obedience to authority

Begun on this day in 1961, the eponymous battery of social psychological experiments were conducted under the supervisor of Yale professor Stanly Milgram (previously) in order to gauge the willingness of test subjects to compile with instructions that conflicted with conscience and empathy. Made to believe that they were facilitators, administering electric shocks to a student to reenforce desired behaviours, the participants demonstrated a concerning eager inclination to better the performance of their assigned learners (a rote memorisation exercise) and deliver electric shocks with increasing intensity in order to marshal their faculties. In reality the punishing discharge was fictitious, delivered via a device labeled Shock Generator, Type ZLB with output from fifteen to four hundred fifty volts, well above the fatal limit, and the students were confederates of the experimenter, but nonetheless illustrating readiness to conform, despite some misgivings and signs of reservation for the distress caused with none of those refusing to give the highest level shock insisting that the experiment be stopped or bothering to check on their students. A test-case for research ethics, most responded after learning of the set-up that they were happy to have contributed and the experiment with variations has been replicated numerous time. Held in the milieu of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for war crimes in Jerusalem and the draft for Vietnam, Milgram wanted to determine if millions of German accomplices were simply following orders in genocide. The unexpected results of the first iteration, wanting to use American students as the control group and considering obedience to an authority figure to be a distinctly Teutonic trait, stopped Milgram from subjecting a group of German students, whom might well have been much more sympathetic to the plight of the “learners” due to recent history, to the same conditions. Ultimately inconclusive, reevaluation of the tests find some heuristic value but a poor lens for understanding the Holocaust and Nazism. 

 synchronoptica

one year ago: retroactive statehood for Ohio (with synchronopticæ) 

twelve years ago: promoting a vegetarian diet plus an exhibition from the Hessen state archives

thirteen years ago: the pictograms of the Mexican Games of 1968 

10x10 (12. 639)

we don’t serve their kind here: “clanker” from the Star Wars franchise has become a universal slur for robots 

jeanine, you’ve changed: a thread about how a consultancy firm in 1987 was responsible for making late 80s and 90s cartoon characters bland and unanimated—via Super Punch 

retrospective: an interview with photographer Dennis Morris whose expansive portfolio of music royalty and documentation of the East End offer a correspondence and symmetry  

do you take this burger to be your dinner: the return after a long hiatus shows that King of the Hill was always about food 

regolith: former reality TV star, Fox News anchor and acting NASA administrator (plus also US Secretary of Transportation) announces the acceleration of the building of a lunar nuclear reactor, as well as freeing commercial drones from line-of-sight supervisor requirements 

ásatrúarfélagið: the resurgence of Norse paganism in Iceland 

bakeneko: superstition and myth regarding cats in Japanese culture—via Nag on the Lake and Everlasting Blört—see previously, see also 

hamburger royal ts: some facts about the McDonald’s Quarter-Pounder  

just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade: set in 1984 California during Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign, the critically polarising 1990 Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (previously) speaks to the present 

flivverboob: a 1922 slur for a careless driver that didn’t not seem to catch on

diurnal cycle (12. 638)

Launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome on this day in 1961, the Vostok 2 capsule carried aloft mission pilot Gherman Titov, who became the second human to orbit the Earth after Yuri Gagarin (below right)—and the four person in space counting the suborbital flights of US astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. Based on the determination that safe re-entry in the open steppe of southern Russia would not be possible if the craft overshot two orbits—much to the protestation of flight medics that believe that human physiology could not withstand an extended time in space—the mission became an endurance test, lasting just over twenty-five hours, and equipping the capsule with more advanced communication and climate controls. Proving that humans could live and work in space, Titov orbited the Earth seventeen-and-a-half times, achieving many firsts, including the first nap in space and a minor bout of space sickness (adaptation syndrome) being the first to vomit aloft, and equipped with a professional still- and film-camera captured the first images of the Earth from above aside from earlier V2 rocket-mounted footage. Titov was subjected to a battery of medical tests afterwards and the mission was considered an overwhelming success. The day of his safe record, the US congress approve, by voice vote, a spending package of over one and a half trillion dollars to fund the American space programme, including almost five hundred billion earmarked as seed money for a crewed mission to the Moon. During a visit to the World’s Fair in Seattle, when questioned by reporters how his space flight had changed his philosophy and outlook on life (see also), Titov was quoted: “Sometimes people are saying that God is out there. I was looking around attentively all day but I didn’t find anybody. I say never angels nor God.” Misattributed to Gargarin, it was cited as evidence of wide-spread Soviet atheism and used as anti-religious propaganda by the Americans.  

synchronoptica

one year ago: a 1963 surf-rock banger (with synchronopticæ), chess notation plus presidential candidate Kamala Harris introduces running-mate Tim Walz

thirteen years ago: hot Eastern European girls, return for deposit plus some impressions from Norway

sixteen years ago: the German Thirteenth Month bonus 

homoplasy (12. 637)

Having recently pondered the convergent instances of evolution that birthed multiple iterations of the crab and crab-like, we quite enjoyed this corollary from MetaFilter on new findings that show that among mammals, by dent of the food source’s sheer abundance—a ready and steady diet, have developed specialisation for eating ants and termites at least a dozen separate times. Myrmecophagous species have occurred independently, from aardvarks to pangolins to armadillos to echidnas (a monotreme), but the rate and occurrence of this adaptation has happened far more frequently and at a much faster pace than the above carcinisation. Everything becomes anteater.

turnover rate (12. 636)

https://www.perfectforroquefortcheese.org/2025/07/endangerment-finding-12-621.html On 1 August, Trump controversially directed White House staff to fire Commissioner of Labour Statistics hours after delivering, on schedule, a weak jobs report for July, which additionally included a downward revision for the prior two months, which had previously suggested despite significant market insecurities caused by the tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill and immigration restrictions. In a post on Truth Social, Trump, without evidence, accused the commissioner of having ulterior motives to discredit Trump’s success and altered employment figures, moreover that the bureau had distorted job gains ahead of the US presidential election in order to make Harris look more favourable and competent. Neither accusations were true and in fact, Labour also revised downward jobs numbers in September just before the election, the department being staunchly non-partisan and neutral, famous for the anecdote when asked if the glass is half-full or half-empty but rather it is an eight ounce container with four ounces of liquid. Whilst numbers were soft and not aligned with the administration’s expectations, the response was chillingly disproportionate, vowing for transparency and integrity in government data, intimating that career staff will be replaced with Trump appointees (see also). Following the unrelenting assault on science—particularly medicine but also weather forecasting and making international students feel unwelcome in American universities, the report would have hardly been newsworthy were it not for Trump’s rather unprecedented move and the knock-on implications in eroded trust in the reliability of this metric as a gauge for economic performance, informing the decisions businesses and investors, including those foreign companies Trump is interested in re-shoring, coerced by the above tariffs. A rosier outlook, timed and recalibrated for political expedience, is the stuff of authoritarian regimes and command-economies and would not instil market confidence. As the US is having its Brexit moment by stoking a potential trade war, there’s a parallel lesson from the recent past in Greece’s eurozone membership (see previously here, here, here and here) when optimistic accounting, overvaluation and outright fraud nearly brought down the whole EU experiment. Individuals’ ability to be hired and runaway inflation will tell the truth, even if the numbers stop being reliable.

public law 94–67 (12. 635)

The culmination of the five year effort which saw the passage of US Joint Resolution 23, begun on the centenary of the 1870 death Confederate general and increased interest in the figure as evinced by growing tourism to Georgia’s Stone Mountain memorial site and other commemorations, on this day in 1975 Gerald Ford (previously) signed into law a declaration championed by senator Harry Byrd of Virginia to posthumously restore citizenship to Robert E Lee. In 1865, after the civil war concluded Lee was paroled and took an oath of allegiance to the United States, petitioning for the revocation of citizenship to be nullified. Portrayed by proponents of the bill as clerical oversight on the part of secretary of state William Seward for not processing the pardon application, thus leaving him a stateless individual, while detractors thought such a symbolic gesture strengthened the mythology and romance of the Confederate cause and was a legitimising acknowledgement of Lee’s status as an icon and cultural hero—something which Lee himself rejected as counterproductive to healing the rift of fighting the war. After the civil war, Washington, DC appropriated Lee’s mansion and grounds in Arlington, Virginia and designated it the National Cemetery, in part so Lee and his family would never be able to return home.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: Trump assures Christian supporters that if they vote for him this once, they’ll never have to worry about voting again (with synchronopticæ) plus assorted links worth revisiting 

twelve years ago: the Moses Bridge Stairs 

thirteen years ago: smoking is derpy 

fourteen years ago: the debt-ceiling and creative accounting 

arguably the most famous and celebrated cnidarian of all time (12. 634)

Outliving her discoverers and with a career spanning the Victorian Era, under the care of a succession of Edinburgh naturalists, the beadlet sea anemone (Actini equina), affectionately known as Granny passed away on this day in 1887 at the advanced age of sixty-seven—though reports of her death were embargoed for the public good until October, with lengthy obituaries first published by The Scotsman and then The New York Times. Receiving many distinguished visitors, as evinced by a guest book with over a thousand entries, Granny, whom was collected as a mature specimen off the shores of North Berwick, is credited with educational reform, igniting popular interest in the sciences outside of professional and specialist circles, and inviting Victorians to bring nature into their homes, with various fashions from houseplants to terraria and aquaria and imparted a sense of curiosity, albeit kept, that advanced understanding and appreciation of marine ecology.

pending adjournment (12. 633)

Though both Republicans and Democrats regularly engage in gerrymandering, depending on the party in power when it comes time for redrawing the boundaries of voting precincts (normally conducted during a pre-set period follow a national decennial census—which some states attempting to remove partisanship from the process of re-districting altogether by soliciting a neural third party to set apportionment), rarely has such a push been made off-cycle and so transparently to disenfranchise Democrat-leaning districts than what is now happening in Texas with Democratic state legislators having fled to Chicago in order that the bicameral congress does not meet quorum and cannot proceed with voting to affirm the changes to the electoral map. Through the state’s governor, Trump has explicitly ordered redistricting in order to eliminate solidly Democratic areas and redistribute a sixty-forty percentile spread over all voting precincts so as markedly reduce the chances of Democrats of the Congress retaining their seats in the mid-terms and not dilute historically GOP-leaning areas—based on a calculus of by what percentage Trump carried the districts. This extreme measure by Texas Democrats is only a temporary delay tactic as they cannot wait out the entire special session called for deciding this issue and face daily fines for the absence. Had they remained within the state and not this self-imposed exile, state troopers could summon them to the capitol and compel their participation. With only the narrowest of majorities in both the House and the Senate, state legislators of other jurisdictions may try this manoeuvres after seeing how Texas combats truancy and forces the matter. Meanwhile, the Democratic caucus is entertaining countermeasures in kind, acknowledging that changing the rules and demographic landscape ahead of the election in eighteen months is not how democracy works, but also realising that further sidelining the minority party by minoritarian strategies is more unacceptable and they can’t roll over again and again.