Even this is too charitable. A short timeline of January 2025 would be something like this:
- Jan 16: The Supreme Court issues its opinion, upholding the legality of the TikTok ban. The Biden administration declines to enforce it, preferring to let the incoming Trump administration handle the matter.
- Jan 18: TikTok voluntarily turns off its services. Google and Apple remove the app from their respective app stores. Trump declares on social media that he will sign an executive order "to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect".
- Jan 19: TikTok restores it service after being assured by the incoming Trump administration that TikTok would not face penalties.
- Jan 20: The Trump administration signs the aforementioned executive order.
However, Trump's executive order was untimely (the law already should have gone into effect), and at any rate it's dubious that the executive order would've been legal regardless. The TikTok ban (PAFACA) had a specific provision for when an extension could be granted. From Wikipedia:
> The president may grant a one-time extension of the divestiture deadline by as long as 90 days if a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, "significant" progress has been made to executing the divestiture, and legally binding agreements for facilitating the divestiture are in place.
Notably, none of these requirements had been met. There were no identified buyers; there were no binding agreements. The Trump administration's refusal to enforce the TikTok ban might have been the first lawless act of the second administration, and it happened only within hours of Trump being sworn in.
CAIR is an American organization established to protect the rights of Muslims in America. The people who work at this organization are, presumably, Americans by and large. So why would an American civil rights group divert its limited resources to something squarely outside its scope, especially when such advocacy would require entirely different, non-overlapping expertise in Moroccan/Turkish/whatever law?
They have a funny way of showing it. Almost all those people will be immigrants, either themselves, or they'll at the very least have family living in muslim countries. Family who'll get arrested when they're protesting their governments or religion.
Yet they really care about free speech ... in America. THAT is where the free speech problem is according to them. Am I really the only one having trouble believing that this is a genuine attitude? Oh and they only defend their version of free speech, with limits on "hate speech" (but not Sami Hamdi's kind of hate speech of course), limits on criticism of religion, and limits on criticizing middle eastern governments. You know, THAT kind of free speech. CAIR, in the US, is really arguing for limits on free speech, "against hate speech", against "islamophobia", against criticism of middle eastern governments, you know limits on the very thing free speech was created for (ie. to protect all criticism of religion and governments, especially foreign ones, but all governments, including the US one)
And who do they invite? Sami Hamdi.
Please go read his twitter stream and tell me if you believe people who hire this guy have any problem with hate speech. Oh and maybe it's just one issue, so filter out the Gaza conflict, and ... nope still hate speech, mostly about the UK. Okay, filter out the UK too. He's defending people who went "on a Jew hunt" in the Netherlands ... This guy is not a moderate in any way shape or form.
I'm sure he'll have made 5 new posts by the time this is read and they'll be another 5 posts inciting at the very least more hatred of Israeli. You may hate Trump, but let's be blunt here: this guy is thankfully powerless, but is easily a LOT worse than Trump.
If you take CAIR's attitude at face value, limits on free speech against hate speech, they'd help deport Sami Hamdi. But clearly this kind of hate speech they don't just want to allow, but protect and nurture.
What I mean is, CAIR really make themselves look really bad here. Really, really, really bad.
Unfortunately, addressing those issues would do little to address the underlying cause: We have many more ways to amuse ourselves compared to a generation ago, most of which require less "reach" for a dopamine hit (social media, netflix, video games, etc).
Just to add some more motivation: in a typical physics undergraduate curriculum, you will spend roughly as much time doing homework as attending lectures. If you skip the exercises, you are quite literally skipping half of the education.
Essentially all of the theory research (specifically, lattice QCD calculations) since the previous white paper in 2020 have been conducted blinded, and at any rate, the deadline to be included in the theory average has already passed. It would take an act of extraordinary brashness to fudge the numbers now.
Since the article doesn't mention it: Ian Tregillis (the first author of the paper and staff scientist at Los Alamos) also moonlights as a sci-fi/fantasy author. Personally I found The Milkweed Triptych a more compelling read than A Song of Ice and Fire, and it also has the benefit of being finished! (Here's a one sentence hook: WWII, except with English wizards fighting Nazi X-Men.)
Well, then don't read it! While that's the most campy distillation of the premise, the writing is anything but. George R.R. Martin himself declared Tregillis "a major new talent".
> If it's 11:55, you would usually mentally subtract and conclude: the meeting is in 5 minutes. But the most probable estimate given the available information is actually 4'30"!
Admittedly I'm being a bit pedantic, but this isn't true. The expectation value might be 4'30", but the time is as likely to be 4'59" as 4'30"; assuming it's 4'30" will simply minimize your expected error.
- Jan 16: The Supreme Court issues its opinion, upholding the legality of the TikTok ban. The Biden administration declines to enforce it, preferring to let the incoming Trump administration handle the matter.
- Jan 18: TikTok voluntarily turns off its services. Google and Apple remove the app from their respective app stores. Trump declares on social media that he will sign an executive order "to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect".
- Jan 19: TikTok restores it service after being assured by the incoming Trump administration that TikTok would not face penalties.
- Jan 20: The Trump administration signs the aforementioned executive order.
However, Trump's executive order was untimely (the law already should have gone into effect), and at any rate it's dubious that the executive order would've been legal regardless. The TikTok ban (PAFACA) had a specific provision for when an extension could be granted. From Wikipedia:
> The president may grant a one-time extension of the divestiture deadline by as long as 90 days if a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, "significant" progress has been made to executing the divestiture, and legally binding agreements for facilitating the divestiture are in place.
Notably, none of these requirements had been met. There were no identified buyers; there were no binding agreements. The Trump administration's refusal to enforce the TikTok ban might have been the first lawless act of the second administration, and it happened only within hours of Trump being sworn in.
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