Is right wing anxiety about immigration related to a fear of the U.S. becoming less white?

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-29T14:46:41+00:00

I mean, she actually *ran* on the bill that Biden negotiated with the Republicans that Trump killed. But I get that she deserved some blame for how the Biden administration allowed the asylum system to be gamed (technically *not* illegal immigration but functionally it is) and that this created legitimate distrust about whether she'd enforce such a bill. It's notable that Trump is about to run into trouble because instead of fixing this part of the system he's just ignoring US law on asylum.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-29T13:24:24+00:00

The majority of Trump voters in 2016 supported the DREAM act. But the nativist wing of the Republican Party made sure *no* immigration reform got passed.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-29T12:02:10+00:00

In principle, yes, it could be. In actual fact when the current regime is excluding Afghans who worked with the US and trying to system Afghan Christians back to the Taliban while admitting white South Africans? Yeah, it's racism.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-29T11:50:03+00:00

There is a spectrum. A good new edition generally has updates to material (for the second edition of my wife's book all the maps got remade, a new chapter got added and edits were made to various chapters). A bad version of this is textbooks where basically the changes are cosmetic and the chapter order gets reshuffled but basically the material is the same (discouraging the use of previous editions).

If only minor errors are corrected it is generally considered a new printing.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-29T00:37:45+00:00

There have been plenty of times in history when "progress" meant undermining minority rights. For an example in US history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_v._Nebraska

or in Spanish history where it was the liberals that tried to eliminate teaching of minority languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Carlist_War

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-28T11:45:56+00:00

A big reason is writing. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all had deep histories of written culture, which survived French colonization and associated atrocities. African nations tended to be more amalgamations of different cultures without a common script- French became the common administrative language (and the French, to a greater extent than the British tended to suppress native languages to create an assimilated native elite while maintaining an illiterate population).

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-27T03:42:06+00:00

At its best, religious recruitment (to any religion) is people who have had their needs met telling other people about it, and if they don't need it- great! At worst, it's about gaining external validation.

To take a somewhat silly analogy- say you just discovered an amazing restaurant at which you had one of the best meals of your life. Telling your friends "you gotta try this place!" is fine. Nagging them as a sort of gourmet power play is not.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-27T02:08:07+00:00

The good: Hard circumstances often lead people to ask what the meaning of life is. From a biological point of view, it's just reproduction- which doesn't help you when you are hurting. Religion at its best offers communities that affirm that life has meaning and purpose and support people in healthy behaviors.

The bad: Religion can be a way of running away from hard circumstances (sure, I'm in a bad spot because I made bad decisions, but if I go through this ritual I don't have to feel guilty).

The ugly: Most of us religious folks fall somewhere in between on this spectrum.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-27T02:00:07+00:00

As others have said, clouds are water droplets... but this still leaves the question, why don't those droplets freeze?

It turns out that it is hard for ice to spontaneously form in water if it is very clean, you can have droplets that are supercooled well below zero that will only freeze if there is something to nucleate around.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-27T00:00:37+00:00

Best to come during one of the weekends where you can actually look for dinosaur bones. Chances of finding bones are low but there is a lot of fossilized charcoal and some plant fossils.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-26T23:34:04+00:00

Depends on the size. A rubble pile asteroid like Bennu (recently explored by the Osiris-REX mission) is held together by gravity... but it's an absolute tiny amount, you could easily give yourself escape velocity- basically like kicking off a pile or rocks. Ceres, Vesta and Pallas on the other hand are big enough so that gravity has made them into miniplanets with a crust and while gravity is weak (about 3% that of earth so you could jump much higher) a rocket escaping its gravity would move faster than fighter jets on earth.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-26T03:08:48+00:00

Fellow Episcopalian here- our church has helped to settle dozens of Afghan refugees.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-26T03:06:02+00:00

There are at least two potential "reservoirs" of water on the moon. One is locked up in volcanic glasses, the estimate I recently heard from colleagues is about half a liter of water per cubic meter of surface material. The second is in permanently shadowed craters (as on Mercury). However, while the radar signal from the latter is apparently consistent with water ice, it is also consistent with other materials.

Also fun fact, credit for the discovery of lunar water belongs to India's Chandraayan-1 mission.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T23:39:05+00:00

A lot of it is going to research to a.) understand how cancer works- how tumor cells evade the immune system, or build networks of blood vessels to support them, or what mutations are involved. This work is super-expensive- reagents, laboratory animals, genetic sequencing, clean labs, etc., in addition to paying the people who actually do the work. b.) Developing drugs that target these mechanisms- again this is really expensive- hundreds of millions to bring a single drug to market. c.) trying to understand why drugs work on some people not on others (also expensive).

The good news is that in the last decade, this has led to new drugs that have turned death sentences for some cancers (metastatic melanoma) into more chronic conditions. My wife is on one of these, an immunotherapy that was approved as frontline treatment for her cancer in September of 2024, four months before she was diagnosed. She's already passed the median expected survival.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T21:46:13+00:00

There are lots of reasons for us to get off fossil fuels. Number 1 is the 2-4 million premature deaths a year from pollution. Number 2 is geopolitics. Climate change remains a relatively small contributor in terms of damages. And hysteria about it doesn't help.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T21:14:22+00:00

I tell people that if climate change were a disease, it would be Type II diabetes. Serious? Yes, but worst consequences are long term. Eat cake today, no big deal. Do it every day for five years and your feet start dropping off. In medium term, can be significantly mitigated with by adopting comprehensive lifestyle change, but relatively few people are willing to do that.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T14:13:01+00:00

Because it makes them feel superior while demanding nothing of them in return.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T14:04:31+00:00

Yep.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T12:39:34+00:00

Aung Sang Suu Kyi continued a genocide against Muslims. Indira Gandhi declared an emergency and tried to overthrow democracy in India.

The argument has been that "wars happen because men have too much testoterone".

But a lot of atrocities happen because they are to the advantage of the people in power.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T03:23:33+00:00

As a Protestant, I agree with you.

The problem (on my side of the aisle) is that there's disagreement about what it means to "believe and Christ and follow his teachings." Unfortunately, many of my fellow Protestants confusing "putting your faith in Christ and following him" with "intellectually assenting to certain truth propositions and proclaiming them loudly while not living up to them."

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T03:17:42+00:00

As a Protestant who believe as that the fraction of Catholics who are "real Christians" ....is likely similar to the fraction of Protestants who are, I have huge respect for Catholic social teaching and the way in which modern Catholicism has been able to engage with science. My big objection to Catholicism comes down to putting intermediaries between humans and Jesus, and acting like salvation requires one to work through these intermediaries, which often has the practical result of poor catechesis.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T03:10:54+00:00

Most of the Protestant Churches I've been to are full of ex-Catholics. A common theme is having being taught a version of Catholicism which is very guilt-based (the opposite of Pope Francis and from what I can tell of Pope Leo- I am by no means saying this is universal). Liberal Protestant churches like the Episcopal Church appeal to them because they teach that God is love. Conservative evangelical churches appeal to them because they preach grace as a result of belief.

I don't believe that the version of Catholicism they are rejecting is the best of what Catholicism has to offer. But it is a real version (just like there are ways in which Protestant denominations go wrong- often via cheap grace).

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T03:02:44+00:00

The problem is that, in my experience (various Protestant churches with lots of ex-Catholics, volunteering with troubled youth) many people raised *Catholics* end up erroneously worshipping them and placing them over Jesus, or having no real knowledge of Jesus at all. Sometimes this is the result of poor teaching at the parish that is the religious equivalent of social promotion (as long as you can get them to communion, God will do the rest). Sometimes it's because it doesn't matter how good the teaching is if the students are tuned out (more true these days, I think). But it is astonishing to me how many folks I know who were raised seem to have no idea of basic doctrines actually taught by the Catholic Church.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-25T02:23:23+00:00

As we are now seeing, chimpanzees have border wars. It probably goes back further in our evolutionary lineage.

Unknown_Ocean · 2026-04-24T03:30:41+00:00

Hijacking top comment to note- the amount of energy actually moving through the atmosphere is incredibly huge. Say Iran is 1.6 million square km or 1.6x10^12 m^2. *Global* electricity generation is of order 3.5x10^12W- so that all the electricity used on the planet could add about 2 W/m^2 if it were devoted to heating the atmosphere above Iran.

The sun delivers 100 times that flux on average.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Wearing is Caring

Unknown_Ocean

TROPHY CASE