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Sixth-century Byzantium was a city divided by race hatred so intense that people viciously attacked each other, not only in the streets but also in churches. The inscription on an ancient tablet conveys the raw animus that spawned from color differences: “Bind them! … Destroy them! … Kill them!” The historian Procopius, who witnessed this race antagonism firsthand, called it a “disease of the soul,” and marveled at its irrational intensity:

They fight against their opponents knowing not for what end they imperil themselves … So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place, neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship.1

This hostility sparked multiple violent clashes and riots, culminating in the Nika Riot of 532 CE, the biggest race riot of all time: 30,000 people perished, and the greatest city of antiquity was reduced to smoldering ruins.

But the Nika Riot wasn’t the sort of race riot you might imagine. The race in question was the chariot race. The color division wasn’t between black and white but between blue and green—the colors of the two main chariot-racing teams. The teams’ supporters, who were referred to as the Blue and Green “factions,” proudly wore their team colors, not just in the hippodrome but also around town. To help distinguish themselves, many Blues also sported distinctive mullet hairstyles, like those of 1970s rock stars. Both Blues and Greens were fiercely loyal to their factions and their colors. The chariots and drivers were a secondary concern; the historian Pliny asserted that if the drivers were to swap colors in the middle of a race, the factions would immediately switch their allegiances accordingly.

Decades of studies have demonstrated the dangerous power of the human tribal instinct.

The race faction rivalry had existed for a long time before the Nika Riot, yet Procopius writes that it had only become bitter and violent in “comparatively recent times.” So, what caused this trivial division over horse-racing teams to turn so deadly? In short, it was the Byzantine version of “identity politics.”

Detail of “A Roman Chariot Race,” depicted by Alexander von Wagner, circa 1882. During the Nika Riots that took place against Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople over the course of a week in 532 C.E., tens of thousands of people lost their lives and half the city was burned to the ground. It all started over a chariot race. (Image courtesy of Manchester Art Gallery)

Modern sociological research helps explain the phenomenon. Decades of studies have demonstrated the dangerous power of the human tribal instinct. Surprisingly, it doesn’t require “primordial” ethnic or tribal distinctions to engage that impulse. Minor differences are often sufficient to elicit acute ingroup-outgroup discrimination. The psychologist Henri Tajfel demonstrated this in a landmark series of studies to determine how minor those differences can be. In each successive study, Tajfel divided test subjects into groups according to increasingly trivial criteria, such as whether they preferred Klee or Kandinsky paintings or underestimated or overestimated the number of dots on a page. The results were as intriguing as they were disturbing: even the most trivial groupings induced discrimination.2, 3

However, the most significant and unexpected discovery was that simply telling subjects that they belonged to a group induced discrimination, even when the grouping was completely random. Upon learning they officially belonged to a group, the subjects reflexively adopted an us-versus-them, zero-sum game attitude toward members of other groups. Many other researchers have conducted related experiments with similar results: a government or an authority (like a researcher) designating group distinctions is, by itself, sufficient to spur contentious group rivalry. When group rewards are at stake, that rivalry is magnified and readily turns malign.

The Robbers Cave Experiment, conducted in 1954 by social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif, investigated intergroup conflict and cooperation. The study involved 22 eleven-year-old boys at a summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. (Photo: The University of Akron)

The extent to which authority-defined groups and competition for group benefits can foment nasty factionalism was demonstrated in the famous 1954 Robbers Cave experiment, in which researchers brought boys with identical socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds to a summer camp, dividing them randomly into two official groups. They initially kept the two groups separate and encouraged them to bond through various group activities. The boys, who had not known each other before, developed strong group cohesion and a sense of shared identity. The researchers then pitted the groups against each other in contests for group rewards to see if inter-group hostility would arise. The group antagonism escalated far beyond their expectations. The two groups eventually burned each other’s flags and clothing, trashed each other’s cabins, and collected rocks to hurl at each other. Camp staff had to intervene repeatedly to break up brutal fights. The mounting hostility and risk of violence induced the researchers to abort that phase of the study.4 Other researchers have replicated this experiment: one follow-up study resulted in knife fights, and a researcher was so traumatized he had to be hospitalized for a week.5, 6

How does this apply to the Blues and Greens? As in the Tajfel experiments, the Byzantine race factions had formed a group division based on a trivial distinction—the preference for a color and a horse racing team. However, for many years, the rivalry remained relatively benign. This was likely because the emperors had long played down the factional distinction and maintained a tradition of race neutrality: if they favored a faction, they avoided openly showing it. But that tradition ended a few years before the Nika Riot when emperors began openly supporting either one faction or the other. But more importantly, they extended their support outside the hippodrome with official policies that benefited members of their preferred faction. The emperors Marcian, Anastasius, and Justinian adopted official employment preferences, allocating positions to members of their favored faction and blocking the other faction from coveted jobs. To cast it in modern terms, they began a program of “race-based” affirmative action and identity politics.7, 8

In nearly all the countries where affirmative action programs have been implemented, they have an invidious effect on the group that benefits, imbuing them with a sense of insecurity and defensiveness over the benefits they receive.

Official recognition of the group distinction enhanced the us-versus-them sense of difference between the factions, and the affirmative action scheme turned this sense of difference into bitter antagonism, which eventually exploded in violence. Procopius, our primary contemporary source, placed the blame for the mounting antagonism and the riots squarely on Justinian’s program of identity politics. It had not only promoted an us-versus-them mindset in the factions, it also incited vicious enmity between them, turning a trivial color preference and sporting rivalry into a deadly “race war.”

Considering how identity politics could elicit violence from randomly assembled groups like the Blues and Greens, it is easy to imagine how disastrous identity politics can be when applied to groups that already have some long-standing, historic sense of difference. Indeed, there have been numerous instances of this in history, most ending tragically. For example, Tutsis and Hutus enjoyed centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence in Rwanda up until Belgian colonialists arrived; when the Belgians issued identity cards distinguishing the two groups and instituted affirmative action, it ossified a formerly porous group distinction and infused it with bitter rivalry, preparing the path to genocide. Likewise, when Yugoslavia instituted its “nationality key” system, with educational and employment quotas for the country’s constituent ethnic groups, it hardened group distinctions, pitting the groups against each other and setting the stage for genocide in the Balkans. And, when the Sri Lankan government opted for identity politics and affirmative action, it spawned violent conflict and genocide that destroyed a once peaceful and prosperous country. This last example—Sri Lanka—is so illustrative of the dangers of identity politics that we’ll examine it in more detail.

Sri Lanka: How Identity Politics Destroyed ParadiseShe is a fabulous isle just south of India’s teeming shore, land of paradise … with a proud and democratic people … Her flag is the flag of freedom, her citizens are dedicated to the preservation of that freedom … Her school system is as progressive as it is democratic. —1954 TWA TOURIST VIDEO

Sri Lanka is an island off India’s southeast coast blessed with copious amounts of arable land and natural resources. It has an ethnically diverse population, with the two main groups being Sinhalese (75 percent) and Tamils (15 percent). Before Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948, there was a long history of harmony between these groups. That history goes back at least to the fourteenth century when the Arab traveler Ibn Battuta observed how the different groups “show respect” for each other and “harbor no suspicions.” On the eve of Sri Lanka’s independence, a British governor lauded the “large measure of fellowship and understanding” that prevailed, and a British soldiers’ guide noted that “there are no historic antagonisms to overcome.” With quiescent communal relations, abundant natural resources, and one of the highest literacy rates in the developing world, newly independent Sri Lanka was poised to flourish and prosper. Nobody doubted it would outperform countries like South Korea and Singapore, with the British governor dubbing it “the best bet in Asia.”

It turned out to be a very poor bet. A few years after Sri Lanka’s independence, violent communal conflict erupted, culminating in a protracted civil war and genocide. By the time it ended, over a million people had been displaced or killed. Sri Lanka’s per capita GDP, which was on par with South Korea’s in 1960, was only one-tenth of it by 2009. As in sixth-century Byzantium, identity politics precipitated the calamity.

Turning a Disparity into a Disaster

At the end of British colonial rule in Sri Lanka, there was significant educational and income disparity between Sinhalese and Tamils. This arose by happenstance rather than because of discriminatory policy. The island’s north, where Tamils predominate, is arid and poor in resources. Because of this, the Tamils devoted their productive energy toward developing human capital, focusing on education and cultivating professional skills. This focus was abetted by American missionaries, who set up schools in the north, providing top-notch English-language education, particularly in math and the physical sciences. As a result, Tamils accounted for an outsized proportion of the better-educated people on the island, particularly in higher-paying fields like engineering and medicine.

Because of the Tamils’ superior education, the British colonial administration hired them disproportionately compared to the Sinhalese. In 1948, for example, Tamils accounted for 40 percent of the clerical workers employed by the colonial government, greatly outstripping their 15 percent share of the overall population. This unequal outcome had nothing to do with overt discrimination against the Sinhalese; it merely reflected the different levels and types of education achieved by the different ethnic groups.

When Sri Lanka gained independence, it passed a constitution that prohibited discrimination based on ethnicity. But a few years after that, an opportunist politician, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, figured he could advance his career by cynically appealing to identity politics, stoking Sinhalese envy over the Tamils’ over-representation in higher education and government. He launched a divisive campaign to eliminate the disparity, which spurred the majority Sinhalese to elect him. After his election in 1956, Bandaranaike passed a law that changed the official language from English to Sinhala and consigned students to separate Tamil and Sinhalese education “streams” rather than having them all learn English. As one Sinhalese journalist wrote, this divided Sri Lanka, depriving it of its “link language”:

That began a great divide that has widened over the years. Children now go to segregated schools or study in separate streams in the same school. They don’t get to know other people of their own age group unless they meet them outside.

Beyond eliminating Sri Lanka’s common “link language,” this law also functioned as a de facto affirmative action program for Sinhalese. Tamils, who spoke Tamil at home and received their higher education in English, could not gain Sinhala proficiency quickly enough to meet the government’s requirement. So, many of them lost their jobs to Sinhalese. For example, the percentage of Tamils employed in government administrative services dropped dramatically: from 30 percent in 1956 to five percent in 1970; the percentage in the armed forces dropped from 40 percent to one percent.

As has happened in many other countries, Sri Lanka’s identity politics went hand-in-hand with expanded government. Sinhalese politicians made it clear: government would be the tool to redress perceived ethnic disparities. It would allocate more jobs and resources, and that allocation would be based on ethnicity. As one historian writes: “a growing perception of the state as bestowing public goods selectively began to emerge, challenging previous views and breeding mistrust between ethnic communities.” Tamils responded to this by launching a non-violent resistance campaign. With ethnic dividing lines now clearly drawn, mobs of Sinhalese staged anti-Tamil counter-demonstrations and then riots in which hundreds—mostly Tamils—were killed. The us-versus-them mentality was setting in.

Bandaranaike was eventually assassinated by radicals within his own movement. But his widow, Sirimavo, who was subsequently elected prime minister, resolved to maintain his top priorities—expansive government and identity politics. She nationalized numerous industries and launched development projects that were directed by ethnic and political considerations rather than actual need. She also removed the constitutional ban on ethnic discrimination so that she could aggressively expand affirmative action. The existing policies had already cost so many Tamils their jobs that they were now under-represented in government. However, they remained over-represented in higher education, particularly in the sciences, a disparity that Sirimavo and her political allies resolved to eliminate. In a scheme that American universities like Harvard would later emulate, the Sri Lankan universities began to reject high-scoring Tamil applicants in favor of manifestly less-qualified Sinhalese with vastly lower test scores.

Just like Justinian’s “race” preferences, the Sri Lankan affirmative action program exacerbated us-versus-them attitudes, deepening the group divide and spurring enmity between groups. As one Sri Lankan observed:

Identity was never a question for thousands of years. But now, here, for some reason, it is different … Friends that I grew up with, [messed around] with, got drunk with, now see an essential difference between us just for the fact of their ethnic identity. And there are no obvious differences at all, no matter what they say. I point to pictures in the newspapers and ask them to tell me who is Sinhalese and who is Tamil, and they simply can’t tell the difference. This identity is a fiction, I tell you, but a deadly one.9

The lessons of the various affirmative action programs in Sri Lanka were clear to everyone: individuals’ access to education and government employment would be determined by ethnic group membership rather than individual merit, and political power would determine how much each group got. If you wanted your share, you needed to mobilize as a group and acquire and maintain political power at any cost. The divisive effects of these lessons would be catastrophic.

The realization that they would forever be at the mercy of an ethnic spoils system, along with the violent attacks perpetrated against them, induced the Tamils to form resistance organizations—most notably, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LTTE attacked both Sri Lankan government forces and individual Sinhalese, initiating a deadly spiral of attacks and reprisals by both sides committing the sort of atrocities that are tragically common in ethnic conflicts: burning people alive, torture, mass killings, and so on. Over the following decades, the conflict continued to fester, periodically escalating into outright civil war. Ultimately, over a million people would be killed or displaced.

The timeline of the Sri Lankan conflict establishes how communal violence originated from identity politics rather than the underlying income and occupational disparity between the groups. That disparity reached its apex at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, there was no communal violence at that point or during the next half-century. It was only after the introduction of affirmative action programs that ethnic violence erupted. The deadliest attacks on Tamils occurred an entire decade after those programs had enabled Sinhalese to surpass Tamils in both income and education. As Thomas Sowell observed: “It was not the disparities which led to intergroup violence but the politicizing of those disparities and the promotion of group identity politics.”10

Consequences of Identity Politics in Sri Lanka and Beyond

Sri Lanka’s experience highlights some underappreciated consequences of identity politics. Most notably, one would expect that affirmative action programs would have warmed the feelings of the Sinhalese toward the Tamils. After all, they were receiving preferences for jobs and education at the Tamils’ expense. Yet, precisely the opposite happened: as the affirmative action programs were implemented, Sinhalese animus toward the Tamils progressively worsened. This pattern has been repeated in nearly all the countries where affirmative action has been implemented: affirmative action programs have an invidious effect on the group that benefits, imbuing them with a sense of insecurity and defensiveness over the benefits they receive. That group tends to justify the indefinite continuation of these benefits by claiming that the other group continues to enjoy “privilege”—or by demonizing them and claiming that they are “systemically” advantaged. Thus, the beneficiaries of affirmative action are often the ones to initiate hostilities. In Rwanda, for example, it was Hutu affirmative action beneficiaries who perpetrated the violence, not Tutsis. The situation in Sri Lanka was analogous, with Sinhalese instigating all of the initial riots and pogroms against the Tamils.

One knock-on effect of identity politics in Sri Lanka was that it ultimately benefited some of the wealthiest and most privileged people in the country. The government enacted several affirmative action schemes, each increasingly contrived to benefit well-heeled Sinhalese. The last of these implemented a regional quota system that was devised so that aristocratic Sinhalese living in the Kandy region would compete for spots against poor, undereducated Tamil farm workers. As one Tamil who lost his spot in engineering wrote: “They effectively claimed that the son of a Sinhalese minister in an elite Colombo school was disadvantaged vis-à-vis a Tamil tea plucker’s son.” This follows the pattern of many other affirmative action programs around the world: the greatest beneficiaries are typically the most politically connected (and privileged) individuals within the group receiving affirmative action. They are often wealthier and more privileged than many of the individuals against whom affirmative action is directed. This has been well documented in India, which has extensive data on the subgroups that benefit from its affirmative action programs.

Decades of sociological research and millennia of history have demonstrated that the tribal instinct is both powerful and hardwired into human behavior.

One unexpected consequence of identity politics in Sri Lanka was rampant corruption. When Sri Lanka became independent, its government was widely deemed one of the least corrupt in the developing world. However, as affirmative action programs were implemented and expanded, corruption increased in lockstep. The adoption of affirmative action set a paradigm that pervaded the government: whoever held power could steer government resources to whomever they deemed “underserved.” A baleful side effect of ethnicity-based distortion of government policy is that it undermines and erodes more general standards of government integrity and transparency, legitimating a paradigm of corruption: if it is acceptable to direct policy for the benefit of an ethnic group, is it not also acceptable to do so for the benefit of a clan or an individual? It is a small step to go from one to the other, a step that many Sri Lankan leaders and bureaucrats took. Today, Sri Lanka’s government, which once rivaled European governments in transparency, remains highly corrupt. This pattern has been repeated in other countries. For example, after the Federation of Malaysia expelled Singapore, it adopted an extensive affirmative action program, whereas Singapore prohibited ethnic preferences. Malaysia subsequently experienced proliferating corruption, whereas Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries in the world today.

Economic divergence between Singapore and Sri Lanka’s GDP per capita, 1960–2023 (Source: Our World in Data)

Perhaps the most profound consequence of identity politics in Sri Lanka was that it ultimately made everybody in the country worse off. After World War II, per capita income in Sri Lanka and Singapore was nearly identical. But after it abandoned its shared “link language” and adopted ethnically divisive policies, Sri Lanka was plagued by violent conflict and economic underperformance; today, one Singaporean earns more than seven Sri Lankans put together. All the group preferences devised to elevate Sinhalese brought down everyone in the country—Tamil, Sinhalese, and all the other groups alike. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s “founding father,” attributed that failure to Sri Lanka’s divisive policies, saying that if Singapore had implemented similar policies, “we would have perished politically and economically.” There are echoes of this in other countries that have implemented identity politics. When I visited Rwanda, I asked Rwandans of various backgrounds whether they thought distinguishing people by race or ethnicity ever helped anyone in their country. There was complete unanimity on this point: after they got over pondering why anyone would ask such a naïve question, they made it very clear that distinguishing people by group made everyone, whether Hutu or Tutsi, distinctly worse off. In the Balkans, I got similar answers from Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, and Kosovars.

The Perilous Path of Identity Politics

Decades of sociological research and millennia of history have demonstrated that the tribal instinct is both powerful and hardwired into human behavior. As political scientist Harold Isaacs writes:

If anything emerges plainly from our long look at the nature and functioning of basic group identity, it is the fact that the we-they syndrome is built in. It does not merely distinguish, it divides … the normal responses run from … indifference to depreciation, to contempt, to victimization, and, not at all seldom, to slaughter.11

The history of Byzantium and Sri Lanka demonstrates that this tribal instinct is extremely easy to provoke. All it takes is official recognition of group distinctions and some group preferences to balkanize people into bitterly antagonistic groups, and the consequences are potentially dire. Even if a society that is balkanized in this way avoids violent conflict, it is still likely to be plagued by all the concomitants of social fractionalization: higher corruption, lower social trust, and abysmal economic performance.

A country that was once renowned for its communal harmony quickly descended into violence and economic failure—all because it sought to redress group disparities with identity politics.

It is therefore troubling to see the U.S. government, institutions, and society adopt Sri Lankan-style policies that emphasize group distinctions. As the U.S. continues down the perilous path of identity politics, it is unlikely to devolve into another Bosnia or Sri Lanka overnight. But the example of Sri Lanka is a dire warning: a country that was once renowned for its communal harmony quickly descended into violence and economic failure—all because it sought to redress group disparities with identity politics.

Surveys and statistics are now flashing warning signs in the United States. A Gallup poll found that while 70 percent of Black Americans believed that race relations in the United States were either good or very good in 2001, only 33 percent did in 2021.12 Other statistics have shown that hate crimes have been on the rise over that time.13 In the last year, we have also seen the spectacle of angry anti-Israel protesters hammering on the doors of a college hall, terrorizing the Jewish students locked inside, and a Stanford professor telling Jewish students to stand in the corner of a classroom. While identity politics have increasingly directed public policy and institutions, relations between social groups have deteriorated rapidly. This—and a lot of history—suggest it’s time for a different approach.

One of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station is undergoing a “medical situation”, forcing NASA to bring the crew home early for the first time ever

Evidence is mounting that specific gut bacteria are linked to sleep conditions, which may open the doors to dietary recommendations aiming to boost the quality of our slumbers

Reader Norman sent me the first video below saying, “in one of your posts the other day you gave a link to an article about how anti-Zionism = antisemitism.”  Yes, I’ve frequently said that and in fact did so in the last post. And I think the equation is clearly true. For those on the left justifying anti-Zionism, the claim that it is NOT antisemitism rests on an incorrect construal of “anti-Zionism” as “criticism of the politics of Israel/Netanyahu”. Alternatively, “anti-Zionism could mean “favoring a one-state solution, a state that includes both Palestinians and Jews—and we all know what that means for the Jews.

As the moderator defines it in the video, “anti-Zionism” is “opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the territory defined as the historic land of Israel or Palestine” and that view implicitly favors the erasure or destruction of Israel, which to any reasonable person is antisemitic (where would the Jews go?). Further seeing the “anti-Zionism” trope as being politically okay ignores the fact that nearly all Muslim states in the Middle East are explicitly religiously Muslim as part of their government (viz., the formal name of Iran is “The Islamic Republic of Iran”). In contrast, while Israel was approved as a homeland for Jews after WWII, there is no requirement for residents to adhere to the tenents of Judaism, for 20% of the population are Arab Muslims and many of the resident “Jews” are, like me, atheists who are culturally Jewish. To show the difference, try being gay in Gaza or Iran as opposed to Israel.

So, below is what Norman wanted me to see: a short speech by British author and commentator Melanie Phillips.  It’s part of a four-person intelligence² debate that took place six years ago. The proposition debated is is “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Phillips’s bit, agreeing with the proposition, starts 47 seconds into the video, and I’ve begun the video at that point. Her bit ends at 10:28, so the part to listen to is about ten minutes long. The rest is some person, not part of the formal debate, banging on.

As Norman says, “this is one of the most forceful and succinct statements I have heard or read.” It is indeed. And despite its title, Mehdi Hasan does not explode here. That is in the second video below, which gives the entire two-hour debate.

Here’s the whold video, including besides Mehdi Hassan (his speech starts at 35:45) and Melanie Phillips, Einat Wulf (who agrees with Phillips; her speech starts at 24:00) and Ilan Pappé, an Israeli who favors a “one-state solution” (his speech starts at 12:25). The audience, clearly on the side of Hassan and Pappé throughout, defeated the motion.  They are wrong.

A new study finds that hot super-Earths begin as large puffy worlds with low densities. Over time their atmospheres are stripped away to leave more dense planets orbiting close to their stars.

The ice-covered island may be strategically important, but it's unclear that it could be a commercially viable source of minerals and oil in the near future

Calculations show that injecting randomness into a quantum neural network could help it determine properties of quantum objects that are otherwise fundamentally hard to access

This longish diatribe against “progressives” (i.e., left-wing extremists who aren’t Communists) appeared in my weekly Substack recommendations. Intrigued by the title, I printed it out and read it (I can’t read on screens.) Que’s thesis is one you’ve often seen me advance: “progressives” have gone so far that they’ve alienated much of the Left, and must acknowledge this honestly before Democrats get a decent chance of winning substantial power.

Que’s indictment is on the mark, but his proposed solutions (see below) seem unworkable—something Que realizes. In other words, he thinks that wokeness will hang on tenaciously until its advocates apologize and work with moderates to “center-ize” the Left, but that this is highly unlikely.

Click below for a free read, but subscribe if you like the content of “Edokwin Editorial”. Que is described as “a prolific storyteller and journalist. A lover of (micro-)blogging, Que’s primary areas of interest are arts, entertainment, philosophy, and politics.”

Que’s thesis starts with a laundry list of “progressive” sins, though it’s ironic to use “sins” for calling out a movement based on moral certainty (see below). I’ve bolded one sentence.

Rationalized bigotry and identitarianism. Political violence and terrorist apologia. Mass migration madness. Cancel culture. Overreaches around BLM, COVID, trans issues, and so much more. The 21st century progressive movement’s mistakes turned outright malfeasance make it one of the most totalizing failures of activism, public policy, global governance, and general wellbeing. It is a global phenomenon, with far reaching and overwhelmingly negative implications.

Keir Starmer’s approval rating sits at 18 percent. His government—barely a year old—polls at 19 percent. A far right party that didn’t exist two years ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform, has surged to 31 percent support, nearly matching Labour and the Conservatives combined. This pattern repeats across the Western world. Trump’s return in America. Wilders in the Netherlands. Le Pen’s surging support in France. Germany’s AfD. The far right isn’t ascendant despite progressive politics & policies. It’s ascendant because of progressivism.

The only hope for this movement, which has been the vanguard of leftism for most of my adult life, is to moderate and make massive mea culpas. I am not optimistic on either front however. The only thing worse than its terrible track record is the constant gaslighting about it.

Before singling out six areas in which, says Que, “progressives” have alienated the rest of America, he points out one specimen of what he calls “craven complicity”: columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein.  To Que, Klein epitomizes the problems afflicting “progressives” called out on their nonsense. Klein, like others of his ilk, “adjust their language just enough to avoid total campaigning disasters and PR implosions, but they never question the core conviction that animates everything they do: We are the moral vanguard, and opposition to our program stems from bigotry, ignorance, or malice.”

And that, Que argues, is the main reason why progressivism has failed, and failed largely because Americans can’t stomach it. It is “progressives'” air of moral certainty. so that they see no point engaging in introspection about their views, nor arguing about them.  They are, they believe, morally right, even when they’re tactically wrong. And it is this smug air of moral rectitude that regular Americans—however dumb “progressives think they are”—can see right through, and reject. A summary:

Here’s what people like Harris, and also Andrew Sullivan, understand that most progressive critics miss: The problem isn’t just that progressives got specific policies wrong. It’s that they’ve constructed an entire worldview in which very basic things most human beings take for granted are deemed “fundamentally and morally wrong.”

That foreigners are not citizens, and citizens’ interests come first. That children are not adults capable of consenting to irreversible medical procedures. That rapid demographic transformation of neighborhoods affects quality of life. That borders serve legitimate functions. That merit matters. That parents have primary authority over their children’s education and upbringing. And that the wrongness of racism & sexism leave no space for social justice carveouts; racism against Asians, Europeans, and Jews is still racism, sexism against men (misandry) is still sexism, and so forth.

These aren’t fringe positions held by extremists. They’re baseline assumptions held by overwhelming majorities across every Western, liberal democracy. And progressives have spent fifteen years treating people who hold these views as moral monsters. They are a political movement that has played footsie with far left extremism for ages, and which believes radical, revolutionary social change is not only permissible but necessary, even against the wishes of the voting public.

Que then singles out six areas in which “progressives” went too far (characterizations are mine, and bolding within quotes is Que’s).  Que’s quotes are either indented or in quotation marks, and my comments are flush left.

a.) Cancel culture and the suppression of discourse, something that Americans see as an extreme form of “mob justice”). Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating disagreement as a moral emergency and for wielding social ostracism as a political weapon.

b.) The Covid-19 pandemic.  Que thinks, and many agree, that “progressives” over-enforced things like masking and closing schools, to the detriment of American well-being. He’s not saying that precautions needn’t have be taken, but that they went too far, and were mandatory rather than voluntary. He argues that, especially in blue states, responses involved not using available evidence but “suppressing legitimate scientific debate.”

Que is right to some extent, especially in light of Fauci’s and Collin’s recently-revealed attempt to suppress investigation of the origin of the virus, but at the time it wasn’t clear what the scientific evidence was, as there was no time to accumulate it. To a large extent, health departments and the government acted on their best guess, and they sometimes got it wrong. And some were certainly wrong in suggesting (and implementing, in Vermont and New York), the idea that minorities get prioritized at the expense of other people more susceptible to infection and death.  Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating emergency powers as a blank check, for suppressing legitimate scientific debate, and for the generational harm inflicted on children who lost years of education and socialization to policies that didn’t work.”

c.) Hamas’s attack on Israel. I’ll quote Que here:

Nothing has more starkly revealed progressive moral bankruptcy than the response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre.

Within hours of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—an orgy of rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping that killed over 1,200 people and harmed thousands more—segments of the progressive left were…celebrating. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter posted an image of a Hamas paraglider. Democratic Socialists of America rallied in support of Palestinian “resistance.” Harvard student organizations issued statements blaming Israel for its own massacre.

The reaction stunned even moderate progressives themselves. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote: “for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i’d like to just state that i was totally wrong.” CNN’s Jake Tapper described the aftermath as “a real eye-opening period in terms of antisemitism on the left.” New York Governor Kathy Hochul spoke of a “category five hurricane of left-wing antisemitism.”

The pattern was unmistakable: progressivism’s oppressor/oppressed binary had trained a generation to see Jews—successful, often “white”-presenting—as oppressors whose suffering didn’t count. When Hamas terrorists raped and murdered Israeli women, the feminists of #TimesUp, #BelieveWomen, and the #MeToo movement stayed silent. When progressive university professors failed to condemn celebrations of the massacre, they revealed that their commitment to “social justice” was conditional on the identity of the victims.

This is absolutely true. The condemnation of Israel began before it even went into Gaza, and a lot of antisemitism that had lain latent before October 7 was quickly revealed.  Jews became “Zios,” a euphemism confected by anti-Zionists, who are the same as antisemites.  Many NGOs, as well as the UN, were arrantly favoring Hamas over Israel: Doctors without Borders, for example, repeatedly condemned Israel for perpetuating “genocide” without (or only rarely) condemning Hamas. Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize to Jews for creating an intellectual and moral environment where celebrating the mass murder of Jewish civilians became acceptable in progressive spaces, and where opposition to that celebration gets you called a hater yourself.”  Harvard has sort of done that, but “progressives” in general? Naah.

d.) Trans issues. “Progerssive” moral certainty has gone so far here that even if you think that biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports and generally shouldn’t be put in women’s prisons, you are tarred as a transphobe. But most American’s aren’t afraid of or hate trans people; like me, they believe that trans people should have the same dignity and respect as anyone else, but also that “trans rights” sometimes clash with other rights (as in sport, which has men’s and women’s divisions for a reason), and those clashes must be discussed and resolved.

Que:

Few issues better demonstrate progressive detachment from reality than transgender policy—and few reveal more starkly the gap between progressive rhetoric and progressive belief.

Let’s be clear about what Americans actually think. Large majorities support allowing trans adults to transition to the gender they want. Large majorities support banning discrimination against trans people. These are not controversial positions. They represent basic decency.

But Americans also believe, by even larger majorities, that: genetic human sex is real and determined by biology, not subjective feelings; children should not undergo irreversible medical transitions, especially without parental consent; male sex athletes should not compete in women’s sports; women deserve single-sex spaces for privacy and safety.

According to Ezra Klein, these majority positions are “fundamentally and morally wrong.” Not mistaken. Not worthy of debate. Fundamentally and morally wrong.

This is the progressive tell.

Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for sacrificing children’s health to ideological purity, for eliminating women’s spaces and sports, for calling majority opinion immoral, and for making reasonable discussion of transgender policy impossible.”  I agree, but again, this ain’t gonna happen. One thing I’ve learned, from my own “cancellation” for the views expressed above, is that ideologues will never broach questioning of their views.

e. The DEI “debacle.  Que has written about it here. Originally well-meaning (and still held as “morally right” by its advocates), DEI, promoted mostly by progressives and those who are relatively well off, became by 2020:

. . . . a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of administrators, consultants, and training programs. Universities created massive bureaucracies dedicated to DEI, often with more administrators than faculty in some departments. Corporations mandated unconscious bias training despite no evidence it reduced bias. Hiring and promotion decisions were made with explicit racial preferences defended as “equity.”

The contradictions were glaring. Progressives who claimed to oppose essentialism reduced people to their demographic categories. They claimed to empower minorities while treating them as fragile victims requiring constant protection. They denounced discrimination while implementing explicit racial discrimination in admissions and hiring.

Most perversely, DEI’s benefits accrued primarily to affluent, educated minorities who needed help least, while working-class minorities—and working-class people of all races—were left behind. As a Tablet Magazine analysis noted, progressivism has always been an elite movement with “class condescension and a paternalistic attitude to the laboring classes” at its core.

Que’s solution: “progressives must apologize for reducing equality to a spoils system, for treating minorities as political clients rather than individuals, and for poisoning the well of genuine anti-discrimination efforts.”  I should add here that, lest Que be accused of racism, he is black.  Finally, we have:

f. “Migration madness.” Although now Trump and his flunkies are going overboard with their seizures and deportations, I well remember when everyone, including many Democrats, were calling for migration reform to stem the tide of people entering America illegally. (This also goes for Europe, which has suffered greatly from a policy of lax enforcement, leading to the rise of the far right in European politics.) Que:

This is the tell. Progressives will finally admit, under electoral duress, that maybe they got immigration a bit wrong. But they cannot stop believing that mass immigration remains a moral signifier, a virtue, an elevating repudiation of “whiteness.” They feel they have to adjust because Trump is dangerous and the country is full of racists, but they still believe their critics on immigration are “on the wrong side of history” and almost all bigots.

Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for treating immigration as a morality play rather than a policy challenge requiring trade-offs, and for abandoning working-class concerns as beneath consideration while calling basic immigration enforcement “immoral.”

You’ve already seen the problem with this critique: solutions don’t seem workable. At the end of his piece, Que recommends three actions:

1. “Apologize, Genuinely and Specifically”
2. “Reform Institutions and Methods.”
3.  “Work with Moderates to Combat Real Extremism”

For each of these Que describes what must be done specifically.

But, ridden with moral certainty, “progressives” simply won’t be able to apologize, for apologies constitute one of the hardest things for anyone to tender. I can envision #2 and #3 happening, but only if we get a centrist liberal President and Congress, and those aren’t in the offing. Even Que admits that this seems unworkable:

Will they do it? Based on the evidence at the moment, my current prediction is: “no.” The moral supremacy is too intoxicating. The institutional capture is too complete. The social rewards for performing wokeness are too powerful.

And he leaves the choice in the hands of progressives. That’s like leaving a lion the choice between eating an antelope or eating cabbage.  Kudos for Que to distill the problem of “progressivism” into a bit-sized hunk, but, as John McWhorter and Sam Harris argued yesterday, wokeness (the manifestation of progressivism) seems here to stay.

A man with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a super donor

Thanks to the people who sent in photos when our tank was almost empty. (I could use more, though. . . )

One of them was reader Ephraim Heller, who sends in part 11 of his installment “Brazil virtual safari.”  Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them:

Here are my photos, please don’t shoot the cute duck!

These photos are from my July 2025 trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area and the world’s largest flooded grasslands. Today I have photos of birds in the tyrant flycatcher family as well as a few miscellaneous birds.

In Brazil, “flycatchers” and “tyrants” refer to the same family – Tyrannidae. It is the world’s largest family of birds, with more than 400 species in North and South America, including 28 species in Brazil. Tyrannidae belong to the suborder Tyranni (suboscines), a primitive passerine lineage that lacks the complex vocal learning abilities of songbirds.  This places them in an entirely different major evolutionary branch from that yielding the Old World flycatchers (Muscicapidae), which are oscines (advanced songbirds).

Boat-billed Flycatcher (Megarynchus pitangua):

Fork-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus savana). The elaborate tail serves both aerodynamic and display functions:

Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus obscurus). A real beauty:

White Monjita (Xolmis irupero):

White-headed Marsh Tyrant (Arundinicola leucocephala):

Black-tailed Tityra (Tityra cayana). Tityras were formerly in the tyrant flycatcher family, but have been split into their own family:

Now for some miscellaneous birds:

Black-capped Donacobius (Donacobius atricapilla). This pair kept up their singing as I photographed them:

Chotoy Spinetail (Schoeniophylax phryganophilus):

Rufous Hornero (Furnarius rufus). Argentina’s national bird, famous for constructing elaborate clay nests resembling traditional mud ovens, with complex internal chambers and entrance tunnels. This master builder creates new nests annually, with old nests often used by other bird species. The clay construction provides excellent thermal insulation and protection.

A standard industrial knitting machine has been modified to produce fabrics from tungsten wire coated in gold, which are used to form the dish on the CarbSAR satellite

Scientists in South Korea have discovered a way to make all-solid-state batteries safer and more powerful using inexpensive materials. Instead of adding costly metals, they redesigned the battery’s internal structure to help lithium ions move faster. This simple structural tweak boosted performance by up to four times. The work points to cheaper, safer batteries for phones, electric vehicles, and beyond.

Can a pharma shill doctor call other doctors pharma shills?

The post Dr. Marty Makary Was Paid $130,357 By Pharma.  Is His “Undue Influence” Affecting the FDA? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Stanford researchers have developed an AI that can predict future disease risk using data from just one night of sleep. The system analyzes detailed physiological signals, looking for hidden patterns across the brain, heart, and breathing. It successfully forecast risks for conditions like cancer, dementia, and heart disease. The results suggest sleep contains early health warnings doctors have largely overlooked.

A team of physicists has discovered a surprisingly simple way to build nuclear clocks using tiny amounts of rare thorium. By electroplating thorium onto steel, they achieved the same results as years of work with delicate crystals — but far more efficiently. These clocks could be vastly more precise than current atomic clocks and work where GPS fails, from deep space to underwater submarines. The advance could transform navigation, communications, and fundamental physics research.

A team of physicists has discovered a surprisingly simple way to build nuclear clocks using tiny amounts of rare thorium. By electroplating thorium onto steel, they achieved the same results as years of work with delicate crystals — but far more efficiently. These clocks could be vastly more precise than current atomic clocks and work where GPS fails, from deep space to underwater submarines. The advance could transform navigation, communications, and fundamental physics research.

But we’re not going for one thing or another, are we? We’re here to explore ideas – that’s most of the fun anyway. And there’s one more aspect of physics that takes part in the free will discussion, and that’s the concept of emergence.

Using NASA’s IXPE, astronomers captured an unprecedented view of a white dwarf star actively feeding on material from a companion. The data revealed giant columns of ultra-hot gas shaped by the star’s magnetic field and glowing in intense X-rays. These features are far too small to image directly, but X-ray polarization allowed scientists to map them with surprising precision. The results open new doors for understanding extreme binary star systems.

Mars has a curious past. Rovers have shown unequivocal evidence that liquid water existed on its surface, for probably at least 100 years. But climate models haven’t come up with how exactly that happened with what we currently understand about what the Martian climate was like back then. A new paper, published in the journal AGU Advances by Eleanor Moreland, a graduate student at Rice University, and her co-authors, has a potential explanation for what might have happened - liquid lakes on the Red Planet would have hid under small, seasonal ice sheets similar to the way they do in Antarctica on Earth.

Tree bark has a total surface area similar to all of the land area on Earth. It is home to a wide range of microbial species unknown to science, and they can either take up or emit gases that have a warming effect on the climate