: How America got so weird: The Pilgrims made us do it, subtitled “Those guys who landed at Plymouth Rock were a doomsday cult, says Jane Borden — and we’ve emulated them ever since”

This is an interview…

Jane Borden’s “Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America” develops a simple thesis: The English Pilgrims who famously landed at Plymouth Rock were essentially a doomsday cult — even if they lacked a charismatic leader — and together with the Puritans who followed them passed on seven key elements of belief that have shaped America ever since. Even as some aspects of their beliefs have faded, these key elements survive in multiple different forms and settings, from pop culture to multilevel marketing schemes and a wide range of spiritual practices and beliefs that migh otherwise seem to have little in common.

I’m going to skim through and compile those seven key elements, but first, the interview begins this way:

You begin your book with a brief description of the Pilgrims as a doomsday cult, and go on to say, “We’ve been iterating on its prototype since. We can’t stop re-creating our first trauma,” although it remains “largely unacknowledged.” What led you to see the Pilgrims as America’s foundational cult?

Well, around 2018 I became very preoccupied by the division in our nation, the cultural and political division. I’d been reporting on cults at the time, and I knew that cults feed off division and that division is fueled by cults in turn. I started to see cultic thinking in America everywhere in pop culture, entertainment and politics, and I just started pulling on the thread. How long have we had this knee-jerk anti-intellectualism? Why are we so obsessed with the illusion of perfection? I just kept pulling that thread and it took me all the way back to the 1620s and 1630s.

The interview questions then follow those seven key elements, or Puritan credos, which I will bullet list:

  1. our innate desire for a strongman to fix our problems and punish those who aggrieve us
  2. the temptation to feel chosen, which justifies acting on our base desires
  3. knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism
  4. our impulse to buy and sell salvation on the open market
  5. hard work is holy, while idleness is a sin
  6. how quickly and easily we fall into us-versus-them thinking
  7. an innate need for order, which makes us vulnerable to anyone screaming, ‘Chaos!’ and then offering control

Each of these points leads to examples from history.

On the fifth point, Brownoski identified this as a key element of the industrial revolution…

On the sixth point, the interviewer says this:

But this chapter seems to get at the underlying dynamic behind the whole book: That thinking has origins in our evolutionary past, but our cultural evolution has produced a distinctive Western mindset, expressed most fully in America, which is in tension with that past, and the inclination to join cults reflects a reaction to that. I think that sums it up, but I’d like to hear you elaborate on that.

And there’s a recommendation of that Henrich book, which I have but have not yet read.

And the interview ends:

Cults are situations where there are no checks on power. The reason America has been so successful is because of checks and balances. We learn that in second grade. When you don’t have checks on power, that’s when everything goes to s**t. Whether you’re talking about corporate governance or our current flirtation with autocracy or about a cult who have moved off the radar onto an island somewhere, what you’re dealing with is the danger of unchecked power.

Comments: These are all elements of base human nature, a running theme here, just not expressed in those terms. Also: this fits neatly into the stories about suppression of education.

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Finally for today, an essay about understanding existence that does not rely on the ancient, supernatural, religions. Is such a thing possible?

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 26 May 2025: Seeking a secular story of existence, subtitled “All worldviews need to address the deepest questions.”

Offhand, I would say, of course it’s possible. But not for most people. It takes some education to understand that humans do not live at the center of creation. That our drives for beliefs in an afterlife are driven by wishful thinking, and are not consistent with humanity’s understanding of the actual world as built up over the past few centuries. The “deepest questions” are the wrong questions.

In the early years of the 21st century, the New Atheist wave, headed by Christopher Hitchens, gleefully anticipated the decline of religion, which they considered a malign influence in the world. While they were not uniformly anti-spiritual—Sam Harris was especially spiritually oriented—they were largely cheerful materialists. Undirected forces and matter were the stuff of existence. Mark Lilla described this materialist orientation in political terms: secularists had no truths worth killing over, unlike religious believers.

Only one member of the New Atheist wave—Philip Kitcher in Living with Darwin—expressed the concern that this materialist worldview might prove demoralizing for ordinary people.

How do things look now, approaching 20 years later?

In America and much of the West, the decline in religious affiliation accelerated in the new century. Today, approximately 30% of American adults identify themselves as “nones”—reporting that they are unaffiliated with any religious tradition. Many former houses of worship stand empty. No American religious figure today captures the attention of the culture the way that Reinhold Niebuhr did in the 1950s and Billy Graham did in the 1960s.

Religion is definitely in decline.

And this:

The materialist story favored by the New Atheists asserts that the universe is a dark and lonely place. Random forces and matter lead to unpredictable outcomes, like the emergence of life, but do not yield any meaningful pattern. Humans have evolved a need for meaning and purpose and a fundamentally moral orientation to existence. But these feelings do not reflect anything in reality. They are an evolutionary spandrel, arising out of the need for social organization without constant coercion. In other words, our feelings are illusory.

This story is brisk, a little tragic, but it is bracing. Science has certainly advanced following it.

Well, yes. This is what systematic investigation of reality (i.e. science) has revealed about the world.

The other story is more difficult to describe but it better coheres with human yearning. In this story, the universe is ordered and rational and can be said to lead naturally to complex organization, life, consciousness, self-consciousness, empathy, generosity and love. This is the universe as understood by Alfred North Whitehead, classically, and recently by Bobby Azarian in his book, The Romance of Reality. In this story, human needs reflect reality.

I have that Azarian book, have read 75 pages, and decided to backtrack to some earlier books before returning. I’ll get back to it.

Posted in Human Progress, Lunacy, Religion | Comments Off on America, increasingly anti-science and anti-intellectual, was founded by religious fanatics, as perhaps most Americans do not realize

Education, Religion, Policies that Don’t Work, the Revolt Against Expertise

Posted on Sunday 25 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Heather Cox Richard on the history of government suppression of education, especially as inspired by religion;
  • The GOP keeps promoting policies that history has shown don’t work;
  • The revolt against expertise, yet again.
– – –

Heather Cox Richardson reviews the history of government suppression of education.

Letters from an American: May 24, 2025

Beginning with the Trump administration telling Harvard this past week that it can no longer enroll foreign students, which are about a quarter of the student body there. (Why does the government think it can tell a private university what it can and cannot do?)

While President Donald J. Trump might well have his own reasons for hating a university famous for its brain power, the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump’s attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States.

Beginning,

That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s, when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies complained that men in the eastern districts, who monopolized wealth and political power, were ignoring the needs of westerners. This opposition often took the form of a religious revolt as westerners turned against the carefully reasoned sermons of the deeply educated and politically powerful ministers in the East and followed preachers who claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God’s inspiration.

Then, 100 years ago,

On May 25, 1925, a grand jury in Tennessee indicted 24-year-old football coach and science teacher John T. Scopes for violating Tennessee’s law, passed in March of that year, that made it “unlawful…to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” In other words, Tennessee had banned the teaching of human evolution.

Later the New Deal and the Church League of America which aligned with businessmen against it. Then:

William F. Buckley Jr. applied this line of thinking to higher education in his 1951 God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. In it, Buckley argued that Yale University was corrupted by “atheism” and “collectivism” not because its faculty actually called for atheism and collectivism, but because their embrace of fact-based argument supported the government that had grown out of the New Deal.

This kind of thinking by the religious baffles me, but you hear it all the time. Don’t think! Suppress the facts! Because they would undermine religion. Their own, of course. As Richardson puts it:

Modern universities embraced the Enlightenment tradition of a free search for knowledge in the belief that informed discussion fed by a wide range of ideas was the best way to reach toward truth. As ideas were tested in public debate, people would be able to choose the best of them. This was the basis of academic freedom.

Buckley denied this “superstition.” Truth would not win out in a free contest of ideas, he said; students would simply be led astray. For proof, he offered the fact that most Americans had chosen the New Deal and continued to support its extension. He called for Yale to replace faculty that believed in academic freedom with those who would advance the causes of Christianity and free enterprise.

Buckley, for all that he was regarded as one of the nation’s leading intellectuals, was actually an ideological zealot. (Just as with Ross Douthat today, Buckley believed that *his* religion was the one true one, and so had no qualms about forcing it upon everyone.)

America’s post–World War II university system was the envy of the world, driving innovation and medical and scientific research that made the U.S. economy boom and raised standards of living around the world.

…

As Republicans embraced economic individualism and religion, they also embraced anti-intellectualism. Their version was not unlike that of the early colonists, in which rural Americans, especially those in the West, claimed their evangelical religion made them more worthy than the urban Americans in the East who far outnumbered them.

To the modern day.

Increasingly, far-right activists insisted that all of the pillars of society, including universities, had been corrupted by the liberal ideas behind the modern government and that those pillars must be destroyed. In 2012, college dropout Charlie Kirk and Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery formed Turning Point USA to purge college campuses of those faculty members they saw as purveyors of dangerous ideas. After Trump’s election in 2016, the organization launched the “Professor Watchlist,” which listed faculty members it claimed—without evidence—“discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” (I was one of the first on the list.)

Then JD Vance prattling on about losing “every major powerful institution in the country…”

“We live in a world that has been made effectively by university knowledge” and to rebuild the nation along the lines of white Christian nationalism, the universities must be destroyed. Vance told the audience, “the professors are the enemy.”

No. Intellectuals are too polite to say this but: It’s the liberal ideas that have built modern society and improved the human condition. It’s the religious right, in their zeal to force their antiquated supernatural worldview on the rest of us, who will destroy modern American society, and let the world be run by China, and perhaps Europe. I think the intellectuals are too polite to say this because they believe the religious right is a bunch of loonies who will never actually prevail; they are at odds with reality. Look how incompetent the Trump administration is. Like other cults, they will pass into history, and those who understand the work with reality will prevail. Would that be so.

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Examples include the many things Republicans keep pushing that have been tried before and failed. They don’t learn. They are *certain* they have to work.

The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, 20 May 2025: The GOP’s Big Medicaid Idea Was Tried Before—And Failed Badly, subtitled “Arkansas and Georgia tried work requirements, and the results were not pretty.”

Republican thinking is always so simple-minded; what could be wrong with asking welfare recipients to work? Seems plausible, right? But reality is complicated. Statistics (I think Paul Krugman compiled some) show that there are many different categories of people who receive Medicaid, and only a small per cent are people who might be able to work, and usually there are reasons that are preventing them from working. The article here discusses some of them.

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Another visit to a recurring theme.

The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr, 19 May 2025: R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise, subtitled “It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened?”

Noted in particular for the last lines of this opening paragraph:

The Cabinet confirmation hearings have been agonizing for congressional Democrats, who have watched in horror as Donald Trump has pushed through one outlandish candidate after another. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vaccine skeptic nominated for Secretary of Health and Human Services, was among the most hair-raising. “Vaccinating children is unethical,” he has written. Unable to prevent Kennedy from becoming the country’s top health official, Democrats could only use his hearing to showcase their values. Liberals stand for science. The G.O.P. stands for drinking bleach, freaking out about Satanist pedophiles, and blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers.

But when was it that progressives distrusted science? I realize that if you go back decades enough, before the current left/right split, everyone loved science and technology because they helped the US win World War II.

The article here goes on to point out that RFK Jr was on the side of progressive causes, and even espouses belief in principles that sound very scientific (“evidence, ignoring appeals to authority, reserving judgment, demanding more research…”) The writer thinks Kennedy may have a point about “the power long held by scientific insiders like Fauci.”

There’s a whiff of deep epistemology here. How do we know what we know? But it can’t go on forever.

Drawing a line is necessary: at some point, you have to declare that the Holocaust happened, that vaccines don’t cause autism, and that climate change is real. The philosopher Bernard Williams noted that science isn’t a free market of ideas but a managed one; without filters against cranks, trolls, and merchants of doubt, knowledge production “would grind to a halt.” But in science, and in intellectual inquiry more broadly, where you draw the line matters enormously. Keep things too open and you’re endlessly debating whether Bush did 9/11. Close them too quickly, though, and you turn hasty, uncertain conclusions into orthodoxies. You also marginalize too many intelligent people, who will be strongly encouraged to challenge your legitimacy by seizing on your missteps, broadcasting your hypocrisies, and waving counter-evidence in your face.

It’s a long article that I haven’t fully read. Next time.

Posted in conservatives, Human Progress, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Education, Religion, Policies that Don’t Work, the Revolt Against Expertise

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. …

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”

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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”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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