It’s difficult to take this spurious reasoning seriously, but simply because you think you detect some trace parallels between what Nazis engaged in and contemporary politics doesn’t make them comparable in any important way. The Nazis adopted a bunch of socialist policies, but that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a would-be Himmler.
Admittedly, there is huge space in-between zero tolerance and lawlessness at the border. But none of the positions that have been taken in American political discourse so far portends the Fourth Reich. Switzerland and Japan, to name just two liberal democracies, have far stricter immigration laws than the United States, and neither is on the cusp of fascism. Simply because the arbitrary number of allowable immigrants you’ve come up with differs from that of your political opponent doesn’t make that person a budding sociopath.
I've never seen a week in which the Holocaust, Nazis, Dred Scott and Korematsu were so trivialized.
A new paper assessing spaceflight mortality. Not sure how useful it is, given the admitted paucity of data.
[Update a few minutes later]
When a Mars simulation goes wrong. Yes, we have a lot to learn before we go to other planets, and even then, people will die, often in terrible ways. Part of the answer is that we have to be more ambitious about how many we send. Six simply isn’t enough.
Sounds like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland are becoming like third-world hell holes. I’m supposed to go up to the city in July for the ISS conference. Doesn’t seem like a great location choice.
10. Can we put the polarization genie back in the bottle, on climate or anything else? I really don’t know. But I do wonder how those advocating further radicalization of climate advocacy imagine any of this ends.
11. Making ever more radical demands might be a fine strategy were there someone to negotiate with. But by the reckoning of most prominent climate hawks, there isn’t.
12. Nor does it appear that a more inclusive climate coalition is likely to bring larger congressional majorities. Any Democrat-only climate strategy has to be predicated on not only winning but holding purple/red districts over multiple elections.
13. These are precisely the districts that radicalized climate rhetoric alienates culturally and the green policy agenda punishes economically. Since the failure of cap and trade in 2010, climate activists have taken rhetoric to 11, and what it got them was Trump.
I remember waking up on a school day to hear that he’d been shot out in California. That was a rough couple months, between it and the earlier MLK assassination. Fifty years on, a useful reminder that much of the history has been rewritten, and that both he and JFK were highly overrated. Teddy was scum, but apparently some Americans have need for royalty.
I’ve never paid much attention to him, but he seems to have been quite a character. Here’s a foreword he wrote to a book in defense of a guileless restaurant reviewer in flyover country.
I’ve never been enough of a Star Wars fan to care whether it lives or dies. I would note, though, that $40M went a lot farther four decades ago than it would today.