Many weapons designers thought they were making war “more humane” by creating weapons that killed faster and more decisively.
Haber, on chemical warfare: “The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing.”
> The lord of the rings on Amazon isn’t otherwise great.
That really underscores how bad the author’s “drama requires moral ambiguity” argument is. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power did everything it could to inject moral ambiguity into a very unambiguous text—Galadriel is now an obsessive that disregards the cost of her vengeance, Halbrand presents as a possible Aragorn ancestor, Adar is just trying to redeem the Uruk, etc.—but all of it falls flat, none of the reveals land (“I am good!”), and the end result is simply narm. The casting of Arondir and Disa hardly makes a difference in the light of all these writing flaws.
I have very little sympathy for “You couldn’t write X today” arguments. Here, X is The Wire.
There is a spiritual successor to The Wire: 2022’s miniseries We Own This City. Same complicated representation of Baltimore. Same complicated representation of American policing. Good critical reception, but less widely-known than a legendary show that ran for six years and sixty episodes.
The substantive difference between the two is that 2020’s-era HBO doesn’t make long-running serials like The Wire and The Sopranos anymore (Hacks is a notable exception).
That’s not a political change forced on them by unnamed leftists. That’s a change in business model.
> pure mathematicians lost themselves in the formalization of hypothesizing/modeling and thus lost touch with mapping it to reality.
You’re describing a very small fragment of total current mathematical labor. Very few people work solely on “formalization” and even e.g. model theory or type theory have real consequences.
Your second paragraph does not make the argument you seem to intend. Most other places in the world did not require an incredibly bloody civil war in order to (partially) abolish slavery.
Southern antebellum culture was so beyond the pale it not only “didn’t think slavery was wrong,” it thought slavery was so good and so fundamental to its way of life that “mass fratricide,” as you put it, was preferable to abolition.
Insofar as originalism did “win,” it was only as a convenient signal to Mitch Mcconnell that a potential appointee would play ball.
As an academic legal theory it’s entirely sterile. There’s little actual content within it and it demonstrates almost no consistent application of its supposed principles. When it ceases to deliver conservatives relatively painless victories, they’ll move on to something else.
> Meanwhile, English common law points one way, while some legislative history, the 1866 civil rights act, and the 1924 indian citizenship act point the other way.
This is a summary of Thomas’ dissent; the majority opinion is based on more than just “English common law.” Even Thomas acknowledged this.
I’m curious why you believe an amendment will help your situation.
This case (placed alongside many others in recent memory) demonstrates that no matter how clear and unequivocal a legal text you write, the textualists can find a way to overturn it.
So what specific legal text for this amendment of yours do you believe is immune from that degree of sophistry?
I have a pet theory that it’s difficult for her to convince the far right wing of the court to let her write the majority opinion, and that’s part of what is fueling these uncharacteristic or “independent” moments.
I hear this explanation a lot but I think it's a convenient fiction. Lawmakers, at least in the US, don't seem to write their own legal texts very often. Sometimes they don't even read them [1]! Congress has no problem producing monstrously complicated laws, in any case.
I think it's likely that politicians and their funding sources have found ways to profit off of these discontinuities. The infamous Medicare "donut hole" [2] was arguably a "benefit discontinuity" of the sort mentioned by the author and pharmaceutical companies profited off of it (more than a hypothetical Medicare structure without a donut hole, not relative to the spending cap that replaced it—which profits them even more).
> how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles?
In my cohort? Several, and who knows? The recruitment effort is very visible and intense.
The US math phd market has been a slow-rolling disaster for over a decade. Everyone who can hack it outside the ivory tower is actively looking for the exits.
So why is it surprising that some of them go to work at the NSA?
> it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop, which at the end of the day is a government job... the only people they make rich are contractors
I don’t think you have context on what math phds are making in entry level positions, post-docs, or adjuncting. I just picked a random entry level NSA role on LinkedIn (doctorate + 0 yrs) and they’re offering solid six digits. There are tenured faculty (post-doc(s) + 5ish yrs) who don’t make that.
Many weapons designers thought they were making war “more humane” by creating weapons that killed faster and more decisively.
Haber, on chemical warfare: “The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing.”