London-based writer. Often climbing.
True, but it was more restricted in its potential application (because you had to be near a reliable water source). Modern electricity generation, including renewables, doesn’t have that limitation - as the application of coal to steam power demonstrates!
But the economics are clear: if renewables stay cheaper than fossil fuels (and there’s no reason to think they won’t), governments will make the switch anyway.
We’re actually doing pretty well, globally, at shifting to renewables. We’re making more, more quickly and more cheaply than ever before.
Too busy listening to the sound of M’Benga’s voice to hear the words he’s saying.
I often wonder about this with regard to right wing Americans believing such ridiculous things. It’s seem that what Trump supporters ultimately have in common is not one set of beliefs but a shared belief in things that make no sense: that all Democrats are paedophiles, that JFK wasn’t really assassinated, that vaccines don’t work, that climate change isn’t real, that Donald Trump is anything but a foolish, evil corrupt man. What do these views have in common? They’re fundamentally foolish things to believe.
The fact is that once you believe one patently absurd thing - for example, that an interventionist god exists - your thinking gets warped. When you then make this absurdity the centre of your worldview and your identity, your views on everything become warped. After a certain point, they seem to start believing things because they make no sense.
If a person believes God actually answers prayers, something there is no reason whatsoever to believe, they’re primed to believe all kinds of other nonsense. This is exactly why many religious people have stopped believing in that kind of thing, and now take refuge in the idea of prayer as comfort or as asking for ‘strength’ rather than asking for anything specific (note that even this compromise requires them to ignore the plain meaning of the words of, e.g., the Lord’s Prayer). Most people find it uncomfortable to believe in nonsense. For others, it becomes the point.
I love Voyager, but of all Treks it’s the hardest to make a move of. Their whole thing was to get home and… they did! You can’t have ‘We need to reunite the old gang to get home from the Delta Quadrant one last time’.
Right, but we mitigate that harm (good) by depriving people of their freedom (bad). It is necessary to do it, for the exact reasons you suggest - to reduce evil overall.
I’ve been meaning to read some stuff about how to approach criminal justice if we don’t have free will, but I keep reading other stuff instead. So many books, so little time!
I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime.
Yes, absolutely. Even for the worst of the worst, their should be rehab attempts, whether it’s anger management, getting them away from gangs - whatever it is they need. I think there are only small numbers of people, if there are any at all, who are really irremediably violent and dangerous, but even for them I’m not exactly happy about putting them away indefinitely.
Prison seems the obvious one. It’s obviously (to me, that is) not desirable to deprive anyone of their freedom, but for persistently violent people I don’t think there’s a better solution, unfortunately.
So, e.g., lots of parks with publicly accessible five-a-side football pitches, ping-pong tables, basketball courts, skateparks whatever - that’s your sport. The parks also have bandstands or outdoor theatres, where there’s space for that.
Public libraries with rooms people can hire (or use for free) for book clubs, sewing circles, art classes - that’s your art.
Good thing about the above is that all these ideas already exist in lots of forms, you just pick whatever works best for your current situation.
People are already painting his face on walls.
It’s job? The vacuum guitar schema. Rough!
Bonus fun: watching YouTube’s auto-generated subtitles try to deal with Klingon.
This is irrelevant to the discussion, which was not ‘Is it an alternate timeline/who likes it?’ but ‘does it possess certain qualities?’.
Yep. I just watched ‘Past Tense’ this week, where DS9 spends an entire two-parter advocating for the humane treatment of homeless and unemployed people through an economic policy of full employment. The characters succeed in bringing this about by staging an armed uprising largely led by a black man. It’s not only ‘woke’ but explicitly socialist!
For me, trek was about people overcoming their differences and trying to work things out despite them, and being kind to each other. Newer shows lack this ideas, in my opinion.
In Discovery, a Vulcan woman gets married to a seven-foot tall walking squid man. In seasons 4-5, Book nearly destroys the galaxy and they forgive him because they understand he was traumatised. These strike me as pretty clear examples (just two, I could add more!) of people ‘overcoming their differences and trying to work things out despite them, and being kind to each other’.
This is entirely separate from the question of whether those plots lines and character arcs were well-written - they largely weren’t, IMO. But they did happen!
Photons or protons?
Assuming we’re going back far enough, antibiotics. Cure one person of the bubonic plague or tuberculosis and people will start taking you seriously.
It’s what the people voted for.
Ha, I came here to say Bitches Brew before seeing it was in the OP!
I’d add Loveless by My Bloody Valentine: much-imitated, but there’s nothing quite like it.
Also, my early '90s bias is showing here, but In Utero by Nirvana is uniquely brilliant. No one’s melded beauty and ugliness so successfully in any medium.