Living a life void of love and compassion is not a happy life

My Sunday movie was Project Hail Mary and I went to an actual movie theater this afternoon to see it. This is a movie for the big screen. The story, adapted from the book by Andy Weir, is about Ryland Grace (which means actor Ryan Gosling is in every scene) solving a science fiction problem. A microbe is nibbling on the sun (yeah, that’s a scientific stretch, but let’s go with it) and the decreasing heat and light will cause the death of humanity in thirty years. Scientists determined a lot of nearby stars are also dimming. But one, Tau Ceti, isn’t. So the scientists of the world want to send a crew there to figure out why that star is spared. Grace is a middle school science teacher. In his past he wrote a paper proposing life could exist in other forms that don’t need water. It got a cool reception in the scientific community. But now his way of thinking might be a help, so he is forcefully recruited for the project. At Tau Ceti he wakes up from a coma on the spaceship, quite disoriented (of course) and finds the rest of the crew is dead. He doesn’t seem to know how to run the ship and I wondered why they would send a man into space without thorough training. The reason is eventually explained. He sees another ship nearby, a being from another affected star also looking for a solution. But this being appears to be made of rocks, confirming the paper other scientists rejected. That turns the story into a first contact story, then into a buddy movie as Rocky (what else are you going to name it?) helps Grace in trying to find the solution. The spaceship is, of course, named Hail Mary. IMDb tells me that gives us “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s a fun story, though one must let the problematic science slide on by. The filmscore by Daniel Pemberton (who I hadn’t heard of before) is pretty good too. So are the special effects. The film deserves its box office take (close to $328 million so far). Even seven weeks since it opened the theater was reasonably full. Before seeing the movie I saw there are related videos on YouTube. First is 19 minutes of behind the scenes, how they did the stunts and special effects. This included exploring the puppetry of Rocky, the large array of sounds used in the score, and the wire work to simulate weightlessness. It is pretty good (not great). One person wondered isn’t Ryan Gosling old enough to be Ryan Goose? Second is a 27 minute video of the science mistakes in the film. This is by Hank Green, who apparently has done a lot of these sorts of videos. He asked his subscribers for science problems that pulled them out of the movie. Green begins by saying he very much enjoyed the film. He sees it as hopeful that so many diverse people came together to solve a problem and that some people were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity. Also, if the film was extra careful to get the science exactly right it would likely be unwatchable as a story. That’s important in an Andy Weir story where science plays an integral part in the story. The thing that got most of the attention was Grace uses a centrifuge and puts two vials in adjacent spots, which could introduce a wobble into the machine. Grace, a scientist, should know to put the vials on opposite sides. Related, Grace rarely uses an isolation chamber when dealing with the microbes. That’s dangerous when he’s the only human on board and if the microbes sicken him there goes the chance to save humanity. There are scenes where Grace is weightless and others where spins up the ship to get gravity. But exactly which plane of rotation is used isn’t consistent. But Green wasn’t all that concerned about it. Green thought Weir having the bad guys, the microbes eating the sun, also serving as fuel for the spaceship was a pretty cool idea. There was one aspect of the science not being right that I caught and Green didn’t mention. That is ships in space move differently than they do on earth. In space once the rockets stop thrusting the ship doesn’t stop, it keeps going at a constant speed. And some of Grace’s maneuvering (he wasn’t trained as the pilot) didn’t move as a spaceship should. It’s a highly enjoyable film, even if the science isn’t quite right. Grace and Rocky are great buddies. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Pridesource, discussed toxic masculinity. Her discussion was brought on by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signing an anti-DEI bill and claiming that white males are discriminated against. Witkowski wonders why white male politicians keep seeing white males as victims even while they say it’s weak to be a victim. But the oppression isn’t coming from DEI, but from white dudes telling other white dudes (like her son)...

they have a god-given duty to be violent and misogynistic and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t look like them. Toxic masculinity is at the helm in this country, and we’re headed straight for a tiny fishing vessel that we’re going to blow up just for fun because we think it’s cool to kill people.

She is teaching her son “Cruelty is not strength. Empathy is not weakness.”

As any human with a heart and soul knows, living a life void of love, compassion and care for others is not a happy life. Yet the message in this country being fed to white, heterosexual, cisgender men is that the key to a good life is seizing power from wherever you can get it, especially from people who have less power than you. Fuck love and other sissy s---. Unsurprisingly, this makes these men very unhappy. And their unhappiness is blamed on immigrants and drag queens and women who wear pants and complain about being called “honey” in the workplace. And so they must oppress them. It’s literally a cycle of abuse.

I can hear a lot of men feeling “I’m not happy.” They may not know themselves well enough to recognize they aren’t happy because the manosphere doesn’t talk about happiness or feelings. Instead of trying to find things that make them happy they lash out at the things the manosphere tells them are the cause of their unhappiness. They don’t see the cause of their unhappiness is what the manosphere is telling them.

The entire Trump administration is the perfect encapsulation of this. A collection of mediocre, mostly white males engaged in a never-ending dick measuring contest. That’s literally all they know how to do.

Last Friday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos commented on the recent Callais decision by the Supreme Court that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. She wrote the decision was based on a statistical error, which is an alarming thing to base such a sweeping and harmful decision on. But Justice Alito, the decision author, doesn’t care about such things as truth when destroying democracy. The statistical error was fed to Alito by the Department of Justice. What they said in their brief on the case was: “Black voter turnout in Louisiana surpassed that of white voters in two of the last five presidential elections,” as Needham phrased it. I won’t go into Needham’s details of the flaws that went into that statement. But this is an example of Alito taking anything he can get to claim that racism is totally fixed so the VRA is no longer necessary. I think Justice Roberts made that claim when they first started gutting the VRA, prompting a strong rebuke in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent. But even if the DOJ statement were true, that does not imply that black people are not an oppressed minority in Louisiana and thus don’t need protections when districts are drawn. Alas, Alito has shown us many times who he is. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital. Grossman provided links to articles that show “the judges denied facts, distorted law, and contradicted themselves” in crafting the Callais decision. I haven’t followed the links. He then wrote:

Republican partisans on the Supreme Court created a pretext to gut the Voting Rights Act so the former Confederate/Jim Crow states, and red states more broadly, could manipulate maps to lock Black Americans and other minorities out of government representation. After the decision, multiple Republican-controlled states rushed to do exactly that. Then Republican partisans on the Virginia state supreme court created a pretext to prevent Virginia Democrats from responding in kind.

Many months ago I wrote that it seemed like Alligator Alcatraz was going away. That’s the deportation detention center built in the Florida Everglades in eight days. Alas, my reading of whatever I read, was not correct. The facility is still there. Needham reports that it may really be dismantled now. After it was built there were lawsuits saying the environmental reviews were not done. The federal government sidestepped the issue saying it was a Florida facility, not one of the feds. But to make that statement stick in court the feds could not contribute to running it. Say goodbye to $600 million. Which means Florida has to pay for it with a cost of $1 million a day. And Gov. DeSantis is resenting the expense. Needham discussed what $1 million a day, well, just $1 or $2 million (a piddling amount), could do for many other programs in Florida, but DeSantis wasn’t going to direct money to such things as food banks.

DeSantis’s ongoing quest to either impress Trump, be Trump, or both has jammed him up here. His unique combination of malice and incompetence meant that the Trump administration could always fake him out, and now the state is left holding this very expensive bag.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Robert Kagan of The Atlantic. Kagan noted that previous military failures – early WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq – didn’t prevent the US from keeping its dominance.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.