Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Come on, man.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Full Feral (Open Thread)

Full Feral (Open Thread)

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As I’ve noted in this space before, I have the keen political instincts of a concussed garden snail. So when I read about Repubs doing something that seems stupidly self-destructive on its face, my second impulse (after “haha, please proceed, morons!”) is to wonder if it’s a double-reverse trap or if maybe there’s an angle my lib blinders prevent me from seeing.

But with the Dobbs backlash manifesting even in red states and the meatball-face of anti-woke floundering even among Repub primary voters, it looks like the House GOP is going to double-down on the full feral agenda, with an extra shot of mean-spiritedness. They’re tacking unpopular austerity cuts, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, etc., riders to House spending bills, perhaps setting the stage for a government shutdown later this year led by Freedom Caucus loons. From Politico:

Even the GOP’s two less-divisive funding bills coming to the floor this week have proven difficult for many House Republicans to swallow. Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.), for example, said he’s opposed to the fiscal 2024 funding bill for the Department of Agriculture and FDA because it would nix mail-order access to medication abortion and cut federal nutrition programs.

Teeing up partisan spending bills this summer will also challenge nearly every House Republican to vote for controversial social policies like denying abortion access to veterans, stripping funding from organizations that serve LGBTQ people and barring young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children from filling federal government jobs.

Another hill McCarthy and the House GOP may die on: a pointless vote to “expunge” Trump’s two impeachments, which almost certainly isn’t a thing that is even possible; it’s on his Permanent Record!™️ And even if it were possible, the attempt might embarrassingly fail to gather enough votes if it’s brought forward anyway. Pelosi commented about it on one of the Sunday shows (via Rolling Stone):

“Kevin is, you know, playing politics. It’s not even clear if he constitutionally can expunge those things. If he wants to put his members on the spot, his members in difficult races on the spot, that’s a decision he has to make… As I have said before, Donald Trump is the puppeteer, and what does he do all the time but shine the light on the strings. These people look pathetic.”

I think the puppeteer action in this scenario is more a hand-up-the-ass than strings-from-above, but apart from that quibble, Pelosi is right — Repubs do look pathetic, and no one more so than McCarthy.

Meanwhile, Politico claims the spirit of bipartisanship is stronger in the Senate than it has been in recent memory as the 100 Club watches the clown show in the House. Jon Tester was blunt about it:

“Hopefully we can avoid a government shutdown and all the craziness that those crazy bastards are going to do over there,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who oversees defense funding in the upper chamber, said of House Republicans.

I’ve learned to never say never. Maybe doubling down on all the unpopular things and showcasing the most feral party members going into an election year will redound to the party’s benefit. Or not. Looks like we’re gonna find out.

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

260Comments

  2. 2.

    Sister Golden Bear

    Meanwhile TX’s governor declares he has “sovereign authority” to use wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande, string razor wire across private property without permission, prohibiting state troopers from giving water to immigrants in 100-degree heat, and ordering them to push toddler and infants back into the river.

    Along with Alabama’s fuck you to the SCOTUS on redistricting, it seems like these mooks are itching for the War of Treason in Defensive of Slavery Part II.

  3. 3.

    MattF

    One thing to bear in mind in the Senate— all the RW pundits are moaning about Tuberville’s one-man boycott of military promotions, but McConnell could stop that with a word if he wanted to.

  4. 4.

    Ken B

    Would there be a shutdown?

    I thought one of the points of the deal to  increase the debt limit was that it includes a provision to just trundle along with a 1 percent cut if there’s no budget or CR.

    Am I understanding/remembering wrong?

  5. 5.

    Roger Moore

    We’ve been predicting the Republicans would go this way for a while.  I suspect we’re going to see a gradual decay in Republican support from the normies rather than a sudden mass rejection, but every little bit helps.

  6. 6.

    Barbara

    Even the GOP’s two less-divisive funding bills coming to the floor this week have proven difficult for many House Republicans to swallow.

    Difficult, but somehow never impossible.

  7. 7.

    schrodingers_cat

    OT: Oppenheimer has upset the feral children of Twitter from tankies to bhakts. Can’t wait to see it tomorrow. I wonder how much physics is covered in the movie. My guess, not much.

  8. 8.

    Jeffro

    Unfortunately, the GQP knows that almost no matter what crazy-ass “platform” they put out there

    1. Their voters will vote for anyone, no matter how vile, if he/she has an ‘R’ next to their name.
    2. Their voters won’t vote for a Dem, no matter how moderate or sensible they are.

    All of the things they do (gerrymandering, carpet-bombing elections with billionaire bucks, SCOTUS letting them walk all over folks’ voting rights) help them keep elections close, and that keeps their base fired up – they’re SO CLOSE to winning almost all the time, right?  So why not go ahead with their crazy agenda?  In their minds, being center-right didn’t get them the fascist utopia they wanted, so why not go all in?

     

    Side note: there is nothing in the Constitution about expunging impeachments so I wish that everyone on our side would stop hedging about it (a la Pelosi’s “it’s not clear”).  It is clear, and the impeachments will stand for all of history.  Let’s not pretend like this is even remotely a thing.

  9. 9.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodingers_cat:

    My brother, who is a PhD physicist like you, didn’t have any complaints about the physics, but he did think the politics was a bit heavy handed and telegraphed.  OTOH, I think he knew the story already.

  12. 12.

    NotMax

    Kind of surprised DeSantis hasn’t yet announced a war on fluoridation.

    “They’re shoving woke water down our throats!”

  13. 13.

    Alison Rose

    Wait, this is confusing me:

    Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.), for example, said he’s opposed to the fiscal 2024 funding bill for the Department of Agriculture and FDA because it would nix mail-order access to medication abortion and cut federal nutrition programs.

    So, he’s in favor of mail-order abortions meds and fully-funded nutrition programs? I don’t know anything about this dude, is he one of those mythical “moderate Republicans”?

  17. 17.

    Baud

    The GOP passed a bunch of crazy budgets before McCarthy cut his deal with Biden.  Don’t expect normies to pay attention.

    You can get detailed information about the GOP’s actions on appropriations here.

    https://cleanbudget.org/

  18. 18.

    RepubAnon

    @Jeffro:  Republicans care less about getting more people to vote Republican than they do about making it impossible to vote against them.

  20. 20.

    rikyrah

    Peanut was among those who did Barbie and Oppenheimer this weekend. She enjoyed both.  I have to accept that she’s growing up. A year ago, she wouldn’t have gone near a movie like Oppenheimer with a 10 foot pole. Time flies and they grow up so fast.

  23. 23.

    trollhattan

    This needs parking in front of their vile noses from now ’til November ’24. Along with all the other convictions yet to come. They are jailing teenagers. A year ago there would be no crime.

    An 18-year-old north-eastern Nebraska woman was sentenced on Thursday to 90 days in jail and two years of probation for burning and burying a fetus she aborted with her mother’s help in a case watched by advocates as a slew of states move to restrict abortion access.
    Celeste Burgess, of Norfolk, was sentenced in Madison county after pleading guilty earlier this year to concealing or abandoning a dead body. Two other misdemeanor charges of false reporting and concealing the death of another person were dropped, in an agreement with prosecutors.
    “The court specifically finds that while probation is appropriate, confinement is necessary because without this confinement, it would depreciate the seriousness of the crime or promote disrespect for the law,” the judge’s order read.
    Burgess and her mother, 42-year-old Jessica Burgess of Norfolk, are accused of working together to end the pregnancy. The abortion, well into her third trimester, violated Nebraska law at the time that banned abortion after 20 weeks of gestation. Officials have said Jessica Burgess ordered abortion pills online, which she gave to her then 17-year-old daughter in the spring of 2022.
    Jessica Burgess pleaded guilty earlier this month to providing an illegal abortion, false reporting and tampering with human skeletal remains. In exchange for her plea, charges of concealing the death of another person and abortion by someone other than a licensed physician were dismissed. She faces sentencing on 22 September.

  24. 24.

    scav

    Have I said this before? I’ve certainly thought it for a while.  Team R seems determined to out-Trump Trump by proving how many (even of their own) they can kill (and not just by shooting) before they’d lose a voter. Oddly enough, some of the richest egomaniacs and companies also seem to competing using body-counts as proof of success at not shortchanging their holy shareholders (Tesla and OceanGate are the easy ones, although meatpackers can’t be far behind).

  25. 25.

    rikyrah

    I didn’t realize how serious the UPS possible strike is.. I mean, in theory I did. But, in actuality…it’s a big phucking deal. And, if the pilots keep to their word and go out on strike too.. Shyt will hit the fan in this country. The full-timers are basically standing up for the part-timers….respect.

  26. 26.

    Mike Molloy

    with … the meatball-face of anti-woke floundering even among Repub primary voters

    The pudding-stained meatball face…

  27. 27.

    dmsilev

    @schrodingers_cat:

    OT: Oppenheimer has upset the feral children of Twitter from tankies to bhakts. Can’t wait to see it tomorrow. I wonder how much physics is covered in the movie. My guess, not much.

    No, not much. By your and my standards, anyway.

    Enjoy the show tomorrow!

  28. 28.

    Roger Moore

    @Jeffro:

    Their voters will vote for anyone, no matter how vile, if he/she has an ‘R’ next to their name.

    This is true but incomplete.  There are certainly a lot of voters who will vote for anyone with an (R) next to their name, but they aren’t enough.  The Republicans also depend on some people who aren’t committed Republicans but who will vote for them at least some of the time.  If they drive those people away, they’re in serious long-term trouble.  If they just discourage them so they stop voting, they aren’t in as bad trouble, but they’re still likely to lose the election.

    The Republicans’ big, long-term problem is the things they do to keep the rapid, vote for Republicans no matter what voters energized are likely to discourage the weakly attached voters.  They have long worked around this problem by dog whistling, but Trump blew that strategy up.  Now the hard-core base want loud and proud Trumpism rather than dog whistles.

  29. 29.

    NeenerNeener

    According to an online gossip site Bob Iger and Nelson Peltz are going out of their way to discourage other billionaires from contributing to DeSantis. Never piss off the Mouse House.

  30. 30.

    Geminid

    @Alison Rose: Molinaro isn’t a “Moderate Republican” because there aren’t any left in the House, just so many moderate conservatives. He is a “Purple District Republican,” though. There are 20 or 30 of them.

  32. 32.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Tankies hate the US. And arguably Manhattan project is one of the biggest technological and scientific triumphs of the US. It was in no small measure one of the things responsible for making the 20th century the American century.

    I have read complaints about the lack of Japanese voices. Evil white men doing evil white men things etc. etc.

    Lack of representation of women. (Historically accurate, I mean Nobel Prize winner and Oppenheimer’s contemporary and fellow student at Gottingen where he got his PhD, Maria Goeppert could not get hired as faculty because she was a woman.)

     

    From the last evening’s dead thread

    As for radiation sickness and its detrimental effects, a lot was not known about it. Many of the scientists who worked on the project died young including Fermi (lived until he has 53). They had some idea of the risks but not to the extent  we know now. I am sure that warning the inhabitants in the fall out radius could have been handled better

     

  40. 40.

    Betty Cracker

    @trollhattan: It’s an appalling case. None of the articles I’ve read say how this came to the authorities’ attention. Does anyone know? IIRC, the cops subpoenaed Meta for the messages, but someone must’ve ratted the mother and daughter out.

  42. 42.

    Geminid

    Benjamin Disraeli’s followers wore the Primrose as a symbol of their loyalty. Kraven McCarthy and the rest of Trump’s followers in the House should wear their own symbol of loyalty: the White Feather.

  44. 44.

    trollhattan

    @Sister Golden Bear: By extension I would like Gavin Newsom to claim Hawaii as part of California “because it’s the first thing you hit when you go thataway” [points roughly southwest, towards the Pacific].

  47. 47.

    jonas

    @MattF: There are plenty of blood-red Trumpy districts in NY where a Republican can let their freak flag fly and vote for all sorts of crazy shit and not really have any problems come re-election time. The problem is for folks like Molinaro who have larger, state-wide ambitions. Having a bunch of anti-choice, homophobic, xenophobic votes hanging around your neck while trying to challenge a Democrat for governor or senator here isn’t a good look.

  50. 50.

    Mike in NC

    @Sister Golden Bear:  It’s a hot-and-humid summertime race to the bottom among all these shitbird Republican governors. Abbott and DeSantis keep trying to outdo one another in sheer stupidity at the expense of their constituents. We seem to be long overdue for a mass shooting event in a red state. But the media is always there to let us know that both sides are the same.

  51. 51.

    rikyrah

    Coming to a Red State near you 

    Meduza in English (@meduza_en) tweeted at 10:41 AM on Mon, Jul 24, 2023:
    Vladimir Putin has signed a bill into law that bans gender changes (including legal gender marker changes and gender-affirming procedures) in Russia. The legislation also prohibits people who have legally changed their gender from adopting children.
    https://t.co/LnM9noImD6
    (https://twitter.com/meduza_en/status/1683502708949499904?t=TZMVPe9CbHyyhe0u1Zseww&s=03)

  52. 52.

    Redshift

    With Virginia having elections this year, I appreciate the assist from the federal clown caucus. Especially since their antics are likely to get a lot more coverage than the awful things Youngkin wants to do if the state senate is no longer a roadblock.

  56. 56.

    Amir Khalid

    @Jeffro:

    If you could delete stuff from the House record, it would not be a complete,reliable record of business conducted by that body. And of course  it wouldn’t make the impeachments themselves un-happen.

  57. 57.

    rikyrah

    LanaQuest aka RosaSparks (@LqLana) tweeted at 9:41 AM on Mon, Jul 24, 2023:
    Ron DeSantis wants to make America Florida.

    1. A national Bill prohibiting “white discomfort.”
    2. A national “Don’t say gay” Bill.
    3. Teachers nationally required to whitewash slavery.
    4. You get a book ban, you get a book ban. A national book ban.
    5. Parents arrested… https://t.co/ZnCkoAzUVt
    (https://twitter.com/LqLana/status/1683487646167756800?t=-QmJ4C9WD84b-HAnLQwgcA&s=03)

  58. 58.

    rikyrah

    The ENTIRE PHUCK 

    Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) tweeted at 9:49 AM on Sun, Jul 23, 2023:
    MARGARET BRENNAN: Several children drowned. Should the buoys be removed now?

    REP TONY GONZALES: I don’t think the buoys are the problem. Every single week we see people drown. I’m glad it’s getting some attention. I’d much rather see the attention get focused on something else https://t.co/idYjMfRJdC
    (https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1683127109248507907?t=a6xQk0NePb24V_EYvF1HMQ&s=03)

  60. 60.

    Ruckus

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    All of their favorite concepts of law, they are superior, they can be as racist as they want – actually as hateful as they want, they are always correct about any kind of bigotry they want..

    They are superior in their level of stupid, that’s for sure. The problem is that somewhere near half the humans on the planet are stupider than the other half, maybe even a larger percentage. Also the world is changing, very slowly, as that is how evolution works. But if humans do not evolve (russians are proving that officially they are not evolving. A portion of them likely are and would like to be better but the one in charge isn’t and never will) then we will always have wars and destruction, in a world that has the tools now to do the job far too well. We have to learn to be better but many humans will and do hold the view that progress is regression, that we are not improving we are caving in, losing, becoming less and/or worse by not fighting as the first and only defense/offense/possibility. Kill thy enemy is their only concept of life. But that really doesn’t work all that well any longer and actually never did but it often was the only possibility. We need, have to find other possibilities. We need to learn, understand that there are only 2 possibilities, life or death and there has never and will never be any more. Life will be different because there are more of us. But if those who think that life was better long ago win the result will not be pretty, because their way is to get rid of change, of growth, of peace, that only the old way works. And it did, for some and for some time. But with the growth of the world’s population we can no longer see the world in the old way, because at it’s base that way was to limit population through war. We still keep doing this because of the drive some have for power over others. But that is the old way. We need to get better, we need to survive not by killing off others but by working together far better than pure greed can give us.

    vlad is an example of the old way. His country is huge, his population is not. He has power because of his military and his countries oil and his greed. But that is changing. By the technology of power generation and usage. Wind, solar, electric vehicles, limit his major power, which is oil. He has to stop that or he really, really loses. He may have other issues but his power is what he sells and what he is willing to destroy to keep it.

  62. 62.

    NotMax

    @dmsilev

    Kind of blows the mind how (relatively) frugal the Manhattan Project was.

    Wartime budget for developing and deploying the Norden bomb sight (itself an expensive with a capital E outlay, over a billion in 1940s dollars) was about 2/3 that of the Manhattan Project.

    Estimates vary, of course, but I’ve in the past seen credible figures that as much as 90% of the wartime costs associated with the Manhattan Project went to building and maintaining housing, infrastructure and associated facilities.

  63. 63.

    Brachiator

    @schrodingers_cat:

    OT: Oppenheimer has upset the feral children of Twitter from tankies to bhakts. Can’t wait to see it tomorrow.

    Please let us know your thoughts on the film.

    I don’t know if I can sit through a 3 hour movie, but the film’s success and the silly controversies have me curious to try to see it now rather than wait for streaming.

  64. 64.

    rikyrah

    Certain things are not my business. This is one of them. This is their CHOICE. NOBODY is forcing them to vote for the criminal. POLICY WISE- they are ALL THE SAME. They can have the same policies WITHOUT THE CRIMINAL.

    BUT, THEY WANT THE CRIMINAL 

    Jennifer Now at Threads Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) tweeted at 7:58 AM on Mon, Jul 24, 2023:
    The GOP may well be saddled with nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee
    https://t.co/8yRwIgJLGG
    (https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1683461628539355137?t=GR301IK-NkZ8-6nBqn7a9w&s=03)

  65. 65.

    Matt McIrvin

    @NotMax: And the Norden bombsight didn’t even really work very well, did it? A technological marvel, but my impression was that it wasn’t a great help at actually bombing things.

  66. 66.

    MisterDancer

    @schrodingers_cat: Tankies hate the US. And arguably Manhattan project is one of the biggest technological and scientific triumphs of the US.

    I feel like I’m a “tankie” in that regard. I’m a pretty big science geek, read tons of Asimov as a kid, loved Tom Swift and even Swift Junior. I laughed at the stories about SF authors getting really close to describing how to build a bomb in their fictions.

    But it’s hard for me to look at work around Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivor stories and not feel something. It’s hard to hear about the stories of the people, including Native Americans, impacted by the bomb’s legacy of testing and…well:

    A 2017 report found that the Trinity Test caused generations of southern New Mexico families to suffer from cancer and economic hardship.

    • But New Mexico is not included in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, a federal law originally passed by Congress in 1990 to award financial reparations to Nevada Test Site “downwinders,” or people who lived downwind of the radiation and were impacted.

    Development of the Atomic bomb and subsequent nukes was not a unalloyed good. And I know the movie tackles that, I do! But it’s OK for people to express discomfort with treating the movie as a celebration of Human/American Ingenuity. I don’t think that was Nolan’s intent, but even with that, it’s OK that not everyone thinks this movie is tasteful.

    As someone who’s Grandfather fought in WWII, the bomb might have brought him home earlier and in one piece (at least in body). Of course I honor that! But there was a cost. And that cost wasn’t evenly distributed across the world.

  67. 67.

    Geminid

    @schrodingers_cat: I’ve been reading about Turkiye a lot lately. I’ve learned more about the special respect cats are given in that country. I also found out that they first trained women to be fighter pilots in the late 1930s. I’m not sure how long women were allowed air force combat roles, but I did see a picture of a Turkish woman who was NATO’s first fighter pilot, in 1952.

    I also learned that in the early 1930s, Albert Einstein asked Turkish President Kemal Ataturk to give refuge to Jewish scientists expelled from their jobs in Germany. Turkiye took them in and these scientists became a force in that nation’s academic community. When Hitler complained, Ataturk, himself a renowned general, said he wasn’t about to let a corporal tell him what to do.

  69. 69.

    MisterDancer

    @trollhattan: I know I’m yelling to choirs, here. But yeah — people warned for decades that teen mothers would be thrown in jail, er abortion gets criminalized.

    And here we are. And really, even before Dobbs, this was a reality for too many women who’s miscarriages were criminalized.

    But you can’t tell some people nuthin’.

  71. 71.

    Anoniminous

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     
    The Norden bomb sight was developed to give B-17s, & also too etc., the ability for precision bombing. Unfortunately the BOMBS AWAY!!!!! Boys forgot minor details like …. clouds – just skipped their little minds.

  72. 72.

    NotMax

    @Matt McIrvin

    The initial models were, shall we say, not a rousing success. But with improvements it was a crucial addition, especially when in came to nighttime flights. And with the co-development of long range bombers, also proved its mettle against U-boats in the Atlantic.

  73. 73.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MisterDancer: Rhodes’ book The Making of the Atomic Bomb was terrific in this regard. There’s a section in which he recounts a collection of horrifying survivor stories from the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. He prefaces it with a note that says something like “In what follows, remember the dead. Their experience was more typical than that of the survivors.” He’s reminding the reader that these waking nightmares he’s recounting are the accounts that are softened by survivorship bias–the typical reality would have been far worse because the people having these experiences did not survive them.

  74. 74.

    jonas

    @schrodingers_cat: The actual science gets somewhat short shrift — there are a few brief conversations here and there where they’re discussing, say, the uranium “bullet” design vs. the spherical implosion device, or Teller’s fixation on a thermonuclear bomb, but nothing substantial. At the very beginning in particular, Oppenheimer’s genius and work on quantum mechanics as a grad student are conveyed via a bunch of rapid-fire, dream-like hallucinatory images meant to convey — I don’t know — like the fabric of the universe or something. I guess Nolan or whoever thought if the characters actually “talked” about science, we’d get bored or something.

    While I enjoyed the movie and thought the performances were almost uniformly excellent (Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves was great and Robert Downey, Jr. is nearly unrecognizable as the sleazy, vindictive Lewis Strauss), it was also really uneven in places. At nearly 3 hours, it still couldn’t really figure out what it wanted to be about. Oppenheimer was one of the pivotal figures of the 20th century and trying to cram all the contradictions of his life and mind even into three hours was a hopeless task, it seems.

  75. 75.

    dmsilev

    @NotMax:

    Estimates vary, of course, but I’ve in the past seen credible figures that as much as 90% of the wartime costs associated with the Manhattan Project went to building and maintaining housing, infrastructure and associated facilities.

    I’d find that hard to believe, unless “infrastructure” means things like “giant uranium enrichment facilities” and “big reactors for breeding plutonium”. The Manhattan Project was in large part the industrialization of physics, and needed several industrial-scale “factories” that had to be built from the ground up. Housing for the workforce wasn’t trivial, especially at Oak Ridge (good book to read about life there: The Girls of Atomic City), but the actual facilities were enormous and were filled with …stuff.

  76. 76.

    Geminid

    @Redshift: I’m kind of hoping House Republicans engineer a government shutdown in October, a few weeks before Virginia’s legislative elections. Then the fat will be in the fire!

  77. 77.

    schrodingers_cat

    @MisterDancer:Development of the Atomic bomb and subsequent nukes was not a unalloyed good.

    I have not said that. People involved in the Manhattan project have not said that. Hindsight is 20/20. The movie depicts a snapshot of history.

    But it’s hard for me to look at work around Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivor stories and not feel something. It’s hard to hear about the stories of the people, including Native Americans, impacted by the bomb’s legacy of testing and…well:

    I agree with the sentiment. Two things though, the movie is a biopic not a comprehensive retelling of the Pacific theater or a documentary about the harmful effects of nuclear radiation.

    As I have written above, many experimentalists who dealt with radioactivity died premature deaths most likely due to radiation poisoning. They did not know everything we know now.

    Not everyone has to like the movie and I can critique takes that  lack logic or make sense.

    Also Imperial Japan were hardly the good guys. A D-day like invasion into Japan would have been a logistical nightmare given that it is a bunch of islands.

  78. 78.

    Tom Levenson

    @jonas: My son saw Oppenheimer yesterday in an Imax-equipped theater and he thought it was great. He’s less interested in narrative and much more so in character and to some extent setting, which kinda tracks with your comment.

    I can’t wait to see it myself, three hour marathon and all. Helps that I knew Phil Morrison well enough to hear him talk over dinner about his drive to Trinity with the core next to him in the back seat of the car.

    My dad encountered Teller at Berkeley in the early sixties.  He told my mom who told me that the father of the H bomb did not lack for confidence, spending the bulk of their conversation at some faculty cocktail party telling dad exactly how to interpret Chinese history.  This was rather interesting for my father, given that his field was…

    …

    wait for it…

    …

    Chinese history.

    Papa was unimpressed.

  79. 79.

    Roger Moore

    @Geminid:

    I also learned that in the early 1930s, Albert Einstein asked Turkish President Kemal Ataturk to give refuge to Jewish scientists expelled from their jobs in Germany. Turkiye took them in and these scientists became a force in that nation’s academic community.

    To me, this gets to a point everyone should remember about taking in refugees: it almost always winds up helping the country that takes them in.  Yes, it’s expensive in the short term to take them in, and it’s disruptive to bring in a bunch of people who don’t know the language and culture.  In the long term, they pay all that back and more.

  80. 80.

    Tom Levenson

    @dmsilev: Yup. Paraphrasing from memory, but the story goes that when Bohr reached the US after being smuggled out of Denmark he was shown one of the Manhattan Project facilities–I don’t remember if it was Oak Ridge or Hanford–and was chided for having said that a bomb was impossible without diverting all a nation’s industrial capacity to the task.

    Bohr replied (or is said to have) something like “well–you have!”

    Likely apocryphal, I’m sure…but the anecdote does capture the scale of the effort required to produce enough fissionable material to build weapons.

  81. 81.

    Brachiator

    The world’s richest man bought the world’s most expensive toy, threw it across the room, smashed it with hammers for fun, & now is spray painting its last remaining pieces w/ a giant ‘X.’

    What, he couldn’t get a swastika right?

     

    ETA. One of his first companies was X com. He seems stuck on recreating past successes. Strange man.

  82. 82.

    Tom Levenson

    @Roger Moore: This!

    Given the current US birthrate, there is no population growth to be had here w/out immigration–with predictable economic consequences. (Lots of other problems implied there, but still).

    This is (IMHO, of course) one of the barely subterranean drivers of the current war on women.  Women with economic independence and wealth enough not to rely on the kindness of kids in old age are a threat to fertility rates.  So the solution is, obv. (/s) drive women out of the workforce and into enforced childbearing and rearing.

    But that’s a rant for a different thread.

  84. 84.

    oldster

    A strange indirect consequence of the Manhattan Project:

    Although it derived some  of its uranium ore from Colorado and Canada, by far the largest source was the Belgian Congo (as it was then called). It turned out that the most powerful metal in the world, capable of powering new wonder-weapons, was located in the heart of Africa.

    Now go forward a few decades to the story of vibranium, found only in the country of Wakanda; the most powerful metal in the world, capable of powering new wonder-weapons.

    I suspect that Stan Lee and his gang were at least indirectly aware of the role of Africa in providing the uranium for the bomb.

  85. 85.

    JMG

    My father, of prime draft age, was an employee of the Dept. of Mines during WW2. He was stationed in Huntsville, Ala., where he always said his job was to examine “freight cars full of mud” for the government. He was a chemical engineering PhD. Given the distance between Huntsville and Oak Ridge, and given he left the government for DuPont shortly after the war, I have always believed he was some small part of the Manhattan Project. He never changed his story to the day he died, though.

  86. 86.

    Geminid

    @schrodingers_cat: There might have been one good thing that came out of the terrible bombings of Horoshima and Nagasaki: people saw how horrific these weapons could be, and they have not been used in the 78 years since. That might not have been the case had a nuclear-armed Russia and US gone to war in the 1950s.

  87. 87.

    NotMax

    @dmsilev

    Thinking back on it, that 90% figure more probably was an estimate of costs incurred by and at Los Alamos, which if plucked from the budget of the entire Project clocked in at a total of around $75 million through 1945.

  88. 88.

    Tom Levenson

    @Brachiator:

    “Strange man”

    Unimaginative man. His tropes are all fed to him by this or that corner of pop culture. He masticates them for a while then regurgitates into the public eye and his fanbois proclaim his world-shaping genius.

  91. 91.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @rikyrah:

    I’m more and more convinced that he bought it to destroy it as a global tool for communication and organization, with the side benefit being that he could financially ruin the employees that were still there when he bought it just to fill the hole in his soul and to make his idiot alt-right fans happy.  By the time he’s done gutting it, there won’t be anything left to satisfy the vendors and employees he’s been stiffing. The authoritarians (his co-investors) will be pleased, leaving creditors (including the big banks that loaned $13B)  holding the bag.

    Some will stick around and spend the cash to pierce the corporate veil, but they’ll take giant haircuts to resolve it.

    This is why there need to be confiscatory tax rates so something like this never happens again – he’s negatively impacted thousands of employees with a malicious act, and stuck a crowbar into the gears of global intercommunication.

  92. 92.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodingers_cat:

    A D-day like invasion into Japan would have been a logistical nightmare given that it is a bunch of islands.

    Despite fears at the time, it was unlikely to happen.  Apparently the best historical research says the thing that really forced the Japanese to surrender was the Soviets declaring war.  As long as they stayed out, the Japanese thought they might be able to keep going, but they knew there was no way they were going to be able to win against the US and USSR.  Basically, the decision to use the Bomb was mostly about two things:

    1. Showing off the Bomb to the world, especially the USSR, so they’d be afraid.  A demonstration against a real city would show off its power and our willingness to use it.
    2. Trying to close out the war before the USSR got heavily involved so we would be in complete control of the post-war treatment of Japan.  It’s no coincidence we used the Bomb just before the scheduled date for the USSR to declare war.
  94. 94.

    Subsole

    @rikyrah:

    They did not actually use the phrase “white discomfort”.

    That is not an actual term being bandied about in The Tetragrammaton’s American English with a straight face. 🙄

    I do not believe that. Nope. I refuse.

  95. 95.

    cain

    @Baud: You’d think they would have paid attention when the pandemic showed up and their lives were completely disrupted. I mean there would be a focus on govt solving the problem. Strange how they are no longer focused on it anymore or if they ever were.

  99. 99.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tom Levenson: All of Musk’s big technological preoccupations have in common that they’re cool ideas that were being batted about in futurist and science-fiction writing in the years around 1980. I remember encountering all of them when I was a kid. Even Hyperloop comes out of old ideas like Gerard O’Neill’s supersonic underground vacuum trains (O’Neill was one of the great space-colonization advocates too).

  101. 101.

    rikyrah

    @MisterDancer:

    But it’s hard for me to look at work around Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivor stories and not feel something. It’s hard to hear about the stories of the people, including Native Americans, impacted by the bomb’s legacy of testing and…well:

     

    Everybody asking CAN we do this.
    Nobody asking SHOULD we do this.

    I wanted to be on the fence, but, I’ve watched Man in the High Tower. I have no doubt that’s what would have happened if the Germans had gotten the bomb first. So, I do accept that we had to get it. Do I think that Truman would have thought twice about bombing Germany if they hadn’t already surrendered? I dunno.

  102. 102.

    Roger Moore

    @Tom Levenson:

    Women with economic independence and wealth enough not to rely on the kindness of kids in old age are a threat to fertility rates.

    Independent women are only a threat to fertility rates in places that force them into a choice between motherhood and a career.  Places that support mothers (and fathers!) in parenthood have managed to maintain a notably higher fertility rate than ones that want women to drop out of public life the moment they have children.

  103. 103.

    cain

    @rikyrah:

    I looked at the logo of X and it’s the same damn logo as Xorg. (https://x.org) I mean wtf – xorg should file a lawsuit. Of course, I could see Elon trying to take over xorg’s trademark. Trust me that shit has happened before and I was in the thick of it.

  104. 104.

    rikyrah

    @Geminid:

     I’m kind of hoping House Republicans engineer a government shutdown in October, a few weeks before Virginia’s legislative elections. Then the fat will be in the fire!

    I hadn’t thought of it that way….you may be onto something.

  105. 105.

    Subsole

    @Matt McIrvin: I have heard level bombing described as “flinging the bombs vaguely in the general direction of the densest flak.”

    While bombsights may have helped somewhat with general aiming, there was only so much the state of the art could accommodate. Forex: many bombs, especially early ones, were not stabilized. That meant they tended to tumble as they fell. Which added to inaccuracy. I believe (may be wrong) German bombs were very bad about that.

     

    Short answer: Probably didn’t help enough to make much difference to the folks caught underneath them.

    (Especially if you happened to live in Japan – in which case the bombs were quite likely full of napalm. In which case accuracy was kind of a silly thing to worry over.)

  106. 106.

    trollhattan

    @Tom Levenson: Heh, a real world “I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here” moment.

    Brother of an in-law did weapons development at Lawrence Berkeley and later, worked on warhead de-mil as part of arms reduction (remember that?) I asked which was more rewarding and he allowed as to design being much more interesting. He will also be the only person I will ever meet who has witnessed a nuclear detonation, having been present for one of the tests conducted at Christmas Island.

  107. 107.

    Eolirin

    @Alison Rose: He is. He’s got a lot of clout in this area for being sensible and good with constituent services in local government. He ran a very out of character and bullshit right wing culture war campaign to try to beat Pat Ryan and lost, but won in a neighboring district after redistricting.

    Even rural New York isn’t red state batshit on abortion. Even Lee Zeldin ran away from the abortion rights fight here.

  108. 108.

    Anoniminous

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     

    “In 1799, George Medhurst of London conceived of and patented an atmospheric railway that could convey people or cargo through pressurized or evacuated tubes.”

    See: Vactrain

  109. 109.

    Betsy

    This is Alexandra-Petri-level material, Betty.

    And thank you for that delightful subjunctive verb (“if it were possible”).

    Each of your posts is a point of light to me.  There is hope!

  110. 110.

    Betty Cracker

    @Brachiator: Musk made lots of noise at first about making ex-Twitter into a digital wallet, which tracks with your suggestion that he’s trying to recreate earlier successes (PayPal). It’s not as nuts as it sounds since WeChat rakes in scads of transaction fees in Asia.

    But for that strategy to pan out, first it has to be a ubiquitous app, which ex-Twitter never really was, and users have to trust it. Musk misjudged what made ex-Twitter valuable and pissed away a largely unearned reputation and cultural cachet, so forget about the trust outside Nazi and incel circles. I’ve never seen anything like it and reckon Musk will be a cautionary tale at B-school lectures until the end of time.

  111. 111.

    Matt McIrvin

    @rikyrah: The thing is, the atomic-bomb program didn’t stop when Germany surrendered, nor did the decision to actually bomb Japan have to do with a continued German threat. (And while there was a Japanese atomic-bomb project, it did not get very far at all, and I don’t think it was considered a serious threat.)

    These things end up with a momentum of their own. And I do know that, whether or not it’s true that the bombings eliminated a need for a bloody, prolonged invasion of Japan, most people in the US seem to have thought it did.

    I have no doubt that if I were around and active in physics at the time, I’d have considered participation in the Manhattan Project as morally justified, in the face of the possibility of Hitler getting the bomb first. I am also pretty sure that, after the war, my feelings about it all would be pretty conflicted, as they were for most of the actual scientists involved.

  112. 112.

    Anyway

    @Tom Levenson:

    This is (IMHO, of course) one of the barely subterranean drivers of the current war on women.  Women with economic independence and wealth enough not to rely on the kindness of kids in old age are a threat to fertility rates.  So the solution is, obv. (/s) drive women out of the workforce and into enforced childbearing and rearing.

    But that’s a rant for a different thread.

    Have you met Suzanne? :-)

    Every time I see this I think it’s too far-fetched, too conspiracy-minded, nah- who’d think that way? And then sane people like you and Suzanne make me reconsider…

  113. 113.

    gvg

    @Geminid: I have always thought that if we had not actually USED a bomb while they were small and scared the shit out of a lot of people including many of us, there would have been an actual nuclear war. People still resist understanding how serious those bombs are.

  114. 114.

    Geminid

    @rikyrah: Virginia gets hit harder by shutdowns than most states. Besides Northern Virginia, there are federal workers in other areas, especially the Hampton Roads region in Tidewater. So a lot of voters might take their frustrations with Congressional Republicans out on state Republicans.

    And I’d really like to see Foungkin Youngkin try to spin that one!

  115. 115.

    NotMax

    @dmsilev

    I apologize for the inaccuracy. Should have checked my original comment more closely; fell prey to the Los Alamos = Manhattan Project fallacy.

  116. 116.

    Anyway

    @Matt McIrvin:

     Rhodes’ book The Making of the Atomic Bomb was terrific in this regard.

    Yes, don’t plan to see Oppenheimer as I already read the book.

  118. 118.

    kindness

    The Kreskin in me says the Senate strips all the Republican burn it all down amendments out of it’s bills, and then Republicans in the House refuse to ratify those bills.  Setting up an eventual Reconciliation bill to fund the whole thing.  Even though Republicans claim to hate reconciliation bills more than they do Democrats.

  119. 119.

    bbleh

    @Ken B: apparently the legislative TEXT of the deal (as opposed to what both sides “agreed to”) LIMITS spending, but it only SPECIFIES spending for Defense and Veterans, which would imply that other nondiscretionary spending still has to go through regular appropriations.  So as I understand it, if they pass big cuts then they’d be violating the deal but not the law.  And of course these are Republicans, so any presumption of good faith, or adherence to an agreement, is suspect at best.

  120. 120.

    Brachiator

    @Roger Moore:

    A couple of questions.

    Showing off the Bomb to the world, especially the USSR, so they’d be afraid.

    Afraid of what? The bomb didn’t stop Soviet expansion.

    Trying to close out the war before the USSR got heavily involved so we would be in complete control of the post-war treatment of Japan.

    So, the Soviets would have invaded Japan even after they had surrendered? Or would have demanded territory?

    How would the joint occupation of Japan by the US and Soviets been a good outcome?

  121. 121.

    jonas

    @Tom Levenson: Yeah, Teller comes off as a pretty big douchebag in the movie — which apparently was most people’s impression of him. Perhaps he thought he was some kind of polymath like fellow-Hungarian John von Neumann, who knew ancient history and languages so well that Classics scholars at Princeton would occasionally call up the IAS to consult him on textual or linguistic questions.

  122. 122.

    PAM Dirac

    @Ken B:

    I thought one of the points of the deal to increase the debt limit was that it includes a provision to just trundle along with a 1 percent cut if there’s no budget or CR.

    I’m pretty sure that provision kicks in on Jan 1, 2024, so it limits the extent of a shutdown, but doesn’t prevent it entirely.

  123. 123.

    smith

    @JMG: My dad worked at Oak Ridge during the war. He graduated in chemical engineering from U Mich in 1943, and immediately after graduating, he first married my mother and then enlisted in the navy. As my mother told it, the night before he was due to report for basic training, he got a call asking him to report to Oak Ridge instead. There he worked on manufacturing some of the chemicals required until the end of the war. My parents never tried to obfuscate what he did, but we also never got much detail about their lives there.

  124. 124.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Anyway: Another thing Rhodes does point out is that “morale bombing” aka “strategic bombing” of civilian populations in WWII was already a well-established thing by the time the US dropped nuclear weapons on Japan, and all sides did it. The US had already devastated Tokyo to a degree comparable to Hiroshima–it was just that they didn’t use one bomb to do it. The destruction of Dresden by firestorm is of course famous, though I understand that it was somewhat exaggerated by the work of a scholar who is under a cloud for Holocaust denial.

    So to some degree, the question of the morality of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki becomes a question about means. The human atrocities involved were already a well-established tool of this war.

  126. 126.

    Roger Moore

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I understand the logic of continuing the Manhattan Project after Germany surrendered.  There were two big reasons to do so:

    1. Even if Japan didn’t have a serious nuclear program, we were still at war with them, and the intensity of fighting in Okinawa and Iwo Jima made a lot of Americans fear the cost of invading the Japanese mainland.  The Bomb was seen as a potential solution*.
    2. It was obvious at that point that a Bomb was technologically feasible, and any big world power would be capable of building one.  The US wasn’t going to give up on the project when it was seen as inevitable that other countries would be able to threaten us with them.

    I think the latter point was really key.  Hawks in the US were already expecting us to get into a showdown with the USSR after WWII was over, and we wanted to have overwhelming power on our side for when that happened.  I’m not sure how much that expectation became a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I can definitely understand it.

    *Avoiding an invasion of the Japanese mainland wasn’t just about saving American lives.  The number of Japanese civilians who would have died from the invasion itself and the continued blockade would have massively exceeded the number killed in the bombings.  That’s not to say the bombings were justified- there’s excellent historical reason to think the Japanese would have surrendered without the Bombings and that Truman knew it- but ending the war as quickly as possible was a good thing.

  128. 128.

    Bill Arnold

    @Roger Moore:

    Apparently the best historical research says the thing that really forced the Japanese to surrender was the Soviets declaring war.

    There is considerable dispute among reputable historians about whether an (island-hopping) invasion would have happened and what the level of casualties (allied/US and Japanese) would have been.
    The scholarship is rife with agendas.
    The bottom line (well, one of them) was that the US was in a position to produce about 2 (maybe 3) atomic bombs per month, though this wasn’t generally known until some material was declassified much later.

  129. 129.

    rikyrah

    @Subsole:

    They did not actually use the phrase “white discomfort”.

    That is not an actual term being bandied about in The Tetragrammaton’s American English with a straight face. 🙄

    I do not believe that. Nope. I refuse.

    But, it’s true. We can’t study real history involving Black Americans because it hurts White People’s feelings.

  130. 130.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Roger Moore: It’s also worth noting that while the German program made some significant technical mistakes and turned out to be nowhere near as far along as the US feared it would be… we had no way of knowing that before the end of the war.

  131. 131.

    rikyrah

    @Roger Moore:

    Independent women are only a threat to fertility rates in places that force them into a choice between motherhood and a career.

    but, to put those policies in place that would help women, means that it would help ALL women. …not just White ones.

  132. 132.

    Roger Moore

    @Brachiator: ​
     

    Afraid of what? The bomb didn’t stop Soviet expansion.

    Yes, it did. The Soviets didn’t try to invade Western Europe, even when Western militaries were at their weakest. The Soviets did turn Eastern Europe into an empire, but that was areas they had already occupied before the Bombing.

  133. 133.

    Soprano2

    My contractor was supposed to start on our bathroom renovation today, but that’s not happening now. His truck overheated on him, so he’s scrambling to get another truck, and said he won’t be able to come today. Then, that 20% chance of rain turned into 100%; my vanity, cabinet, sinktop and shower door were supposed to be delivered today, but since I need to put them in the yard and cover them with a tarp until the contractor can move them to the house across the street he’s helping his buddy renovate, I told the delivery people I couldn’t take delivery today, because I didn’t want to be dodging rainclouds. They’re going to take the stuff back to Menard’s; hopefully I can reschedule for Wednesday, because I have two appointments tomorrow and of course they can never give you a delivery time, just a window of “between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.”. I learned when we renovated our kitchen that things rarely go smoothly, so I wasn’t surprised, but I am disappointed – I’m ready to get it fixed and over with!

  134. 134.

    M31

    here’s a story that reminds me of the huge scope of the Manhattan Project — they needed wire to make the magnets to help separate the U235, but copper was needed for all kinds of other military uses so they borrowed 30 million pounds of silver from the Treasury and used that instead

    “Hey, Mr. Secretary of the Treasury, we need 30 million pounds of silver but we can’t tell you what it’s for”

    “OK”

  136. 136.

    rikyrah

    @Anyway:

    This is (IMHO, of course) one of the barely subterranean drivers of the current war on women.  Women with economic independence and wealth enough not to rely on the kindness of kids in old age are a threat to fertility rates.  So the solution is, obv. (/s) drive women out of the workforce and into enforced childbearing and rearing.

    But that’s a rant for a different thread.

    Follow the dots….

    Abortion..

    Birth control….

    Trying to get rid of no-fault divorce…

    Getting rid of Affirmative Action (The biggest beneficiaries of AA are White Women – stats show it’s not even close .)

    All the articles about ‘ the poor lonely men’, whose solution is ‘ why won’t women lower their standards’

    instead of

    Why don’t men improve themselves and make themselves more attractive partners?

     

    Follow all the dots.

  137. 137.

    trollhattan

    @Brachiator: Given the Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project and acquisition of key developments, providing a demo to prove American Awesomeness™ would have had Stalin chuckling to himself, “So, it does work. Full speed ahead!”

  138. 138.

    HumboldtBlue

    @NotMax:

    “They’re shoving woke water down our throats!”

    Lol.

    “And what’s with these stoplights? You don’t have the authority to impinge on my freedom of travel!”

  139. 139.

    Ruckus

    @Matt McIrvin:

    It was a big improvement over what was before.

    Was it good/great?

    That depends on comparing it to before it existed or now. We have to be careful, especially about technology, and comparing it to today, because technology has come a long, long way and builds upon itself. As someone born in the first half of the last century a lot has changed, no, everything  has changed and the rate of change has accelerated massively over my lifetime. Everything machined out of metal when I was born was done manually, men turning handles. Today most machines are controlled with computers, the tolerances are dramatically closer, the precision is far better, far more consistent. And even that has been only 50 or so yrs ago that change started. I bought my first computer in 1978. It was a better way to create 1 inch paper tape programs for our first numerical control machine than the teletype machine we had been using to punch the tape. Electronic communications to the machine didn’t exist yet.

    My point is that technology before most of humans alive today was basically not existent. I used a slide rule because I had to use trig to work and calculators didn’t exist. Hell we made molds to be used to create the case for one of the first calculators, finished them, got paid for them and they were scrapped because the electronics progressed so much while that was happening that it was no longer financially feasible to sell at the price point.

  140. 140.

    Paul in KY

    @Roger Moore: We were going for Unconditional Surrender. If it meant invading ala D-Day, the we were going to do it.

    Luckily the entry of the USSR and the Emperor insisting the jig was up got us out of having to do such a terrible thing.

  141. 141.

    schrodingers_cat

    @rikyrah: And yet only WW are the only demographic of women that vote majority R.

    Yes I know that some states are worse than others and women with college degrees vote D (in Yougkin’s election for example WW with college degrees voted 53% for McAuliffe). Which means that too many WW still vote R.

  142. 142.

    Subsole

    @MisterDancer:

    It was not unalloyed good. And that bears repetition and contemplation. That said, I think you fall well short of Tankie-ism. Tankies take a reasonable critique well past the point of unreasonable.

    A Tankie would say that we dropped the bomb as a cheap political ploy and nothing else. Therefore we are just as evil and irredeemable as the regimes we fought, which, uh…no. I’m sorry, but no.

    Was America a checkered Imperium? Absolutely. That can be discussed and debated and, one hopes, perhaps rectified in some way.

    Granted I am a bit biased. But ultimately, what the debate comes down to for me is this: when they surrendered, we stopped killing them. We killed the everliving hell out of them until they did, but once they did, we stopped. Which was far, FAR more than Imperial Japan ever did. Or ever intended to do.

    Imperial Japan would have gone right on slaughtering until there were none left to slaughter. And then they would have slaughtered ththemselves. Just like Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy, or Falangist Spain. Or, I would posit, Stalinist Russia. Because that’s what Fascism is. It is the sublimated suicide urge, projected onto the species. A national midlife crisis that metastasizes into a murder-suicide. Stopping that may be an alloyed good, but I would say it remains good. Or as close to good as any war has come, excepting perhaps the American Civil War. (The crowning tragedy of that war is that we didn’t utterly, pitilessly, and permanently break the bastards who started it.)

    I do not know if you can quantify such things, but the abject disgust with which I recoil from the callous, rank, chauvinistic brutality of the Dai Nippon Teikoku is no less visceral than the horror with which I recoil from accounts of the firebombing of Tokyo. I find I can forgive an awful lot in service to stopping, say, Unit 731.

    That said, yes. The Downwinders got screwed and it is very hard not to feel some kind of way about that. But one can feel that without sliding into Tankie-ism.

  143. 143.

    Brachiator

    @rikyrah:

    I didn’t realize how serious the UPS possible strike is.. I mean, in theory I did. But, in actuality…it’s a big phucking deal. And, if the pilots keep to their word and go out on strike too.. Shyt will hit the fan in this country.

    A news reporter noted that UPS moves about 6 percent of America’s GDP every day.

  144. 144.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Geminid:

    Kraven McCarthy and the rest of Trump’s followers in the House should wear their own symbol of loyalty: the White Feather.

    I’m not sure many would understand the reference. For 21st century sensibilities, maybe their symbol of loyalty would be a poop emoji brooch.

  145. 145.

    MisterDancer

    @schrodingers_cat: @Subsole: OK, I understand better. Understand that I left Twitter, and even when I was on, Tankies (whom I think are same as “rose Twitter”?) were people I generally didn’t engage.

    So…I see tankies used in this thread. I look up the meaning, but I don’t grasp how the items being said earlier here around Oppenheimer as a film amounted to unwarranted criticism, thus my comment. I don’t know what the people y’all are talking about are saying, and it’s not easy w/o a Twitter account to see in without a link, these days.

    Thanks, again, for your patience and clarifications.

  146. 146.

    trollhattan

    @Subsole: Dad would have been part of an invasion of the Japanese mainland on the Navy side of the equation, and I’m rather pleased that did not occur otherwise I might not exist to make internet comments eighty years later.

  147. 147.

    Steeplejack

    @schrodingers_cat:

    My knowledgeable but not-a-physicist friend, who has read some of the Oppenheimer books, says a lot of the science is “glossed over” in the movie.

  148. 148.

    JMG

    @M31: At one point, Secretary of War Stinson went to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and said that there was an important military project that needed an extra billion or so immediately to keep functioning, and that it might make the difference between winning and losing the war. Stinson was ready to describe the Manhattan Project when Rayburn said, “don’t tell me what it is. If I don’t know a secret, I can’t leak it out. You’ll get the money.”

    And they did.

  150. 150.

    Eolirin

    @NotMax: There actually is a big pushback happening against fluoridated water amongst certain conspiracy minded communities, and it’s resulting it getting shut off in certain towns/cities.

  151. 151.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Subsole:

    Granted I am a bit biased. But ultimately, what the debate comes down to for me is this: when they surrendered, we stopped killing them.

    Well, except for a few of the higher-ups who got the hangman’s noose for crimes so monstrous that it’s hard to argue with the sentence.

  152. 152.

    Subsole

    @rikyrah:

    Hard to say. One of the sad wrinkles of the whole saga is that we had been absolutely going over those nations with a rake for so long that there was some trouble finding a strategic target still worth bombing. I mean, go look at pics of Tokyo after the firebombing. It looks every bit as desolate as Nagasaki. There was nothing left. (Like, no, seriously, what the hell are we supposed to blow up? It’s all ashes already…)

    Germany was also complicated because the Russians were already in Germany. Dropping a bomb too close to our allies could end…badly.

    I think that is why we dropped it before the Russians got involved in Japan. At least in part. No chance of friendly fallout, as it were.

  155. 155.

    Brachiator

    @Ruckus:

    Everything machined out of metal when I was born was done manually, men turning handles. Today most machines are controlled with computers, the tolerances are dramatically closer, the precision is far better, far more consistent. And even that has been only 50 or so yrs ago that change started.

    A very interesting point. I had not thought about it in this way before. My stepfather worked in a machine shop that made parts for aircraft.

    I worked at a newspaper that transitioned from the big press machines where guys had to carry heavy lead plates, transformed into a smooth electronic process that used lightweight plastic plates and did not require manual setting of type.

    Also, at one time the parent corporation owned Pickett, the slide rule company. It was interesting to see how electronic calculators changed everything and demolished the market for slide rules.

  157. 157.

    Subsole

    @Matt McIrvin:

    You could, actually, make an argument that using such horrifically powerful weapons was morally right.

    You need far fewer planes to deliver equivalent devastation. You risk fewer crews. You therefore put fewer people in harm’s way and are – in a really twisted way – being somewhat humane.

  158. 158.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MisterDancer: “Tankies” in the narrow sense are modern-day apologists for violent Soviet abuses. The term gets used perhaps over-broadly to refer to the sort of online leftists who seem to primarily be not so much leftist, as opposed to the United States in every possible way.

    And I think Rose (socialist) Twitter was actually a lot broader than that, incorporating some relatively reasonable people as well as these pests.

  161. 161.

    Subsole

    @Roger Moore:

    Very hard to say.

    The Japanese public might have surrendered. The assholes with the guns? Well…not so mmuch. I seem to recall that a cabal of officers was seriously considering arresting the Emperor, to prevent him surrendering.

    And as you point out, the civilian death toll would have been staggering, even if we tried starving them into submission and never stepped foot on the island. Because the men with guns did not want to surrender. And who, do we suppose, is going to be the last group to starve in the siege?

  162. 162.

    Eolirin

    @schrodingers_cat: White men are also the only demographic of men that vote majority Republican, nationally at least. At the state level, a couple of states have Latino (not Latina) populations that vote the barest majority Republican, though only those states, and the Cuban-Americans do, and that’s kinda it.

  164. 164.

    Matt McIrvin

    @schrodingers_cat: I sometimes wonder about alternate histories in which the US joins the Axis, or stays neutral, or is hung up by, say, the Confederate States of America being independent and bringing a theater of war to North America.

    I think one possible end of that scenario is just that the USSR gets the Bomb first and conquers the whole world.

  166. 166.

    Brachiator

    @Soprano2:

    My contractor was supposed to start on our bathroom renovation today, but that’s not happening now.

    Sounds like a crazy cascade of issues. Hope everything works out.

  168. 168.

    Paul in KY

    @trollhattan: My dad was in Patton’s 3rd and was on a train over to West Coast when bombs ended the war. He was to be part of the invasion force.

  171. 171.

    Cacti

    @schrodingers_cat: Also Imperial Japan were hardly the good guys.

    That a portion of the Japanese population considers the country a victim of WWII rather than a perpetrator, shows that lost cause fantasies aren’t unique to the US southern states.

    Even John Rabe, Siemens executive, and local Nazi Party leader for German expatriates in China, was repulsed by the brutality of the Imperial Japanese Army at Nanking.

  173. 173.

    rikyrah

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I sometimes wonder about alternate histories in which the US joins the Axis

    That’s why I pointed out that I have seen Man in the High Tower. I was absolutely convinced about what the Nazi’s would have done if they had gotten the bomb first.

  174. 174.

    M31

    in anticipation of the invasion of Japan, the US military made so many purple heart medals they are still using them

  175. 175.

    Subsole

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Frankly, I don’t see the CSA surviving WW 1. Too little manpower, too little industry. At best, they’d have gone the way of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  177. 177.

    Kathleen

    @Eolirin: That’s been going on at least since I was a kid in the 50’s and 60’s. John Birch Society really pushed that.

  178. 178.

    M31

    @Matt McIrvin: How you get from Marxism to being anti-anti-Putin I’ll never be able to figure out.

    well, the US is the worst imperialist state, especially the Democrats, so whoever is opposed to them is by definition good, and we’re all manly men with very big brain power, and they nominated that evil warmonger Hilary can you believe it

  179. 179.

    sab

    @Matt McIrvin: @Subsole:

    My father in law was a young chemist during WWII who thought he was an essential worker until he was drafted and sent to the South Pacific to help prepare for waging chemical warfare when we eventually would invade Japan. He figured he would have died from our weapons in the invasion, as would a lot of Japanese.

    The bomb was horrible, and most of the altermatives were probably worse.

  180. 180.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    Meanwhile TX’s governor declares he has “sovereign authority” to use wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande, string razor wire across private property without permission, prohibiting state troopers from giving water to immigrants in 100-degree heat, and ordering them to push toddler and infants back into the river.

    I want him tried for crimes against humanity.

    I know, he can get in line after Trump, Stephen Miller, and their aides; after GWB, Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, Yoo, etc., and let’s not forget Kissinger. If he’s gonna keep on living, then The Hague needs to take advantage of the opportunity that presents.

  182. 182.

    Brachiator

    @Eolirin:

    At the state level, a couple of states have Latino (not Latina) populations that vote the barest majority Republican, though only those states, and the Cuban-Americans do, and that’s kinda it.

    A Brookings Institute study on 2022 voting noted the following at the state level.

    Democratic support among Latinos in the critical states of Michigan (74%), Pennsylvania (73%) and Colorado (71%) proved vital in Senate and governors races. Florida was the lone state where the majority of Latino voters supported Republican House candidates (54%), and the Latino vote mirrored the overall electorate in the state of Florida which was one of the few states where Republicans performed up to pre-election expectations.

    And national voting trends.

    Although there were no major national-origin groups among Latinos that had higher Republican support than Democratic, there were razor thin margins for Cuban American and South American Latinos who supported Republicans at rates of 46% and 47%, respectively. Cuban Americans were one of the few sub-groups of Latino voters who shifted toward the Democrats in 2022—55% Republican in 2020. However, South Americans increased their Republican percentage by a large margin, +18% from 2020.

    The South American group included many Hispanics from Venezuela.
    There was also an interesting note about gender differences.

    Latinas defied pre-election surveys and once again voted for Democratic candidates at a high level, with 68% of Latinas casting ballots for Democratic House candidates, higher than the 58% for Latino men. The 10% gender gap among Latinos in 2022 mirrors the gap in the 2016 election.

    Latinas were twice as likely to indicate that the most important issue driving their voting decision this cycle was women’s reproductive health and abortion relative to Latino men.

  183. 183.

    Fake Irishman

    @gvg:

    There’s actually a large amount of research around this very concept of nations being hesitant to use nuclear weapons called “the nuclear taboo” One of my friends from grad school coauthored a book on it. I wish her well, but I really don’t want to see her doing cable news hits seeing as what that would imply….

    (kind of like I’m rather sad that many of my friends who study racism and political violence go on TV. I’m happy for them, but it’s a bummer they are in demand.)

  184. 184.

    Geminid

    @schrodingers_cat: I describe them as Jerkobin.

    Magdi Jacobs had fun critiquing a Jacobin article that analysed a poll described as showing the potential of mobilizing working class voters for the Left. She found their method amateurish:

      “I feel like a I just found a child eating crayons.”

    Besides having a good grounding in social science methodology, Jacobs had taught 1-3rd graders. Some of them gave her the name “Mangy Jay” that she tweets under.

    Further on in her critique, Jacobs quoted some more of the article and tweeted:

       “Someone come talk me off this ledge I think I’m having a brain bleed.

  185. 185.

    Betty Cracker

    @Eolirin: It’s not a bare majority here in FL: DeSantis won 58% of the Hispanic vote overall in 2022. He got nearly 70% of the Cuban American vote, which is a higher percentage than he carried with white voters. I think their support is more about anti-communist hysteria than white supremacy and (possibly) misogyny, but the effect is the same.

  186. 186.

    lowtechcyclist

    @schrodingers_cat:

    And yet only WW are the only demographic of women that vote majority R.

    The flip side is that white women still vote 20 percentage points more D than white men.  But sure, keep dumping on white women.

  187. 187.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodingers_cat:

    There was more going on with the German nuclear weapon’s program than just lack of talent.  As I understand it, they settled on a heavy water reactor for breeding Plutonium because they had ruled out graphite moderated light water (which the US used) after testing the properties of contaminated graphite.  The Allies figured out what was happening and blew up their heavy water production facilities.

    Those are the details, but what they really show is a program that didn’t have the resources it needed to succeed.  One of the things that made the Manhattan project work was it was well enough supported that they could try many different approaches.  We had several different methods of enriching Uranium, gun and implosion methods for assembling the critical mass, U235 and Pu239, different reactor designs, etc.  When one method had problems, they had something to fall back on.  The German program didn’t have the same kind of resources, so they had to focus on whatever approach they thought was best and do what they could to make that work.  That made it possible for the Allies to interfere with their progress because there were single points of failure the Allies could target.

  188. 188.

    Lapassionara

    @gvg: I have wondered that myself. There certainly has been pressure to use them since (“Bomb them back to the Stone Age”). I remember reading Hiroshima, I was maybe 11 or so, and thinking that those types of weapons were too horrible to contemplate using. Than, much later, I saw “The Day After,” which just made the aftermath of using even tactical nuclear weapons so plain and so horrifying. If we had not used them then, they would have been used sometime later, if not by us, then by the USSR.

  193. 193.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    My mind is melting at the realization that (the male) half of society apparently thought we were playing happy homemaker with our Barbies all this time💀YMMV and my friends’ Barbies lived SUPER varied lives but… that wasn’t one of them— Emily Thiede (@EKTwrites) July 24, 2023

  195. 195.

    Roger Moore

    @Cacti:

    That a portion of the Japanese population considers the country a victim of WWII rather than a perpetrator, shows that lost cause fantasies aren’t unique to the US southern states.

    I would argue that various lost cause narratives are at the core of fascism.  More than anything, fascism is the politics of grievance, and various forms of lost national greatness are common sources of the grievance that fascism latches onto.  That kind of grievance is everywhere, which is why fascism shows up everywhere.

  196. 196.

    M31

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: lol not sure exactly what games my sisters were making up with their Barbies back in the day but I do remember that Ken’s head never could stay on his body

  197. 197.

    Elizabelle

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:  I know. That’s pretty hilarious, given that it turns out most of us did not even have a Ken doll in the mix.

    It was Barbie, single woman extraordinaire.

    They never even marketed a baby for her.  The one baby I recall was her “little sister.”  Right.

  199. 199.

    gvg

    @rikyrah: It hurts SOME peoples feelings who think they speak for ALL white Americans. They don’t speak for me or plenty of other white Americans.

    First, I didn’t do slavery, and guilt is not inheritable. Nor is honor. You have to make your own way.

    Second, I don’t think it’s been the position of the majority of whites for a long time that the truth was too painful. if it was, O think it would have been suppressed more. It has been not well taught, but that has been partly people don’t care to much about history and are busy. I was taught the basics and always found it easy to find out more even here in the south, some kids paid attention and others just barely, like on most subjects.

    But now the politicians are paying too much attention to the schools details and things are getting worse. Its extreme nuttiness though.

  201. 201.

    sdhays

    @Matt McIrvin: Stalin would have sent all the scientists to the gulags for a decade just to show them who was boss and the project would have fizzled (ha!), just like he did with the rocket program and whatever else.

  204. 204.

    raven

    I did buy a hydraulic clutch kit for my 66 chevy truck so maybe now I can actually drive it again!

  207. 207.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Elizabelle: Some people (men) are under the delusion that it’s primarily the marketing that’s driving people (women) into the movie theaters to see Barbie. I still believe the studio guys had no idea what type of movie Gerwig was making, and it caught them by surprise.

  211. 211.

    sdhays

    @mrmoshpotato: “Here you are, Mr. Powell. This is your room with your universal soul mate, with whom you will now spend eternity, Donald Rumsfeld! Oh, good, you know each other! I’ll let you two catch up, then.”

  212. 212.

    MisterDancer

    @The Thin Black Duke: I still believe the studio guys had no idea what type of movie Gerwig was making, and it caught them by surprise.

    That makes a ton of sense. I’d say marketing knew, 1000%, and pushed hard for the funding to do a ton of work. It’s been one of the most brilliant viral/word-of-mouth efforts I’ve seen. I suspect some of it was someone in that team knowing they had a subversive hit on their hands.

    BARBIE is very much the kind of movie that would be a cult classic if it wasn’t so successful.

  213. 213.

    rikyrah

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    They never grasped it.

    You bought Barbie, the different kinds of Barbies, and set up a world where they all lived and worked.

    I experimented with Barbie. Barbie astronaut had a different life than regular Barbie, than Doctor Barbie.

    Barbie was going to space and healing the sick. Even regular Barbie had a job…

     

    All the Barbies had a middle name…and they were called by their middle names so that you could distinguish them.

  214. 214.

    Matt McIrvin

    @sdhays: They did have a lot of trouble as it was–early on, Stalin was following the Lysenkoist model and getting physicists to denounce quantum mechanics as “bourgeois idealism”, until some of the nuclear physicists basically conveyed to him that he would get no nuclear bomb if he continued with this bullshit. And before too long, the Soviet fundamental physics establishment was world-class, pretty amazing actually.

  216. 216.

    Kay

    @raven:

    I love that collection. The polka dot raincoat is so cute. Me and my sisters and the girls in the neighborhood loved Barbie – “wanna play Barbie?” It could go on all day. She had an exciting life, Ms. Barbie.

  217. 217.

    burritoboy

    That’s what fascists do in legislatures.  They do this weird, performative shit until (usually) an outside scandal or externally caused economic problems destroy / overwhelm the range of democratic parties (or most of the range of democratic parties). Then, the fascists can take over by claiming they were the opponents of the entire “corrupt system”. Then the fascist regimes go through their inevitable rise and inevitable destruction cycle.

    What legislatures ultimately are are reasoned public arguments between political formations.  Since “reasoned public arguments” are meaningless to fascism (both on theoretical and practical levels), whenever fascists get into legislatures, they produce this very spectacle-driven, clownish behavior that isn’t actually legislating in a real sense.  Their actual proposed legislation is actually meaningless to them whether it passes or not.  Its primary function is to symbolically emphasize the separation of the fascists from the entire range of democratic parties, i.e. building the fascists up as the “opposition” that can take power when the negative external shock happens.

    Though occasionally the fascists can create that negative external shock themselves, it’s far more often that the negative external shock is just something that happens to the democracy that the fascists themselves haven’t done. Usually, it is something on the lines of a massive corruption scandal, drastic military loss or economic recession/depression.  (And it certainly isn’t the fascist legislators who take the lead on doing any of those.)  The fascist legislators are mostly sitting around making up spectacles instead of actually doing anything concrete in this interim period.  Doing something concrete means participating in the “corrupt system” which negates their fascism, and they’re really not going to do much of that.

    This is pretty much the universal experience of fascists “legislators” within democracies.  They aren’t really legislators in themselves at all, but sort of clowns or performers waiting in the wings for the ultimate leader to save the nation. At best, they might be preparing the way for the ultimate leader, but even this is a fairly minor role. This is part of the reason why DeSantis is a secondary or tertiary figure compared to Trump, and always will be.

  219. 219.

    Betsy

    @rikyrah: Also, if you are a single woman with a decent income, the Social Security formula penalizes you in favor of the married woman who doesn’t work or earns less than her spouse.  In other words, the formula shorts you (takes money away from your SS pension) and over-pays (gives extra money to) the trad-wife survivor of a conventional patriarchal marriage.  The trad-wife gets the benefit of the higher spousal income when that spouse dies leaving her widowed.

    Another penalty for women who remain single and earn their own incomes.  Money out of their pockets, and into the pockets of trad-wives.

  221. 221.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Roger Moore: The fact that they had calutrons, gaseous diffusion and plutonium breeding going all at the same time, with completely different bomb designs under development for uranium and plutonium, is kind of mind-blowing.

  222. 222.

    rikyrah

    @Betsy:

    it also penalizes women who were married and worked.

    How do I know? It penalized my mother when my father passed away. That change came under Reagan – another reason to hate him.

    Also, cut my child’s survivor benefits off the month I turned 18, instead of 22, before Reagan.

  224. 224.

    rikyrah

    Barbie had a beach house. A car. She had her own city apartment. Barbie had the life.

    And, little girls could move it. That city apartment could be in NY, or Chicago, or Paris. Get little pictures of the Eiffel Tower. Cut them and tape them in the windows. Get a beret and Barbie is traveling through the streets of Paris.

  225. 225.

    Kay

    @rikyrah:

    we always put her in a apartment because none of us lived in one – we would say “a high rise” – exotic!

    lol

  227. 227.

    mrmoshpotato

    Re: Oppenheimer

    Anyone know if there’s an intermission, or is it 3 hours straight through?

  229. 229.

    Roger Moore

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     
    Multiple, parallel approaches is the way you always go if you care about success, and the military knows this. It’s why they have competitive bidding for anything remotely important, and for really important things they’ll often hedge their bets by buying more than one. It made total sense they’d be willing to fund as many different approaches to building nukes as they had funding and ideas for. If anything is really amazing, it’s that most of the approaches they tried actually panned out rather than a bunch of them failing. I think the only thing they tried that unequivocally failed was gun assembly for Pu weapons.

  232. 232.

    Roberto el oso

    Oppenheimer: Possible SPOILER below:

    I read in a review what might be the cause of the complaints that the Bhagavad Gita was being disrespected — that Oppenheimer quotes from it right after having had sex with a woman who is not his wife. So perhaps it’s the circumstances of the quoting which have set folks off?

    I haven’t seen it yet (tmi, but my bladder will not cooperate, even though I love excessively long movies).

  233. 233.

    FelonyGovt

    @Elizabelle: It’s really funny that they’re saying that Ken is “low-T”. Ken dolls had NO GENITALS. As those of us who had them discovered almost immediately after getting them home 😈

  234. 234.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Roger Moore: The Apollo Moon program was kind of the opposite lesson though–the Americans locked down many elements of the spacecraft design pretty early even when they were noticeably suboptimal, and settled on one approach to focus on, whereas the Soviets had multiple parallel programs with antagonistic chief designers competing for resources. (Maybe the antagonism was the real problem.)

    There was a program for a crewed circumlunar flight that was completely separate from the landing program–the Proton booster, which the Russians were still using until very recently, came out of it.

  235. 235.

    Roberto el oso

    I think it’s worth considering that the A-bomb would never have been deployed against the Germans because of race. The war in the Pacific was very much a race war, with the Imperial Japanese forces fully as racist as those who fought against them.

  236. 236.

    Skepticat

    Another hill McCarthy and the House GOP may die on …

    Forgive me for wishing this could be literal.

  237. 237.

    glory b

    @rikyrah: I just hope that these things can be resolved before they affect the economy. The pointy heads say so many strikes at once will cause a downturn & they will say since Biden wants the credit now, he’ll have to take the blame at a point so much closer to the election.

    Expect the Republicans to howl 24/7 on television. They’re hoping for a win/win, blame the economic problems on both Biden and “greedy” unions.

  238. 238.

    LiminalOwl

    @rikyrah: Do you know (or does anybody else here know) whether this practice might have been directly connected with Lois Gould’s (1972) The Story of X? I’ve been wondering and haven’t found an answer.

    I remember some predecessor of the current glassbowls (probably William Safire) reviewing Gould’s story very negatively, and in particular mocking the idea of non-binary identity.

    And a tangent from the Oppenheimer discussion: might I recommend Ellen Klages’s not-quite-SF YA duology, The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace?

  239. 239.

    Betsy

    @rikyrah: Ugh. So sorry that affected your mom and you.

    I know so many people who were horribly hurt by Reagan – my friend who dropped out of college when he cut Pell Grants, gay friends, and many more.  What an awful person he was.

  243. 243.

    LiminalOwl

    @MisterDancer: Thank you. I’m no expert, but that doesn’t sound like a “tankie” to me. Wanting America to live up to its alleged ideals is not the same as hating America… (as my parents explained to me when I asked about the “Love It or Leave It” bumper stickers). And I really appreciate your perspective, as always.

  245. 245.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @trollhattan: It’s been noted more than a few times that the most critical secret of the Manhattan Project was that an atomic bomb of militarily significant size and utility could be built.** Very few nations at the time had the resources to pursue what looked like a screwball long-shot out of the science-fiction magazines at an eventual cost of $35bn in the middle of a world war. But once it was shown to be possible, what nation with aspirations of major military power could afford not to pursue it? And that train left the station NLT 6 August 1945.

    ** I.e., it was possible to build a nuclear-fission device small enough to be dropped from a bomber with enough explosive power to destroy a large section of a city, at least 1000 times the that of the largest conventional high-explosive bombs.

  246. 246.

    Roger Moore

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I think there were two factors that made the projects different:

    1. Making the “try every avenue and take the best one” approach demands strong management.  At some point, you do need to narrow things down to the best approach, and knowing when is critical.  Oppenheimer and Groves were able to provide that kind of leadership to the Manhattan Project, and it sounds as if the Soviets didn’t have it for their moon program.
    2. The Apollo Program was much less of a technology development project.  Rockets were fairly well understood technology by that point, and we knew from the beginning that it would be possible to go to the moon by building bigger versions of what we already knew how to do.  That’s not to say the Apollo Program was boring or easy, but it was a lot more feasible to decide on basic parameters at the beginning of the project and go with them than it was with the Manhattan Project.
  247. 247.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Steeplejack: My knowledgeable but not-a-physicist friend, who has read some of the Oppenheimer books, says a lot of the science is “glossed over” in the movie. ​

    Your friend (and all others of a sufficiently pedantic bent) should read Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb and dig into the references if he wants the unglossed details. It’s a frackin’ movie fer dogsake!

  248. 248.

    JBWoodford

    @Matt McIrvin:

    There’s a story I’ve heard, not sure if it’s true, about a Soviet physicist who was fighting on the Western front through the early part of WW II. He got leave, went back to Moscow, started catching up on physics journals, and immediately realized that the Allies were trying to build a bomb. The clue was the number of American and refugee physicists who completely stopped submitting papers around the start of the Manhattan Project….

  252. 252.

    Roger Moore

    @JBWoodford:

    That sounds apocryphal, or at least base on shoddy reasoning, to me.  Plenty of scientists who didn’t wind up on the Manhattan Project were diverted into wartime work.  We needed lots of people to work on radar, sonar, rocket propulsion, etc., etc., etc.  Scientists who were still at their schools were busy training a huge influx of students for all kinds of technical jobs.  Heck, you notice the scientist in the story was fighting on the front lines, so the diversion to wartime work wasn’t limited to technical jobs.  Noticing a bunch of physicists weren’t publishing and this must mean they’re working on a specific project is reasoning way beyond available evidence.

  253. 253.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @rikyrah: Umm…The Man in the High Castle. (I’ve been watching clips from it most of the day.)

    Clearly you had him confused with Jim Hightower…

  254. 254.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Uncle Cosmo: I think Ronald Moore said that the specific point of divergence of his alternate history in For All Mankind was “Korolev doesn’t die on the operating table.”

    (There are a bunch of things in that timeline I don’t regard as 100% plausible, but the Soviets getting their shit together sufficiently that Alexei Leonov is the first man on the Moon… yeah, they could have done that.)

  255. 255.

    Kelly

    My Uncle Walt was a bombardier on a B29 out of Tinian. He flew the massive firestorm missions before we dropped the bomb. Flew reconnaissance over Nagasaki after the bomb. He did not think the results of the bomb were any worse than the firestorm missions. He had General Sherman’s attitude “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it”

  256. 256.

    JohnC

    @Anyway: I respectfully respond that “I already read the book” isn’t necessarily a very good reason not to see a film. A good audiovisual media adaptation of a text must/will have many differences from the source, and if it’s a good adaptation, it will provide new pleasures of its own.

  260. 260.

    Citizen Alan

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I believe I mentioned at one point that I used my sister’s barbie dolls as villains to fight my mego superhero action figures. Proportionally, each of them was 2 feet taller than Batman or superman, and they were terrifying Amazon monsters to my young imagination.

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