Politics, The Crazies, Science and Culture, Religion
- Jeff VanderMeer (and a coauthor) on DeSantis and students in Florida; David French on cancel culture and the now two Overton Windows; Amanda Marcotte on Republican hypocrisy;
- MTG’s confused timeline; bills to outlaw the Democratic Party in Florida, abortion because OB-GYNs might lose work, to require political bloggers to register with the state in Florida, and to ban public drag shows;
- Paul Krugman on social security; claims about abortion, fact-checked; a 65-year-old Danny Dunn book and its relevance to AI and homework;
- Questioning “God-given” rights as they’ve changed over the centuries and vary across the world.
Politics
The Nation, CD Davidson-Hiers and Jeff VanderMeer, 28 Feb 2023: Ron DeSantis’s War on Florida Students, subtitled “The Florida governor is using children as pawns to test the limits of his power.”
Long article co-written by SF writer Jeff VanderMeer (author of Annihilation among others). Full of examples, short on sweeping indictments aside from comments like “No solutions for actual problems. No tolerance for debate—just punching and pummeling.”
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NY Times, David French, 2 Mar 2023: Two Different Versions of ‘Cancel Culture’
French compares and contrasts the “cancellation” of Scott Adams’s Dilbert cartoon strip by many papers because of his recent incendiary racist remarks, with the recent reports that the Energy Department has concluded (with “low confidence”) that Covid-19 arose from a Chinese lab leak (as widely suspected by people antagonistic toward China, or scientists), recalling “that Facebook and Twitter once labeled misinformation and censored on their platforms.”
So what’s going on? French concludes it’s about not one but two “Overton Windows.”
The Overton window is a political term of art that roughly refers to those ideas within the political mainstream. … [T]he more that America polarizes, the more it contains not one but two Overton windows, the “red” window and the “blue” window. Speech that is squarely mainstream in Red America is completely out of bounds in Blue America, and vice versa.
Moreover most peoples’ “presumptions of [their] opponents’ views are often simply false.”
How can we end this cancel culture? Switch the presumptions. Rather than beginning with the idea that our opponents are evil people who express evil ideas, operate with a rebuttable presumption that our political foes are decent people expressing heartfelt thoughts in good faith.
He applies these premises. There is no good faith defense of Scott Adams’ words, which were “gutter-level racism,” French concludes. While the lab-leak theory has a plausibility that makes it worthy of consideration, “even if the speculation [about it] sometimes came from people you might despise.”
But recall the Mehdi Hasan interview discussed yesterday. If only both sides argued in equally good faith. They don’t.
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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 3 Mar 2023: The truth about GOP hypocrisy: Jessa Duggar’s abortion and Bill Lee’s drag are more than “gotchas”, subtitled “Laws banning drag and abortion were always meant to be selectively enforced against those the Christian right hates”
Marcotte opens,
Like many a professional opinion-haver who has been at it a long time, I grow weary of “Republicans are hypocrites” discourse. This has, of course, been a demonstrable truth for a very long time now, yet it never seems to move the needle. The party of “family values” is in the thrall of a thrice-divorced chronic adulterer who bragged about how he likes to “grab them by the pussy.” Clearly, being seen as hypocrites doesn’t bother the vast majority of Republican politicians or voters. If anything, they probably like how their bad faith “triggers” the liberals.
And yet, I can’t quite blow off two recent stories about the depraved depths of Republican hypocrisy: Right wing reality TV star Jessa Duggar Seewald terminating a pregnancy, and photos surfacing of anti-drag Republican politicians wearing women’s clothes. In both cases, it’s not just that the people involved are massive hypocrites. Republicans love to make noble claims about their intentions as if they care about “protecting life” or “protecting children.” In reality, as these stories show, their main goal is policing people’s personal lives and self-expression based on gender.
The hypocrisy is annoying. The hate that the hypocrisy reveals, however, is what is truly terrifying.
She goes on, with all the details.
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The Crazies
Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder, 1 Mar 2023: Marjorie Taylor Greene blames Biden for brothers’ fentanyl deaths, but Biden was not in office; Trump was
Also covered elsewhere. She can’t be this stupid; she must simply be playing to her base that will believe anything bad about Biden. When called out about this, her press aide hurled an F-bomb.
Salon, Samaa Khullar, 2 Mar 2023: “Amazing”: Biden dunks on MTG after she blames him for fentanyl deaths that happened under Trump
Joe.My.God, 3 Mar 2023: Ex-RNC Chair to “Crazy Fool” MTG: Shut The Hell Up
Michael Steele. “She has no clue what the hell she’s talking about. Why do we listen to this crazy fool? Marjorie Taylor Greene, please just shut the hell up. Do us all a favor.” Also, this admission: “Red states are paid for largely by blue states. If you want this divorce, figure out how you’re gonna pay for it.”
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NBC News, 1 Mar 2023: Florida Republican pitches bill to eliminate the Florida Democratic Party, subtitled
“The Ultimate Cancel Act” would “cancel” the filings of any party that “previously advocated for” slavery, which the Democratic Party did more than 150 years ago.
As if nothing has changed in the past 150 years.
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Slate: I Close-Read the 113-Page Complaint Trying to Ban the “Abortion Pill” in Texas. It’s Extremely Revealing. (Title on the linked page: “The Litigants Trying to Ban the Abortion Pill Have Some Truly Wild Legal Claims: They are seriously proposing that ending a pregnancy robs an OB-GYN of a financial opportunity.”
This reminds me one of the arguments against student loan forgiveness: it would put loan managers out of work. And simplifying the tax code would put tax preparers out of work.)
Salon: Florida GOP bill would require bloggers to “register” with the state to write about Ron DeSantis, subtitled “‘It’s hard to imagine a proposal that would be more violative of the First Amendment,’ attorney says”
Also here:
Boing Boing: Florida Republicans attempt to chill free speech
The Week: Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee quietly signs bans on drag shows, gender-affirming health care
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Science and Culture
NY Times, Paul Krugman, 28 Feb 2023: How Not to Panic About Social Security (subscriber only)
Summary:
Social Security isn’t a Ponzi scheme, it isn’t going bankrupt, and it will probably continue much as it has.
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Politifact, 2 March 2023: The top claims about abortion, fact-checked
Handy-dandy list of abortion talking points. Conclusions: abortion is *not* dangerous; it doesn’t cause infertility; first-term fetuses cannot feel pain; some surveys show that most Americans favor abortion (access) but results depend on how the question is asked; it does not cause breast cancer; Plan B is not a form of abortion; increased access does not increase demand; there is no ‘fetal heartbeat’ at six weeks; and so on. (In other words, virtually every claim made by the “right to life” crowd is incorrect. Things that are not true.) With a lengthy list of linked sources at the bottom.
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The New Yorker, David Owen, 25 Feb 2023: What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I., subtitled “Rereading an oddly resonant—and prescient—consideration of how computation affects learning.”
And what 65-year-old book is he talking about? Some SF novel perhaps? Well, sort of: he’s talking about Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, one of a series of 15 children’s books by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin, a schoolboy who lives with his mother in the house of university professor Euclid Bullfinch. I read a bunch of them as a kid, and tracked several down and reread them just a few years ago. Most volumes have some science-fictional theme; the first was about “anti-gravity paint” and others were about a weather machine, an automatic house, a smallifying machine, and so on.
The article conveys the flavor of the series and gives a good description of Homework Machine’s plot. What about AI?
First, that it can take as much work to program a computer as to do what the computer will do.
Danny, in order to program Minny to do his homework, had to do the equivalent of even more homework, much of it quite advanced. (“Gosh, it—it somehow doesn’t seem fair,” Danny says.)
At least until recently, almost everyone has thought of computers in roughly that way. … Yet Minny’s [the computer’s] abilities clearly surpass those of a mere “tool.” The children “program” it by loading it with tagged examples, from which Minny somehow produces individualized schoolwork—a method that seems less like mid-twentieth-century programming than like the way that A.I. researchers create algorithms today.
A second point is about the value of doing homework at all, and issue that’s recently being disputed.
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Religion
AlterNet, Sky Palma, 1 Mar 2023: ‘I’m not gonna yield!’ Republicans furious after Democrat questions ‘God-given’ rights at House hearing
According to Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), the notion that “all our rights are God-given” doesn’t make sense.
“I just wonder, when God decided to give women the right to vote, and why God didn’t give women the right to vote back in the 1700s,” Cohen said. “And when God decided that slavery would be illegal — God was okay with slavery until we had a war millions of people were killed, then God changed his mind? That’s hard to fathom.”
Cohen went on to provide the same analogy for abortion and interracial marriage. He clarified that he has respect for people’s belief in God, but added that he doesn’t believe the notion that every right is “God given.” “God did not decide to keep African Americans as slaves until there was a Civil War, and then God changed his mind,” he said.
Besides, why did God give Americans certain rights and not given them to other peoples? Didn’t God create all of humanity? And yet ideas and practice of civil rights vary drastically across the world. Because Americans are special? OK, then. The religious, I’ve long concluded, do not think these things through.
“Rights” are social contracts, not blessings arbitrarily handed down from on high.
