Bob Zimmerman, on the cancel culture within the space and science community.
Keith has blocked me on Twitter, and I suspect I’m on a lot of blocklists. I follow a lot of space people, like Carolyn, but only engage them on space and science topics. I don’t argue non-space politics with space people, because many of them are leftist loons, which is why I maintain separate accounts for space stuff and the book.
[Update Wednesday morning]
I thought it odd that Kieth had deleted my comments yesterday. Someone *asked* about some happenings in the Portland area, and I described them, and their basis.
I guess that’s not acceptable.
Sorry to see things come to this pass.
At this rate, it’s really no surprise to see people like Deudeny becoming prominent.
I had three of mine deleted. Very disappointed to see such partisan hypocrisy on his part. But I got the message, so no more NASA Watch for me.
I like Keith but damn he needs to lighten up and not be so easily offended.
You’re a saint then, because he is most unlikable. Online at least.
8:30 AM ET and I cannot get to the link. IP Address Could Not Be Found.
Hopefully server maintenance and not canceled.
9 AM, it is working now.
The progressive scientist will get a chance to carefully consider priorities and fealty to a profession when their federal funding becomes subservient to the demands of social justice.
She thinks Elon’s money should be spent on woke global warming causes.
I wonder how she feels about the billions of taxpayer dollars spent on space telescopes and deep space probes instead of the green new deal? I hear Cassini and Hyugens cost about three and a quarter billion dollars. I bet Elon will be able to send a manned expedition to Titan for less than that once starship is established.
I strongly suspect she would rupture from the contortions she would undergo squaring those two disparate positions.
She=Porco
If she can’t justify the money Elon is spending on SpaceX’s efforts, how can she justify the money being spent at JPL on planetary science – you know, the stuff that’s given her a job for decades?
In any event, I thought Elon was spending a lot of his money trying to make us into an electric automobile economy. Apparently that cuts him no ice.
You can’t make the lefty wokescolds happy, happiness simply isn’t in their nature.
She probably wouldn’t like people looking at her finances and bullying her about how she spends her money. Sort of like how Chaz/Chop don’t like when people look at how they run their occupied territories in ways that don’t comport to their professed ideals.
Let me tell you what e should call these wokescolds, we should call them Herberts.
We reach, brother!
You may remember an “Outer Limits” (the original one) about a machine designated “OBITS”. It allowed you to spy on anyone at any time and was highly addictive. The upshot of the episode was that OBITS was planted here by an alien race and was designed to kill human society and culture prior to invasion.
Twitter is the real life OBITS. It’s nonlinear in character in that it self selects destructive ideas from the noise background and projects the most destructive and grotesque into the mainstream conversation. The dopamine hit this creates in people accounts for it’s ability to addict and the “instant” mob mentality that it supports radicalism of all types. If Twitter didn’t exist, would “cancel culture” even be a thing?
Twitter is good because it keeps idiots from doing damage in the real world. As long as they spend their lives pretending they are going to cancel something or other (today it’s Taco Bell), they won’t be following a Robespierre or Mao into a real world catastrophe.
Keith is a standard liberal democrat as well as being smugly arrogant as hell. FWIW.
Where he gets his arrogance from I have no idea.
I remember when Keith used to whine daily about being blackballed by NASA PAO. When he began to simply parrot them is when I stopped reading him.
For those curious about Carolyn Porco’s views on Elon Musk, SpaceX, and NASA commercial efforts generally, you can get an earful (or eyeful, if you want the transcript) from the Planetary Society’s interview with her last year:
https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1113-2019-carolyn-porco.html
Richard,
Can you give us the cliffs notes summation of her views?
South African man bad?
I watched it. It was as I suspected. Typical lefty green nude eel tripe.
Old science lady says colonization of worlds besides Earth impossible due to lack of potential volatiles on Mars.
She makes a strawman that Musk only wants to colonize Mars if he can immediately terraform it. She doesn’t even mention ONeal colonies and thinks Bezos and Musk should stop making so much money and give back to the earth.
I guess Tesla and Solar City aren’t woke enough for old bitter science lady.
I don’t have time to draw up a Cliff’s Notes, beyond noting that it basically comes down to a) Elon is on drugs, b) the upmpteenth employment of the Antarctica argument against any planetary colonization, and c) Elon shouldn’t have all that money, but he should spend it all on making Eartha better place. Here’s the relevant section of the interview:
___
Mat Kaplan: Very understandable. A big jump back in toward the center of the solar system to Mars. Lots of great stuff happened there. Lots more to come. Uh, including plans to send people there. Uh, we talk every now and then on this show about Elon Musk building his big spaceship. And wanting to establish a human community, a colony if you will, uh, on that planet. You have strong feelings about this.
Carolyn Porco: Oh, you know I have strong feelings about this.
Mat Kaplan: [laughs]
Carolyn Porco: Have you heard me?
Mat Kaplan: A little, a little bit.
Carolyn Porco: Express my strong feelings? Yeah. I think the guy’s on drugs.
Mat Kaplan: [laughs] Well, that’s a proven fact in at least one case. But, uh-
Carolyn Porco: [laughs] I, I, no, seriously. I think he, maybe he can afford fact checkers but he’s not going to terraform Mars. It’s not possible.
Mat Kaplan: Well, you agree with our boss about that, Bill Nye. I have a bet with him. I said, “You, you don’t think terraforming, maybe in 10, within 10,000 years?” He said no.
Carolyn Porco: Here’s, let’s, let’s [00:54:00] say, let me, let’s just get to the facts and I have been informed by people who are on Mars orbiting missions. Recent results show that there are, there is an insufficient amount of CO2 in reservoirs that are not atmospheric to ever get the atmosphere to the point where terraforming would even be possible. So, you know, you’ve, you’ve got CO2 already in the atmosphere. We know that’s insufficient. But even if you could take the CO2 and the reservoir’s under the ground, or on the surface in, I guess the ice caps.
And put them into the atmosphere, it still wouldn’t work. So you can’t terraform Mars. And besides, why would you want to?
Mat Kaplan: Mm-hmm [affirmative]
Carolyn Porco: Here’s where I’m becoming very critical of commercial space. I hear things like mining asteroids will save the earth. Or we need to go to Mars because we’re in danger here on earth. We’ve screwed things up. We’re going to get hit [00:55:00] by asteroids. We need another place to go. And of course, the same motives are given for this even crazier notion that we’re going to actually colonize another stellar system. Uh, it’s not going to happen. These are lovely thoughts. I, I empathize with the people who put f- them forth because they, some of them are younger than me. But some of them are about my age.
I grew up in the ’60s. I, it was a Star Trek fan. I love the whole concept of us being a f- a, you know, space fairing civilization, being on the Starship Enterprise. I love the whole thing. It’s a wonderful fantasy. It’s inspiring but let’s get real. It can’t happen. It can’t happen. And, but we’re hearing things like again, Elon saying terraforming Mars. And he’s going to, people are going to be living on Mars. People will live on Mars in the same way people live on Antarctica now. There is an outpost there. It’s continuously inhabited. It’s not continuously [00:56:00] inhabited by the same people.
People aren’t living there. They’re not giving birth to the next generation there, raising, it’s not going to be a multi-generational thing in the Antarctic. And that’s the way we will make our way across the solar system. There will be outposts. I had been calling them colonies. I think now, it’s better so you’re not, don’t get confused with the idea of a colony where people live out their lives. And you know-
Mat Kaplan: Yeah.
Carolyn Porco: … They, they don’t, they don’t make their living there or they don’t give birth to the next generation. We will see outposts. We could on the moon. Maybe on Mars, I could see it for reasons of scientific research. But to have this idea that humans are going to move off the planet, and that’s the way we’re going to survive is in fact, irresponsible.
I say these days, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, if you have so many resources that you could talk about putting thousands [00:57:00] of satellites into low earth orbit to connect the remaining four billion people onto the internet, uh, why don’t you spend those resources down here? Because we are at a crossroads with regard to our own planet. We are in really very serious trouble. And we could use a little love.
Mat Kaplan: Mm-hmm [affirmative]
Carolyn Porco: You know? I, I don’t see why they have, those people have to make even more money that anything they do, they want to have it be profitable. It’s time to give back. Going to Mars for research purposes, going there because I come to the, the, the Apollo 11, but the Apollo program how inspirational it was.
I like how bitter old science lady throws out he is on drugs like that invalidates Elon.
I also like how she makes the Antarctica strawman without noting that settlement is prohibited by treaty.
Plus how if you can’t immediately terraform Mars, a colony must not be worthwhile or possible.
I also like how BOSL casts shade on connecting the unconnected half of the planet too. How dare they make money off her sky and not spend it In the way she approves which will enrich her woke progressive friends with graft and corruption!
Elon needs an NFE list with regards to rides into space. I think Aleta Jackson had one. He could take that and add to it. BOSL could be near the top. Taking that many strawmen into space would be a combustion hazard.
As I said, don’t worry, in the woke Marxist utopia, planetary science is an unnecessary expense. Poroco is the last of that breed.
I often agree with what Zimmerman says but he can be cantankerous, overly sensational, and stubborn in admitting he is wrong on anything.
He is right when he describes what is going on, as many many other people have been, and it wouldn’t be enough if his site was apolitical because progressive marxism demands you be overtly political, with the proper level of enthusiasm, or you are complicit.
He could go the FOIA route to get information.
You don’t know the half of it.
Yes, he over-reacted when I accidentally posted ‘fuck’ quoting over the hill science lady telling me to go fuck myself. I was the one who sent him the email pointing out my faux pas by asking him to correct it for me.
He still put me on probation for it, I guess no good deed goes unpunished with Mr. Zimmerman and intent counts for zero. I wrote an involved and I believe well-argued response as to why this was not justified in light of the totality of the evidence.
I told him it was unreasonable to expect zero defect posting and am awaiting a reply to my last statement.
Kind of ironic considering the rationale for a good chunk of that piece is material I provided him.
At least when Cowing tells you off he doesn’t try and justify it with false sophistry.
To apply a standard rigidly to a mistake which I, by his own admission, made a good faith effort to correct in the same manner as a blatant violation does not pass the reasonable man standard of behavior. Especially when one lacks at least a short term method to edit the mistake.
Rand wrote a book railing against the whole zero defect mindset and how it has stymied human space flight for over a generation. This is Robert applying the same mindset to your comment section.
We shouldn’t have to walk on eggshells to participate in a free discussion of ideas. His response was an arbitrary and capricious over-reaction the totality of circumstances fail to justify.
That said, I am putting his whole website on probation. Unless he provides an apology for his disrespectful treatment, I will be avoiding it, him and his associated works for an indefinite period of time.
Good job Robert, way to alienate an ally all because your ego wouldn’t admit a mistake.
“This unique twist on Original Sin – without the possibility of salvation ”
Oh, but there is the promise of salvation. You need only do what the progressive marxist Democrats demand of you at that moment. There is no future, no afterlife, there is only the present. Sometimes, even the faithful must be sacrificed, just think of the good your unplanned donation means to the cause.
When it comes to Palmer, re-education camps, and Jim Crow for non-Democrats, the Jim Crow already exists. Conservatives are already prohibited from getting jobs at colleges unless they openly profess, and demonstrate adherence, to the Democrat’s progressive marxist ideology. Government jobs are much the same way as they are governed by progressive marxist HR regulations. Democrats also exercise control over the means of production even though they do not outright own it. Control isn’t total but it’s close.
It is almost amusing that so many people in the science community are not self aware of their magical thinking and human foibles. As Palmer shows, they think they are more evolved and enlightened but really, it is the opposite. These people can do math but wallow in ignorance. It really isn’t amusing as these people wield so much power and wealth.
I’ve never met Bob but I think he and I would get along quite well. There’s a long list prominent leftist scumbags in space circles. In addition to Keith Cowing (who really I don’t pay a lot of attention to – let him be the sad king of his empire of dirty) I can think of Will Pomerantz, Ben Brockert, Chandra Prescod Weinstein, Sarah Horst, Loren Grush.
Oh and Will Claybaugh of course.
Some of this is self-defeating. When Cowing ejects part of his readership, he gets less readership. As Richard M and Wodun noted, Porco’s arguments are even more effective when used against her. And it probably isn’t that hard to sow dissension among the ranks since they’ll readily turn on each other given a pretty slight excuse.
Really, the only reason they’re this bad is Trump. Give them one target and they’ll unify quite nicely.