Fragments

I don’t think Trump’s working relationship with Putin in the 2016 election (and beyond) amounted to his literally being a Manchurian candidate, but there is at least one feature of his political and Presidential career that forcefully echoes that of Senator Iselin in the 1962 movie, namely, the way he casts accusations at his opponents that are (more) true of himself. In the movie it was Iselin calling other candidates communists . The one accusation by Trump that has become most salient for me (writing now the day before the 2020 election) is candidate-for-re-election Trump’s railing against the movement to pull down statues or otherwise modify memorials to famous figures in American history who were also slave-holders, from Columbus to Jefferson to Lee. He claims this is an erasure of our proud history and the very meaning of America. But to me it is his railing that is the true erasure of what it means to be an American.  The present counts more than history.   ...

 © 2020 by Joel Marks and a TOTH to Nick Bostrom and David Koepsell  The physicist Enrico Fermi famously posed the puzzle of there being no evidence whatever of other intelligent life in the universe, despite the seemingly plausible assumption that intelligent life would be abundant in our galaxy and others and have had time to reach extraordinary levels of power to enable constructions and alterations and explorations that would be detectable over galactic distances. But it has just occurred to me (on Hallowe’en 2020) that this argument can be turned on its head. For perhaps the lack of evidence is itself evidence that there is other intelligence life than our own.              Here is what I have in mind. Let us suppose that the premises of Fermi’s argument are true or at least plausible, to wit:  (1)   The conditions in our universe allow for the coming into being of life as a common natural process...