To celebrate the launch of Trump Towers Istanbul
Kurdish journalists report that a Kurdish politician, a 35-year old woman, was raped & stoned to death by advancing Turkish forces. What’s happening in Syria is due to Trump taking an unstaffed call with Erdogan & caving to his Turkish business allies.
And, because it’s always important to understand context, this 2012 tweet from Ivanka Trump.
We change over the years, whether we like it or not. In my time I’ve been an adherent of the super-rationalist position, a fan of Richard Dawkins and other notable twats; I’ve been an unthinking supporter of harmful trans-related ideology; somehow an advocate of both burning everything down and building everything up; an optimist, pessimist, realist and cynic; certainly naive: shat on but fierce, fierce but trying to help; not helping.
I expect everyone else here winces at their former selves too. iTrump of now doesn’t and can’t. She hasn’t changed at all. Nothing that’s happened in the last few days will change her opinion of the last few years.Holy fucking shit.
And the thing about Ivanka is…she probably does in some sense know how awful he is, since she and the prince used to have aspirations to be in with the Manhattan liberal elites.
latsot, that was one of the things that was notable about Dubya – how he didn’t change. Everyone touted his consistency, while complaining the Clinton swung with every public opinion poll. While I don’t agree with following every poll, the changing in the face of new evidence or new experience is a solid way of doing anything – business, government, science, theatre, photography, activism – everything I find of interest has required me to adjust in new and often unexpected ways.
Trumps are not capable of doing that because they are so internally (and externally) confident of the rightness of their views, their lives, and their own selves. When you know more than anyone else, there is no room for new information, because you already know more than the person giving it to you.
And people point to Trump’s alleged changes, but all he changes is the noises he makes. He shouts whatever gets him what he wants, and he doesn’t have any reason to stick by an idea, or to admit he ever had that idea, if it becomes obvious it is not good for Trump. But this doesn’t really mark the sort of change that equates with growth, since his only reason for doing or saying something different is to continue in the one truth he has always known, and will never change: that Donald J. Trump is a stable genius who has more to offer the world than anyone else ever did. Ivanka is second only to his own superior brain.
But did she want to be in with the elites because she shared their values, or just because she just wanted to be in with the in-crowd? I can see her assuming that if she got to go around with the popular, intelligent, influential crowd, people would assume that she was just like them.
No, I think it’s as you say…but I guess I also think she was at least exposed to some non-Fox ideas and ways of thinking, aka she learned enough to be able to fake it.
But really I’m just guessing; the reality is I don’t understand a thing about her. I don’t understand any of them.
I get that. Hell, I have single days when I can whip through those states of mind. I currently think we’re totally fucked, and I would wish that when we go extinct, we take as few other species with us as possible (with perhaps the exception of our industrial agricultural domesticates, though they aren’t to blame for their own existence). At the same time, I would like humans to smarten up and succeed, because there’s so much more cool stuff to learn about how the universe works.
We’re in the midst of a federal election in Canada. One of the parties (I won’t call it “major” because it’s new and has no hope of winning), the People’s Party of Canada, has a position on climate change (which it denies is a problem) that says that since 70’s talk of a “new ice age” didn’t pan out, we can ignore what climate scientists are saying now.
So not just not taking in new information, but denying there is new information to take in.
The PPC party leader, failed Conservative Party leadership aspirant Maxime Bernier, has had a number of well publicized twitter lash-outs at Greta Thunberg over the last months: https://www.narcity.com/news/ca/maxime-berniers-greta-thunberg-trash-talk-is-now-extending-to-her-family
But it would be unwise to discount or ignore Bernier and the PPC, seeing what happened with Trump. Electorats can be fickle and unthinking. Today’s crank could be tomorrow’s head of government.
Not Bruce, I hear that nonsense about the ‘ice age’ all the time. The problem is, that was not a scientific prediction. Science was already predicting warming. That was touted mostly by the media, and was never a mainstream idea. But hey, these deniers can’t let something like truth get in the way of a good – okay, not good, stupid, but in their mind good – story.
I do recall a time when the scientific consensus was split between runaway global cooling or warming, but that was many, many data points ago. There was, however, agreement that whichever way it went, the Earth will be screwed.
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The idea was that particulates caused by industrial activity were (and, indeed, are) increasing the Earth’s albedo–the amount of sunlight reflected back into space from the atmosphere and reflective surface features, like ice caps. Isaac Asimov wrote an article explaining the plausibility of the idea that humanity would bring about (or at least hasten) another ice age this way. This sort of speculation, even in public, is healthy and the heart of the scientific process; the world is a messy place and there are lots of possibilities. The fact that this sort of speculation existed isn’t an indictment of the scientific method or of the current consensus.
Seth – and the fact that we cleaned up the air substantially is a big reason why cooling didn’t happen. And it’s likely that the particulates masked at least some of the warming early on.