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At around 8:40 a.m. on January 1, a disgruntled U.S. soldier blew up a rented Cybertruck in front of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. Seven bystanders were injured in the blast, though nobody was killed except the driver, who died by self-inflicted gunshot wound. The charred rubble and twisted metal left behind invoked both the cars creator, Tesla tycoon Elon Musk, and the hotels owner, returning president-elect Donald Trump. It also telegraphed untold carnage on the horizon from the prospect of this dystopic duo running the government together.The year had just begun and 2025 already delivered its most prescient visual metaphor. Plenty of other striking images have since emerged during the first 100 days of Trumps second term, though, that perfectly capture how this sequel presidency has played out so far.Elon Musk elongates his armFrom top: A neo-Nazi group salutes during a gathering in Orlando, Florida, in 2023; Elon Musk in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. [Images: Sandi Bachom/Getty Images, Alex Wong/Getty Images]Although the sheer abundance of tech billionaires at Trumps inauguration raised some eyebrows, only one of those billionaires actions that day dropped jaws. During a speech about his then-gestating Department of Government Efficiency, Musk put his hand over his chest, said My heart goes out to you, and then, well, lets just say he made a memorable gesture. Twice.What kind of gesture? Media outlets have dog-eared their thesauruses searching for a euphemism that wont leave any legal exposure or get anyone fired. It was either a stiff-arm, odd-looking, or Roman salute, but it bore more than a passing resemblance to Sieg Heiling. Only Musk knows for sure whether he made the alarming gesture by mistake, on purpose in brazen earnestness, or on purpose but just to troll the left. Either way, he never apologized. Instead, he complained on X that all criticism of his gesture amounted to dirty tricks. No word yet on whether dirty tricks are why several people who mimicked Musks salute lost their jobs.Volodymyr Zelenskyy walks into a buzzsaw[Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images]Trump seems to delight in humiliating people he perceives as disloyal. Think of Mitt Romney looking medical-grade embarrassed to be photographed at dinner with Trump after criticizing him throughout the 2016 election, or Robert Kennedy Jr. being force-fed a Big Mac last fall after badmouthing Trumps diet. Those incidents seem like a mere warmup, though, for the humiliation ritual Trump put Volodymyr Zelenskyy through back in February. The Ukrainian president entered the Oval Office presumably expecting to reach an agreement about trading his countrys rare minerals in exchange for continued support from the U.S. Instead, Zelenskyy found himself ambushed. Trump and VP JD Vance took turns berating him on live TV for not being sufficiently grateful for U.S. support throughout the Russian invasion. (Days earlier, Trump falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war.) Zelenskyys face during the disastrous meeting served as an apt avatar for leaders of other U.S. allies around the world, realizing in real time that a major geopolitical realignment may be currently underway.Trump take egg[Image: MrGeoff/Adobe Stock]Joe Bidens entire presidency was haunted by the specter of grocery store sticker shock. Whether he could have actually done more to assuage it or not, pandemic-driven inflation and supply chain issues kept driving up prices. Consumers were furious. Many were also desperate for relief, which Trump promised to deliver on day one of his second term. Instead, egg prices shot up further after Trump took office, for a variety of reasons. (DOGEs firing of the team assigned to study rampaging bird flu almost certainly didnt help.) Grocery store signage about egg rationing quickly showed up all over social media, forcing even Fox News to acknowledge it. The egg crisis has since receded, but not entirely, and not before birthing a massive meme.Gretchen Whitmer cant hideGretchen Whitmer temporarily shielded herself from the cameras when she was in Trumps Oval Office, per this photo from NYTs @erjleehttps://t.co/TFDPPnci7Q pic.twitter.com/hnLnvuQvlX bryan metzger (@metzgov) April 12, 2025After an election cycle spent warning Americans about the dire consequences of a second Trump term, Democrats in power have had difficulty finding their footing with it underway. Opposition took the form of holding up tiny signs of resistance during a Trump speech to congress, which GOP colleagues promptly snatched away. Although some Dems like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Cory Booker, and Chris Van Hollen have found meaningful forms of fighting back, the partys initial awkwardness out of the gate is crystallized in an April photo of Gretchen Whitmer. When the Michigan governor went to speak with Trump in the days after his Liberation Day tariff blitz, she had not been informed Trump planned on making a photo op out of her visit. To avoid looking like shed come crawling to Trumps bargaining table, Whitmer shielded her face with folderswhich only made the resulting photo exponentially more embarrassing. Its the image of a person who has been thoroughly outmaneuvered by someone who better understands the contours of visual manipulation.Heavy images tweeted lightly[Image: Official White House Twitter/X.com]The White Houses X account has undergone a radical vibe shift under Trump. Instead of serving up official dispatches from the government, most of its posts read like far-right shitposts from 4chan. Though many worthy contenders come to mind, the most egregious example is probably the photo of a woman crying while under arrest by ICE, which the White House social media manager then ran through an AI Studio Ghibli filter, rendering it paradoxically adorable. Regardless of her alleged past convictions, making fun of her pain on an official government channel is shameful behavior. Its an image that announces to the rest of the world: America runs on casual cruelty. The Epstein files stunt was very [redacted]Various right-wing influencers carry binders bearing the seal of the U.S. Justice Department reading The Epstein Files: Phase 1 as they walk out of the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C., on February 27, 2025. [Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images]Although the White House has touted this administration as the most transparent in American history, that title hasnt always proved out. When congressional Democrats tried to enter federal government offices in the midst of DOGE shredding their staff, for instance, they found police officers standing in their way. You know, somewhat non-transparently? The moment that best visually captured the opacity of historys most transparent administration, though, was the release of the so-called Epstein files. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited 15 far-right influencers to the White House to receive binders supposedly filled with declassified information about deceased human trafficker Jeffrey Epsteinand his suspected ties to powerful people. The binders contained scant new information; nothing approaching the realm of revelatory. If anything, the photo stunt invited further questions about just what might be missing from those binders and why. Not exactly an ideal outcome for an event (and an administration) so vocally proud of its historic transparency.These babies are priced to move[Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images]Considering Tesla stock is down 71% year-over-year this quarter, it seems as if quite a few people are not very happy with Musks gleeful chainsawing of the federal government. In an effort to help his embattled colleague stem the tide, Trump put on a White House-set version of a seasonal car saleTeslathon on the White House lawn. Trump gushed to the assembled press about how sleek and cool he found the phalanx of Teslas on the South Lawn. (Everythings computer! he crowed at one point.) The spectacle ultimately didnt help Musks fading fortunes one iota, but it did bring to life an image long lurking in certain corners of the public imagination: Trump as an overzealous used car salesman.A crimson tide washes over the stock map[Screenshot: Finviz/Internet Archive]Trumps red-light-green-light approach to imposing tariffs on more or less every countrynot all of which are even populatedhas created a lot of compelling images. Most of them, however, are stock brokers with their faces in their hands on some of the recent days when the Dow dropped by 1,000 points or more. The most lasting image from the post-Liberation Day stock free fall, though, is probably a stock market heatmap turning nearly all redalmost as if Americas economic security had bled out.Just say Noem[Photo: Alex Brandon/Getty Images]Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is apparently a fan of cosplay. Shes donned tactical gear several times to tag along on ICE raids, seemingly with the sole purpose of making content. On one of these raids, she even brought along Chaya Raichik, the far-right influencer better known as LibsofTikTok. Noems largest contribution to the visual vocabulary of Trumps second term, though, was her late-March stunt at El Salvadors Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison, where Noem filmed herself standing in front of a crowded cell full of mostly shirtless inmates, and threatened all criminal illegal aliens in the U.S. that they could soon be there, too. Using these men as props is already in poor taste, inviting painful memories of Abu Ghraib. That the administration admitted, just days later, to sending a man to CECOT by mistake made it even worse.Of course, for many viewers, the hardest part of looking back at any of these images from the past 100 days may be the shocking realization that it has only been 100 days.
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Is your green my green? Probably not. What appears as pure green to me will likely look a bit yellowish or blueish to you. This is because visual systems vary from person to person. Moreover, an objects color may appear differently against different backgrounds or under different lighting. These facts might naturally lead you to think that colors are subjective. That, unlike features such as length and temperature, colors are not objective features. Either nothing has a true color, or colors are relative to observers and their viewing conditions. But perceptual variation has misled you. We are philosophers who study colors, objectivity, and science, and we argue in our book The Metaphysics of Colors that colors are as objective as length and temperature. Perceptual variation There is a surprising amount of variation in how people perceive the world. If you offer a group of people a spectrum of color chips ranging from chartreuse to purple and asked them to pick the unique green chipthe chip with no yellow or blue in ittheir choices would vary considerably. Indeed, there wouldnt be a single chip that most observers would agree is unique green. Generally, an objects background can result in dramatic changes in how you perceive its colors. If you place a gray object against a lighter background, it will appear darker than if you place it against a darker background. This variation in perception is perhaps most striking when viewing an object under different lighting, where a red apple could look green or blue. Of course, that you experience something differently does not prove that what is experienced is not objective. Water that feels cold to one person may not feel cold to another. And although we do not know who is feeling the water correctly, or whether that question even makes sense, we can know the temperature of the water and presume that this temperature is independent of your experience. Similarly, that you can change the appearance of somethings color is not the same as changing its color. You can make an apple look green or blue, but that is not evidence that the apple is not red. Under different lighting conditions, objects take on different colors. [Photo: Liia Galimzianova/Getty Images] For comparison, the moon appears larger when its on the horizon than when it appears near its zenith. But the size of the moon has not changed, only its appearance. Hence, that the appearance of an objects color or size varies is, by itself, no reason to think that its color and size are not objective features of the object. In other words, the properties of an object are independent of how they appear to you. That said, given that there is so much variation in how objects appear, how do you determine what color something actually is? Is there a way to determine the color of something despite the many different experiences you might have of it? Matching colors Perhaps determining the color of something is to determine whether it is red or blue. But we suggest a different approach. Notice that squares that appear to be the same shade of pink against different backgrounds look different against the same background. The smaller squares may appear to be the same color, but if you compare them with the strip of squares at the bottom, theyre actually different shades. [Photo: Shobdohin/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA] Its easy to assume that to prove colors are objective would require knowing which observers, lighting conditions and backgrounds are the best, or normal. But determining the right observers and viewing conditions is not required for determining the very specific color of an object, regardless of its name. And it is not required to determine whether two objects have the same color. To determine whether two objects have the same color, an observer would need to view the objects side by side against the same background and under various lighting conditions. If you painted part of a room and find that you dont have enough paint, for instance, finding a match might be very tricky. A color match requires that no observer under any lighting condition will see a difference between the new paint and the old. That two people can determine whether two objects have the same color even if they dont agree on exactly what that color isjust as a pool of water can have a particular temperature without feeling the same to me and youseems like compelling evidence to us that colors are objective features of our world. Colors, science, and indispensability Everyday interactions with colorssuch as matching paint samples, determining whether your shirt and pants clash, and even your ability to interpret works of artare hard to explain if colors are not objective features of objects. But if you turn to science and look at the many ways that researchers think about colors, it becomes harder still. For example, in the field of color science, scientific laws are used to explain how objects and light affect perception and the colors of other objects. Such laws, for instance, predict what happens when you mix colored pigments, when you view contrasting colors simultaneously or successively, and when you look at colored objects in various lighting conditions. The philosophers Hilary Putnam and Willard van Orman Quine made famous what is known as the indispensability argument. The basic idea is that if something is indispensable to science, then it must be real and objectiveotherwise, science wouldnt work as well as it does. For example, you may wonder whether unobservable entities such as electrons and electromagnetic fields really exist. But, so the argument goes, the best scientific explanations assume the existence of such entities and so they must exist. Similarly, because mathematics is indispensable to contemporary science, some philosophers argue that this means mathematical objects are objective and exist independently of a persons mind. The bright colors of this granular poison frog signal a warning to predators of its toxicity. [Photo: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA] Likewise, we suggest that color plays an indispensable role in evolutionary biology. For example, researchers have argued that aposematismthe use of colors to signal a warning for predatorsalso benefits an animals ability to gather resources. Here, an animals coloration works directly to expand its food-gathering niche insofar as it informs potential predators that the animal is poisonous or venomous. In fact, animals can exploit the fact that the same color pattern can be perceived differently by different perceivers. For instance, some damselfish have ultraviolet face patterns that help them be recognized by other members of their species and communicate with potential mates while remaining largely hidden to predators unable to perceive ultraviolet colors. In sum, our ability to determine whether objects are colored the same or differently and the indispensable roles they play in science suggest that colors are as real and objective as length and temperature. Elay Shech is a professor of philosophy at Auburn University. Michael Watkins is a professor of philosophy at Auburn University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Social media users have been having a field day with Waymos autonomous vehicles, sharing videos that poke fun at the driverless cars getting stuck, acting unpredictably, or simply navigating the world a little too awkwardly. The latest wave of posts follows Waymos recent expansion into Austin, where users are already documenting bizarre and frustrating experiences with the service. TikTok user Becky Levin Navarro posted a video on April 20 claiming a Waymo car trapped her and her fellow passengers on the side of a highway after heading in the wrong direction. This is the most insane thing. Were in a Waymo, here, under Mopac, she said. It was going the wrong way, we called customer support, it stopped us right here and wouldnt let us out of the car. @beckypearlatx Zero stars for waymo. When we pulled up next to Deep Eddy Cabaret and the waymo didnt let us out and instead kept going the wrong direction towards downtown we said please let us out here it wouldnt let us out so it headed east, turned around back towards deep eddy cabaret and then STOPPED in a horrible spot to stop. We kept asking for it to move and customer service refused. #waymo #tiktok original sound – Becky Levin Navarro The video shows passengers speaking to customer support through the cars intercom. The agent explains the car can’t be moved manually, and asks for a physical address to relocate the vehicle. A Waymo spokesperson later responded: Waymo riders always have the ability to pause their ride and exit the vehicle when desired. Passengers can exit the vehicle by pulling the handle twiceonce to unlock and another to open the door. From being called drunk robots to causing traffic jams in the middle of the night, Waymo has become a regular subject of online trolling. Viral clips include Waymos honking at each other in the early morning hours, jamming up intersections, and getting stuck in drive-throughs. Some show police and parking enforcement stepping in to deal with wayward vehicles. @bluenote727 Waymo Self Driving Car Big Malfunction original sound – Blue Note A video from San Francisco shows a Waymo going the wrong way during a Warriors game as officials try to redirect it. Its not funny. This is a very serious matter, a police officer jokes to bystanders. The vehicle eventually backs up, awkwardly swerving to avoid a pickup truck. See, it worked!” the officer says with a shrug. “Still a little weird. I wouldnt have went that way, but . . . @travellingnepali When a Waymo driverless car goes the wrong way during a Warriors game in SF and the cops + parking enforcement have to teach it a lesson. Waymo: processing processing Finally it gets the memo and turns back! #Waymo #bayareacheck WaymorivingStruggles #SanFrancisco #WarriorsGame #driverlesscar #nepali original sound – Anil & Mansha Waymos fleet has more than tripled on California roads over the past year. A DMV report from April 11 cites 30 autonomous vehicle incidents in 2024. Still, Waymo reports 81% fewer injury-causing crashes and 64% fewer airbag deployments compared to human drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix. Despite its safety claims, the company remains a favorite online target. As Waymo expands into more citiesincluding a recent launch in Tokyothe internet doesnt seem ready to let the driverless cars off the hook.
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