Re: Planck's Principle

1

More pithily and apocryphally "Science advances one funeral at a time."


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 7:23 AM
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2

Although in this realm "What fresh hell?" may sadly be the operative aphorism.


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 7:25 AM
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3

I think political beliefs change a lot quicker than that. For example, I remember believing that the Supreme Court was the best part of the US system, that it was the governmental body that protected the rights of minorities and the accused and prevented the country from becoming a theocracy.

It's not that ordinary people are more committed to truth than scientists, it's that they are more feckless, and so respond quickly to different incentives.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 7:36 AM
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4

I don't know. This ignores that GW Bushism transmuted into Trumpism in far less than generation. There are continuities (xenophobia, authoritarianism) but those have essentially always been present and show no signs of dying out.


Posted by: Yawnoc | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 9:22 AM
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5

It seems like they are able to decrease the level of democracy in tandem with their declining popularity, if not faster.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 9:31 AM
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6

Yes. It's that they deliberately reinforced and boosted in their own movement everything that the prior generation of Republicans claimed was a failing of black inner-city culture.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 9:35 AM
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7

6 to 4.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 9:36 AM
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8

I'd like to think that we weren't prepared for/didn't prevent this radicalization because we hadn't any previous experience with the Fox News/social media phenomenon (from 4chan onward), both of which are new to humanity so maybe it wasn't foreseeable what it would do to people. But then I also hate the 'no one could have predicted" talk when there are always experts right there, predicting the thing for twenty years.

I do think that if the drivers aren't neutralized, they'll keep driving people the way they have been. I don't expect that to change before the sources end.

I do sort of like when the ever-more-rightwing turns on the previously-rightwing. That part is fun.


Posted by: Megan | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 10:05 AM
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9

Megan last- that's all just part of everyone in America systematically punching left. That's why current Republican ideology so closely resembles crazy Bircher stuff from the 50s.


Posted by: Roger the cabin boy | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 7:03 PM
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10

Megan last- that's all just part of everyone in America systematically punching left. That's why current Republican ideology so closely resembles crazy Bircher stuff from the 50s.


Posted by: Roger the cabin boy | Link to this comment | 12-21-21 7:03 PM
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11

"I think political beliefs change a lot quicker than that. For example, I remember believing that the Supreme Court was the best part of the US system, that it was the governmental body that protected the rights of minorities and the accused and prevented the country from becoming a theocracy"

But that isn't so much a political belief as a belief about how the world works. You presumably still think that protecting minorities etc is a good political goal, you've just realised something about who else shares it.


Posted by: Ajay | Link to this comment | 12-22-21 4:40 AM
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12

also how Academia and Scholarly Theories work


Posted by: E. Messily | Link to this comment | 12-22-21 11:46 AM
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13

11: There is truth to that, but belief in judicial review is a fundamental belief about government. I would make arguments that it was essential to have an judicial body that was not beholden to the voters to prevent a tyranny of the majority,that without the Supreme Court the Bill of Rights would be toothless and ignored.

That is mostly what I thought about posting in our Supreme Court thread, as it occurred to me that I came of age just at the time when a child raised in a liberal home would be taught to revere the Supreme Court.

But to relate this to today's Republicans, we could look at beliefs about the importance of private morality in our political leaders. I listen to a VoX interview with never-Trumper conservative, David French. He believes that if you talked to his conservative friends that are now Trump supporters in 2014-2015, they would have said sincerely that they would never support a draft-dodging, adulterous bully, and that when they voted for him in 2016, they would say it was only because compared to Hillary Clinton, he was the "lesser of two evils". He argues that it was only in the course of the Trump presidency that they became so morally addled that they started to see Trump's vices as virtues. Can another Republican politician lead them back to true virtue? This is French's hope, and it is based on his perception that they are easily swayed.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 12-23-21 8:54 AM
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