In light of recent events, the politics-related topics are cropping up very quickly. Since this forum is meant mainly for science, let’s try to keep the posts that are purely about recent U.S. politics confined to this megathread. We can decide on a case-by-case basis which topics deserve to get sent here and which deserve to stand on their own.
This is how I feel after some of my discussions with DOGE fans.
I think it is a clip from an old Ma & Pa Kettle film:
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Oh my. That is so painfully poignant.
I appreciate your posting it. I had almost forgotten about Gore’s reform measures.
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. . . they might represent much better leadership than what we have now.
I’m first seeing this story behind paywalls—my WaPost and TheAtlantic subscriptions are well worth it—but I assume within hours the information will be more generally available to you all through free sources. So I’m not hesitant to post a paywalled link.
The Atlantic reported that its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a group chat where Trump’s national security team plotted attacking Yemen.
@Dan_Eastwood also saw the original National Security Team post in the Peaceful Science moderators’-approval queue but he turned it down. (That was a close call for national security. Thanks, Dan!)
Dan messaged Marco Rubio and told him that citations were necessary before he would approve its posting. Dan also told Rubio that “Why I outta murderize those Yemen Houthi militants!” needed rewording in order to comply with Peaceful Science standards of polite engagement.
POSTSCRIPT:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) asserted that “the leak showed ‘top-level officials doing their job’ and ‘no one was jeopardized because of it.’” Speaker Johnson also claimed, “You can’t prove that the war plans were leaked prior to the bombing of the Yemen Houthi militants because there’s a difference between historical science and operational science. So we can’t know anything for sure about the past because one cannot go into the past to directly observe it.”
As a result, Dan Eastwood gave Representative Johnson a 48 hour time out from PS posting.
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“Text STOP to opt-out of updates to Top Secret war plans.”
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There goes another keyboard. (That’s so sad and funny at the same time.)
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I’m jealous. All I got was a DELIVERY CONFIRMATION of Trump’s KFC bucket-o-chicken order from Grubhub.
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If, during the last administration, someone had started a thread about the dangers of having a president all too obviously suffering from dementia, would that have gotten past the moderators or would it have been deemed too off-topic for a forum whose “mission is to advance a civic practice of science”?
…I recall the Nazi propaganda magazine of that name:
https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/object/p861-p863/
From 1940 to 1945 regular features included, “Goose-stepping Your Way to Fun & Fashion”, “Lebensraum Decorating Tips”, “Pardon My Blitzkrieg”, and the very popular “Dear Adolf” advice column.
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It’s strange to me that most of the fallout seems to be over how Goldberg was added to the group chat. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the fact that they were using a less than optimally secure commercial app like Signal in the first place.
I am by now desensitized to being in the position of citing John Bolton as a voice of reason.
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Yes. I thought operating under any such unsecure platform would subject a military officer to court-martial and likely imprisonment, even for a far less dangerous situation.
Meanwhile, I have long suspected that John Bolton and Sully Sullenberger are actually the same person (although Tom Hanks has only portrayed the latter personna, to my knowledge.)
Anyway, as to the Chat Group, Trump bragged that it did get lots of upvotes. So we’ve gotta give 'em that.
And, as always, Trump complained that he didn’t much like The Atlantic and that he was surprised to hear that it was still around because “It has been failing.”
Of course, truth means nothing to him—and I had just gotten an email from the CEO (?) of the The Atlantic a few days ago explaining that their subscription volume has been rising so quickly in recent years, that they were returning to a MONTHLY periodical of a full 12 issues per year.
Indeed, I found this:
Subscriptions to The Atlantic have increased by double-digit percentages in each of the past four years––and surged 14 percent in the past year . The Atlantic has more than doubled the total number of paid subscriptions since it launched digital and a digital + print bundle four years ago.
So at a time when lots of periodicals are indeed struggling, The Atlantic is not.
Of course, why even an allegedly “struggling” periodical would make any difference whatsoever in a dangerous security breach is unclear.
If anyone wants to see a rough transcript of the leaked chat, this will help:
It’s Trump. Every publication he doesn’t like is “failing”. No matter how well it’s doing.
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The political carping on this forum is contrary to its mission and is a real turn off.
“Peaceful Science ’s mission is to advance a civic practice of science…”
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Excellent point to bring up.
As a moderator, I don’t want to address it until others have the opportunity. I would like to see a community of feedback on this.
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I’m not sure whether political discussions on the forum are “contrary to the mission” of Peaceful Science but I am personally mostly uninterested in such discussions here, especially if they proliferate into multiple threads under Conversations. I certainly don’t mean to say that “politics” shouldn’t be a major topic here–of course it should–but it might be a lot better for discussions of the latest obscene examples of incompetence, hate, and hypocrisy from the American “right” to be gathered into a single thread. Just a thought.
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I’ve also suggested this before, but we never got around to setting up a thread designated specifically for this. Let’s do that now.
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The saying is that when you mix politics and science, you get politics.
While science funding, and education policies around evolution, inescapably involve politics, some of the recent topics are pretty distant to any connection with faith and/or science. Certainly, they are interesting. There are a lot of thought provoking comments. But there is already no lack of forums and scrums dedicated to politics 24/7. My suggestion is to foster the forum mission with its unique and particular focus on faith and science, with many participants especially qualified to contribute.
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