…what’s the word? [DOT 29/6/23]

no...the polite version...

29/6/23 SplinterRIP 41

…well…that’s fun

…if you like that sort of thing

…still…it’s not clear that enough people do for it to get that far…but it seems plenty clear too far is where these assholes think they need to go to get to their promised land

That disconnect helps explain Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s radical new plan to secure the border, which he rolled out Monday. The plan is meant to propel him to Trump’s right on a leading MAGA issue. But DeSantis’s blueprint contains a bunch of warmed-over ideas — mass deportations, draconian efforts to limit asylum-seeking and legal immigration, even an end to birthright citizenship — that Trump already tried to execute, yet could not.

The fundamental promise of DeSantis’s GOP presidential primary campaign is that he’d execute the MAGA agenda far more competently than Trump. But there’s a reason Trump largely failed in controlling the border, and it has little do with competence or “toughness.”

Rather, it’s that presidents lack the authority to close down legal immigration in any substantial way, and however harsh their enforcement gets, it simply doesn’t dissuade migrants from coming, including illegally, and settling here successfully.
[…]
DeSantis also promises to disregard legal limits on how long child migrants can be held in detention to facilitate detaining migrant families longer. Guess what? Trump tried that, too, but it was struck down in court as outside presidential authority. DeSantis would apparently mandate extended detention of all migrant families awaiting legal proceedings, but this would likely require Congress to fund a large expansion of our detention machinery. Good luck with that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/27/desantis-immigration-border-plan-trump-maga/

…but then, like the headline says…it’s about performative cruelty…&…well…they do like to put on a performance

…which

Global heating making extreme rain and catastrophic flooding more likely [Guardian]

…when you get down to it

‘It gets worse every day’: why are sea lions and dolphins dying along California’s coast? [Guardian]

…is why even the good news

If ‘Bidenomics’ works, it will be a very big deal [WaPo]

…can seem like it’s just the least bad news

‘Victims are terrified’: supreme court ruling on stalking cases sparks alarm [Guardian]

…it’s a lot to keep straight

Seventeen states during their most recent legislative sessions passed restrictions on medical care for transgender people, joining just three other states that passed similar bans in the last two years. A series of other laws passed regulate which bathrooms transgender people can use and whether schools can affirm transgender children’s identities.

Already many of these laws are being challenged in court, and judges are scrutinizing their precise wording. A federal judge in Arkansas last week struck down that state’s law forbidding medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transitions. Earlier this month, a Florida judge sided with families seeking to block the state’s law banning gender transition care for minors, saying that the ban is likely to be found to be unconstitutional.
[…]
Out of an estimated 1.6 million Americans who are transgender, about 300,000 are under 18. A small number get surgery as part of their transition, but it is much more common for children to transition socially — changing their name, clothing, haircut or other parts of their appearance and identity — and through the use of puberty-delaying medications or hormones.

Often these laws lay out a broad list of procedures. Indiana’s law, for example, includes mastectomies but also mentions procedures like liposuction and hair reconstruction. The legislation specifies that these procedures are banned for minors only if they are for the specific purpose of gender transition.
[…]
Proponents of the bans argue that these operations can be harmful and that children are not mature enough to make decisions about such procedures.

Leading medical organizations oppose bans on transition care, citing extensive evidence that such treatment leads to better mental health outcomes, and associating a lack of treatment with higher rates depression.
[…]
While most of these laws focus on treatments for minors, some states included provisions that will also create obstacles for transgender adults seeking transition treatments.
[…]
Laws in both Florida and Missouri prevent Medicaid from covering transition care, which could make it harder for transgender adults to afford treatments and surgeries.
[…]
Many states have defined the act of providing surgeries and medical care to transgender minors as “unprofessional conduct,” which could jeopardize a doctor’s ability to practice medicine.

Some states added potential penalties for people beyond doctors. For example, Indiana and Mississippi outline legal consequences for doctors and others who “aid or abet” in administering care. This language is similar to abortion bans that include legal penalties for providers or others who “aid or abet” someone receiving an abortion.
[…]
“In some states, such as Mississippi, the ‘aid or abet’ language is very broad,” said Elana Redfield, the federal policy director of the Williams Institute at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles, “and could conceivably subject parents or allies to liability.”
[…]
While most of the laws passed this year do not include criminal liability, last month Florida joined at least four other states that make providing such care a felony. Florida’s law penalizes doctors who violate the law with up to five years in prison. It also changes child custody rules to treat transition care as equivalent to child abuse.
[…]
Both as part of the medical bans and sometimes as separate laws, states are strictly defining “male” and “female.” This could prevent transgender people from receiving identification that matches their identity and appearance.

Tennessee’s law defining sex goes into effect on July 1, and would prevent anyone from changing the sex on their birth certificate and driver’s license. This can create challenges for transgender people when they need to, say, vote or apply for a library card.
[…]
In Ohio last year, early drafts of the state’s athletic ban, which is still being debated by the legislature, included language requiring a physical examination by a doctor when the sex of an athlete is disputed. That language has since been removed. But it’s unclear in many of the laws how schools and organizations should enforce the bans.
[…]
At least nine states this year have passed laws regarding how pronouns are handled in school. Florida’s law explicitly prohibits teachers and students from discussing their preferred pronouns.

Kentucky has a law saying teachers can’t be required to use pronouns for students that differ from their sex.
[…]
Overall, the many new laws governing transgender children and adults have yet to be tested in everyday life. But already, many are facing lawsuits seeking to stop them.

Nearly half of all the medical bans that have passed are already being challenged in court. A Florida judge issued a limited injunction this month, saying that the state’s medical ban would most likely be found unconstitutional. The judge took issue with the state’s prohibiting treatments “even when medically appropriate.” Texas’ law, which was enacted this month, is also expected to face legal challenges before going into effect in September.

States Passed a Record Number of Transgender Laws. Here’s What They Say. [NYT]

…even for the people who are good at that sort of thing

…but…it’s…telling

If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.

A Handy Guide to the Republican Definition of a Crime [NYT]

…that they’re so consistently inconsistent

…guess it depends on how you think the dots join up what you think the picture looks like

…or

Russian general who may have known about Wagner mutiny goes missing [Guardian]

…you know

…how warped your lens is

[…] When originalist arguments favor a result the conservative justices dislike, they’re content to ignore them, or to cherry-pick competing originalist interpretations that comport with their underlying inclinations. Originalism doesn’t serve to constrain but to justify. This is not a fair fight — or an honest one.

And it is one with dangerous consequences. The more liberals present originalist arguments, the more they legitimate originalism rather than refuting it and offering a compelling alternative. Courtroom advocates need to win the case at hand, yet that undermines the more critical long-term effort to wrench the court away from its reliance on what is, at least as currently practiced, a flawed doctrine that peddles the illusion of impartiality in the service of a conservative result.
[…]
In short, the project of taking on originalism is urgent — indeed, overdue. It might begin with the cheeky title of a 2009 law review article by University of Pennsylvania law professor Mitchell N. Berman: “Originalism is Bunk.”

Originalism was a fringe legal theory when it was developed beginning in the early 1970s. It arose in reaction to the perceived excesses of the Warren Court, which had worked a legal revolution in the 1950s and 1960s with freewheeling decisions on the rights of criminal defendants, civil liberties and voting rights — among other issues — that conservative critics said were grounded in the majority’s policy preferences more than in the Constitution itself.

Among those developing an alternative, and supposedly more legitimate, legal theory was Robert H. Bork, then a Yale Law School professor. In a 1971 Indiana Law Journal article that was to become famous during his failed Supreme Court confirmation hearings 16 years later, Bork first laid out what came to be called originalism. (The term was coined by a liberal critic, Stanford Law professor Paul Brest.) “Where constitutional materials do not clearly specify the value to be preferred, there is no principled way to prefer any claimed human value to any other,” Bork wrote. “The judge must stick close to the text and the history, and their fair implications, and not construct new rights.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/01/originalism-liberal-lawyers-supreme-court-trap

…yup…that kind of borked…kind of like the court, you might say

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Harper rejected the most extreme version of the so-called independent state legislature theory. In doing so, the court avoided any immediate and significant disruption of the structure of federal elections.

But the decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is not a total rejection of the theory. The court actually endorsed a weaker version of it, and this version will loom over — and potentially affect — the 2024 elections.
[…]
Relief that the court did not endorse this extreme position, though, must be tempered by the fact — which many initial responses to the decision have not recognized — that the court simultaneously endorsed a version of the independent state legislature theory. The court held that the Constitution imposes some limits on the way state courts interpret their own state constitutions. These limits also apply to the way state courts interpret state election statutes — as well as the way state election administrators apply state election statutes in federal elections.

Yet the court offers no guidance, no standard at all, for lower courts to know when a state court has gone too far. The decision merely says that “state courts do not have free rein” and that they may not “transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”

The court offers no concrete understanding nor any example of what that means. It’s clear that a majority was cobbled together among conservative and liberal justices by agreeing to decide this part of the case in the narrowest terms. Indeed, the court announced this constitutional constraint but avoided telling us even whether the North Carolina Supreme Court — in the decision the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed — had violated this vague limitation.
[…]
Judicial minimalism can be a virtue in many contexts. Deciding cases on narrow grounds or postponing resolution until a sharp conflict is unavoidably before the court can limit judicial overreaching and produce more consensus within the court.

But in the context of election law, it can be a vice. Elections benefit greatly from clear rules laid out well in advance of Election Day. Such rules minimize voter confusion; bolster the ability of election officials to communicate clear, consistent messages to voters; enable political campaigns to organize efforts to mobilize voters; and avoid continual litigation over unclear rules or doctrines. Clear rules specified in advance are all the more important in this era of pervasive distrust and suspicion concerning elections.

Rejecting the extreme version of the independent state legislature doctrine did provide important clarity along one dimension. But by endorsing a weak version of the independent state legislature theory, the court has ensured that legal uncertainty on this remaining constitutional front might roil the 2024 elections — and it has opened a different, if less expansive, set of problems. No great feat of lawyering will be required to transform disputes in federal elections about the actions of state election officials or state courts into federal constitutional claims that assert those state actors have “gone too far” in their interpretation of state constitutions or state statutes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opinion/supreme-court-independent-state-legislature-theory.html

…& if it feels like the world keeps turning but it seems increasingly out of kilter…that’s not your imagination

For decades, scientists had been watching the average position of our planet’s rotational axis, the imaginary rod around which it turns, gently wander south, away from the geographic North Pole and toward Canada. Suddenly, though, it made a sharp turn and started heading east.

In time, researchers came to a startling realization about what had happened. Accelerated melting of the polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers had changed the way mass was distributed around the planet enough to influence its spin.

Now, some of the same scientists have identified another factor that’s had the same kind of effect: colossal quantities of water pumped out of the ground for crops and households.

[…there’s even an FAQ…which would be helpful…if the Times didn’t paywall their stuff…gotta love that joined up thinking]

Between 1960 and 2000, worldwide groundwater depletion more than doubled, to about 75 trillion gallons a year, scientists estimate. Since then, satellites that measure variations in Earth’s gravity have revealed the staggering extent to which groundwater supplies have declined in particular regions, including India and the Central Valley of California.

Something Was Messing With Earth’s Axis. The Answer Has to Do With Us. [NYT]

…so…when you find that the “answers” just beg more questions it’s abundantly clear the asshole who won’t stop flapping those sphincter-looking lips of theirs couldn’t adequately state much less respond to appropriately…there’s probably a reason for that

In a 2017 Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” Jeremy Adam Smith argued that Lee’s work

highlights a difficult truth about our species: We are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial — compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest — in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence — and socially sanctioned deceit.

The deference, or obeisance, of so many seemingly well-informed Republican leaders and millions of Republican voters to Trump’s palpably false claims — the most egregious and damaging of which is the claim the 2020 election was stolen from him — raises an intriguing question: How can this immense delusion persist when survival pressures would seem to foster growing percentages of men and women capable of making discerning, accurate judgments?

In their March 10 paper, “The Cognitive Foundations of Ideological Orthodoxy: Threat Avoidance, Ingroup Mobilization and Signaling,” Antoine Marie and Michael Bang Petersen, political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, posed the question this way:

Navigating the world and solving problems would seem, by default, to be best done with beliefs that fulfill the epistemic goal of faithfully portraying how things are. Prima facie, one would thus expect selection to favor belief formation systems that prioritize accuracy and motivations to flexibly correct those beliefs in the face of compelling evidence and arguments, including in the domain of ideological beliefs.

The authors ask how, in this context, powerful “orthodox mind-sets” emerge, mind-sets that restrict free thinking, armed with a “disproportionate righteousness with which they try to protect cherished narratives.”
[…]

First, oversensitive dispositions to detect threat, from human out-groups in particular. Second, motivations to try to mobilize in-group members for cooperative benefits and against rival groups, by using moral talk emphasizing collective benefits. Third, (unconscious) attempts to signal personal devotion to accrue prestige within the in-group.
[…]
anger promotes the use of self-serving deception. The decision to engage in self-serving deception balances concern for oneself (i.e., self-interest) and concern for others (i.e., empathy). The greater concern individuals exhibit for themselves and the lower concern for others, the more deceitful they are likely to be.

This Is Why Trump Lies Like There’s No Tomorrow [NYT]

…well…I’ll be damned if that doesn’t seem woefully familiar…in ways that extend well beyond that particular off-color exemplar…but then…the truth is hard to credit sometimes…harder for some people in particular, granted…but…harder than it should be for most of us, really

I’d like to tell you a story about the pandemic, one that may sound so gauzily hopeful, it would qualify today as a public health fairy tale.

The story is this. When Covid arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into Covid partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as the source of our national misery. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war.

You may be laughing, but this is actually a pretty good description of what genuinely happened in the spring and summer of 2020, despite how you may remember those days now. Back then, the president was a lightning rod who seemed to polarize the country’s response all by himself, although he had rhetorical help from podcasters and radio hosts, governors and members of local school boards. But at the state and local levels, for many months, red and blue authorities moved in quite close parallel. For the most part, red and blue people did, too.

This is one of the revelations of “Lessons From the Covid War, an Investigative Report,” by 34 experts, published in April by PublicAffairs. Over the next few weeks, inspired by this book and a few other efforts at pandemic autopsy, I’ll examine the experience of 2020 and how it is already distorted in our memory.

One of the biggest distortions, the authors of “Lessons” argue, concerns that familiar bugaboo of Covid polarization. As the years unfolded, the country’s pandemic response began to suffer under the pressures of familiar red-blue conflict. But early pandemic partisanship, they suggest, is something of a myth.

Don’t believe it? Let me take you on a tour of those early months.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opinion/covid-pandemic-2020-or-covid-pandemic-politics.html

…& just because of the strident bent of the coverage making it such a glaring example of political dysfunction…doesn’t mean that the states don’t have a lot of company when it comes to the examples being set

Earlier this month, the UN announced it will require fossil fuel lobbyists to identify themselves as such when registering for the Cop28 climate summit. The move was applauded by campaigners and politicians alike, but it’s a shockingly small first step towards matching the boldness demanded by UN secretary general, António Guterres, when it comes to rooting out fossil fuel influence. In a speech earlier this month, Guterres called for the phase out of fossil fuels themselves, and said oil majors must “cease and desist influence peddling and legal threats designed to knee-cap progress.”

The UN’s move to transparently label lobbyists at Cop28 looks a lot like damage control after recent embarrassing revelations, such as there having been more oil lobbyists than any one nation’s delegation at Cop26 in Glasgow. But to actually rid Cop of fossil fuel influence, the UN has to go far beyond finally unmasking industry lobbyists; it needs to hold up a mirror to its own enabling behaviour over the years, then reverse all of it.

Exposing just a single node – in this case, the lobbyists – in the complex ecosystem of climate misinformation is not enough to defuse its impact, and in fact might only add to the fairytale that industry representatives are attending the summit in good faith.

Oil and gas companies don’t just have a seat at the Cop table: they are in charge of the table [Guardian]

…turns out…when you lack substance but love to talk like you know it all

Boris Johnson committed an unambiguous breach of the rules when he failed to get permission from the ministerial appointments watchdog before taking a job as a Daily Mail columnist, which has led to calls for reform of the “good chaps” system.
[…]
The Mail unveiled Johnson as a columnist a day after a damning report found he deliberately misled the Commons and was part of a campaign to intimidate MPs who investigated him.

The paper’s announcement was accompanied by a video in which Johnson said the column would be about “exactly what I think about the world”.

“It is going to be completely unexpurgated stuff. I am going to be writing whatever I want. I may even have to cover politics from time to time but I will obviously try to do that as little as possible unless I absolutely have to,” he added.
[…]
Johnson was previously paid a £275,000 salary to write for the Telegraph. He also faced censure from Acoba for failing to seek advice from the committee before joining the Telegraph, after he resigned as Theresa May’s foreign secretary.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/27/reform-calls-after-johnson-found-to-have-broken-rules-over-daily-mail-job

…there’s definitely some chapping involved

Former cabinet ministers and allies of Boris Johnson have been accused of launching an “unprecedented and coordinated” campaign to undermine the inquiry into whether he misled parliament over Partygate.

The finding came in a new report by the privileges committee, which posed a fresh problem for Rishi Sunak as it recommended toughening up the rules on interference in such inquiries and condemned the behaviour of former ministers.

Seven Tory MPs and three peers – including a serving government minister – were named and told their behaviour risked discrediting a fundamental arm of the system of checks and balances in parliament.

The former cabinet ministers Nadine Dorries, Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg were named, as were other former frontbenchers Brendan Clarke-Smith, Mark Jenkinson, Andrea Jenkyns and Michael Fabricant.

Zac Goldsmith, a Foreign Office minister, and two other Tory peers – Lord Cruddas and Lord Greenhalgh – were similarly criticised.

Earlier this month, the privileges committee said it would write a special report on the issues it encountered during its 14-month inquiry into Johnson’s Partygate denials. In its ruling, the committee found he had committed five contempts of parliament.

Its follow-up report, published on Thursday, said some senior Tories had waged a campaign across newspapers, radio and social media to discredit the committee’s work and the seven MPs that serve on the cross-party group.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/29/boris-johnson-allies-campaigned-to-undermine-privileges-committee-report-says

…but that’s how it goes with small minds touting inflated opinions, I suppose…occupational hazard, you might say

So much for holding your nerve. Rishi Sunak appears to have lost his. He looks beaten. The man who has lived his entire life in a gilded protective cage – Winchester head boy, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, the Tory party – is now powerless to stave off defeat. The real world has finally caught up with him. Or he with it. There are no easy fixes. Only barely managed decline. It’s no longer a question of if he fails. The only game in town is when.

You can sense the despair in Sunak’s body language. His shoulders are hunched. A small man making himself even smaller. His eyes look sunken, half dead. His speech reduced to a tired monotone. His repartee shot to pieces: neither funny nor clever. Deep down, somewhere in the hell that is his subconscious, he knows the game is up.
[…]
For Keir Starmer it’s almost too easy. There are so many lines of offence, it’s hard to know where to start. But as Labour is this week trying to position itself as the party of home ownership, he went in on housing. In the Tory party’s leaflets for the Uxbridge byelection, they were against a target of 300,000 new homes a year. Yet that target seemed to be government policy. Could Rish! put everyone out of their misery and tell us which was the real Conservative policy?

He couldn’t. Rish! was more or less incoherent. He couldn’t say whether 300,000 houses had been built or not – presumably it depends on whether you consider thousands of empty cardboard boxes to be luxury penthouse flats – but he did know he had built more than Labour. Starmer didn’t have the heart to tell him that was because the Tories had been in power for the last 13 years. Sunak will kick himself when he finds out.
[…]
Rish! could only burble something about Labour having changed its mind. He should know, I suppose. It’s hard to keep up with the number of U-turns the Tories have done in the last few years. If there’s one thing Sunak does better than condescension, it’s hypocrisy.
[…]
The sense of pointlessness continued with an urgent question on the imminent collapse of Thames Water. Then, it could hardly be otherwise as Thérèse Coffey had thrown a sickie – does she actually ever do any work as environment secretary? – and had sent Rebecca Pow along instead.

Pow is an interesting psychological case study. Even her shrink can’t decide whether she’s a very stupid person trying to be clever. Or a very clever person trying to be stupid. Or even if she’s human at all. No one can tell because she appears to be powered by 1980s beta AI.

“Water is what makes life possible on this planet,” she began. Seriously. It was as if Pow had chosen to look up water on Wikipedia just to make sure she knew what she was talking about. Or to prove that she didn’t. And she is the water minister. She was also keen to point out that things couldn’t be all bad because the water companies had borrowed more than £60bn. She didn’t seem to know that almost all that went on shareholder dividends.

The shadow environment secretary, Jim McMahon, gently pointed out that everything couldn’t be fine. Water companies couldn’t sort out leaks, pumped sewage into rivers, were still broke and were planning on raising prices by 40%. Which bit of that did Pow not get? All of it. Most of our beaches were perfectly fine. No one had ever died from swimming in shit.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/28/rish-drowns-in-despair-as-water-minister-finds-herself-way-out-her-depth

…seriously…it’s way more fun thinking about abstractions

Moore’s ‘open question’ argument is then offered to support his claim that ‘good’ is indefinable. Consider a proposed definition of the form:

(G) The Good is X.

(Suggested candidates for ‘X’ might be ‘that which causes pleasure’ or ‘that which we desire to desire’; cf. PE, 15-16.) Then either ‘the Good’ means the same as ‘X’, or it does not. If it does, then the definition is trivial, since ‘analytic’; but if it does not, then the definition is incorrect. But for any substitution for ‘X’—other than ‘the Good’ itself, which would obviously make (G) analytic—we can always raise the question (i.e., it is always an ‘open question’) as to whether (G) is true; so ‘X’ cannot mean the same as ‘the Good’ and hence cannot be offered as a definition of ‘good’. In particular, any attempt at providing a naturalistic definition of ‘good’ is bound to fail, the contrary view being dubbed by Moore the ‘naturalistic fallacy’.

This argument has been influential—and controversial—in metaethical discussions ever since. But in its general form what we have here is the paradox of analysis. (Although the problem itself goes back to the paradox of inquiry formulated in Plato’s Meno, and can be found articulated in Frege’s writings, too [Quotation], the term ‘paradox of analysis’ was indeed first used in relation to Moore’s work, by Langford in 1942.) Consider an analysis of the form ‘A is C’, where A is the analysandum (what is analysed) and C the analysans (what is offered as the analysis). Then either ‘A’ and ‘C’ have the same meaning, in which case the analysis expresses a trivial identity; or else they do not, in which case the analysis is incorrect. So it would seem that no analysis can be both correct and informative.

There is a great deal that might be said about the paradox of analysis. At the very least, it seems to cry out for a distinction between two kinds of ‘meaning’, such as the distinction between ‘sense’ and ‘reference’ that Frege drew, arguably precisely in response to this problem (see Beaney 2005). An analysis might then be deemed correct if ‘A’ and ‘C’ have the same reference, and informative if ‘C’ has a different, or more richly articulated, sense than ‘A’. In his own response, when the paradox was put to him in 1942, Moore talks of the analysandum and the analysans being the same concept in a correct analysis, but having different expressions. But he admitted that he had no clear solution to the problem (RC, 666). And if this is so, then it is equally unclear that no definition of ‘good’—whether naturalistic or not—is possible.

Conceptions of Analysis in Analytic Philosophy [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

…you never know when that far-flung example might be your ticket out of dodge in the face of a seemingly inescapable fate

All across the Milky Way, dying stars are gobbling up their planets. Even Earth is likely to perish this way about five billion years from now, when the sun expands and devours its innermost worlds.

But the giant planet Halla, which closely orbits a star 520 light years from Earth, appears to have narrowly escaped such an apocalyptic fate. A new explanation for this planet’s survivor status hints that there may be a hidden population of death-defying worlds elsewhere in the galaxy, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Halla is “a forbidden planet of sorts,” said Marc Hon, a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an author of the study. “The star itself might have a very unusual history that somehow permitted this planet to survive at such a close distance around what is otherwise a rather inhospitable host star,” he added.

As stars like the sun reach the end of their lives, they transition into red giants that exponentially puff up in size, incinerating any worlds that fall within their advancing boundaries. Scientists have spotted indirect signs of such planetary engulfments across the galaxy, and a team recently reported the first direct detection of a planet flaming out, as a star consumed it. In some systems, planets may even cannibalize each other, according to another recent study that found evidence of a gas giant that ate a Mercury-size world.

Halla, first discovered in 2015 and resembling Jupiter, has added a new wrinkle to the evolving tale of planetary engulfment. Scientists realized Halla was in a precarious position only when they examined the star system a few years later with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Those observations revealed that Halla’s host star, Baekdu, has exhausted its hydrogen fuel and is now burning through helium.

By the time most red giants dip into their helium supply, they have already ballooned in size by orders of magnitude. In other words, Halla, which occupies a tight 93-day orbit, ought to be in Baekdu’s belly right now. But when Dr. Hon and his colleagues conducted follow-up observations with ground telescopes in Hawaii, they saw that Halla was still there, intact and flouting all expectations.

The ‘Forbidden Planet’ That Escaped a Fiery Doom [NYT]

…for my part…as ever…it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface…but…unlike the little planet that could…that’s pretty much par for the course…& about as predictable as a few other things that spring to mind…but I lack the time…& most days the inclination, if I’m honest…to get into…how does it go again?

…gimme a minute…& probably another coffee…& I’ll try to find something a little easier on the ear to go down here…otherwise…knock yourself out?

[…speaking of tubs & better uses for your time]

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41 Comments

  1. These DOTs (and everything and everyone else) have taught me (and my family) so much (and would teach me so much more if I was better at following up on the information) that I am forever in debt, to all who have ever had even a small part in them. I truly appreciate it.

    • …well,to the extent I had any hand in anything for anyone to be grateful for…you’d be more than welcome on that score…but since the folks hereabouts have done a frankly miraculous job of helping me retain my vestigial grip on sanity…I am, to butcher a bit of paraphrasing…more by way of owing thanks than owed…so I’d be happy to join your chorus if there’s a spot open?

  2. I was pretty troubled by the cheering over the Moore decision. Yes, the worst possible outcome was averted. Hooray! But 3 of the 9 unelected but unimpeachable magic wizards who control all power in the United States by fiat thought that half-baked nonsense sounded perfectly reasonable. And I’m glad rabid-dog state legislatures can’t invalidate non-Trump votes (yet). But those magic wizards will still have the last say on elections in the future. It’s not great!

     

  3. Things went south in the US’ Covid response when the Trump Admin based on foolish/shortsighted/stupid/cynical advice from unindicted scumbag and general all round fool Jared Kushner told Trump that he could “gain” a political advantage by fucking over the blue states thinking that somehow only blue state voters would die.

    Trump being more foolish/shortsighted/stupid/cynical than Kush went with it not realizing that if it wasn’t contained in the ‘tourist’/travel states then it was going to spread like wildfire and repeat the pattern of the Spanish Flu (and most other pandemics) where it hit the (blue) cities hard, but the (red) rural areas the hardest.

    The end result, CoVID is what killed over a million Americans and the Trump Admin.

    • I’ll never defend Mango but I read that story yesterday and I had to agree with the premise: There wasn’t a partisan bend on Covid at first but I don’t think it was Trump (or his assorted shitbag family) that caused it. In fact, one thing that’s funny about him is how put off he seems now about crowds booing him over vaccines when he thinks — and for once, kinda correctly — that he should be getting credit for getting them out so quickly.

      The other thing is that there’s no way the GOP would have allowed a dime to go toward anything Covid-related under a President Clinton because the political advantage of a cratered economy in an election year would be way too good for them to pass up.

        • Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting he did a good job. Obviously this is a man who believed that more cases looked bad for him. That’s brain damage shit spoken by a person who doesn’t give the slightest fuck about anyone other than himself.

          But I think there’s a clear dividing line between the poor Covid response and the antivax/minimize Covid movement. One is entirely Mango’s fault; the other one, IMO, was built by other people after he was already out of the picture.

          • That is probably true.  I think if Trump had done the improbable smart thing AND stomped down on the crazies, it might have minimized the affect of CoVID.

            He opened Pandora’s box. He FAFO’ed.

             

      • The way you can judge Trump on Covid is the same way you can judge Fox News and their Dominion problem.

        The response is all about setting the proper framework.

        It’s in the same vein as decoding a magician’s trick, who tells audiences to carefully look up his sleeve, which means they never look at the bigger framework.

        What the guilt-absolvers for Fox try to do is say “they were trapped — they looked at their daily ratings and were scared to death when they dropped 10%!” Except the best evidence is that Fox is more than happy over years to take a short term hit when they think it will lead to even bigger longterm gains. They’ve happily dumped popular personalities like Glenn Beck, accepted the short term audience hit, and moved right on.

        And likewise the best evidence is that Trump was happy to sit tight through incidents that upset GOP voters, because he was sure they were going to come back to him. The incident where he called America’s war dead “losers and suckers” is a classic case. He hated going to cemeteries, he knew that kind of behavior would have blowback, but he also knew his base would come right back.

        Trump could have taken the temporary hit on Covid with the antivaxxers, launched a simultaneous distraction on whatever he wanted, and gotten his 35% back. Given the choice between him and weird Facebook memes about needles, where were the crazy uncles going to go?

  4. The “Blue Lies” piece from Scientific American makes a great point, and it’s absolutely right about how lies told to create group solidarity are willingly overlooked is spot on.

    The problem with Edsall, who cites Blue Lies, is that he has a baked in bias toward trying to defuse this effect by joining the liars rather than undermining them. He has a hopelessly naive (possibly intentionally so) view that if you just find common ground with these groups and gently nudge them toward other things you all think together, everything will be lovely.

    A lot of it comes from a basic intellectual fault of Edsall, who ridiculously views this as an abstract issue of two groups diverging where both sides are relatively equal. That’s just not the case of what is going on with the modern right wing. I think he knows it too. I don’t think he’s too dumb to see it, but persists in this stuff anyway.

    He’s carrying out a variation of the whole “let’s debate!” nonsense of certain intellectuals, trying to divert opposition into digging empty wells.

    You have to actively disrupt them. You have to undermine their faith, and it doesn’t happen in the gentle, incremental way he says.

    What “Blue Lies” addresses, though, is that how you go about disrupting and dividing is critical too. You can’t be scattershot, or treat the GOP as a snide joke, or try to drown them in data. You have to focus on undermining them by breaking apart their solidarity wherever you can. Elevate the apostates. Highlight the victims of their schemes who belong to the supposed inside group. Keep talking about the broken promises.

    This isn’t about countering Blue Lies with more Blue Lies, though. It’s about figuring out how to choose the truths you want to tell.

    • …at the end of the day anyone who claims to be free of bias is deluding themselves…the best we can do is try our best to be aware of our own & try to mitigate the ways they throw us off…but whatever edsall’s personal failings I think that assessment does him a disservice…the conclusion that…were it possible to bring those sorts of people to a table where they would be willing to engage with that order of consideration…however implausible such a scenario might be in reality…doesn’t read to me as though it would result in your “everything would be lovely” so much as it would constitute a form of progress from where things are generally held to stand in our era of divisive & disingenuous polarization for seemingly its own sake…though in reality for a host of motivations that wouldn’t have any place in an ideal world…but…there’s a time & a place, as the saying goes…& laying that sort of thinking out for people to consider doesn’t seem all that out of place in the opinion pages of a major newspaper…which isn’t necessarily talking directly to those people the way you’d need to be for it to avail you of much to try undermining their faith or actively disrupting them…gently or otherwise

      …& he’d hardly be the first to suggest you get more flies with honey that (piss &) vinegar…so I’m not altogether convinced that writing that off isn’t the counter-productive kind of cavalier…I’m pretty sure that beau of the fifth column guy…or that liberal redneck fella, for that matter…have changed a lot more of those sorts of minds than I could claim to…& more power to them, frankly

      …but otherwise…sure…I’ll subscribe to that newsletter

      …that said…I do wish the baseline of discourse could tack a bit more in the direction of conversations than debates, though…they’re often more interesting in addition to being more informative…& when you take out the antagonistic elements the common ground tends to be easier to see…absence of the red mist & all that…& I don’t just mean online…I know some smart folks…& one group in particular who are the kind of people that get described as “ferociously intelligent”…but if you get too many of them together at the same time they are preternaturally incapable of having a conversation…everything has to be a debate…everyone has to pick a position…nobody gets to share…& they must be defended with anything & everything at your disposal…the whole exercise devolves into mere competition to assert “I’m right & therefore everyone else must be entirely wrong”…it’s exhausting…& it’s boring…& nobody comes away thinking anything they didn’t start out convinced of already

      …& I dare say I could say something similar about edsall’s efforts…but I think he deserves points for at least making an attempt at something constructive…there’s certainly no shortage of people champing at the bit to sound off in ways that seek the opposite effect, after all…not least in the same opinion section that came from?

      • Edsall is bad at his job, and consistently enough that it is almost certainly deliberate.

        Over the years his takes are take the same form over and over. Take a position where Democrats have not only factual grounds but a political advantage, and where the GOP has gone into Overton Window mode.

        Present the issue as an ahistorical, both sides issue with no actual merits. Then, having stripped away all context, argue that Democrats need to muddy their position and cede ground, on the theory that the GOP will act in good faith.

        Insert Lucy and the football GIF here.

        That was his position on national health care in the Obama years. Democrats, Edsall argued, should shy away from it, preemptively compromise with the GOP, limit their arguments in favor of it, and whatever they implemented should be complex.

        An then even as the GOP went even more radical, as late as 2014 he was complaining that Democrats shouldn’t defend Obamacare.

        And then, after the intense defense of Obamacare in 2017-18 was a major unifying theme which actually flipped significant numbers of Trump voters to vote for Democrats in the midterms…. crickets.

        He has done the same thing on assault weapons. He argued in 2020 that Democrats would be smart to avoid establishing their bona fides on abortion, muddy their messaging, and assume the GOP would act in good faith and moderate.

        We all know how that turned out. And the best way to build a strong national consensus on abortion looks increasingly like taking a strong stand to defend it.

        If this was a one time deal, it would be one thing. But he’s been at this for a long time and he never changes. He’s not playing the game he says he is.

        • …bad at the job we’d like him to be doing…pretty much…bad at the job the people who sign his paycheck consider him hired for…maybe less so…& as bad as the bedbug boy, or a fist full of fellow travelers manning the decks at the grey lady…maybe not…but depends on the criteria

          …still don’t think that disqualifies him from the lesser evil column on the NYT balance sheet…which isn’t the sort of thing that should be confused with any sort of endorsement…& given his tendency to bring a blockquote or several to the table…& from some pretty respectable source material…maybe that’s just my bias showing…but it’s not the kind of slack that follows the “give ’em an inch” rule…more…”the perfect is the enemy of the good”, I suppose…which…as the standford precis was alluding to…is just the thin end of an array of wedges the process of analysis will drive through its own heart given half a chance

          …so…yes…his takes may cleave to a recognizable formula…but you could say the same thing of mine…or yours…particularly where that paper is concerned…& you clearly think at least one out of three isn’t a waste of time…though I’m not sure you or I are any less qualified for the lucy with the football gif in the grand scheme of things

          …maybe it’d be different if we had a shot at a paycheck from the NYT…but on balance I think I’m good just making idle conversation in a place where I don’t have to adjust my pitch for an antagonistic audience…even if I’d be like a kid in a sweetshop if I got to hire & fire columnists…in which case all I’m really saying in edsall’s favor is that there’d be a number of names on the firing call sheet that I’d consider a higher priority?

          • My take on the Times is there are some excellent parts and some terrible ones, and they tend to break down by section, and to a large extent that points to an institutional problem that goes to the publisher’s office and the Sulzberger family.

            By and large the Political/DC news desk is terrible. There are a few exceptions when a reporter like Charlie Savage has extensive knowledge of the substance of their beat. But the Times overwhelmingly hires generalists for that beat who don’t know and don’t care about substance at all, which makes them ripe for manipulation.

            Opinion is also largely terrible. There’s fake balance there, but it’s overwhelmingly superficial lefties like Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins vs. David Brooks and Ross Douthat, and you’d be hard pressed to find any insight from any of them. With someone like Edsall it’s frustrating because there are genuinely interesting, thoughtful data science based writers out there, but no permanent station for them at Opinion. And meanwhile a miserable hack like Frank Luntz gets to run regular supposedly scientifically based focus groups with top editor Patrick Healy. It’s a miracle Jamelle Bouie has a spot among so many lazy thinkers.

            The good thing about the Times is they have a lot of serious, knowledgable writers on subjects like science and business. They have some great investigative reporters — they just hired John Carreyrou, and they ran the great pieces on Trump’s tax fraud.

            But one of the best ways to understand the Times’ problems at a management level is to think in terms of the split between the knowledgable writers and the generalists. A functional upper management would break down the silo that allows the DC/Politics crew and the single note Opinion writers to publish on an island, and require them to draw from the lessons of the expert reporters on staff.

            Instead, you get situations like the Politics beat completely omitting the fraud findings of their colleagues from their reporting on Trump’s trial in Manhattan, and treating it as just a horse race. You get the fact that Bret Stephens was allowed to deny for years the excellent reporting of his colleagues in the science beat on global warming, and when he finally made a small concession as to the existence of it, he gets a million column inches insisting that laissez faire will fix it, despite all the reporting of his colleagues in the economics beat.

            Basically, the way the Times is run, if you’re in certain sections, there’s no penalty for being wrong, and there’s never a need to talk to your colleagues who know the answers to the questions you’re just asking. They have the people on hand to fix much of their failings, but the top editors and AG Sulzberger make sure it doesn’t happen.

      • Lying is absolutely the wrong way, and I’d also argue that GOP lies are something that truth tellers need to exploit.

        There are effective ways to do it and ineffective ways, though. Simply broadcasting that Trump is a liar isn’t much good, but building a narrative that focuses on how a subset of his lies hurt his own supporters is a good way to go.

        Part of the GOP method is to lie so much and so broadly that they all turn into a blur. So opponents need to focus on winning issues where the truth is on the side of Democrats, like health care, and use it to undermine GOP defenses.

        And another key piece is to cut down people like Edsall who keep both sides-ing it. The truth is, they’re wrong.

        • Truth isn’t magical. It won’t shine brighter than a lie. In fact, most science shows that it’s way less palatable to people than a previously held belief. So just pointing to something and saying “This is true and this is not” only holds the value that the person listening places on your opinion. Sometimes that’s enough to get through. It’s certainly a much better tactic than trying to argue. But being factually correct is not an automatic W. It’s not even a card you can play that forces the other person have to pay attention to you. If there is one single lesson I wish I could make Democrats and liberals learn, it’s this: Being right is not enough!

          Moreover, while the GOP lies like I expel carbon dioxide, it’s hard to say that the Dems are golden paragons of virtue when it comes to truth-telling. I think their goals and policies are built in the real world as opposed to Tucker Carlson’s brain, but they’ve screwed and misled people on health care and abortion and lots of other issues, too.

          • Absolutely, truth alone isn’t any kind of magic bullet.

            That’s why I’ve stressed that putting together truthful narratives is the key, as opposed to just spray and pray.

            The Obamacare fight in 2017-18 was a great example, because instead of abstractions about GDP and percentages of net private sector spending on health care, Democrats could tell millions of people to look in their wallets at their ACA health insurance cards and truthfully say that the GOP was going to take them away.

            Calling the GOP liars alone won’t work. It doesn’t give people anything to connect to. But one of the interesting things about recent polling on abortion is that people who believed the GOP line about how they supported abortion in the case of things like the health of the mother have flipped hard. The specifity of the lie, and the way it relates to the larger narrative, creates a multiplying effect.

            The truth is powerful, but it needs to be harnessed to more than just itself to go anywhere. And the flip side is that exposing lies doesn’t do much, but when exposing lies helps create an understanding of betrayal, then it goes a long way.

      • I’ve got a little bit of experience in dealing with MAGAs, and so far my best approach has been to quietly and dispassionately explain facts to them.

        1. No, payroll taxes are collected by the employer and submitted to the government. Illegal immigrants can’t file tax returns. This is a net gain, not a drain on the economy.

        2. No, employers deliberately hire illegals and help them fake paperwork. They need them to pick produce in 101 degree heat.

        3. No, there’s no election fraud in Florida. 20 people were arrested, and almost all of them have been exonerated. Only one was convicted through a plea deal. One.

        It goes on, but histrionics don’t work at all. My way has occasionally generated an “oh, I didn’t know that.” I will say talking about Trump or a similarly polarizing figure is a waste of time. Trump = Jesus to them and is accepted as a similar point of faith.

        • “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” the dissent reads in part. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems. No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal racelinked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.”

          https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.yahoo.com/amphtml/entertainment/read-supreme-court-justice-ketanji-150423547.html

          • …makes me think wistfully about what things would look like if was the jackson court rather than roberts’

            …but no…we get the other thing…just like with the voting rights act stuff

            • I guarantee we’ll see the exact opposite on religion. There’s a pending case on whether anti-gay discrimination can be allowed on religious grounds, and it’s only a matter of time before these extremists decide that the First Amendment trumps the Reconstruction Amendments and allows racial discrimination on religious grounds.

              • …this case?

                https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court

                …I mean…when the person who supposedly submitted the request the plaintiff objects to having to carry out says they never did any such thing…feels like a verdict with that much in common with the merits isn’t exactly any more of a suprise that it’s going to be subtle

                …otherwise surely they’d have punted it on account of the foundation of the “merits” is a fabrication

                • It’s always possible they’ll punt on that case on some kind of procedural grounds, or try to craft a narrow ruling that lets the non-Alitos maintain the fiction that they’re moderates and reasonable.

                  But the longterm direction is clear. They want a claim of religious belief to be a super-right which overrides other rights. I’m guessing from a tactical perspective they will probably outsource the decision on what constitutes a religious belief to other entities, either state or local governments, or some kind of quasi-public institution in order to maintain the appearances of respecting the establishment clause. And of course, somehow being Jewish, Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist won’t count.

                  We’ll see a reemergence of the old US phenomenon of sundown towns, where minorities might be able to buy gas or maybe work in the warehouse, but after dark they needed to be gone. They want a situation in huge swaths of Red America you can be a racial or religious minority, or be gay, you just can’t actually live that way.

                  • They want a claim of religious belief to be a super-right which overrides other rights.

                    …except for the part where they don’t…for obvious reasons

                    Religious Freedom Arguments Underpin Wave of Challenges to Abortion Bans [NYT]

                    …that’ll be a similar needle-threading exercise as the affirmative action stuff, one would expect…but…it’s not like they give two shits about the object of those sorts of clauses anyway at this point

                    …so…yup…sounds about white

          • …or…by way of the tl;dr

            • 43% of Whites at Harvard got preferential treatment from being kids of donors, legacies, or athletes. Only 16% of Blacks, Asians and Latinos got that advantage.

              https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361

              The numbers for Whites would grow if you counted things like advantages for glee club singers, theater kids, and more. And that’s not counting school bias, where the network bias for going to a school like Choate add to the grease in the pipeline.

              I’d add that there’s growing bias to increase informal affirmative action programs for young Republicans. Donors are increasingly making it clear to the Ivies that they want more declared Republican activist kids given the same preferential treatment as squash and field hockey players. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

              • …& now that it’s verboten to take that approach to access to education…how long do think they can hold themselves back from wading into how it shouldn’t have to be a consideration for employers, either

                …after all…surely the applicant’s academic record should be a more than sufficient yardstick against which to measure them on this most equal of playing fields?

    • …I predict I shall be watching the hell out of that…thank you very much

      …looks a lot more fun than the kind of worries my brain serves up for worst case scenarios with hardcore AI…I mean…we’ve made a pretty good start on making the joint inhospitable to human life…if you have an army of robots to do any necessary fetching & carrying & you want the dominant fauna out of the picture…that’s probably not too hard to achieve by means we couldn’t fight…which…is the way you find yourself thinking when you’ve read too much philip k dick…& that looks like an eminently palatable antidote to that kind of thing…so…bring it on, I say?

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