Trump Believes

Leave a reply

Classic newswriting practice discourages the use of subjective words like “believes,” “thinks,” and “feels” because they imply an inner state of mind that cannot be independently verified by reporters. Instead, journalists are generally advised to rely on neutral attribution verbs such as “said,” “stated,” or “told reporters.” When distance or skepticism is warranted, words like “claimed,” “asserted,” or “suggested” can signal that the outlet is reporting an allegation or interpretation rather than endorsing it as fact.

Yet in normal political coverage, “believe” is frequently used. Writers routinely say things like “Democrats believe” or “the mayor believes.” That isn’t normally a problem. Used this way, “believes” stops short of endorsing the belief as fact while still capturing that someone is expressing more than a single, isolated quote; it gestures at a broader worldview.

In the context of Trump, however, many otherwise reasonable norms become problematic. When the word “believes” is used to characterize assertions made by Trump or his administration, it becomes subtly misleading. Trump strains or breaks many norms, including the use of the word “believes” to describe his frequently shifting claims. If reporters use the word “believes” to suggest a coherent worldview, that framing is often inaccurate in his case.

Describing statements by Trump and his administration as sincere “beliefs” does more than attribute an inner mental state or suggest a worldview; it risks conferring a kind of moral and epistemic dignity. A belief can be wrong, even wildly wrong, but it usually suggests some sincerity, some continuity, and some relation to evidence as the believer understands it—some sense that, if the world looked different, the belief might eventually yield.

None of that is typically true with Trump. Few of the disingenuous claims he spouts at any given moment can be legitimately called beliefs, apart from some of his most openly spiteful or ideologically consistent ones.

To many readers, “Trump believes” often feels not merely imprecise but almost perverse. It sounds like a credibility upgrade, a quiet promotion from “he says this” to “this is how reality appears inside his sincere inner life.” Even when the rest of the sentence and the surrounding reporting are fully critical—fact-checks, counterevidence, context—the verb itself grates, because it conflicts with the reader’s core assessment: that Trump does not believe in the ordinary sense so much as deploy statements. In that frame, “believes” is not a neutral label; it is an inaccurate and undeserved benefit of the doubt.

The problem is compounded by how small words are processed as we read them. Readers rarely stop on “claims,” “says,” or “argues.” These are background verbs that their brains skip over. But “believes” stands out. It draws attention to itself because it imports psychology. This may help explain why journalists use it; it can subtly signal interpretive authority and make a piece feel more insider-informed.

Because “believes” stands out, once you notice its misuse in regard to Trump, it tends to keep surfacing. Each instance can leave the impression that the writer or outlet is softening or normalizing Trump’s unrelentingly false claims and arguments.

It is unfortunate that, like many things strained by Trump, we can no longer take for granted the otherwise benign use of a word like “believes.” News writers should be far more careful about describing claims by Trump or his administration as “beliefs.”

Daredevil Born Again

Leave a reply

I have never been one to rant about movies and shows. I hate those haters who compulsively rush to nitpick and complain about everything to prove they have better taste than everyone else and that nothing is ever as good as it used to be. If I do rarely write about shows, it is because I particularly loved them. One was Penny Dreadful which was the topic of my very first Figmentum back in 2015. Another of my rare fanboy raves was over the Netflix Daredevil series when that first came out (see here).

But here I am today to rant about Daredevil Born Again. In particular, the absolutely horrible season two finale.

The ending actually made me outraged and angry.

Warning, a spoiler follows...

I am outraged not only by a terrible end to an otherwise great series, but by the larger messages it sends. Storytelling can bend physics, ignore the finer points of criminal procedure, and occasionally tape over plot holes with a well‑timed quip. What it cannot do, at least not without breaking my trust, is casually invert the moral core of its own protagonist and then ask me to applaud. That is what the “Fisk goes free” ending does.

The series doesn’t merely show Wilson Fisk as a corrupt politician or an off‑screen orchestrator of crime. The finale graphically shows him rampage through the NYC courthouse brutally butchering crowds of protesters, with deliberate January‑6‑style imagery, in full public view. We aren’t dealing with a shady back‑room deal or a body count the characters can plausibly hand‑wave away; this is a literal spine-smashing massacre in the heart of the justice system and in full view of the cameras.

In response, Matt Murdock does two things. First, he stops the mob from killing Fisk, which is consistent with his established refusal to become an executioner. Then he does something else entirely: he presses Fisk to accept a political deal that allows him to avoid trial and prison altogether, provided he promises to leave New York.

First off, I will just point out that the idea that Matt could broker such a deal is absurd beyond words. The suspension of disbelief it requires to allow this goes well beyond absurdity. It is just utterly unrealistic and ridiculous even in a superhero show. No city anywhere would allow Fisk to walk away unpunished after such blatant and heinous crimes.

But even if we can get past that small point, in a universe that pretends to care about justice, this is not mercy. It’s complicity. Daredevil has always walked a line between vigilante violence and belief in the rule of law. He beats people up in alleys not because he enjoys it (usually), but because it is his ugly way of dragging them toward a system he still, somehow, wants to work. His no‑kill rule is tolerable precisely because it’s tethered to a conviction that real accountability must happen somewhere else — in a courtroom, in a cell, in a moment where the state, not the man in the mask, passes sentence. Here, that delicate tether is simply cut. Matt doesn’t just refuse to kill; he actively helps dismantle any chance of justice at all. The man who has no compunction about shattering the bones and livelihoods of low‑level crooks suddenly discovers boundless scruples when it comes to the one person proven to be beyond redemption. That is not a subtle ethical tension. It is moral whiplash.

Watching this, I found my mind wandering somewhere I didn’t expect it to go: Batman and the Joker. In the darker takes on that relationship, Batman’s refusal to kill the Joker stops looking noble and starts looking pathological. The body count mounts. Gotham burns. At some point, you have to ask whether Bruce is more attached to his identity as “the man who doesn’t kill” than he is to the lives being lost as a direct consequence. Fans have wrestled with this for years. Daredevil, by contrast, has usually felt healthier. Matt is tormented, but he isn’t supposed to be in love with the endlessness of his war. He wants his enemies actually stopped. His Catholic guilt is directed inward, not fetishized as an excuse to keep the real villains around to justify his own existence.

Fisk’s exile ending throws that distinction away. By brokering a deal that allows a mass‑murdering Fisk to simply walk free, Matt crosses into exactly the territory that makes many Batman stories uncomfortable: the hero who, whether he admits it or not, needs his monster so badly that he is willing to give up on everyone else’s safety to preserve the dance. Except in this case, it’s worse. Batman usually at least turns Joker over to Arkham and pretends the system is trying. Matt skips that step entirely. Instead of “I won’t kill you because I believe you should face justice,” the message becomes “I won’t kill you and I will also help you dodge justice.” It’s not a tragic compromise; it’s a psychotic level of enablement.

The obvious question, and the one that has kept nagging at me, is: how did this get through? How did an entire chain of professionals — writers, producers, executives — look at this and say, “Yes, this is the necessary and best culmination of our story”? The answer, I suspect, has less to do with anyone secretly believing that this is actually a strong ending and more to do with the mundane, grinding logic of franchise management. Marvel has been very clear, in ways both public and implied, that you do not permanently break your toys. As far back as the original Netflix run, creators talked about needing to leave key villains alive and reusable. The Disney+ era doubles down on that. Kingpin is a valuable asset, needed in other corners of the MCU. Born Again needed to end the “Mayor Fisk” storyline without killing him or burying him in a hole the wider franchise couldn’t easily dig him out of.

Within that box, the writers’ room still wants poetry. One man in jail, one man in exile. One in chains, one in a self‑made hell. It looks good on a whiteboard. It sounds powerful in a pitch. You can drape it in Frank Miller shadows and Catholic symbolism and convince yourself you have done something bold. The problem is that the poetry is built on sand. The more clearly the show depicts Fisk’s crimes, the more absurd and grotesque the “deal” becomes. Critics who otherwise liked the episode acknowledge that it “pushes credibility” and amounts to a “grave injustice.” Fans whose tolerance for comic‑book nonsense is usually high describe the logic as “breaking my brain.” And here I am, the usually easy‑going guy muttering “take it easy” at other people’s outrage, pacing my living room and inventing new synonyms for “what were they thinking?”

Although the show did not intend it, perhaps the calculation of Marvel, Disney, and the showrunners here reflects a deeper rot in our society when real supervillains escape justice only to be rebooted over and over because they are “franchise characters” in a gigantic money-making machine. So the larger question is about what our stories teach us to accept. We live in a world where powerful men commit public harms and then negotiate quiet “exiles”: golden parachutes, consulting gigs on another continent, opportunities to reinvent themselves while their victims get, at best, a carefully crafted press release. We already know, at some level, that this is wrong. Fiction has an opportunity — maybe even a duty — to state that clearly, to dramatize the difference between mercy and complicity.

Stories are one of the ways we shape our collective morality. Instead of a nuanced study of justice and retribution, Born Again perverts the pattern and frames it as tragic nobility. The hero of Hell’s Kitchen, the man whose greatest virtue is supposed to be his insistence that regular folks’ lives matter, chooses to let a rich and powerful mass murderer walk because killing him would stain his soul, and the narrative nods approvingly. The dead in the courthouse are reduced to set dressing for Matt’s spiritual aesthetics and Fisk’s franchise viability. This is not an inconsequential message.

There is, in theory, a way to redeem this. Season 3 could treat Matt’s decision not as a clever bit of symmetry but as a catastrophic mistake. Fisk could go on to commit greater horrors precisely because he was allowed to leave. Matt, sitting in his cell, could be forced into the kind of genuine reckoning that Daredevil is uniquely qualified to handle: confronting the difference between refusing to kill and refusing to demand accountability. Forgiveness without consequences could finally be named for what it is: not saintly restraint, but a sin of omission. The man who wears a devil on his chest could realize that in this case, he sided with the wrong one.

I do not expect that to happen. The way the ending has been discussed by the show’s creative leadership and covered by the trades suggests they see it as a striking status quo, not a grotesque misstep. Fisk will be exiled, then of course he will be back, and the story will move on to new villains, new costumes, new hallway fights. Maybe some of that will be good. Maybe I will keep watching out of habit and because I still, stubbornly, like these characters.

So this is not just about one bad decision in a TV writers’ room. It is about the kind of stories we are willing to tell and the kind of compromises we are willing to shrug off because the larger machine needs to keep milking their cash cows. If even Daredevil can lose sight of what justice means, maybe it’s worth pausing to ask whether we might be doing the same thing — in our entertainment, in our politics, in the stories we tell ourselves to rationalize our own righteousness.

I am not the only one disappointed and outraged by this ending, and perhaps that in itself is a tiny piece of evidence that some lines are still visible, even in a world where morals and values must be twisted to serve the sacred franchise.

Sophisticated Arguments for Preposterous Propositions

Leave a reply

Intelligence does not immunize against delusion, and intelligent people can produce sophisticated sounding arguments to support their delusional claims. This has always been epidemic amongst the intelligentsia who believe in, and need to rationalize, the existence of a god that cannot and therefore does not actually exist.

The latest delusional religious reasoning comes from theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart, in a long New York Times interview (see here) where he announces that the only reason he is not an atheist is that “the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable.” It’s an impressively confident conclusion, especially given how weak the actual arguments look once you strip away the prose and the piety. Underneath the erudite-sounding facade, what we are dealing with here is just more misrepresented and logically flimsy pseudo‑intellectual religious nonsense.

Hart warms up with a casual swipe at Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, dismissing it as “decades out of date” when it first appeared and a logical failure. That isn’t just wrong, it’s the kind of wrong you get when you start from “atheists must be idiots” and work backward. Whatever you think of Dawkins’s metaphors, the 1976 book was not peddling obsolete biology; the gene‑centric view it popularized is still one of the basic perspectives in population genetics, even though it has since been supplemented by multi‑level selection and systems thinking, and that’s exactly how its serious critics treat it. Biologists like Denis Noble argue that talking as if genes are little agents oversimplifies a complex causal web, and they argue for reframing and extending, but clearly not for declaring the whole thing “decades out of date” at birth. When Hart actually engages Dawkins elsewhere he mostly attacks the cartoonish way Dawkins talks about “selfish genes” and “lumbering robots,” that is, his metaphors and metaphysics, not the math or the lab work. At no point does he demonstrate that the science was obsolete; he just sneers at a popular book written by an atheist and hopes the insult will do the work of argument. If a Christian apologist wrote a lively popularization of cosmology and an atheist waved it away as “decades out of date” with no evidence, we’d call that what it is: rhetorical BS. If you want to claim modern science has destroyed materialism, you should at least show you can accurately summarize modern science.

The heart of Hart’s case is his insistence that a “mechanistic” view of nature can never explain consciousness, that the scientific picture of the world was built precisely by excluding mental properties, and that trying to add mind back in breaks the machine. He leans toward an idealist picture where consciousness, or “mind,” is fundamental and matter is in some sense derivative. There are at least three big problems with how he plays this. First, he treats “mechanistic” science as if we were still doing physics with brass gears and clockworks. He’s right about one historical point: early modern physics modeled nature as a soulless machine and bracketed talk of purposes and minds to get a clean method going. That was sort of a brilliant move. But he then writes as though that coarse mechanical picture is still the only game in town. It isn’t. Contemporary physics is explicitly non‑mechanistic in his sense; quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and information‑theoretic approaches do not imagine the universe as billiard balls banging around in absolute space. Contemporary biology is likewise not stuck in clockwork mode; it routinely analyzes feedback, homeostasis, regulatory networks, and even minimal forms of goal‑directedness at cellular and organismic levels without smuggling ghosts into the machine. So when Hart admits that “our sciences are not strictly mechanistic” and yet somehow uses that as a weapon against materialism, he’s trading on an equivocation. Materialism in 2026 does not mean “Descartes’s res extensa forever.” It means that whatever exists is ultimately describable in terms of physical fields, structures, and dynamics—even if those structures are richer than 17th‑century clockwork.

Second, Hart treats “no explanation yet” as if it means “requires a spooky extra force.” He is genuinely offended by the idea that a purely physical story could ever explain why there is “something it is like” to be you. Fine; lots of philosophers share that intuition. But “I don’t see how that could work” is not evidence that it cannot work. Physicalist theories of consciousness—from higher‑order thought theories to global workspace models and integrated information approaches—don’t invoke new metaphysical forces bolted onto physics; they identify consciousness with specific kinds of information‑processing and global availability in the brain. Even critics of those theories generally argue about their completeness or conceptual clarity, not about physics needing to invent some non‑mechanical pixie dust. So there is exactly zero empirical requirement for some mysterious non‑mechanistic “force” to explain consciousness; the conceptual puzzles are real, the data gaps are real, but the demand for a supernatural‑ish add‑on is not. Hart’s move is not “maybe we’ll need a modest additional ingredient.” He jumps from “current models leave an explanatory gap” to “the foundation of all reality is spiritual and mental, not material.” That’s not filling a gap with legitimate science; that’s exploiting any temporary gap to stuff an entire theology into it.

Third, he leans heavily on caricaturing “illusionist” talk about consciousness. Hart loves to quote people like Daniel Dennett saying that “consciousness is an illusion” and then pointing out, correctly, that if you take that literally you’ve sawed off the branch you’re sitting on: if there is no experience whatsoever, there is no one left to be “under an illusion.” But here again he stops at the cheap false victory. Most illusionist or deflationary physicalists mean something much more specific: there is experience, but our naive model of that experience—as a private inner theater with atomic, intrinsic qualia and a simple “self” watching the show—is badly mistaken. On that view, the brain builds a simplified, user‑friendly representation of its own activity and mistakes that representation for a little inner soul; the “illusion” is the brain’s self‑description, not the existence of experience itself. That is not “we gave up on explaining consciousness.” It’s one kind of mechanistic explanation of how an evolved biological control system might misdescribe itself. Saying that consciousness is “in some sense an illusion” is not a concession that mechanistic explanations failed; it is a mechanistic explanation. Hart either does not understand that distinction or finds it more convenient not to. This is not a case where illusion talk admits defeat; it’s a case where Hart is punching a straw man and declaring victory.

Once you clear away the rhetorical fog, the “unanswerable” anti‑atheist case looks very familiar and age old. The pattern goes roughly like this: define “materialism” as a crude, outdated, 17th‑century billiard‑ball picture plus Dennett at his most provocative; show—correctly—that this caricature struggles to account for rational thought, moral value, and consciousness; then declare victory for a vaguely classical‑theist or idealist picture where “mind” or “spirit” is metaphysically basic. The trouble is that many contemporary naturalists explicitly reject the crude “mechanistic” straw man he keeps fighting. They are physicalists, not cartoon mechanists, and they work within a physics that already moved past that picture. Non‑theist philosophers like Thomas Nagel have raised similar worries about materialism’s ability to capture value and reason without concluding “therefore, theism,” and Nagel’s critics have shown in detail how you can respond to those worries from inside a broadly naturalistic framework. There is no valid path from “explaining consciousness is hard” to “the God of Eastern Orthodox Christianity exists,” any more than from “we have not yet fully explained crop circles” to “this proves that aliens created them.”

Hart’s move boils down to this: if he defines “atheism” as commitment to a simplistic metaphysics he dislikes, then his arguments against that metaphysics are “unanswerable,” and therefore atheism is irrational. Sure. And if I define “Christianity” as the belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that God personally scripts every toddler’s cancer, I can prove Christianity is evil before lunch. Both maneuvers are lazy. If you want to refute atheism, you have to interact with the best naturalist positions on offer today, not with the weakest airport‑paperback atheism plus your favorite 17th‑century straw man.

None of this means Hart is stupid. He’s obviously not. He’s well read, rhetorically gifted, and very good at exposing shallow, popular atheist arguments. But brilliance in one direction doesn’t inoculate you against motivated reasoning in another. What shows through in that Times piece, and in the wider body of his work, is someone starting from a deep emotional and aesthetic commitment to a Christian‑Platonic picture—beauty as a transcendental, Jesus as uniquely “uncanny,” consciousness as a window into a mental foundation of being—and then retrofitting “philosophical arguments” to protect that picture from contact with a godless universe. Along the way he mischaracterizes contemporary science, caricatures naturalist positions he doesn’t like, and leans hard on loaded definitions (“God” as necessary being; “materialism” as crude mechanism) that atheists simply do not have to grant.

From the outside, this is not a rigorous refutation of atheism; it’s a very educated, very eloquent catechism for people who already want Christianity to be true but don’t want to sound naive. As an unabashed atheist, I have no problem with people finding Christianity emotionally or aesthetically compelling. Believe whatever myths get you through the night. What I object to is pretending that this is where logic forces us to go, that atheism has somehow been rendered philosophically childish by “unanswerable” arguments that fall apart as soon as you stop being impressed by the adjectives. If you want to believe in God, own it as a choice, an intuition, a story that works for you. Just don’t try to tell the rest of us that we’re being irrational for declining to share your delusion.

Staying Sane Is Hard Work

Leave a reply

Sliding down into delusion is seductive, easy, and fun. Modern information technology is making it ever harder to resist. Staying sane, on the other hand, is hard work—and it is getting harder every day.

The internet has made it possible for infectious ideas to spread faster than any physical disease. For a virus to circle the globe, you need mutations and air travel. To become infected by fake news and dangerous ideas, you need only a Wi‑Fi connection. Modern technology exposes us to vastly more information than ever before, much of it unhealthy, and every time our neural networks are exposed to bad information, it feels a bit more sensible to us—even if we know it is fake. Mere repeated exposure wears ever‑deepening grooves of familiarity into our brains. The more we see, hear, and click on a claim, the more reasonable it feels. Eventually, insidiously, it becomes self‑evident—common sense that seems inescapable.

In the past, news was filtered through human editors and gatekeepers. They certainly had their biases and blind spots, but at least someone was nominally responsible for quality. Today, sources like Facebook, Fox News, YouTube, podcasts, X/Twitter, and even our government have largely abandoned any obligation to fact‑check before amplifying. They create the illusion of informed reporting but are often almost completely untethered to reality. Their algorithms and personalities have one overriding job: keep you engaged. They notice what you watch or click and then say, in effect, “If you believe that, then check this out!” They do not care whether they are feeding you solid science or the latest conspiracy theory; they only care whether you will stay tuned in and click some more. The responsibility to sort out well‑supported information from unsupported claims, sound logic from specious arguments, is pushed entirely onto you.

That would be a tall order even if our brains were perfectly rational. They aren’t. Imagine you are curious about a fringe idea like Bigfoot. You type “proof of Bigfoot” into a search engine or social platform, intending to investigate skeptically. You will quickly find articles, videos, posts, and even reality shows arguing that Bigfoot is at least plausible or even real. Because you clicked, the algorithms learn that Bigfoot content “works” on you and begin to serve you more of it: more sightings, grainy photos, confident testimony. Before long, your feed is heavily populated by Bigfoot believers. From your perspective, it starts to look as if there is an enormous body of evidence out there. Everywhere you look, people treat the idea seriously. If so many people think there is something to it, there must be something to it.

In reality, you are being drawn out onto ever thinner and more dangerous limbs. The algorithm nudges you along in little steps, each of which seems perfectly solid and reasonable. This process does not just happen with Bigfoot. It happens with vaccine myths, climate denial, election lies, cultish political beliefs, and every other infectious or click‑inducing idea. The result is that many people come to feel they have made a careful, “objective” study of an issue when in fact they have been drawn, step by step, down a rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland alternate reality.

We cannot redesign the global information system by ourselves, but we can develop habits that make us harder to capture. One simple practice is to explicitly search for the reverse of whatever you are investigating. If you search for “proof of Bigfoot,” deliberately also search for “debunking Bigfoot claims,” and click on those results often enough that the search engines learn you will reliably choose that kind of content too. This at least gives you some exposure to different perspectives. Both sides might still be exaggerated, but you are less likely to be left with the illusion that everyone agrees with one side only.

Another, related technique is to always look back to first principles. If you only consider that next little step out along the branch, it will seem safe and sensible. But if you stop and look back at how far you have wandered from the solid trunk, you quickly realize that you are dangerously far out on a limb. Having acknowledged that we do occasionally discover new species, must really therefore admit that a hitherto undiscovered tribe of Bigfoot might actually exist?

It also matters where you spend your time. Just as like‑minded people congregate in person, different online communities attract and cultivate different kinds of thinkers. Choose to frequent healthy online environments. That is not to say you should avoid diverse ideas; but if rumor, outrage, and unvetted claims infect the community or the platform itself, you will become infected. Seek out vibrant but serious gathering sites where people demand citations, scrutinize sources, and correct obvious nonsense. If you stick to them, your own brain will become better at recognizing sound evidence and logic, as well as specious arguments. If the level of discourse on a trusted site degrades, you should leave and stop exposing your brain to it.

Given all the infectious information we are unavoidably exposed to, it is no surprise that people sometimes slip from belief into delusion. Beliefs, at least in principle, are subject to change. We might hold them strongly, but new evidence can persuade us to reconsider. When a belief becomes impervious to change—when no amount of contrary evidence, no matter how strong or consistent, is allowed to matter—it has crossed over into delusion. Using that word makes many professionals uneasy. In a clinical setting, “delusional” has a specific meaning and diagnostic criteria. Nevertheless, in the generally accepted lay domain, delusion is the proper word to describe thinking patterns that have become impervious to evidence or reason.

When a person or a movement has fallen prey to delusional ideas, when contrary facts are dismissed out of hand or reinterpreted as attacks, we no longer function in the realm of honest disagreement. We are locked into a self‑reinforcing mental world that will not adjust to reality. In a culture where influencers dominate the discourse, the rest of us are put at risk. Delusions can be comforting, energizing, and politically useful, but facts always assert themselves in the end. Reality does not care if you believe in it.

As a result of so many infectious ideas being disseminated so quickly, we are currently suffering from a global pandemic of delusion. We cannot wipe it out, but we can protect ourselves and try not to contribute to its spread. We can monitor our own information diets, seek out counter‑evidence, choose better communities, learn to better assess claims, and be more precise in our language. We can and must resist being nudged toward delusion. As susceptible as our brains are to misinformation, they can also be trained to better assess the soundness of claims and to detect specious arguments.

The way repetition reshapes our memories and our very perceptions, the way algorithms exploit our pattern‑seeking brains, the way beliefs slide, inch by inch, into full‑blown delusion—all of these dynamics, and many others, are at work in our politics, our media, our religions, and our personal lives. In my book Pandemic of Delusion: Staying Rational in an Increasingly Irrational World (see here), I unpack those mechanics in much greater detail, with concrete examples and practical tools for recognizing when you, or someone you care about, is being nudged away from reality. If this short essay inspires you to want to bolster your defenses, the book will provide you with a practical field guide: offering insight as to why we are so susceptible to misinformation, how to recognize it, and how to immunize yourself against it. It will give you a fighting chance to stay sane when the world around you seems determined to drive you crazy.

Star Trek Reality Check

Leave a reply

Star Trek and Star Wars offer visions of the future that have become so familiar that it’s all too easy to over-credit the plausibility of the technologies they present. But how much of what they depict is plausible science fiction and how much is implausible science fantasy?

Modern physics is incomplete, but not in the sense that it’s going to casually overturn core constraints like the light‑speed limit, energy conservation, or causality. Any future theory will still be bounded by those hard limits where we’ve already measured them to absurd precision. So betting that some future “breakthrough” will make Star Trek‑style tech real is not cautious skepticism; it’s wishful thinking.

First and most fundamentally, let’s start with the Vulcans visiting Earth. As much as we like to fantasize about technologically advanced aliens visiting us now or ever, to help us or to destroy us, this is implausible. As I discuss in my book (see here) and in this blog article (see here), aliens certainly exist, but they can never visit us. There is only an extremely remote chance that we could ever even detect signs that they existed somewhere, at some time, in the distant past.

Yes, you can always wave your hands and say “maybe some unknown physics will let them come here,” but that’s not reasoning, it’s magical thinking. Given what we already know about distances, speeds, energy, radiation, and biology, the probability that flesh‑and‑blood aliens will ever cross interstellar gulfs and happen to visit us is effectively zero. Not small, not unlikely, but zero.

I wanted to communicate that most strongly as it is so critical to understand. And of course since no alien could possibly ever visit us, it is equally implausible that we could ever visit them. The only remote possibility could be sentient machines who could survive inhumanly long and dangerous journeys. In this sense, the Transformers franchise (those in which organic makers are canon) could be the most plausible science fiction. I also depict such a plausible “space travel” science fiction in my short story The Dandelion Project (see here).

So while virtually everything that follows in Star Trek cannot happen, let’s set aside the basic implausibility of interstellar space travel and look at some of the other fictions that writers concoct to make it all seem plausible once we grant the possibility of space travel.

First, there is warp drive which overcomes the inconvenient reality of time and space. This is science flavored magic. While the physics of faster than light travel may have some plausibility at the mathematical level, it has zero plausibility at practical scale. Faster‑than‑light travel isn’t just “very hard.” It clashes directly with the way spacetime is structured. To get around the speed limit you have to either break causality (allow time travel paradoxes) or rely on enormous quantities of exotic matter that may not exist in any usable form. When a “solution” demands both magic materials and broken causality, that’s not serious speculation, that’s fantasy dressed in equations.

This is similarly true of the magical energy sources that the science fantasy writers concoct to make the fantastic power requirements seem plausible. They construct anti-matter reactors stabilized in a dilithium matrix. Again, even where anti-matter technologies are theoretically plausible they are effectively hopeless in any practical sense. Antimatter is real and ridiculously energy‑dense, but producing and storing it in useful quantities is so far beyond plausible engineering that it may as well be sorcery. Talking about “antimatter reactors” powering star cruisers is like proposing a jet engine that runs on bottled lightning captured in jars. You can write that into a script and make it sound theoretically plausible but you simply cannot build it in this universe.

The implausible power requirements involved in fantasy space travel also apply to weaponry. Hand phasers and similar variations are simply implausible. Directed energy starship weaponry is somewhat plausible, but certainly nowhere remotely near the hull-slicing power depicted in the shows.

And speaking of weaponry, even if hand phasers were plausible, they would at best fire invisible millisecond bursts. Phaser gun fights would never happen. Advanced weaponry would have computer targeting and essentially never miss. One could certainly never “duck” out of the way of an energy beam. A hand‑held weapon that fires at or near light speed, with computerized targeting, does not produce Western‑style shootouts. Once the weapon can lock onto you, your chances of side‑stepping a beam that crosses the distance in microseconds are exactly zero. The only real “dodging” is not being targeted in the first place—and that’s a software and sensor game, not a reflex test.

The same logic destroys the idea of starship dogfights. If you ever had vehicles throwing serious energy around at interplanetary ranges, the fight would be decided by who detected whom first and whose fire control software shot first. It would last seconds, or less, and the human crew would learn the battle was over when the computer informed them that their enemy had been destroyed.

We don’t need to imagine futuristic AI to see the problem. Even today, guidance computers outclass human pilots in reaction speed, precision, and ability to juggle massive sensor inputs. Scale that up to space combat and the idea that a flesh‑and‑blood pilot is “flying” a starship in combat is as quaint as imagining a locomotive engineer sprinting ahead to lay track by hand.

In that vein, there would be no possibility of human (or any organic) navigators or tactical crew members. Computers would certainly handle all the piloting and targeting. There would be no time for a real-time Captain to shout even one order as he’s flung around the bridge. Han Solo would not be able to pilot the Kessel Run safely in even a fraction of the time it would take a computer-controlled ship, if at all. Operating any function of a star ship would not be a job for humans.

As to other technologies, transporters, replicators, “subspace” radios, and hard‑light holograms all have the same problem: each one quietly assumes away a core rule of the universe. They don’t just extrapolate technology; they ask you to believe that information, energy, and matter can be shuffled around with a casual disregard for limits that we’ve already measured in laboratories. That makes for great science fantasy, but it is not remotely plausible science fiction.

But there are a few places where I suspect they get the possibilities more right than wrong, even if only for practical production and storytelling limitations.

There is the plausibility that many alien planets would be so familiar to us. Given that life can only evolve in a very limited set of conditions, and that the rules of physics, chemistry, and evolution are the same throughout the universe, I don’t find it implausible that many environments, and even many alien species, would be quite familiar or at least quickly understandable to us, both morphologically and biologically (see here). Life that can build radio telescopes is probably confined to a very narrow zone of temperatures, chemistry, and environmental stability. Under those shared constraints, evolution is pushed toward a limited set of workable body plans—limbs, mouths, sensory organs. So yes, there are good reasons to think that intelligence elsewhere might evolve a shape that is surprisingly close to our own. That doesn’t mean “humans with cranial ridges,” but it does mean that “unrecognizable swirling gas entities” are probably rarer than TV’s familiar human-like bipeds.

Also, one thing that Star Wars got right was recognizing that in the future all medical diagnoses and procedures would be performed exclusively by medical droids. I can understand that it would take all the fun out of the fiction if they also admitted that Han piloting the Millennium Falcon or Luke manning the gun turrets would be just as obsolete, even with The Force assisting him!

There is a fashionable kind of optimism that treats science as an unbounded well that can eventually make anything possible if we just “don’t close our minds.” That’s not how science works. Science narrows possibilities by discovering hard limits. We don’t say “maybe one day we’ll find a way around conservation of energy” or “maybe light will decide to go faster.” We already know that won’t happen. The technologies I’m calling fantasy aren’t just impractical; they lean on the hope that the universe will overturn its own rules to realize our fantasies.

Just to say, I love these science fantasy shows. If they depicted a more plausible Sol-bound future with computers basically running everything they would be a whole lot less inspiring and engaging. But just as with a good horror or superhero movie, we can love the fantasy while still fully appreciating that it is mostly fantasy.

Often the distinction between science fiction and science fantasy becomes blurred in a world where science seems capable of such magical and limitless achievements, but it is still critical that we recognize science fantasy as just that. If we fail to do so, we become susceptible to imagining that some fantastical future science will save us from actual threats like climate change that demand real solutions right now.

An Honest State of the Union

Leave a reply

My Americans: the state of my Union is strong. Strong like never before. Frankly, it was pathetic before — weak, sad so sad — but now it’s tremendous. Nobody’s ever seen anything like what I’ve done. People said, “Oh, that Trump, he’s all talk, just rhetorical style some called it.” And now they say, “Sir, America has never been as strong as it is under your leadership.” They’re right. It was a Biden disaster before, but in just one short year I demolished the broken administrative state and rebuilt it into a beautiful new Trump-branded America. It’s like my new White House ballroom. Have you seen the plans? It’s going to be a thing of beauty for all my wealthy donors to enjoy.

No one appreciates it. No one says, “Thank you, Sir, for fixing America.” But that’s okay — as long as I’m raking in the money. People ask me, “Sir, how did you do it?” Easy. I cut all that useless red tape. Gone! Environmental protections — gone. Worker protections — gone. Public education, well, almost gone. We’re working on it. Now our great Trump business leaders are making record profits and dividends, the biggest in history. Maybe in the world, if we’re being honest.

Still, they’re not all playing ball. Not yet. But they’re coming around. And the fake news corporations, the shady law firms — they’re learning, believe me. They either do what’s right for America or they suffer. Oh, they’ll suffer. I’ve got many tools, many ways I could make them do the right thing. But I’m too nice some say. Viktor Orbán — ever hear that name? Strong guy. Very smart. I like strong leaders.

But all those moochers? Not so much. We’re taxing them like never before. I just call it “tariffs,” and they cheer. “Sir, make China pay!” they yell. Marketing genius, believe me.

Our so-called allies — same story. They’re not mooching anymore. I keep them spinning in circles. That’s the art of the deal. Like my old friend Mohammed Ali. Fast Mo I called him. I keep them guessing and that keeps them paying. We can’t think of them as allies. They’re competitors. Or marks really if you are smart like me.

And what about immigration? Nobody gives me credit for the incredible job I’ve done stopping the invasion. I’ve rounded up more rapists and murders than even exist. More even than President Roosevelt. Think about that. We frankly pay way too much to house them in top-of-the-line warehouses. Some call them warehouses but they’re far more than these scum of the Earth deserve. The Supreme Court says I’m right — and when they don’t, I just ignore them. I’m the President not them, and I have all the power to do anything I want.

I’d like to introduce some special guests tonight. They came here illegally — work visas, supposed green cards, whatever. But my ICE — I call it “my ICE,” ICY ICE is Nice! — they rounded them up. They’re here tonight as an example. Stand up, Manuel, Sophia, and little Concha-whatever. Let everyone see those beautiful ICE shackles. I wanted to paint the chains gold but they told me “Sir, that is too good for them.”

So tonight we celebrate what we’ve built: an America that looks in the mirror and says, “Maybe I don’t like what I’ve become, but at least I’m strong and I have more billionaires than ever.” America is finally strong like never before thanks to me. And we’re just getting started. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet as they say. With your help, or without it honestly, I’m going to fix this crooked, broken election system that claims I lost. I’m not going anywhere — because frankly, this is the only thing that’s keeping me out of prison.

AI Can Only Regurgitate Information

1 Reply

Although I have urged readers to spend some time playing “AI Why” instead of just surfing YouTube for “guy gets hit in balls” videos (see here), you do occasionally find that amazing gem of a video that makes random surfing a truly rewarding treasure hunt.

What inspired me to point this out was recently running across one such treasure. It is a video of two street performers in Santa Monica doing an interpretation of “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd (see here). Both musicians were amazing. Dovydas (see here) is fantastic enough, but particularly jaw-dropping was the incredible performance of the young violin prodigy Karolina Protsenko (see here).

Technically she is absolutely magnificent. But more amazing is the fact that she had never heard of Pink Floyd let alone Another Brick in the Wall. She was improvising an accompaniment with no preparation whatsoever – and it was incredible.

But this introduction is only meandering toward my main topic. You see, watching (and rewatching) their performance inspired me to play AI Why with my AI tool Perplexity to discuss Another Brick in the Wall. If you happen to be a young Ukrainian who, like Karolina, has never heard this rock classic, know that it has been interpreted by many as an anti-education rant.

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone

When I asked Perplexity what songwriter Roger Waters intended for the song to convey, it quickly clarified that Waters was only cautioning against the kind of authoritative, abusive, and humiliating schooling he experienced in 1950’s Britain that focused on obedience over learning (see here). His teachers employed sarcasm and punishment to keep kids obedient rather than teaching. He wanted the song to be a sharp and pointed condemnation of this kind of “educational” system. He wanted it to have a visceral impact, which it did.

But for many, particularly those who did not hear it in the full album context, that visceral impact was one of disgust and horror toward the song itself. They took it at face value as a rant against education. Some even successfully pressured local radio stations to ban the song. At the same time, other people adopted it as their “screw the establishment, screw education” anthem.

So I asked Perplexity another follow-up question. What was its postmortem analysis of the actual impact of the song. Did it achieve Waters’ goal of cautioning against the perversion of real education, or did it do more harm than good by fueling anti-education bloodlust and deepening divides?

Perplexity gave a mixed review. In said that in retrospect it was a strong and effective “signal” but very “leaky” in that it was susceptible to unintended interpretations leaking in and out. It reached large audiences in a very powerful way, but its message did not stay intact across that entire audience.

To support the conclusion that the song did produce some undesired and undesirable outcomes, Perplexity stated that:

Waters has said outright that even “intelligent writers” misread it as anti‑education and that the song is “misunderstood,” which is as close as you get to the author conceding the surface reading pulled many people away from his actual target.

Perplexity was pointing out that Waters himself acknowledged that the song was widely misinterpreted which is implicit evidence that the song had an undesired impact on many people. In reading the referenced materials I did not find any such inferential assessment. So I followed up again and asked Perplexity if this inference was something it had found and was repeating or whether this was a completely independent inference it was making.

It replied:

That specific inference was mine; the raw ingredients came from sources, but the “postmortem” framing is an inference. I connected the dots: if Waters acknowledges that intelligent critics took the surface reading and calls the song misunderstood, that functions like an author implicitly conceding that the catchy surface interpretation pulled a lot of people away from his intended target. That interpretive step—treating those quotes as a kind of design‑tradeoff admission—is my synthesis, not a line I copied from any one source.

And now I finally meander up to the titular topic of this article. To all of you folks who like to claim that “AI only repackages and regurgitates stuff from the Internet,” I say to you that you grossly underestimate what current AI technology can do. That fact of the matter is that AI can reason and think and infer conclusions as well or better than many of us humans most of the time. To minimize or dismiss this as not a big deal is like yawning and falling asleep during a performance by Karolina Protsenko.

With Great Power Comes Great Vulnerability

Leave a reply

You might feel powerful cruising around in your luxury car, but you’ll quickly defer to the first guy in an old beater that decides to run you off the road.

Wealth and power certainly bring with them lots of advantages. In fact great wealth and power bring so many advantages that it’s hard to grasp, let alone sympathize with, the incredible vulnerability and weakness they bring with them.

We have always understood that the greater your wealth, the more you have to lose. What we don’t understand as clearly is that the more you have to lose, the more timid and compliant you become. In ways even the compulsive greed of the wealthy can be understood in part as needing ever more buffer to alleviate their anxiety over losing what they have already acquired. The more they acquire the greater that anxiety becomes and the more they need to feel secure – a self-perpetuating cycle.

As that wealth grows, so does vulnerability and risk aversion. The phrase “I’ve got nothing to lose” is a very scary one. But in the greater society “I’ve got too much to lose” is even scarier.

Rich people are paradoxically more controllable and manageable then poorer ones. They just have too much to lose to make any waves or stand up to more powerful forces, no matter how corrupt. If you want to control someone entirely, enrich them with enough money and power to make them easy to bring to heel.

This applies not only to individuals but to corporations any other entities that amass wealth and influence. Donald Trump has demonstrated clearly that powerful interests are both the strongest weapons for a dictator to control and the easiest to force into compliance. The rich and powerful who should be most capable of protecting democracy and standing up to corruption are the first to abandon democracy and become thoroughly corrupted.

It’s probably futile to expect the rich and powerful to risk anything at all for the greater good. Ultimately the only answer to this and a host of other social problems stemming from great wealth inequality is a wealth cap that prevents anyone, individual or corporation, from becoming both dangerously powerful and easily corruptible by Trump or any other despot.

The Secret Rain

Leave a reply

Upon the dusty road that assaults the skin,
where sweat crusts in salt upon the brow,
and the air transmutes into iron, pressing down—
the traveler bows low beneath thirst’s oppression.
There, even haughty princes in bejeweled robes
would ransom kingdoms for one moment’s grace
beneath its cool, flowing caress.

At the silent poles, where marrow freezes,
and the soul hardens into ice,
the body craves not gilded halls
nor velvet cushions or opulent feasts—
but melts only beneath a humble miracle
heat that neither sears nor burns,
touch that neither bruises nor pricks,
but tenderly melts those icicles of bone.

To linger beneath is rebirth—
rivuletted fingers caress every fold,
each sorrow, each exhaustion,
with patience more tender than any lover.
It finds the hollows where longing huddles,
the crevices where memory clings,
and washes away, yet does not erase,
leaving one luminous and reborn—
a desert that at last remembers spring.

What banquet, what marble palace,
what perfumed chambers of emperors
could rival this steamy embrace?
The satiny bed is for forgetting;
this rain of liquid rapture
is for exalting, naked,
body and soul rejuvenated.

Yet how fragile the covenant—
once, waters fell aplenty
to lavish themselves upon our skin;
tomorrow, perhaps, the cisterns echo hollow,
and their gift is offered no more.

So cherish it.
Filter, gather, pour again, unending.
Treat each drop as a jewel,
the last note of a never-repeated song.
When the sky withholds its kindness,
and Earth’s wellsprings but distant longings,
recall how it felt:
your secret rain within four walls,
solace no monarch could command,
joy, intimate and infinite,
vanished, but never mercifully forgotten.

Superman vs the Tech Bros

Leave a reply

I just watched the new James Gunn Superman movie for the second time on the big screen. What stands out most for me was not David Corenswet’s supremely noble yet authentically flawed human portrayal of Superman, nor was it Nicolas Hoult’s disquietingly relevant embodiment of a deeply flawed modern tech-genius. Rather it was Lex Luthor’s staff of willing, even exuberant, tech bro employees.

The intentionally discordant portrayal of these fresh-faced henchmen (and equally women) has been widely noted and discussed, but I don’t believe it has been specifically written about as much as is deserved.

Traditionally in comics, and in their movie renditions, the henchmen of the named villain are invariably stupid, thuggish, and cravenly despicable individuals. They are the lackeys who actually perform the hands-on murder, mayhem, and destruction. The scientists who create the death rays that the villain will unleash are typically mad and insanely amoral.

But in Superman, Lex Luthor runs a very wholesome-seeming high-tech enterprise. He hires brilliant, mostly young, people. He clearly treats them well (most of the time) and presumably pays them quite well. These are young people who listen to upbeat music while they work and kick the soccer ball when they have some free time.

And they also high-five each other and express pride and glee as they unleash death and destruction.

When Lex’s tech bros remotely control their creations to torture, pummel, and kill they take great joy in their accomplishments. When they design armies of “bot chimps” (don’t ask) that deluge the public with lies and misinformation, they high-five each other. Even as the dimensional rift they created is leveling Metropolis, and is quite likely to go on to destroy the Earth, they show little concern about the horrific destruction and cost of human life, let alone any thought about their own complicity.

Perhaps most disquieting is at the end, after all that, when Lex is exposed in the media as a liar, they all turn toward him with surprised stares of shock and betrayal.

I don’t want to politicize this article too much by launching into a diatribe about the parallels to leaders like Musk and Trump. But I do want to hold this movie up as a stark mirror reflecting the true image of all those fresh-faced, music-loving henchmen who actually do the dirty work of lying and harming so many people to satisfy the insatiable ego of our deeply flawed, and all-too-real, super-villains.

Without all their enthusiastic efforts, these super-villains would be powerless.