Started my day with a thoughtful retrospective on 1968 from Robert Reich.
I find such strength in history. This reflection on another year that broke people's idealism is a fortifying read as we close out 2023.
There will come years that break our hearts.
And if fortunate, we will survive them.
@MLClark Yeah, people who complain about current times should have lived through 1968. 2023 is a vacation compared to 1968.
I had an argument with a family member who was proud that the West had "won" the Cold War in the end. Some "winning" for all the men whose lives were tossed to the meat grinder of Viet Nam, and the civilians in My Lai, and all the others suffering war time atrocities in that terrible churn. What a country and what a half century might've been had, if more effort had been put into wonder then, and less into hate and warfare to fuel the ego and arrogance of a few men in Washington.
I detest that gamified language something fierce. No one "wins" in war. One survives, if fortunate. And if super fortunate, one survives it in a way that might guarantee a better peace for some time.
But only if one never forgets the cost - which is always too high when it shatters human lives.
@MLClark Shortly after I started working at KSC in 2011, a tourist yelled at me, "Why is the Muslim Obama making our American heroes fly with them Communists from the Soviet Union?!"
Never before had I encountered one sentence so compacted with falsehoods. I almost laughed at the man.
That is an impressive number of falsehoods packed into a single line! It would be funny if it weren't so depressing.
I detest the narrative, too, that we "had to" have war to achieve our current tech. War certainly hastened along the development of some tech, but in forms and through power structures that might've been avoided if we'd developed knowledge through other forms of competition & collaboration instead.
People always want to innovate. We don't need war for that drive.
That's a stunning point. I wonder how much conflict could've been avoided if better funding models existed, so one didn't have to play off a sense of false urgency to secure investment.
It's a group behaviour that exists in scientific funding models today, too, especially through unis so tied to pharmaceutical/tech groups that you mostly need to demonstrate that your project will yield something marketable to go forward.
No wonder so many ache for a +U in the real world, eh? ;)
We came... *close* during pandemic, but also got to watch in real-time as pharmaceutical companies fought shared knowledge coalitions something fierce - and even got their countries involved, to force bans on other countries using vaccine tech that might undercut their own profit margins. The US played a huge role in India's death rates for this reason. Just... absolutely galling that even pandemic couldn't give rise to a scientific world less driven by capitalism.
What will?
@MLClark If our president had not been Trump, I suspect a Democratic occupant in the White House would have ensured Big Pharma was in a more generous mood ... although we the taxpayer probably would have had to compensate them for their generosity.
I'e been frustrated by legacy media for a number of reasons in recent years, but one of the most reprehensible things mainstream media did during pandemic was play up the sense of a horse race between Pfizer, Moderna, et al - as if what the public really gave a hoot about was which company would come out tops in the stock market, and how it would "win".
Legacy media had a huge opportunity to advocate for collaboration.
It chose to stump for big business instead.
Unconscionable.
Also, you're now reminding me of the other heartbreak of that person being so high in the US presidential polls.
This person killed so many US citizens. He gutted the warehouses of emergency supplies that Obama had put into play *precisely* for crisis mitigation. He then did everything in his power to sow disinformation and distrust of medical recommendations.
So many people *in his base* died because of his actions.
And apparently that doesn't matter to the survivors, either.
@MLClark Yep, I see that here every day in Trumper Central. 25% of this county's population is 65+.
When I was in the hospital recently for my "false alarm," several staff members told me that nearly all their COVID patients are unvaccinated.
The cold and calculating political scientist in my head thinks, "Fewer votes for Trump. Natural selection at work."
How you survive with your sanity intact there is a story unto itself!
Unless... maybe the trick is having given up on sanity a long time ago? 🤔 Maybe settling for a sort of rueful contentedness with the strange wonder of life instead?
@MLClark It's a beautiful place to live, quite serene. We launch rockets. (SpaceX woke me up at 11 PM last night ...) It's far more affordable than Southern California was.
I lived in Orange County CA for 30 years. When I moved there, it was as fascistic as Brevard is today. When I left there, it was far more moderate, downright progressive in places. I hope the same will happen here.
No place is perfect. I've heard that even Medellín has a problem or two. 😉
@MLClark We don't need war to innovate, but history tells us that's usually the justification.
Von Braun and Korolev wanted peaceful space exploration, but could only get funding through military R&D. They never met, but I'm sure they were playing off one another by scaring their bosses with warnings that we'd be annihilated unless the money kept flowing.