Month: February 2026

Love in a godless universe

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, personal, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 15 JDN 2461087

This post will go live just after Valentine’s Day, so I thought I would write this week about love.

(Of course I’ve written about love before, often around this time of year.)

Many religions teach that love is a gift from God, perhaps the greatest of all such gifts; indeed, some even say “God is love” (though I confess I have never been entirely sure what that sentence is intended to mean). But if there is no God, what is love? Does it still have meaning?

I believe that it does.

Yes, there is a cynical account of love often associated with atheism, which is that it is “just a chemical reaction” or “just an evolved behavior”. (An easy way to look out for this sort of cynical account is to look for the word “just”.)

Well, if love is a chemical reaction, so is consciousness—indeed the two seem very deeply related. I suppose a being can be conscious without being capable of love (do psychopaths qualify?), but I certainly do not think a being can be capable of love without being conscious.

Indeed, I contend that once you really internalize the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, “just a chemical reaction” strikes you as an utterly trivial claim: What isn’t a chemical reaction? That’s just a funny way of saying something exists.

What about being an evolved behavior? Yes, this is a much more insightful account of what love is, what it means—what it’s for, even. It evolved to make us find mates, protect offspring, and cooperate in groups.

And I can hear the response coming: “Is that all?” “Is it just that?” (There’s that “just” again.)

So let me try phrasing it another way:

Love is what makes us human.

If there is one thing that human beings are better at than anything in the known universe, one thing that most absolutely characterizes who and what we are, it is love.

Intelligence? Rationality? Reasoning? Oh, sure, for the first half-million years of our existence, we were definitely on top; but now, I think computers have got us beat on those. (I guess it’s hard to say for sure if Claude is truly intelligent, but I can tell you this: Wolfram Alpha is a lot better at calculus than I’ll ever be, and I will never win a game of Go against AlphaZero.)

Strength? Ridiculous! By megafauna standards—even ape standards—we’re pathetic. Speed? Not terrible, but of course the cheetahs and peregrine falcons have us beat. Endurance? We’re near the top, but so are several other species—including horses, which we’ve made good use of. Durability? Also surprisingly good—we’re tougher than we look—but we still hold no candles to a pachyderm. (You need special guns to kill an elephant, because most standard bullets barely pierce their skin. And standard bullets were, more or less by construction, designed to kill humans.) We do throw exceptionally well, so if you’d like, you can say that the essence of humanity is javelin-throwing—or perhaps baseball.

But no, I think it is love that sets us apart.

Not that other animals are incapable of love; far from it. Almost all mammals and birds express love to their offspring and often their partners; I would not even be sure that reptiles, fish, or amphibians are incapable of love, though their behavior is less consistently affectionate and I am thus less certain about it. (Especially when fish eat their own offspring!) In fact, I might even be prepared to say that bees feel love for their sisters and their mother (the queen). And if insects can feel it, then our world is absolutely teeming with love.

But what sets humans apart, even from other mammals, is the scale at which we are able to love. We are able to love a city, a nation, a culture. We are even able to love ideas.

I do not think this is just a metaphor: (There’s that “just” again!) I would as surely die for democracy as I would to save the life of my spouse. That love is real. It is meaningful. It is important.

Humans feel love for other humans they have never met who live thousands of miles away from them. They will even willingly accept harm to themselves to benefit those others (e.g. by donating to international charities); one can argue that most people do not do this enough, but people do actually do it, and it is difficult to explain why they would were it not for genuine feelings of caring toward people they have never met and most likely never will.

And without this, all of what we know as “human civilization” quite simply could not exist. Without our love for our countrymen, for our culture, for our shared ethical and political principles, we could not sustain these grand nation-states that span the world.

Yes, even despite our often fierce disagreements, there must be a core of solidarity between at least enough people to sustain a nation. Even authoritarian governments cannot sustain themselves when the entire population stops loving them—in fact, they seem to fail at the hands of a sufficiently well-organized four percent. (Honestly, perhaps the worst part about fascist states is that many of their people do love them, all too deeply!)

More than that, without love, we could never have created institutions like science, art, and journalism that slowly but surely accumulate knowledge that is shared with the whole of humanity. The march of progress has been slower and more fitful than I think anyone would like; but it is real, nonetheless, and in the long run humanity’s trajectory still seems to be toward a brighter future—and it is love that makes it so.

It is sometimes said that you should stop caring what other people think—but caring what other people think is what makes us human. Sure, there are bad forms of social pressure; but a person who literally does not care how their actions make other people think and feel is what we call a psychopath. Part of what it means to love someone is to care a great deal what they think. And part of what makes a good person is to have the capacity to love as much as possible.

Love binds us together not only as families, but as nations, and—hopefully, one day—it could bind humanity or even all sentient life as one united whole. Morality is a deep and complicated subject, but if you must start somewhere very simple in understanding it, you could do much worse than to start with love.

It is often said that God is what binds cultures, nations, and humanity together. With this in mind, perhaps I am prepared to assent to “God is love” after all, but let me clarify what I would mean by it:

Love does for us what people thought they needed God for.

How are this many people in the Epstein files?

PNRJ current events, ethics, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 8 JDN 2461080

It’s been obvious from the start that Donald Trump had something to hide in the Epstein files, but the list of famous people mentioned in the Epstein files absolutely staggers me.

Just listing people I had previously heard of, even aside from Donald and Melania Trump:

Woody Allen, Steve Bannon, Ehud Barak, Richard Branson, William Burns, Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, Bill Clinton, David Copperfield, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jackson, Thorbjørn Jagland, Lawrence Krauss, Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Brett Ratner, Ariane de Rothschild, Kevin Spacey, Lawrence H. Summers, Peter Thiel, Robert Trivers, and Michael Wolff.

There are of course more people who are famous for various things that I simply wasn’t familiar with, such as Anil Ambani, Peter Attia, Todd Boehly, Andrew Farkas, Brad S. Karp, and Brian Vickers. And more names may yet come out as the saga continues.

Now, some of these connections are more damning than others: At the milder end, we have Bill Gates, who doesn’t appear to have actually received (let alone responded to) the emails addressed to him, and Thorbjørn Jagland, who was planning to visit the island but apparently never actually did so. At the worse end, we have Richard Branson, who introduced Epstein to his “harem” (Branson’s word), Noam Chomsky, who had extensive exchanges and received $270,000 from a mysterious account (he claims Epstein had nothing to do with it), Lawrence Krauss and Robert Trivers, who both continued to publicly defend Epstein even after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes against children in 2008, Peter Thiel, who received $40 million from Epstein, and of course Donald Trump himself, who is mentioned in the Epstein files some 38,000 times. (That we know of.)

Even the damning ones are largely not conclusive; the documents that have been released don’t appear to be sufficient to prove anyone guilty of crimes in a court of law. But given that Donald Trump is President and is probably doing everything he can to suppress and redact any such evidence that does exist (at the very least against himself), this absence of evidence is not particularly strong evidence of absence. The best we can really say at this juncture is that it looks very suspicious about an awful lot of famous people.

I guess it’s honestly possible that some of these people knew Epstein well but really didn’t know about his secret life sexually abusing children. Sometimes monsters can hide in plain sight. But several of these people have been credibly accused of sex crimes of their own, and many of them circled the wagons to defend each other whenever new accusations came out. And once someone pleads guilty and is convicted (as Epstein was in 2008), you really should stop defending him.

It honestly seems like QAnon wasn’t entirely wrong after all! There was a secret cabal of famous, powerful people sexually abusing children! They just got some (okay, nearly all) of the details wrong, and for some reason thought that Donald Trump was going to bring that cabal down, rather than do everything in his power to suppress and redact all files related to it and still end up being mentioned in said files over 38,000 times. But honestly, the whole idea sounded crazy to me, and apparently it was basically correct! (Even at least one Rothschild seems to have been involved!)

I am particularly disturbed by the academics on this list: Chomsky, Hawking, Krauss, Summers, and Trivers. These men are (or were) taking up scarce tenure slots at highly prestigious universities, while at best being guilty of very bad judgment, and quite likely actually guilty of serious sex crimes. Even if they aren’t actually criminals themselves, keeping them on at prestigious institutions—as several top universities did, for years, after much was already known—besmirches the reputation of those institutions and is a disservice to the many qualified academics with better reputations who would happily replace them.

To that list I might add Chopra, who has also taught at extremely prestigious universities, but doesn’t actually do much credible research, preferring instead to peddle pseudoscientific nonsense. I don’t understand why universities ever let him teach at all—frankly it’s an insult to every other applicant they haven’t hired. (Having applied to many of these institutions myself, I take it quite personally, as a matter of fact. You think he’s better than me?) Chopra’s associations with Epstein are just one more reason to cut ties with him, when they never had any reason to make ties with him in the first place.

I am not optimistic that releasing these files will accomplish very much. Like I said, none of it seems to be conclusive. Even if evidence of crimes did emerge, they’d likely be beyond the statute of limitations. All the secrecy surrounding Epstein and his cohorts actually seems to have been pretty effective at protecting them from facing punishment for their actions.

But please, please, I’m begging here, for the sake of all that is good in the world, could this at least make people stop supporting Donald Trump!?

This is fascism.

PNRJ current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 1 JDN 2461073

The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

– George Orwell, 1984

As I write this, we haven’t even finished January of 2026, and already there have been not one, but two blatant, public executions of innocent people by federal agents that occurred in broad daylight and on video.

I already thought the video of Renee Good’s shooting was pretty clear, but the videos of Alex Pretti’s just leave no room for doubt at all. He was disarmed and restrained when they shot him; this was an execution.

I have heard liberals mocked by leftists as “people who are okay with the government killing people as long as the right paperwork is filed”. This is sort of true, actually—if by “paperwork” you mean due process of law. You know, the foundation of liberal democracy? That little thing?

Yes, I am actually okay with (some) military actions, police shootings in self-defense, and even executions of convicted murderers (though I should note that actually many liberals aren’t okay with the latter). I think that a world where nobody kills anybody is a pipe dream, and the best we can reasonably hope for is one where there are few killings, most of them are justified, and the ones that aren’t are punished. (And if your problem is specifically with the government killing people… who do you think should have that authority, if not democratically-elected representatives?) I understand that the government needs to kill people sometimes, but I expect those killings to be limited to justifiable wars, imminent threats to life and limb, or the result of a proper conviction by a fair jury trial.

But this was not due process of law. There was no judge, no jury, no trial—there wasn’t even a warrant or an arrest. Nor was it an in-the-moment response to an imminent threat—even a perceived one. The videos are crystal-clear: Alex Pretti was no threat to the border patrol agents who shot him to death.

This is fascism.

It’s not like fascism. It’s not toward fascism. This isn’t how it starts. Masked men executing innocent people in broad daylight is fascism. It’s here. It’s happening.

This does not necessarily mean that our entire country has fallen to fascism; there is still hope that we can stop this from happening again, and also hope that this will not escalate into a full-blown civil war. But shooting an innocent unarmed man without a judge or a jury is an inherently, irredeemably fascist act. If the men responsible are not tried for murder, it will be a grave injustice—and it could very well escalate into much larger-scale violence.

I wish I could say this sort of thing is totally unprecedented; but no, it’s not. The United States government has done a lot of horrible things over the years, from slavery to the Trail of Tears to the Japanese internment. I think that our country has been in a profound state of tension from the very beginning, between the high-minded ideals of “all men are created equal” and the deep-seated tribalism that comes naturally to nearly all human beings. I don’t think America is uniquely evil; in fact, I think we are especially good—it’s just that even a good country often does horrible things.

And there is something different about this. It’s not the first time our government has killed anyone, or even killed anyone for an obviously unjustified reason. But I think it might be the first time the government has publicly and blatantly lied about the circumstances in a way that can be directly refuted by video evidence. They aren’t painting it as a “mistake” or saying it was “a few bad apples”; they are actually trying to claim justification where obviously none exists. They are asking you to believe what they say over what you can see with your own two eyes.

This is what authoritarian states do. They try to undermine your belief in objective reality. They try to gaslight you into believing what they say instead of what you can see. And even in an extremely prosperous, well-educated country, they have been shockingly effective at it.

This is what we warned against when Trump was running for election.

Maybe it’s not productive to say “We told you so”, but, uh, we told you so.

He’s done so many terrible things, and has been enabled so many times by Republicans in Congress and the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court. As a result, it’s hard to draw any bright lines in the sand. But if you really want to draw one, this might be a good one to draw.

Honestly, the best time to turn against Trump was ten years ago; but people are finally turning against him, and better late than never.