Listening to the Universe
A radio telescope of the astronomy lab at Lord’s Bridge near Cambridge.
Quote of the Day
”A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own — that is, the written word. All the honours he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre explaining his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
J.S. Bach | Double Violin Concerto in D minor – 2nd Movement, Largo Ma Non Tanto (BWV 1043)
Long Read of the Day
Is Donald Trump a fascist?
The question on everyone’s mind. Here’s David Runciman’s take on it. As ever, he’s judicious. Here’s a sample:
In Paxton’s 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, he identified a willingness to summon up the violence of the streets to intimidate and if necessary overpower established institutions as a defining characteristic. It is what distinguishes fascism from other kinds of authoritarianism. Illiberal authoritarians invariably want to control government institutions but they aim to do so from the inside by bending them to their will. They are wary of conjuring up an independent source of power in violent paramilitaries and other kinds of street politics. True fascists such as Mussolini and Hitler have no such compunction. Their political authority was built on establishing parallel party structures – from the Blackshirts to the SS – willing to bypass the institutions of the state whenever necessary and answerable to the leader personally. It is what marked them out from other dictators of the period. Stalin in the Soviet Union simply replaced state institutions with their Bolshevik equivalents, which monopolised all political coercion. Franco in Spain worked with existing state institutions – and the Catholic church – to keep a lid on political chaos. Hitler and Mussolini called up the chaos of untamed violence when it suited them.
In that respect, Project 2025 is not a fascist document. It has a lot more in common with the governing philosophy of illiberal authoritarians such as Victor Orbán in Hungary, including in its strong embrace of traditional Christian values. Its approach is more consistent with the goal of getting sympathetic judges on the courts than a private militia into gear…
Do read the whole piece. I can’t help thinking, though, that the terminological argument about whether Trump fits the definition is beside the point — which is that he is very bad news for the US and for the world
Books, etc.
Screenshot
I finished reading Richard Evans’s book and went to the launch event for it in my College last night. I found the book compulsively readable and informative — but also disquieting because earlier in the week I had watched (a) a BBC Panorama report based on travelling to Trump rallies with some of his most dedicated fans, and (b) watching a video of his Madison Square Garden rally. In both I heard and saw echoes of the behaviour of Hitler and his entourage, right down to the use of the ‘blood libel’ of immigrants “poisoning the blood” of ‘real’ Americans (whoever they may be). The overwhelming impression I had, though, was that Trump worship has the overtones of a personality cult, much as public worship of Hitler was.
My commonplace booklet
From Charlie Warzel…
”Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.”
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
AI datacenters are keeping coal-fired power stations busy
From The Register:
With AI still the hot new trend, demand for compute to operate it is pushing the growth of bit barn capacity along with the need for ever more energy to power it all. This growth is having some unintended effects, at least in America.
In Omaha, one power company has had to abandon plans to stop burning coal to produce electricity because of the need to serve demand from nearby datacenters, according to The Washington Post, picking out Google and Meta in particular.
It claims that rising energy demands from those facilities mean that two coal-burning generators at the North Omaha power plant cannot be decommissioned without risking a power shortage for that district…
But don’t fret: According to Sam Altman & Co, AI will ‘solve’ climate change in due course.
Yeah, and pigs will fly in close formation.
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