“I really believe this is a very sad day for America, this should never happen. If you challenge an election, you should be able to challenge an election, I thought the election was a rigged, election, a stolen election, and, I should have every right to do that, as you know, you have many people that you’ve been watching over the years do the same thing, whether it’s Hillary Clinton, or Stacey Abrams, or many others, when you, uhhh… have that great freedom to challenge, otherwise you’re going to have very dishonest elections, what has taken place here is a travesty of justice, we did nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong, and everybody knows it. I’ve never had such support, and that goes with the other ones too, what they’re doing is election interference, what they’re trying to do is interfere with an election, there’s never been anything like it in our country before, this is their way of campaigning, and this is one instance, but you have three other instances, it’s election interference. So I want to thank you for being here, we did nothing wrong at all, and we have every right, every single right to challenge an election that we think is dishonest, and we think it’s very dishonest, so, thank you very much, and I’ll see you all very soon. Thank you very much.”And, should that not suffice to get your exculpatory eloquence juices flowing, Sarah Palin is pleased to help out on Fox News:
“Do you want us to be in a civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen.We’re not going to keep putting up with this, and Eric, I like that you suggested that we need to get angry. We do need to rise up and take our country back. I would say the RNC though—that’s what’s lacking when it comes to collective anger that can be healthy, and it can be useful… where is the RNC—they hold the purse strings to the party, they hold, they hold the funds that could be helpin’ out in this situation, they have the platform, and yet they’re too timid—a buncha frickin’ RINOs, so, the RNC, they better get their stuff together, or, ya have to ask them too, What do they want as an outcome of this? Civil War?”Please. Reliably babblelicious.
In The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, physicist Marcelo Gleiser attempts to save the world by way of a pessimistic but spiritual application of the Drake equation—the mathematical framework used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations likely to exist in the Milky Way Galaxy. Gleiser has written a number of stimulating books on the existential implications of modern science, and here he continues that trajectory in what he calls a manifesto of “urgency and hope.” His goal is to change humanity’s collective mindset to divert us from the “delusional and suicidal” climate path on which we find ourselves by reframing the stories we tell ourselves about the Universe and about humankind.
The Dawn of a Mindful Universe is a wide-ranging, fast-paced journey from the pre-Socratics to Star Trek. It is both a story of the evolution of the Universe and life and a story of our understanding of them—a very wide scope for a relatively short book, which means that not every topic gets equal coverage or analysis. At times, this leads to some unevenness, but it is a worthwhile price to pay for gems such as Gleiser’s insightful discussion of the multiverse as a secular “God of the gaps.”
Gleiser’s overall goal is to chart how we came to value ourselves over nature and, in parallel, came to think that the Universe should be full of life-forms like us. He argues instead for a “post-Copernican” mindset, one that embraces the preciousness of our planet over its similarities to other worlds. Here, he builds on his earlier writings about the limitations of science to cast doubt on the uniformity principles used to assume that life is common in the Universe, warning readers not to extrapolate what we know about life on Earth to the rest of the cosmos. His arguments echo those made by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who stressed the contingency of life’s emergence and development, arguing that if a single event had been different, we might not be here…
Going against the tide of opinion, Gleiser argues that the failure so far to find life elsewhere means that we are, essentially, the only intelligent beings in the Milky Way—a conclusion he uses to call for a resacralization of nature. We should embrace a biocentric view that life must be protected as something unique and endangered, he maintains…As with the long-standing tradition of natural theology, it seems unlikely that The Dawn of a Mindful Universe is going to convince anyone who does not already agree with Gleiser’s position that the biosphere needs protecting. However, it will no doubt provide ammunition and many interesting ideas to those who already believe.
No one wants to appear before a judge as a criminal defendant. But court is a particularly inhospitable place for Donald Trump, who conceptualizes the value of truth only in terms of whether it is convenient to him. His approach to the world is paradigmatic of what the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit: Trump doesn’t merely obscure the truth through strategic lies, but rather speaks “without any regard for how things really are.” This is at odds with the nature of law, a system carefully designed to evaluate arguments on the basis of something other than because I say so. The bullshitter is fundamentally, as Frankfurt writes, “trying to get away with something”—while law establishes meaning and imposes consequence…
— Quinta Jurecic
No comments:
Post a Comment