Nazi Update (geez, I hate even having to type that), and waves of star birth in ancient clusters

December 26, 2023   Issue #661

About this newsletter

Ooo, meta

Well, this isn’t the holiday message I was hoping to write this year, but here we are.

Update: So I recently wrote about the very big problem of Substack hosting and monetizing Nazis who write newsletters. A public letter was posted by many (well over 200 now!) newsletter writers asking for clarification about this from the folks running Substack.

The results were… disappointing. Hamish MacKenzie said that kicking Nazis off Substack was “censorship”. He specifically said demonitizing them (literally forcing them to not be able to make money off their newsletters) was censorship and “wouldn’t make the problem go away”.

That’s wrong. For one thing, it’s ridiculous prima facie to say demonetizing them is censorship. They could still have lots of free subscribers. I’ll add that part of the problem — a big part — is that Substack makes money off Nazis, and that strikes a lot of us as extremely gross.

For another thing, deplatforming absolutely makes the problem go away, or at least makes it much better. There’s actual science on this. And the flip side of this is that if you allow it, you are tacitly saying it’s OK to give them a voice and wider reach.

Again, I will point out that Substack is not the US Government. There’s no right to freedom of speech here. Substack could say, “Y’know what? We don’t need to support and make money from hate speech or people who use it.”

In fact, even calling it a platform or a venue dilutes what it really is: a business. One that amplifies voices. And they made a business decision to doing that business with Nazis. Oh, and TERFs and anti-vaxxers and other people who spread disinformation to the literal detriment of humanity. That’s not exactly beside the point, either.

I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment. But I also know that freedom of speech isn’t absolute, and it certainly isn’t in the non-governmental sector. If I’m at a party and find someone standing in the middle of the room in an SS uniform and reading aloud from Mein Kampf, the host has every right to kick them out. If they don’t, then that says something about the host.

Speaking of which, because of the impact of the original article I posted, I had comments open to anyone. It didn’t take long for Nazi apologists to start making facile and specious arguments about this. I booted them, and then switched permissions so only paid subscribers can comment. Is that censorship? Nope. It’s being a decent host.

I understand the slippery slope problem quite well, and I also understand that it can be OK or even useful to platform viewpoints that disagree with your own. But Nazis, by their very existence, want to wipe out mine, and those of many others. There is a time to be intolerant of tolerance, and when it come to Nazis — Nazis, for crying out loud — that time is always. We had a whole war about this.

As for what I will do next, I’ll decide the specifics of that in the next couple of weeks. I have guests over for the holidays, and will be visiting family soon as well. I know a lot of folks are unhappy about this — I’ve received comments and emails from followers who are unsubscribing from my newsletter due to Substack’s policy — and rest assured I am very much thinking about what my next moves are. Until then I’ll continue writing this newsletter as usual, because y’all are following me here for my writing, and I made a promise to you to provide it.

Stay Tuned.

Astro Tidbit

A brief synopsis of some interesting astronomy/science news

Globular clusters are among my favorite objects in the sky, for a couple of reasons. One is that they are tightly packed roughly spherical collections of hundreds of thousands of stars, and through the eyepiece look like an active beehive frozen in time. A lot of them are easily seen in small telescopes, so they’re great targets and fun to look at.

The second is that they’re an astronomical enigma. We used to think they were pretty simple; they formed when the Universe was young, collapsing out of clouds of gas with all the stars created so near each other they form a gravitationally bound cluster. The stars are all the same age, and made from the same building material, so they make perfect labs to study how stars change over time.

But then it became clear things weren’t that simple. Some stars in clusters were clearly ancient, but some looked to be not quite so ancient, as if they formed a billion years after the first wave of star birth. They had more heavy elements in them, for example; these weren’t around when the Universe first got going, but were created in massive stars. These stars exploded, sending this material into space, “polluting” the simpler gas, such that the next generation of stars started out with more heavy elements already in them.

Still, there’s another explanation for this chemical dichotomy. Maybe more massive stars made the heavy elements and blew them out into space — after all, massive stars blow out fierce winds of subatomic particles, like super-solar winds. This material could then fall onto other stars, polluting them directly.

So which is it? Were the heavy-metal stars born later, or were they victims of second-hand smoke? There’s a way to tell: More massive stars have more gravity, and would pull in more of the polluted material if it were being blown by winds. So you can look at massive stars and lower-mass stars, and check their chemical content. If they’re the same, they were born together in a second wave of star birth. If they’re different, with the more massive ones being more polluted, then it was caused by winds.

Astronomers used JWST to look at the nearby globular cluster M92 — I wrote about JWST observations of this cluster in an earlier issue of BAN. And now the results have been analyzed, and the answer is… both low and higher mass stars have the same amount of heavy metal elements in them! That means they were likely born later than the first generation of stars, and add support to the idea that globulars have multiple waves of star birth in them [link to research paper].

To be fair that’s pretty much what everybody thought, but it’s nice to have added confirmation. Globular clusters are indeed more complicated than astronomers first thought, which is a bit of a running theme in science. Just because something looks simple doesn’t mean it is.

If there’s a moral to be extrapolated into the larger picture of life, feel free to interpret that yourself. I’ll add that, in general, people are more complicated than astronomical objects.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!