The Hunger for Certainty

Posted on Sunday 18 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Posting 18 Oct, items compiled from 4-6 Oct;
  • About the drops in crime and conservative fears;
  • Alito on what he thinks is “religious liberty”;
  • How Christians are attracted to answers from AI;
  • Paul Krugman on the administration’s obvious corruption;
  • Carl Zimmer: Are babies “conscious”, and whether it matters;
  • Francis Fukuyama on why we’re better than our ancestors;

Compiled Tue 6 Oct 26:

In spite of conservative fears, crime is dropping. A recurring theme.

NY Times, 30 Sep 2026: ‘It’s Not an Issue’: Crime as a G.O.P. Line of Attack Loses Traction, subtitled “Across the country, especially in the North Carolina Senate race, Republicans have charged opponents with being soft on crime, even as crime rates plummet.” [gift link]

A central line of attack in the waning weeks of the 2026 midterms comes straight out of the tried and true Republican playbook: Democrats are soft on crime.

But as crime rates plummet across the country, it’s been a hard case to make. In Michigan and Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, Republicans have struggled to pull voters back to the violence and disorder that followed the onset of Covid-19.

\\

But we can always scare conservatives with talk about crime.

Axios, today: Trump says Chicago crime is worsening as homicides decline (via JMG: Demented Liar Lies About Crime Rate In Chicago)

President Trump is again raising the prospect of federal intervention in Chicago, saying the city is suffering an “unprecedented” crime wave that’s “getting worse by the day.” Trump’s renewed focus on Chicago comes as the city is on pace to record even fewer homicides than last year, when killings fell to their lowest level in 60 years.

Trump is lying, of course, as always; he’s riling up his base. But he’s tapping into a bias in human nature — to think the worst of everything, to be afraid. And I’ve said this before: if there were only *one* violent crime in the nation on any given day, conservative media would promote it as a story about how liberals are soft on crime, or whatever. Conservatives do not understand rates.

\\

No, he didn’t.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: A Christian influencer says he went to Heaven and met a testosterone-fueled Jesus, subtitled “Gabe Poirot says he met a fiery, muscular, intolerant Jesus. Fox News is helping amplify the story.”

If you believe this, you are living in a fantasy world.

\\

There is something weird here about conservative thinking.

JMG, via ABC News, today: Alito Calls 2015 Obergefell Ruling “Perhaps Decisive Point In Our Nation’s Turn Against Religious Liberty”

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the devout Catholic conservative who has long warned of animus against religion in America, says in a new book that he believes the court’s landmark decision extending marriage rights to same-sex couples was “perhaps the decisive point in our nation’s turn against religious liberty.”

I can’t parse this. How does he believe extending marriage rights to same-sex couple is *against* religious liberty? Does he think that unless his own religion is imposed upon everyone, his religious liberty is constrained?

Consider this:

“In dissent from that ruling,” he said in the 2018 address, “I expressed my worry that equating the expression of certain views with bigotry — or, if you like, with dignitary harm — would drive believers out of public life.”

Squinting… so he’s concerned that laws that respect the dignity of all human beings, all that stuff about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, about all men being created equal, would *drive believers out of public life*? And that’s why such laws are against religious liberty??

Actually, that would be a good thing. We need fewer zealots (religious or otherwise) in public life, and more reality-based rationalists.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Items compiled Mon 5Oct26

This is revealing.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, today 5 Oct: Christians bow down at the altar of AI, subtitled “Artificial intelligence is becoming a competing source of theology.”

Do they not realize that AI just absorbs what thousands or millions of its sources have said and boil them down into appropriate feedback? In other words, it’s telling them what they want to hear.

Our era is going through a massive economic transition, as AI has enabled computers to do jobs that were once the sole domain of humanity. From writing code to churning out books to generating art and music, the explosive proliferation of LLMs threatens to make millions of human workers obsolete.

But here’s one AI-driven layoff you probably didn’t see coming: Artificial intelligence is threatening to put God out of a job.

Where they might once have turned to the Bible or their pastors, millions of devout churchgoers are treating chatbots as sources of spiritual advice and theological wisdom. It sounds almost too strange to be true, and yet it is. What’s going to become of religion when millennia of practice collapse down to the statistical output of a word-prediction model?

From a July 2026 survey by the Barna Group:

Practicing Christians are outpacing nearly every population segment on AI adoption, including pastors, according to Barna’s newest research on faith and AI.

OK, some of them are using AI for mundane questions. Yet (shown in a chart) those who attend church the most often, trust AI the most.

Here I think is the key:

The appeal of religion is that it promises an infallible source of wisdom to tell followers what to do in all aspects of their lives. Whatever secular critics might say about the stifling atmosphere of religious dogmatism, or the cruelty of discouraging curiosity and punishing doubt… the uncomfortable truth is that some people don’t want to think for themselves.

Maybe this is the key:

The hunger for certainty

Better still for this purpose, AI is always confident.

For people who care about accuracy, this is a major drawback of AI. LLM chatbots are algorithms that obey a statistical model of word association; they have no inherent concept of truth or falsehood. Sometimes they provide correct information, but sometimes they hallucinate facts. In either case, they speak with the same calm confidence and apparently persuasive reasoning.

However, in the eyes of religious believers, particularly fundamentalists, this is a feature and not a bug.

Religion offers certainty in a chaotic world—that’s always been one of its selling points. It promises immutable truth that holds fast against the shifting tides of culture. It asserts that its doctrines are trustworthy because they never change, no matter what.

Concluding:

How far will this trend go? As churchgoers age and dwindle, will brick-and-mortar churches die off? Will the congregations of the future huddle around the glow of screens, getting spiritual advice and consolation from virtual avatars? Will we craft AI gods and prophets in the likeness of the old pantheons, or will we let the computers dream up brand-new ones for us? It seems bizarre, implausible, ridiculous even to contemplate. But who would have guessed it would play out even to the extent it already has?

\\\

That this is so obvious, and that his fans can’t see it, says something about human nature. The tribal nature thereof, and the inability to see reality for what it is.

Paul Krugman, today 5 Oct: The Trump Administration is a Cesspit of Corruption, subtitled “And fighting it should be at the heart of the Democratic agenda”

The cesspit of corruption that is Donald Trump’s presidency is finally getting the attention it deserves. It’s about time. And if a massive blue wave sweeps Washington on November 3rd as polls now suggest, Democrats should put corruption front and center of their agenda in Congress.

The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before. America currently has a Republican president who, along with his family, has raked in billions, possibly close to $10 billion in personal gain from office in less than two years. He has effectively sold criminal pardons to scammers, invalidating the legal claims of their victims for restitution. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has become a billionaire running an investment fund for Gulf petro-state autocrats despite having no discernible investment skills. The Times just reported that Kristi Noem paid hundreds of millions over the reasonable price for 5 aircraft – one of which contains a marble bathroom and luxury bedroom – that were ostensibly for deportations but are instead sitting on the runway. And then there’s Trump’s Secretary of the Commerce, Howard Lutnick, whose family has doubled its net worth to over $7 billion, largely through its investments in Tether, the crypto-currency of choice by Iran, terrorists and rogue states.

\\\

How does it matter…?

NY Times, the venerable Carl Zimmer, today: Are Babies Conscious?, subtitled “By pinpointing when it begins in young humans, scientists hope to better understand what consciousness is, and how it arises, in all of us.” [gift link]

I’m not going to try to profile the article, so much as consider some of the philosophical issues it raises.

Indeed, there’s an active scientific debate over whether newborns possess consciousness. Resolving it could help solve one of science’s most stubborn mysteries: what consciousness is, how it emerges and how we can know if another being possesses it.

The obvious issue is about the “soul.” The religious think an embryo, no matter how young, possesses a “soul” and so is the equivalent of a full human being and deserves preservation of its life.

This is religious fantasy. There is no evidence that anything like a “soul” exists. It’s all about brain function. (Yet another example of … confusion among realms)

At the same time, this is evolutionary precaution. Humans are wired to protect their children, no matter how young, because those who do have bigger families and larger tribes.

Does the argument change if it’s about “consciousness”? I don’t think so. The drive to protect newborns remains. At the same time, history is full of examples of triage. Among humans, and animals. If an infant isn’t likely to survive, then… let it go.

The modern idea of abortion and its opposition is due to the success of modern medicine. And the philosophical distinction of when an embryo is truly human. The religions play it safe. Thinkers like Carl Sagan suggested that only until an embryo reached a certain limit.

(From his book BILLIONS AND BILLIONS, reviewed here:

A long essay is about abortion, trying to find a middle ground, which Sagan and Druyan conclude to be the point at which the embryo’s thinking becomes barely possible, brain waves, around the 30th week, which is coincidentally where the Supreme Court drew the link (in Roe v. Wade), though on different grounds.

)

Peter Singer took these issues to animals. And his criteria was: do they feel pain?

\\\

Compiled Sunday 4Oct26.

Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 30 Sep 2026: Francis Fukuyama on why we’re better than our ancestors, subtitled “Everyone matters. If you believe that, it’s a good sign.”

Immediate reaction: well of course. Many do believe that now. But certainly the writers of the OT didn’t, nor do Christian nationalists.

Key Takeaways:

  • A few weeks ago, John Gray told me that he believed there is no such thing as progress in politics and ethics. This week, Francis Fukuyama fundamentally disagrees.
  • For Fukuyama, the fact that most people view all human beings as morally important is a definite sign of moral progress.
  • Fukuyama argues that the nation-state is perhaps the best, necessary tool of governance. This can bring benefits and problems.

Recalling historical accounts of indifference to casual violence. Recalls Pinker’s BETTER ANGELS.

The writer recalls a rare case (in science or philosophy) of an opposite opinion.

A few weeks ago, I explained John Gray’s theory that we never make progress in ethics and politics because any advancement we make is short-lived and forever reversible. Technology and science accumulate over millennia. But ethics? Well, we’re no less brutal than we ever were. It only takes a strong wind to push us back into evil.

Recalling those historical accounts,

Fukuyama disagrees. … In other words, [those] societies had devalued another portion of society. They’d dehumanized them. The poor, the criminal, the outsider — these groups were considered below compassion. They were no longer moral subjects.

Fukuyama’s point is that this is no longer the norm. Of course, people still are terrible to each other. Just five minutes on your news app of choice will reveal that. Of course, we all treat people at work, on the street, or in our homes awfully from time to time. That’s a part of being human. But the point is that the norm is universality.

Most people, in most of the world, think that other human beings are at least worth some moral consideration. 73% of people think human rights exist. Most of the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty. Four out of five people think that torture is wrong, no matter what. Today, it’s widely accepted that no one is valueless. And that, for Fukuyama, is progress.

As usual with sharp disagreements, it’s easy to see what’s happening here: different perspectives, and different timelines. Does violence go up and down? Sure, given whatever scale you’re looking at. But compare Fukuyama’s scale, and Pinker’s. Gray might be right that circumstances might “push us back into evil.” Circumstances might make us extinct, too. We try to guard against such circumstances.

The morality of religious fundamentalists, and Christian nationalists, are parts of the problem we must guard against.

A related question is asked, about how far empathy can extend.

I asked Fukuyama a common question about universalism or global cosmopolitanism: Does this mean that we have the same responsibility to those thousands of miles away as to those who live next door? Fukuyama thinks not.

First, it’s psychologically implausible. We grow to love those people we see regularly. We care for those we help and who help us in turn. Communities and relationships are established through real-life, felt actions. To ask someone to hang up these feelings or loyalties in the interests of a faceless, distant name or number is like asking a parent to not love their child.

Second, and most relevantly, it’s politically undesirable. “The nation-state is a necessary political structure,” Fukuyama says.

“They empower police forces and armies to protect the community, and those forms of power have to be territorially limited. If you have a police force that can arrest anybody anywhere in the world for a crime you deem to be a crime, you’re going to be living in a very, very chaotic world.”

Again, these are issues of scope. The same might have been said centuries ago about the feasibility of an entire nation of 330 million people living under one set of governmental principles. Some of us think we can. Many of us would overthrow those principles, if they could, in favor of their tribal priorities.

Posted in Politics, Psychology, Religion | Leave a comment

If Humanity Doesn’t Have a Grasp on Reality, Does It Matter?

Posted on Saturday 17 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Today: posted items from 1-3 Oct that I collected while this site was down: The Thin Skin of Reality;
  • And today: posted page Notes on Meaning, (and Wisdom and Purpose and Progress), part of my grand plan to identify broad philosophical themes and how they relate to science fiction;
  • And today: wondering if it matters that humanity doesn’t have a grasp on reality, via recent politics about James Talarico.
– – –

A thought piece for today.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, 16 Oct 2026: A Hoax About James Talarico Went Viral and Then Fell Apart. What Happens Next Will Tell Us a Lot About Politics in 2026., subtitled “Texas just set up a natural experiment on the power of conspiracy theories—and whether it matters if they’re debunked.”

Title on homepage: “Texas Just Accidentally Set Up a Great Experiment About Whether Facts Matter at All in 2026”

If humans cannot engage in reality, what hope is there for our race?

This is about the penchant of conservatives to make up conspiracy theories to demonize their opponents. In this case, about James Talarico, candidate for senator in Texas.

It seems, finally, that the strange episode involving James Talarico and a nonsense story about a mental health facility has concluded. The story’s greatest promoter, the man who claimed to hold the smoking-gun evidence showing the Senate candidate had been institutionalized, declared on Thursday that the matter was over.

“Frankly, this entire situation has been blown completely out of proportion,” wrote the social X user Rhein Amacher, somewhat bafflingly, given his own singular efforts to blow the situation up. “I’m not going to speculate beyond the information available or continue fueling a controversy based on an unverified claim. As far as I’m concerned, this matter is closed. It’s time to move on to more substantive issues facing voters.”

It was an odd statement, as it didn’t quite recant the story, which has been thoroughly debunked. (“Everyone can listen and draw their own conclusions,” he said.) But other anti-Talarico accounts went quiet on the matter after that, and the social media campaign to portray Talarico as a man in a state of emergency, too mentally ill to represent Texas in the Senate, fizzled out.

And:

By virtue of being everywhere and then falling apart so completely, the hoax has become a natural experiment in whether a ridiculous conspiracy theory can move the needle in a close election—even after it’s thoroughly debunked.

It’s been long observed that many more people hear the lie than ever hear the correction. Mark Twain said this: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”

The background of this incident is in the article. It’s all about getting the flu. The piece concludes:

For now, it’s difficult to determine how much the conspiracy theory will matter in November’s election. It’s possible that it was almost entirely self-contained in conservative conversations on X—people who were never going to vote for Talarico anyway. It’s also possible that it went beyond that, and that voters who lacked either the time or the inclination to follow the story through to its debunking will go to the polls next month believing they are choosing between a candidate who spent a week in a mental institution and one who didn’t. In what’s forecast to be a close race, even a marginal number of such voters could matter.
Advertisement

(There’s a third possibility, perhaps one too outlandish to take seriously. And that’s that Paxton and his team may pay some sort of penalty for pushing a story that fell apart instantly upon making contact with a shred of reason. The lesson of Trump’s decade atop American politics is that the penalty for lying is generally nonexistent, but this may just be the exception.)

Which of those three possibilities—the story flopping, working, or backfiring—emerges is an important barometer of where we stand in 2026, and whether the truth still has any purchase in our modern era.

If a couple of weeks from now we’re hearing that voters were turned off by their fear of Talarico’s fragility or instability, we’ll know things are worse than ever. But if this whole episode is dismissed and laughed off as the misadventure of a few desperate attention-seekers, then it’ll be a sign: Even in one of the hottest battlegrounds in the country, reality still matters.

In a sense, of course, reality doesn’t matter. Humans have evolved to exist within a particular set of environmental circumstances. It’s not that the cosmos exists with particular parameters that allow life to evolve (that cosmological argument for the existence of God); it’s that our species evolved to survive within the parameters that exist, for whatever reason. So we are perfectly capable of surviving without perceiving the extent of reality that exists beyond our senses and intuitions.

Still, there’s a level of reality that exists, just slightly beyond our intuitive senses, that can affect us, and might destroy us.

Posted in Human Nature, Philosophy, Politics | Leave a comment

The Thin Skin of Reality

Posted on Saturday 17 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Items from 1-3 Oct.

  • Trump in Time;
  • How AI could worsen a common cognitive trap;
  • Trump’s demand for Fox propaganda;
  • People with lower cognitive abilities are more likely to endorse Christian Nationalist claims;
  • Shaun Tan and the “thin skin of reality”;
  • Trump and Republicans seem to think that permanent daylight saving time will literally provide an extra hour of daylight;
  • RFK Jr thinks AI will free us from the “tyranny” of medical facts;
  • Paul Krugman on MAGA delusions;
  • More about Trump, the press, and propaganda;
  • Two loonies;
  • Trump trying to cheat, and how Project 2025 is succeeding;
  • How Pete Hegseth is consolidating his religion inside the military;
  • How Disney solved infrastructure problems by planning ahead.
– – –

Apparently there’s a new interview with Trump in Time Magazine, and they didn’t sanewash his prose.

Slate, Ian Prasad Philbrick, yesterday 2 Oct: The Man Is Not Well, subtitled “We just got an unfettered view into the mind of the world’s most powerful person. It’s alarming, to say the least.”

There’s a link here to the transcript, which I haven’t looked at yet.

Donald Trump talks constantly, which makes it a minor miracle that he can still surprise us. But he did Thursday after Time magazine published the full transcript of a 75-minute interview with the president. Conducted this week by correspondent Eric Cortellessa and top editor Sam Jacobs, the 11,000-word interview is in some ways an unremarkable artifact of the president’s usual tics: run-on sentences, bluster, insults, lies. But it also contains moments of confusion, incoherence, and paranoia that look like windows into Trump’s mental state. Far be it from us to diagnose him from afar, but suffice it to say that if any other president—or person—spoke the way Trump does, you’d probably worry about their psychological and perhaps medical well-being.

I’ll just list the subheadings in the Slate piece, as they are numbered.

  1. Trump immediately gets confused about where he was this week.
  2. When it comes to Iran, Trump is on another planet.
  3. He gave an incoherent answer about the future of Gaza.
  4. His paranoia is reaching mad-king proportions.
  5. Does Trump know that JFK and LBJ are dead?

And concluding,

The above is just a sampler platter from a long, rambling, grievance-fueled interview with the most powerful person in the world. Much of the ensuing coverage has focused on Trump losing his temper, ripping into the interviewers with lines like “You haven’t asked me one f***ing positive question.” (As the New York Times reports, the president has gotten more publicly profane as he has aged.) It’s easy to become numb to all this; Trump’s incoherence is matched by his ubiquity. But this is the brain responsible for making life-and-death decisions for the rest of us every day. Does anything from this transcript suggest it’s still up to that task?

His fans have to notice eventually, right?

\\\

Science, and epistemology.

The Atlantic, Tania Lombrozo, today 3 Oct: AI Could Worsen a Common Cognitive Trap, subtitled “Almost everyone knows less than they think.”

The thesis in the subtitle is certainly true. Mostly we know where to find out what we need to know. Or, many people don’t care about knowing much of anything. What is the thesis here? How could AI make this situation any worse?

One of humanity’s most remarkable cultural achievements is the division of explanatory labor. When my daughter came down with a fever, I solved the problem by consulting a pediatrician, who shared a likely diagnosis of the flu. Unlike the doctor, I wasn’t able to tell my daughter much about the mechanism by which the flu leads to fever, or exactly why it was so important for her to keep drinking fluids. But the explanation I acquired—roughly “fever because flu”—was what was needed to treat her.

Society runs on this efficient type of information sharing. Just as coordinating specialized skills can streamline the fabrication of products—be it pins or cars or newspapers—coordinating specialized knowledge can facilitate the answering of questions. You can drive a car even if you don’t have the expertise to manufacture one yourself, and I benefited from the pediatrician’s explanation even though his understanding far exceeded my own.

And so on.

Humans’ sense of whom to ask for what is fine-tuned by evolution, culture, and personal experience. Even 3-to-5-year-olds are more likely to say that you should ask a doctor rather than a mechanic about fixing a broken arm, and a mechanic rather than a doctor about fixing a flat tire. As kids mature, they develop an even deeper understanding of expertise.

The author discusses how easily “a contagious sense of understanding” can appear from superficial descriptions of new phenomena. Then:

As information becomes more accessible through AI assistants, chatbots, and other technology, will these illusions of understanding become even more pronounced? Some early evidence suggests that the answer is yes. Several studies have now found that when people have information available to them through the internet, they overestimate how much they themselves know.

With examples. Well, OK. A problem that already exists might be made slightly worse by AI.

The kinds of errors that AI systems make are likely to change as AI develops, and human intuition about AI will probably evolve alongside these changes. As we expand our community of explainers beyond human experts to chatbots and other forms of AI, we create new opportunities for human understanding. But we also introduce an increased potential for illusion and error.

But these are enduring problems with human understanding, which is already very limited. Most people just “know” things without any kind of understanding.

The writer has a book on this topic: Why We Ask Why, subtitled “The Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand”, that comes out Tuesday. Maybe.

\\\

Again, about propaganda. Trump thinks he can create his own reality.

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 1 Oct 2026: Donald Trump’s insatiable demand for Fox propaganda

President Donald Trump lashed out at Fox News on Wednesday with a lengthy online harangue that made little sense but demonstrates the network’s impossible task in satisfying the president’s demand for pure propaganda.

“Why does FoxNews always put Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Jessica Tarlov, and every Democrat on, saying bad things about the Republican Party and, of course, me?” Trump posted to his Truth Social account at 12:15 pm ET. “I actually think they get more airtime than Pro Republicans. This is why MAGA, and REAL Patriots, will never like Fox! They repeat a completely negative narrative, on and on it goes, and then we get a quick retort.”

Because he’s completely oblivious to how most Americans, and most of the rest of the world, outside his MAGA base, perceive him. Dunning-Kruger.

\\\

Well *of course.* It’s just that the rest of us non-D-K folks are too polite to point this out.

JMG, today 3 Oct 2026: Study Finds That People With Lower Cognitive Abilities Are More Likely To Endorse Christian Nationalist Claims (from PsyPost)

A new study indicates that Americans with lower scores on a vocabulary test commonly used to measure cognitive ability are more likely to endorse Christian nationalist beliefs, even when accounting for their overall level of education. The findings suggest that the appeal of this political and religious ideology relates to underlying cognitive resources rather than just differences in schooling.

Religion is easy; science is hard. Fantasy is easy; reality is hard. This goes again to my notions about the limits of human cognition, and the appeal of tribalism, which humanity seems not able to escape.

\\\

One more. Here’s a take on why the arts are so significant in understanding human nature, and the reality we cannot perceive.

The Guardian, Tim Byrne, yesterday 2 Oct: Shaun Tan: ‘We’re always only seeing a thin skin of reality’, subtitled “One of Australia’s most cherished and awarded picture book illustrators on what makes a good painting, the mechanics of life and the fine line between utopia and dystopia”

Not just in Australia. He’s won a Hugo — and an Oscar. I met Shaun Tan once, at the Worldcon in Melbourne, back in 1999, IIRC, and I have many of his books. I’m taken by that skin of reality quote. Let’s find some more.

“I have this theory that if a painting is really good a five-year-old can still get something out of it,” Tan says. “A good painting should hit you in an emotional way.” Often he will haul one of his kids into the studio to see their reaction to a piece he’s working on. “A bit happy and a bit creepy? Great, that’s what I wanted. You can go now.”

…

The conversation orbits too, back to the question of reality and the thin veil between worlds that exists for all of us. “I have the same problem as everybody else: it’s hard to penetrate the veneer of familiarity. We’re always only seeing a thin skin of reality, which is what an illustration is, just another thin skin. And that’s the world around us, it’s only paper thin.”

Tan’s enduring interest in the mechanics of life (at one point he envisioned becoming a geneticist) has led him to think of reality as “arbitrary. I was very interested, as a young person, in science and quantum physics. It satisfied my suspicion that this is one reality amongst many.”

And this supports my notion about different realms of reality that have different explanations and ‘meanings.’

\\\\\

Items from Friday, 2 Oct.

They’re still on about changing the clocks. But they’re thinking about it wrong, of course.

JMG, today: Demented Man Rages About “Changing The Clocks”

The very name of their bill betrays their misunderstanding of how this all works. And the evidence he cites is backwards.

“Republicans in the Senate have to get moving on what I call the ‘No More Changing of Clocks Act,’ officially known as The Sunshine Protection Act, a ridiculous Clock changing process that takes place twice a year, costs our Country a fortune, is bad for Crime, stress on people, Sports, and just about everything else you can imagine.

…because everyone will be enjoying an EXTRA HOUR OF DAYLIGHT.

But you lose it in the morning. Get it? No of course not.

\\\

They’re deluded about this too.

Ars Technica, Beth Mole, 30 Sep 2026: RFK Jr. thinks AI will free us from the “tyranny” of medical facts, expertise, subtitled “AI is far from a perfect resource. But it seems to hallucinate less than Kennedy.”

RFK Jr. and Vance, chatting.

Kennedy boasted that the Trump administration is “making it easy for every American to use AI,” which he claimed would free us from the “medical tyranny” of doctors and health experts. He suggested Americans should start using AI to get second opinions about medical recommendations, saying AI is “better informed than any doctor in the country.” He also suggested that the technology would confirm his misinformation about vaccines and contrarian views on public health guidance.

Doesn’t he understand where AI gets its information? By gleaning the web, and libraries, and medical journals. At best it is/will be a distillation of medical expertise, not a contraindication of it. He think AI will validate his contrary views? He’s delusional.

The writer provides examples, asking about masks and vaccines, asking both ChatGPT and Gemini.

Anyway, AI is not at its best. It still has a record of ‘hallucinating’ sources and manufacturing data. It is almost certainly still more reliable than RFK Jr. and Vance.

\\\

Yet MAGA loyalists live in a world of delusion, believing everything and anything Trump tells them.

Paul Krugman, today: A “Who You Gonna Believe?” Election, subtitled “If you’re arguing, you’re losing. Trump is arguing.”

(IIRC it was Reagan who said, if you’re arguing, you’re losing.)

Krugman begins by displaying a graphic from current Trump press released that proclaims “Welcome to the Golden Age!”

They’re still doing it! Click on any White House press release and the image above pops up. The tone-deafness is almost surreal. Even if you’re a Trump loyalist who really believes that things are going great in America, surely you have to be aware that this isn’t how most voters see it.

In contrast to actual data, as in the chart shown above.

Voters famously blame whoever is in the White House when fuel prices are high, even though presidents normally have very little influence on these prices. In this case Trump, with his disastrous war of choice in Iran, really does bear full responsibility for high energy prices — and voters know it.

With more charts!

\\

Trump wants to be able to say anything, no matter how at odds with reality, and have the press repeat it, and have his followers believe it.

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 28 Sep 2026: Trump’s press grievances are based in their refusal to do propaganda

The Justice Department sought last week to justify President Donald Trump’s decision to ban three news outlets from the White House by arguing that their reporters had jeopardized national security. But Trump’s own statements show what he actually wants from the press: servile propaganda that parrots what he and his political allies say about his administration.

“‘The United States has the BEST Employment Numbers in HISTORY,’” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform in the 7 a.m. hour Monday morning. Trump attributed the quote to “FoxNews,” then added: “The Fake News Media REFUSES to report this rather significant development, however!!!”

\\\

The Loonies.

\\\\\\\\\\\\

From Thursday, 1 Oct:

This is about those TV ads extolling American virtue (and Trump) that are being paid for with tax dollars.

Slate, Shirin Ali, today 1 Oct: Trump’s Latest Attempt to Cheat in the Midterms Faces Little Blowback

Midterm elections are around the corner, and for months, while strategists have predicted a Democratic sweep, the GOP has been throwing everything and the kitchen sink at its base in hopes of mitigating the anticipated blue wave. This past week, those efforts took the form of a series of television ads, each one featuring President Donald Trump and highlighting his administration’s policies while also warning against unspecified threats of communism. The ads themselves, though, were not the most disturbing thing. The most alarming part of the ads is a small disclaimer at the bottom of the screen: “Paid for by the U.S. government.” It appears that Trump was using our taxpayer dollars to fund his midterm political efforts. Using taxpayer dollars for ads that are clearly political is a blatant violation of federal law, but the unfortunate reality is that there may not be a clear-cut way to actually stop the Trump administration from continuing to air them.

Every day Trump gets away with something new, and his MAGA fans don’t care.

\\\

Stories like this appear in new depth after reading the Huffman book.

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, today 1 Oct: Trump’s failure hides Project 2025 success, subtitled “OMB director Russell Vought is quietly remaking the federal government, and Congress is next”

Huffman specifies how closely Vought and others in the Trump administration align with various Christian nationalist groups, and really would take down American democracy in favor of their fundamentalist Christian faiths.

It seems like a million years ago now, but there was a moment back in 2024, in the heat of that weird presidential campaign, when everyone was talking about the radical blueprint for Donald Trump’s restoration. Project 2025 was so extreme, in fact, that his campaign had Trump disavow it publicly. He usually said that he hadn’t read the plan and didn’t intend to, but at times he went further. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump said, “Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25 . . . They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right, and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25 . . . and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme, seriously extreme.”

Trump disavowed it then, but hired people who are implementing it.

Project 2025 was a far-right manifesto, filled with the kind of pie-in-the-sky fantasies that denizens of conservative think-tanks had been churning out for decades in the hopes of influencing Republican administrations.

… This effort was largely guided by its co-author, Russell Vought … As a self-described Christian nationalist, he also believed that the U.S. should espouse fundamentalist Christianity, and that the country has no obligation to engage in global initiatives that do not directly benefit its own people.

The essence of tribal selfishness, the policy of conservatives.

\\\

And religious theocracy. The Huffman book show how scary Hegseth’s religious commitments are. More than just white nationalism.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today 1 Oct: Pete Hegseth is centralizing religious power inside the military, subtitled “Hegseth’s explicitly Christian defense of a new Pentagon religious office leaves non-religious service members on dangerous ground”

During a “State of the Force” address in Virginia yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the formation of a new “Office of Religious Affairs.” The office would give military chaplains a direct line to him and make sure the needs of religious service members are being met.

While this office is supposed to support service members regardless of their beliefs, Hegseth spoke about it in explicitly Christian terms. And when the official memo announcing the office was released, it only confirmed that the resources were geared almost entirely toward religious programs.

Just imagine the outrage of MAGA folks if a Muslim tried to do this in favor of his religion, and that is how us non-Christians feel about this. Christians seem not to understand the comparison.

\\\

Progress can be made. Some new ideas are good.

Vox, Future Perfect, Sara Herschander, today 1 Oct: Disney World solved a problem that could save America billions every year, subtitled “Our cities are built atop a dangerous obstacle course of cables. The Magic Kingdom found a better way.”

Buried beneath every American city is a mysterious jumble of cables, pipes, and gas lines, entangled like a pair of wired headphones the moment you pull them out of your pocket. Every time a contractor sticks a shovel in the asphalt, they embark on a high-risk excavate-by-dots obstacle course, dodging color-coded clusters of spaghetti-like power lines, gas mains, sewers, and fiber-optic cables. A line of blue spray paint means water. Red means power. Yellow is gas. Orange is telecom.

This is interesting. Our local street seems to be a nexus for utilities over the entire hillside from Route 13 up to Skyline, and so every couple three weeks there’s a utility crew with their spray cans painting different-colored stripes in the street. Presumably to plan their next excavation job.

About 700,000 times a year — that’s once every 47 seconds — something goes wrong.

With examples of how things can go wrong. But the point here is how the Disney properties have done this. It takes advance planning.

Directly beneath the Magic Kingdom is a sprawling network of tunnels. Initially designed to shepherd around Mickey and his friends, the system now also serves as one of the largest utility corridors ever created. Unlike the rest of America, where cables are typically dumped in ditches before being covered with dirt, the electrical lines that power Cinderella’s castle quite literally get the princess treatment.

Alongside water pipes, sewers, and animatronic control systems, these power lines lace the walls and ceilings of the utilidors, meaning they’re protected from weather and changes in the soil. They are also easy to monitor, catalog, and access if something needs fixing. While the cost of building a controlled system like this is much higher upfront than burying directly in the ground, the practice virtually eliminates the risk of accidentally rupturing a gas main or slicing a fiber optic cable during routine maintenance. Once they’re built, they can also drastically reduce costs in the long run because you no longer need to tear up a street every time a utility needs fixing.

Bottom line:

“Obviously, it’s expensive,” said Debra Laefer, a professor of civil and urban engineering at New York University, “but in the long term, it would be hugely cheaper,” especially “in areas where we are digging all the time, there’s a direct business case for moving towards these utilidors.”

This is why it will never be done locally. Conservatives don’t invest in the long-term.

\\

Posted in Art, Human Nature, Lunacy, Politics | Leave a comment

Along the Spectra

Posted on Friday 16 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • In the context of the Tom Cruise film Digger, thoughts about the difficulties of thinking about climate change;
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson wonders if humans are intelligent enough to understand everything;
  • Fareed Zakaria on why Marco Rubio thinks the West is great because of pre-Enlightenment values;
  • A similar piece by Ishaan Tharoor;
  • And how a Kansas GOP candidate seems to literally believe in witches;
  • The running theme: the limitations of human cognition, perhaps one spectrum among several others.

Site is back up after a couple weeks repairs from hacker attacks. Here are some items from today and yesterday. Over the next few days I’ll post items I’ve collected over the past two weeks.

\\\

From a review of Digger, the Tom Cruise climate change movie that I haven’t seen, some perspective on how difficult it is for many people to grasp the scope of the problem. This goes to themes I’ve been calling scale-blindness, and the difficulty of long-term thinking.

NY Times, opinion by Jayson Greene, 14 Oct 2026 (but in today’s print paper): Tom Cruise’s Big Flop Is a Secret Masterpiece

The pertinent point:

Climate crisis movies have always been notoriously hard to make, for the same reason the climate crisis is hard to combat: It’s too big. Everyone’s affected, but not in the same ways, on the same timelines or at the same scale. We can see and comprehend elements of the problem, but no one sees the whole picture or how its disparate causes and effects connect.

Those two themes speak to a newer theme here: the limitations of human cognition. Even if a few people can think beyond human short-sightedness, if not enough people can, or if those people who can are hobbled by reactionaries, we might have the explanation for Fermi’s Paradox right at hand.

\\

An item from yesterday reflects a similar theme.

Neil deGrasse Tyson asking his guest, Are we intelligent enough to understand everything?

I listened to this partially, but need to listen to it more closely and fully. A crucial theme here is the limitations of human cognitive intelligence. Surely we are limited to some extent, or else everyone would intuitively understand relatively and quantum mechanics and so on. Most of us, perhaps none of us in the latter case, don’t. Evolutionarily, we don’t need to. That some of us can is a feature. My thought here is to step out… and consider the intelligence of dogs. The animals nearest to us. Dogs have a certain intelligence, which we are often surprised by. But they don’t understand the human realm; they only learn how to respond to it. Will listen to this further.

\\

And this is related. I’ve wondered before, what is it conservatives want to conserve? (Actually Carl Sagan asked this question long before I did, in a book I reviewed here.) More and more it seems they want to preserve basic protocols of tribal human nature — what predate the ideals of democracy and equality that the people behind the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and the American Constitution tried to impose over those tribal instincts. (I have an item by Allen Clifton about this too.)

Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, today 16 Oct: Marco Rubio misunderstands what makes the West great, subtitled “His speech in Greece celebrated power and strength, overlooking the revolutionary idea of universal rights.”

In a well-written speech last week delivered against the magnificent backdrop of the Acropolis in Athens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged the West to rediscover what makes it exceptional. He described the qualities that define Western civilization as “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride,” and he celebrated its ambition, nationalism and relentless pursuit of excellence. He warned that the West has become ashamed of the very things that make it great.

Rubio is right that the West has sometimes lost confidence in its own traditions and ideals — and that it shouldn’t. But Rubio himself seems deeply confused about what makes the West exceptional.

But his role models for these virtues would be…

Consider the qualities he celebrates: courage, strength, ambition and pride. Genghis Khan had all of these in abundance. So did Persian emperors, Russian czars and rulers of imperial China. Every great civilization has celebrated its warriors, glorified its conquests and believed in its own superiority.

Whereas the qualities Zakaria sees as distinctive are, these days, increasingly dismissed as “woke” by the MAGA crowd.

What truly distinguishes Western civilization is not its military power or national pride, but its intellectual and political traditions. From Greek philosophy and Roman law through Christianity to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the West developed a set of ideas that challenged the arbitrary exercise of power. Reason, scientific inquiry, individual liberty, democracy, the rule of law and universal human rights became central to Western civilization and set it apart.

Zakaria goes into details… and concludes:

What makes the West exceptional is its ability to transcend the narrow claims of tribe, nation and empire, and to develop ideas about freedom, equality and human dignity that can speak to all people, everywhere. The West conquered much of the world through force. But it changed the world through ideas. I wish that the secretary of state of the United States would celebrate these ideas — and that this administration would live up to them.

\

Another piece on Rubio, from two days ago.

The New Yorker, Ishaan Tharoor, 14 Oct 2026: Marco Rubio’s Wild, Wild West, subtitled “In Greece, the Secretary of State cast the West as a civilization defined by its warriors and conquerors, not by its democracies.”

Longish. I skimmed. It ends:

“Civilization” is one of the favorite words of these sorts of politicians, more committed to supremacy than to democracy. But, as a rallying cry of the American right, it’s language that rings more hollow by the day, given the excesses of the past two years, the brutalization of migrants and protesters, the bullying of weaker countries, the repeated turns to unprovoked war and displays of force, and the garishness of an Administration that plans to live-stream a public execution later this year. Sebastian Gorka, a White House official focussed on counterterrorism, told the audience in Jerusalem that right-wing forces find themselves “in a war between civilization and barbarity.” He may not be on the side he thinks he is.

\\

Speaking of the limitations of human cognition:

The New Republic, 14 Oct 2026 (via JMG): “Demonic Stuff”: Kansas GOP Accuses Democrat of Being a Witch, subtitled “Ty Masterson had a lot to say about witchcraft while speaking at a Wichita church this weekend.”

Ty Masterson, the Republican candidate in the Kansas gubernatorial race, accused his Democratic opponent, Cindy Holscher, of being an actual witch capable of “demonic” magic, while speaking at the Praise Chapel in Wichita on Sunday.

Masterson introduced the dubious portion of his pseudo-sermon by suggesting that God wanted him to run for Kansas’s top political office.

“God’s armies are out there in this,” Masterson said. “What we’re fighting right now is a spiritual battle that I’ve never seen before, in [this] state, in this politics.

“Evil is maturing with the brotherhood, and it is rising to a level that is just in your face,” Masterson continued as a pianist played a contemplative melody beside him. “Really, my race and the U.S. Senate race with Roger Marshall versus [Adam] Hamilton. Those are spiritual battles.

Sigh. No. This is an illustration of the limitations of human cognition. To believe in demons and angels and witches and gods. Seriously. I realize that rational people are supposed to be deferential toward those with religious beliefs. But at some point, you have to call them out. These are not people with a grip on reality. These are not people who can understand long-term threats. These are not people who will solve problems. These are people who deny that problems exist.

\\

Now, there is the oft-cited spectrum of autism. (I’m about a 4 on a scale of 10.) Surely there’s a spectrum of intelligence (I’m maybe a 7 on a scale of 10). And a spectrum of musical talent (I’m about a 3). And so on. We are all a mix of various qualities. There is no best way to be. There is no just one thing. This is about diversity. We need these various talents, to solve different kinds of problems.

Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Human Progress | Leave a comment

Clapping for Stupid Things

Posted on Sunday 11 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Belatedly posted 19 Oct 2026, items collected on 11 Oct, about censorship in Texas, Trump saying stupid things, David Brooks on the soul, and how “polarization” is about sexists and racists on one side and those are aren’t on the other.

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, today 11 Oct: All the Things You’re Not Allowed to Say In Texas, subtitled “The state now controls what professors can teach.”

Because AIs now evaluate what professors plan to say.

It flags anything that might violate new rules laid out by the university chancellor, including a prohibition on the “advocacy/promotion of race or sex-based prejudice,” and a requirement—now Texas state law—that “only two sexes, male and female, are recognized.”

The world is simple, black and white. No nuances allowed. Transgenders, gays, Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies

…many Americans have come to believe that academia is too ideological and too intolerant of conservative views and arguments.

That’s because conservatives insist on black and white thinking, while the world is complex and multifaceted. That’s why they don’t like education.

\\

JMG, today: Trump: “I Could Say Stupidest Things And You’d Clap”

He did, and they did.

\\\

My take, short answer: No. Not in the way people imagine, as some sort of ethereal nonphysical entity that survives the body’s death and lives forever. That idea is a category error. See Core Themes.

The Atlantic, David Brooks, today 11 Oct: Do Human Beings Have Souls?, subtitled “The philosopher Shelly Kagan has gained millions of fans online while arguing that we can embrace physicalism without giving up meaning, morality, or human exceptionalism.”

The majority of Americans believe that every human being has an immaterial soul, and they tend to base their sense of human dignity and equality on this belief. Yet the culture at large often operates under the assumption that physical reality is all there is. Which view is correct? In this episode of The Permanent Questions, self-described “spookiest” David Brooks talks with Shelly Kagan, a best-selling philosopher who insists souls do not exist—and that we don’t need them in order to embrace the wonder and mystery of human experience.

Because people don’t understand the complexity that naturally arises from the physical state of the universe. They divide everything into physical — what they intuitively understand — and the supernatural.

Brooks thinks people do have souls. He can be correct only in the sense that every individual is a unique ineffable character. That doesn’t mean there’s a ghostly soul that will float away into heaven when the body dies.

Should read this fully. The author’s book about Death is 392 pages long, so I’m unlikely to get to it.

\\\

Was listening to KQED on the way back from visiting friends in San Jose this afternoon, and heard this week’s On the Media program, about how Polarization Is Not Our Biggest Problem. The segment that caught my ear was the one by Lilliana Mason. There’s a podcast, but no transcript. But there’s a link to Mason’s piece published in the Journal of Democracy at John Hopkins University Press: Polarization Is Not the Problem.

So what is the problem? Let’s see if in this I can find the way she boiled it down very cleaning during her radio interview.

It’s not that there’s polarization between two equally serious sides.

The people who are most likely to vilify and dehumanize their partisan opponents are Republicans who are high in racism and sexism and Democrats who oppose racism and sexism. The people who are least likely to vilify and dehumanize their political opponents are Republicans who are low in racism and sexism. One explanation for these patterns is that those Republicans who are racist and sexist vilify and dehumanize Democrats because they see the Democratic Party as a party of racial minorities and women; and Democrats who score low in racism and sexism will vilify and dehumanize Republicans because they consider Republicans to be racist and sexist. In other words, the people who are the most “polarized” in the U.S. electorate are those who are racist and sexist, and those who oppose racists and sexists.

That’s a good gloss, but it’s superficial, perhaps. There are deeper distinctions between the two sides, which I’ve been characterizing as tribal (which entails racism, sexism, and supernatural thinking) and cosmopolitan (which entails tolerance, openness to people different from oneselves, and rationality). One way is advancing the world; the other is dragging it back.

\\\

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Nature, Philosophy | Comments Off on Clapping for Stupid Things

All of this is coming your way

Posted on Wednesday 7 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Posted 19 Oct 2026, items compiled Wed 7 Oct 26, about the decline of reading, declining violence, the Gulf of America, the GOP as the party of white people, Hegseth’s war on “weirdo,’ how to save money by not buying anything, and my favorite R.E.M. song.

– – –

Substantial piece today. From a book about the decline of reading.

Washington Post, opinion by James Marriott, today 7 Oct: Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated., subtitled “Shorter sentences and monotonous lyrics form a sign of something bigger.”

This is adapted from the writer’s book The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.

(But recall that effect identified by Pinker and others about the increase in IQs… what was that due to?) Flynn effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Once upon a time, the idea that the world was growing stupider was mostly confined to the realm of dyspeptic reactionary polemic. But nowadays, the idea is increasingly mainstream. The belief that smartphones are “rotting our brains” is a widely repeated cliché. Data seems to corroborate this feeling, too: Studies have shown declines in IQ over the past two decades, with the sharpest drops among age brackets that use their phones the most. Students themselves have reported since the 2010s that they have difficulty concentrating and remembering. One study found that even having a phone turned off on a table nearby may be enough to impair a student’s academic performance.

With examples of how films and songs are becoming simpler. We’ve heard this particular point before:

In a world of constant distraction, scriptwriters can no longer rely on audiences to pay attention. Executives at Netflix have reportedly demanded simpler scripts in which characters repeatedly announce what they are doing, so that scrolling viewers can keep track of what is going on.

And then contrasting bestselling books in 1960 to those of today. And movies. And the preference these days for series and franchises that repeat the same basic story over and over.

Concluding:

Still, trends toward simplification are worth worrying about. If culture loses its capacity to sustain complexity, readers, moviegoers and music enthusiasts may find themselves with increasingly inadequate understandings of the world. Self-help books and derivative films are fine in themselves, but there are aspects of human experience that cannot be described by lists, formulaic plots or declarative sentences. Not everything can be said simply, and understanding requires sustained concentration from readers, viewers or listeners. If they are distracted and unfocused, culture risks being transformed into a smartphone wasteland. Audiences may find themselves fated to endless repetition and pastiche, song by song, remake by remake.

As always, it’s worth wondering if there isn’t some underlying issue. No one read books before some 600 years ago, let alone watched movies. Perhaps the reason books that seem complex to us were popular 75 years ago were because there were fewer options then.

Stepping out even further. What functions do books, movies, songs provide? Considering just books, some writers (Pinker?) credit books, especially novels in the 17th and 18th century, with increasing empathy toward different kinds of people, which in turn inspired various civil rights movements. More broadly, fiction of any kind can be seen as a kind of rehearsal for events of life, from the marriage trials of Jane Austen to the supernatural threats of horror. Much to think about here.

\\\

JMG, today 7 Oct: NYC Sees Record Low In Violent Crimes So Far In 2026

Once again, conservatives are terribly worried about problems that don’t exist. (The even more ridiculous issue of theirs is about transsexuals, a tiny, tiny fraction of the population.)

\

JMG, today 7 Oct: Alabama Forces Schools To Use “Gulf Of America”

The world laughs. The moment Trump is gone, everyone will forget about this. And the people in Alabama will forget they did this.

\

They say it right out loud.

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 6 Oct 2026: White Nationalist Jared Taylor Celebrates That The GOP Recognizes It Is ‘The Party For White People’

\

Another example of neglecting real problems in favor of prioritizing their ideologies and prejudices.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today 7 Oct: Pete Hegseth’s holy war on “weirdos” targets most Americans, subtitled “Forget Iran — the defense secretary is focused on forcing his religion on everyone else”

\

Latest example of how Trump is a dolt.

JMG, today 7 Oct: Trump Suggests Foreign Trade Will Soon Be Unneeded

If you don’t buy anything, you save all that money! But then, you don’t have anything.

\\

I have got to leave to find my way.

My favorite R.E.M. song.

…All of this is coming your way.

 

Posted in Culture, Decline, Music | Comments Off on All of this is coming your way

Conservatives and Empathy

Posted on Wednesday 30 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservatives against empathy: excuses for selfishness;
  • Another piece about boarding houses, once banned, perhaps now more appropriate than ever;
  • Recalling a 50-year-old thesis about how human stupidity drags societies down;
  • Quotes from Thomas L. Friedman and Paul Krugman about Donald Trump;
  • Reading the Jared Huffman book.
– – –

What does it say about conservatives that lately they’re against empathy?

The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig, 27 Sep 2026: Why Empathy Is Now ‘Toxic,’ ‘Suicidal,’ and a ‘Sin’, subtitled “According to Gad Saad and his powerful acolytes, compassion is a recipe for ‘the collective suicide of the West.'”

A crusade against empathy is sweeping through the right. In sometimes apocalyptic terms, prominent conservatives are denouncing that feeble human capacity to understand the feelings of others. This is a trend I’ve written about before, but I’ve been intrigued by the way these figures have lately been adopting the language of the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad and his influential book, Suicidal Empathy, released earlier this year. According to Saad, suicidal empathy is when otherwise positive impulses are “hijacked and used to make policy decisions that are best tackled via a sober analysis”—a phenomenon that will lead to nothing less than “the collective suicide of the West.”

The arguments seem to be excuses for why conservatives need not be concerned with the less-fortunate. A justification for selfishness.

But his reasoning seems more political than spiritual. Suicidal Empathy and books like it are aimed not at liberals, but at conservatives who may be struggling with a conflict between their politics and their conscience. Arguments about the harms of empathy help justify personal and political behavior that might otherwise seem wrong or feel bad, such as cutting food-stamp benefits for poor people or tearing immigrant mothers away from their children. By claiming that an excess of compassion is in fact a social blight, Saad’s book and others offer a theoretical framework for selfishness.

Is there a wider picture here? Apparently Saad tries.

By empathy, Saad means “a noble and evolutionarily selected virtue, a central feature of our humanity” which, he says, is correlated with kindness. What he means by suicidal is less clearly defined, but the overarching idea is that when people—typically woke liberals—advocate certain actions or policy positions out of empathy for other people, rather than based on Saad’s idea of objective reasoning, they undermine the societal values of security and cohesion.

Well that first bit is true enough; it’s what’s made us a social species able to cooperate with other tribes, and grow into a global civilization. But the writer here, Bruenig, sees the core motives of this movement.

To the degree that books such as Saad’s are meant to help conservatives resolve their internal conflicts and ignore their consciences, they are basically right-wing self-help guides. Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy seems especially targeted at conservative Christians who feel torn about subjects such as immigration and welfare. Stuckey is at pains to reassure her readers that any dissonance they might feel between their religious duties and political interests is a treacherous mirage generated by the left. The goal of “toxic empathy,” she says, is “to get us to suppress our opposition to a particular issue or point of view by playing upon our desire to be a good person.” By this account, liberals are emotionally exploiting feelings of guilt or shame in conservatives to persuade them to support left-wing goals.

A couple more bits:

And, like much self-help literature, the anti-empathy genre does not have to make sense to change minds. In Saad’s imagination, seemingly any personal or political cost, such as paying high taxes, or halting human encroachment on the habitat of endangered animals, is a form of individual or collective suicide.

… Suicidal Empathy is not really a theoretical text, but rather a guidebook for ignoring human suffering. Saad and his ideological colleagues may be helping conservatives resolve the tension between their political positions and their moral values, but only by compromising the religious principles at the heart of the Western civilization they purport to defend. And unlike the exhortation to love thy neighbor, this kind of thinking merely reinforces the idea that might makes right.

\\\

We’ve seen this next subject recently. And coincidentally, we watched an episode of The Waltons (yes) in which John-Boy stays in a rooming house in the town near his university, and my partner asked, what kind of place is that? It looks nice. And I am reminded against the 1950s movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Vox, Rachel Cohen Booth, 28 Sep 2026: America’s empty bedrooms are up for grabs, subtitled “A 20th-century backlash banned a popular affordable housing option. It’s now seeing a revival.”

The authors of ABUNDANCE discussed this; review here.

Key takeaways

  • Cities spent much of the 20th century banning cheap rented rooms, and a 1974 Supreme Court ruling still lets them decide who counts as a “family” under zoning law. That’s now being challenged on two fronts.
  • A Kansas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to revisit that precedent, and “Golden Girls” bills that have already passed in four states and are spreading.
  • The next few years will determine whether co-living stays a niche workaround or becomes a normal option, with more states set to take up the issue in 2027.

\\\

Well, I wouldn’t call it human stupidity… exactly.

The New Republic, Ross Rosenfeld, today: Trump Personifies the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, subtitled “How a 50-year-old treatise by an Italian economic historian makes sense of our utterly senseless moment”

Fifty years ago, in his most famous work, the prolific intellectual Carlo Cipolla argued that stupid people, as a group, are “much more powerful than the mafia, or the military industrial complex.”

Today, as we witness one of the dumbest wars in history unraveling in Iran, an inept health and human services secretary working to bring back measles and polio, a Republican Party wherein only 20 percent view the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a violent insurrection but 71 percent deny Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and an administration that refuses to properly regulate AI and crypto industries that threaten the economic well-being and safety of all, Cipolla’s contention is as apt now as when he first proposed it in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, in 1976—an era when the country, and indeed the world, was similarly roiled by sociopolitical rage and seemed on the brink of a catastrophe.

Is this really about human stupidity? My current thesis is about a range in human nature, from tribal to cosmopolitan, along which anyone can be stupid. A lot of people don’t think through the things they claim to believe, but instead accept by rote.

Still, this is another categorization that I will consider:

Cipolla divided people into four groups: the helpless, whose actions harm themselves but benefit others; the intelligent, whose actions benefit themselves and others; the bandits, who enrich themselves while harming others; and the stupid, whose actions harm others while producing no benefit to themselves.

But he was writing 50 years ago, before modern understanding of human nature emerged.

\\\

Another trenchant quote. And wonder how so many people in the US support this guy, even against overwhelming evidence. Maybe they are really stupid.

NY Times, opinion by Thomas L. Friedman, yesterday: Trump Is Going Viral in the Worst Ways

President Trump is such an awful human being that just writing about him feels degrading. What president would denigrate his predecessor in front of China’s leader the way Trump mocked Joe Biden, now suffering from cancer, by pointing out that a framed picture of an autopen was hanging in the White House instead of Biden’s portrait?

Alas, though, when someone as morally warped as Trump — whose first secretary of state called him a “moron” — assumes this much unchecked power at the dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence, he can’t be ignored. Because right now Trump is leaving America exposed to dangerous viruses: digital, biological and diplomatic. Something bad is going to happen to us as a result. We and our children are going to pay for this, and not only at the gas pump.

\

Another good take here.

Paul Krugman, yesterday: The Beclowning of Scott Bessent, subtitled “Another Trump enabler pays the price”

One iron law of current politics is that nobody who associates themselves with Donald Trump emerges with a shred of credibility.

Perhaps I should leave it at that. But I’ll quote on:

For some, that’s not a big loss — it’s not as if anyone respected Pete Hegseth even before he decided that the key to military success in an age of drones and AI was more testosterone. For others, however, the costs are real. I’m old enough to remember when Marco Rubio was widely considered a reasonable, thoughtful politician.

Right now, however, my candidate for the biggest loser is Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury.

And he goes on.

\

I’m currently reading a book by Jared Huffman, the one member of Congress who has come out as a non-believer, and his take about Christian nationalism. No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism. And he recounts the factions of Christian nationalism, and how Hegseth, among others, aligns with factions who would happily take down democracy in favor of Biblical literalism. And how you don’t hear much about this from main-stream media. Will write up the book when I finish.

Posted in Human Nature, Politics, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off on Conservatives and Empathy

A World We Can’t Trust

Posted on Tuesday 29 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Bill McKibben on how we weren’t built for a world like this;
  • Locus server issues today;
  • More destruction: Trump scales back fuel emission standards, and removes supports for LGBTQ+ folks;
  • How Trump’s new AI-powered America.gov tells truths that counter Trump’s lies.
– – –

NY Times, Bill McKibben, today: I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This.

Opening:

Psychologists have claimed that evolutionary biology leaves humans ill-equipped to deal with giant, slow-moving problems.

A point I’ve made repeatedly — or at least, the point that *most* people have trouble dealing with slow-moving problems, especially conservatives, who dismiss anything they see as long-term, meaning it won’t affect themselves in their lifetimes.

But suddenly we live in a moment when problems are speeding and piling up.

The climate crisis now consists of walls of water sweeping down Nepali rivers, obliterating entire towns in the blink of an eye, and wildfires that wipe out California neighborhoods in hours. And we’re confronting the birth and Bunyanesque growth of a new technology, artificial intelligence, that, according to some of its creators, is fairly likely to kill us all in the near future. We have to sit and listen as men worth unfathomable sums speculate about whether our species will survive their companies’ initial public offerings.

We definitely weren’t designed to cope with all this — our bodies, our nervous systems, our brains. Among all the other dangers these developments represent, they’re simply wearing us out. A lot of us would like politicians to offer, alongside their promises of affordability, even a glimpse of serenity.

Again, I’ve observed this for some time. The piece is mostly concerned about psychological consequences. The writer adds a comment at the end:

It increasingly feels to me like we just aren’t designed to cope with the pace and scale of events that keep crashing down on us — I mean, how are parents (or grandparents like me) supposed to cope with the notion that AI might wipe us all out, or that the El Niño now bearing down on us will take temperatures to unprecedented heights for our species? Along with affordability, might it be wise for some politician to start thinking up a few strategies for serenity?

Of course, “designed” only makes sense in terms of evolution. Humanity was “designed” by natural circumstances to survive in its ancestral environment, which was quite different from our modern environment.

\\\

Distracted today by the hack of the Locus server, which has brought down sfadb.com, though apparently the digital wonk at Locus has managed to restore locusmag.com and this site.

\\

Let’s note a few things very briefly.

They’re either stupid, or malicious.

\

Most interesting story today.

Slate, Ian Prasad Philbrick, today: Donald Trump’s Chatbot Says Joe Biden Won the 2020 Election, subtitled “We finally found someone in the Trump administration who’s willing to tell the president the truth. It’s a robot.”

Trump launched AI powered America.gov, which tells the truth about things like climate change and the 2020 election. Contrary to what Trump says. How will this work out?

And

JMG, today (from Washington Post): White House Launches Federal Services AI Chatbot, And It’s Already Changing Answers About Trump’s Lies

The predictable thing is that Trump will instruct the Chatbot to conform to his lies. How will he do that? Where will this lead? You already can’t trust AI.

Posted in Human Nature, Psychology, Technology | Comments Off on A World We Can’t Trust

Attending the Ballet

Posted on Monday 28 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

No post yesterday; we were busy attending a concert, with dinner afterwards.

Yesterday we attended Oscar, a ballet at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, staged by The Australian Ballet, on tour, with the local Berkeley Symphony playing the score, with conductor Jonathan Lo. Choreography by Christopher Weldon; score by Joby Talbot, whom I’d never heard of before.

Here’s the page on the Cal Performances site, though it will likely disappear soon:

Sep 25–27, 2026
The Australian Ballet
Oscar© by Christopher Wheeldon
North American Premiere

It’s about Oscar Wilde, and is told in a semi-chronological, non-narrative fashion. Much of it depicts memories and fantasies of Wilde as he lies in prison, after conviction for indecency (i.e. homosexuality, which was illegal then). There are allusions to his works, especially The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I was most curious about the composer, whom I’d never heard of. Joby Talbot. He’s a British composer, of stage works and film scores (he did The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy back in 2005), and apparently quite prolific. It’s difficult to generalize about his style after hearing this one score just once, but the word I’ve settled on for this music is “colorful.” Eclectic. Bright and busy, with Philip Glass arpeggios there, John Williams bombast there, ominous horror movie thump-thumps there, harp and soprano glissandos there.

There are lots of Talbot samples on YouTube, and a few about this ballet, Oscar.

Here’s 10 minutes of the composer talking with the conductor, Jonathan Lo.

Here are some samples of the music, in rehearsal.

\

I had made a reservation for dinner after the concert, but at intermission I saw an email from the restaurant saying they had cancelled my reservation. The restaurant was, in fact, Zino, the restaurant in the hotel where Locus staged their Locus Awards ceremony about four months ago. I phoned them; they said the restaurant was not opening that evening. No explanation. I’ve never experienced this before.

Posted in Music | Comments Off on Attending the Ballet

Dicey Claims

Posted on Saturday 26 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • No, Noah’s Ark has not been found, again;
  • Evidence suggests Trump wanted the Kennedy Center to fall into ruin;
  • Lenders around the world don’t trust the US;
  • An example of how AI is making things worse, by claiming credit for mathematical results that cannot be easily confirmed;
  • Thoughts about mathematics, AI, and the limits of human cognition.
– – –

This kind of story pops up every few years, and it’s no truer now than it has ever been. The searchers have had 2000 years. But gullible people feel confirmed by it every time.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: Scientists have not “100% confirmed” the resting place of Noah’s Ark, subtitled “The Daily Mail turned a Christian company’s dubious claims about Turkey’s Durupınar Formation into a wildly misleading story”

(The Daily Mail, says Google, is “a middle-market tabloid-size conservative newspaper.”)

Did you know Noah’s Ark was real and scientists just confirmed it?

That’s what you might think if you just read the headline from a Daily Mail article which says Noah’s Ark’s resting place has been “100% confirmed” after 4,300 years.

And

You’ll be shocked to learn the actual story doesn’t back any of that up. But will anyone read the story? Probably not. It doesn’t help that the article is behind a paywall, so most people will only ever be able to see the headline.

They also won’t learn that the group behind this story got NBC’s Today to cover the exact same story last year.

Needless to say, the only thing that has been confirmed is how easily Christian propaganda can spread.

Mehta goes on to describe how stories like this get promoted.

This isn’t about faith, or the gullibility of Christians. It’s about basic literacy about how the world works, and how therefore the whole Noah’s Ark story is absurd on its foundations. It’s completely implausible. That all the animals in the world were saved on the Ark and then propagated to their current positions? People searching for the remains of Noah’s Ark are wasting their time.

Mehta concludes,

So who the hell said this was Noah’s Ark and that’s “100 percent confirmed”? The Daily Mail. Which was spurred to do so by a Christian group with a vested interest in proving Noah’s Ark was real—or at least making people think it’s a possibility.

Not scientists.

The Christians here wanted headlines so they could raise money, and they knew exactly which tabloid would run with it.

Noah’s Ark isn’t real. But Christian grifting is still alive and well.

Are they that cynical to be merely trying to make money? Perhaps. I think they’re just grasping at straws, anything to confirm their faith.

\\\

Today’s paper.

NY Times, today, posted yesterday: Kennedy Center Shelved Repairs Now Cited for Closure, Whistle-Blowers Say, subtitled “In a letter to Congress, former employees say the center delayed a plan to address the leaks that its officials now cite as a serious safety risk.”

It’s almost as if they wanted a reason to demolish it.

\\\

Continuing a theme.

The Atlantic, David Frum, today: Lenders Don’t Trust the United States Anymore, subtitled “Blame Trump for rising borrowing costs.”

All over the world, lenders are demanding higher interest rates. The global bond market is extracting higher yields from every borrower, starting with the biggest borrowers of all: national governments. But not every government is paying equally.

Trustworthy borrowers with solid finances and honest leadership pay less. Distrusted borrowers with disordered finances and corrupt leaders pay more. In times past, the United States would have headed that first list. Under President Trump, the United States has tumbled onto the second one.

\\\

Here’s a rebuke to optimistic thinking about AI.

NY Times, guest essay by Zeynep Tufekci, yesterday in print, posted 22 Sep 26: This Is a Rare Arena in Which People Think A.I. Is Helping. It’s Making Things Worse.

This is about the AI proof of a certain mathematical conjecture.

It was one of the most famous challenges in the history of mathematics: the fluid dynamics problem known as Navier-Stokes, whose solution had proved so elusive that a million-dollar prize had been posted for the genius or geniuses who could finally crack it. Until the other day, that is, when OpenAI announced that one of its advanced models had found an answer at last. And it had taken only half a week.

The problems are, in a nutshell, is that OpenAI may have stolen the work of two human mathematicians working on the problem, and, that the claim of a solution is extremely difficult to verify.

\

So beware claims like this.

Scientific American, 24 Sep 26: AI solves 79-year-old mathematical mystery, subtitled “Can a six-dimensional sphere be described using imaginary numbers? For decades, experts puzzled over this question. Now an AI has apparently answered it”

He’s done it again: mathematician Levent Alpöge, at Anthropic, has solved yet another open math problem using artificial intelligence. He had already tackled the Jacobian conjecture and found two new elliptic curves. Now add to these the 1947 Hopf problem. It asks whether a six-dimensional sphere can be completely described using complex numbers, which include the (seemingly impossible) square root of –1. According to Alpöge, the answer is yes, though the result remains unverified.

OK, maybe. We need to temper our enthusiasm. I suggested here just recently that these AI results illustrate the limitations of human cognition. Perhaps they do. The difficulty we have verifying AI results may just be another illustration. Or perhaps we’re being fooled, fooling ourselves. AI only knows what we know, in a sense.

\

So maybe mathematics is the case study about the range of human cognition. At one extreme are those savants I’ve discussed. At the other are most folks who admit they’re “bad at math” or simply don’t like it, and have no intuitive understanding about sizes or ranges. But at the higher extreme are those problem humans can’t seem to figure out, but which may or may not are being solved by AI. Can AI reveal to humans a realm we cannot intuitively understand? That would be the optimistic possibility.

Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Mathematics, Religion | Comments Off on Dicey Claims