Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 20:09 on 5 November 2018
Instability may well increase as a result of it. Here’s one example why.
Because of course they will. Any election that does not give fascism a victory will be proclaimed illegitimate by the fascists. I would not in the least be surprised to see losers refuse to give up their seats. The leadership in Congress may well even get in on this game.
Published at 16:13 on 3 November 2018
A bunch of people are flying off the handle at Sarah Lawrence College in suburban New York because one of the professors there happens to be politically conservative (or at least not liberal or leftist) and penned a mildly-worded op-ed in the New York Times. This basically proves that left-wing political correctness on campus is not a total myth.
The off-campus reaction to it further proves that right-wing political correctness isn’t a myth, either. Cue Reason magazine, which claimed “Abrams’ office door was vandalized” in response to the op-ed, but furnishes absolutely no evidence of this claim. They do show pictures of an office door covered in signs and notes, some using strongly-worded (but still nonthreatening) language. Sorry, taping notes and signs to a door is not “vandalism” by any stretch of the word.
It is still an overreaction, however. If Prof. Abrams had opined that LGBT students or students of color had no right to expect fair and equal treatment (he did not), and as such should basically like it or lump it (again, he did not), then plastering his door with notes that he should shut up or leave would have been appropriate. It would have been giving an intolerant bigot a taste of his own medicine.
It’s not the first time Abrams has penned such an op-ed, and it probably won’t be the last. If your ideology (wherever it falls on the political spectrum) is so fragile and weak that the only way it can prevail is if competing ideologies are not allowed at all, then your ideology is basically useless. There’s no way it can prevail in the big, bad world off campus.
What would have been a fair response? Prof. Abrams’ most recent op-ed contains a bunch of claims about statistical sampling Abrams has done, without divulging anything about how the sampling was done. Skepticism is certainly in order here: Abrams should be challenged to show his homework and furnish evidence that the sampling he did was conducted in a rigorous fashion. And if Abrams refuses the challenge, he should be dismissed as a hypersensitive right-winger with a persecution complex who is prone to blow smoke.
But, as it stands, his critics are the ones that have done the most to demonstrate hypersensitivity.
Published at 08:46 on 2 November 2018
That should be obvious, but Netanyahu’s apologists find the conflations useful, aggressively promote them, and manage to sucker all too many into falling for them. That, despite how the Netanyahu regime has grown increasingly corrupt, nationalistic, and distant from the norms of a free society over the years.
It’s not just hardcore right-wingers that fall for it, either. The more moderate right does, too: Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot recently reiterated the meme that the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement was nothing but a left-wing version of antisemitism in the wake of the shootings in Pittsburgh. It’s not just those on the political right, either: Cory Booker has fallen for it as well.
The conflations are easier to make than they should be for those who believe Israel can do no wrong, because feigned concern over the plight of the Palestinians is a trope sometimes employed by actual antisemites. That anti-Israel views can be motivated by antisemitism does not imply that they are necessarily motivated by it, however.
Furthermore, there is a difference between being opposed to the Netanyahu regime and being opposed to Israel. It’s entirely possible to support sanctions against Israel as a form of tough love.
The converse to the subject of this post is true as well. Supporting the Netanyahu regime is not the same thing as supporting Israel or supporting the Jewish people as a whole. In fact, the USA’s most rabid Netanyahu supporters tend to be fundamentalist Christians. Their support is motivated by the Book of Revelation, which prophesies a restored Israel as a prerequisite for an Armageddon and Second Coming that sees Israel being destroyed and the Jews condemned to eternal hellfire. Concern for the Jews has nothing whatsoever to do with their support for the Netanyahu regime.
Published at 07:48 on 1 November 2018
Tom Nichols recently tweeted:
I just visited the World War I museum in #KansasCity and it filled me with dread, because I feel like we’re in danger of heading toward another disaster fueled by ignorant nationalism. I have always been less worried about a reply [sic] of 1933 than about a mad rerun of July 1914.
First, when people talk about history repeating itself, they don’t mean that entire complex scenarios literally go into a scene-by-scene replay. Nobody named Adolf Hitler is going to be appointed chancellor of Germany, repudiate the Versailles sanctions, rearm, and start a new war. No archduke is going to be assassinated in Sarajevo and trigger a series of complex, interlocking, secret mutual defense pacts into touching off a world war. When “history repeats itself” it happens via a theme happening again in a different context, not as a whole complex context replaying itself.
Second, there’s a false dichotomy here: it’s not either/or. The resurgence of fascism is a real thing, as are the attacks on the multilateral internatonal institutions that emerged after World War II (fascism is nationalistic and opposed to that order). It’s entirely possible that we could be headed for a repeat of both 1914 and 1933. In fact, if we get a repeat of 1914, it will probably also involve the 1933 elements.
Published at 11:37 on 25 October 2018
One of the reasons I haven’t been posting so much recently is that I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a booklet I’ve self-published, Common Trees of Bainbridge Island.
I’ve yet to distribute what hard copies I’ve had produced. Until then, soft copies may be downloaded from this Web site:
I plan to print and self-publish more booklets in the future.
Published at 13:39 on 18 October 2018
I don’t know what’s more remarkable—the galling nature of Trump’s submissiveness to foreign tyrants, or that his followers still manage somehow to reconcile said weakness with the mythos of being an “alpha male” who puts “America first.”
Published at 09:48 on 16 October 2018
Remember when the last carbon tax, I-732, was being voted on? The one whose corporate-funded Big Green backers failed to consider the wishes of tribes and minority groups? The one that those of us on the left, by and large, held our noses and voted for despite its warts? The one that Cliff Mass dishonestly blamed the left for its failure at the polls?
Fast forward to the present moment. There’s a new carbon tax measure coming up on the ballot, I-1631. You’d think that maybe Mr. Suck-it-up-and-compromise (in relation to I-732) would be advocating people who share his center-right politics to suck it up, compromise, and support I-1631 even though it has a laundry list of lefty things in it?
Ha, ha. Think again.
Probably nobody knows more about local weather patterns than Cliff Mass. His blog and book have significantly helped me understand the complex weather patterns of this region and why forecasters often fail to accurately predict what’s going to happen (although on that latter point, their accuracy has improved significantly in the decades since I first moved here).
But when he comes to politics, he’s a total crank, a complete victim of his own strong emotions and biases.
Published at 07:53 on 16 October 2018
First, she orders a genetic test.
Then, she loudly trumpets the results.
She chooses to do this in October of a critically important midterm election year, when it is important to stay on message as being a responsible check on Trump.
She chooses not to first run this harebrained scheme past Native Americans (i.e. known Native Americans, with more than a minute trace Native American blood in their veins) first.
Now it’s all predictably blowing up. She has effectively handed a gift on a silver platter to the fascist side.
And she’s trying to portray herself as having the sort of judgement it takes to make a good president?
Published at 16:19 on 9 October 2018
Apropos this, it also really helps to spend a bit more per page and opt for a smoother, higher-grade paper that can take toner more evenly. It is not necessary to splurge and use the finest grade of coated paper; simply spending 2¢ more per sheet and getting the next level up from the default paper grade was enough to make for a dramatic improvement.
I was hoping it might, and today I was pleased to learn it does. I’m finally getting the print quality and overall effect I envisioned on the trees booklet I am putting out.
It’s really no big surprise, as advances in paper quality (and the resulting image resolution) were one of the things modern serif fonts were designed to show off.
Published at 08:46 on 9 October 2018
I remember when I first figured out I was naturally good at discrete math, probability, and statistics. It was in a probability theory class, which up to that point had been easy. Then came the unit on Bayes’ Theorem. Up went a welter of new and confusing notations on the board, accompanied by a confusing, mind-numbing, and nonsensical welter of jargon. For the first time in the class, I was lost.
The end of the class came. Unexpectedly, the teacher assigned a problem which to my eyes had nothing to do with all the confusing mumbo-jumbo of the past hour. Moreover, the apparent answer was so cryingly obvious I couldn’t fully understand why the professor would ask anyone to solve such a self-evident exercise. Hoping to clarify the past hour of confusion, I blurted out a question to the effect “Well, offhand, the answer is intuitively (some number), because the second event is a sub-event of the first, and that’s a product of the two probabilities, but I’m not sure that’s right by the theory you just discussed.”
The professor scowled at me, because I had just ruined his homework assignment by answering it and explaining the logic behind it, and he now had to cook up another one on the spot. It was then that I thought back about times I’d run across sets of math problems in puzzle books: generally difficult, but with a few mysteriously easy probability or statistics ones thrown in for some reason.
It dawned on me: those “easy” problems really weren’t intrinsically easy; I was gifted at solving them. The problems just seemed easy, because they were easy… to me. In the absence of any data on how challenging those branches of mathematics were for others to understand, I had been operating on unrepresentative information and laboring under the misconception that my level of talent was representative.
That latter assumption is usually a valid one, of course. In most things, talent is distributed according to a bell curve, and odds strongly favor one being somewhere near the middle of it. The rub is, usually and always are not the same thing.
Nearly everyone has at least some areas where they excel far above the norm, but the principle above can make it difficult for one to realize those strengths. For those trying to assess their strengths, or to build a career based on them, this can make that task difficult.
For those trying to advise others, it can render their advice far less useful. Consider this article. It’s a common thread I’ve run across: just follow your passion and everything will sort itself out.
Sorry, wrong. No, it won’t—not unless you’re very lucky and by random chance happen to choose something that’s marketable. I speak as someone who pissed away four years of his life doing just that sort of passion-following and hoping for something to come of it. Nothing ever did.
You see, that author has innate entrepreneurial ability, and I do not. While he was “simply following his passions” he was also filtering them for marketability without even realizing it, or at least without realizing how difficult that can be for others not so gifted as he. He simply assumed he was normal and virtually everyone else shared his special ability. He wrote a whole book on helping the innately entrepreneurial make careers for themselves while believing he was writing a book useful for everyone.