2025 Readings II

 Some formatting issues occurred in the original 2025 Readings post and I don't know html so I can't fix it.  So I'm gonna make this post the place where I try and start again.  Stuff will follow ...

I read most of This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress.

The first few essays all pretty much said the same thing: there is no Theory of Everything. After reading the first essay, the following essays fell flat-- the point had already been made.  ...  And the redundancy of essay topics truly blunted the edginess of any attempt at a novel argument.  ...  I will spare you my frustration about the jargon-filled and ego-laden, pseudo-arguments made in most of the essays – at least for now. On a positive note, a few of the essays did teach us something new, and made us think deeper, drawing us to lines of thought far-removed from our typical work and interests. Like Infinity by Max Tegmark! Who knew there is more than one type of infinity?! The essay on Entropy by Bruce Parker was similarly notable. It tackled a complex problem and was able to put in words the typical confusion many have when grappling with the concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system. The idea also actually seems radical, and it is one of which I have never before heard.  ... Notice that you don't need to own the book to read the essays, they are all freely available on edge.org. 

The book had some good stuff.  Apparently there's nothing to the idea that the language you speak molds your brain differently from people who speak a different language.  I'm going to have to dig deeper into the ideas presented in Ross Anderson's "Some Questions Are Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle."  But this is the sort of book you read when you have a lot of time to sit and think and read further.  At least some of the essays, the interesting ones.

 2025/07/01

I got 500 pages into The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson.  Somebody else requested it from the library so I had to return it.

Wilson really knows how to convey a mass of information clearly and eloquently.  Great book.

From the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, brutal warfare swept across Europe. In his monumental study of the causes and the consequences of the Thirty Years War, Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Hull in England, challenges traditional interpretations of the war as primarily religious. He explores instead the political, social, economic as well as religious forces behind the conflict—for example, an Ottoman incursion left the Hapsburg Empire considerably weakened and overshadowed by the Spanish empire. ... Wilson's scholarship and attention to both the details and the larger picture make his the definitive history of the Thirty Years War. 

Next I hope to insert a quote from a Reddit review that I saw a couple of days ago:

One of the tricky things that bedevil the social sciences in pop culture is that a little knowledge about a topic can often be worse than no knowledge at all. Humans and the societies they build are mind-bogglingly complex; surface-level understandings are inherently reductive. OK, that’s by necessity. But then you throw in human tendencies to pattern-match, or frame things through their own ideological lens, or replace a foreign context with their own, and things get warped even further.

This isn’t just a problem with laymen: Wilson himself notes that much of the history of the 30 Years War was written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an age of nationalism and centralized nation-states, in which a multi-ethnic/linguistic/confessional entity that looked to have been vomited onto a map of Central Europe seemed hopelessly obsolete to historians. German historians in particular blamed the Holy Roman Empire for all the then-current ills of Germany at the time of writing.

The great success of this book is the way it unravels the overarching narratives and simplifications of popular memory of the 30 Years War. Principally this is done through very liberal doses of context; the book takes up more than a quarter of its massive length in addressing both its causes (while stressing its non-inevitability), as well as investing time in the periphery (if you would like to know more about the metallurgy and export of Dutch cannons, this is the book for you). Thanks to engaging writing it rarely drags though, and the drama is compelling.

There you go.

Um, well, ... you see ...

 

First I read this: "Dear Generation Z, Where Are You?" by Michael Albert of "Z" fame.  In this essay he asks why they aren't out protesting:

Great. But Gen Z, you are 70 million strong. 70 million. Where are you? First one, then another.

I tell myself you are preparing yourselves. You are meeting to get your arguments in order.  You will soon burst amorously onto the activist scene. Trump to savages education. Trump exiles students. Did Trump’s troops grab you? Grab a classmate? Grab someone across town? Trump commands whole universities to bend a thousand knees and some rush to do so. Are you at one of those? Are you applying to attend? Are you at work wondering who gets fired next? You must be minutes away from boiling over, mustn’t you?

How Far We've Come

 

Thom Hartman at "Common Dreams" has an editorial about the truly dangerous territory that Trump is taking the USA into:

Opinion | Do You Understand How Dangerous This Moment Is — How Far We've Drifted? | Common Dreams

He insisted that justice must be blind to nationality or legal status; that due process, as encoded in the Constitution, must apply to persons, not just citizens. If the government could arbitrarily decide who deserved rights and who didn’t, then no rights were truly secure.

It was a radical argument for the time, but the Supreme Court agreed. Adams won. And in doing so, he helped define a cornerstone of American jurisprudence: that the rule of law exists to constrain the state, not to be selectively applied at the whim of those in power.

Fast forward to 2025, and that principle is now under direct assault.

The Trump administration, enabled by allies in Congress and the judiciary, has weaponized immigration law and executive authority in ways that Adams would have recognized and condemned. They are now detaining legal permanent residents, like Mahmoud Khalil, not for crimes, but for speech. They are targeting foreign students and legal residents — often young people of color — for deportation based on political views, often under the thinnest pretexts of “national security.”

...

Because once the government claims the right to strip anyone of due process, rights cease to be rights and become privileges, granted or revoked at the whim of those in power. That is not a constitutional democracy. That is the scaffolding of fascism.

And sure enough, what began with undocumented immigrants is now creeping toward legal residents, foreign students, and even American citizens. The Trump administration recently floated the idea — with a straight face — of deporting certain American citizens to El Salvador.

Let that sink in.

So far as it goes it is an accurate summary of the openly fascist, dictatorial Trump regime.  But Hartmann fails to mention the contributions of the Democrats to this nightmare.  Biden wrote the pre-cursor to the PATRIOT Act.  Hillary Clinton normalized bush II's moving government communications to private servers.  Obama chose not to prosecute the previous bush II regime's use of torture.  (Because Democrats had approved of it at the time.)  And he expanded the state's surveillance of the populace.  And he arrogated for himself a supposed legal right to murder US citizens overseas.  

There's more, but we don't need more evidence that the USA's slide into fascism has been a bipartisan effort.