Fearmongering and Gratuitous Cruelty

Posted on Friday 27 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • E.J. Dionne Jr. on Trump’s fearmongering;
  • Gratuitous cruelty in Kansas: canceling the driver’s licenses of transgender people, immediately and without notice;
  • Florida cuts off HIV meds access; White House edits video of US hockey star;
  • Thoughtful piece by Ryan Burge about the “God gap” in American politics, and the decline of mainline churches;
  • And a sample of Philip Glass’s opera Orphée.
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Another take on the SOTU.

NY Times, opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr., 27 Feb 2026: Why Trump’s Fearmongering Is Falling Flat With Voters

President Trump did the nation a big favor in his State of the Union message: He brought home the dark secret behind his success. His one and true genius is hating on other people — Democrats always, immigrants and racial minorities (Mexicans one day, then Somalis), trans people, mythical election fraudsters, street criminals, drug dealers, foreign enemies and anyone else he finds it convenient to hurl a brick at.

The next paragraph makes an interesting point:

His speech was thus an unhappy marriage of bloody images designed to scare people and borrowed glory as he handed out medals to those who earned the honors by accomplishment and bravery, not flimflam. Mr. Trump demonstrated something too often overlooked: He can win when he’s not the incumbent and can go on the attack (2016, 2024), but he leads his party to defeat when he has to govern and fails to deliver (2018, 2020).

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The MAHA Veil, Cruelty, and What Trump Supporters are Teaching their Children

Posted on Thursday 26 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • MAHA isn’t about health, it’s about making money off quack cures;
  • Matthew Rozsa thinks Trump will lose in November because of one word: cruelty;
  • John Pavlovitz spells out what Trump supporters are teaching their children, about diversity, compassion, women, and much else;
  • Timothy Snyder fantasizes a Cabinet meeting in which members say honestly what they’re trying to do: destroy education, wreck the civil service, and so on;
  • How Trump’s problem is that voters don’t believe a word he says;
  • Short items about blaming Biden for closing rural hospitals, educating the Pope, and headphones;
  • About Fermi problems and Trump’s misconceptions about math;
  • Speculation about how American democracy repairs itself every 60 years or so;
– – –

The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, 26 Feb 2026: Behind the MAHA Veil, subtitled “It’s not about transparency or choice. It’s not even about ‘natural health’ It’s about making everyone else take their quack cures.”

The other day I mentioned in passing that anyone who puts “anti-woke” at the center of their ideology is trying to camouflage their real beliefs.

I think that’s become pretty obvious in recent years with the journey of Bari Weiss, Elon Musk, and most of the famous anti-woke, “free-speech absolutists” who, it turns out, were just shy MAGAs who preferred not to cop to their real allegiances.

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SOTU last night

Posted on Wednesday 25 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Perspectives on last night’s State of the Union address;
  • Followed by personal thoughts about ICE and why conservatives are especially concerned about crimes committed by immigrants.
– – –

We saw only a bit of the SOTU address last night, mostly sections where Trump highlighted someone in the audience for this or that or the other and presented them with some award. Was there anything about the actual state of the union? Fortunately I check lots of sites every morning that provide their spins.

All posts are from today unless otherwise indicated. Start with this.

The Bulwark, William Kristol: Revealing Omissions

Here are a few terms that President Trump never uttered last night:

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Rutger Bregman: HUMANKIND

Posted on Wednesday 25 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “A Hopeful History”
(2019 Dutch; 2020 Little, Brown, xviii+461pp, including 64pp acknowledgements, notes, and index)

Still catching up posting about big books I’ve read in recent years. This book came out in 2020 (in the US) and I blogged about it briefly here. His first book, UTOPIA FOR REALISTS, came three years before this one, and I blogged about that one here. His third book, MORAL AMBITION, was released last year, and I picked it up last week to read next, before realizing I should catch up on the second book here, first.

Bregman is an historian and thinker and all-around optimist about things that many people are pessimistic about. This he aligned with Pinker and Rosling and Norberg and others. The title of this book is a play on words; Humankind doesn’t mean just humanity, it stands for the author’s conviction that people are more often kind rather than innately bad. In the big picture, he’s aligning himself with Rousseau rather than Hobbes, and so on that level he’s challenging the ideas of people like Pinker, who in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE documented the decline of violence over human history in the context of Hobbes’ Leviathan and the ideas of the Enlightenment that reigned in earlier violent tendencies. Bregman is claiming those early violent tendencies didn’t exist, or have been misinterpreted through bad history or bad storytelling. And he makes a good case, even though he seems to rely on anecdotal evidenced a bit too often…

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Does ICE need to come and track you down?

Posted on Tuesday 24 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why Trump fears “woke,” why he loves the poorly-educated, and how advances in American history were due to “woke”;
  • How he cares about discrimination only if it’s against Jews or whites;
  • How his creepy emails work on the MAGA faithful;
  • Short items about Kash Patel in the locker room; AI slop showing Trump winning the hockey game; Noem lied about a cannibal; how DHS lied about ICE training.
– – –

It’s all about whether humanity is stuck in tribalistic human nature, or whether, through principles, rules and laws, and agreed-upon values, we can transcend our base instincts. (And, perhaps, become a global civilization, and reach for the stars, as science fiction has always imagined.)

LA Times, LZ Granderson, 21 Feb 2026: The slur ‘woke’ highlights what Trump fears most

Summarizing all that’s happening with Trump lately: Board of Peace, $10 billion, Epstein files.

Which is why the president encourages his supporters to ban books and reject journalism. He doesn’t want voters to pay attention. He doesn’t want voters to understand his actions.

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Competence vs. Competition

Posted on Monday 23 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Olympics thoughts: zero-sum games; competence vs competition;
  • Amanda Marcotte on the violence and propaganda from the DHS;
  • Zack Beauchamp on how to stop a dictator: make the threat obvious;
  • Tom Nichols on the Republican Party’s Nazi problem;
  • Short items about book bans, Christian theocracy, hanging people in the streets, and how conservatives have claimed voter fraud for decades.
– – –

As I finish this post, let me see if I can squeeze this in. I’ve never been all that interested in sports, of any kind. I do watch the Olympics, to see performances of skill and beauty, but I don’t actually care about who wins. Sports is a zero-sum game. Unlike the Olympics, professional sports picks teams that don’t actually represent the cities they supposedly represent; they’re arbitrary. Sports is a sublimation of warfare, and if sports keeps cultures from actual warfare, that’s fine. If it attracts the attention of millions or billions of people around the world who might otherwise direct their aggressive instincts elsewhere… that’s fine.

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Another Take on the Left/Right Divide

Posted on Sunday 22 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Kalen Dion on the right/left divide: homogeneity/diversity, and all that implies;
  • What do historians mean that tomorrow won’t be better than today? Because human nature;
  • The modern economy and the limits of human cognition;
  • Conservative values: the Biblical right to the entire Middle East; how morality can come only from God (Coyne counters); deport Native Americans;
  • Trump’s hospital ship to Greenland.
– – –

Busy day yesterday with events in the city. Stopped at Borderlands Books for the first time in years. Yes, they do carry the SF magazines, but not yet the Jan/Feb issues of Analog and Asimov’s, let alone Mar/Apr.

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Here’s a post from Facebook today by someone named Kalen Dion, a poet, author, and visual artist. Never heard of him. Is Fb smart enough to show me short essays about human nature and the left/right divide, no matter who they’re by? Otherwise I’m not sure why I would have seen this.

The right wants homogeny.

The left wants diversity.

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Whatever They Can Get Away With

Posted on Friday 20 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Short items today

  • Trump’s move to demolish greenhouse gas standards is based on a (admittedly technical) lie;
  • America is experiencing a tourism slump (because… one guess);
  • About Trump’s “cartoonish” monuments to himself;
  • How Trump makes his own voters suffer;
  • How Democrats might take advantage of Trump’s claims he “fixed” the affordability crisis;
  • And more items about renaming the Palm Beach Intl Airport; Sean Feucht’s long hair; Trump telling soldiers to vote GOP; Trump officials want to rebuilt the WHO access that they cancelled for three times the cost; Statin hysteria; how trust in clergy hits a new low; Trump’s sons blame their own corruption on all of us (and our pesky laws); and Hegseth inviting a Christian Nationalist extremist to lead a Pentagon worship service.
– – –

Today is the day the Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s tariffs are illegal. Much consternation is about the land.

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A bunch of short items today, which I don’t need to quote from or comment about very much.

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Does Western Civilization Depend on Christian Monotheism?

Posted on Thursday 19 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Challenging David Brooks, the retiring NYT columnist, and his idea of building a humanist culture, from Bruce Ledewitz and Robert Reich;
  • Brooks’ problem, claims Ledewitz, is that Brooks can’t let go of religion; “the past collapsed for a reason”;
  • And Reich challenges him on issues of inequality.
– – –

Not unrelated to yesterday’s items. Two writers respond to the retirement of David Brooks from the NYT by examining the worldview he espoused — another version of restoring Western Civilization — and its crucial flaw: his unwillingness to let go of the presumptions of monotheism and learn what science has discovered about the actual world.

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 18 Feb 2026: David Brooks wants to rebuild a humanistic culture, subtitled “To rediscover our values, we first have to forge a new foundation for them.”

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Are There Superior Civilizations?

Posted on Wednesday 18 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Reactions to a speech by Marco Rubio claiming the superiority of Western Civilization over all others, by Bret Stephens, Eliot A. Cohen, Jamelle Bouie;
  • Noting again Jared Diamond, who explained decades ago why the fact that the Enlightenment et al originated in Europe doesn’t mean white men are superior to all others;
  • And by the way Trump is building concentration camps.
– – –

There are divergent takes on a speech given by Marco Rubio in Europe the other day.

NY Times, opinion by Bret Stephens, 17 Feb 2026: Western Civ Can Save Us — Again

But the title in print, in this morning’s paper, was “The Only Civilization Worth Defending.”

And I thought, seriously? Isn’t this a little like saying, the only religion that is true is mine — because it’s mine?

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