The survey details are very confusing, the terms change from the legend to the table, but I did not notice that the border chosen seperates Minnesota from the Dakotas. The Dakotas have relatively few I meant.
I think people have to get more serious about separating science as a procedure from scientism (that is, philosophical issues that are often discussed in tandem). When one uses the phrase, “science denier”, it often means, “you don’t agree with my philosophy/metaphysics/economic policy” rather than “you deny these particular facts”, which causes people to be rightly concerned. I’m not optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon, but this, I think, accounts for many of the issues in current discourse.
In the UK we've seen a fascinating evolution from skeptic societies to science denial conspiracy theorists. To _massively_ simplify what's a relatively complex piece of sociological weirdness: using your intuition about how the world works is a good heuristic for spotting charlatans, but it fails you badly when the science tells you something that doesn't accord with your intuition.
I tend to limit my use of "science denier" when an organization or its followers systematically deny scientific knowledge on multiple unrelated fronts.
Interestingly, I have read that in the 1920s and 30s, there was actually an organized relativity denialist movement, that wrote articles and held public protests.
Relativity was a huge philosophical shift from the comparative simplicity of Newton's laws. It's not surprising that there was resistance to it.
Tesla was famously against relativity, telling the New York Times, "Einstein’s relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king".
Indeed, and the anti-relativity movement also had a very strong undercurrent of antisemitism.
Chances are, most of the people marching against relativity had no clue about Newtonian mechanics, and were told stuff such as relativity leading to moral relativism.
Since I read Seeing Like a State, I've started to think "charlatan" whenever I hear the word "science". As in "scientific forestry", "climate science" (scientists who study Earth's climate call themselves meteorologists), "scientific racism". Is "computer science" an exception? I'm not game to speculate.
Which actual scientists describe themselves that way? We're physicists, geologists, botanists, psychologists or whatever. When someone says they're a scientist, it suggests that they're not part of any actual scientific discipline, but making a false appeal to authority.
>scientists who study Earth's climate call themselves meteorologists
This is just incorrect. Meteorologists don't study Earth's climate, they study weather. Meteorologists don't use ice cores or tree rings for their research, they study much shorter-term fluid dynamics. Climate scientists do study climate, and not weather. The disciplines are related (specifically, they're under atmospheric sciences), but to dismiss either one as being less scientific is picking favorites despite all evidence to the contrary. I suppose you could use the synonym "climatology" if you want a word without "science" in it, but it seems like a pretty silly heuristic regardless.
This version if I recall retains the horror aspect? What worries me is when they change the ending for some disturbing kind of happy ever after, the kind I can't imagine. Like what they did to the Little Mermaid. Next they'll be making a version of the Happy Prince (Hans Christian Anderson) where he remains a gold statue and keeps his jewels.
Did the Watership Down remake get sanitized? I never watched it, having been part of a generation of Australians who all got taken as school children to see it and scarred for life. It was just assumed animations are for kids. It must have been hell for the teachers, dealing with a class of traumatized 6 year olds in a cinema.
Yes it was completely more like the the book, the new animated remake. It was beautiful but far less brutal. Easier for the younger child, certainly. As a fan of the book since a child, I also found the original movie very intense and wasn't keen to revisit it.
The "A cartoon movie of life under Marxist-Socialist Communism." subtitle is wrong.
That's absolutely not what the book is about, in George Orwell's words it was "un conte satirique contre Staline" (a satiric tale against Stalin), he didn't like the cult of personality that Staling created, it was against him, not against Marxism in general.
When he wrote the book UK and USSR (Stalin) were allied against nazi germans and Stalin was kept in high esteem from British politicians, a fact that Orwell hated.
Orwell was strictly against totalitarianism (state > people) and in favor of liberalism (people > state). He considered himself an anarchist, before settling with the social-liberal-democrats.
In schools he is often represented as "anti-soviets" but that is a simplification. He was a very political intellectual who cared far more about the patterns of government and the structures of society in general. Sure, he did despised stalinism, but he did so, because it was a tyrannical, totalitarian system. In the long run it is wiser to read the fable and consider if your own government is run by power hungry pigs.
A differentiation socialists love. In reality, all explicitly Marxists regimes are well represented by the book pretty well, whatever Orwell own believes. Marx himself was incredibly authoritarian as acted in his own movement and what he was willing to tolerate to achieve his vision. Bakunin and others had pointed that out already before any real Marxist regime ever existed.
Other than the usual boring "all socialists are equal, also Bakunin" that brings me back to when I was in school 30 years ago (I wore patches of Gaetano Bresci back then)
Engels, Bakunin, Marx, were alle right on something and completely wrong on other things.
For example Bakunin was against private property and for equal mandatory work for everyone.
He theorised the abolition of money and collectivisation of the means of production.
Exactly like Marx, so why they disagreed?
Because Bakunin didn't believe in the democratic process and the universal suffrage.
He thought that "the State, any State, even the most democratic one governed by the most leftist idealists in the World, can ever give the people what they need" because he didn't believe in the institute of representation (that includes liberal democracies)
He obviously did not believe in "no taxation without representation"
Today he would put every western State in the same "totalitarian oppression of the people" ballpark.
But was this the point of my post?
No, it wasn't.
Orwell himself wrote in letters and other books (for example "Why I write") what story he wanted to tell in Animal Farm and it's not "how is life in Marxism-communism"
The book became a metaphor for every modern political system, where corruption and the betrayal of early ideals of a revolting community are the way to get the power.
Today Animal Farm describes USA or Italy as well as it did 80 years ago about Stalin and the UK politicians that first admired Mussolini in Italy and then Stalin in USSR, because the way they ruled their empire wasn't dissimilar.
So a better description of the video would be "Animal Farm - a contemporary political satire"
People do vote with their wallets, there are many websites that let you pay to remove ads. How is that not self-regulating?
> That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.
But lead wasn't known to be bad, once it was, an entire industry scrambled (successfully) to innovate to provide alternatives. I think this makes the opposite of your point lol
Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable.
The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on.
It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?
Except that advertisers' activities goes beyond just showing ads. They stalk you, collect data and build a profile which will persist forever & be used down the line against you in one way or another (either intentionally by those advertisers or by someone else if the data falls into the wrong hands) long after you've left the website.
> It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?
I'm not confident in that either.
But in a democracy, the government is the people. It's voted by the people, replaced by the people. The government may be corrupted but at least its stated goal and the way it works is to serve the people.
Corporation don't even have that as a goal. They only serve their shareholders.
So on one hand we have one party which has a stated goal to serve the people and another one which has goals that can directly contravene this, and nobody will bat an eye.
Given the American federal response to Covid-19, compared to the efforts of corporate America... it's not so clear to me that being chosen by the people is the better option.
The cost of lending and reselling a book is explicitly part of the initial remuneration.
Books deteriorate, and a normal book can only be lent or resold so often. A paperback read by one reader is usually in a good condition (but obviously 'read'), a paperback read by twenty readers (who took it along on travels, dropped it, put it on dirty surfaces, etc.) will be near the end of its life. Hard-cover library books can take more of a beating, but are read by more people and get damaged nonetheless. The average lifespan of a popular library book is short.
If books didn't deteriorate authors and publishers wouldn't make any money from second-hand or library books, but as it is, they do. Any time you read a book, it gets closer to being taken out of circulation. Any time you purchase a book and keep it, you take it out of circulation for years, decades even. That all drives the need for new editions of that book. This is no different from second-hand cars or bicycles.
