Skiffy Flix: The Day the Earth Stood Still

Posted on Wednesday 9 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Of all the 1950s science fiction films, this one is arguably the most profound, the least typical, and the most liberal. It involves an alien arriving on Earth, but he is not hostile, despite the knee-jerk fears of the military who thinks he must be something dangerous and to be destroyed. Ultimately it’s about humanity, and whether we can mature, overcoming our tribal differences, sufficiently to be worthy of membership into some kind of interstellar community. (Still, for all its high-mindedness, it is not without a few points of naivete about how things work. But they are pretty minor.)

[Draft. I’ll do another pass and fill in/correct details.]

Gist

A peaceful alien with a powerful robot companion comes to Earth to delivery a message: Earth needs to clean up its act, and join the galactic union, or face destruction.

Take

Perhaps the best of the 1950s science fiction, it challenges the notion that aliens are hostile and must be destroyed, and turns its attention to humans and human nature, and what it would take for humanity to join an alliance of other peaceful alien races.

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Consensus Reality Is Disappearing Before Our Eyes

Posted on Wednesday 9 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • No matter how dissociated from reality something a politician says is, there are people who will believe it.
  • People who think everything (such as Hurricanes) must happen for a reason are debating between God’s wrath and Deep State weather control;
  • The founder of Politifact reflects on the failure of fact-checking.
– – –

 

Slate, Jim Newell, 8 Oct 2024: This Does Not Bode Well for the Election, subtitled “The hurricane conspiracy theories spread by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are really bad, even beyond their obvious danger.”

Summarizing the situation since Helene, and the conspiracy theories that followed…
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For Certain Values of Truth

Posted on Tuesday 8 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

As one terrible Hurricane just passed through Florida and devastated North Carolina, and another potentially worse one is lining up to hit Florida’s Gulf Coast, here are some further reminders of conservatives’ views of climate change and other matters.

Here’s a convenient baseline. Vivek Ramaswamy has a new book out called, modestly, Truths: The Future of America First.

You can click the link and preview the book to see the table of contents, and some of the text. First chapter: “God Is Real.” (Which one? No point in asking.) “The Climate Change Agenda Is a Hoax.” (Is he quibbling with the word ‘agenda’?) And so on. The reader reviews extol him for providing all the answers! In simple language! Easy to read!

There are no reviews from reputable sources.

Let’s move on.

\\\

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Have There Always Been Crazies?

Posted on Monday 7 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How is it the Republican party is increasingly dominated by cranks and crackpots? Ideas from Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson, and examples from the debates, and about Hurricane Helene.
  • NYT is finally paying attention to Trump’s mental decline;
  • JD Vance and Lance Wallnau again, and the Pentacostals who believe in angels and demons.
– – –

Either the crazies have always been with us, and they just haven’t been as apparent as they now are through social media, or something has happened in the past few decades to turn the Republican party and its followers into… well…

Robert Reich, 7 Oct 2024: How did the GOP become the party of cranks and crackpots?

(The cartoon, widely circulated over the years, is credited to Randy Molton, 2015).

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October Heat Wave, and Dark Skies

Posted on Sunday 6 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

We’re a week or more into a heat wave in the Bay Area, and it’s at least the 6th day in a row the temperature here in Oakland has been above 90. Ever since last weekend the forecasters predicted the heat dying off in another day or two, yet it persists. Something weird going on out in the ocean, apparently.

Here’s what they were saying Tuesday:

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The Myths Americans Live By

Posted on Saturday 5 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

A person’s history affects how he views the world; so too does a nation’s history affects its perceived position in the world, and its place in history. And every nation, or at least most nations, think it is very special, in some way or another. In ways that wouldn’t matter to some other nation. Everyone needs to feel special. Problems begin when people insist those reasons to feel special are somehow built into the natural order of things, and must be institutionalized.

– – –

NY Times, guest essay by Richard Slotkin, 5 Oct 2024: To Understand Trump vs. Harris, You Must Know These American Myths

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Further Notes from Our Report on the Third Planet

Posted on Friday 4 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

What would alien spectators taking notes on modern American society observe?

  • Society is unsettled, and political compromises are fragile; yet those advocating actual violence are a minority (Adam Lee)
  • Society has developed high principles to overcome tribal conflicts, but while many claim fidelity to those principles, they ignore them in practice, and rather outright lie to preserve their tribal identities. (Adam Serwer on “freedom of speech”; Trump and his supporters support violence; right wing media pushes lies about non-citizen voting; Paul Krugman on why Trump lies about disaster relief; MAGA influences lie about Buttigieg; Trump lies about his JPMorgan endorsement)
  • Despite the scientific and technological progress of the species, many in the population reject such thinking and prefer intuitive, fantastical, conspiratorial thinking. (MTG on how “they” control the weather; a GOP conspiracy theorist who thinks her opposition are driven by demons)

And what would they conclude?

——

Those who would wreck society

Some of them, though perhaps only a very few of them, would wreck society if they cannot have their way. This appears to be some kind of base, animalistic response, as if every member of the species were driven simply by animalistic motivations to survive and reproduce; a disavowment of the capability of advanced creatures to diversify and learn to get along with others unlike themselves.

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Monochrome and One-Dimensional and Upside Down

Posted on Thursday 3 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Items from Facebook about MAGA conflation; John Kenneth Galbraith; and conservatives’ lack of a sense of humor;
  • How legislators in North Carolina left homes vulnerable;
  • Fact-checking the debate, Vance’s irritation that he was fact-checked, and how Republicans consistently lie and misrepresent more than the Democrats;
  • Vance wrong on climate change, and conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene;
  • Yet another example of Fox News doing what it does best.

Three items from Facebook.

Public post by Don D’Ammassa, 30 Sep 2024:

A year or so back, I mentioned that various things we take for granted – social security, disaster relief, roads, etc. – were actually socialist. Our society is a mixture of socialist, capitalist, libertarian, and other concepts. A fairly well respected writer whose background is in the sciences objected that these were not socialist because they were good things. I can’t even begin to explain how sad that is.

Comments to this echo my thoughts about how most people don’t actually know what these words mean and conflate them all as ‘bad’:

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Skiffy Flix: When Worlds Collide

Posted on Wednesday 2 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Next of up my intermittent revisiting of 1950s science fiction movies is this one, one of the more popular and well-regarded of its era. It was produced by George Pal, who also did Destination Moon the previous year, and his touch is evident in the high-end production values, i.e. special effects, which won an Academy Award.

This is the movie in which people escape the Earth, as it’s threatened by destruction from a passing star, using a spaceship that launches on a big ramp, as in this photo, which I’m going to link from IMDb:

It resembles Destination Moon somewhat in its story line concerning scientists, their discoveries, and the engineers and entrepreneurs who put ambitious plans into place.

Gist

An approaching star and its planet foretell the imminent destruction of Earth. After some debate, a rocket ship is built to carry a select crew of refugees to the new planet, in hopes of survival there. Its mission succeeds.

Take

It’s ambitious for its time, with big special effects and a big cast, but like virtually all the other movies of its time is undermined by scientific and technical implausibilities.

Summary

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Changing the Subject

Posted on Wednesday 2 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • About last night’s Vice Presidential debate, and how Vance kept changing the subject;
  • How Vance’s contempt for climate change science belies his purported concern for children, and reflects this recent Cory Doctorow column about marshmallow longtermism;
  • How Vance’s conversion to a specific kind of Catholicism reveals his longing for a simpler, more structured past — in defiance of the classic liberal ideas of equality, personal liberty, and individual rights;
  • And a final thought about how conservatism in general is about trying to change the subject, from the present to the past.
– – –

Last night was the Vice Presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. I thought it went well only in the sense that both men spoke fluently. I kept noticing the tendency by Vance to change the subject. He would be asked a question about, say, war in the middle east, and JD would say, It’s more important to talk about why Kamala Harris is responsible for all the spoiled food in your fridge, or something equally absurd. Kamala is to blame for everything, never mind she’s only vice president; whereas Trump for some reason isn’t responsible for all the things he promised (like the Wall) and didn’t get done *as president*. The most telling example of this, and the critical point of the debate, was this.

NY Times, Matt Flegenheimer: The Moment When Vance Dodged a Jan. 6 Question but Said Plenty, subtitled “JD Vance sailed fairly smoothly through some 90 minutes of Tuesday’s debate with Tim Walz. Then the subject turned to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”

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