How history, and current events, become approved stories

Posted on Wednesday 3 September 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Humans live by stories: comparing the story of Jesus to the story of the stolen 2020 election;
  • Short items about Cracker Barrel; RFK Jr the vax quack; how women are not people; erasing the existence of gay people from public education; how Trump is delusional and thinks the world loves him;
  • And how crime rates are higher in the red states than in the blue state cities they are sending their National Guard troops to.
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Here’s a piece that might seem cheeky, or offensive (to the easily offended), but is actually a reasonable concern, given how history works and how people create the stories they need.

Free Inquiry, Ronald A. Lindsay, 28 Aug 2025: The Resurrection of Jesus and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
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Are There Any “Good Republicans” Left?

Posted on Tuesday 2 September 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why there seem to be no good Republican politicians;
  • How happy Republicans are to cut benefits to the poor;
  • How Texas is pushing Christianity on public schools;
  • Scientists denounce the administration’s climate report, full of errors and cherry-picked data, that was written to prove what the administration wants to believe;
  • How Elon Musk has tweeked Grok to give MAGA the answers they want;
  • And how most people won’t notice when democracy is gone, as long as their daily lives are not affected.
– – –

[Note: three of the images from JMG are not displaying properly. Click through to the articles to see the images.]

Were there any Good Germans? Are there now any Good Republicans?

We’ve been thinking for a while that there were, maybe a few, but as time passes and the Congress keeps rubber-stamping Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic demands/orders, maybe not. This is how politics works. It’s as much about keeping your job, as about supporting governing principles.

LGBTQNation, commentary by John Gallagher, 2 Sep 2025: It’s long past time to acknowledge there are no good Republican politicians

Subtitle: “Trump has set the stakes so high that politicians who stay in the party are complicit in his attack on democracy.”
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LA Weekend Trip, and Certain Types of Principles

Posted on Monday 1 September 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

We drove from Oakland to LA (Santa Monica area) Friday, and returned home today, avoiding all the predicted holiday weekend traffic by leaving early each time, around 9am. We celebrated my birthday and my partner saw his new granddaughter for the first time. We stayed at the Luskin Conference Center Hotel on the UCLA campus (as we did at Christmas), and I had a chance to wander around the campus a bit more. This time, unlike last year, the Powell Library and UCLA bookstore were both open.

I remember both fondly. On my first visit to the campus, in August 1973 before I began my freshman year that Fall, I visited the bookstore and found books in the science fiction section I’d never seen before, not in the local paperback shops, or the Pickwick or Walden bookstores in the malls. They were Ballard’s THE VOICES OF TIME, Moorcock’s BEHOLD THE MAN, Disch’s CAMP CONCENTRATION, and Lafferty’s THE DEVIL IS DEAD. (I confess I never have gotten around to reading that last one.)

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Greed, and Heaven

Posted on Thursday 28 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Thom Hartmann on the motivation of Republicans: Greed;
  • Brief items about Trump as dictator; why Trump talks about heaven; Robert Reich on how to respond to Trump’s lies about “crime wave” (point out Trump’s violations); the suspended postal shipments to the US because of Trump’s tariffs; how ICE is capturing fire fighters while on duty; the relentless cruel campaign against Kilmar Abrego Garcia; and more about how women should submit, JFK Jr.s magical powers of diagnosis, and lowering standards.
– – –

 

Another quick batch. Which to begin with?

Here’s a writer and radio host I’ve been aware of for a while but not followed closely. Addressing that question about what really motivates Republicans (and those who vote for them).

The Hartmann Report, Thom Hartmann, 28 Aug 2025: The Long Con: Why Every Republican Policy—From Guns to Healthcare to Taxes—Harms the Public & Enriches the Few

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature | Comments Off on Greed, and Heaven

The Disappearance of Linus

Posted on Wednesday 27 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Distracted the past couple days by the disappearance of Linus. I mentioned this on Facebook last night. Maybe he’ll come back.

Click for much larger image. I posted this on Facebook, yesterday the 26th.

Our beloved Linus, who appeared exactly one year ago yesterday with his mother on our back patio, has disappeared. Mother and later kittens were given up to East Bay SPCA, and quickly adopted. Linus grew up outdoors, and while we have tried to make him happy as an indoor cat, we’ve indulged his pining for outdoors — he looks outside the dining room sliding glass doors, and yowls — to let him go outside. He rolls around on his back on the patio pavement, and he has always come back in 2 or 3 hours. But I let him out yesterday at 3pm, and he has not come back, in over 24 hours.

Yes, I’ve read articles about how outdoor cats can be gone for days or weeks, and eventually return. I hope so.

I look over to the window where he would reappear every 10 minutes. Well, 5.

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Posted in authoritarianism, Human Nature, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on The Disappearance of Linus

Conservative Motivations and Magical Thinking

Posted on Monday 25 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Recalling how conservative motivations echo Hutson’s 7 laws of magical thinking;
  • Examples of banning flag burning, removing the rainbow crosswalk in Orland, and French Gallic culture;
  • Hemant Mehta examines why the Jehovah’s Witnesses have relaxed their prohibition against higher education;
  • And Frank Bruni and why Trump is bleeding American campuses dry;
– – –

 

My discussions the past two or three days about what really motivates conservatives, especially the MAGA folks, not being principles like the Constitution or even everyday law and order, made me recall a nonfiction book I read several years ago, Matthew Hutson’s THE 7 LAWS OF MAGICAL THINKING (review here). As I’ve noted before, many of these books about psychology and human nature overlap in topics even if they use different terminology. Thus the protocols of tribal thinking are analogous to the naive ways of perceiving the world (Bering) and to the intuitive ways of perceiving the world that Hutson calls “magical thinking.” Recalling his seven:

  1. Objects carry essences;
  2. Symbols have power;
  3. Actions have distant consequences;
  4. The mind knows no bounds;
  5. The soul lives on;
  6. The world is alive;
  7. Everything happens for a reason.

The conservatives mindset essentially incorporates these elements of “magical thinking,” in that these elements are prioritized over secular principles. Examples from today:

AP News, 25 Aug 2025: Trump moves to ban flag burning despite Supreme Court ruling that Constitution allows it

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Frightened Conservatives’ Paranoid Fantasies

Posted on Sunday 24 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Tribal thinking: Jan 6 rioters: good, pardoned; prosecutors following law and order: bad, fired;
  • Troops for Chicago, New York, Baltimore? It’s the revolt of the rubes;
  • With a US map showing the concentrations of blue and red;
  • How Gavin Newsom is spoofing Trump, and the right hasn’t yet quite gotten it. Insight from Tom Nichols.
– – –

At some point you have to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt, because of their presumed high-minded holiness, since in this country at least we’re supposed to be deferential to religious faith; and call them out for what they are — cultists, driven by ignorance, tribal loyalty, and a quest for power. Certainly not law and order. Or principles.

NY Times, 24 Aug 2025: Reframing Jan. 6: After the Pardons, the Purge, subtitled “In its campaign of ‘uprooting the foot soldiers, the Trump Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen Jan. 6 prosecutors, even as those they sent to prison walk free.”

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Working Definitions, and Examples

Posted on Saturday 23 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Reviewing basic definitions of evil, sin, morality, woke, and fake news, with examples:
  • The Trump admin and MAGA would like to take over all the big cities;
  • How the far-right agenda is entering the mainstream;
  • Do Republicans actually believe in anything? Apparently not the Constitution, or law and order;
  • David Brooks pities sports fan who have to endure progressive TV ads;
  • And MAGA solutions for unruly kids, adulterers, and LBGTQs.
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In the spirit of MAGA, let’s suggest a few more simplistic definitions to characterize the political/cultural divide.

We already have, from yesterday’s post:

Evil is that which would kill us, or disturb the capacity for the tribe’s survival.

So then, Sin is the committing of any act which might be construed as evil, even very indirectly.

(Like all morality, it’s relative to circumstances and viewpoint. There’s no fixed list of things that are good or evil, moral or not.)

Anything that doesn’t support or conform to the (simplistic) worldview of the conservative tribe is dismissed as ‘woke’ or ‘fake news.’ Or ‘evil.’

Just glance through the news and see how well this thumbnail definitions works. The matching to these examples is left as an exercise for the reader.

\\

The Oregonian, 22 Aug 2025: Donald Trump Jr. calls Portland, Seattle ‘craphole cities,’ hints at federal takeover of police forces (via)
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Secular Values, and Reality as Evil

Posted on Friday 22 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Two thematic follow-ups to yesterday’s post.

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 20 Aug 2025: Can people thrive in a secular society?, subtitled “Are secular values the cause of our malaise?”

Yesterday’s post extended a theme on this blog concerning a range or divergence in human nature that I’ve previously characterized (following Lakoff) as conservative vs. progressive. Red vs. blue, tradition vs. change, and so on. Even, emotion vs. logic. That’s the simplex take. The complex take is every single person is a mix of various positions along multiple dimensions of human nature, and it requires such mixes and blends for optimal survival, given that circumstances change. Iron everyone down to a single traditional way of thinking, as the current administration and MAGA are trying to do, and society will suffer in the long run. Attacking diversity is self-defeating, if only because other societies that value diversity will then prevail.

Yet there are many who think traditional values are essential and secular values are actively harmful. This piece at OnlySky responds to a recent piece by David Brooks on that idea.
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Everything Old and Simple; Conservatives, the Conceptual Ceiling, and Cognitive Dissonance

Posted on Thursday 21 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conceptual ceiling and conservatives;
  • Thoughts about how humanity might survive, via deliberate cognitive dissonance: “One mindset to maintain the tribe and ensure near-term survival; another to solve problems that threaten long-term survival.” Which one is right? Both are, in different contexts.
  • Can people thrive in a secular society?;
  • Items about the anti-vaxx playbook; Trump and the Smithsonian; Trump and heaven; Gavin Newsom’s trolls; and several others.
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I’ve written before about how maybe humanity may have hit a sort of conceptual ceiling, where not enough of us are able, or willing, to understand the complexities of the modern world and would prefer to turn the clock back to simpler ways of life, or reject reality entirely in favor of the local mythology or religion.

But today’s thought, distilling dozens of examples of political behavior every day, is that — of course, since humanity is a spectrum along many dimensions and not everyone is the same — is that many people have already hit this ceiling. To them, everything old and simple is better than anything new and complex. Raw milk, good. mRNA vaccine, or any vaccines at all, bad. The Nazis were the good guys after all, because they hated the same icky people, more or less, that MAGA and ICE hate. Our authoritarian president is preferred by millions who claim to venerate the principles of the Constitution, but by doing so show that they don’t. The flat earth is intuitive–just look out the window. Don’t believe anything you can’t see with your own eyes. Climate change is unreal, because the evidence is too complex to understand, and anyway, father god will take care of us.

These are the conservatives.

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