Well, our ruling elites in Washington are coming pretty close to emulating Lavrentiy Beria. Recall that he was also the head of Stalin’s secret police, whose most famous quote is “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
Paraphrasing Stephen Schwarz's paraphrase, my take is that it is going to get worse before it gets worse. But, then, I am working on a State of Science 1, 3, 10, 30 years essay Dorian invited.
Ideology is a great weapon to seize and hold power but the USSR didn't let ideology get in the way of increasing its military power, as this story explains.
I am trying to think of an analogous situation in the United States in 2022. At first glance, one would expect that ideology would not be allowed to get in the way of mitigating climate change. Except that I am cynical enough that I think that climate change is largely a pretext for other things and not an actual concern of many who allegedly want to address that issue. Those of us who really are concerned about climate change (like me) understand that the dramatic expansion of the use of nuclear power is a critical part of addressing the issue. Notice that many of those who talk loudest about this issue are not interested or actually are hostile to nuclear power.
In Italy, in the 90s, I had lots of Soviet books as an undergraduate. That was because the publisher of the Italian Communist Party (Editori Riuniti) got the rights for free (plus illegal funds... to the party) from Moscow, and was already selling them for cheap until the 80s (an honorable initiative if you ask me). Then in the 90s, as the Communist Party did not exist anymore, they went on dirt cheap sale to empty the warehouses which I suppose were themselves to be sold.
Most were excellent books (the entire Landau series, for instance, which costed me maybe 50 bucks in today's money, and which I still use for reference sometimes). I had also one introductory textbooks of Quantum Mechanics, also good. It had been written under Stalin. Don't remember the author.
What I do remember is that the book had a long, bizzarre, introduction to explain that, contrary to what some counterrevolutionary would imagine, indetermination in quantum mechanics does not go against socialist realism. In fact, the preface concluded, after lots of pages of the most bizarre lucubrations, that quantum mechanics not only is compatible with Marxism-Leninism and historical-dialectical materialism, but demonstrated its necessary truth!
I must still have it in Italy somewhere, I want to look for it and bring it here. Things being as they are, that preface might help us for our future publications.
As to Beria, here's an article that appeared in a link in an Atlantic story yesterday. It gives a short summary of his life and some sketchy details of his death.
As to nuclear power, it's a complicated and risky solution to deploy nuclear power for electricity in a world in which state- and non-state adversaries can weaponize the technical knowledge or just the critical piles, as we are seeing in Ukraine in 2022. Or even just threaten to do so.
I often say that I am a big fan of nuclear power in the form of the Sun, very safely 150M km away, delivering power wirelessly all over the Earth.
Well, our ruling elites in Washington are coming pretty close to emulating Lavrentiy Beria. Recall that he was also the head of Stalin’s secret police, whose most famous quote is “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
Paraphrasing Stephen Schwarz's paraphrase, my take is that it is going to get worse before it gets worse. But, then, I am working on a State of Science 1, 3, 10, 30 years essay Dorian invited.
Regarding the corruption and politicization of science in the West, allow me to paraphrase Lenin: “It will have to get worse before it gets better.”
What a great article! I hope we can save science from DEI and other related destructive ideologies.
Too late in most Universities, and the effect of that will radiate out beyond the academe for many years to come
So sad, it is a great tragedy. I am worried what the effects of this DEI poison will be.
Ideology is a great weapon to seize and hold power but the USSR didn't let ideology get in the way of increasing its military power, as this story explains.
I am trying to think of an analogous situation in the United States in 2022. At first glance, one would expect that ideology would not be allowed to get in the way of mitigating climate change. Except that I am cynical enough that I think that climate change is largely a pretext for other things and not an actual concern of many who allegedly want to address that issue. Those of us who really are concerned about climate change (like me) understand that the dramatic expansion of the use of nuclear power is a critical part of addressing the issue. Notice that many of those who talk loudest about this issue are not interested or actually are hostile to nuclear power.
In Italy, in the 90s, I had lots of Soviet books as an undergraduate. That was because the publisher of the Italian Communist Party (Editori Riuniti) got the rights for free (plus illegal funds... to the party) from Moscow, and was already selling them for cheap until the 80s (an honorable initiative if you ask me). Then in the 90s, as the Communist Party did not exist anymore, they went on dirt cheap sale to empty the warehouses which I suppose were themselves to be sold.
Most were excellent books (the entire Landau series, for instance, which costed me maybe 50 bucks in today's money, and which I still use for reference sometimes). I had also one introductory textbooks of Quantum Mechanics, also good. It had been written under Stalin. Don't remember the author.
What I do remember is that the book had a long, bizzarre, introduction to explain that, contrary to what some counterrevolutionary would imagine, indetermination in quantum mechanics does not go against socialist realism. In fact, the preface concluded, after lots of pages of the most bizarre lucubrations, that quantum mechanics not only is compatible with Marxism-Leninism and historical-dialectical materialism, but demonstrated its necessary truth!
I must still have it in Italy somewhere, I want to look for it and bring it here. Things being as they are, that preface might help us for our future publications.
As to Beria, here's an article that appeared in a link in an Atlantic story yesterday. It gives a short summary of his life and some sketchy details of his death.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/lavrenti-beria-executed
As to nuclear power, it's a complicated and risky solution to deploy nuclear power for electricity in a world in which state- and non-state adversaries can weaponize the technical knowledge or just the critical piles, as we are seeing in Ukraine in 2022. Or even just threaten to do so.
I often say that I am a big fan of nuclear power in the form of the Sun, very safely 150M km away, delivering power wirelessly all over the Earth.
lol - interesting account.