State of the Discussion

And now for something completely different (as they used to say in Monty Python), this came to me in one of the newsletters I don't subscribe to but still get sent, Comment is Freed by Sam and Lawrence Freedman. I thought the Vance stuff was interesting:

This piece orginally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and is reproduced with their permission. It’s a review of three new books about various elements of the the new right in the US, but I used the opportunity to sketch out the different roots of MAGA philosophy, such as it is, and to highlight the contradictions between them.

The rise of MAGA is arguably the most important political phenomenon of this century. Tracing its conceptual roots is critical to understanding where it came from and how best to manage the fallout. But it is challenging to analyse something that is so often aggressively anti-intellectual, revelling in its juvenile offensiveness. When confronted with a movement in which two of the leading lights call themselves Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist, it is tempting to roll one’s eyes and wait for the nonsense to pass. That would be a mistake, though, because the messy and often contradictory set of ideas that make up Trumpism didn’t appear from nowhere and won’t evaporate when the president leaves the stage.
In Furious Minds: The making of the Maga new right, Laura K. Field identifies three distinct sets of thinkers: a group based at the Claremont Institute, focused on returning to the principles of the Founding Fathers; postliberals, who want less focus on individual rights and more on community; and national conservatives, who believe in the importance of the nation state over global governance.
The Claremonsters, as they like to call themselves, are the most intellectually interesting of the three. They are disciples of the hugely influential philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973), whose methodology involved close readings of “great books” such as Plato’s Republic or Machiavelli’s The Prince, based on the belief that they contain permanent truths that can be identified in a quasi-religious fashion. Strauss saw this as a way to counteract the relativism of liberal modernity. It is an approach that naturally appeals to conservatives of all stripes. Many of the neocons who clustered around George W. Bush and pushed for war with Iraq were also Straussians. “Great books” are handy for bolstering a range of ideological priors.
After Strauss died, his supporters split into an East Coast faction led by Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago and a West Coast one led by Harry Jaffa at Claremont College in California – an academic version of Biggie vs Tupac, with similar levels of bitterness. Jaffa’s school focused on activism rather than what it saw as the East Coast’s intellectual parlour games, and in particular on instilling the wisdom of the Founding Fathers back into modern politics. For adherents of this school, the founders’ version of the United States is close to the best possible regime, and thus any attempt to dilute it via liberalism is seen as disastrous.
This may all seem somewhat esoteric, except that seventy Claremont alumni hold or have held jobs in the current Trump administration. One of the best known is Michael Anton, who wrote the infamous National Security Strategy of 2025 claiming Europe to be facing “civilisational erasure” due to high levels of immigration. Anton has now left government, but he remains a powerful influence. His overwrought essay “The Flight 93 Election” (2016), in which he argued that a Democrat win would be the end of the US, was the first to make an intellectual case for a candidate whom many Republicans still opposed: “Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect. So what? … The alleged buffoon is … more prudent – more practically wise – than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him”.
The postliberals considered by Field will be more familiar to British readers, who have their own troop of red Tories and blue Labourites bewailing the atomizing individualism of the modern world. For them, globalization and social liberalism have created an internationalist elite disconnected from ordinary “left behind” folk who are pining for communalism and traditional values. These analyses tend to ignore the existence of a large, young and ethnically diverse working class, preferring instead to focus on older, white former industrial towns. But they certainly tap into a genuine sense of loss and bewilderment.
As there is much overlap between conservative postliberalism and left-wing critiques of neoliberalism that also see individualism as an evil, it is the new right school that appeals most to Democrats (and to Labour MPs), particularly those representing those fading industrial towns. The most prominent American advocate for postliberalism, Patrick Deneen, got his big break when Barack Obama recommended his book Why Liberalism Failed (2018) on a summer reading list. This outlook also appeals to the religious, because implicit in the argument is the notion that the church provided the sense of belief and community now missing. In the US, it is particularly associated with Catholicism and “Catholic integrationists” such as Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, who reject the separation of church and state, and argue that government should be based on spiritual values.
Then there are the national conservatives, a more loosely defined group built around a big annual conference who have helped to bring more traditional right-wingers into the Maga tent. These events are hosted by the Edmund Burke Foundation, currently chaired by Yoram Hazony, an Israeli American whose book The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) argues for the nation-state as a bulwark against imperialism in the form of international bodies such as the EU. Unsurprisingly, this is the part of Trumpworld that is most connected to radical right parties in Europe, in particular to Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary. Orbán has spoken at several NatCon events.
All three groups share a deep hostility to immigration, whether as a threat to the US’s founding vision, to community or to the nation state. This hostility exposes the movement to what Field calls a “dark underbelly” of extremism – which is where Mr Pervert and Mr Nationalist come in – both, despite being palpably deranged, have wheedled their way onto the new-right podcast circuit to sell their visions of brute masculinity in a world apparently in thrall to the feeble “gynocracy”.
Initially, people such as Anton and Hazony made some effort to maintain a cordon sanitaire, however flimsy, against white supremacists and incels, but that has now largely collapsed, with many adhering to the admonition NEOTR: “no enemies on the right”. This stance is reflected in the more openly racist language and behaviour of the second Trump administration, with the president’s policy chief, Stephen Miller, leading the charge. The mastermind of the ICE raids that are still terrorizing US cities and a known fan of white supremacist websites, Miller is close to the Claremonsters and has been a regular speaker at NatCon events.
There is one other vital set that Field doesn’t discuss: the tech bros. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel get a few mentions in Furious Minds, but they, along with fellow travellers such as Marc Andreessen, arguably deserve their own category. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff have a go at trying to define “Muskism” in a new book of that name. The authors don’t pretend that Musk himself has a coherent philosophy, but instead point to a set of behaviours via which tech utopians like him try to subvert the state for their higher purpose. Thiel is more explicit in his view that democracy has failed and that “extreme concentrations of power benefit humanity”. This can be seen in his patronage of the dismal Curtis Yarvin, a “thinker”, in the loosest sense of the term, who promotes dictatorship and dismisses the liberal order as a “cathedral” that needs to be destroyed. It’s an outlook that explains Thiel and Musk’s war against universities and government (which the latter attempted to gut via his DOGE initiative), as well as their obsession with the “woke mind virus”.
Unlike true libertarians, though, the tech accelerationists do not want government to disappear; rather, they wish to co-opt it through their companies. Thus SpaceX, thanks to a stream of lucrative defence contracts, has become indispensable to the Pentagon and Palantir has become an essential part of the surveillance state, informing ICE of potential targets. The vast expense of the tech bros’ utopian visions to conquer Mars and build cyborgs supplemented by superintelligent AI can only be met by steering the resources of the state towards them and, ideally, minimizing pesky costs such as welfare and education. At the heart of Musk’s world-view is, in his own words, the belief that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of civilisation”, because it delays progress towards his interplanetary paradise.
Of course, one problem with trying to analyse all these different strands of Trumpism is the man himself, who has no interest in Mars, Straussian close reading or Catholic integrationism. All the thinkers trying to find philosophical justifications for the president’s behaviour have to keep shifting position because his only real goals are power and personal enrichment. In “The Flight 93 Election”, Anton praised Trump for understanding the damage done by the “globalists’” trade deals and entanglements in foreign wars. Yet, though the president has imposed tariffs on other countries, he has been quite happy to sign up to deals with countries willing to remunerate his family (or give him a private jet). And any concern about “forever wars” in the Middle East has long been forgotten.
In some ways, this total lack of interest in consistency has held the MAGA coalition together. It is worth everyone trying to stay on Trump’s good side not only because of his gangster-boss demands for fealty, but also because he offers something for everyone and can often be persuaded to change his mind. Thus the tech bros keep supporting him, despite his tariffs harming their interests, because they can squeeze out other concessions. And the postliberals stick with him, despite his proclivity for foreign wars and tax breaks for the wealthy, because he is willing to sign executive orders condemning critical race theory and transgenderism.
The interesting question is where this will all go when he’s done. There is no chance of a return to old-school establishment Republicanism, but it’s also not clear that anyone else can contain the MAGA contradictions. If anyone can, it might be Trump’s most likely successor, J. D. Vance, who thinks of himself as an intellectual and is carefully positioned at the centre of all strands of new-right thought.
In Field’s book, Vance keeps popping up all over the place like an extremist Zelig. He gives talks at Claremont and helps senior alumni such as Anton and Russell Vought (who worked with Musk to gut the civil service as director of the Office of Management and Budget) into jobs. He is shown to be an admirer of Deneen, having converted to Catholicism in 2019, and has allied with Vermeule in arguing that the executive should have more power to assert its values over the judiciary. He is a regular speaker at NatCon events. And his Senate campaign was funded by Thiel, who once employed him as a hedge-fund manager.
Vance’s approach to managing the contradictions between these different schools is to barge through them with shameless hypocrisy. He condemns Europe for its “attacks on free speech” while attempting to shut down American universities for teaching opinions he dislikes. He sometimes pretends to care about the dangers of tech monopolies and corporate greed, while taking Thiel’s money and backing massive tax cuts for the rich. He is against pointless wars in the Middle East while defending those started by his boss, at least in public.
This tendency to play both sides was evident in Hillbilly Elegy (2016), the bestselling memoir that made Vance’s name. It was lauded as a paean to the forgotten Appalachian white working class; an explanation for Trump’s success. It is also full of cheap stereotypes and attacks on the citizens of Vance’s home town for their lack of gumption and reliance on the welfare state. It encompasses Deneen and Thiel at the same time. One could psychoanalyse this as the internal fight between guilt and pride at his having escaped his background to Yale and a career in hedge funds. Or it could just be that he is good at telling people what they want to hear.
Either way, Vance’s gamble is that a shared hatred of liberals is enough to prevent anyone on the new right from worrying too much about any of this. NEOTR is a powerful creed against a shared enemy and one he has been happy to support, for instance in defending one of Musk’s DOGE-ites, Marko Elez, when he was briefly fired for writing racist tweets. One of those posts said simply, “normalize Indian hate”. One wonders what Vance’s wife, Usha, whose parents emigrated from India, made of that.
The obvious problem with NEOTR, though, is that it means defending increasingly unsavoury characters as those on the fringes see how far they can go. Doing so drags the new right further away from an electorate who may not be liberals, but aren’t Nazis either. Exactly how far NEOTR extends is now an active conversation being had on the new right, following a softball interview of the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes by the MAGA superstar Tucker Carlson in October 2025. And Fuentes really is a Nazi, having engaged in Holocaust denial and professed to being a fan of Hitler. Some MAGA supporters, including Ben Shapiro, have criticized Carlson, who remains a regular on the conference circuit and continues to interview administration figures on his show (aired on the Tucker Carlson Network). Trump, who used to be a big fan, but has more recently fallen out with him over Iran, defended Carlson over the Fuentes affair.
This put Vance in a tricky situation. He had previously criticized Fuentes for insulting his wife with a racial slur; and he has made pro forma statements that “antisemitism and all forms of ethnic hatred have no place in the conservative movement”, while also arguing against “self-defeating purity tests” and claiming: “we have far more important work to do than cancelling each other”. It is not clear, however, how these attempts to thread the needle will play with the true believers, leaving open the alarming possibility of an even more extreme candidate taking on Vance from the right for the next Republican nomination. Carlson might consider running himself. Jason Zengerle’s fair and balanced new biography, Hated by All the Right People, charts Carlson’s journey from being an intelligent conservative magazine writer to a Fox News populist, then on to the darker reaches of conspiracism after he was fired.
What makes Carlson interesting is not just his reach and overweening ambition, but the sense that he is a true believer. Throughout his career, he has been willing to compromise his views to a point, but less so than most. In Field’s typology, he fits best into the postliberal category – opposing foreign wars and willing to criticize corporate disdain for the working class. Unlike others, though, he hasn’t shifted position to accommodate wherever the Republican Party happens to be. He was one of the first conservatives to criticize the Iraq War and has continued to attack Trump for his Middle East escapades, while others have made excuses. His dislike of America’s support for Israel was one of the things that led him to interview Fuentes.
It also makes him dangerous, because he has even less interest in making concessions to mainstream opinion than do Trump or Vance, as was evident when he decided to interview Vladimir Putin in 2024, in a piece of television showmanship that was interspersed with promos for Russia supermarkets. Likewise, he is willing to embrace the worst figures from Field’s “dark underbelly” of the new right if they are prepared to support his views.
Carlson was a big supporter of Vance, having him on his show during his Senate campaign more than any other candidate, and persuading Trump to make him vice president ahead of Marco Rubio, whom he sees as an unrepentant neocon. They are still in touch, and Vance has continued to defend Carlson against accusations of antisemitism. But one wonders if Carlson thinks the vice president has made too many compromises and sees an opportunity to push the post-Trump Maga movement more in his direction.
Either way, the contradictions within the new right cannot be contained for ever. Whether liberals are in a position to take advantage of this brewing internecine battle remains to be seen. While the new right may be riven with obnoxious views and nonsensical arguments, it is at least home to a lively debate. Liberalism, by contrast, seems stuck between a defence of old norms and an acceptance that some criticisms are correct. For now, it is sustained by resistance to MAGA. But at some point it will need its own intellectual revolution worth writing about.

Traditional German translations of Shakespeare have a tendency to bowdlerize/tone down the bard's 'strong' language, turning it more 'classic'. Shakespeare's English audience was mixed of commoners and educated nobility, the German was primarily bourgeois at the time of the classic translations. Before that Shakespeare in Germany was the trade of wandering theater troupes that tended to heavily rework the plays to better fit the German audience (then still as mixed as in England).
Frederick the Great considered Shakespeare's plays as 'worthy of a Canadian savage' and defamed Goethe's early (and more earthy) works as bad copies of the bad English plays (=Shakespeare). I do not know, whether he only knew the low-brow versions of the vagrant Thespians or whether he too found the author too vulgar for German upper class sophisticated taste (very French at the time).

I see from the Google AI that:

"the classic 19th-century Schlegel-Tieck translations..... ...turned his plays into masterpieces of German literature"

and given that the GLOML was in certain ways more like a 19th century German this makes sense.

(Hartmut, and everybody else, I am so sorry to bring the tone down, but on an only tangentially connected point and to add to the gaiety of nations in these troubled times, the difficulties of translating from German led one Scot attending a Burns Night celebration in Germany to reveal that in the printed program, where Burns's "Ode to a Haggis" was translated into German for the occasion, with a retranslation into English by the side, "Great Chieftain o' the puddin' race" was translated as "Mighty Fuhrer of the sausage people".

On the other hand, the great love of my life (who was German) used to tell me that among many educated Germans it was reckoned that the works of Shakespeare were better in German than in English.)

it would be interesting to know if your theory is about altruism, or lay people trying to understand things…

I was just being facetious, but my PhD was in metaphor and its use to teach second language writing, so I'm always struck by how particular metaphors are used in some way and end up constraining the way people think. And here in Japan, when Japanese often adapt metaphors, they are often oblivious to them and the places where their own metaphors clash with the metaphors they try to adapt is always interesting, if you have enough distance from it.

The best option for the Middle East, in terms of American involvement, is for King Pussygrabber to declare victory and turn his attention to tariffs and rants on social media. Then let the regional players work it out. (Yes, I know, the regional players will have a job working it out, esp. with Netanyahu, but getting Trump out of the talks is essential. If he sends Kushner over to be the diplomat, he'll support whoever gives him the biggest bribe.)

So far, there seems to be little agreement between the United States, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, and the Arab Gulf states about who is involved in the ceasefire, who is not, and the terms. Israel/US says Lebanon is not included, Israel continues air strikes there. Iran says Lebanon is included, keeps the Strait closed. KSA and UAE disagree on tolls entirely, with KSA having made air strikes in Iran and UAE threatening to freeze/confiscate Iranian assets in their banking system. Kuwait seems to say that damage from Iranian strikes have put them out of the oil and LNG business entirely.

I suppose this could just be a case of experts in a field consciously perverting the meaning of common terms in order to exclude those not participants in the field.

Or just borrowing words where there is some sort of vague relationship between the concepts rather than making up new words. Many years ago, in a Bell Labs cafeteria, I was involved in a discussion about certain sorts of error recoveries in early long-running Unix systems. One of the problems was "orphans", running processes that had no "parent" process. Another was "zombies", non-existent processes that still had an entry in the process table. Much of the talk was about turning orphans into zombies, or vice versa, and how to attach them to a parent so the parent could safely kill them.

When the gray-haired lady at the next table got up to leave, she paused to tell us, "You people are sick."

wj, I began reading the Wikipedia page under a roughly similar misapprehension, but realised as I went through it what the meaning is in context. I found it really interesting, and I'm grateful to nous for it, but I didn't even attempt the second link because I knew perfectly well that neither my science nor maths would be up to it!

wj - I suppose this could just be a case of experts in a field consciously perverting the meaning of common terms in order to exclude those not participants in the field.

Most people would say that a field is a large, open piece of land. Are you trying to exclude me with this jargon of yours?

And my friend the mathematician would really like to have a word with you.

It's not uncommon for people who are not part of a particular discourse community to misinterpret messages between members within that community.

nous -- the Stanford article starts:

In evolutionary biology, an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring. So by behaving altruistically, an organism reduces the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but boosts the number that other organisms are likely to produce.

UnlessI am being exceptionally dense this evening (always a possibility) that appears to say that altruism is not possible for a (childless?) individual who is a) a women after menopause, b) a man who have had a vasectomy, or c) anyone else who knows they are not fertile.

That conflicts massively with the general use of the word. Not just differs in nuance, but flat out conflicts. My understanding of the word is that it signifies actions which benefit another (or others) without expectation of benefit in return. That is, it is explicitly not a trade or exchange of favors.

I suppose this could just be a case of experts in a field consciously perverting the meaning of common terms in order to exclude those not participants in the field.

"In summary, human nature supplies the psychological building blocks (empathy, fairness intuitions, reward from helping) at perhaps 30–50% heritability for the underlying traits. But the degree and extension of altruism specifically toward strangers is heavily cultural/societal—often the decisive factor in explaining why it is common in some contexts and rare in others. Modern large-scale stranger altruism likely arose via cultural evolution building on biological foundations, enabling humans to cooperate in ways no other species matches. It is neither purely “hardwired” nor wholly learned; it is an evolved capacity powerfully shaped by the societies we build. Real-world examples (charity, disaster response, anonymous donations) reflect this interaction rather than any single cause."

Altruism: Nature, Culture, and Strangers

The President is quite correct that his proposed actions would destroy a whole civilization. But it wouldn’t be the civilization in Iran. It would be American civilization.

His Orangeness as the new Croesus: Make war on the Persians and a great empire will get destroyed.

At the beginning of this particular shitshow, Shitheels tweeted something about how Iran was part of a great civilization in the course of saying he was for MIGA (Make Iran Great Again) Someone must have fed him that, since he's got no idea of history, but as this has gone on, it's blowing them back to the Stone Age etc. I'm really curious who had Trump's ear initially and who moved in.

Since apparently the White House has said that Trump would be making no more comments tonight, as a palate cleanser I give you this remarkable (in many ways) obituary from today's Times of Robert Trivers:

Robert Trivers obituary: evolutionary biologistIndividualist who explained the origins of altruism but whose volatile, ‘ungovernable’ character made him an academic misfit, dies aged 83
Monday April 06 2026, 12.01am, The Times

In a burst of creativity in the early 1970s, Robert Trivers published a series of scientific papers that earned him a claim to being among the most important evolutionary theorists since Darwin. He was the first to fully appreciate how a gene-centric view of natural selection could explain some of the most puzzling and fundamental patterns in social life: the function of altruism, why males and females differ so much, the underpinnings of sibling rivalry and the delicate dynamic of conflict and co-operation that exists between parent and child.
Brilliantly original, Trivers was also an academic misfit: a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking individualist with a notable tendency to get into violent scrapes and an ungovernable character that eventually strained his relationship with the academy to breaking point.

Why do we ever behave altruistically? That is, why would an organism ever promote the reproductive success of another at some cost to its own? Since the work of the great evolutionist WD Hamilton, it had been appreciated that “kin selection” could explain why close relatives help one another out: doing so promotes an organism’s “inclusive fitness”, a measure accounting not only for an organism’s own genes but for copies of the same genes likely to be present in relatives. But why help non-kin? To Trivers, it was an obvious fact of life that we sometimes give priority to friends, and even strangers, over direct relatives.

Persuaded of the misguidedness of “group selectionist” theories that were fashionable at the time — according to which organisms sometimes sacrifice themselves for the “good of the species” — Trivers gave the central explanatory role to the gene. In his landmark 1971 paper, The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism, Trivers argued that altruism depended on the possibility of reciprocity. As long as helping a non-relative is not too costly, and there is sufficient probability that the favour would one day be returned, genes coding for altruistic dispositions spread.
One caveat is that it must be possible to notice and punish cheaters. Trivers’s model elegantly explains why altruism co-evolves with a host of moral emotions, such as a sense of fairness, righteous outrage, gratitude, guilt, contempt for cheaters and an appetite for retribution for its own sake. These function as enforcement mechanisms to prevent altruistic dynamics from being exploited, and ultimately undermined, by free-riders.

While still a graduate student at Harvard, Trivers had demystified one of the greatest outstanding problems in biology. Several more blockbuster articles followed in quick succession. 
Watching pigeons roosting outside his apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Trivers noticed the possessive way male birds would guard their partners, while taking every opportunity to cuckold rivals, a pastime females seemed to begrudgingly tolerate. Why are males and females so different — not just with respect to physiology, but in proneness to sexual jealousy and pickiness? Trivers’s explanation was strikingly powerful and unifying. The key was the disparity in parental investment between the sexes. In humans, as in many species, a man’s contribution to reproduction can be over in mere seconds; the woman, on the other hand, is left to grow and deliver a three-kilogram baby over the ensuing nine months. Whichever sex has to expend the most time and energy in producing offspring will be the pickier in partners, with countless physical, psychological and behavioural differences turning on that important fact. To his delight, Trivers had alighted on “an entire outline of a theory of the evolution of sex differences”.
 
Conflict reigns not only between the sexes, as Trivers discovered, but also between parent and child. Though biologists had typically thought of that relationship as essentially harmonious, genetic logic suggested otherwise. While parents are equally genetically related to each of their offspring, the calculus is different from the child’s point of view: each is twice as genetically close to himself as he is to any of his siblings (identical twins aside). Accordingly, the child’s incentive is to extract more than his fair share of resources from the family. The well-attested phenomena of cuteness, temper tantrums and other forms of attention-seeking are now speculated to be among the tools with which that conflict is waged.

Each of Trivers’s insights transformed behavioural ecology, spawning whole fields of research devoted to developing their empirical consequences. A final fertile idea from this period was one he simply slipped, in two elegantly compressed sentences, into the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, a book that Trivers helped to shape. There, he speculated that the widespread use of deception — and deception-detection — in evolutionary arms races suggests that self-deception should be a pervasive feature of life too. Engaging in conscious deceit is often cognitively taxing, after all, increasing the risk we might give ourselves away: better to fool ourselves, the better to fool others. Once again, Trivers had found a compelling evolutionary framework for exploring a question of enduring human interest, in this case the murkiness of the mind’s access to itself.

Trivers was justly revered by his fellow Darwinians. His ideas were rapidly popularised. EO Wilson, widely regarded as the father of sociobiology, called him “one of the most influential and consistently correct theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time”. Steven Pinker went a step further in praising him as “one of the great thinkers in the history of western thought”. In 2007 Trivers was presented with the prestigious Crafoord prize by the queen of Sweden.

Despite his accolades, he did not always return the admiration he was offered. “Sociobiology is pure bullshit,” Trivers would say of the field he regarded as artificially cut off from biology proper. Nor did he sympathise with the central methodological assumption of many evolutionary psychologists that our minds had not much evolved since hunter-gatherer times.
 
His astonishing talent for exposing its logic left Trivers little able to avoid conflict in his own life. Impulsive and prone to getting into violent entanglements, Trivers confessed to having “enjoyed” an unusual number of near-death experiences — “due in part to my tendency towards intense interpersonal disagreements late at night”. In 1985 Trivers was held up at knifepoint in the Netherlands but disarmed his assailant and attempted to choke him to death: an incident he was dismayed to find his editor urged him not to include in his 2015 memoir, Wild Life. 

“The scimitar of natural selection”, as Trivers put it, “has often been raised high above my head”. Once, when a graduate student inquired about a fresh cut on Trivers’s thumb, he explained indifferently that he had just survived a home invasion at his house in Jamaica, in which he was held hostage by two men armed with machetes. Having escaped by leaping from a second-floor window, he apparently returned to stab the men with an eight-inch blade he carried for such occasions. He was 67 at the time.
 
Robert Ludlow Trivers was born in Washington DC in 1943, the son of Howard, a diplomat with a doctorate in philosophy, and Mildred (née Raynolds), a renowned poet. He grew up in a succession of European cities, speaking five languages. A precocious child, he taught himself integral calculus in his early teens by studying his father’s discarded college textbooks.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had the first in a series of psychotic breakdowns that would come to cramp his working life. This first breakdown was the result of a manic five-week episode of increasing sleeplessness and mental agitation during which he became convinced he was the first person to properly understand Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. By the time his friends installed him at the Harvard infirmary, Trivers could not identify himself by name. His three-month spell in hospital later exempted him from military service in Vietnam, seeing him classified 4-F, “unfit for service in any war”.

Abandoning an ambition to study law, he wrote educational books for children, an experience that drew him by a roundabout route to evolutionary biology, and back to Harvard for graduate work, despite having no formal background in the field. In his fieldwork, he briefly observed chimpanzees with Jane Goodall (obituary, October 1, 2025) in Africa. At one point, he considered taking up psychology, but found the field relied on unscientific standards that struck him as little better than guesswork; later in life, if asked to elaborate on his own mental ill health, he would caveat his response by cautioning his interlocutor that he didn’t “follow the literature on being nuts”.

Frustrated by the Harvard biology faculty’s delay in granting his tenure application in the late 1970s, he abruptly left with his young family to take up a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a decision he came to regard as a “once in a lifetime” mistake. There, he befriended Huey Newton, co-founder of the paramilitary Black Panther political party, who was a doctoral student at the university. They co-authored a paper on self-deception, and Trivers made Newton his daughter’s godfather. He joined the Panthers for a period and later confessed to doing “an illegal thing or two”, before Newton removed him from the group for his own safety.

By temperament, Trivers was neither cool-tempered nor particularly inclined to correct his personal failings on reflection, a fact that amused him. “Inside me,” he observed, “there are two voices. One cries out, ‘Bob, you have made this mistake 630 times in the past and regretted every single one. Why not forgo it this time?’ Then comes a stronger voice, ‘No, Bob, this time is different.’ And there goes 631.”

Trivers’s jaundiced sense of humour left him an outsider to academic life and its niceties. However hot-headed he was, though, he also displayed a fierce capacity for moral indignation on behalf of others. He abhorred racism, married two Jamaican women and when he discovered the brutal violence directed at local gay men in Jamaica, helped to form an armed vigilante group to protect them.

Trivers married Lorna Staple in 1974. They divorced in 1988 and he married Debra Dixon in 1997. The marriage was dissolved in 2004. He is survived by a son, Aubrey, from his second marriage, and four children from his first marriage: a son, Jonny, twin girls, Natasha and Natalia, and another daughter, Alelia.

He attached unusual priority to getting things right in his work. He would stubbornly retract papers he found to contain inaccuracies, often at great inconvenience to himself and others. Instead of resting on the laurels of his early success, much of the middle of his career was channelled into a time-consuming attempt to master modern genetics (“I naively thought: I’ll whip genetics into shape in three to five years. Fifteen years later, genetics has whipped me into shape. You do not whip genetics into shape within three to five years. It took me eight to ten to understand what I was reading.”) 

In 2015 he was suspended by Rutgers University for refusing to teach a course on human aggression, a field he claimed he was not expert in (despite its being a personal forte of his). He quit university life for good shortly after. Later, he was among the set of high-profile intellectuals pilloried for maintaining financial and social links to Jeffrey Epstein, even after the latter’s conviction for sex offences. Far from apologetic, Trivers, who accepted funding from Epstein to study the relationship between knee symmetry and sprinting ability, vouched for his integrity; in Trivers’s view, Epstein’s imprisonment was punishment enough and his crimes less “heinous” than they were made out to be. 
It is testament to the depth and generality of Trivers’s discoveries that they could be applied so readily, as he unsparingly conceded, to his own case. As he understood, natural selection has built us, and it is to natural selection we must return “to understand the many roots of our suffering”.
Robert Trivers, evolutionary biologist, was born on February 19, 1943. He died of undisclosed causes on March 12, 2026, aged 83

But since it presupposes Iran agreeing to re-open the Strait of Hormuz, unless the Pakistanis got the Iranians’ agreement to that before making this suggestion...

I'm already depressed today** but I can't imagine Iran agreeing to that unless Pakistan was able to credibly tell them, "Guys, he's really going to drop a nuke outside Isfahan if you don't agree to open the Strait." Absent the leverage closing the Strait gives them, Iran either surrenders or bombs the snot out of the Arab Gulf states' oil/gas terminals and then surrenders. It seems unlikely that if they surrender they can get any meaningful guarantees that Israel/US won't start bombing again in t he future.

** Since it's an open thread, this week I donated my wife's car to charity. She's slowly dying in memory care from early-onset dementia, and there's no need for me to keep a second car licensed and insured. Getting rid of it hurt -- there are a lot of family memories attached. By the time she and I met we were both rather compulsive about keeping paperwork about assets. Today I put 27 years worth of paperwork, starting with the receipt for the initial deposit, into the recycle bin.

The US president just threatened the genocide not only of a people but a 'whole civilization'. Can somebody go out on the streets in protest? Or evoke the 25th amendment?

This is not normal. Not even Putin said such things.

An analysis of the Powell vs Miller debate.

"Overall Assessment

No major factual inaccuracies. The debate’s logical structure is strong on both sides, but Miller’s central analogy fails under scrutiny, and his performative-utterance claim sidesteps Powell’s evidence-based concerns. Powell’s predictions have held up remarkably well demographically (Birmingham’s transformation, national ethnic-minority growth, ongoing integration debates). Miller’s optimistic faith in absorption has been tested by subsequent events (enclaves, cultural tensions, riots). The exchange remains a model of substantive disagreement without rancor—rare today—and highlights enduring tensions between empirical realism and idealistic universalism on immigration. No one “won” in the moment, but history has lent more weight to Powell’s warnings than Miller’s reassurance."

Enoch Powell vs Jonathan Miller: 1971 Immigration Debate

Nous, a really interesting clip. A couple of things I was struck by
-the enthusiastic applause Powell got for some of his bullshit
-Powell's insistence that he was just pointing out a problem, giving voice to something out there without taking any responsibility

I heard an echo to this Bolton interview where he explains that he was in Maryland, so it didn't matter who he voted for.

https://youtu.be/5KXFYjKvr4k?si=5FvcZYOavnh7Np-U&t=1034

But are we really talking about a "mechanism" in any meaningful way when we talk about gravity? Mechanism is such an interesting word - it's full of thingness and of a materialist paradigm. It implies a mover and a moved, when what we are actually observing is not a noun, "gravity," but a description of a relationship between two or more entities (or elements) that seems to repeat itself in a regular fashion - it's the nouning of a verb. And it is a very selective view of things that prioritizes those relationships in quite interesting ways - helped along by our linguistic habit of constructing things as subjects and objects and inferring things about them based on their status as one or the other. This gets even more fraught when we start to consider the role of pronouns and the difference it makes in our understanding of personhood when we shift between he/she/we/they on the one hand and it on the other.

I arrived at this, in typical me fashion, through a series of lateral jumps while surfing the Web and trying to dig in around the idea of physics and animism - focusing on entities (nouns) versus focusing on reciprocal relationships (verbs). Found a physicist discussing their linguistic notions thereof and citing Robin Wall Kimmerer - and probably getting problematically out of his own linguistic depth and mine in the process. But his discussion of what gets the status of an entity and what gets the status of an object - taken with lj's discussion of citizenship - got me thinking about JL Austin and performative utterances and illocutionary acts - not descriptive, or predictive as in the "laws of physics" but utterances that transmute social reality by moving a thing from one social status to another. It seems to me that the whole citizenship question is of this nature. It's attaching a speech act to a protocol in order to enact a social (and thus legal) change of status. It has material traces that can be verified (a record of citizenship) but that status only holds so long as the various parties involved agree to follow the protocol.

The part of all this that really sent a chill up my spine, though, was going to Wikipedia to refresh my understanding of JL Austin, and seeing that one of the citations there under performative acts was this conversation between Enoch Powell and Jonathan Miller on the Dick Cavett show, with Miller bringing up performative acts in conjunction with Powell's "Rivers of Blood" immigration speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEPtyb9OHP8

Fuck me if we aren't right back there again in both the US and the UK. Aside from the fashion and the unapologetically highbrow diction, the entire conversation feels contemporary and relevant.

Damn their eyes, these nationalist bigots.

The law of gravity discussion smells of Plato.
I'd say that what we call gravity 'existed' before anyone was there to think about it, i.e. matter and energy 'interacted' in a way that can be approximated by 'laws'. These 'laws' are our mathematical description of something pre-existing. That description is a human invention and thus only exists since someone came up with it. But that has no influence on the interaction thus described. The problem I see is the use of the term 'law' that implies a law giver or (in Plato's diction) the 'idea' of a law independent of material existence. Nature does not 'obey' laws or 'follows' them, it simply (Ha!) functions in a certain way without necessary a 'reason' behind it. And nature and its mechanisms can be reasonably said to exist. So, if we use 'law' barely in the sense of these mechanisms, then laws existed since nature existed. If we assumed an animated universe that literally 'obeyed' set laws, we had to postulate something like the auditors of reality (as per Pratchett) to enforce obeysance. Then 'laws' would fit our everyday definition.
Only when we confuse laws as our description of nature with the mechanisms of nature itself, we run into the question of 'did they exist before Newton'.

'natural laws' and 'natural rights' are a useful illusion (like the value of paper currency). To claim their existence makes things easier. The problems arise when nihilists in practice deny it but behave as if they were not. They claim the authority of the ideas (while redefining them) because outright denial would not give them what they want. That includes 'might makes right' because it keeps up the illusion of 'right' while in reality it abolishes it by making it freely redefinable.