Home » Open thread 8/13/24

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Open thread 8/13/24 — 73 Comments

  1. I’m still grateful to Glenn Gould after all these many years listening to and never tiring of his music.

  2. Morning dose of Megyn Kelly talking with 2 right wing reporters. She notes that the best polls now show Harris up in the swing states of MI, WI, and PA, and maybe losing NV, AZ, and even GA. Her two guests claim the Trump campaign is unfocused and should have consistent messaging on the border and the economy.

    I have to disagree. No amount of “messaging” will help as long as Harris remains behind the castle and moat that the media have built around her. The typical attack on a castle is a siege, but there’s not enough time. Somehow, an all out assault on the media, who are manning the battlements, has to happen to get to Harris who is inside. I wish I was more astute in political machinations, I can see the problem, but have no idea as to the solution.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koWfn2rh5VI

  3. Gould is always a dilemma for me! His music does make me a little uncomfortable. It is interesting at first but then becomes boring for some reason I don’t understand.

  4. Just another open-thread comment about something I read someplace else.

    For many years, Wikipedia has had a leftist slant, but thankfully its decentralization led to an inconsistent application of leftist politics and ideology. That era of decentralization has come to a close, and the authoritarian Marxists have taken over. This article, published about a week ago, describes how it happened.

    Admittedly, the article has a gossipy, inside-baseball quality, but it’s more important than it might seem at first glance. For many people, Wikipedia is their most trusted source of information about anything and everything. Their research begins and ends with Wikipedia. And now, LLMs and Chatbots have made Wikipedia an invisible information core. Soon, it’ll be hard to escape.

    Anyway, here’s the article’s title, subtitle, and link:

    “How the Regime Captured Wikipedia : inside the cultural revolution at wikipedia, which pivoted it from a decentralized database of all the world’s knowledge to a top-down social activism and advocacy machine”

    https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-the-regime-captured-wikipedia

  5. I hear Gould.

    Quite so. Is that a bad thing?

    Gould was the first classical musician I could hear. Until Gould I thought classical music was something standardized. The composer wrote his music down on paper and musicians played it like a player piano roll.

    My back and hands hurt when I watch his posture while playing. I was not surprised to learn he had chronic back pain and hand problems.

    Interesting video, touching on several different aspects of Gould.

  6. So… everyone should go for the Gould?

    <baaaaaaaa–dum-dump…>

    Sorry, couldn’t resist. 😀

  7. Is that a bad thing if “hear Gould” is taken for a tautology of “not Bach”? In other words, Gould = Absence of Bach. Can’t possibly be Bach’s music because Gould. That’s my takeaway from Seymour Bernstein. Which, hey, some may land that way. I’d say so much the worse for them, but that’s just me.

  8. }}} which pivoted it from a decentralized database of all the world’s knowledge to a top-down social activism and advocacy machine”

    Foo. It’s always been thus.

    While reliable when it comes to basic technical info — such as, say, “Conformal Mapping” as a mathematical technique — if the topic was about — or even adjacent to — a “hot button issue” — it continually and constantly reflected the Left agenda — try and make any “unacceptable” change to the entries on McCarthy, Green Energy, Nuclear Power or anything else, and with in 10 minutes — usually far less — it would be reverted to the Leftist standard position. They have had lots and lots of people camping on pages who have no jobs and who enforce the leftist position… because you can tell the general wiki engine (e.g., non-Wikipedia wiki sites, as well) to notify you if anyone changes a given page.

    This has been the case for WAY more than a decade.

    😀

    All you are saying is that they’ve automated it fully?

    So, out of curiosity, why can’t we anti-automate it? E.G., push out our own bots to “fix” it?

    Other than the fact that I don’t really give that much of a crap, I just make sure peeps know not to trust Wikipedia for stuff like that, I could do some of that.

    EVERYONE knows better than to cite Wiki for any serious purpose or argument already. I quote it for info on Grover Cleveland, because that IS the kind of thing it’s reliable about. But I’d never cite anything even vaguely close to a hot button issue.

  9. Jashinsky is a little more aware than eliana but not much more

    What has changed harris is still the same bucket of sludge we want to pretend otherwise go ahead

    What sources wikipedia uses are critical as tp what they leave out (often reflected in thd talk section)

  10. Anyone watch the Musk/Trump X “rambling” interview yesterday? I didn’t, so am only seeing some stories about slurs, a “lisp,” said Harris resembled Melania (?!?), and that he’ll move (“flee”) to Venezuela if he loses.

  11. “Jashinsky is a little more aware than eliana but not much more”

    Miguel,

    But what does that have to do with the MSM keeping Harris out of reach? I did say I didn’t agree with either of those two people, so what’s your point?

  12. Re: Sabine Hossenfelder / Climate Change

    –“How I lost trust in scientists”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMOjD_Lt8qY

    Disappointing. She has lost trust in physicists doing foundational physics. However, she has followed the papers of climate science and she trusts climate scientists.

    The earth is warming and humans are causing it. Period. The DENIER arguments have all been refuted. The real problem is that DENIERS have the poor climate scientists running scared and holding back lest they be called Alarmists and face lawfare.

    I’d say Hossenfelder is suffering from irrationality at a level different than science. I could rebut, but I doubt I need to here.
    __________________________________

    I’m not a climate scientist, and I swear I have no aspirations to become one. But I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the basics, read lots of papers and textbooks, attended seminars, and talked to climate scientists, etc. I’m not asking you to trust me or anyone really. But I have found no major reason for concern about climate science. Is the climate changing? Yes. Are we causing it? Yes.

    Every other option for what could be causing climate change, all the denier arguments that you have heard, have long been ruled out. It’s the sun, we’re coming out of the little ice age, cosmic rays, and so on. It’s not like climate scientists ignored these possibilities; the deniers are just repeating stuff that was laid to rest decades ago.

    Yes, climate models have some problems, which I’ve talked about a few times before, but their biggest problem seems to be that they underestimate the pace of warming and the uncertainty.

    And this returns me to the social problem. I’ve found that climate scientists clearly do have social problems in their community. But these problems present themselves totally differently than in the foundations of physics. In the foundations of physics, scientists basically seem to have concluded that they don’t need to care about what the public thinks—they’ll get paid anyway, so now they just ignore all criticism.

    Climate scientists, in contrast, are afraid of the public. They’re afraid of being hunted by activists on either the left or right side, of having their privacy violated, of being quoted out of context. They’re afraid of being called alarmists. They’re afraid of being harassed by climate deniers. They’re afraid of being dragged into decades-long lawsuits. Because these things have happened and continue to happen.

    –Sabine Hossenfelder

  13. physicsguy – I disagree. Message discipline, backed with substantial air play highlighting Harris’s greatest hits, could make a difference, or could have made a difference. But opportunities have been squandered.

    If Harris was relentlessly being defined as a San Francisco progressive, who holds all of the positions that she held until about two weeks ago and utterly failed to manage the border, she might have to come out and actually take questions from the press and respond.

    Instead, for the first two weeks of her campaign, when the fight to define her was on, Trump chose to focus his attacks on calling her a DEI hire and questioning her racial identity. These attacks did not land, to put it mildly. Harris is more than happy to have a campaign about diversity, firsts, and Donald Trump’s bad manners.

    If Harris isn’t taking any flack on issues that the electorate actually cares about, she’s going remain behind her moat. Trump has already kissed away the best timing he will ever have in this campaign with frivolous drivel. It is debatable whether he has time to recover. It is less debatable whether he possesses the character and temperament to recover.

    I think there is a good chance that we will look back to the last week of July and the first week of August as the time that the election was won or lost.

  14. I really dont get how sabine could ignore the foundations and go in for what amounts to alchemy and divining.

    I understand from yergin there was some basis in observing temperature spikes but oppenheimer and mann corrupted the whole framework

    Climate scientists are shoving this chicken little narrative 24/7 the sun which is 500 times our size is less influential then the earth

    Like a fish she doesnt know there is air outside

  15. We engage in make believe or in reality

    https://x.com/dom_lucre/status/1823403085449896009

    There are some people who are not marks in philadelphia has there been a single solitary narrative you have not fallen for maralago raid carrolls law and order plagiarism the noon tale of hutchinson any notion that seemed too ludicrous

  16. I guess for some voters it must be a tough choice between “The Orange Man is Hitler!” and “I can’t afford groceries”.

  17. “Yes, climate models have some problems, which I’ve talked about a few times before, but their biggest problem seems to be that they underestimate the pace of warming and the uncertainty.” – Sabine Hossenfelder

    Wow! What has she compared the models to?
    Here’s a link that depicts the model predictions versus the observed temperatures.
    https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/image-39.png?w=803&ssl=1

    The constant propaganda is maddening. We are having a rather cool summer here in Puget Sound. Yet, every night on the news they harp about high temps and wildfires. The way they present the info, it sounds like warm temperatures cause spontaneous combustion. Most fires are caused by humans. You wouldn’t know it from the way the weather news is presented. It’s really disgusting. They’re trying to create fear of warm temperatures.

  18. So Sabine is now a protector of the poor persecuted Climate (Alchemists) Scientists.

    The evil deniers. Take a hike, Sabine.

    Don’t trust the science, trust the magic, is her motto now?

  19. “I think there is a good chance that we will look back to the last week of July and the first week of August as the time that the election was won or lost.” -Bauxite

    According to this statement, there’s a chance all the things you are criticizing Trump for doing may actually cause him to win the election. Good to know you don’t know.

  20. Huxley,

    I agree about Sabine. Over the last few months she seemed to be making progress in understanding how the climate community is compromised. Then last week she put out a video which was a complete regression. She’s disputes string theory, standard model, and skeptical of dark matter, but totally buys into the climate models.

    My own journey 20 years ago was that I hadn’t looked at the topic much but bought into the whole global warming. I then had to teach a course on energy and environment. As I dug into it, I was shocked. Just one example of the paleo climate data disproves CO2 as the climate thermostat; and there are many more examples. She can’t see it.

    The kicker is that if I was asked if the earth is warming I would say yes. Is there a greenhouse effect? Yes. Oceans rising? Yes. CO2 as the cause? No! Details are important but not convenient when there’s a huge political agenda attached.

  21. Bauxite, I’m not sure this argument has been tried to persuade never Trumpers/reluctant Trumpers/confused sometime Trumpers to vote for Donald J. Trump.

    If Kamala-Tiny Tim win and the Dem/leftists win back the House and maintain control of the Senate the first or second or third order of business will be correcting the bias on the Supreme Court and adding four justices.

    I would think that will be high on the agenda, because if she is elected there is a whole host of bills that would only pass muster if the court were friendly to a socialist agenda.

    Hold your nose, bite your tongue because at least one of the elements of government must remain in Republican control.

    One of the issues that I haven’t heard mentioned is where the voting public is on the level of government support for the average American. How popular would it be, in the name of compassion, to continue some of the covid government handouts?

    The Rescue Plan by itself lifted more people, including more children, above the poverty line with government assistance in a single year than any other piece of legislation enacted in more than 50 years.

    https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/governments-pandemic-response-turned-a-would-be-poverty-surge-into

    It’s one of the reasons, I think, that no one in government, with the exception of a few Freedom Caucus cranks, even talks about the unsustainable level of deficit spending.

  22. Well from what baseline have their been similar increases throuhh time

    I dont know what data set james burke used in after the warming an early pioneer in skydragon porn

    The richest men in the world got richer ans many got poorer during the lockdowns what special sauce is cbpp tasting

  23. “She has lost trust in physicists doing foundational physics. However, she has followed the papers of climate science and she trusts climate scientists.”

    Sounds like Gell-Mann Amnesia has kicked in.

  24. I enjoy Seymour’s insights and erudition. But the FACT that in Bach’s time, scoring was not standardized to relate the composer’s intent (until the 19thC), and thus “defining” Gould’s playing as something too different from Bach is also a needless slur.

    On the other hand, Bernstein might have a point. For example, when Stokowski transcribes Bach’s Passagalia and Fugue from organ to large orchestra, I still hear Bach. But when an Elgar transcription of a work by Bach, I mostly hear Elgar. He swamps his source.

    My point again? Some musical tastes are acquired — or not. sdferr seems to fall into this category, too.

    Would Seymour still insist otherwise? Or is he deliberately ambiguous?

  25. @physicsguy:No amount of “messaging” will help as long as Harris remains behind the castle and moat that the media have built around her. The typical attack on a castle is a siege, but there’s not enough time. Somehow, an all out assault on the media, who are manning the battlements, has to happen to get to Harris who is inside.

    The folks who comment here are largely on the back nine of life, so to speak. We’re used to thinking of “the media” as NYT-WaPo-network news etc. Are we missing out by still concentrating on these and not thinking about new media.

    I’ve never watched an interview on X, I don’t have accounts there or for TikTok or Instagram, I’ve never listened to a podcast. But tens of millions of people are doing these things and are getting perspectives that the legacy media doesn’t do. If 30 million people watched Musk’s interview with Trump, but legacy media doesn’t say anything about it, would people like me know anything about it?

    I have to wonder if there’s not a lot here we’re missing, because of age and ingrained habits.

  26. I don’t have access to Sabine’s thought processes but my guess is that her comfort with climate science is due to the fundamental physical processes not being in question.

    It’s the complexity of the interactions and feedbacks that make climate hard to understand. In that situation, building and testing models is more or less the best thing to do. I think she’s convinced of the basic scientific integrity of the approach.

    The results of the approach are of course another matter. But whenever I’ve dug into climate issues, I find activists and journalists far often to be more responsible for distortions and exaggerations than scientists. There are only a handful of what you might call “climate skeptics” who have enough expertise to actually do any climate work themselves. Everything else the climate skeptic community presents is the result of work the climate scientists themselves are doing and publishing; if it were really all fraud they would not publish things that can be used against them.

    “Not fraud” can of course include “honestly mistaken”.

  27. because they are sloppy in their work despite the incentives to come to this conclusion, one commenter at another blog, was filling me in on the all the irregularities in the dataset including the yamal ice cores out of Siberia, that disproved what mann and company were saying, this was about a year before the Ecru hack, of course said narratives were in the original ARRA stimulus funding formulas, baked in the cake

    while the Cackler was laughing about the DDOS against Musk, another inconvenient facts comes to light, she was the czar for rural broadband, and she accomplishe bupkis on that score, everything she touched turns to whatever cognate for droppings you prefer,

    the deplatforming debaking or defaming of climate skeptics, see what they did with Judith Curry, is part and parcel of this exercise, if Blofeld were alive, this is how he would roll, Maurice Strong, who inspired the Stromberg character the architect of PugWash and the Rio Summit, the first concerted exposition of this foolishness,

  28. physicsguy, regarding your comment at 2:19pm:

    – if CO2 is not the cause then what do you think is the cause?

    – the closest thing I’ve heard to “science” from the AGW crowd is that supposedly there is some “proof” – experimental?? – that there is a relationship between increasing CO2 and increasing temperature. The kicker is that the temperature goes up x degrees for each *doubling* of CO2. I. e. the relationship between CO2 and temperature is antilogarithmic with the temperature curve getting flatter over time if you assume steady increase in CO2, the opposite of the dreaded “hockey stick” effect that warmists use to scare people. Does any of this ring a bell with you?

  29. I wonder whether Sabine is familiar with Judith Curry’s work. Does anyone know if she’s addressed it?

  30. Brian E – It would be great if Trump picked an argument like that and stayed on message.

    And I’m not sure that argument works for Trump – you could accomplish the same goal by voting for Kamala or third party for president and voting GOP for Senate and House. For example, I think that case works very well for voters in Montana if Trump remains behind. Montana voters can’t afford to leave Jon Tester in the Senate because Kamala might be president. Larry Hogan has a very similar argument available in Maryland – except I think voters believe he would stand up to either candidate should they win.

    There are dozens and dozens of reasons why reasonable people should vote for the GOP ticket – and one great big reason that they may not – the erratic and offensive loose cannon at the top of the ticket, who wore out his welcome with a majority of the voting public a long time ago – and seems to be much better at reminding the voting public why that is instead of reminding them of the dozens and dozens of reasons to vote GOP.

    To your other point – I’ll amend my previous statement. If Trump loses, I think the past two weeks will be when he lost it, and not just because of the poll changes.

  31. Tester is another carbuncle on the back of the Republic, surprise there is a Libertarian candidate running there, to ensure his return, no Democrat should be elected in a red or purple state, it’s like weighing the amount of locusts you want in your salad, none thanks for me, Charlie Cheetah was the closest I went, and I have made profuse apologies for that, Warnock, Kelly, and the mummy, do nothing but infect the body politic,

    who has worn out their welcome MCConnell and his majordome Cornyn, who expedited another bogus gungrab, the blood price of the Uvalde tragic instance of criminal malfeasance,

    Hogan will be boried by a 10 point landslide they don’t even have to stuff the ballots, no one will come out for him

  32. FOAF,

    Yes, it’s the standard temp sensitivity eqn used by all the modelers. I can get it for tomorrow if you are really interested. The eqn itself acknowledges that CO2 itself doesn’t directly drive climate but produces a feedback loop with increasing water vapor which is the real greenhouse gas. Lots of parameters to play with which is what leads to all the different models.

    Check out John Christy at UAH for a comparison of models to the actual data…bottom line: even if they line up with the data initially say 30 years ago, they ALL end up deviating by at least 2 sigma.

    Why Sabine doesn’t look at Christy’s graphs I don’t understand. I’ve sent her links.

  33. Wasn’t it Letterman that had the top 10 list? Donald Trump has a Top 20 list.

    Before the never Trumpers start their endless, “well he didn’t do that”– since Donald Trump isn’t a dictator and isn’t seeking to be a dictator, some of these goals will require the cooperation of Congress.

    1 Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion

    2 Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history

    3 End inflation, and make America affordable again

    4 Make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!

    5 Stop outsourcing, and turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower

    6 large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!

    7 Defend our constitution, our bill of rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms

    8 Prevent world war three, restore peace in Europe and in the middle east, and build a great iron dome missile defense shield over our entire country — all made in America

    9 End the weaponization of government against the American people

    10 Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders

    11 Rebuild our cities, including Washington dc, making them safe, clean, and beautiful again.

    12 Strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world

    13 Keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency

    14 Fight for and protect social security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age

    15 Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations

    16 Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children

    17 Keep men out of women’s sports

    18 Deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again

    19 Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship

    20 Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success

    Liz on another thread pointed out Trump’s website had these as his goals.

  34. I’ve always made an assumption that our Constitutional rights will always protect us from abuses by the state.

    But will it? Could this happen in our country? Harris wins the presidency. The Democrats retain the Senate– and increase their majority to 60. The Democrats take back the House.

    Is it possible, given the tenor of the country, that the Democrats, for the sake of strengthening Democracy, would add four Supreme Court justices to the Court?

    Would the Supreme Court rule that Hate Speech is not protected by the First Amendment?

    We’ve always put talk like this into the “crazy conspiratorial” file. Is it?

    In this conversation on Megan Kelly about, among other things, the outrageous reaction to the Trump-Musk conversation and the potential of Musk facing all sorts of consequences in Europe for hate speech, for which the reply was “we have the First Amendment”.

    We do, but how hard would it be for that protection to disappear.

    Elon Musk’s Massive X Conversation with Trump Amid Calls of Potential Arrest, with Bethany and Karol
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vXrmGQfSOg

  35. @Brian E:I’ve always made an assumption that our Constitutional rights will always protect us from abuses by the state.

    Well, that’s just words on paper. Bad faith application by appointed and elected officials will (and does right now) result in our rights being trampled no matter what the Constitution says. It’s instructive to review the rights guaranteed to the people by the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China–which functions as a sort of intelligence test, are you dumb enough to believe the government will follow any of those pretty words?


    But will it? Could this happen in our country? Harris wins the presidency. The Democrats retain the Senate– and increase their majority to 60. The Democrats take back the House.

    It’s important to remember that the Dems do not always give the Left everything they want when they have enough power to do so. The Dems, like the GOP, are also a coalition of factions and delivering too much too fast could destroy the cohesion of their majority. (They have “maverick” Senators partly for that purpose, to provide deniability when they have to tank something the Left wants, that way they can blame 1 or 2 Senators for something that 20 of them might prefer to vote down.)

    The biggest difference is that the Dem officeholders lionize and praise their more extreme members and the GOP officeholders marginalize theirs.

    So it does, if you listen to what they SAY, seem like once the Dems get the House and 60 Senators democracy is over, and it would be if they were all on the same page about what they want to replace it with.

    I think it more likely that they might do some things on the Leftist wishlist–abortions for all!–and those things might make it much harder for the GOP to ever have Congressional majorities or influence the Supreme Court or win the Presidency. But what I think they’d use that power to do, primarily, would be crony capitalism and appropriations to favored constituencies.

    I think we’d see another 50-60 year period of Dems running everything, and this time it would look more like PRI in Mexico than it would look like it did in the 20th century.

  36. i just watched the 1950 Disney Cinderella on 4K disc (when someone makes noise about cancelling a classic i buy a hard copy) and i am amazed at how much the cartoon evil sisters look like the sisters in the 1957 Margot Fonteyn TV presentation (which i bought on DVD after you showed it here).

  37. Blinken OKs Sale to Israel of Military Equipment Worth Over $20B

    President Joe Biden’s administration on Tuesday approved more than $20 billion in new weapons sales to Israel, brushing aside pressure from rights activists to stop arms deliveries over the death toll in Gaza.

    In a notification to Congress, the State Department said it had approved a sale of 50 F-15 fighter jets to Israel for $18.82 billion.

    Israel will also buy nearly 33,000 tank cartridges, up to 50,000 explosive mortar cartridges and new military cargo vehicles.

  38. …this time it would look more like PRI in Mexico…

    Niketas Choniates:

    I don’t know how Democrats think of what they want — much of the time it just seems like the tropism of a flower to absorb light — thus the Democrats track power.

    But I think the Dem outcome is more like PRI Mexico than, say, Communist China.

  39. I was quite disappointed that Sabine Hossenfelder used the D-word — denier.

    To me that’s a scientist slipping over the edge from being a scientist to a sleazy political operative.

    And worse yet, not even realizing it.

  40. @ physicsguy > “Why Sabine doesn’t look at Christy’s graphs I don’t understand. I’ve sent her links.”

    Much as I love listening to Sabine on physics: who is sponsoring her videos, and do they have an iron in the Climate Change fire?

  41. @huxley:To me that’s a scientist slipping over the edge from being a scientist to a sleazy political operative.

    I think she probably means by that something like “skepticism in bad faith” and as a non-native English speaker she might not know the connotations of “denier” in the climate-change context, but that’s me giving her the benefit of the doubt.

    There are definitely such people as “skeptics in bad faith” though. And it’s challenging for a scientist how to respond to such people. Most scientists like to talk about what they do with the public, but they don’t much like dealing with bad faith skeptics and crackpots (who bring another set of challenges to the table).

  42. ”In a notification to Congress, the State Department said it had approved a sale of 50 F-15 fighter jets to Israel for $18.82 billion.”

    This is huge. The F-15EX is the second-best fighter in the world after the F-22, which is no longer in production. 50 Eagle IIs could probably take down the entire Iranian air force by themselves.

  43. @ miguel > “liberal-authoritarianism”

    Thank you so much for that link!
    Uncibal’s post clarified for me what has always seemed to be a contradiction: why so many liberals (in what used to be the classic meaning) become socialists, who always and everywhere are authoritarians.
    In other words: there really is no point any longer in separating Liberals from Leftists.

    The full argument is longer than I can justly summarize, but here is an excerpt as a teaser:

    The first thing is to understand what is really meant by ‘liberalism’: that is, the ideology that holds that the purpose of political power, in the form of the State, is to liberate. Here, the important point to emphasise is that, while many people still have a vague notion in their heads that this means that the State should be small, it is of course a recipe for the biggest State that there could possibly be. The essence of liberalism is the construction of a relationship between the autonomous individual and the State which guarantees, and fosters, that autonomy, and this means that the State must intervene in society in literally every single aspect in order to ensure that all individuals maximally enjoy the exercising of their autonomy at any given moment. Any social institution, whether concrete or abstract, which might constrain individual autonomy – family, church, community, employer, business, social norm, cultural taboo – must be broken down insofar as it provides a constraint, with the result being that there is prima facie no barrier that may be permitted to exist anywhere against State action.

    The important corollary of this is that since the State must maximise individual autonomy it must also maximise individual equality – in the sense that all individuals must at all times be made to enjoy perfect equilibrium of both opportunities and outcome. Liberation always gestures towards the absolute abolition and prohibition of hierarchy of any kind, because where hierarchies are found to exist, individual autonomy is in some sense or other inhibited for those who are lower in that hierarchy than higher in it. Liberal government must then always work to ensure that nobody can find himself in a position of superior status to anybody else. And liberalism, therefore, in its relentless drive to liberate, also constructs a relationship between the individual and the State in which the latter guarantees to the former that, in perpetuity, it will instantiate itself as a great moderating force in society to ensure that nobody is ever able to occupy a position of ‘privilege’ vis-à-vis anybody else.

    The inconsistencies and self-contradictions in all of this are evident to anybody with two brain cells to rub together; it is definitionally impossible to reconcile autonomy and equality in practice, because, since everybody is different and has different sets of abilities, as soon as anybody exerts their autonomy in any meaningful sense it will inevitably produce inequalities. The fact that a free market necessarily produces big differentials in wealth are an obvious example of this.

    But this irreconcilability is, as the kids say these days, a feature of liberalism, rather than a bug – it is the reason why there needs to be a liberal State at all. Communists (and this is one of the admittedly good things one can say about Marx and Engels) at least had a notion, as harebrained as it may have been, that there would one day not need to be a State, and that it would ‘wither away’ once scarcity was in effect abolished. Liberalism has no such notion, because it posits the complete regulation by the State of all human interactions in perpetuity. And it needs to do this, because it has to always make a plausible claim to be creating the conditions in which the irreconcilable imperatives of autonomy and equality can be somehow in fact reconciled.

    Liberals are therefore perfectly happy to accept trade-offs in this regard, because the making of trade-offs itself justifies the ongoing existence of liberal government.

    The result of this is a liberal authoritarianism which people do not really have the vocabulary to describe even as they sense that it is in motion and relentlessly advancing all the time. It has long gone past the point at which it could be rationally justified (there were formal inequalities that needed to be torn down; there were people in our societies who were living in de jure or de facto bondage) and has now shifted into fifth gear, such that we can properly begin to discern its pathologies and disastrous consequences. But the important point to re-emphasise is that ‘liberal authoritarianism’ is not an oxymoron; it is the inevitable playing out of the main predicate of liberalism itself, which is, to repeat, the repudiation of inequality, since equality is the necessary corollary of liberation conceived as the very purpose of government.

    This connection between human rights and liberal authoritarianism is not widely understood, but is obvious when one thinks about the way human rights typically feature in our legal landscape – not as a way to restrain State power in general (think about how human rights activists completely vacated the scene during the Covid lockdown era) but as a way to determine who gets what from the State at a given point in time. Human rights do not limit State power per se, but only as a means of shaping the scope of executive decision-making so as to guide it towards liberation and equality – or to help decision-makers in an individual case find an appropriate reconciliation between those two imperatives, or between competing claims.

    The appeal of this to somebody like Starmer, who likes everyone to fit nicely together into a grand, intricate and orderly social machine, is obvious – as is the idea that he might be the one who ultimately gets to press the buttons and pull the levers so as to fine-tune that machine to its absolutely perfect modulation. So the fact that he had a career as a human rights lawyer before entering into politics is absolutely fitting, and there is nothing unexpected or self-contradictory about his apparent lurch towards authoritarianism when in office. Authoritarianism is entirely in keeping with the zealous adherence to human rights – it is just that we do not really not have a way of conceptualising the phenomenon of liberal authoritarianism as such, and therefore imagine the two things to be somehow contradictory when they are in fact closely linked.

    And, of course, all good Liberals are sure that they, and only they, are qualified to press the buttons and pull the levers, and that this sacrifice on their part requires that they be just a little bit more equal than all the others.

  44. Having linked a post about Starmer and the UK, I second this comment from the Melanie Phillips thread, predicting that a tipping point may soon be reached, without being able to specify exactly what it will look like.

    https://www.thenewneo.com/2024/08/12/melanie-phillips-succinctly-explains-what-happened-in-the-recent-british-election-that-gave-the-left-such-an-enormous-victory-and-why/#comment-2756167
    Richard+Aubrey on August 13, 2024 at 1:28 pm said:
    “Even in free countries, the poorer working class are not free (cannot afford) many of the aspects of the good life they see others enjoying every day.
    I suspect a diffuse resentment awaits a seemingly specific injustice as a detonator. And enough is enough. Point is, riots like this have more fuel than the most recent, visible event.”

    The danger of the Liberals is also what Orwell said: they play with fire without knowing it is hot. Even if their goal really were achieving personal autonomy and equality for all, there is no practical way to do that in the temporal mundane world, so they have to compromise on the ideals in some way, as Hayek memorably argued in “The Road to Serfdom.”

    Enforcing not-freedom on some people to “ensure freedom” for others is about as unequal as you can get.

  45. More Bad news if this is true – blaming about picking Vance. Yeah, the buck never stops w/ Trump unless it is super ego soothing. Terrible pick of Vance, and he lost me w/ it. Sure seems out of kilter since Harris became his opponent.

    In August 2016 Trump had a similar meltdown, according to Scaramucci, and ‘blew everybody out’… which is when he brought in Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon as advisors.

    Maybe he can fix it like in 2016, but he can’t fix that terrible Vance pick. Fortunately, he didn’t pick Byron Donalds, Haley, DeSantis, or Scott. Let him destroy Vance instead of those. Right now, Donalds is my favorite for 2028 – has moved up fast.

  46. I think she probably means by that something like “skepticism in bad faith” and as a non-native English speaker she might not know the connotations of “denier” in the climate-change context, but that’s me giving her the benefit of the doubt.

    Niketas Choniates:

    A doubt I won’t give.

    Sabine Hossenfelder is a bright, educated, GERMAN woman. She knows about holocaust denialism and she can grasp that rhetoric it doesn’t apply to matters of scientific disagreement.

    Unless one is committed to the deplatforming and destruction of climate skeptics by any means necessary.

    I’ve been through DENIER discussions with the climate change advocates often enough to know they absolutely insist on using the term because they want to link such skepticism to gas chambers and genocide for the purposes of their propaganda.

    And so they have an excuse not to debate the issues on the merits. They stopped doing so after Climategate when they realized they couldn’t win honestly.

  47. @huxley:She knows about holocaust denialism and she can grasp that rhetoric it doesn’t apply to matters of scientific disagreement.

    The “skeptics in bad faith”, whatever word you want to call them, and whatever topic you are talking about, could be the round earth or 9/11 or whatever, have similar patterns of behavior. One of them is the “Gish gallop”. One of them is reiteration of the same talking points regardless of whether they’ve already been addressed and refuted. Motte and bailey tactics are frequently used. “Skeptics in bad faith” are not actually interested in advancing the understanding of the topic, but in winning over the “audience” of the engagement to their predetermined position, typically by appealing to prejudices and trying to give the impression of maximum uncertainty even if they have to put forward conflicting alternative accounts for what else might be happening.

    If Sabine is really conflating all critics of climate science with “denialists” then that’s irresponsible at best and bad faith at worst. But for just about any topic out there you can find “denialist” behavior operating from at least a small group of people. The Holocaust “denialists” had, for the most part, anti-Semitic motives, which is why the term got so poisonous. But as for the behavior they used in their argumentation, that’s found in lots of places.

  48. Niketas Choniates:”

    Wrong on all counts. People are mistaken on tons of stuff and sometimes they are in bad faith.

    That still doesn’t warrant pinning the DENIER label on them, unless they truly are arguing for gas chambers.

  49. Karmi, you sly troll you. So much concern, So little time.

    From the story you linked to:

    The former president’s reported meltdown comes from two staffers who worked in the White House under the former president and have since turned on him, as polls show the race with Kamala Harris is getting tighter by the day.

    Of course, former staffers are the most reliable source of information going on at Mar A Lago. And Scaramouche as a source?

    By the way, Vance is a great VP pick.

    The New York Times has however reported that Trump has not lost any confidence in Vance and has been impressed with how he has performed on the campaign trail.

  50. Brian E:

    Karmi, you sly troll you. So much concern, So little time.

    From the story you linked to:

    Relax dude…you’re starting to repeat yourself. From that POST that you are sweating bullets over:

    More Bad news if this is true…

    I had merely linked to the article, and clearly stated “if this is true”. Don’t shoot the messenger…so to speak.

    Vance was & is a disastrous VP pick, and we both know it. I know you’re worried—I once worried about Trump getting elected, so know what it is like.

    Will be linking to many more articles before November rolls around – don’t get panicky and go searching thru them for some fuking non-existent ‘Hidden Agenda’…Jeez.

  51. Karmi, yes I noticed your qualifier– ‘I knew it was a stinking pack of putrid lies, but I just couldn’t help myself’. So much concern for a troll.

    That story was bilge from first sentence to last, and of course, they had their obligatory qualifier from the NYT, which I quoted, in the last sentence of their fantasy story.

    The New York Times has however reported that Trump has not lost any confidence in Vance and has been impressed with how he has performed on the campaign trail.

    Vance is doing exactly what the campaign needs him to do– win over the working class again. He is a great pick and will be a great president sometime in the future.

  52. Karmi:

    You write: “I had merely linked to the article, and clearly stated ‘if this is true’. Don’t shoot the messenger…so to speak.”

    Classic concern troll denial. Each person chooses to post links for a reason. You chose to post that one.

    Here’s another troll-like comment of yours:

    Vance was & is a disastrous VP pick, and we both know it.

    No, “we” don’t. Nor are you a mindreader.

    The question is: are you a troll? Let’s just say you act like one too often. I happen to think you otherwise bring an interesting perspective to the comments. Why not try dropping the trolling?

  53. sigh, scaramucci went on to be in contention for a treasury post and settled for press secretary, since he couldn’t sell skybridge in the alotted time, now there was much agita about his brief tenure, as they said of bud fox, in wall streetlast I checked he was still trying to sell the company to the chinese bank hna, which had position is rosneft, which they surrendered,

  54. US allegedly presented Tehran list of Mossad agents involved in Haniyeh assassination – report “The delegation sought to deliver messages to Tehran in order to de-escalate the tensions in the region between Iran and Israel. “: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-814793

    An unnamed source in Iran’s Supreme National Security Council told Kuwaiti newspaper al Jarida that . . .

    Therefore, maintain a hugely skeptical grain of salt on hand for everything which follows in this article. Such as

    Allegedly, the American delegation presented a list with the names of ten Mossad agents within Iran whom the Americans believed were involved in the assassination, directly or indirectly.

    And yet?

  55. neo on August 14, 2024 at 4:30 pm:

    Some of you people must dream about trolls—every night.

    How many troll versions are there?! “concern troll”?!?!?!?!

    Jeez…

  56. You’re an idiot, or a troll pick one, we have tried to set you right, but you don’t listen, so as they said of Cromwell,…

  57. miguel cervantes the gibberish moron.

    Neo:
    Thanks for that link.

    OK, do me a favor—just block my addy or ban me, so that—that I am unable to troll here anymore…

  58. @Karmi: Miguel is cryptic but not writing gibberish or a moron. Reference is to Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament. Those times are well worth studying as we may soon see such times again.

  59. miguel is vastly knowledgeable and deeply insightful. As I said recently, I like his writing style, and also the thought processes that inform it. I don’t find him at all cryptic.

    He can also be very funny.

  60. We don’t have to dream of trolls at all, Karmi, you deliver the real article without asking or prodding. And the persecuted denial game doesn’t sell.

    Good luck with the eye surgery by the way.

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