Do you feel better about utter despair? Asking for a friend.

Not really your point, but the hardest thing for me is dealing with people in my personal life who are in denial about their own lives - particularly if their denial affects me in some way.

I have a neighbor who decided to befriend me. He feels that his neighbors hate him because he's different. I think they hate him because he plays Steve Winwood on his front porch.

2: no, yes, exactly! I recently heard a story of parents in massive denial about their 4 year old likely having autism. And not just being on the spectrum, but on a trajectory to have trouble functioning as an adult. Ie, nonverbal and not potty-trained.

The story went that the grandmother and other relatives had tried to encourage the parents to get the kid checked out, and instead found themselves cut-off, and had only gently been able to establish limited contact, but it's fragile.

The latest update was that the parents are going to homeschool the kid so as not to trigger any interventions that would come from starting school. The whole thing makes me reel.

4: I'm super extra bad at managing things like that, because my Dad's denial did so much damage. So, when my FIL was dying, my MIL wanted to believe he had like 6 months to 1yr even after it was clear that it was going to be much sooner. She bought a chair for him even when it looked like he would never get hom3 from the hospital. He didn't. Both she and he put off having his brother come to visit, because they wanted to wait until he could have a nice visit at home. His brother never got to come. I did say "Don't wait," but I didn't push it.

3: Solo Steve Winwood or Spencer Davis Group. or Traffic or Blind Faith Steve Winwood? Or all of the above?

If you like any kind of popular music at all, there's probably a Steve Winwood song for you.

Is it just that he plays it too loud or too often?

Too loud and too often.

7: Maybe you should just tell him.

I'm sure someone else has and I don't live close enough to have a direct stake.

He asks loaded questions seeking support for the idea that he's not too loud and I say that it is probably something to take up with the neighbors.

On the topic of monoculture -- I was thinking about that period of history in which the three major TV networks dominated, and they all presented pretty much the same version of the news -- was that the aberration in history? Or was it like that before TV, with the big radio stations and newspaper chains dominating?

My dad always watched Dan Rather, probably because he watched Cronkite before that.

10:. So he's hoping you will respond that he's not loud at all, it's just that the neighbors don't like him, because he's too good-looking and intelligent.

I don't know if it's exactly "denial", but most people clearly have beliefs that are, in an emotional sense, load-bearing truths. These are often not very empirically supported in my opinion, but if it's something like "My scrambled eggs are the best" I'm not going to challenge it. It's when you get to "the election was stolen" that I'll start screaming.

load-bearing truths

I like that.

Your eggs are too dry.

"Two tablespoons of butter tends to help" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dGBRGtyzX0 (Featuring Adam Savage from Mythbusters)

Is this a bad time for a Marlon Brando joke?

A New Atheist-type friend of mine and I were discussing what I view as the problem with the New Atheism. I had two points: 1.) The prominent New Atheists are all assholes and 2.) This is not a coincidence.

We were discussing this in the context of Stephen Jay Gould's charitable view of religion, which the New Atheists find contemptible.

To oversimplify a bit, Gould suggests that religion and science, properly understood, simply deal with different subject matter, and therefore can't contradict each other. I'd broaden that a bit and describe the two categories this way: There are things we can know, and things that are beyond our understanding but are nonetheless necessary components of life and so we are therefore obliged to make up stories about them.

I think the world is full of people who don't recognize the difference between those two categories, and are happy to make up stories whenever they feel like it -- and who are generally well-served by this attitude, though every now and then they have to be intubated. On the other hand, you have your New Atheists, who deny the legitimacy of the latter category of knowledge, even though they make up shit all the time.

I disagree pretty strongly with Gould's non-overlapping magisteria viewpoint (mostly because they always end up overlapping somewhere, but also because I think handwaves away that many religious perspectives don't fit it at all), but I do think that Gould's generosity is a huge part of his appeal as a thinker and that the word "charitable" is a very apt one.

That said, the New Atheists were basically ahead of their time, now literally every politically viewpoint shares this tendency towards perfectionist maximalism and behaving like an asshole all the time.

I like Gould.

Mostly the essays on evolution and the Mismeasure of Man.

20: Gould is (well, he was) an atheist. He doesn't hand-wave anything. He thinks religious people, by and large, are doing it wrong, but he recognizes a need for types of knowledge that science doesn't address, and he admires some religious efforts along those lines.

Assholism is baked into New Atheism because it requires denial of its own obvious limits. If Sam Harris hates Muslims, I want him to explain why without resorting to moral logic that isn't grounded in science. (I freely admit that I lack a scientific explanation for why Sam Harris ought not hate Muslims.)

22: I've read basically all of that. Great stuff.

I should find the box in the basement with them. Haven't read in decades.

Religion and scientific reality do overlap, and religious people have a responsibility not to overextend their religion to the point where it infringes on other people's rights or common resources. This means there really are parameters on acceptable beliefs and unacceptable beliefs. Or rather, if you want to have an unacceptable belief system, fine, but you can't act on the bad parts.

Atheism has a component of being a belief system and you can't act on the parts that make you an insufferable asshole.

Watch me think out loud and say basic stuff as a result.

26.1 was much of Gould's point.

The rest of it was about not having to use science to prove Sam Harris shouldn't hate Muslims.

But more broader than just that.

I don't really know who Sam Harris is, so to save effort, I'm assuming his views are similar to Dawkins and his appearance to Col. Klink.

I am skeptical of the claim that Sam Harris claims that his beliefs on Muslims follow purely from scientific principles.

Hogan!!

My MIL lives her life in complete denial and it drives me so crazy I have a hard time interacting with her. She was in denial that her husband was abusive, then in denial that he had a serious opiate addiction. After he had a stroke, she was in complete denial that his stroke caused significant cognitive impairments and continued to let him manage their money. I'm sure she would have been in denial about his physical problems too but it's hard to pretend someone isn't paralyzed on their left side or is able to walk. She was further in denial about his multiple serious health problems that kept accruing over the years and was completely blindsided when he died last October, even though he had been living on borrowed time for at least a year. I am sure her denial was a coping mechanism for her awful life and I would feel some sympathy if she hadn't forced my husband to put up with abuse when he was a child. She lived with me for four months and kept wanting to talk about how tragic her husband's sudden death was and I just had to leave the room.

Gould's "Wonderful Life" persuasively argues that there is a major element of chance in evolution, and that things could have been different.

"Time's Arrow / Time's Cycle" talks about the relationship between reversible time or cyclic repetition (when more or less the same thing keeps happening again and again) and irreversible time (when something new happens and the world is never the same again). This is an important and (in my opinion) neglected question, and people tend either to insist that one kind of time or the other is really real, but not both, or te slip sloppily between the two without noticing.

32: Harris contends that he makes judgments according to an objective morality, and this objective morality is rejected by Muslims. (Hence his disdain for Gould's tolerance of moral judgments that are made in a sphere separate from science.)

The problem is, his position ultimately comes down to an unprovable first principle, or principles. He refuses to admit that.

For instance:

Once we acknowledge that "morality" relates to questions of human and animal well-being, then there is no reason to doubt that a prescriptive (rather than merely descriptive) science of morality is possible.

But what if we don't acknowledge that? What in science requires us to acknowledge it? Harris doesn't even recognize the existence of that question, much less answer it.

Honestly, I probably eat more animals than one is supposed to under that science.

Okay, I'm wrong. I regret thinking anything other than Harris is a moron.

Not the best Dumbledore either.

I particularly hate it when someone offers up an excuse or rationale that is so nonsensical and transparently false that you can't then engage.

In my personal and professional life, I don't tolerate nonsense. (I do realize most people can't discriminate this way.)

But from a comfortable distance -- on blogs or Facebook or whatever, or just reading the news -- I don't have any problem engaging with it. The key (as I think I've said here before) is understanding what the conversation is about.

It's not about "Did Biden steal the election?" That's not a sensible question, and you can't engage with it. The question is: "How does one distinguish truth from falsehood? What makes some things true and others not?"

Many of the people we call morons really do understand this, and you can talk to them about it. It's the liberals who have trouble grasping the lesson of Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty:

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all."

I make an effort to tolerate nonsense online (probably poorly) because otherwise I would get into unproductive arguments. Since political discussion is increasingly Twitterized, and consists of one-liners dunking on someone, the most tempting for me are the arguments where I agree with the sentiment, and yet the actual substance strikes me as oh so stupid. For example, over the last six months I have read four thousand one-liners on how we could solve all the world's problems by spending Jeff Bezos' money. I agree with the sentiment that inequality is bad, and we should raise taxes (plus probably some other things) to combat inequality. But just the sheer dumb magical thinking, the sheer lack of understanding of how the world works, in the endless variants of "if we took all of Jeff Bezos' money we could buy everyone two ponies" makes me want to argue the point. But then I don't, because the thought of arguing in defense of Bezos is too depressing.

I still think we should steal their stuff while they are in space if they stay very long.

I am indebted to you, Walt, for your comment in a recent thread suggesting that I tend to take certain outlandish views "seriously but not literally." That's exactly right, but it hadn't occurred to me to phrase it that way -- and to recognize my genuine commonality with the Trumpkins.

Fuck Bezos, is what I say. As long as people get the broad principle right, I am mostly unconflicted about letting them have their say without contradiction.

I'm still upset that spoons don't stick to my face now that I'm fully vaccinated. I was promised the ability to attract spoons and to not get sick. I got half a loaf.

43: Eh, I'm tired of it. Politics should be more than an endless series of dopamine hits.

Anyway, when my mom's cousin clearly wanted to argue about whether I should have let our teenage son make up his own mind about being vaccinated, I just walked away instead of telling him to fuck off. Who does that at a funeral anyway?

Politics is, and must be, a lot more than careful ruminations on policy. I can't think of a political hero who wasn't big on dopamine hits -- though admittedly, Joe Biden provides a significant counter-example.

An electorate with decent hearts is necessary for decent policy, but a complex understanding among the masses of the merits of free markets is almost completely unnecessary to move policy in the right direction.

Speaking of Biden -- and getting back to the original post -- he seems to be really finding his voice in confronting The Crazy.

47: People regularly recommend policies that would subtract several percent off of GDP. Now, it's unlikely that they'll get to implement those policies, but the same thing is true of the right and their many terrible policies.

Except that they have implemented many of those terrible policies and are very close to implementing others.

The Socialists and similar are no threat to anything I hold important, but right-wing Pennsylvanians are a direct and demonstrated threat whether it be mass murder down the street from my house or repeated attempts to block my vote from counting.

If you think white supremacists have implemented more than 5% of what they have in mind, you are sadly mistaken.

I didn't say that. Just that they are obviously the biggest political threat to me personally.

Obviously, they are a bigger threat to others.