Tim Urban, WHAT’S OUR PROBLEM?, post 1

(Wait But Why, 2024, 584pp, including 112pp of characters, acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, and bio)

I wrote about this book back in December, before deciding to buy it. Which I did despite some cautionary signs: it’s apparently self-published, it’s enormous, it’s expensive ($50), the only blurbs are by semi-celebrities like Lex Fridman, Andrew Yang, and Elon Musk (!). Worse, upon seeing the actual book, there’s *no index!*. Perhaps a consequence of its being self-published. (Though there are nearly 100 pages of detailed notes, keyed to the main text by page numbers.) On the other hand, he has a “long-form” blog and did a popular TED talk a while back and has some 600K followers.

Also, as I said in that previous post, the topics in the book that I could see via the Amazon preview are very similar to topics I’m interested in on this blog, if perhaps somewhat simplified and popularized, via all sorts of colorful line-drawings and cartoons.

Last month I read about the first 130 pages, then set it down for a while. There’s actually enough of substance in the book so far that I wanted to summarize the beginning before continuing on. The first hundred pages defines his terms, so to speak. And lays out his plan.

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Introduction: The Big Picture

Beginning with this striking diagram:

In several books read recently there has been the idea of a “base” human nature, one that evolved over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years in the ancestral or Savannah environment, optimized for tribal life, in contrast to a more “advanced” or “cosmopolitan” human nature, one arguably more suitable to the global society humans have created in which once isolated tribes have become forced to deal with one another, many learning how to do so for their mutual benefit. But this can’t be quite right. The implication that some higher form of human nature has ‘evolved’ can’t be true because there hasn’t been time, over the past few thousand years, for such evolution to take place. (If I implied such a thing myself, that was an error.) More likely the situation is that there is a range of human attitudes — think Haidt and others — that amounts to built-in diversity. That range served well in the ancestral environment, given the range of different situations that occurred then. But now the environment has changed, misaligning those two ranges. And so there now many people not comfortable living in the modern environment.

Moving on. Author identifies the problem.

1, Technology is exponential. For most of history one year was like the next. Not true for the past couple ‘pages’ in our book. The last page is very different from all those before—chart, p4.
2, More technology means higher stakes. It means more good times, but also badder bad times. We’ve had world wars and now climate change. The pace of change keep dizzying.
3, My society is currently acting like a poopy-pantsed four-year-old who dropped its ice cream. It seems we’re not getting more mature; we’re getting more childish. We’re going backward in wisdom.

Ch1, The Ladder

The author identifies dueling takes on human nature, analogous to the takes by Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, Joshua Greene, George Lakoff, and others. My paraphrases.

The PRIMITIVE MIND is “a set of coded instructions for how to be a successful animal in the animal’s nature habitat.” p14. The coder is natural selection. Occasional bugs make this software better. An animal’s software is actually optimized for the environment of its ancestors, which is OK as long as the environment changes very slowly. But humans, very quickly, have created a new environment called civilization. While our brains are optimized for our old habitat. Like moths thinking a streetlamp is the moon.

There’s also a HIGHER MIND, which can think outside itself and self-reflect and get wiser with experience. P16. It can see the world as it is, and try to behave accordingly. The primitive mind takes care of eating and sleeping, which higher mind is fine with, when it makes sense. When primitive mind takes change, you drift over into a no-sense zone. Like giving into temptation to buy a bag of candy. In the ancient world there was no processed food.

Then: the tug of war between these two minds can be represented as a four-step Ladder, p19.

  • Higher mind in control
  • Higher mind has the edge
  • Primitive mind has the edge
  • Primitive mind in control

Higher mind doesn’t mind the primitive mind having its fun, but when primitive mind is riled up, it fills the mind with smoky fog, dulling the consciousness, and higher mind. We become shortsighted and small-minded, petty, given to hypocrisy; our worst selves.

From these author developed an Idea Spectrum, a way to depict the range of opinions on a particular topic. The Higher Mind knows that humans are often delusional, and tries to learn more to become less ignorant. Primitive Mind disagrees; it’s concerned with beliefs that generate survival behavior, whether or not they’re true. And these are acquired in early life from family and community, and treat them as sacred objects. Higher Mind seeks truth; Primitive Mind seeks confirmation of existing beliefs. The four rungs on the Ladder correspond to four ways of forming beliefs.

(These are depicted with various diagrams. I’ll just summarize in words.)

Rung 1: Thinking like a scientist. You start with “I don’t know” and follow evidence wherever it takes you. You form a hypothesis: gather information, evaluate information (largely about knowing who to trust, and mastering the art of skepticism), then puzzle together a hypothesis. Express this idea publicly, and get responses. They’d welcome being wrong. (Quote from Adam Grant in Think Again). They search for the humility sweet spot between arrogance and insecurity, p28. Knowing all beliefs are subject to change by changing times or new evidence. It’s hard to do all this.

Rung 2: Thinking like a sports fan. Now you have a goal in mind, and are subject to motivated reasoning. And confirmation bias. This is Primitive Mind at work. You alternate between ‘can I believe it?’ for confirmation, and ‘must I believe it?’ when hearing dissent. You tend toward the arrogant side of conviction; it feels good to think that you are right. Once your motivation passes your interest in truth, you’re in ‘Unconvinceable Land’ where people can’t be persuaded by any amount of evidence. Religion, ideology, dogma.

Rung 3: Thinking like an attorney. It’s their job to win, and nothing can alter their allegiance. You don’t start at point A, you start at B, knowing your conclusion. In the real world a courtroom hosts both sides of a case, not just one. Attorneys will never admit a point and consider that they’re wrong.

Rung 4, Thinking like a zealot. Their sacred ideas are precious babies to be adored and protected. Challenges to their beliefs are taken as personal insults. The is the Primitive Mind on overdrive. Zealots live in simple, crisp, black and white worlds.

These four can be grouped into high-rung thinking and low-rung thinking. Each of us is a mix.

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That’s only through page 37. What I like about the book is that he starts with basic principles — his primitive mind and higher mind — and extrapolates them into a range of behaviors of people. A bit like building up a geometry from postulates.

Further topics in this long book include “liberal games” (that is building systems of rules to manage primitive impulses, like the US Constitution was intended to do), the downward spiral of tribalism, the rise of the golem (i.e. the Republican party since the 60s), social justice, colleges, society, and ideas about how to change course. Here’s the author’s diagram of the book:

Posted in Book Notes, conservatives, Culture, Human Nature, Human Progress | Comments Off on Tim Urban, WHAT’S OUR PROBLEM?, post 1

Palace in the Sky, For the One

  • Several items today about the Trump administration’s acceptance from Qatar of a $400 million luxury 747, for Trump’s personal use;
  • How Trump shrugs off intelligence briefings; he knows what he knows because he’s smart;
  • How the story of a woman who struggled to get a job at NASA was taken down, and then she was fired, because DEI;
  • Another take on why the current administration is defunding the investments into technology and innovation that have made America great.
  • And so, it’s hard to be unaware that Americans are living in a fading nation.
– – –

The latest example of egregious behavior by Trump that most of the MAGA folks don’t care about is the gift by Qatar of a $400 million tricked-out Boeing 747, to serve as Trump’s Air Force One stand-in. Presidents aren’t suppose to get big gifts like this. It’s in the Constitution: the Emoluments Clause. But clearly Trump and MAGA do not care about the Constitution. And the right lawyers can justify anything.

ABC News, 11 May 2025: Trump administration poised to accept ‘palace in the sky’ as a gift for Trump from Qatar: Sources, subtitled “The luxury jumbo jet is to be used as Air Force One, sources told ABC News.”

In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

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Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, 12 May 2025: Donald Trump’s Corruption Reaches New Heights, subtitled “His ‘flying palace’ scheme could not be more brazen.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi—whom Trump also evidently gets to use and keep for life—told ABC news that Trump’s top White House lawyer, David Warrington, had determined this gift is “legally permissible” because it is being directed to the United States Air Force and will then be transferred to Trump’s presidential library foundation. (Bondi herself formerly received $115,000 a month to lobby on behalf of Qatar.) These very real, very serious lawyers also determined that acceptance of the plane does not constitute a bribe because the gift does not hinge on an official act. Bondi provided a legal memorandum addressing all of these issues to the White House counsel’s office last week, after Warrington asked her about the legality of the Pentagon accepting a massive palace in the sky. The memo has not yet been released to the public, quite possibly because its reasoning would fall apart upon even the slightest independent inspection.

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The Bulwark, William Kristol, 12 May 2025: A Garish, Outlandish, Stunningly Corrupt Act, subtitled “Trump wants Qatar to gift him a shiny new Air Force One because he thinks the Emoluments Clause is for suckers.”

I’m old enough to remember when this was a republic. A proud republic. We were proud to be different from the principalities and powers of the old world. We were confident of our superiority to the hereditary aristocracies and monarchies that had dominated political life everywhere on the globe, and that still did in many places.

In those older and simpler days we spoke of and even believed in republican virtue.

… [[ details about emoluments ]] …

How naïve we were back then.

Now, the president of the United States is boasting of receiving as a gift a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. The plane will be upgraded to serve not as the Air Force One but as his Air Force One, since it will only be available for use by the government of the United States during his time in office. It will then revert to him—well, nominally to his presidential library, but it will of course be totally at his disposal—after he leaves office.

Trump responds to critics about how the plane is “FREE” and “The Dems are World Class Losers!!!”

This is the voice of old-world autocracy. Those who take seriously the constraints and requirements of republican government are fools. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.

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Slate, Fred Kaplan, 12 May 2025: The Free Plane Trump Wants to Accept Might Just Be a Trojan Horse, subtitled “The violation of ethical norms isn’t the only jaw-dropping part of this deal.”

Air Force One is equipped with everything that a president needs in the air—all the communications gear, intelligence files, and other top-secret paraphernalia that he or she would have on the ground. And of course, all the aides traveling along would have their phones as well.

One can only wonder how many listening devices and cybertools the Qataris will plant inside that plane before turning it over to the White House.

Recalling the US embassy in Moscow that the Russians offered to build, back in the 1970s, with the same problem.

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JMG, 12 May 2025: MSNBC: Trump Has Long History Of Lying About Planes

Quoting Steve Benen at MSNBC

In Donald Trump’s first term, the president cultivated an unexpectedly amusing list of incidents related to airplanes. I actually maintained a list, documenting a curious array of stories in which the Republican suggested that F-35s are literally invisible, whined about the complexity of piloting, referenced F-52s that didn’t exist outside of video games, complained to members of Congress that the emir of Kuwait’s plane was bigger than his, and (among other things) got caught lying about Japan buying U.S. fighter jets and lying about Finland doing the same thing. In his second term, the news at the intersection of Trump and planes is far less funny.

Trump lives in a fantasy world.

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Conservatives, including Trump, know what they know, and don’t need any new “information.”

MSNBC, Maddow Blog, Steven Benen, 12 May 2025: Trump reportedly shrugs off intelligence briefings he needs, but doesn’t want, subtitled “In his first term, the president blew off intelligence briefings that he needed to govern. The problem is even worse in his second term.”

Beginning with Kash Patel.

It’s worth emphasizing that different presidents have approached these briefings in different ways. George W. Bush received intelligence briefings on a nearly daily basis. Barack Obama received briefings roughly every other day, but he was known to be a voracious reader of the written President’s Daily Brief (often referred to as the PDB). Joe Biden received an in-person briefing once or twice a week, but like Obama, he was also known to read the PDB briefing book.

Trump, meanwhile, reportedly doesn’t read the PDB, and if the Politico report is accurate, he’s receiving in-person briefings roughly once every 10 days.

Broadly speaking, a couple of angles are worth keeping in mind in response to reporting like this. The first is probably obvious: Trump is dealing with serious national security challenges — war in Ukraine, a crisis in the Middle East, China expanding its global influence, domestic security threats, et al. — and the United States is being led by an incurious former television personality who desperately needs — but apparently isn’t getting — valuable information that would lead to better decision-making.

Less obvious, however, is the pattern: The problem isn’t just that Trump is avoiding intelligence he needs; the problem is made worse by the fact that Trump has always avoided intelligence he needs.

During his transition process in 2016, for example, Trump skipped nearly all of his intelligence briefings. Asked why, the Republican told Fox News in December 2016, “Well, I get it when I need it. … I don’t have to be told — you know, I’m, like, a smart person.”

Sigh. Dunning-Kruger. And even so, smart is not well-informed. He’s an idiot.

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More about the current administration’s cruelty (which is the point, said Adam Serwer).

Michael Swanwick posted this on Facebook today, with this comment:

This woman went from extreme poverty–she lived under a bridge for three years–to a job at NASA. They put up a page celebrating her determination to get an education and then a position. Then the administration decided that since she was a black woman, that was DEI, and took down the page. And then they fired her.

Space.com, Josh Dinner, 12 May 2025: NASA celebrated this employee’s story of resilience, then tried to scrub it from the internet. Then fired her., subtitled “It feels like everything that I worked for has been taken down little by little.”

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And one more about the current administration tearing down what has made the US great. (Are they agents of a foreign power intent on taking America down? Or mindless penny-pinchers heedless of anything but short-term consequences?)

Washington Post, opinion by Bina Venkataraman, 12 May 2025: RIP American innovation, subtitled “Why destroy the funding that made the United States a leader in technology and invention?”

Whether they are geeks in garages or eggheads in university labs, American entrepreneurs have built their ideas and fortunes on the back of basic research supported by taxpayers, who then reap the rewards. It’s not an accident of geography or artifact of culture that the United States has bred some of the best inventors of the 20th and 21st century. The hidden engine of the country’s illustrious track record has been the grants given to academic researchers by federal agencies that the U.S. DOGE Service has been decimating and that President Donald Trump proposes to shrink catastrophically in the next budget.

Concluding, many paragraphs later,

There is no plainer betrayal of the MAGA promise to restore the nation’s storied past than to destroy this legacy of invention. What we’re losing is far more important, however, than the pride one felt being part of that America. We’re losing the country’s future.­

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It’s by now hard to be unaware that we’re living in a fading nation. And it’s hard to imagine how this might reverse itself.

Posted in authoritarianism, Conservative Resistance, Culture, Decline, Politics | Comments Off on Palace in the Sky, For the One

Disconnects from Reality, and a Couple Positive Notes

On the one hand,

  • A Truth+ movie about ‘Lizard People’;
  • RFK Jr vows to stop chemtrails;
  • Democrats have a ‘dictatorship mentality’?
  • Texas Christians presume to spend a month celebrating God’s promises;
  • Tom Nichols on a witch hunt at the State Department;
  • When rain falls, Trump takes credit; when it stops, Biden’s to blame;
  • Making misinformation great again, on the Internet;
  • How MAGA’s favorite fantasy, The Turner Diaries, is about genocide against racial minorities.

On the other hand,

  • Adam Lee on how if America won’t build the future, China will;
  • How America’s fourth estate — journalism — has and is keeping us advised of the lawlessness on the right.
– – –

On the one hand…

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Talking Points Memo, Hunter Walker, 6 May 2025: President Trump’s Media Company Is Offering Movies About ‘Lizard People’ And Other Wild Conspiracy Theories, subtitled “Among other things, movies on the Truth+ streaming service have suggested Jesus Christ and Buddha are aliens.” (via)

This bizarre narrative echoes a paranoia about shadowy reptilians that has persisted for decades on the absolute fringes of the conspiracy theory movement. However, in this case, the story of “serpent or lizard-like aliens” who are secretly wielding influence over the human race isn’t coming from some pamphlet or dark corner of the internet. It is among the most watched films available for streaming on a service run by a multibillion dollar media company that is owned by the President of the United States.

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RFK vows to stop chemtrails.

PolitiFact, 5 May 2025: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated on April 29, 2025 in a town hall event: DARPA is spraying the skies with chemicals that are in jet fuel.

Rating: Pants On Fire!

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Projection.

Ring Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 5 May 2025: Michele Bachmann Says Democrats Have ‘A Dictatorship Mentality’

They aren’t focused on solving problems. They aren’t [focused] on making our lives better or bringing down costs. What do they want? They want power. So these are the last people we should ever give power to because they want power for power’s sake.”

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Dim, or arrogant?

Friendly Atheist, 6 May 2025: Texas lawmakers want a month-long celebration of God’s promises in the Bible, subtitled “With ‘Promise Month,’ politicians are pushing a Christian agenda in a secular democracy”

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Which problems is this solving?

The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 1 May 2025: A Witch Hunt at the State Department, subtitled “Trump’s commissars are looking for ideological enemies.”

Considering how obsessed Trump’s top people are with calling everything “communism,” it’s ironic how much this whole business seems like a page from Soviet history, with Party commissars trying to identify ideological saboteurs in their midst. Under Stalin, such contacts with unapproved persons, or even with people once trusted who had fallen under suspicion, could carry fatal consequences. Trumpism is more like the later regime under Leonid Brezhnev: Apparatchiks who ran afoul of new guidance or who might have been associated with people now out of favor could find themselves out of a job, demoted to menial work, or even prosecuted for petty infractions of the law.

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(This is from 10 days ago.)

The Bulwark, William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift, 1 May 2025: Donald Trump, an All-Powerful President With No Power at All, subtitled “When the rain falls, Trump wants credit. When the rain stops, Biden’s to blame.”

This crown-on, crown-off posture has become a regular thing for Trump. One moment, he’s the master of the universe, demanding total prostration from world leaders and government officials and taking credit for all blessings that may rain on the lives of the people. The next moment, he’s a very smol bean working with limited knowledge and a limited toolset, and why are you bullying him by asking him whether the law requires him to give hearings to deportees?

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Make Disinformation Great Again

The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany, 5 May 2025: We’re Back to the Actually Internet, subtitled “Fact-checking is out, ‘Community Notes’ are in.”

Meta’s abandonment of traditional fact-checking may be cynical, but misinformation is also an intractable problem. Fact-checking assumes that if you can get a trustworthy source to provide better information, you can save people from believing false claims. But people have different ideas of what makes a trustworthy source, and there are times when people want to believe wrong things. How can you stop them? And, the second question that platforms are now asking themselves: How hard should you try?

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And their go-to conspiracy theory is…?

Salon, Gregg Barak, 30 Apr 2025: MAGA returns to a fave fantasy to tune out Trump’s troubles, subtitled “The right’s go-to conspiracy theory can help explain why Trump’s base won’t drop him anytime soon”

There has been much attention rightly paid to Project 2025 during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. However, not enough attention has been paid to modern America’s original manual of hatred, “The Turner Diaries.”

First published in 1978 and recently banned by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon following the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, thanks to the combined minds of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, this racist dystopian novel about a white supremacist insurrection undergirds the Trumpian worldview. In a nutshell, the book is an apocalyptic tale of genocide against racial minorities set in a near-future America.

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On the other hand…

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A recurring theme of late.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 22 Apr 2025: If America won’t build the future, China will gladly do it, subtitled “The US isn’t the only nation capable of technological progress.”

While the US is lobotomizing itself by purging scientists and starving universities of research grants, our main competitor, China, is forging ahead.

The main example being a nuclear power plant fueled by thorium.

From the standpoint of our shared humanity, I believe we should welcome this news. It would be wrong to give in to provincialism, believing that nothing counts unless America does it. Progress is progress, wherever it happens and whoever achieves it.

In the long run, scientific and technological achievement benefits all of humanity. New discoveries spread and diffuse until they’re part of the common knowledge base of the world, which raises everyone’s living standards. …

At this moment of history, when some nations are falling under the shadow of malignant anti-intellectualism, it’s reassuring to know that progress is continuing somewhere. Even if the US is marching backwards, we’re not dragging the rest of the world with us. Smarter nations will continue to fund research, make discoveries, and build the future whether we join in or not.

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Room for optimism.

Salon, Lucian K. Truscott IV, 6 May 2025: Our fourth branch of government is saving us, subtitled “There is only one reason why our country has survived this terrible storm of political lawlessness”

When Donald Trump appeared on a national television program and told “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker that he does not know whether he is compelled as president to uphold the Constitution, America was hit with an unforeseen and unprecedented question: Just how far gone are we as a country?

The answer is, pretty far.

Recalling Nixon and Watergate, Reagan and Iran-Contra, Gingrich, Bush. And then recent positive signs, such as Substack.

A new ecosystem of news gathering and distribution has sprung up because people are unhappy with mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post — which has caved to Trump under the ownership of Trump-suck-up Jeff Bezos — and the New York Times, which almost daily seems to come up with story headlines and reports that minimize Trump’s anti-democratic behavior and policies. People are subscribing to Substack columns and other online outlets that provide reports and analysis that fill in the blanks left by the fading and failing MSM. An entire world of podcasts and video reporting has sprung up to repair and replace cable and network news outlets that are increasingly seen as irrelevant to what people want and need.

The answer to lies is to speak the truth. The answer to repression is to stand up and take a stand. The answer to fear is courage. The answer to the attempted closing of American political life is taking to the streets. The answer to authoritarianism is political freedom. The answer to feeling alone is standing together.

Study history. It’s the same in every repressive regime. And we know that because of what the journalists managed to report, despite attempts by the authoritarians to shut them down.

Posted in authoritarianism, Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Politics | Comments Off on Disconnects from Reality, and a Couple Positive Notes

How the US is retreating into tribalism

  • The White House press secretary, addressing the firing of the head of the Library of Congress, is either ignorant, stupid, or lying;
  • How the natalist movement, perhaps led by Elon Musk, relies on endless growth, which is not plausible;
  • To some MAGA folks religious freedom means you can be any kind of Christian you want; Roger Stone would execute anyone who questions Trump; How Trump pleads ignorance about so many things; How a simplistic word search screws MAGA voters; The surgeon general nominee suggests trusting only people you can look in the eye.
– – –

It’s impossible to summarize a substantial book in half an hour, which is why my Bronowski summary yesterday and today leaves me with less than usual time for today’s news items.

From Facebook.

Others have made similar points. The Library of Congress collects *every* book published. That’s its mission. It’s not a lending library. For anyone, let alone kids. She’s stupid, lying, or both.

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I’m perplexed by the notion that global population has to keep expanding, apparently the main rational being that we need more kids to take care of the oldsters. (See Elon Musk and the Natalist movement.) This can’t go on forever. Perhaps we need to find another, a sustainable, economy, that does not depend on endless (cancerous once might say) capitalistic growth.

Vox, Kelsey Piper, 10 May 2025: Progressives should care that the global population is set to fall, subtitled “Don’t let polarization distract you from one of the most important issues the world faces.”

The key here is that our economics are structured on endless growth.

You might wonder: What’s the big deal? Wouldn’t fewer people mean fewer demands on resources, more space and opportunity for everyone else?

But the economics of population don’t work this way. An aging and shrinking population means a massive decrease in expected quality of life in the future. It means a smaller working population will be supporting a larger elderly population. It means there will be fewer people to do all of the things that don’t technically need to be done, but that make life richer and more interesting. And a shrinking population doesn’t represent a one-time adjustment, but a dimming state of affairs that will continue to degrade until something reverses it.

This is the kind of quandary science fiction should try to solve. And it probably has.

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Boing Boing, Grant St. Clair, 8 May 2025: Watch MAGA supporters struggle to explain religious freedom at NRA convention

I watched some but not all of the video. I’m noting this for the end of the commentary, especially the last line.

My favorite part of any Good Liars video is the moment the interviewee realizes they’ve been backed into a corner and silently walks away, and this one delivers in spades. An all-timer TGL moment comes from one attendee explaining his views on freedom of religion: he believes you can be whatever kind of Christian you want.

These people will always be with us.

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Stone Age mentality.

JMG, from Daily Beast, 9 May 2025: Roger Stone: Execute Sen. Mark Kelly For Treason

Why? For “Questioning Trump’s crypto connections.”

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Isn’t it odd that Trump pleads ignorance about so many things his administration is doing?

Washington Post, Aaron Blake, 10 May 2025: The many big things Trump ‘didn’t know’ about, subtitled “Repeatedly in his second term, Trump has pleaded ignorance about major events and suggested he’s not involved in major decisions.”

The first line of this piece:

One of the major themes of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was the idea that Joe Biden had no idea what was happening around him.

And repeatedly he’s claimed no knowledge about all sorts of things, from Project 2025, to Casey Means.

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Once again, a simplistic word search approach goes wrong.

The New Republic, Greg Sargent, 10 May 2025: Angry Trump Kills “Woke” Program—and Accidentally Screws MAGA Voters, subtitled “It’s called the Digital Equity Act. That word—’equity’—caught the White House’s attention. So now Trump is moving to nix funding—but it could cut off millions destined for red America.

The theme tag on this article is “Clown Show.”

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And some examination of this unqualified surgeon general nominee.

Slate, Shannon Palus, 10 May 2025: Let Them Eat Flackers, subtitled “Trump’s surgeon general nominee is a disaster in many ways. It begins with her favorite cracker.”

First about those crackers:

The specific brand of noncracker crackers that she recommends frequently are made of flax seeds, and are called, unfortunately, Flackers.

I tried the Flackers after listening to Means talk about them. … They look like a bunch of flax seeds glued together and taste like dense particleboard squares dipped in apple cider vinegar. Crumbled onto a salad, they are actually not bad. I’d eat them again, I think, if they were there. They do not, and I cannot stress this enough, come close to being an adequate substitute for chips. I cannot imagine seeing them on a cheese board at a public event, let alone topping one with a dollop of brie.

To hear Means tell it, though, the alternative is the devil.

Everything about modern nutrition and health care is bad. Near the end of the piece:

As with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., her critiques of our food systems and treatment of the environment can, if you just catch them on TV for a second, make sense. But what that translates to in practice seems to be that you personally need to figure out how to solve that for yourself, including by looking farmers in the eyes and being responsible for your child’s vaccine schedule rather than trusting the recommendations of many, many, many, many doctors, researchers, and scientists.

Again, this seems to me to be a retreat into tribalism, into trusting only people you can look in the eye, and rejecting any knowledge that has accumulated over millennia that you can’t verify first-hand.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Politics | Comments Off on How the US is retreating into tribalism

J. Bronowksi: THE ASCENT OF MAN

(Little, Brown, 1973, 448pp, including 9pp (in tiny print) of bibliography and index)

This is a substantial book that was popular in its time but is probably not really recommendable now, simply because it’s 50 years out of date in those sections that impinge on current science. (That’s the first problem.) It was a big deal in the 1970s because it was the book companion to a 13-part BBC TV series (it would have been on PBS in the States) by a well-known erudite mathematician/historian, who hosted and narrated the show as it was filmed in various spots around the world. It followed the similar series CIVILISATION by Kenneth Clark, and was followed by three or four similar shows, including Carl Sagan’s CONTACT in 1980. Television was in its first prestige period, and least with public television, in that it could finance big-budget documentaries like these.

And therein lies the second problem. The author notes that the text of the book is virtually unchanged from the show’s script, aside from a tense references and so on. Thus the structure of the book reflects the structure of the show, which focused on events that happened at those various spots. Thus, in this book we learn probably too many details about Galileo’s trial before the Inquisition than we need to know (we get pages of transcript), and too many technical details about breeding hybrid garden peas, which Gregor Mendel did, than we need to know. Presumably Bronowski was standing in the room where the trial was held, and later standing in Mendel’s monastery room, when he discussed these topics on camera. The book is heavily illustrated with diagrams and shots from the filmed locations.

I probably saw the show and read the book when they came out in the ’70s. I don’t have a recording of the show but I did find a couple episodes of it on YouTube, and watched the first, here.

It’s worth looking through the book at least in summary to see what topics Bronowski chose to consider as representing the “ascent” of man (meaning of course humanity, men and women, but “man” was the all-purpose word for the species back then; I’ll follow suit in the summary here). Especially given that the previous series, Kenneth Clark’s CIVILISATION, confined itself entirely the *western* civilisation, from Rome to the present, with virtually no acknowledge of Asia or the Americas or anywhere else, and with an apparent fondness for cathedrals. (Also, Bronowski chose “ascent” in the title as a deliberate counterpoint to Darwin’s famous book.)

Ch1, Lower than the Angels
About the evolution of man beginning in Africa. This is the weakest chapter since so many more details about this period have been discovered in the past 50 years; Bronowski uses obsolete terms like Peking Man and Proconsul, and didn’t know about the other cousin species, along with Neanderthal, that have been discovered in recent decades. (See Harari.) Still, the best part of Bronowski is his philosophical purview. Art and science both involve the ability to visualize the future, he writes; “Cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagine.” [[ And this of course fits nice with my big theme of how science fiction fits into everything. ]]

Ch2, The Harvest of the Seasons
About agriculture. How biological evolution took millions of years; cultural evolution has occurred only over the past 12,000 years or so. Most of this is familiar, but Bronowski recognizes none of the downfalls of sedentary life, as dwelled upon by Harari.

Ch3, The Grain in the Stone
About structures built of rock, Machu Picchu and Greek structures built with beams, and Roman structures built with arches, first semicircles and later ovals, enabling all those huge cathedrals. Freemasons are what those traveling construction workers were called.

Ch4, The Hidden Structure
How fire inspired alchemy; it doesn’t just destroy, it transforms. Copper the earliest metal known, but like the other pure metals (silver, gold) too soft to take an edge; until the discovery of alloys. From iron came steel, and Japanese swords. Alchemy focused on mercury and sulfur, then salt. The discovery that air is composed of different gases. The idea of atoms.

Ch 5, The Music of the Spheres
Mathematics, number systems, Pythagoras and harmony in nature. His proof. Euclid’s elements of geometry. Ptolemy’s theory that everything revolved around the Earth was wrong, but it lasted 1400 years. Rome fell, with the help of Christianity; Islam became the center of the scientific world, building mechanical computers, simplifying Roman numerals with Arabic numbers. Christianity return to Spain; ancient Greek texts translated into Latin, and the discovery of perspective in painting, Kepler realized the true motions of the planet; Newton and Leibniz invented calculus.

Ch6, The Starry Messenger
Astronomy was the first science in the modern sense, since its observations could be turned into exact numbers. All cultures keep calendars to manage the plant and the harvest. Copernicus put the sun at the center in 1543, but waited years to publish, fearing church backlash. Galileo bought a spyglass in Venice in 608 and saw Jupiter’s moons. He created the modern scientific method. Galileo was naive thinking people could be persuaded by evidence; anyone against the church was a heretic. He was put on trial and forced the recant.

Ch7, The Majestic Clockwork
The center of gravity of the civilized world shifts to northern Europe. Newton born 1642. He calculated the force of gravity, worked in optics, did experiments to prove his ideas. Newton assumed that space was flat and infinite; that universe lasted 200 years, until Einstein, whose ideas were extrapolated from Michelson’s experiment showing the speed of light was the same in all directions. What would it be like to ride on a beam of light? It led to the conclusion that there is no universal time. Relativity.

Ch8, The Drive for Power
The Industrial Revolution began around 1760, just before two others: the American in 1776, the French in 1789. In England. Working at home was no longer sufficient, and that was work in poverty and darkness; by 1820 workers went to factories. The revolution came from machines: the mill, the water wheel. Canals (called ‘navigation’) were built across England. In America Benjamin Franklin wrote his almanack, realized lightning was electricity. Iron boats, iron architecture. Mass production came from factories that were ghastly. The cardinal sin became idleness; everything was about extracting power from nature, ideas reflected in poetry of the time. Lots of wacky invention; then the railroads. We’re still in the Industrial Revolution, which has brought about social and intellectual equality, and established the unity of nature.

Ch9, The Ladder of Creation
Evolution: Darwin, and Wallace. On Darwin’s trip on the Beagle he realized species were not immutable, but new of no mechanism to drive them apart. When he did, he didn’t publish. Wallace traveled to the Amazon to collect specimens for museums. When he contacted Darwin back in England, they published a paper, that went unnoticed; so Darwin wrote his book, published in 1859. So: the world is not static. How to tell what came before? Look to chemistry. Much richer evidence for evolution accumulated over the next century. Amino acids, the early atmosphere of Earth, Stanley Miller’s experience, the four bases of DNA.

Ch10, World Within World
Elements were discovered and found to be ordered by Mendeleev, in a table with gaps that implied new elements would be found. Electrons were discovered; atoms weren’t indivisible after all. Thus began modern physics: a great collective work of proposed models and bigger and bigger machines to test predictions of new particles. The atom was imagined to be a little solar system, with electrons circling the nucleus, moving from one orbit to another, each quantum jump corresponding to a particular color of light. Neutrons were discovered, fired at atoms to deduce their structure. Hydrogen became helium in stars; then in turn into heavier atoms like carbon, all the way to uranium. Is the universe running down? No; statistics allows order to be build in some places while disorder takes over in others. [[ this was the key concept of the Greene and Hidalgo books read last year. ]] Evolution is a ladder of such steps, which author calls “stratified stability.”

Ch11, Knowledge or Certainty
Physics in the 20th century showed there is no absolute knowledge, that all information is imperfect. We need shorter waves of light to see small things, but no matter how precise our instruments, things still look fuzzy. Debates about electrons (particles or waves?) led to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or principle of tolerance. By this time Hitler and others were coming to power — ironically, in displays of monstrous certainty. Leo Szilard and information theory, he tried warning Roosevelt. But the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima anyway. The human dilemma has two parts: the belief that the ends justify the means, and the assertion of dogmas that close the mind. It is not science that dehumanizes people; science is a form of knowledge, open to error and the possibility that we are wrong.

Ch12, Generation Upon Generation
Gregor Mendel and genetics, the basis for the modern life sciences. He flunked school and became a monk, studying garden peas. He published his results, and no one cared (and the other monks didn’t like it). It took decades for his work to be noticed, which explained how sex produces diversity, the propeller of evolution. Eventually these ideas were married to the understanding of DNA, and how a child inherits genes from both parents. Oddly, the author muses, many creation myths seem to yearn for an ancestral clone — Eve cloned from Adam’s rib, e.g. And he speculated how matches between suitable males and females drove the pace of human evolution. [[ This last seems naive now, given the nuances of modern evolutionary psychology. ]]

Ch13, The Long Childhood
Man is both a social and solitary animals. Human culture, the mind, is plastic. Art and science are both expressions of this mind. The brain isn’t just a computer; it’s a learning machine. Specific areas control certain functions. E.g. the mind is wired to learn language. It has functions for thinking about the future. People can postpone gratification. Childhood, puberty, youth is about learning how to do this. Hamlet is about trying to reach a decision–until it’s too late. We revere our children. Civilizations fall when they limit the freedom of the imagination of the young. Yet most sons do what their fathers did. Only a minority learn new things, ascend ladders of promotion. In the church, that ladder ends with “now that shalt not question.” The democracy of the intellect comes from the printed book. Thus the age-old conflict between intellectual leadership and civil authority. A scientific society is one in which specialists do their work, but everyone understands how nature works. “You cannot possibly maintain that informed integrity if you let other people run the world for you while you yourself continue to live out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs.” 436.8 A knowledge of man’s origins must become commonplace or we shall not exist. Author is saddened to see a retreat in the west: into Zen Buddhism, false profound questions, extra-sensory perception. “Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.” Civilization is in a balance. If we give up, some other culture will take our place, in Africa or China.

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This last chapter is prescient: the modern US is abandoning knowledge right and left, in favor of civil authoritarianism and all sorts of woo beliefs. And indeed we may be handing the world to China. He understands the point that Pinker was at pains to explain in THE BLANK SLATE 20 some years later. There’s also the flavor of Wilson’s CONSILIENCE here: that art and science together form the basis of a mature culture.

Posted in Book Notes, Culture, History, Human Nature, Human Progress, Science | Comments Off on J. Bronowksi: THE ASCENT OF MAN

The US Is Becoming a Demon-Haunted World. Not Necessarily Again.

  • The National Science Foundation abolishes its 37 divisions;
  • Yet another Trump sycophant from Fox gains a top position, as DC’s top prosecutor;
  • Loonies: Loomer on witchcraft, Hegseth on homosexuality;
  • How wacko conspiracy theories are now affecting the highest levels of the US government;
  • And recalling Sagan’s THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD, and Asimov’s “cult of ignorance” quote. And how all this is an inescapable part of human nature.
– – –

 

Once again, the United States is ceding leadership in science to the rest of the world.

Science, Jeffrey Mervis, 8 May 2025: Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions, subtitled “Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund”

The National Science Foundation (NSF), already battered by White House directives and staff reductions, is plunging into deeper turmoil. According to sources who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight NSF directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced. The current directors and deputy directors will lose their titles and might be reassigned to other positions at the agency or elsewhere in the federal government.

The consolidation appears to be driven in part by President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut the agency’s $4 billion budget by 55% for the 2026 fiscal year that begins on 1 October. NSF’s decision to abolish its divisions could also be part of a larger restructuring of the agency’s grantmaking process that involves adding a new layer of review. NSF watchers fear that a smaller, restructured agency could be more vulnerable to pressure from the White House to fund research that suits its ideological bent.

Again, this sounds like bureaucrats presuming to tell the experts how to do their work.

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More loonies.

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 8 May 2025: Jeanine Pirro’s Fox producer thought she was “nuts.” Trump just named her DC’s top prosecutor., subtitled “Pirro is a diehard Trump sycophant who thinks the DOJ should serve his interests and punish his enemies”

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro is so unhinged that the network took her show off the air following the 2020 election out of (subsequently confirmed) fear that she’d use it to launder deranged conspiracy theories about the results. But she’s a fanatical supporter of President Donald Trump, and that is apparently enough to get her tapped as the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C.

Trump announced Thursday night that he was appointing Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, specifically praising her Fox News career. Earlier in the day, Trump indicated that he planned to move on from acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, another right-wing media figure, who appeared unable to muster sufficient votes for Senate confirmation. Pirro is the 23rd person with Fox on their resume whom Trump has selected to join his second administration.

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JMH, 9 May 2025: Loomer: Surgeon General Pick Practices Witchcraft

I love that this is one crazy complaining a different flavor of crazy.

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LGBTQNation, Daniel Villareal, 9 May 2025: Pete Hegseth’s pastor says homosexuality is caused by abuse & can be cured by Jesus, subtitled “The pastor called gay people ‘sodomites’ that are “perverting” God’s beautiful design.”

No it isn’t and no it can’t. These people are so aggressively simple-minded, and deeply superstitious.

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This isn’t news, is it? Wacko conspiracy theories have been around for decades, right? Well, it is news. The US, as represented by its government, is losing its collective mind.

NY Times, Tiffany Hsu, 6 May 2025: Trump’s Return to Power Elevates Ever Fringier Conspiracy Theories, subtitled “At every level of government, authority figures are embracing once-extreme ideas, including that the Earth is flat or that the state controls the weather.”

People who question whether the Earth is round — a fact understood by the ancient Greeks and taught to American children in elementary school — might have been political pariahs a decade ago. Now, they’re running local Republican parties in Georgia and Minnesota and seeking public office in Alabama.

A prominent far-right activist who has said, despite years of research and intelligence establishing otherwise, that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were an inside job by the U.S. government commemorated the 9/11 anniversary last year alongside President Trump.

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged the agency’s support last month for a fight involving so-called chemtrails, a debunked theory that the white condensation lines streaming behind airplanes are toxic, or could even be used for nefarious purposes.

Conspiracy theories that were relegated to random and often anonymous online forums are now being championed or publicly debated by increasingly powerful people. Mr. Trump in particular has embraced, elevated and even appointed to his cabinet people promoting these theories — giving the ideas a persuasive authority and a dangerous proximity to policy.

With examples. And ending:

Mr. Trump referred to “demonic forces” on the campaign trail and called Democrats a “very demonic party.” Days before interviewing both Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Musk at Mar-a-Lago on Election Day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, posted a YouTube video claiming he had been attacked in the night “by a demon or by something unseen.” Dan Bongino, a right-wing pundit and podcaster who is now the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on his show that “demon energy is real.”

“It’s no longer an abstraction — it’s about straight-up demons,” Mr. Carusone said. “The fever swamps are all of our reality right now.”

Way back in the 1990s Carl Sagan published THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD. (My review here.) Americans were settling into irrationalism even then. And before that, in 1980, was Isaac Asimov’s famous cult of ignorance quote. Is this something peculiarly American? I suspect not, just that it’s more visible in the US because it contrasts with our dominance and performance in scientific achievement, especially the big successful projects that NASA has pulled off, and technological achievements Americans have produced like the internet and the iPhone. Rather, as I’ve come to conclude over the past couple decades, it’s due to the inescapable lingering of primitive human nature, which sees agency in everything and prefers tribal allegiance to abstract expertise.

Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on The US Is Becoming a Demon-Haunted World. Not Necessarily Again.

Shades of Baseless Certainty

  • Sean Hannity thinks the new pope is too liberal, and Hannity (of course) lies about crime;
  • MTG thinks Catholics are evil; how RFK Jr thinks that the new Surgeon General being unqualified makes her a perfect choice;
  • MAGA’s “soft eugenics” explains why DOGE has cut so many health measures;
  • The measure of losing our democracy will be the cost of opposing the government;
  • Short takes on defunding libraries, the reasons for DOGE’s cuts, how bike lanes are “communist garbage”, and MAGA’s obsession with traditional binary gender expressions (dolls).
– – –

Our first piece today follows up an item posted yesterday. Once again, despite the data, conservatives are lying about crime and immigrants. The MAGA crowd objects to the new Pope as being too woke, too Jesus-like.

JMG, 8 May 2025: “Hannity Attacks New Pope As “Indoctrinated Liberal”

That’s pretty disappointing. Does he not know — do people not know how many Americans were murdered and raped and victims of violent crime because we had open borders?

And:

And nobody’s taking children away from their parents. I mean, it sounds like he’s been indoctrinated into the liberal way of thinking.


This church has been leaning more left-wing, more left-wing.

To object to children being taken away from the parents — which happened under the Trump administration — is a “liberal way of thinking”? And it’s long been noted that if Jesus showed up today, preaching what he preached, he’d be deported as a woke illegal immigrant.

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And I haven’t even addressed how the extreme MAGA folks think the Catholics are evil. This amuses me. One baseless religious faith against another. Newsweek: Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘Evil Being Defeated’ After Pope Francis Death.

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Meanwhile, via JMG, Trump hires yet another Fox News host and that the new Surgeon General is unqualified is what makes her a perfect choice.

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Why is this MAGA administration (in the name of DOGE) cutting back various health-care services, including e.g. a suicide-prevent phone line for LGBTQ folks? Let ’em get sick, let ’em kill themselves, seems to be their policy. This essay explains a lot.

Guardian, Derek Beres, 4 May 2025: Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed, subtitled “At the heart of all Trump administration policies is ‘soft eugenics’ thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving services, then only the strong will survive”

Too much to quote. Key items: Francis Galton, RFK Jr, Elon Musk. Nutrition, measles, autism. Tax benefits for women who have children. (When Kamala Harris advocated something similar, in terms of “child support,” it was condemned by the right as “socialism.”)

And, I might say, not something Jesus would do. (But MAGA aren’t really Christians.)

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You can’t know something unless you can measure it, perhaps.

NY Times, Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt, 8 May 2025: How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?

I’ll bold their key point.

How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy.

Under authoritarianism, by contrast, opposition comes with a price. Citizens and organizations that run afoul of the government become targets of a range of punitive measures: Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.

When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.

By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration’s weaponization of government agencies and flurry of punitive actions against critics has raised the cost of opposition for a wide range of Americans.

With many examples that have been obvious all along. I post this with my usual proviso: most people will not notice, or care. Most people will get along with their day-to-day lives. Just as they did in Nazi Germany.

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Short takes.

Slate, Even George W. Bush Liked Libraries, subtitled “How the legal battle to get funding back for the Institute of Museum and Library Services is faring.” (Homepage title: “Why Would Trump Dismantle This Tiny Little Agency That Does So Much Good?”) Well, the answer is obvious.

The Atlantic: The Actual Math Behind DOGE’s Cuts, subtitled “If you thought Elon Musk was really trying to cut costs, you weren’t in on the joke.” Because it was never about saving money. It was about attacking institutions the MAGA government didn’t like. Including folks like Elon Musk, who are out to make more money by privatizing government services.

Similarly. JMG: Newsmax Panel: Bike Lanes Are “Communist Garbage”. Notice how obsessed they are with being “normal”: “I have a car like a normal American.” There is only one proper way to be, you see.

CNN: Why Trump is suddenly fixated on how many dolls kids should have. Because of “the MAGA right’s obsession with traditional, binary gender expressions.”

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And I always have more to discuss tomorrow.

Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Shades of Baseless Certainty

The Conservative War Against Liberals, and Cat Toys

  • Trump’s war against Harvard isn’t about anti-Semitism, it’s about a war against being liberal;
  • And how this fits into my running theme on this blog;
  • The US is trying to impose its anti-DEI values on other countries;
  • Crime is down, while conservatives/Republicans play up crime anecdotes to frighten their base;
  • And thoughts about how cat toys are analogous to our obsession with crime in TV and movies;
  • How indoor cats looking outside are like humans looking up into the sky.
– – –

The anti-Semitism rationale was always somewhat plausible; religious conservatives defend Israel no matter what it does, because of something about the Book of Revelation and the way the end times need to play out in the middle east, or something. But this is so much simpler, and so more likely to be true.

The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch, 6 May 2025: Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext, subtitled “The latest letter to Harvard makes clear that the administration’s goal is to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.”

The intensely hostile letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to the leadership of Harvard yesterday has a lot going on. But the most notable thing about it is what it leaves out.

To hear McMahon tell it, Harvard is a university on the verge of ruin. […] She accuses it of admitting students who are contemptuous of America, chastises it for hiring the former blue-city mayors Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot to teach leadership (“like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation”), questions the necessity of its remedial-math program (“Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics?”), and accuses its board chair, Penny Pritzker (“a Democrat operative”), of driving the university to financial ruin, among many other complaints. The upshot is that Harvard should not bother to apply for any new federal funding, because, McMahon declares, “today’s letter marks the end of new grants for the University.”

What you will not find in the McMahon letter is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. […]

Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.

The writer recalls the earlier attack on Columbia University, then returns to how Harvard — a university older than America! — has handled this. And ending:

In a 2021 speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy,” then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.” The solution, Vance said, was to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” We’ve been seeing the aggressive part of that formula for two months. With the McMahon letter, the administration has gotten much closer to honesty.

My take on this, a running theme on this blog, may seem simplistic, but it explains a lot. Conservative ideas have had hundreds or thousands of years to prevail. Some of their ideas have endured. But things change. We learn new things. Conservatives resent change, and reject new knowledge, presumably (to give them the benefit of the doubt) simply to maintain social stability. But we can’t escape the implications of having learned new things. Each generation of conservatives will lose some of its battles, leaving the next to find new things to complain about. (Prothero.) While the rest of us move on.

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And this is more of the same. Who does the US think it is to impose its current white supremacist values on other nations?

JMG, from Raw Story, 7 May 2025: US Demands That Stockholm End Diversity Policies

If this involves threats to cut off business dealings, well, the rest of the world is already doing that, because of tariffs. Trump doesn’t realize he’s turning over world control to China.

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Once again, frightened, paranoid conservatives are living in a fantasy world, not reality.

Slate, Henry Grabar, 7 May 2025: A Farewell to Arms, subtitled “With some American cities seeing their lowest murder numbers in decades, will Donald Trump change his tune?”

Nineteen people were killed in Chicago last month, which is the fewest murders the Windy City has experienced during any April since 1962. In Baltimore, there were just five murders in April—the lowest number in any month since 1970. Three other major cities—Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Detroit—recorded their fewest first-quarter homicides since the 1960s.

Criminologists tend to speak in caveats, with warning of reversion to the mean and admonitions to wait for better data, but even they must admit: These are some eye-catching numbers. “It’s really encouraging,” said John Roman, a crime researcher at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. “It’s worth taking a moment and noting that we are approaching the numbers in most crime statistics we haven’t seen since the 1960s. In these cities, if you’re under 55, this is probably the safest moment you’ve ever lived in. That’s great, and it should be celebrated.”

Why is this happening? The article offers several ideas. Meanwhile, Trump frightens people — a certain minority of them will always be frightened by such anecdotes — with stories and baseless claims. Once again, conservatives/Republicans believe things that are not true.

Most people in the president’s orbit have been in denial about the crime drop, mired in conspiratorial thinking about FBI statistics and laser-focused on demonizing immigrants for grisly murders. At the beginning of the drop, in 2023, more than 90 percent of Republicans mistakenly believed that crime was on the rise. Interestingly, Americans were almost four times more likely to say crime is a problem nationally than they are to say it’s a problem for them personally. We’re a nation that consumes a lot of videos of people doing crimes. There may be fewer crimes these days, but the videos just keep getting better.

Again, social media is implicated here, and perhaps, as I’ve suggested before, TV and movies, that depicts more crimes on a weekly basis than actually happens in real life.

Why are people so drawn to watching images of violence and crime?

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Here’s my thought for the day, via that Tom Nichols book, and cat toys.

It’s because both cats and humans have minds that evolved in a wild environment. We take care of our indoor cats now, so that they live lovely, safe lives, but they still like the stimulation provided by toys like sticks with feathers or bells on them. A human wielding  those mimics the hunt, especially for birds. Humans watching violent movies and TV shows do so for the same reason — we enjoy the stimulation of potential danger. Otherwise, safe modern life is boring, both for us and for cats.

Do cats adapt to indoor life? Do they know they are better off living indoors? I’m not sure that they do. They are always looking outside. Like humans looking up into the sky.

Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on The Conservative War Against Liberals, and Cat Toys

Academic Freedom, Good Citizens, and Moving Forward

  • Alan Lightman on academic freedom;
  • Alan Lightman and Martin Rees on how scientists can be good citizens;
  • Rewatching Conclave, and recalling two key quotes, about certainty, and moving forward.
– – –

The very idea of academic freedom, of freedom to think what you like without coercion by church or state, is a relatively new one.

The Atlantic, Alan Lightman, 30 Apr 2025: The Dark Ages Are Back subtitled “Americans must insist on academic freedom, or risk losing what makes our nation great.” [gift link]

(I’ve cited Lightman and reviewed three of his books on this blog.)

Today the concept of academic freedom may seem obvious to Americans. But the roots of academic freedom, which can be traced back to medieval European universities, were never certain. Back then, when scholars demanded autonomy from Church and state, they were often rebuked—or worse.

What began as a slow-burning fuse eventually led to the concept of the modern research university a few centuries later, found in the writing of the English philosopher Francis Bacon and his 1627 novel, New Atlantis. There, Bacon envisioned a college called Salomon’s House, in which scientists and others worked in an atmosphere of generosity and freethinking. This college came to be known as “the noblest foundation (as we think) that ever was upon the earth; and the lantern of this kingdom,” as the Governor of Bacon’s fictional utopia put it. “It is dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.”

With details. Then:

After centuries of intellectual progress, Americans must face a terrible question: Are we now descending from light into dark?

Since April 22, more than 500 leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies have signed a statement protesting the unprecedented interference of the Trump administration into higher education, interference that included external oversight of admissions criteria, faculty hiring, accreditation, ideological capture, and, in some cases, curriculum. As the statement says, higher education in America is open to constructive reform. However, “we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

Especially targeted by the administration have been international students.

Because Trump and his dimwitted followers don’t understand the point of academic research. Here’s two paras about that.

Both tangible and intangible benefits flow from academic freedom. First, the tangible. The business world should be alarmed by the proposed jamming of the greatest engine of invention, innovation, and economic prosperity in our nation. To name just a few examples: The internet, in the form of the ARPANET, was developed by researchers at UCLA, Stanford, and MIT under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s and ’70s. Key concepts and materials for lithium-ion batteries were developed at the University of Texas and the University of Oxford. The first artificial heart was developed by Robert Jarvik and colleagues at the University of Utah. Google originated as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. Natural-language processing, neural networks, and deep learning—all fundamental parts of AI—came out of research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Toronto. Pivotal work in CRISPR gene editing was done by Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley. (She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.) Many other technological inventions, although not directly produced in our universities, were nurtured by the training and knowledge gained in them: computers, vaccines, smartphones, social-media platforms, Global Positioning System (GPS), insulin synthesis, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), lasers.

Of course, the intellectual and creative freedom in America has enabled great productivity far beyond the precincts of science and technology. Exemplars include William James in philosophy and psychology, Toni Morrison in literature, Noam Chomsky in linguistics and cognitive science, Hannah Arendt in political theory, Martha Nussbaum in law and ethics, Margaret Mead in anthropology, W. E. B. Du Bois in sociology, John Rawls in political philosophy, Susan Sontag in cultural criticism, John Dewey in philosophy and education, and many, many more.

Much more. Great essay. Once again, this is about the ability of humans to think for themselves and draw conclusions from their observations of the world, versus the social forces that would prefer conformity, for the sake of survival of the tribe.

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A few days later.

The Atlantic, Alan Lightman and Martin Rees, 4 May 2025: How Scientists Can Be Good Citizens, subtitled “We have a responsibility to ensure that our discoveries are used in the public interest. That isn’t always easy.”

(I’ve reviewed one Rees book here but have several others yet to read.)

The essay begins by recalling how German scientists captured by the Allies reacted to the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. And the guilt they felt, since the bomb was a result of their discoveries.

The ethics of science and the responsibilities of scientists do not have simple formulations or prescriptions. Yet the questions that animated Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker 80 years ago are as urgent as ever today. The role of scientists in their society is especially relevant when science and evidence-based thinking are under attack, and scientists are sometimes portrayed as driven by financial or political interests.

It’s a long essay, adapted from a forthcoming book. I’ll quote one more bit.

Our view is that science and the technology resulting from science do not have values in themselves. It is we human beings who possess values. And we should employ those values in how we use science and technology. (In this view, we disagree with the AI entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman, who argues in his recent book, The Coming Wave, that technology is inherently political.) The “good” referred to by Heisenberg probably meant—as it does for many people—increasing the well-being (happiness and quality of life) of the largest number of people. And the “bad” diminishes that well-being. We further suggest that scientists, as citizens of their society, have a responsibility to ensure that their discoveries and innovations are used for good and not for bad. Such a responsibility, of course, means that scientists will have to take some time away from their lab benches and equations to engage with the public and with policy makers. We also suggest that scientists, as citizens of the world, share a responsibility to help relieve the world’s economic inequalities, including the global South’s relative lack of access to energy, food, health care, and technology. As von Weizsäcker said, scientists are not policy makers, nor do they have the required skills. But their special expertise and evidence-based thinking should be resources for policy makers to improve the lives of everyone. And, because we live in a scientific and technological age, buffeted by rapid developments in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and many other areas, scientists have a responsibility to educate the public in scientific matters. Policy makers may often be motivated by self-interest, but ultimately, in democratic societies, they must answer to the public.

I’m inclined to step back and look at the big picture. Sometimes these fine-tuned discussions miss that big picture. Which I’ve explained many times here.

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We re-watched the film Conclave the past couple evenings, given current events. I won’t try to summarize it, or the reactions to it, here. What I will note is a couple striking passages of dialogue.

The main character, played by Ralph Fiennes, gives a speech as the conclave opens. From Imbd/Quotes.

“Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore, no need for faith.”

I heard an interview with the author of the original book, Robert Harris, about how much he admired Ralph Fiennes’ delivery of these lines, especially on that final word.

And later this, from the Pope-to-be Benitez:

The church is not the past. It is what we do next.

At a minimum, I would observe that the Catholic Church, “the” Church to so many, is as riven as any other faith or political philosophy by shades of doubt and trends in thinking. They think they have an iron-clad basis for their beliefs, but they do not. There is an alternative, which strives to identify what is actually true, and to continually re-examine and revise their provisional truths. As I’ve discussed many times.

Posted in progress, Religion, Science, Social Progress | Comments Off on Academic Freedom, Good Citizens, and Moving Forward

Cory Doctorow on Project 2025 and Long Knives

  • Cory Doctorow on how the Project 2025 document is an anthology of often contradictory right-wing fantasies;
  • How Europe is recruiting American scientists, since America under Trump doesn’t want them;
  • Short items about tariffs, tariffs on movies made outside the US, reopening Alcatraz, how everything good is Trump and everything bad is Biden, and how Trump’s family is enriching themselves.
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Locus Online, 5 May 2025: Cory Doctorow: Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives

The very savvy science fiction author Cory Doctorow writes a column for Locus Magazine every two or three months. His latest, posted on the website today, tells me something about Project 2025 I hadn’t heard about before. To be fair, he’s drawing on the work of one Rick Perlstein, writing for The American Prospect (though I can’t find the link to this particular column). Here’s Cory:

One of the central controversies of [Trump’s] campaign was Project 2025, a 900-page document overseen by the Heritage Foundation, a powerful, billionaire-backed Christian nation­alist group. Project 2025 is full of far-right proposals that rightly frightened and enraged ordinary people.

But only one analyst identified the most important aspect of Project 2025: Rick Perlstein, a historian of right-wing movements (author of the essential histories Nixonland and Reaganland). In his American Prospect column, Perlstein pointed out that the most significant part of Project 2025 was its contradictions.

Now, Perlstein wasn’t concerned with inconsistency for its own sake. The point wasn’t, Look at these dopes, they can’t even get their story straight!

Rather, Perlstein pointed out that, time and again, Project 2025 presents multiple, contradictory, mutually exclusive plans, on virtually all of its major themes: monetary policy, defense, immigration, industrial policy, all the big ones.

Perlstein says that whenever you find these contradictions, you are looking at an unresolvable fracture in the Trump coalition. Project 2025 is a kind of anthology of cherished dreams from allies in Heritage’s orbit. Normally, the compiler of such a document would resolve conflicting proposals by evaluat­ing the consequences of thwarting each proposer, and telling the less powerful that they didn’t make the cut.

Presumably, this happened several times in the compilation of Project 2025. The contradictions that survive in the document – and remember, there are many – represent conflicts between parties who are so powerful that none of them can be safely refused. These are people who are on the same team, but not on the same side.

Hmm, a collection of writings by different people that are not consistent. What does this remind us of?*

Cory relates this to a pattern in history, exhibited even in THE HOBBIT.

Many’s the victory party that turned into a night of the long knives. It was easy for the USA and the USSR to fight Hitler together, but after Adolf blew his brains out, all bets were off as both sides moved to seize as much of Germany (and as many German rocket scientists) as they could.

Trump stitched together an impressively diverse coalition to win control of the Senate, Congress and the White House. By “diverse,” I mean these people barely agree on anything. As Perlstein says, that is the core lesson of Project 2025: that this movement is full of equally matched power-brokers who hate each others’ guts and want diametrically opposing outcomes.

With examples. Then, finishing:

The long knives are already out. After Project 2025 became synonymous with dystopia, Trump distanced himself from it and ordered the Heritage Foundation to shut up about it. But Heritage, stung by the criticism, insisted on volubly, publicly defending its honor, declaring itself to be the HR depart­ment of Trump’s White House-in-waiting. This pissed Trump off to no end, and was noticed by Heritage’s archrivals, the America First Policy Institute, who swooped in and maneuvered Trump into granting it the hiring authority that Heritage so jealously guarded.

The fracture lines are appearing. Project 2025 is a map to some of the most important ones. More will come in the days and years ahead of us. For op­ponents of the Trump agenda, Project 2025 is a cheat book telling us where to find the weak spots in his coalition.

Every sudden political change is really a coalition in disguise – and coali­tions who attain victory are their own worst enemies.

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Speaking of moving in to seize scientists…

Politico Europe, Giorgio Leali, 5 May 2025 (via): Von der Leyen, Macron knock Trump’s war on universities as ‘gigantic miscalculation’, subtitled “The European Commission chief and the French president are trying to woo American researchers with a new program called ‘Choose Europe for Science.'”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday slammed U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign against American higher education as she unveiled a half-billion-euro plan to attract foreign researchers.

“The role of science in today’s world is questioned. The investment in fundamental, free and open research is questioned. What a gigantic miscalculation,” von der Leyen said. “Science has no passport, no gender, no ethnicity or political party.”

Appearing alongside French President Emmanuel Macron at Paris’ storied Sorbonne University on Monday, von der Leyen said the “Choose Europe for Science” initiative would put forward a €500 million program from 2025 to 2027 to attract foreign researchers to “help support the best and the brightest researchers and scientists from Europe and around the world.”

Happy, MAGA?

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The New Republic, Michael Tomasky, 5 May 2025: Donald Trump’s Biggest, Dumbest Lie Is … Really Big and Really Dumb: subtitled: “The president is peddling hot nonsense on what tariffs can do for America—and the person he’s conned the most seems to be himself.”

With numbers.

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In other news today, Trump wants tariffs on movies made outside the US because foreign films are a national security threat (?!); he wants to reopen Alcatraz because a local Florida TV station showed the movie Escape from Alcatraz the other night, and he and MAGA are obsessed with locking up bad bad people; and Trump thinks everything good is because of him, and everything bad is because of Biden. I think he’s mentally ill. Also, *of course* Trump and his family are making deals to enrich themselves.

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*It reminds me of the Bible.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Cory Doctorow on Project 2025 and Long Knives