The Rain episode is pretty cool too. It has almost no words apart from the goodbye at start. The good thing about bluey is that it teaches kids to do mischievous things and gives you ideas to do fun activities with kids.
this is the one where my wife came in while I was watching Bluey in the morning with the kids and she's like hey did something happen you're crying a lot
There seems to be a lot of negativity from the HN crowd about this. But, the reality is that your fellow Americans voted for this. If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea. Getting worked up about Trump or Musk or SV bros isn't getting us anywhere.
> If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea.
You can't convince people whose attention bandwidth is entirely consumed by the social media engagement algorithms controlled by the very people doing this.
I'm afraid this might be a fait accompli for democratic institutions. The chance to stop this was 10 years ago, by breaking up concentrated media ownership and regulating social media. We didn't, and it's too late.
Hard to say what people voted for. Any winning candidate's coalition is going to be not unified on lots of issues, but Trump's especially. Project 2025 and many of its specific policies pulled out separately all polled like total garbage, so Trump simply lied and said he'd never heard of it and wasn't doing it, and the media dutifully reported the denial. So what did the people who voted for him vote for?
His dizzying array of contradictory statements, lies, and flip-flops have always made him someone where people, his supporters in particular, see the Trump they want to see. Isolationist or imperialist, the man who would ban TikTok or its savior, pro/anti vaccine, really pick just about anything.
There was a popular sentiment in his first term that Trump seemed to believe whoever had talked to him last on any issue, but he manages to have that same effect on other people, too.
Going back to the concept of the will of the voters, Trump won Muslim-heavy Dearborn, MI on the back of people voting to protest Biden/Harris's approach to Gaza. He just announced side-by-side with Netanyahu that he wants to totally depopulate Gaza and have the US take it over and rebuild it as a resort, and throw in the West Bank too while you're at it. Is that what those people voted for?
First, Trump voters didn't exactly vote for this, at least not many. Identify politics and owning the libs, sure, but I'd say that a minority of his voters wanted to totally dismantle the administrative state - or if they thought that sounded good, they may not have been aware the repercussions of that on their lives.
Second, we all have a right to bitch about what seems like a new America being formed. If things go as badly as many of us seem to think, well it doesn't really matter if we convince trump voters they were wrong, because democracy will be have evaporated anyway. Our society has been almost molded for this moment: Americans are more isolated and alienated from each other than ever. The internet today is a fundamentally difficult place to organize any sort of coherent protest when the places people post are algorithmically controlled, manipulated by bots, and moderated.
We are broken as a society. What a waste was all that 20th century plundering and bloodshed and brilliance and effort. I would imagine that even for someone looking at the teetering American Empire with satisfaction, there is a bit of emptiness in just how stupid and pathetic this all is.
Well voters have two-four years to vote this out of office if they don't like the results. History says the Republicans will likely fail to keep power, and it will be the Democrats turn again to set the ship right, or whatever.
>Millions of lost jobs, millions of better, easier, higher value jobs created.
Partially true. But look at many of the rust belt towns now. High unemployment, opioid addictions. Has that been a fair outcome for them? Is it ok to leave them behind in exchange for some of these "higher value jobs"?
>Why? It has never been fair play. The US has the world's biggest military and they push countries around for economic gains. The US has historically installed dictators as long as the they side with the US.
Exactly my point. It has never been fair play. Hence the traditional approach to evaluating tariffs does not always work.
>No one in America wants to work in factories anymore. Unemployment is already extremely low. Where are you going to find workers to slave away in a factory in America? Illegal immigrants?
Not entirely true. Many of those workers who would traditionally work in factories are now in low wage service jobs with little job security or prospect for earnings growth.
>Partially true. But look at many of the rust belt towns now. High unemployment, opioid addictions. Has that been a fair outcome for them? Is it ok to leave them behind in exchange for some of these "higher value jobs"?
They'll need to re-invent themselves. The entire country can't be tailored to save a few towns in the rust belt. I know those states hold a lot of power because they're swing states.
>Exactly my point. It has never been fair play. Hence the traditional approach to evaluating tariffs does not always work.
That we agree. It was never a free market. It was always who had the biggest guns and point them at people standing in the way of your economic goals.
>Not entirely true. Many of those workers who would traditionally work in factories are now in low wage service jobs with little job security or prospect for earnings growth.
Seems like you've never been inside a factory making lower value goods. You're thinking of coushy factories making Mercedes Benz. I'm thinking of factories mass producing pens. You know. The other stuff Trump wants to tariff.
Maybe tariffs can work better for America. But your reasons are unconvincing.
Trust in institutions is at an all time low. The last thing we need is for these institutions to veer away from their goals to push a political agenda. Good riddance to her.
There are no apolitical institutions. You would see that more clearly when visiting (or god forbid living in) a dictatorship or totalitarian regime, where all institutions are either brought in line with the regime or abolished. And I do mean all including gardening clubs.
Enjoy institutions having the freedom to express political opinions, it is not guaranteed to last.
"Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.
Everything exists within the political climate of modern society. Institutions are forced to navigate the political landscape in which they exist.
But that does not make the institutions political in nature. There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.
When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"
The word “political” is rife with confusion. Careful discussion requires slowing down long enough to make sure different people are talking about the same thing.
One of my favorite definitions of politics is the set of non-violent ways of resolving disagreements, whether interpersonal, organizational, or governmental.
Others may reserve the word politics to only apply to governmental issues, campaigning, elections, coalition building, etc.
P.S. Language is our primary method of communication. Ponder this: why are people so bad at it? Do people really not understand that symbols can have different meanings? Do they forget? Do they want to get peeved because they want to think that other people don’t know what words mean?
> "Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.
1. The comment above didn’t say “Everything is political”.
2. "Everything is political" isn’t true. One might say that many things are influenced by politics; that’s fine, but downstream influence is neither pure single-factor causality nor equality.
3. "Everything is political" isn’t a tautology either.
Support for #2 and #3: There are things in the universe that existed prior to (and independent of) politics, like the Earth. There are phenomena influenced by politics but not inherently political, such as the phenomena of global warming or measuring the level of inflation. What to do about global warming or inflation is political, if you are lucky, meaning you have some persuasive influence at all (not the case in a dictatorship) and/or don’t have to resort to violence.
I believe you're nit-picking instead of interacting with the content of my comment.
OP did not literally say "Everything is political", they said "There are no apolitical institutions". Which is functionally the same thing. "Everything is political" is a common phrase used to express a common school of thought, [1] for example. I was interacting with this school of thought directly in my comment.
I agree with you that "Everything is political" is not true. But tpm is arguing the opposite.
"Everything is political" is a trivially true statement when using tpm's definition of "political", which is the point I was trying to get across. tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature. This means that even the rocks and trees and oceans are political, because they are at the mercy of government policy.
I am arguing against this definition of "political".
Here, I'm thinking out loud. Are "Everything is political" and "There are no apolitical institutions" are functionally the same thing?
When I read "everything is political", I interpret that as meaning "all human interactions involve power relations, competing interests, and/or resource allocation".
When I read "there are no apolitical institutions", I interpret that as meaning "all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form)".
I think it is useful to differentiate between the two phrases and their meanings. But of course they are closely related. Beyond each of us understanding what the other means, I'm not sure we're making specific enough claims to warrant litigating if "they are functionally the same". It seems like a contextual and subjective choice of where to draw a line. Feel free to say more if I'm missing something.
> tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature
I am arguing that any institution is political by its very existence. Even if the true nature of the institutions is hidden by the current regime, as it is often the case in the West.
The funniest thing, of course, is that we are arguing under an article containing a political attack in the political magazine Reason, published by the political Reason Foundation. That's not the ideal starting point if you want to prove the possibility of apoliticalness of anything.
Can you define "institution" and "political" for me, then?
I would argue that there is nothing political about a local bakery, for example. Just a dude making some cakes. He may occasionally be forced to interact with the government, but his bakery as an institution has nothing at all to do with government organizations or political theory. By its nature, a bakery is apolitical.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution is as good as any. I would not consider a small (one person or family) bakery an institution. A large one (measured by number of employees etc) would be an institution, and defining the threshold is not important here.
Political - relating to the government or public affairs of a country
My argument is that every institution is political whether it wants or not.
Bakery is very obviously political because everyone tends to eat food and as such food is an evergreen political theme. Perhaps this is more visible in some countries than others, for example in a neighboring country the price of butter is a quite common item in TV news (really), and it's not a poor country.
But also other than that, a few years ago there were some articles about a bakery that refused to bake a wedding cake for gays, and it was a public affair for a few weeks. Is that political enough for you?
I just think we are talking about different things. I hear what you are saying, but I don't think that bakeries being tangentially related to politically charged topics make them a political institution.
Bakeries also handle and store money, but that doesn't make them a bank. etc. The nature of bakeries as an institution is not political - they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies. They may interact with the government but that doesn't make it a political institution.
This started as a discussion about whether not-primarily-political institutions (like Scientific American) should have and publish political opinions. It was started by an attack of a political institution (Reason) saying they should not. That attack itself makes the target politically relevant.
Bakeries are in a similar position. Once an owner declines to serve a customer based on his (owner or customer) political leaning, it's politically relevant. If a politican attack bakers because (he feels that) the bread price is too high, it's politically relevant.
I think there was an American civil rights movement in the 60's which was in a great part about equal access to services for all ethnicities. Was that not political?
> they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies
'or public affairs'. You wanted a definition and then you are ignoring it?
I read tpm's core points as (1) all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form) and (2) Therefore, don't take institutions for granted; they rely on compatible upstream governance. I think tpm most wanted to impress the second point upon readers.
When reading dahfizz's comment ""Everything is political" is such a boring tautology."... (a) I didn't see how a point being boring has any bearing on tpm's second point; (b) So I couldn't tell if dahfizz agreed or disagreed with tpm's second point; (c) As a result, dahfizz's comment felt nit-picky to me.
Meta-commentary: It would seem that dahfizz and I both feel like the other is being nitpicky. It seems to me this is a signal that some kind of breakdown is happening on at the conversational level.
"There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles"
It will be used as an example of how we are wasting tax money by politicians. It will be used as an example of how homosexuality is natural by one side, and then it will be used as an example of how science is used to "groom" children by the other. There will be fights about whether it should be in school books, and then some states will ban all school books that mention that research, and then publishers will be forced to remove it to still have enough of a market for their books. The authors will be called out on Twitter and receive death threats, their university will cut their funding to avoid the controversy, some students will complain about it, and then that will be used to show how universities indoctrinate our kids.
And so on.
That's what "everything is political" means. When people say things like "get politics out of x," they really mean "make x match my politics", because there's no such thing as "no politics."
The important distinction is that it is possible, and should be the expectation, that you can study beetles and publish the results without any sort of political motivation or bias.
In that sense, it is perfectly possible and reasonable to "take the politics" out of scientific research. Simply do the research and publish the results. There absolutely is a thing as "no politics".
Once the results are out in the world, politicians and pundits are going to talk about it. That doesn't make the science itself a political act.
Yes, neutrality is an important principle: we want a study to proceed without outside influence.
Yet, there is an additional point worth mentioning: to the extent public money is allocated to e.g. study beetles, it is downstream of a political process. Meaning, there was allocation of resources that allows the study to proceed.
>> "Simply do the research and publish the results"
> And then you don't get any grants anymore.
This is exaggerated to make a point, which I interpret as: savvy researchers are mindful of how to conduct their work and communicate their results so they get more grants in the future. To what degree does this distort or corrupt an ideal research process? This is complicated. Political economists often frame this as a principal-agent problem. Organizational theorists discuss concepts such as resource dependence. (What other concepts would you include?)
> When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"
Could you provide some examples? TFA seems to link to opinion pieces at Scientific American and not actual research, so I'm a little unclear.
> There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.
Well, what about studying the mating patterns of humans, studying the decisions to abort, studying the decisions to change gender? Still not at all political in your country? Then, who decides if a study gets funding, who decides if it is ethical, who decides if the results can get published? It's all political decisions around the 'pure' science, which is why I mention different political regimes where stuff like this is often completely explicit unlike in more free societies where it may look like it's free of politics.
> they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism
And they should be glad, not complaining. Everyone is using their position for political activism, business owners, unions, all sorts of organisations, churches etc. There is no reason SA shouldn't do that.
Of course they only complain because they don't agree with SA.
Scientific research is apolitical. Even the act of studying abortion or transgenderism is not inherently political.
Just because scientists have to occasionally interact with political institutions does not make Science itself a political institution. Science is fundamentally apolitical.
I don't believe anyone here believes that scientific research is political. But how a society funds, publishes, and integrates scientific research is deeply political.
I believe we are living in an interesting time (yeah, that kind of 'interesting time"). Decades from now, given a historical context, I suspect a lot of the headlines like this one will be viewed very differently.
I used to love Popular Science but these magazines all died 20 years ago. Science reporting was the first type of journalism to go, much easier to write clickbait about current events. Remember Scientific American already endorsed Biden last election which was a wtf moment.
> Remember Scientific American already endorsed Biden last election which was a wtf moment.
In his first term the Trump administration tried to massively cut scientific and medical research, tried to change the rules for the board of outside scientists that review EPA decisions for scientific soundness to not allow academic scientists so that it would only consist of scientists working for the industries that the EPA regulates, tried to make it so that most peer reviewed medical research that showed products causing health problems could not be considered by the EPA when deciding if a chemical should be banned, tried to massively increase taxes on graduate students in STEM fields, wanted to stop NASA from doing Earth science, and let's not forget repeatedly claiming climate change is a hoax. I'm sure I'm forgetting several more.
I don't expect my technical publications to have an opinion on things politicians do that have nothing to do with the fields they cover, but when politicians start doing things directly concerning those fields I don't see how it is a WTF moment for them to comment.
Why do you find it a "wtf moment" that a scientific magazine would endorse the opposition candidate to one threatening to all but destroy federal funding for most scientific research in the country?
It seems clear to me that this would be the most appropriate circumstance for such an endorsement.
Interestingly the only people who are not supposed to “push a political agenda” are usually accused of being “woke” in one of the next sentences.
“Keeping politics out” brought the US - and the world - Trump, two times. Most things in life are political.
>“Keeping politics out” brought the US - and the world - Trump, two times.
Given the degree to which Trump benefits from anti-establishment sentiment, I'd like you to ponder if putting politics absolutely everywhere might very well be what got Trump elected twice. I find the idea that there just isn't enough political message completely incompatible with current reality.
If you don‘t seriously talk about politics but consider it sports and entertainment and about “winning”, you get Dr. Oz and RFKjr to decide about your health and Matt Gaetz overseeing justice.
Politics is everywhere and it has to be everywhere but politics is not Joe Rogan or Fox news. That‘s propaganda.
Can't be everything. Electrical power is like 20-35% or so of total power used in most countries. I just checked some statistics of the Umweltbundesamt, the German ~environment protection office. The electrical fraction is suprisingly low! Though it's supposed to increase because most renewable energy production is electric.
My guess is nuclear energy, more efficient cars, better insulated houses, and less heavy industry.
One of the interesting things demonstrated there is that you really don't want to be generating most of your electricity from imported oil during a global oil shock.
What's the point? His policies are what the local population were asking or even begging for. Even if the recall is successful, you will just get you a carbon copy. He is not using his position of power to abuse a powerless electorate, so why not let the local experiment go on?
Even if you are against it, you should still want that experiment to continue right? Otherwise you would get people claiming that x policy wasn't actually tried for real and that y opposition made it fail before it could bear fruits. NYC went bankrupt right before it came back and reached one of it's peaks. And maybe hitting the bottom of the barrel was what it needed.
They just elected him a year ago. He didn't change since then. He promised to do exactly what he did - release criminals from jails to the streets, reduce policing and de-emphasize small crime enforcement. This is exactly what is happening now. Why would anybody want to recall him for doing exactly what they elected him to do?
