Weekly Digest – October 25, 2020

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Too much work last week to pull together a Weekly Digest so this week is a double edition.

Worth reading

Being rooted in something – whether a community, a faith, a set of traditions, a philosophy, or a devotion to a particular activity – is a way of forming an identity, of telling others, but mostly ourselves, who we are. Rootedness gives us a way of orienting ourselves in the world, of navigating our way through the challenges we face by locating ourselves vis-à-vis the phenomena we encounter… Rootedness, then, is a good thing. However, it comes with some drawbacks. Chief among those is that when we must decide either to hold tight to the ways we are rooted or to believe the reality in front of our faces…

To be useful, paradigms must accurately reflect reality. When they cease to do so, they must be replaced, or the institutions that rely upon them will inevitably fail.

Every generation delivers its own update to the worry, as old as democracy, that military crusades abroad will come back to damage freedom at home. The Founders of the United States, haunted by ancient Rome’s descent from republic to empire, resisted establishing a standing army. At the end of the First World War, the American Civil Liberties Union formed in opposition to mass arrests and deportations carried out by the Department of Justice. In our own time, it seemed apparent, until recently, that the main blowback of the war on terror would be the surveillance state inaugurated by the Patriot Act of 2001. Yet, while troubling, mass surveillance did not prompt most Americans to think that their country had become fundamentally unfree…. What is under way now, during the Presidency of Donald Trump, is something different. War—its implements, its enmities—pervades civic life…. As the war on terror loses its emotive force, American leaders cast fellow-citizens as akin to foreign enemies. Senators call for an “overwhelming show of force” against protesters with the knee-jerk zeal once reserved for distant peoples. Endless war has not merely come home; endless war increasingly is home. American politics has taken on the qualities of American wars.

A new book by a psychology professor and a former lawyer in the Nixon White House argues that Trump has tapped into a current of authoritarianism in the American electorate, one that’s bubbled just below the surface for years. In “Authoritarian Nightmare,” Bob Altemeyer and John W. Dean marshal data from a previously unpublished nationwide survey showing a striking desire for strong authoritarian leadership among Republican voters.  They also find shockingly high levels of anti-democratic beliefs and prejudicial attitudes among Trump backers, especially those who support the president strongly. And regardless of what happens in 2020, the authors say, Trump supporters will be a potent pro-authoritarian voting bloc in the years to come.

The idea of returning to something akin to normal — releasing everyone from a kind of jail — is attractive, even seductive. It becomes less seductive when one examines three enormously important omissions in the declaration.  First, it makes no mention of harm to infected people in low-risk groups… Second, it says little about how to protect the vulnerable… Third, the declaration omits mention of how many people the policy would kill. It’s a lot.

Two questions which advocates for full re-opening don’t address:  “Who dies?”  “How much do those people’s lives matter?”  I presume they don’t raise those questions because most of us would find their answers objectionable.

If American democracy is nearing a breaking point, the crisis generated by the Trump presidency could also be a prelude to a democratic breakthrough. Opposition to Trumpism has engendered a growing multiracial majority that could lay a foundation for a more democratic future.

Ending on a Positive Note

Dahn now concludes that these [Lithium-ion] batteries in a medium-range electric car would be able to last over 3.5 million km or over 2 million miles…. Most impressively, the batteries show very little to no capacity degradation when they are discharged between 25% to 50% of their capacity, which is actually how most people use their cars…. Dahn also brings up that these new super long-lasting batteries could be useful to enable vehicle-to-grid features.

  • Monika Schleier-Smith:  Experimental Physicist, 2020 MacArthur Fellow (My Ph.D. research was a couple degrees of separation removed.  I understand enough of what she’s doing to find it exciting.)