It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes.

Stone underwent her political change in recent years, and this phenomenon still has the power to surprise her. I experienced it over twenty years ago, and so I’m more used to the idea that most people will follow the tyranny du jour. From my observation, this mentality is more common on the left, but the right is hardly immune. It just takes a different form.

Many years ago I read Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 essay that appeared in Harper’s and was entitled, “Who Goes Nazi?”. It’s a catchy title, isn’t it? Thompson presents it as a parlor game, but a deadly serious one:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

I have many quarrels with Thompson, and I also disagree with some of what she wrote in the essay. That’s not the subject matter of this post, however. I’m introducing it here because I very much agree with her basic premise, which is that most people are susceptible to totalitarian leanings and to propaganda. In the essay it’s “Nazism” – after all, it was written in 1941. But it’s hardly limited to that; we’re talking about the totalitarian impulse, either “for your own good” which turns into evil, or for outright evil.

Some embrace it wholeheartedly and some half-heartedly, some think they are being virtuous, some are indifferent but go along to get along, some don’t pay any attention, and some do it out of fear. But to defy it takes a great deal of insight and courage.

In addition to the Thompson essay, I sometimes think of the Milgram experiment. This particular post from 2008 explains the phenomenon best. An excerpt:

If you’re unfamiliar with the Milgram experiments, here’s a summary. The gist of it was Milgram’s shocking (literally) finding that ordinary people in this country could be persuaded to inflict what they thought were painful electric jolts to “subjects” (actually, actors) in what was billed as a learning experiment, if an authoritative “researcher” (also an actor) told them it was okay.

This was true for most subjects even if the “victim” was screaming in pain and complained of a weak heart. It was also true if the “doctor” didn’t have a white coat, and was in a lab in a seedier part of town. No actual shocks were administered, but I recall that, in follow-up interviews, most of the subjects thought the shocks were real.

Milgram varied the details of the experiment over and over (read his book if you have time; it’s a masterpiece of its genre), but the results always pointed to the troubling fact that the majority of people failed to “question authority” …

“Authority” can vary. It can, for instance, be some online charlatan whom a person has come to trust. It can be a leftist professor, or a series of leftist professors, at a university. It can be the baying hounds of cancel culture, or the Furies of the “Me Too” witch hunt. It can be Jew-haters of all persuasions. It’s a shape-shifter exploiting a fact of human nature.

Our Founders believed it was possible to create a system of government that would be at least somewhat resistant to these forces. They did the best they could, and they were brilliant men. Perhaps they did the best possible. But no system can guard against the tendency well enough to make tyranny impossible, and the Founders were well aware of that, too.

[NOTE: Sasha Stone’s entire essay is worth reading, and there are some especially good short videos there.]

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I’ve watched many of Saad’s YouTube videos, and he’s a no-nonsense guy, a Jew who was raised in Lebanon and whose family was one of the last to leave. He’s been living in Canada although I think he’s in the US now. At any rate, here’s something about his book, from the description at Amazon:

In his new book, Suicidal Empathy, Saad unleashes a blistering critique of maladaptively irrational altruism that has gripped our culture. This mind parasite hijacked the empathy module of our progressive elite, leading to a catastrophic miscalibration of moral priorities. The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. We are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline. Lunatic policies are instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over The Truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. This is not humane; it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.

Saad is a professor, but he seems to be very realistic as well. His thesis makes me think of Robert Frost – yes, that Robert Frost. For example, this post of mine from 2019 contains the following thoughts from Frost:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed.

Frost was writing about socialism in 1936, whereas Saad is writing more generally. But the principle is much the same. Empathy – similar to Frost’s mercy – is part of human nature and definitely has its uses. But taken to an extreme, and misapplied, it is dangerous and can lead to either failure of an economic system or cultural suicide or literal deaths, as well as restraints on liberty in the name of kindness.

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I’ve seen it for years and years and years online: the idea that the Boomer generation has screwed the younger ones. It’s often advanced by 40-somethings or younger, who feel insufficiently flush with cash and that the world hasn’t rewarded them in the manner they think they deserve. The idea that previous generations struggled and that many still struggle (I have friends my age with little savings, for example) is brushed aside. And the opinions of older people are shrugged off with the dismissive, “Okay, Boomer.”

It’s not unusual to wish that the Boomers would die already. Just shuffle off this mortal coil so that the young can get the spoils. And this is usually said with no sense of shame whatsoever.

I’ve seen most of this in the comments sections of blogs and MSM articles, as well as on social media of many kinds. It’s said not with humorous tolerance but powerful hatred and envy. But envy has now become perfectly okay, a kind of badge of virtue with “microlooters” and the like.

Now the New York Times is getting into the act:

The New York Times on old people:

“It is not ageist to ask whether older people should be required to give more to younger Americans… Older Americans favor restrictions on immigration… there is a correlation between age and resistance to policies to halt the overheating of the planet… impose age ceilings on political offices… Older Americans own much of the most desirable real estate… It is not ageist, finally, to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain.”

Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, whom I interviewed once, always seemed generous and reasonable, even when our politics differed. But unless it’s an elaborate meta-joke, the above column and forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Wealth and Power in America advance some of the most intellectually vicious ideas I’ve ever seen. The Godwin’s Law factor alone is a shocker.

Moyn observes that people of years have accumulated money and influence and contrives to end the “tyranny of the old” by having “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property,” because reasons. The title of the Times piece, “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” carries the obscene lefty connotation that no one really owns anything and the elderly, by dint of living too long to begin with, and having a generally shitty quality of life compared to the young, and voting incorrectly/selfishly (hilarious, in the context of open scheming to seize their savings) and wasting resources “playing for time” for “another day, month, or year among loved ones” makes them lousy stewards of what the author unironically calls “our inheritance,” i.e. their homes and bank accounts.

That’s by Matt Taibbi, who is 56 years old. Young to me, but not young.

Moyn’s work doesn’t surprise me at all – there’s a huge market for this sort of thing, based on the ideas I’ve seen widely disseminated online. Taibbi is absolutely correct that this is part of an attack on private property, based on the idea that one can decide who should own what and how much, and act accordingly by confiscating the goods of the supposedly non-virtuous.

NOTE: I’ve written on this topic of inter-generational rage before, but at the moment I can’t find the piece. But this post is somewhat relevant to the topic.

NOTE II: I saw the movie Zorba the Greek in a movie theater when it first came out in 1964. I was young, and I didn’t like it and have never looked at it again. But various scenes have stuck with me, and not in a good way. So, this one comes to mind. Of course, the people confiscating the dead woman’s goods here actually are dirt-poor, and they are of all ages and not just young. The deceased woman wasn’t exactly what you’d call rich, either. So the parallel isn’t very good, although the envy impulse is there. Here’s the scene, and watching it now it seems even more chilling than I recall:

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,,, [I]n every other aspect of [the lives of the Democrats I know who want Trump dead], they act within the general morality of our culture. They don’t beat puppies and babies, they don’t steal, they’ll lend a helping hand to their neighbors, etc. My BiL is extremely active in the Catholic Church. Yet…..when it comes to Trump, and now through the relentless propaganda, conservatives and republicans in general, the “violent minds” turn on. I keep wishing that someone well-versed in psychology could explain this phenomenon to me, and also provide a solution. I haven’t seen such. If it exists it might even save the country from some terrible consequences.

It does certainly seem like a contagion, but there seems to be no antibiotic to employ.

I have no solution. But I’ll have a go at an explanation. The analogy to contagion is a good one, although obviously there are no microbes involved. People come to believe Trump is a Hitler equivalent, tremendously evil and otherwise unstoppable politically, so it follows that he must be killed. The analogy to Hitler is not an idle one because there were indeed many failed attempts on Hitler’s life and most people consider those who tried to do so to be heroes. The fact that Trump bears no resemblance to Hitler is irrelevant, because most people don’t evaluate things for themselves and their sources – their trusted sources – say Trump is tremendously evil, Hitlerian, and out to destroy our country and must be stopped.

Why those sources are trusted is another story. It’s different for different populations. For older people, it’s the news media amplified by social media. For younger people, the source is other online platforms such as TikTok and Twitch (Hasam Piker is a huge Twitch personality, for example). For many of all ages, they live in communities where pretty much everyone thinks this way, whether it be a blue city or just their own family or their own ethnic group. Often a clergyman or church or synagogue group is part of the echo chamber (in which case Trump-hate is not a religious substitute but is considered consistent with their religion as a sort of “just war”), and of course many Democrat politicians and spokespeople, as well as celebrities, artists, authors, and public intellectuals.

In my case I am often the only Trump supporter friends and family members know. Some have cooled, but some have “grandfathered” me in, as it were, because they’ve known me so long and know I’m not evil.

In addition, some of my Democrat friends simply don’t care. It’s not that they don’t care about politics, but they don’t care in the same very personal way. They never talk politics to me and never mention my curious support of Trump; it simply is not an issue they take into the personal realm. They are my friends (at least so far), they’ve been my friends for years, and that’s that. Nor do they ever mention wanting to kill Trump or wanting him dead, although they’ve made a few remarks indicating they detest him.

What distinguishes these two groups from each other? I think it’s the personalization of politics and the transformation of it into a religious substitute, plus the intensity with which they view it. But why do people belong to one group rather than another? I don’t know. I have found no specific characteristics that I can see that differentiate between the two groups: neither is predominantly male or female, neither is religious, nor do they differ in education or the way they habitually vote. They also do not differ in the intensity of their personalities in other areas of their lives.

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Adult children vs. parents, siblings vs. siblings — calling quits on one’s kin seems increasingly common.

In a 2025 YouGov poll of 4,395 US adults, nearly 4 in 10 respondents said they “no longer have a relationship with” one or more immediate family members. An episode of the Oprah Podcast on the “culture of estrangement” brought the topic home to millions of listeners.

While polls, social media and news of high-profile celebrity splits highlight the prevalence and pain of family breakups, researchers’ growing but still limited attention has yet to quantify how much they’ve multiplied. There are, however, plenty of potential drivers in today’s divorce rates, political polarization, rising individualism, reliance on therapists and social media memes about toxic relationships, says Joshua Coleman, an author, researcher and psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It all comes at a time when more Americans are prioritizing mental health — and when the internet is helping people find connections outside the family, he adds.

It’s mostly the younger generation cutting off the older rather than vice versa – also not surprising. They’ve been taught to label even minor disagreements “toxic” – and that they’re in need of withdrawing in order to protect their fragile selves from them.

I see evidence of this in real life and online. And of course I’ve been writing about familial estrangement because of political differences for my entire blogging career. It happens with long-term friendships, too.

Much of the younger generation wasn’t ever taught that “honor thy father and thy mother” has any particular valence. That Commandment is an interesting one, too; it doesn’t say to “love” parents or even “like” them. But to “honor” them would seem to preclude breaking off relations, unless it’s at the request of the parents.

The entire article is of interest and worth reading, especially if you’ve suffered from this sort of estrangement or know anyone who has. I consider the phenomenon tragic, for the most part. Of course, if parents are truly dangerous (blatant sexual abuse or something else of a very extreme nature, with no repentance or change on the part of the parent), sometimes breaking off is the only answer. But what I see online are almost always more minor complaints or political disagreements causing rifts, usually with the adult children feeling very self-satisfied and virtuous about their act of cut-off.

From the author interview with Joshua Coleman at the link:

A: Yet another strong factor these days is politics. In the Harris Poll, 42 percent said politics was the biggest factor driving family members apart.

Q: It’s the kids who are mostly initiating these estrangements, correct?

A: That’s true. We don’t have good research on the parents, but we know they are in the minority, and that it’s usually for religious reasons or they disapprove of the child’s gender identity or maybe the person that they’ve married, or their values.

Q: Why do you think parents are so much less likely to cut off their kids than kids are to cut off their parents?

A: Sociologists use the phrase “the intergenerational stake,” to convey the idea that when you’re raising your children you make a big investment, in part in the interest of furthering your genetic line. That can lead parents to assume that when they raise children, they will be close to them throughout their lifetime. Yet that’s obviously not how it is for most kids. This may help explain why a classic study in 1999 showed that parents of young adult children reported closer relationships and fewer problems than the children perceived.

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My favorite:

The lunar surface fills the frame in sharp detail, as seen during the Artemis II lunar flyby, while a distant Earth sets in the background. This image was captured at 6:41 p.m. EDT, on April 6, 2026, just three minutes before the Orion spacecraft and its crew went behind the Moon and lost contact with Earth for 40 minutes before emerging on the other side. In this image, the dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime, while on its day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater shows terraced edges and a relatively flat floor marked by central peaks — formed when the surface rebounded upward during the impact that created the crater.

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The differences in color between the two photos stem from the settings used to take them, and where in space they were taken from.

NASA’s Flickr page, where the Artemis II crew’s photos live, shows the type of camera and the settings used to take the picture. Most of the settings are usual for taking photos, except for one. The ISO setting, which controls the camera’s sensitivity to light, is set to a staggering 51,200. For context, a common ISO setting for pictures taken on Earth is around 200.

The reason Wiseman had to use such a high ISO was that his spacecraft was on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, meaning to the astronauts’ naked eyes, the Earth appeared much darker than it does in the photo. The sun is actually what’s causing the bright light on the bottom right of the Earth.

And here’s a post of mine from February of 2005, very early in my blogging career, on the subject of first seeing photos of earth from space:

I’m not so very old, but when I grew up and artists or scientists drew conceptual drawings of the earth from outer space, the globe was always pictured as just that–a globe like those spinning ones in school, tethered to their metal stands (only, of course, without the metal stands). No clouds at all. Despite the fact that we all should have known better–all we had to do was look up at the sky most days to see those voluminous clouds–no one did seem to know better.

I still remember the shock of seeing those first photos …

By now we’ve incorporated the clouds into our mental image of the earth. Here’s one of those early photos, though – the “Big Blue Marble” one:

And here’s my very favorite so far, the “Earthrise” photo taken in 1968:

If you’d like to see a history of photos taken of earth, please go here.

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That’s one of the reasons the news of nine people dead in an avalanche while back-country skiing in the Tahoe area filled me with dread and sorrow. Such young, vibrant people, their lives snuffed out in an instant – although such deaths are usually not instantaneous. The news reports didn’t tell us some things I’d like to know, such as whether they were all skiing at once, and where the survivors were positioned that allowed them to live, and why the decision was made to go despite avalanche warnings.

There was also a less-publicized death but no less horrible, of an 11-year-old girl in Utah, killed in another avalanche while back-country skiing with her family, and another in Utah of a father who was snowmobiling with his son. In both cases, family members tried to dig out the victims, but didn’t manage to save their lives. One can imagine the frantic desperate efforts, the terrible feelings of failure and grief and perhaps guilt.

Why do people engage in such activities? That’s not hard to imagine: it is beautiful in the mountains in winter, and ski resort areas can be terribly crowded. For a lover of nature, mountains, and outdoor activities in snow, back-country activities have a huge draw. And we all do plenty of other seemingly risky things, such as driving.

Then I learned that there have been many avalanche-related deaths in the Alps this year, and that although the number is high, the numbers are usually high (or what I would consider high):

Though the recent spike in avalanche deaths in Europe is worrying, it is not exceptional – according to European Avalanche Warning Services, 95 have died so far this season, compared to 70 in the whole of 2024-25 and 87 in 2023-24. The 2020-21 season, when 131 died, and 2017-18, when the figure was 147, seem comparable.

The articles I’ve read on the European deaths haven’t broken down the figures for back-country deaths, but my guess is that almost all are of that type. Here’s a video that goes into how and why avalanches occur, and how ski resorts prevent or at least reduce their occurrence. The second video is about the Alps avalanche deaths:

It seems to me that back-country skiing has increased in recent years, and that is the case (the article is from a year ago]:

Backcountry skiing has surged in popularity since the pandemic, but those wishing to leave the relative safety of busy resorts can find themselves at the mercy of an unforgiving wilderness. If something goes wrong — as it often does, with avalanches a constant threat — skiers do not have a first-aid team nearby, and rescue can take hours.

And yet Ennen, from Park City, Utah, says the peaceful isolation found up remote mountains is preferable by far to being stuck in lengthy lines at resorts, and he is willing to embrace risk for a sense of freedom.

“I love being in the mountains and surrounded by nature,” said Ennen, a 45-year-old cardiac anaesthesiologist. “It’s my time for my brain to relax and to decompress from the real world. When you’re skiing in a resort, you’re in a controlled environment but with an uncontrolled group of people.

“The backcountry is the opposite. You’re with a controlled group of people, your team, but in a very uncontrolled environment.”

It’s a decision an increasing number of people have been making. Advances in avalanche-related equipment, such as beacons, have probably helped give a sense of security- perhaps a false one? The Tahoe skiiers were thus equipped. In terms of relative risk, though, I don’t know what the figures are and I’m not sure there are figures for how many people back-country ski these days.

Writing this post made me think of the last verse of this poem by Emily Dickinson, which goes like this:

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

RIP.

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At the age of eight or nine I was fascinated by George Gamow’s One, Two, Three … Infinity. I don’t know how it came into my hands – I certainly didn’t buy it because I wasn’t buying much of anything back then except the occasional comic book or candy bar. But I tried and tried to understand it, and although much of it was opaque to me, I got the general idea for other parts of it.

I was especially fascinated by the four color theorem, which at the time had not yet been proven (a proof came in 1976):

In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. Adjacent means that two regions share a common boundary of non-zero length (i.e., not merely a corner where three or more regions meet).

I can’t find my decrepit copy of the book right now, although I’m pretty sure I still have it. But my recollection is that Gamow wrote that, if anyone could offer a proof or could design a map that used more than four colors, that person would achieve fame. I didn’t even know what a proof was, but I tried to design such a map. That, I could understand.

I didn’t quite comprehend the assignment, because after much trial and error I thought I had it. But my map had some countries which resembled pie pieces – a no-no, although I don’t recall if that limitation was made clear in the text of the book. Somehow – how, I don’t recall – I managed to write a letter to Gamow at the university where he taught, and boldly offered my map. It must have been clear that the letter came from a young child of eight or nine; I didn’t even have the ability to type it.

But wonder of wonders, I got a response. I still have that response, which was a standard note sent to the many people who wrote to Gamow with this or that idea. The letter said he just didn’t have time for a reply. But someone – almost certainly not Gamow himself, but someone – was being very kind, and there was a handwritten part in red that explained the error I’d made.

Here is that part:

In case you can’t read that, it says:

P.S. The countries must meet on a line, not at a point. Your map needs only two colors.

Many years have passed since then, and I haven’t stopped trying to understand advanced science. But these days it’s mostly through YouTube videos. I listen when I’m exercising, or doing the dishes, or just vegging out in a chair. This was the latest, and although I think I got the basic idea (everything spins due to initial asymmetry, and continues to spin because there’s nothing to stop it), I simply don’t get the details. But here it is:

However, I’ve also read that the Webb has discovered that the majority of galaxies spin in the same direction, which was not predicted:

About two-thirds of the 263 galaxies studied in a paper published February 17 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society rotate clockwise, while the other one-third rotate counterclockwise.

“The analysis of the galaxies was done by quantitative analysis of their shapes, but the difference is so obvious that any person looking at the image can see it,” Lior Shamir, a computer scientist from Kansas State University and sole author of the study, says in a statement. …

The problem is that astronomers have long posited that galaxies should be evenly split between rotating in one direction or the other, astronomer Dan Weisz from the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the study, wrote for Astronomy back in 2017. “This stems from the idea that we live in an ‘isotropic’ universe, which means that the universe looks roughly the same in every direction. By extension, galaxies shouldn’t have a preferred direction of spin from our perspective,” he added. According to Shamir, there are two strong potential explanations for this discrepancy.

One explanation is that the universe came into existence while in rotation. This theory would support what’s known as black hole cosmology: the hypothesis that our universe exists within a black hole that exists within another parent universe. In other words, black holes create universes within themselves, meaning that the black holes in our own universe also lead to other baby universes. …

Another possible explanation involves the Milky Way’s rotation. Due to an effect called the Doppler shift, astronomers expect galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way’s motion to appear brighter, which could explain their overrepresentation in telescopic surveys.

“If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” Shamir explains in the statement.

I’m not going to try to tackle that one.

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