How to Change Minds

/ Thomas Harper / Leave a comment

So far in 2026, here in the United States, I’ve encountered a fair number of people calling for the impeachment, removal, and even arrest of various officials in the Trump administration. Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Greg Bovino because of the lies and mishandling leading to, and in the aftermath of, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and just the overall illegal occupation of Minneapolis. Pam Bondi and Kash Patel due to aiding, abetting, and covering up the Epstein conspiracy. Trump himself for being the ringleader (or perhaps useful idiot) of this grotesque spectacle, all while enriching himself and threatening to “nationalize” the 2026 midterm elections. While impeachment and legal action are certainly in order, those actions, I contend, are the easy part. The hard part is to demonstrate to the ~40% of the U.S. population who either loves what the regime is doing, or who are fine enough with it not to care, that all of this really is as bad as what the detractors are saying. Such an undertaking – completely discrediting the fascist authoritarian project in the eyes of a significant majority of U.S. citizens – requires being able to change peoples minds. But how does that happen?

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Renee Good, Greenland, Maduro, and Epstein

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Renee Good, Greenland, Venezuela, Epstein Files
(image source)

At least in my own siloed echo chambers, the three stories getting discussed most often as of writing this are the murder of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, the colonial conquest of Venezuela, and the threats of conquering Greenland. A fourth undertone is that all these other stories are meant as distractions for (it is implied) the real story, which is the Epstein file release (or lack thereof). I’ll give my opinion on each of these in turn.

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Is AI Doomerism Part of the Hype?

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I think that I, like many people, am drawn to the drama of both AI Doomerism (artificial intelligence is going to be existentially disastrous for the human species, and therefore we need to slow or halt its development) and AI Boomerism (AI is going to be enormously beneficial for the world, and therefore we need to accelerate its development, i.e., we need an AI boom). In the former, we get cool sci-fi stories like The Terminator and The Matrix, with all the action and heroism that comes with it, where the latter gives us stories like Her and Star Trek, with all the philosophical wonder at what it means to be human and what consciousness is. Especially as someone who wants to be (or at least likes to pretend to be) an author, and someone who is interested in philosophy, these stories are engaging and it’s easy to get caught up in them. But in the real world, AI has more mundane, but no less impactful, real world consequences. And so, people like me who often live with their head in the clouds, easily swept up by the high-minded ideas of AI, need to be brought back down to earth.

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The Woke Right Did Not Start With the Woke Left

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Right Wing Woke
(image source)

In my recent post about Donald Trump being an authoritarian dictator, I linked to an article by Jonathan Rauch discussing the woke right. The article claims that the right has gone woke because they learned this tactic from the woke left, stating:

The notion is not that the far left and far right share the same politics or goals. Rather, it is that the far right has adopted, partially on purpose but mostly through osmosis and convergent evolution, claims and strategies that parallel the far left’s.

This is incorrect. The right has been woke since at least the late nineteenth century, likely much earlier.

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Why I Came to Believe the Patriarchy is Real

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(Image source)

When someone mentions “the patriarchy” many people seem to conjure an image in their mind of men dominating women. This is certainly what I thought when I first heard people talking about this term maybe ten or fifteen years ago. Patriarchy, in this view, is a system where men sit at the top of wealth and power hierarchies while hoarding all sorts of benefits and privileges. Meanwhile, women are relegated to second class citizenship, prohibited from rising through the ranks of wealth and power hierarchies. The idea seems to be that, under patriarchy, men do not suffer or struggle while women are crushed under the weight of oppression. But then the men who hear this think “but wait, my life sucks. This can’t possibly be true!”

Patriarchy is actually quite a bit more nuanced than this. As Bell Hooks said, “Patriarchy has no gender.” Indeed, patriarchy is likely the cause of many of the struggles that men suffer. Not least of which is the male loneliness epidemic.

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Common Sense for Modern America

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It may not yet be politically correct to say what is about to be said here, since the long tradition of respectability politics makes it easy for the perpetrators to hide behind a façade of reasonable discourse. A well-curated program of propaganda makes what is occurring appear not as wrong, but instead gives it a superficial disguise of being right, making it easy to resort to outrage in defense of the status quo. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

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Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza?

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(image source)

Genocide is a legal term. Here in the United States there is a lot of hand wringing about what to call the atrocities being perpetrated by the Israeli government against the population within the Gaza strip. Is it a genocide? Or just “merely” ethnic cleansing? There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to call this one thing or another – financial and/or political incentives, but also legal ones. So, let’s look a bit at how we might clarify things.

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Expertise, Meritocracy, Pseudo-Intellectualism, and the Problem of Testimony

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The vast majority of what people “know” about any given subject they only know because someone told them, or they read it in a book or online, or heard someone talk about it online. The point being, we get our knowledge from what philosophers call the testimony of others. This worked out well in our hunter-gatherer past, when a member of a tribe knew everyone else in the tribe. Person A knows that person B is someone capable of or knowledgeable about X, and so person A can trust person B with telling them about X.

In much larger societies, such as in modern nation states, many, if not most, of the people we run into online and in our daily lives will be strangers, or at the very least not people we are intimately familiar with. This means that much of what we are told comes from strangers, who are usually themselves relaying information they were told from yet other strangers. Since we don’t know if these strangers know what they’re talking about, humans have come up with various means of lending their testimony legitimacy and trustworthiness.

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The Trump Assassination Attempt: the State of Current Politics in the U.S.

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Like him or not, July 13, 2024 is the day Donald Trump won the 2024 election. It’s a good thing that Donald Trump was not assassinated; it would have been a bad thing if he had been killed, or even wounded worse than he was. I hate the guy, but I’d hate even worse to live in a country where elections are decided by assassins (instead of the oligarchs who usually decide them). One can look back, for instance, at Japan in the early twentieth century for a country where many elections were decided by assassination. More recently, the election in Mexico was plagued by assassination. The point being, no good can come from such a state of affairs.

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The Crisis of Meaning and the Assumptions of Political Christianity

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Image source.

Fairly recently there has been somewhat of a resurgence of appreciation for religion, and Christianity in particular, among public intellectuals. The idea seems to be (and this is one I’ve harped on before) that secularism has failed to give anyone a sense of meaning or purpose – humanism does not fill the “god-shaped hole” that everyone has – and in fact has only engendered political extremism as a poor substitute for that sense of purpose we all seek. As such, the thinking seems to go, we ought to turn back to what worked for thousands of years, to religion, and Christianity in particular. Are these political Christians onto something?

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Nature vs. Nurture: an Unsolvable Problem

/ Thomas Harper / 1 Comment

A large underlying part of the culture wars has to do with the nature vs. nurture debate. The “nature” camp wants everything about humanity to be explainable in mechanistic, biological terms. The “nurture” camp wants everything about humanity to be attributable to social construction and cultural influence. Probably most people understand that there is some interplay between these (i.e., nobody is purely in one camp or the other), but will tend to favor one over the other. But is anyone correct? And, more importantly, is it even possible for anyone to be correct (or to know whether they are correct)?

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The Myth of the Flat Earth

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flat earth meme

Let’s be up front: the notion that the earth is flat is ludicrous. Anyone who believes this either is ignorant of the evidence, or simply wants to believe it more strongly than they care about evidence. A lot of people seem to think it has more to do with the former, but it almost certainly has more to do with the latter. This is because humans crave meaning-making mythologies, and the conspiracy cult of the flat earth offers just that.

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Do Numbers Actually Exist?

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Many people will attest to their dislike of math. Yet, it is difficult to navigate the modern world without it. We routinely mentally count and calculate distances, times, speeds, weights, volumes, money, various objects we come across, and other everyday things. When talking about numbers that are associated with units (meters, minutes, grams, liters, dollars, etc.) it seems fairly straightforward what the numbers are referring to out there in the real world**, but what do the numbers themselves actually refer to?

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Consciousness, the Brain, and Josh Rasmussen’s Counting Problem

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Consciousness Counting Problem Joshua Rasmussen
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Consciousness is one of the biggest philosophical questions we know of. David Chalmers says that consciousness has two issues: the easy question of consciousness and the hard question of consciousness. The former, while not easy per se, is much easier than the latter. The easy question has to do with everything that neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and so on, all pay attention to with questions such as: what are the neural correlates of perception, memory, belief, cognition, emotion, intuition, behavior, etc. and how can they be manipulated? How does thought/perception occur and how does it go wrong (e.g., cognitive biases, perceptual illusions)? How do thoughts/perceptions influence behavior? How are thoughts and behaviors shaped by biology and culture? Is the brain like a computer? And so on. These are all questions that we are relatively certain can be answered within the purview of these fields. Even if it is difficult to find the answers, we can be confident they have answers that will eventually be discovered. The hard question, however, is essentially this: how is it that non-conscious physical matter can give rise to conscious experience?

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You Do Not Have Free Will

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(Source)

What is the first animal to come to your mind when I ask this question? I bet at least one animal comes to mind. But why did the animal you chose come to mind? Why did, say, a blue spotted salamander or box turtle or naked mole rat come to mind when I asked the question? You might reply that it is because it was the animal you chose to think about, using your own free will. But was it, though?

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Should (Consensual) Incest be Normalized?

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House of the Dragon incest

If there is one sort of consensual sexual relationship that remains stigmatized in our more “open” and “sex positive” and “no kink-shaming” society, it is that between closely related family members (siblings, parent-child, cousins, and even second or third cousins). Interracial relationships are normal (which is a surprisingly recent development), gay relationships have become (relatively speaking) normalized, asexuality is not all that looked down upon (or, if we’re honest, even thought about very often), and so on. But consensual incestual relationships are not. Is there a good reason for continued disapproval of consensual incestual relationships?

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Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali Right About Christianity?

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(image source)

To the delight of many Christians and the chagrin of many atheists, the activist and (former) atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has declared herself for Christianity. Some atheists and Christians seem quick to point out that her article does not explicitly say she accepts Christian doctrine about Christ dying for our sins, resurrecting, the hypostatic union of the trinitarian God, and so on. Her article is more about politics and resisting Islamism than spreading the Good News. She does say, in the last paragraph, that she attends church, which is likely a good sign that she does accept (or is coming to accept) the Christian doctrine. But is she right to convert to Christianity?

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