I don’t know why “for now” means anything. Trump has the ball. And he has 2 years before the next election to wear down the opposition. And he’s going to do the same with opposition to his other agendas. He’s going to wear people down until they get bored, get tired, run out of money, etc. and then do it anyway. And I think anyone who believes he’d back down is an idiot. His game has always been do something provocative, let his enemies vent their spleen until the6 look crazy, then do some slightly less terrible version of what he wants to do.

It works because most ordinary people simply don’t have the wherewithal to continually fight on multiple fronts at all times. And so eventually most of the protestors will accept a symbolic win “yay us, Trump hasn’t declared martial law yet!” Ignoring that his state of emergency allows him to do a lot of tge stuff he wants to do anyway. “Yay! We got some funding through!” But most of it is still cut off and we don’t know for certain if the appeals will go his way. But people have lives to live, bills, kids have baseball games and dance recitals, and damn the Chiefs rock. The media will eventually get over Trump’s being Trump because everyone else is exhausted by it. Who wants to hear about Trump doing something else?

> Up until 1940 or so, "educated" meant "through the 8th grade." Meanwhile the argument from authority fallacy, which is misunderstood by most of the Internet, goes back to at least the romans: "I am an excellent general, therefore I shall be an excellent emperor."

In terms of formal education, sure, they stopped at eighth grade. On the other hand, they were absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on. We have more schooling, but very few people still bother with long form articles, books, magazines, or even long form podcasts with subject experts before making a decision on an issue. My grandfather didn’t have much formal education, but he read a lot of books on history and as such knew a lot about history. That generation also tended to get their news from newspapers not gossip.

I don’t think that’s always been the case. At least in the past, it was expected of those who considered themselves educated would be expected to know something about the subject they were talking about. The new attitude is much more of a feelings based vibe where the only criterion for taking a given position is that it feels right to them. I wouldn’t expect everyone to derive everything from first principles, however I think at some point, you need to at least know how a given system works, or the actual facts on the ground before you form an opinion.

But we’re a culture that doesn’t read books, one that will absolutely fall for anything. The Q phenomena was pretty much a wake up call from inside the house. People somehow came to believe that germ theory was fake. Or that Biden wasn’t really in tge White House or something. The threads on numerology of the exact timing of a tweet were insane. We are more credentialed than ever, but I think it would be fairly rich to say that we’re educated. Most people seem to lack the skills to understand anything going on around them. They don’t understand logic, probability, statistics, history, or basic sciences. As such the ability to make rational decisions about how to run a government are lost. People who think demons run Hollywood won’t make good decisions.

I think the reason people are so into the culture war stuff is that it provides lots of opportunities to create negative imagery that play well on screens, and that it’s easy to generate a hot take on. It’s spectacles. The freaky looking trans person is a spectacle to dangle in front of the screen to get conservatives big mad, especially if it looks like the6 work in a school. Getting liberals hopped up by showing weird Jim Bob’s unhinged sermon is likewise easy. But this level of discourse is happening because the idea of having long conversations based on factual evidence doesn’t work on a society that runs on vibes.

Honestly, I think Carl Sagan was right about the USA. We’ve long since abandoned the idea of seeking truth, and very much prefer comfortable lies. A conversation with the average American would have confirmed this decades ago. I’m not shocked mostly because I was watching the credulous news coverage of effing UFOs (okay we’re calling them UAPs now) and there was no real pushback even among people who like to consider themselves rational.

If people still credulously believe it’s possible for alien craft to travel through the galaxy despite the laws of physics denying the possibility, I don’t expect us to have rational arguments about more serious matters. And this plays directly into the hands of fascists as their narratives tend to have the virtues of being simple and easy for people to understand. Reading three articles about climate change is work. Calling it a hoax is simple, easy and requires nothing of the believer. Blaming immigration for inflation, lack of housing, and so on is easy. Talking about home investors buying up every house on the market to make rentals is harder.

I’ll agree that we’re on our own. What’s worse is that I don’t think most people can understand their times. Nor can we really sustain the attention and the dedication needed to do anything. We’re the society of the spectacle, everything is on screens or as media stories. And thus we’ll be bothered much more by things that can excite an audience— like the salute — over the boring reality of things that will actually happen.

I don’t think the aesthetics are the problem. The campaign was not really making a huge secret of anything they wanted to do. Trump talked about immigrants eating pers — did you think anyone missed that? He said he’d declare a state of emergency and deport people. Annnd he’s declaring an emergency so he can deport people. People knew what they were getting in this election, so why the pikachu shocked face when they cheer for a Bellamy salute on Inauguration Day? This was all in your face the whole time. I went in deciding whether I wanted cackling Harris or Nazi Trump. Between nothing changing for four years or Project 2025, military deportations, and abandoning Ukraine for the lols.

What I don’t see is any serious opposition from leadership. They’re shocked by the salute, but we’ve known the results since November 5. I guess the best we can muster is a day or two of protests, pardons for the important people (not you) and whining because Elon did a dorky version of a Nazi salute. I saw as much outrage over the senator from Minnesota wearing a hoodie. Honestly if this is the tenor of the response, if the best we can muster is “Oh no, not the straight arm salute! Well, anyway…” I don’t see how you actually keep any of our constitutional rights intact. I suspect we’ll still be voting, but it’s like voting in Russia— Putin always just so happens to win in landslide and a lot of opposition leaders fall out of windows.

The universe is 14 billion years old. I’m not sure how long it would take for the first truly habitable planets to form. You need to cycle through enough stars to form heavy elements and AFAIK you need the building blocks of carbon based matter so it might take 5 billion years just to get to the point of life being possible, let alone complex life, we’re talking just barely enough to support E. coli. Life on earth took 5 billion years to go from E. Coli to Elon Musk and being able to go to the moon and hopefully Mars. Being optimistic, I think you might have a window of opportunity from 10 billion years ago to a couple billion years in the future.

It might be that you need more than just a marginally habitable planet. We might be lucky because we have outer planets to stop asteroids from hitting the earth, we have a moon to create seasons, we aren’t tidally locked, and we have lots of liquid water. If you get all life on the planet destroyed by asteroids and comets, or the seasons are too short, or only the twilight zones between the super hot tidally locked zone and the frozen night zone— all of this might make it hard to start life and might make colonization difficult.

Wouldn’t life have to spring up pretty quickly to make this feasible?

To get from primordial cells to us took 5 billion years. Then it’s 2K years per system, which might mean 2.5 million stars 10 billion years after life begins on the planet in question. There are 100 billion in just the Milky Way (and I think anyone outside of that could safely be neglected as we cannot possibly detect them. So less than 1% of all stars in a galaxy within several billion years? I just don’t understand why anyone was asking the question.

Live action One Piece.

My understanding of the reason FTL travel is impossible even if (huge if because it requires infinite energy to start and stop) we could somehow figure out the boundaries, is that it breaks causality. Causality travels at the speed of information and to my understanding that is at c. If you launch a ship in response to a signal, and the ship goes faster than light, you have the potential for tge ship to arrive before the signal summoning it is sent. And this assumes that all the negative energy and negative mass and space debris problems are actually surmountable by beings anywhere in the universe. If you’re talking about breaking causality, either we admit that we know literally nothing about anything in physics, or we admit that we’re likely talking about a fantasy and we’d get equal results by spending billions to try and mix Floo powder and travel across Europe by fireplace.

As for wormhole theory, I’m not sure it actually fairs much better, unless we’re going to start dosing up pilots with worm-puke gas until they turn into fish-like superhumans who can predict the future.

You probably won’t like it, but I think honestly religion might be the best bet. They’re the only groups at present that have the funding and are already available in the region. Starting a men’s crafts meetup at a baptist church is much easier than trying to do so on your own.

I think this makes sense, especially since most women seem to not want to put anything over their ass when the pants themselves are so form fitting that it leaves nothing to the imagination. If it were comfort, a pair of shorts covering the ass, or maybe a skirt for walking about town etc.wouldn’t be a big ask. Or,sweatpants. Instead, they’re choosing crop tops and leggings where they display every curve they have. Doubly annoying when these people go to gyms with every curve displayed, do bent over exercises and film the guy’s reactions in order to shame him for noticing the barely hidden ass displayed before him.

I’m a woman and I do work out and I do want to be comfortable. But I find basketball shorts to be nearly ideal for the gym, sweats or lose fitting jeans to be comfortable around town, and skirts (I do use leggings under if it’s cold) to be perfectly comfortable. And because I don’t display my body in provocative fashion, people do tend to not stare at my ass/boobs and take me fairly seriously.

I think the issue especially for the employer is that much like other environments you can’t prevent Steven in the cubicle next to a woman from being a perv. Sure you fire him afterwards, all well and good, but there are lots of situations where the proper decorum must be kept and the business must be done with a minimum of fuss. And if you can’t say no to provocative clothing and remarks in the name of creating a neutral space where the company business is getting done and so on, then it’s not goin* to happen.

In theory sure. But an essay by nature gives all kinds of information that they’re likely using as proxies for leadership, and most of them are indicative of race, religion, social class, and political affiliation. They want people who volunteer, but be honest, if one kid volunteers at a Pro-Life organization and a second in a soup kitchen and a third at a Pro-Palestinian group, who gets that one spot even if all three show “leadership?” Does it sound better if the things they were doing happen in America, near their home, or in Kenya? Keep in mind that only people likely to be able to afford to give gifts to the college post graduation are likely to be able to afford sinecures in NGOs doing interesting work in a far away country.

There isn’t really a way around this. The nature of an essay is that it cannot help but give out information that has nothing to do with “leadership”.

I think the Alicuberre drive is worse because it’s expensive science working on a project that violates known scientific principles in multiple ways. At minimum LLM has some good uses in business and to create boiler plate journalism. It might turn into something more eventually. Alibucurre drives can only end in futility because none of the stuff proposed can exist. Negative mass and negative energy are fiction. The theory of relativity closes off FTL travel and must do so to preserve causality.

I mean if we were talking about science fiction fans in the 1989s, I’d agree with you for the most part. The problem is that as science education has declined for the general population (alongside mathematical and general literacy) I’m seeing more and more often that fans of these series have no idea what actual space looks like and the hard limits on speed. It doesn’t help when grifters like Albucurre come along with a mathematical curiosity in a physics equation and goes “Behold the Warp Theory”. I don’t blame NASA for playing along, they need those fanboys calling congress to fund them.

What’s disturbing is how many people are taking the idea seriously.

I guess my point is that I don’t think there’s actually much of a paradox to be has here. Space is extremely big, and for most types of communication and transport, there’s no reason to even start with us being able to see or hear anything. If travel to the nearest star is measured in years at speeds that don’t need eye-watering amounts of energy, weird matter, etc. there’s no reason to even start looking for aliens. It would be like Native Americans in 1300 using their best technology to look for humans in Europe and formulating lots of theories about why they never see anything to indicate intelligent life in Europe. They probably are out there, not even hiding, just that in 1300 nobody could possibly cross the ocean and they weren’t really trying to communicate across the Atlantic.

The Fermi paradox only matters because it’s an easy way to fleece money out of the scifi nerds who believe that Star Trek represents a realistic future in space. It’s why the people running NASA and SETI and other similar agencies have an operating budget despite doing nothing other than being make-work projects for nerds. I don’t expect to see humans on Mars as anything other than a photo opportunity in this century and maybe the next.

I just mostly find the theory-making amusing. Maybe they’re hiding? Maybe they’re using super-secret technology. Maybe they’ve gone into a higher levels of being and aren’t physical anymore. Maybe they’ve gone Borg, maybe the Grey goo got them. It’s just anything to avoid dealing with the obvious— space is simply too big for aliens or us to effectively colonize or control and thus communicate that crosses tge nearest heliopause is unnecessary.

I think honestly all the handwringing about why we can’t detect aliens may point to something else. Maybe the kinds of technology that would enable us to gather enough material to build Dyson spheres and escape the solar system simply are not feasible. If the best speed we can make is 75% of the speed of light, even the short distance to the nearest Star system becomes a generational journey. And getting up to that speed is going to take a lot of energy. As much as I love my space opera, I just don’t see it as a plausible future.

What seems possible is akin to the maximum ground speed on earth being limited to walking speed. At such a speed knowing about tribes a thousand miles away just isn’t going to happen, long distance communication makes no sense when the entire civilization might well be trapped in the nearest star system and maybe if super advanced, tge one next to theirs. They don’t need to broadcast anything beyond that, so they’re not going to develop it. What would we detect? Unless we somehow manage to detect them directly, there’s nothing to see, and nothing to hear.

The paradox seems to rest on the assumption of interstellar travel being feasible. If it’s not, Theres no paradox. They’re here, but too far away to hear or see.

I’ll agree with almost all of this, although I’m agnostic on the alcoholism. But I think the other huge weakness here is just how “inbred” the entire thing is. There’s a lot of people working on the series who have done almost nothing else. If there’s a way to kill the vision of a scifi series (or really any series) getting a second or third generation of people who have done nothing else is a great way to do it. There’s not really an outside perspective, what exactly can aging trek actors turned directors bring to the series? What can Spock’s son literally raised on the set see here? In all cases, it’s soaked in that vision of what was. And it generally means taking fairly safe routes and going to the familiar, or going for the modern mania for deconstruction where you simply subvert and change things in odd ways just to change them.

The Dune book series had the same problem. Brian Herbert simply is not his father. And so you have things that are safer if boring and bland. Or you have Kralizec in which Duncan Idaho teaches computers to share with humans. It’s lost a lot of tge mojo it had. It’s an adventure story now, with no more of that boring philosophy or science or weirdness that made the original story interesting.

As someone who grew up with it, that’s what turned me off of it. Back in the day, it was perfectly willing to try new things, to say things about culture and science and ask deep questions about reality and so on. At present, it goes in one of two directions.

First you have the Nostalgia Trek, which seems mostly interested in catering to people who like Star Trek as an aesthetic setting. People who like the setting of Guys who Explore Space and Lecture Aliens about Neoliberalism. They like the aliens, the ships, the politics, they like to see their favorite childhood stories and heroes on their TVs. But they have no interest in the ethos of Trek, or even Science Fiction as a genre of fiction. This version in essence is Sci-Fi for people who want to pretend to like sci-fi but hate all the stuff that makes it actually science fiction— the hard science, the philosophical questions about reality and the questions about things that modern Americans take for granted. To them the Federation is America, but in space, and Starfleet is the USA military who are always right and never fail.

Second, you have the too-cool-for-school Trek. It’s not any more willing to tweak noses or really shake things up. They just decided they don’t like the old Trek aesthetic and therefore “deconstruct” it, or lampoon it, or “subvert” it in utterly predictable ways. What if … the federation is the bad guys? What if we totally glued teeth all over Klingons for no reason? What if we suddenly discovered the Roger’s and Hammerstein Nebula? Or turned Spock human just before his mother comes to visit. None of this is deep or interesting it’s more like a kid deciding it’s cool to deface a painting.

I think too that a lot of the fantasy is the loosening of restrictions. You can shoot people in the apocalypse. You can leave your normal responsibilities and bug off to the woods and do nothing but fish hunt and garden. No more commutes and shopping for ramen at piggly wiggly. No more spreadsheets and emails. No more shuffling the kids off to soccer practice. Just a simple little life.

Somehow none of that surprises me. But I’ve always found the weird psychology around a lot of the fears rather fascinating. The things Americans tend to fear are violent catastrophes that seem borne out of movies and television and especially superhero comics. Countries that actually have these sorts of disasters tend to be pretty laid back about it. In Puerto Rico, they stock up on rum and have bock parties to care for their neighbors. They don’t cower in their homes with an arsenal of automatic weapons. They help each other out.

Most prepping is basically LARP. They aren’t preparing for survival in an actual emergency, they’re preparing for Walking Dead or Red Dawn. If you pay attention to the stuff they emphasize, it’s weapons, hardware, solar panels for long term power loss, and tons of survival food. It’s probably more a masterbation to the image of themself as a tough, manly survivalist who can take care of his family alone and can absolutely shoot someone in the face.

The problem with the pandemic is that it’s was a feminine disaster. The solutions did not feel masculine. It wasn’t “go shoot something”, it wasn’t go out to the woods and hunt. It wasn’t man craft kinds of stuff using tools and high tech gear. The power didn’t even go out. It was basically boring. And the stuff you had to do outside of the mask were normal things. Stay home, wash your hands, and so on. And the mask didn’t feel manly. So they decided the real threat was something more like the movies — the big bad government doing a psyop. Now they could be brave and defiantly demand their rights. Now it looks like 1776.

I think real prepping (and you can find sensible ideas on ready.gov or any site that gives advice on getting ready for natural disasters) has some usefulness. You don’t want to be down to your last can of beans when a disaster strikes.

Shooting CEOs might feel good in a moment (other than the obvious Thou shalt not kill thing), but it’s not a policy, and it doesn’t fix any of the underlying problems. The next CEO isn’t going to change how he does things because he’s beholden to shareholders who will replace him if he doesn’t do exactly like the last guy did.

I honestly don’t read the MAGA types in general caring, they just don’t. If we end up having more people than they can feed, it’s not like tge people cheering it on are goin* to demand that something be done about it. And that’s assuming that we get honest reports, which would require a press willing to challenge Trump. That seems unlike given how major press outlets are already sucking up to him pretty hard.

He wants to, sure. But I’m not sure he can get his way on this. There are, to quote Dune, “plots within plots”. Blue states and cities are absolutely looking to resist here. This probably means no cooperation or even actively hiding people. There will be court cases beyond that. And even if they lose, there might be a situation that’s the reverse of the border stuff from last year, where Blue areas call up the National Guard to protect people from deportation, giving Trump no good options. You can’t simply order your troops to fire on the National Guard, you might have a hard time arresting them. You can’t arrest sitting governors or mayors or whatever if they haven’t broken the law. And so what we have is a standoff and I’m not convinced that if he goes full retard and tries this stuff it goes the way he thinks it will.

Except that there have been incidents of antisemitism in the USA as well. It’s not something that you can easily guarantee because Jews in NYC are at the mercy of the rest of us, and like most in NYC are not allowed to be armed. I really don’t have a good answer, but as I said, the history of Judaism when Jews don’t have an Army and Navy is pretty bleak. Even leaving aside the Nazis, Jewish history pretty much shows why they need an ethos Tate somewhere with an army and navy under their control.

I’ll have to be fair to their argument though. The reason Jews are so gung ho about Israel and so willing to do anything to defend it it’s basically about hundreds of years of Jewish history. Jews got kicked out of their homes, exiled, pogroms everywhere, often for things that they had nothing to do with. And of course there’s the holocaust after all of that. From that perspective, Israel is basically the only place where Jews can at least to some degree control their own fate. And that’s not something they’ll give up, obviously.

I agree. But until you have a message you believe in and are willing to put out far and wide without apologizing for having an agenda. Look at the GOP — they believe in stupid things, but I guarantee you that everyone reading my words can absolutely tell you what the6 want to do and why they want to do that. The words are repeated in every organ of the GOP, every radio show, every news organ, every podcast, every white paper issued by a GOP think tank all have a message. And because they have that message and actually not only believe in that vision but are absolutely committed to it. I don’t think I could make the same bet on the democratic side. They have no vision of government, of culture, or why they think that. The democratic organs of culture mostly document GOP bad and snipe at other democrats. There’s nothing really to hold people to doing.

Honestly I think part of the problem is how long the campaign is. It takes several years to run for president, and the formal kickoff is often more than a year out. People in formally elected offices basically spend 70% of their time in office preparing to campaign and actively campaigning for office. Of course they need that much money.

I think the first step to getting the party back on track is to invest in getting the message out there. Have a network or three on the radio or TV, have news sites, etc that can explain what the ideas are and why they work and where they’ve actually done good things. Start talking about your ideas.

And when you do something TELL THE PEOPLE. It’s like the democrats almost want it to be top secret. I’ve had this conversation a few times with conservatives convinced there’s a conspiracy to poison Americans with additives in foods. Exhibit A is that a lot of things that are common in American food are not in European foods. So the government is obviously trying to kill us, population control and so on. No, the European Union is simply much more willing to ban poison from their foods than our FDA is. So this would be an excellent thing for democrats to be actually talking about and making the case for smart regulations to protect people. They’re generally MIA. And the same is true of other things. The infrastructure bill Biden passed is building lots of highways. Not one will have any sort of signage telling people that this is the infrastructure bill at work making roads better.