Opinion | Forget the Multiverse. Embrace the Monoverse. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Capgras syndrome. First defined a century ago, Capgras typically describes a person’s belief that someone close to him or her — a spouse or a child — has been replaced with a duplicate impostor
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n this case, the patient believed that the whole world — everything she could observe of it — was a duplicate, a fake.I know a little bit how that feels.So do you, probably.
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It’s easy to see the appeal of the multiverse, even as metaphor: the notion that we’re surrounded by a multitude of parallel selves, one of which might be living in a better timeline than the one we’re stuck in. It’s probably no coincidence that the idea has become so popular during an era of pandemic, climate change and political turmoil, when so many of us have felt helpless and trapped.
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Opinion | Why Do Russians Still Want to Fight? - The New York Times - 0 views
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a significant number of Russian men are still keen to fight — more, in fact, than at the war’s outset. What explains the disconnect?
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One obvious reason is fear. Men called up to the army have no choice but to obey, because opposition to the war has effectively been outlawed.
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while fear and repression shape responses to the war, that doesn’t explain the readiness — willingness, even — of some Russian men to serve at the front. About 36 percent of Russian men are content to be conscripted, with the most supportive group being men aged 45 and older.
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We've Lost the True Meaning of Cynicism - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture.
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Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.
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the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.
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Sixty years on from the Cuban missile crisis, the US has learned its lessons - but Puti... - 0 views
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They itched to rectify a military balance that was tipped in favour of the US. The Cuban revolutionaries also approved. Nobody, however, asked Khrushchev what would happen if the Americans discovered the missiles en route to Cuba, before they were ready, or if they reacted violently to them once they were installed. There was no “plan B”.
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This failure was compounded by sloppy Soviet planning. The head of the Strategic Missile Force, Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, promised Khrushchev that Americans would not discover Soviet missiles because palm trees would cover them. One expert, who knew Cuba’s vegetation better, wanted to object, only to have his superior press on his foot under the table, to make him shut up. The tradition of telling bosses what they wanted to hear while sweeping awkward realities under the rug is not Soviet-Russian monopoly. Yet tradition truly flourished under the Soviets, and warped their decision-making, even in life-and-death situations.
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There is a whole library of excellent books by US historians on the Cuban missile crisis. Innumerable conferences, seminars and “games” have taken place in an attempt to learn the lessons. No wonder that Biden, his people and the US military no longer share the Kennedy-era “gung-ho” approach to nuclear war. On the contrary, they are extremely careful and attentive to the slightest dangers of escalation in Ukraine. And they are determined that a taboo on the use of nuclear weapons should be maintained.
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Health Experts Warily Eye XBB.1.5, the Latest Omicron Subvariant - The New York Times - 0 views
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Most recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses have dwindled away in a matter of weeks or months, unable to outcompete other lineages. XBB, on the other hand, got a winning ticket in the genetic lottery.
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Yunlong Cao of Peking University and his colleagues tested out XBB.1.5 in dishes of cells, comparing how it fared against earlier forms of XBB. The researchers found that the F486P mutation allowed XBB.1.5 to grab tightly to cells again. But the new subvariant could still evade antibodies as well as earlier forms of XBB.
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“XBB literally picked up the most possible mutations that it could possibly pick up from those two parents,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. The new combination made XBB one of the most evasive Omicron subvariants in existence last summer.
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Unlimited guilt, hubris, arrogance - and The Tragic Mind | by David Wineberg | The Stra... - 0 views
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The book is a purge, a catharsis, a way for others to understand and avoid making his big mistake. It focuses on tragedy, not the death of thousands, but the self-discovery by the hero of powerlessness, of fear in place of bold moves, of human failings clouding global accomplishments
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“Tragedy is not fatalism; nor is it related to the quietism of the Stoics. It is comprehension. By thinking tragically, one is made aware of all of one’s limitations, and thus can act with more effectiveness.”
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Kaplan discovers that the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare differed in one major way: the Greeks laid all the fault at the feet of the gods. It was the gods’ unchallengeable decisions that led to continual tragedie
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Opinion | Blue Lives Matter and How the Thin Blue Line Came to Jan. 6 - The New York Times - 0 views
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a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.
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as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.
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First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.
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Opinion | The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don't Know - The New York Times - 0 views
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First impressions are hard to erase, and the obstinacy that made Ms. Ocasio-Cortez an instant national celebrity remains at the heart of her detractors’ most enduring critique: that she is a performer, out for herself, with a reach that exceeds her grasp.
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In straddling the line between outsider and insider, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is trying to achieve the one thing that might just shore up her fractured party: building a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.
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In some ways, she’s asking the obvious questions: What’s broadly popular among a vast majority of Americans, and how can I make it happen? To achieve progress on these issues, she has sought common ground in places where her peers are not thinking to look. Her willingness to forge unlikely alliances, in surprisingly productive places, has opened a path to new voters — for her party, her ideas and her own political ambitions if she ever decides to run for higher office.
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Opinion | Ozempic Is Repairing a Hole in Our Diets Created by Processed Foods - The New... - 0 views
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In the United States (where I now split my time), over 70 percent of people are overweight or obese, and according to one poll, 47 percent of respondents said they were willing to pay to take the new weight-loss drugs.
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They cause users to lose an average of 10 to 20 percent of their body weight, and clinical trials suggest that the next generation of drugs (probably available soon) leads to a 24 percent loss, on average
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I was born in 1979, and by the time I was 21, obesity rates in the United States had more than doubled. They have skyrocketed since. The obvious question is, why? And how do these new weight-loss drugs work?
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Ozempic or Bust - The Atlantic - 0 views
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June 2024 Issue
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Explore
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it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.
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Opinion | Biden's Approval Is Low, Except Compared With Everyone Else's - The New York ... - 0 views
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Q. What do you call someone who speaks only one language?A. An American.
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in general, Americans’ lack of language skills is less important than their insularity, their relative unfamiliarity with what happens and how things work in other nations.
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Other countries, especially wealthy ones that more or less match the United States in technological development and general ability to get things done, are a sort of mirror that helps us see ourselves more clearly. Yet many Americans, even supposedly knowledgeable commentators, often seem unaware of both the ways other nations are similar to us and the ways they are different.
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In defense of science fiction - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion - 0 views
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I’m a big fan of science fiction (see my list of favorites from last week)! So when people start bashing the genre, I tend to leap to its defense
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this time, the people doing the bashing are some serious heavyweights themselves — Charles Stross, the celebrated award-winning sci-fi author, and Tyler Austin Harper, a professor who studies science fiction for a living
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The two critiques center around the same idea — that rich people have misused sci-fi, taking inspiration from dystopian stories and working to make those dystopias a reality.
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Opinion | Yes, Nikki Haley, the Civil War Was About Slavery - The New York Times - 0 views
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Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery
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it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?
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The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.
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AI in Politics Is So Much Bigger Than Deepfakes - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“Deepfakes have been the next big problem coming in the next six months for about four years now,” Joshua Tucker, a co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, told m
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Academic research suggests that disinformation may constitute a relatively small proportion of the average American’s news intake, that it’s concentrated among a small minority of people, and that, given how polarized the country already is, it probably doesn’t change many minds.
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If the first-order worry is that people will get duped, the second-order worry is that the fear of deepfakes will lead people to distrust everything.
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Germany's Far-Right AfD Is Worse Than the Rest of Europe's Populists - 0 views
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Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.
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Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities
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Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
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Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant - The New York Times - 0 views
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“Immanuel Kant: A European Thinker” was a good title for that conference report in 2019, when Brexit seemed to threaten the ideal of European unification Germans supported. Just a few years later, “European” has become a slur. At a time when the Enlightenment is regularly derided as a Eurocentric movement designed to support colonialism, who feels comfortable throwing a yearlong birthday party for its greatest thinker?
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Before Kant, it’s said, philosophers were divided between Rationalists and Empiricists, who were concerned about the sources of knowledge. Does it come from our senses, or our reason? Can we ever know if anything is real? By showing that knowledge requires sensory experience as well as reason, we’re told, Kant refuted the skeptics’ worry that we never know if anything exists at all.
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All this is true, but it hardly explains why the poet Heinrich Heine found Kant more ruthlessly revolutionary than Robespierre.
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Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today | Samantha... - 0 views
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The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation
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The Foundation said Gessen’s comparison was “unacceptable”, but has since backtracked and has now said that they stand behind the award.
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The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israe
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Republicans begin to target Putin 'apologists' in their midst - The Washington Post - 0 views
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The thing about the Republican Party is that it’s not so much that it likes Putin or even thinks he’s an okay guy. Polling last year showed fewer than 1 in 10 Republicans had a favorable view of Putin or trusted him to do the right thing on the world stage, and Republicans said 76 percent to 16 percent that Putin is a war criminal. These are not in line with Carlson’s professed worldview.
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But a significant and influential segment of the party has demonstrated a tendency toward a brand of moral relativism and even authoritarianism that creates an opening for giving Putin a pass.
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Shortly after it was revealed in late 2016 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, an Economist/YouGov poll showed a sharp increase in favorable GOP views of Putin. Suddenly, 37 percent had a favorable view, and 47 percent had an unfavorable one. Just 14 percent had a “very” unfavorable view of him.
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I Am Sorry But Joe Biden Crushed It in Michigan - 0 views
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Damon Linker has the most thoughtful meditation I’ve read on Aaron Bushnell, the airman who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy this weekend.
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before we get to that, I want to put in front of you Linker’s definition of small-l liberalism:
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I’m fully committed to the liberal project of domesticating and taming the most intense political passions, ultimately channeling them into representative political institutions, where they are forced to reach accommodation and compromise with contrary views held by other members of the polity.
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