Whumpster Fire

Even more than that, Rocky finds it horrifying that the vast majority of stars that humans can see are millions of years in the past due to light traveling long distances in space.

"You see back in time, question???"

The vast majority of stars humans can see are within a couple thousand light years, with a few exceptionally luminous ones up to around 10,000 ly away. In theory, an extremely luminous star with an absolute visual magnitude of -8 to -10 could be seen with the naked eye from up to around 20,000 to 60,000 light years away IF none of their light was blocked by interstellar dust. In practice these stars are extremely short lived and are found almost exclusively in the galactic disk, so a star that far away is likely to have most or all of its visible light blotted out.

The brightest known thing that might be a single star or star system is an object known as Godzilla, in a galaxy about 11 billion light years away, with an absolute magnitude estimated at -14.8 to -17.3. At a low-end magnitude of -15, a star this bright would be visible to the naked eye even from the Large Magellanic Cloud. At the maximum estimated brightness of -17.3, it would be visible with a magnitude of 5.1 at a million light years away. However, for a sense of scale, a star with an absolute magnitude of -10 is approximately a million times brighter in the visual spectrum than the sun, and -15 would be a hundred times brighter than that and FAR brighter than any star observed in the local universe. This is almost certainly either an extremely massive star that's undergoing something like Eta Carinae's 19th century eruption making it briefly much, much brighter than normal, or a star cluster with hundreds of extremely luminous stars, like R136.

Like, Erid is pitch dark because its atmosphere is too dense to allow light through to the surface, or any other type of radiation for that matter (thus why they didn't know to shield against ionizing radiation on the Blip-A). Nothing on the planet even evolved to have eyes as far as we know.

I'm just imagining it going like

Rocky, brandishing his texture "camera": I invented this to hear the wavelengths of electromagnetic energy Friend Grace can hear with the sensory orbs in his upper carapace

Eridian scientists: ...the WHAT Savior Grace can hear with WHAT

Rocky: also we need to invent something that emits electromagnetic energy of certain wavelengths or he won't be able to navigate his biodome. His "hearing" isn't the same as our hearing, he has several extra senses.

At a minimum this means they have light sensing instruments, including equipment good enough to measure stellar parallax. (Note: if their observatory is at the top of their space elevator, this is a bit harder than it is for Earthlings, because Erid is several times closer to its star than Earth so the stellar parallax is several times less for a given distance). We know they can measure at least some range of infrared. I'm not sure how much of the electromagnetic spectrum they were observing though, or how precise of spectral analysis they can do. E.g. did the Eridians already know Adrian (planet) existed before they launched the Blip-A, like humanity did? (in-universe. Tau Ceti e has been found to be a false positive IRL because subsequent observations haven't detected it).

The conversation might be something like:

Rocky: "Grace has weak hearing, but has two tiny biological telescopes that are part of his body."

Biologists: "Wow. That's pretty crazy and unexpected, but more or less plausible, especially if he came from a planet with a transparent atmosphere."

Rocky: "Also instead of crystalline material, the entire organs including the lenses are made of jelly."

Biologists: "They're made of WHAT?"

Rocky: "Anyway he needs electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength of [400nm] to [700nm] since that's his main navigational sense. Preferably spread around that spectrum. Also a very small amount of [280-320 nm]. There are electric light sources on his ship I've been working on reverse engineering, but the materials will fail at room temperature so they'd need to be manufactured in a cooled environment. However, Grace also said that thermal radiation above around [1500 K] will work. A tungsten or carbon wire heated to around 3000 K is more efficient and provides a wavelength range that gives him better perception."

Eridian In Charge Of Equipment Procurement: "Okay, that seems feasible... wait. Doesn't his habitat need to be full of OXYGEN? That will destroy a metal wire at those temperatures."

Rocky: "Yes. Humans enclose the wire in a light transmitting quartz ball filled with an inert gas like argon at an even lower pressure than their atmosphere. Interestingly, the information on Grace's thinking machine indicates that humans do occasionally use xenon as the filler gas and this improves the efficiency and longevity of the light source, but usually they use other gases since xenon is very rare and expensive on Earth. This technology is considered obsolete due to its energy efficiency and the limited lifespan of the light orbs, but they'll be the easiest to manufacture in a normal temperature environment: we just have to make them strong enough to handle pulling a near vacuum inside them, unless you want to make them pressurized to atmospheric pressure and then bring them down to Grace's atmospheric pressure as they're brought into his habitat.

Source

so janity is looking at this thing and thinking. this looks. a lot. like mom's description of the fuck-ass secunit

One of these people is a prominent public intellectual whose work appears in major publications. The other is running for Congress and is endorsed by the mayor of New York.

I don't know what will come of giving these people huge platforms. As a Jew, I don't think it's good. It's as bad for the general population as it is for Jews, but the fact that it's bad for Jews should be enough for morally upstanding people to resist their presence in public life.

I wish I knew a solution. People will say "vote third party" as they have for decades, but the fact remains that there is no remotely viable third party at the national level, and they tend to be full of conspiracy theorist wingnuts too. Voting Republican is just voting for a party that jumped enthusiastically into fascism over a decade ago, and they're rapidly moving away from the pretense of fighting antisemitism toward embracing antisemitic conspiracy theorism as an excuse for Dear Leader's failures re Epstein, the economy, and Iran. And not voting is just abdicating any responsibility and sitting on the sidelines.

If I were Jewish in America, I'd probably flee to Israel now while that's still an option. Since I'm not... I guess just try to vote for the least bigoted and fascist candidate you can find in any given race, which is probably still going to be a Democrat most of the time in practice, but you'll probably still be voting for someone who is friends and colleagues with Nazis/the genocidally antisemitic, even if they aren't openly so themselves. I'd say that we should call a general strike, but there doesn't seem to be enough support or will to make it happen, and even if there was, I don't think it will help much with this- all major sides of the political spectrum hate Jews, condone some form of bigotry and political violence, and a strike can make specific policy demands but it can't force changes to widespread cultural attitudes, not directly.

That pretty much leaves "hunker down and hope you're still alive by the time it blows over" or "get ready to go down fighting," and both are shit options. The former, which most people will probably take, is just surrender, learning to make your peace with fascism in the hopes that you'll be spared its worst brutality, assuming that one is privileged enough to even be given a choice (Jews won't be, neither will trans people, neither will immigrants unless they're rich). The latter option is just a fancy murder-suicide pact.

I think we are probably past the point of no return as a country for the forseeable future, that our institutions and culture have been so broken by the successive disasters of the last decades and by the tidal wave of fascist propaganda that even if Tr*mp dies or MAGA falls some variety of extremist authoritarianism is going to be the norm in America for many years, maybe decades, assuming the country doesn't collapse. Quite possibly this will be the case for the entire world, as there are precious few major powers that aren't at least semi-authoritarian already, and they are teetering.

Yet all that said, we cannot give up. That is what the fascists want: for us to accept that fascism is inevitable. If I'm the last anti-fascist on Earth, then may I always have the courage to keep fighting.

But I'm tired. Having been born to relative freedom, I dread the thought of living the rest of my life in the authoritarianism that has been the norm for most of human history, hoping that I live to taste a few years of freedom again in my old age.

And yet how can I complain? So many others have fought harder to stop this, and so many others have it much worse than I do. So many others are already dead.

Fuck Ta-Nehisi Coates is disappointing too. I used to really respect him. I'd heard he'd said some sketchy things about Israel/Palestine, but this is a whole other level. Saying he wouldn't have been able to help participating in the mass murder, torture, abduction and r*pe of Jewish civilians if he'd been there. Or, in other words: He wants to do those things, he wants to commit crimes against humanity as long as the target is Jewish, and the only reason he isn't is because there isn't a mob or army in America (yet) for him to do it with, and he's too much of a coward to do it by himself and get arrested.

He'll proudly participate in a pogrom as soon as the Overton Window shifts far enough that he thinks he can get away with it.

That is a man that should be in prison.

this story is the current obsession of those who believe in race war, most notably the owner of twitter and the rubes who follow him, and in some ways it's even dumber than the George Floyd obsession, not least because people should have learned better by now.

if I was the cop in that situation I would probably have assumed the guy on the ground was drunk! which is what British cops usually have to deal with when they get called to deal with someone being disorderly; murders are rare and the perpetrator doesn't usually call the cops.

and when the cops realised he had been stabbed they arrested the murderer and jailed him for life; this story is only an outrage if you believe cops should be clairvoyant, or arrest anyone of Indian ancestry on sight regardless of what's happening.

They arrive on scene to a call having been told that some drunk dude was being disorderly, find him delirious under a windowsil, drag him out, gently lay him in the recovery position. He says he's been stabbed, the guy who called the police says nobody was stabbed, police agree it doesn't LOOK like he's been stabbed but that they'll still check. And then they check, and then one minute later they call an ambulance. And once they figure who stabbed who the stabber is promptly arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Anything the stabber says to try to weasel out of life in prison (that the stabbed guy was racist and hate criming him) are swiftly dismissed.

The evidence of 'Two Tier Policing' here is that a murderer attempted to play the race card. But failed! The attempt to avoid a life sentence for murder by claiming the guy was racist and playing the victim didn't work, and they guy who did that got a life sentence.

Really that's a common issue with self-defense cases in general. In the American context I think it combines with some aspects of law to produce a perverse incentive.

You also see a bit of the "race to call 911" here.

Assuming the police indeed didn't realize at first that Nowak was badly injured, the question kind of becomes one of how prudently/aggressively they arrested and investigated Digwa for murder once they realized that he was and that Digwa admitted to an altercation. It's my understanding that under British law a stabbing allegedly in self defense is going to be subject to pretty intense examination of why someone had a knife and whether it was really justified.

It's also possible that there's been some drift or mile -taking here.

I am "pleasantly" surprised to not see very many responses to this focusing on "the real victims of this are the Sikhs who now face more racism" the way one expects of British officials. the judge in the case mentioned it at sentencing but that clearly wasn't the main focus of the statement and he also went on about the depraved nature of the crime.

Digwa and his family clearly expected that they could cry "racism" and get away with this scot free. I say the same thing when it comes to police misconduct: people acting with the expectation they will get away with something says more about the culture around them than the act itself. One cop killing someone is an indictment of that cop; a cop killing someone and confidently predicting that his fellow officers will help cover it up is an indictment of the entire department and police culture. The fact the family all joined in is an indictment of that family and not of the ethnicity but it sure is a Thing That Inflames Racial Tensions.

When one cop cover-up fails to work, we are told to wonder how many other times it did work. When one race hoax cover-up fails to work, we are told that was clearly just that one time and isn't a trend. When a demagogue like Louis Farrakhan (to use an old example) inflames racial tensions by saying things of dubious truth, that supposedly proves how mistreated black people are that the racial tensions exist to inflame in the first place. When Nigel Farage does the same, that supposedly proves that he's just an evil liar. Black American people protesting over an event that might not mean what they think it does supposedly proves their justified anger; white people doing exactly the same supposedly proves their anger is unjustified. Black American protests erupting into riots is the rage of the disenfranchised that gives credibility to their cause. White protests erupting into riots is a terrifying display of far-right fascism that discredits them forever.

People who show up to the emergency room with random household objects stuck up their asses frequently claim they were vacuuming or doing some other normal household task while they happened to be nude, and happened to slip and fall in an inopportune position. From the fact that these people clearly expect that they can say "million to one shot, doc" and get away with it scot free. From this, we can surmise that for every instance of medical professionals calling BS on this excuse there are numerous times when they fall for it, and we can infer things about the culture of the medical system from this.

...Using an unsuccessful cover-up to infer that there must be successful cover-ups using the same strategy, because if it wasn't frequently effective people wouldn't expect it to work, isn't a sound argument without other supporting evidence because people come up with terrible excuses or cover stories all the time, either because they're grasping at straws since they don't have anything better, or because having the poor judgement to do stupid shit in the first place is correlated with not having good judgement of whether an excuse is likely to work. There have to be examples of the coverup actually being successful, otherwise there's no proof that the perpetrator and his family didn't, say, assume they could get away with violent crimes by accusing the victim of racism because they heard the Daily Mail say that immigrants were successfully doing that all the time. Or some other reason they had a counterfactual belief that it would work.