Vidoes of the commet fragment exploding over Portugal on May 20: NY Times, YouTube.
Almost unbelievable Scott Siskind post on "Internal Family Systems" therapy, which sometimes involves recognizing your bad thoughts as literal demons and exorcising them. Oy. On the other hand, "One thing Falconer talks about again and again is that trauma patients - or the Parts of their mind, or the spirits inside them, or whatever - just want to be witnessed and validated. Getting an exorcism seems like the strongest way possible to say yes, you’re completely right, all of your pain is 100% real, but now you’re allowed to stop having it without it invalidating how traumatized you were."
Kevin Drum has more on the remarkable disconnect between how the US economy is doing and how Americans feel about it; 49% of Democrats think we're in a recession, even though unemployment is at 3.7%.
The latest from Berenike on the Red Sea is a papyrus that lists the names of Roman centurions, from a room that may have been an army office.
A claim that the population of Çatalhöyük was much smaller than previously thought. Estimates to date, based on assuming the whole mound was occupied at once, range from 3,000 to 10,000; the new paper argues that many fewer houses were occupied at once and estimates the population as 600 to 800. This would solve a lot of problems – how did 10,000 people live to gether with no sign of a government? – but raises another, why there would be so many unoccupied houses. Lots of theories about the Neolithic have based on the high population counts, so if this is true, lots of theories have to be revisited.
The astonishing success of Taylor Swift, via the New York Times. Among other things, she is the only artist ever to have all ten top ten Billboard pop hits at the same time, and she has done it twice, in 2022 and 2024. She accounts for about 1.3% of all the music streamed in the US.
Big new installation from Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, lots of weird sculptural stuff.
Review of a new book about medieval minstrels.
Noah Smith on the decline of the Internet, which cheap, AI-generated content is likely to make worse.
Yale Review article trying to take some kind of clever, sophisticated, hyper-cool approach to polyamory: "polyamorous people appear to like talking about sex more than they like having it."
Kevin Drum reviews a major study that finds internet access promotes happiness. They did try to correct for income.
The Milky Way photograph of the year contest.
Today's unjustified weirdness: "The train station has a mystery vending machine where you can buy whatever is in the unclaimed packages from delivery lockers."
To help them train guerilla fighters for WW II, the OSS relied on men who had been trained by the Soviets during the Spanish Civil War.
Amazing aerial photographs of Iceland's glacial rivers by Ben Simon Rehn. If the ads at that site are too annoying, you can extract these images from the feed on his web site.
Possible victim of Iron Age human sacrifice found in Dorset, England.
Amazing Han Dynasty tombs in Shandong Province. More pictures at the Chinese source.
Detailed 3-D mapping of the neurons in a small piece of human brain reveals surprising patterns.
David Bromwich ponders the relationship between two banes of our public discourse, the rise of outrageously insulting speech and the parallel rise of censorship. He finds censorship much more dangerous.
David Corn asks, how crazy is RFK Jr.? "In May 2022, Kennedy appeared on the podcast of comedian and reality TV star Theo Von, and he presented a harrowing tale: A global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world. He claimed to have proof: the ominous-sounding Event 201."
Orcas have been ramming and even sinking boats off Spain and Portugal, and now a committee of alleged experts finally has a theory as to why: they're bored teenagers looking for something to do.
Random fact I learned in a corporate presentation this week: in Virginia, data centers account for 25% of all electricity consumption.
Some scientists have argued that within 25 years new sensor technologies will render submarines easily detectable, creating a so-called "transparent ocean." In this 62-minute video, Perun asks if that is likely to be true and what it might mean for the future of naval conflict. One clue is that the nations investing most in new detection technologies (China and the US) are also investing heavily in the industrial base for future generations of submarines, so they don't seem to think the game is up.
4 comments:
Videos of the comet fragment exploding over Portugal on May 20: NY Times, YouTube.
The wild thing is realizing how high up that actually is (the angles viewed from the ground are VERY deceptive), and thus A] how absurdly FAST that was moving and B] how absurdly BRIGHT the explosion actually was.
That was something like 37 miles up (just shy of 200,000 feet). And it was moving at something like 100,000+ mph relative to the atmosphere (more than 130 times the speed of sound; almost 28 miles PER SECOND).
Compare with how slowly a commercial aircraft will appear to trace a contrail across the sky when you observe it from the ground - and then realize that such an airplane is only flying at 30,000 feet, and were it flying at 200,000 feet at the same speed, it would appear almost 7 times slower to us on the ground. The difference in speed is dizzying, and the sheer magnitude of the physical forces involved is absurd.
Kevin Drum has more on the remarkable disconnect between how the US economy is doing and how Americans feel about it; 49% of Democrats think we're in a recession, even though unemployment is at 3.7%.
A reminder that "the economy" doing well doesn't mean "everyone within the economy" is doing well.
Corporations are doing great. Investors are doing great. The wealthy are doing great. The middle class is doing so-so. The poor are doing pretty badly.
That's the trouble with talking about things in aggregate. If you take money away from the bottom, and give it to the top, there's no difference in the economy "on average".
The average of 5 and 5 is 5.
The average of 4 and 6 is 5.
The average of 3 and 7 is 5.
The average of 2 and 8 is 5.
The average of 1 and 9 is 5.
The average of 0 and 10 is 5.
"On average", those are all identical "economies". But in actual reality, there is a huge difference between all of them, and some of them are very "unhealthy" distributions to have.
David Bromwich ponders the relationship between two banes of our public discourse, the rise of outrageously insulting speech and the parallel rise of censorship. He finds censorship much more dangerous.
I'm so sick of people throwing around the word "censorship" when referring to public discourse among private individuals and organizations.
"Censorship" is when the government silences you. When private individuals and organizations refuse to listen to you, or refuse to give a platform to your speech, that's not censorship - that's your speech being deemed worthless in the marketplace of ideas.
There is nothing troubling about ordinary people refusing to play host to outrageous speech. There is nothing untoward about companies and corporations refusing to sponsor outrageous speech. There is nothing dangerous about educational institutions which cater to the public choosing not to tolerate outrageous speech in their facilities and on their campuses. That's ordinary life, as it has existed for all of human civilization. When people find your speech despicable, they aren't going to tolerate it in areas that they have power over.
No one is stopping you from starting your own newspaper and filling it with outrageous speech. Nothing prevents you from writing your own books, creating your own websites, producing your own video essays, etc. But at the same time, no one has to listen to your bullshit if they don't want to. If no one buys your newspaper? If no one visits your website? If no bookstores want to carry your books? If Youtube is unwilling to host your videos because of their content? Tough luck! That's their prerogative! And it always has been!
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Now, I would have liked to think that David Bromwich is simply well-meaning but misguided.
But sadly, having taken a quick look at some of the other articles on the linked page ("How Libel Kills Free Speech", "The Betrayal of the Media Leftists", "Dominion's Blow To Free Speech", "The De-Banking of Dissent"), it has immediately become clear to me that this is just the usual sort of bad-faith right wing rhetoric which serves as a dog whistle to the faithful.
"Free Speech" is a favorite excuse employed by conservatives who want to be able to say whatever they want, whenever they want, without ever facing any consequences for it. Whenever anyone criticizes their positions, or refuses to help spread their message, they cry "Censorship!" and play the victim - often even going so far as to imply or even outright claim that there's a nefarious conspiracy against them which seeks to silence them.
The reality is so much simpler than that - most people just don't want to listen to or host their bullshit and have every right not to. But to the "Free Speech" crowd, that's unacceptable - they MUST be heard, and they will accuse other people of being tyrants for exercising their right not to listen. They believe that "Free Speech" means they should be allowed to impose their speech on others freely.
Yet no matter how much they might insist, the Freedom To Speak is not the same thing as the Freedom To Have An Audience.
Also, it is truly ironic that for a group of people claiming to be "silenced" and "censored", they are able to speak out so vocally and so ubiquitously about it!
Go walk into your local bookstore and head to the section where they have political books, and browse the shelves looking for conservative titles. You will find dozens, if not HUNDREDS, of titles by conservative writers decrying how they are being "Silenced" and "Free Speech" is being "killed" by "The Leftists"!
Awful lot of speech coming from a supposedly "silenced" group of people, huh?
@Verloren
I sympathize with your position on free speech; there's a real distinction between free speech as a legal/constitutional principle, and as an interpersonal way of life. That said, what I saw of Bromwich on Wikipedia indicates he may be less of a right-wing agitator than the sort of liberal whose vocation is saying things other liberals don't always want to hear (like our esteemed blogger, perhaps?).
It seems to me the real question is whether Bromwich is naively missing our historical moment, or if he's brilliantly identifying the solution to it. His essay sounds to me a little old-fashioned; there's a sort of academic, chin-stroking, peaceable kingdom aspect to it. Has the urgency and conflictuality of our moment taken us, sadly, past that? *I don't know.*
Three points I would make:
1) The fact is, a lot of serious historical badness does start with public speech; for example, I'm in the process of reading (along with about fifty other things at once, with only slow progress on all) a dissertation that traces how Colombia's Violencia epoch was (partly, of course) born in a deterioration of political rhetoric. The question is, is today's divisive speech leading to some larger badness in this country, or is that an illusion? I truly don't know, but I do know that that's not a question that I think can be answered with a Kevin Drum-style "shape up, folks" screed. Unhelpful to pretend it's not a hard question.
2) Bromwich does miss, I think, that a good deal of public speech is now consciously meant to be divisive. In the sixties leftists called this "heightening the contradictions." I think it would be naive to assume that, at this point, right wing groups invite Charles Murray or Milo Yiannopoilos to campus because they "just want to hear what they have to say." Creating divisive media sensation is the point. And I don't think it's enough to say liberals have asked for it by restricting speech--particularly if our historical situation really is getting to a Bad Place.
3) I think there is some truth to the idea that, let's call them, progressive attitudes toward speech (including complaints of "hurt," etc.) have reduced the amount of what Rorty called "socially-accepted sadism" that was the casual norm in this country 70 or so years ago. I admit that it can go too far, that I have trouble using "they" and other unaccustomed formulations that I didn't grow up with, and that when I was teaching I feared being called to account for a stupid unmeant blunder that would reflect my age (and yes, probably some only semi-repressed biases, too). But I also don't want to go back to where we were in, say, 1960. I understand that resentment of those restrictions are *part* of what feeds Trumpism (how much, I think, is open to debate--and in any case, the role it plays in sparking Trumpist backlash doesn't make me regret our new social forebearance).
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