Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, April 19, 2024
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44 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Yesterday drj referenced this article, From an August 1941 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Who Goes Nazi” by Dorothy Thompson, written months before the US entered the war, before we knew anything about the Final Solution or the death camps. It is chilling and frighteningly relevant to the moment at hand. I highly recommend it.
@MarkedMan: I meant to include the first few paragraphs:
Hit him again. and again. and again.
A brief, but telling, item from Trump’s trial yesterday:
https://x.com/TylerMcBrien/status/1780960069888147653
Trump believes he is above the law and therefore has no respect for the jurors who will determine his guilt or innocence.
@Mikey:
Has the judge told him to elevate his capacious ass?
@Mikey: Trump has a great deal of sway over weak people looking for a strongman, i.e. suckers, but he is absolutely terrible at dealing with anyone else. Why did he get those astronomical findings in those civil cases? Because he showed up and hung his ass out at the judge and jury and flung his poo at them. He didn’t even need to be there, but he can’t help himself. He has no self control.
They say “birds of s a feather flock together” but I guess there is an exception to every rule:
Arthur C. Clarke once predicted that the development of more powerful computers would be limited because they’d require massive power and a Niagara Falls for cooling. That became quaint as transistors, then integrated circuits, replaced vacuum tubes. WAPO has a story today (gift link, but not really interesting except for it’s existence) about running new power lines to Joyner country to support massive data centers, powered by coal plants that had been scheduled to be shut down. I’ve seen photos of what looked to be four foot diameter water cooling pipes for similar centers.
Data centers are one thing, but I see bit mining operations are also massive power draws, for no economically useful purpose.
@MarkedMan:
@gVOR10:
This is an issue in Texas. From a local columnist’s newsletter:
Fake $1M lottery ticket could land Florida couple in prison for 40 years
@ptfe: When I was in my overcrowded Catholic grade school back in the 60’s, one day the whole school, room by room went in single file down to the basement meeting hall and the lights went down and we were shown documentary footage from the liberation of the Nazi death camps. It was horrifying, of course, but at one point I turned away from the screen and looked around at all the children and teachers in the flickering dark and wondered what each of the them would do in similar circumstances. Even at that young age I recognized that Germans were just people, and we were just people, which means there were circumstances in which we, collectively, would do the same things. Which meant that some would enthusiastically lead the death march, and almost everyone else would rationalize and just go along, and very few would risk much of anything to put a stop to it. And once it got started those few would not be enough. It made me realize that without the rule of law, the adherence to norms, the commitment to justice for all – especially justice for those we don’t like, we would eventually find ourselves on the same path. (Yes, even as a 5th grader I had those thoughts.)
Preventing those circumstances from arising is what preserves civilization. Full stop.
What if the solution to the Fermi Paradox is as simple as timing?
Earth is but 4.5 billion years old. In about a billion years, the Sun will grow too hot for life on this planet, certainly for human life. While the Sun will continue to exist for several billion more years after that, there’s a clear window of around 5.5 billion years for a technological civilization to develop around a Sun type star.
Now, life arose rather soon after the Earth cooled down enough. But most of that time, it consisted of simpler, single cell organisms, maybe a few larger, but still microscopic, multicellular ones.
Complex, multicellular lifeforms like grass, apple trees, sharks, and humans, are only about 400 million years old.
What we don’t know is how typical this timeline is. For all we know, we developed life, multicellular lifeforms, and complex brains in record time. Or maybe we were so effing slow we missed everyone else. Most likely, we’re close to average. But there’s no way to tell.
Suppose we developed fast, though. Suppose the average is closer to 5.5 billion years from planet formation to rudimentary space travel. If so, then we got massively lucky and can develop a high technology civilization over the next few hundred million years. Meantime everyone else dies off as soon as they figure out what the bright disk in the sky is.
Of course, there are other types of stars. A red dwarf wont ever gros so hot. A blue giant will blow up in a few million years. A slightly smaller yellow star will last longer than the Sun.
For a definitive answer we need to find aliens, dead or alive.
@Mikey:
One bit of conventional wisdom needs updating: never antagonize people who handle your food, your money, or your verdict.
On related matters, reports from bored journalists indicate Baby Lardass is snoozing again, and he may be chewing on something.
I think he may be biting his cheek to keep awake.
@Kathy:
Let me add to that my late father’s words of wisdom: “Never argue politics with someone wielding a scalpel.”
@Kathy: The fact that for over 90% of the time in which life has existed on Earth, it was nothing but bacteria and other prokaryotes just endlessly duplicating, suggests that simple life has no tendency to evolve into more complex forms.
@Kylopod:
Bill Bryson makes the observation that “life wants to be, but ti doesn’t want to be very much.”
Not only did life stay unicellular for most of the history of life on Earth, but most existing life today is unicellular as well. By far, bacteria are the dominant lifeform all over the planet.
So, yeah, maybe we’ll find lots of bacterial mats and colonies in other worlds, and not much complex multicellular organisms.
The House passed the resolution to bring the Security bills up for a vote. Vote was 316-94, an overwhelming majority. Even republicans voted 151-55, passing their Hastert rule.
From both parties, the votes against were from the far right and far left. Far right voted against Ukraine aid and the far left voted against Israeli aid. Imagine Ilhan Omar and Paul Gosar being in bed together. Metaphorically, of course.
Now we’ll see how the individual packages fare in the voting.
@CSK: I recall, some decades ago, a dentist asking me what I thought the biggest issue in the upcoming election would be. Fortuitously, he had tools in my mouth, so my response was along the lines of, “Gom boohah humbo.”
One’s sense of historical time can be funny. When I was a kid WWII was current events. It was over, but many of my friends’ fathers, my uncles, male teachers and scoutmasters, and so on had served. Movies and comic books were full of it. But the Civil War was ancient history. WWII is becoming as long ago as the Civil War was in my childhood. I recently stumbled across a surprising bit of trivia. Harvard University was founded in 1636. Galileo was still alive.
@gVOR10: Cleopatra was much closer in time to iPhones than to construction of the Egyptian pyramids.
(I got that one from Cracked.com.)
Hot new election year trend
Fortunately, groceries are not included in the CPI or inflation calculations. So the media hype shouldn’t change.
@CSK: Or scare the pants off the very nervous Med Student with his hand in your chest cavity.
Huh. I did not know that. More than a little surprised they were far enough along to manage it.
The things I learn here.
@gVOR10:
Wise of you.
A man set himself on fire in the “designated protest area” outside the courthouse where Trump is being tried. The fire was extinguished and the person was taken to a hospital.
@CSK: Vietnamese monks for Trump?
No wonder they have all convinced themselves that election fraud is rampant. They are engaging in it.
Translation: “Waah.”
@Kylopod:
Beats me. One of the flyers the guy was flinging around before he torched himself read “NYU is a mob front.”
@CSK: @Kylopod:
Apparently it was this guy.
Crypto, Peter Thiel, something something, light myself on fire!
@OzarkHillbilly:
Which would seem to indicate that he was right when he claimed
The only thing I’m curious about is why mock them about it if you’re going to forge signatures to run for office? It seems counter productive.
@Michael Reynolds: Uh… yeah, I’m finding it hard to see the connection between Thiel, cryptocurrency, and setting yourself on fire, too. (I can see a connection between cryptocurrency and setting Thiel on fire, but that’s just one of those why-cracker-will-make-a-poor-public-official things.)
I don’t know yet whether these stories will become a turning point in the election, but we look to be approaching some sort of critical mass or event horizon.
Well sure, but you only think it’s shocking because you live in a state that for 3 consecutive terms has elected evil lesbian women to be governors who will veto measures calling for people to live by God’s ordinances. If you were less fortunate, it would still be shocking, but in a “how did I wake up in this dystopia?” sense.
ETA: The other shoe drops. From the same article:
Color me not optimistic.
@gVOR10:
I’ve experienced something along those lines myself. My great grand-dad lived to 99, and he was mentally sharp and active to about 97, and spent a lot of time with his great grand kids….so I have talked to a guy who was in WW1. He once told me he had met several Civil War vets in his youth.
Just a couple long life-spans away it was, yet it seems ancient history.
@Kathy:
I suspect that without the name “Fermi” in front of that paradox would’ve been dismissed long ago. It’s downright silly. The SETI project openly admits that aside from some of the most powerful emissions of some military radars, they could not detect ourselves from just one light year away, and after a very brief period of having strong radio transmitters we are already transitioning to much lower power forms of communication. Space is a noisy place in the radio spectrums. It’s like Helen Keller positing “If there are colors, where are they?”
@dazedandconfused:
I think we could detect ourselves from some light years away. For some reason my memory says about 40. Don’t take that seriously.
Now, regular radio transmissions for communications, radar, and media are one thing. Deliberate transmissions would be another matter, if anyone were sending them. The Arecibo Message was 450 kw. I don’t know enough about radio to say if this is high or low (I think the radio station at a summer camp I attended in Canada was like 12 watts, and had a range of a few kilometers).
But then, radio telescopes are designed to receive signals, not to send them. Granted they can do both, you still need a transmitter and a power source.
TL;DR I don’t know.
Then, too, suppose aliens are using lasers. Or gravitational waves, or modulated dark matter somethings, or some other means we can’t conceive any more than Archimedes could have conceived of radio.
@Kylopod:
The premiere of Star Wars is closer to WWII than to today.
More shocking yet, Apollo XI is closer to the end of WWI than to our day.
@MarkedMan:
I think these days we are wrong to think the Nazis were all about exterminating Jews. The Jewish issue was tangential, they were after communists when they went into Russia.
When you read the accounts of the surviving German vets, many of which are in the form of diaries taken from their dead bodies, it becomes clear most were far more indoctrinated and ginned up for a fight against those evil commies then they were worked up about the Jews. Adolph and co did a very professional job of conflating “Jewish” and “commie” in their minds, so I am not saying it wasn’t a thing, but they used separate units to do their dirty work behind the lines of contact with the Soviets, not Wehrmacht, and not even most of the SS.
Many were shocked, protested vigorously and had to be told in no uncertain terms to STFU, particularly in Ukraine where they had been welcomed as liberators, at what they saw happening when they were rotated off the line and sent back west a bit for R&R. The result of that was they started rotating their troops all the way back to Germany or not at all.
As of 4:45 p.m. today, Trump is still vowing to testify at his trial. If he really wants to do so, his lawyers have no choice but to let him.
@CSK:
I’d say I expect he’ll testify as soon as he releases his tax returns, but he did testify at the penalty/damages phase of his fraud trial, after having pleaded the 5th for a time or seven million in depositions. So we have conclusive proof he can be that stupid.
Or maybe he wants to sue his lawyers for malpractice for letting him testify.
Sit, Trump Dog, sit!
Also, apparently some Biden staffers in the WH refer to Trump as HitlerPig.
@Michael Reynolds:
This is going to be such a clusterfuck. I’m still somewhat shocked that he hasn’t gotten someone killed yet. Although it does confirm my belief that conservatives are fundamentally cowards.
Except for the fact that his fraudulent signatures didn’t make it thru the system.
But if he’s right, they may well have just checked his petition more closely in hopes of catching him.
@Michael Reynolds:
And here I thought you liked dogs…