Hotspur
I’d imagine for the same reasons that people study the past and try and understand how events unfold. People still mention the name Chamberlain when discussing the rise of the third reich for instance.
When Snowden released his collection of files way back when, he made the argument that the panopticon that was being built wasn’t being used in the worst way at the time of his decision to whistleblow. But his point was that the construction of such tools could not be justified based on their eventual use by a worse form of American govt.
When the liberal mainstream—and this includes Biden, major media, and most other center/center-left politicians and pundits over the last year and a half—presided over the framing of anti-semitism as the act of being critical of Israeli govt actions and supported that govt in a year long punishment campaign to destroy an ethnic group, they normalized the positions that are now being used to deport green card holders and leverage higher ed into submission. Free speech on this issue was fought over last year, and generally, the anti-free speech side won.
It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re worse, or even equal in vileness to the current admin, but it is a point worth recognizing. Enshrining Trump, as horrid as he is, as an exception may be comforting, but it removes the broader narrative that brought our present about. If we don’t work to understand this sequence with clear eyed judgment, our resistance to it will likely fail.
“Scientist” as a general concept doesn't have an inherent positive or negative value. Some scientists have invented things that saved lives or expanded our understanding of the universe. Others experimented on prisoners, or developed addicting drugs for big pharma. Personally I’d say scientists are more likely to resemble the first, not the second, but what defines the value is not the profession, but the actions they take as individuals.
His comment appeared to describe the issues with approval of scientists as a baseline, when the capitalist system they’re trapped within has other incentives and agendas. It’s a point one can certainly disagree with, but it is a coherent argument.
What’s sort of eerie though is that DCA has been having lots of these TCAS alerts If you consider multiple TCAS alert incidents, as well as the in-air collision that happened, it’s an unsettling pattern developing at DCA.
Yes I heard an anecdote that describes this trajectory well on a podcast recently: when a society or economy is at the beginning of a development arc, each mile of sewer, road, power, rail, etc can be justified, as it leads to economic growth that was not possible yet. But like you say, 50-100 years later all of that infrastructure requires replacement, maintenance . And the problem is, that investment does not deliver growth, it simply maintains the economic base you already have. So you’d have to be a really long term thinking society and factor in replacement costs in upfront somehow, which would make development substantially more expensive, all for a population that doesn’t exist yet, that you won’t know… a staggeringly difficult ask.