OT: the state of play on dark matter

To obscured for me, they need to shed more light on the subject.

John

There was a post in the backreaction blog spot about the latest gravity wave detection (from a visible source) nixing some of the MOND theories. (Since it showed that gravity and light waves both go at the same speed.)

George H.

It's impressive how severely reality overcomes theory.

All science is based on/(checked by) data. You need good data to do good science. Otherwise we lose our way. That is not to say that science is 'just data'. It goes way beyond the data, but we need data to keep it grounded. I have no idea about Mond theories, (or dark matter) but I think some Mond theories have gravity and light waves moving at the same speed.

George H.

Please explain socialism, then.

Krw imagines that Scandinavia and Germany aren't "real" probably because he's never been anywhere near there, and isn't really convinced that any of the countries involved actually exist.

He's going to get a nasty surprise when reality catches up with Tea Party Republicanism. Trump's success in getting the Republican presidential nomination could have been a wake-up call, but seeing Trump as an aspect of "reality" is a bit of a stretch.

This is a good piece on the 100th anniversary of Communism.

Socialism is sort of a metastable state between a free economy and communism.

OK, so we have a very clear 100 years of reality for all to see. Why are so many hooked on a theory that has killed 100M?

e:

The Wall Street Journal doesn't like communism much. Socialism hasn't thoug ht much of communism for quite a bit longer. Marx and the proto-communists got thrown out of the international socialist movement for being un-democra tic back in 1870.

Mikhail Bakunin was remarkably accurately prophetic at the time.

?If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.?

Wrong. Socialism is a way of running a free economy that spends enough on t he services that capitalists don't like paying for to keep the capitalists businesses running efficiently.

Capitalism is a metastable condition on the way to a failed state - one run by some kind of criminal conspiracy (which may call itself fascist or comm unist) where the most successful capitalists have replaced the free market with monopolies and cartels and bought up all the political parties in the process. The US is well down that road already (though Trump isn't any of t he capitalists involved).

Communism is just one more criminal conspiracy - it happens to have emerged from the socialist movement and pinched convenient bits of socialist dogma in the process. Russian communism was clearly a metastable conditions on t he way to a failed state. Chinese communism has embraced aspects of capital ism enthusiastically enough that it subjects have enough to eat, and more c onsumer goods than they used to, but the enthusiasm for central political c ontrol is the fundamental error (which is what is also messing up US capita lism) and will prove fatal if they don't see sense.

Socialism - as practiced in Scandinavia and northern Europe -m doesn't seem to be showing any sign of this kind of problem, and certainly no tendency to move towards a Russian-style centrally-controlled economy.

John Larkin doesn't seem to know enough to be conscious of this, and he doe s listen to James Arthur, who has some very strange ideas, probably implant ed during his time in a right-wing de-education camp.