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Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday: Giant Meteor in 2031 (again) [1]
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Date: 2022-12-16
Taken literally, it means "after modernism." Postmodernism is a reaction to modernism: a skepticism towards modernist beliefs in empiricism, technology, human progress, and metanarratives. It's no secret that all literary movements are simply reactions to the previous one--severe swings to the opposite end of the spectrum.
Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.
In 2031 a comet will come somewhat close(sic) to Earth. Don’t worry, it’s not going to hit Earth, although I have a kind of fatalism which suggests that it will make its arrival generally coincident with my own passing. It makes estate planning easier. We're now at the moment where Alan Sokal, academe’s old man of reactionary cloud-yelling, has seeped into vernacular anti-vaxxism with a 2021 posting. Because cooties will make us extinct before the Giant Meteor.
Sokal, a mathematics professor at University College London and emeritus professor of physics at NYU, has written or co-written two books on the nonsense of postmodernism, and how it damages real scholarship: Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture , and Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (written with Jean Bricmont). I’ve read them, and they’re both good.
(2021) Alan Sokal, you may recall, became famous for perpetrating the “ Sokal Hoax “, in which he made up a postmodern scholarly article full of bizarre contentions but larded with real quotes, and submitted it to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies viewed through a postmodern lens. The article, called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was accepted, whereupon Sokal revealed the hoax in another article. It was the first demonstration of how a completely off-the-wall article could find favor with postmodern academics. (It’s been repeated with the more recent “grievance studies” hoaxes .)
An academic’s meta-skepticism amplified even more reactionary discourse… who knew there’s an audience for the Jordan Petersons of the world.
"The Meteor is particularly appealing to independent voters, functionally in a three way tie at 27 percent to 35 percent for Clinton and 31 percent for Trump," the 2016 poll reads.
In 2016, nearly one in four told an opinion poll they would rather have a giant meteor destroy the Earth than see Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the White House.
edition.cnn.com/…
The object, officially designated a comet on June 23, is called Comet C/2014 UN271(opens in new tab) or Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its discoverers, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and astronomer Gary Bernstein.
Astronomers estimate this icy body has a diameter of 62 miles to 124 miles (100 to 200 km), making it about 10 times wider than a typical comet. This estimate is quite rough, however, as the comet remains far away from Earth and its size was calculated based on how much sunlight it reflects. The comet will make its closest approach to our planet in 2031 but will remain at quite a distance even then.
www.space.com/…
(2016) BOSTON (Reuters) - Young Americans are so dissatisfied with their choices in this presidential election that nearly one in four told an opinion poll they would rather have a giant meteor destroy the Earth than see Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the White House.
The tongue-in-cheek question was intended to gauge young Americans’ level of unhappiness about their choices in the Nov. 8 election, said Joshua Dyck, co-director of UMass Lowell’s Center for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll alongside Odyssey, a social media platform.
The choice alluded to the Twitter hashtag “#GiantMeteor2016,” a reference to an imaginary presidential candidate used to express frustration about this year’s election choices.
Some 53 percent of the 1,247 people aged 18 to 35 said they would prefer to see a meteor destroy the world than have Republican New York real estate developer Trump in the Oval Office, with some 34 percent preferring planetary annihilation to seeing the Democratic former Secretary of State win.
Some 39 percent said they would prefer that U.S. President Barack Obama declare himself president for life than hand over power to Clinton or Trump, with 26 percent saying the nation would do better to select its next leader in a random lottery.
Some 23 percent, nearly one in four, preferred the giant meteor outcome to either Trump or Clinton.
“Obviously we don’t think that they’re serious,” Dyck said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “The fact that one in four of our young people pick ‘Giant Meteor’ tells you something about the political disaffection that is being shown by American youth.”
That contrasts with the surge of participation by young voters that helped propel Obama into the White House for his first term in the 2008 election.
www.reuters.com/…
x Longing for Asteroids - The Morning Heresy wishes upon a giant meteor o'death.
https://t.co/FP6na47y53 pic.twitter.com/6xIvs2NEuP — Center for Inquiry (@center4inquiry) August 25, 2020
In the wake of these surprising poll results, the “Sweet Meteor O’Death” celebrated its big win on Twitter (where its bio reads, “Ready to Make an Impact, Tough on Putin & Iran, I’ll probably destroy all Earthly life”), thanking its “human supporters” for the kind words and for considering changing its plans in order to put an end to human life.
When the giant meteor was left out of the equation, Clinton received 45 percent of the vote, Trump had 41 percent, Johnson had 5 percent and Stein clocked in at 2 percent. In a head-to-head vote between Clinton and Trump, the former secretary of state bested the real estate mogul with 48 percent to Trump’s 44 percent.
people.com/…
x The most exciting part about this comet potentially being alien-manufactured is that "we might not be the 'sharpest cookie in the jar' or 'the smartest kid on the block,'" Dr. Avi Loeb told VICE.
https://t.co/jm3CigSBI4 — VICE (@VICE) December 13, 2022
(2021) You may remember in 2017 when a bizarre, blunt-shaped object came whizzing our way in space. It measured approximately half a mile in length and was moving at an irregular pace, getting alien watchers excited. The vast majority of scientists who have studied the object have said ‘Oumuamua, was a natural phenomenon, but the head of Harvard's Astronomy department just published a book in which he says he believes the giant object was alien in origin.
In his book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Dr. Avi Loeb lays out in 240 pages exactly why he believes the object from 2017 was an intergalactic attempt to contact Earth.
“The most exciting aspect of the possibility that 'Oumuamua is weird and unlike any asteroid or comet that we had seen before is that it might be a product of an alien technology,” Loeb told Motherboard in an email. “If so, we might not be the ‘sharpest cookie in the jar’ or ‘the smartest kid on the block.’ We should search for additional interstellar objects to find out.”
In 2019, researchers at the University of Maryland published a paper in Nature Astronomy concluding that the giant space blunt was bizarre, because of its color, the fact it didn't have comet-like propulsion, and the fact that it didn't give off gases in the way a comet would be expected to. But they also said it was unlikely to be alien in nature: "'Oumuamua's having some unusual properties is by no means sufficient evidence to conclude that it must be aliens," Matthew Knight, coauthor of that paper, told Motherboard at the time, adding "As a scientist, I'm trained to not think in absolutes, so I can't say with 100% confidence that it *wasn't* aliens." Knight hypothesized that the object was "planetesimal," meaning it could be a building block of a planet.
www.vice.com/...
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