In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

I'm procrastinating, and I stumbled upon a link to this.  " The Worst Political Predictions of 2019 ."  Oy.  Look, folks, I've made some good predictions in my time, and some bad predictions, but this list is terrible, and demonstrates why those who rely on Politico  are being failed by the foolishness of that wretched outlet. What does it mean for a prediction to be "bad?"  Is having been "wrong" enough?  Here's the thing.  Every well-constructed prediction is at least implicitly probabilistic, and better yet, explicitly probabilistic.  Sometimes that's easy, as with political science general election forecasting models.  We do those about six months out from a presidential election, and contrary to what you have heard, those models were right  in 2016.  Sometimes, it's harder.  See my attempt to make some veepstakes predictions about 2020 .  (But hey!  Remember when I called it in 2016, in April?)  However, l...

OK, time to pick up where I left off last week.  Vaguely. In Part I of Virtue and virtue-signaling , I argued that the politics of the science fiction and fantasy community is far more complex than either the reactionary "sad puppies" or the dominant left-wing fan base would care to admit.  Time to push further on this. I posed the question of what would happen if an author like Orson Scott Card published a book as good as Ender's Game  in today's political climate, and the Hugo Awards had a choice between that book and Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars .  Kowal won in 2019, but her competition was nowhere near the level of Ender's Game .  In a contest of literary merit alone, Kowal should not win that contest.  But, I suggested that Kowal probably would  win this hypothetical, alternate universe Hugo for her hypothetical, alternate history book.  Card, or his reactionary successor, would face personal political backlash, whereas Ko...

Ash Grunwald, the title cut from Give Signs .

Well.  So, 2019 is a thing that happened.  Like, disco and other atrocities.  History shall render a judgment.  Or, will it?  This will be a ramble.  I was born a ramblin' man. I'm going to ramble about music in order to make an analogy, and then get to the politics.  You've been warned. Every micro-era has its own version of pop music, upon which "culture" looks back and frowns in dismay, wondering how anyone could have ever found it enjoyable.  And yet, plenty of people did.  Along with plenty of detractors.  From disco to hair metal to boy bands to... whatever is popular today.  I don't know.  I managed to tune out long ago.  However... None of these sub-genres were ever uniformly popular, and after a period of time, you get your nostalgia factor.  Some  people decide, hey!  Maybe disco was actually awesome!   (Hint:  it isn't, and never was.  Neither was hair metal, nor any of that g...

Gary Lucas, "The Nightmare of History," from Bad Boys of the Arctic .

Arguably the best bassist around.  He can give Jaco Pastorius a run for the all-time title.  Victor Wooten, "The Vision," from A Show of Hands .

2019.  If you think 2019 was uniquely messed up... remember this?  Bah, humbug.

Awww!  Who's a happy  puppy?  Happy puppies are the best , aren't they?  (If you are a hardcore science fiction & fantasy fan, you probably have a sense of where I'm going with this.  I'm needling everyone.  It's what I do best.) Anyway, it's time to do this.  The J.K. Rowling dust-up is the impetus I need for what will be a series, because I have been meaning to get-a-writin' about this, and there is a lot to say. The short version of the J.K. Rowling thing is that she tweeted something supportive of a "TERF" (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), and made a comment about sex , omitting  gender identity , being "real."  She also made comments about live-and-let-live, but everyone is ignoring those comments.  Regardless, the implication was to give primacy to the biological ( sex ) over the psychological self-identification ( gender identity ), while the transgender community wants primacy given to gender identity , as opp...

Goran Ivanovic, "Sick Puppy," from Goran Ivanovic Trio .

The semester is over.  I'm taking a break from impeachment-mania to write something that just needs to be written. Look, folks.  Y'all know I just detest liars.  They... trigger me.  Liars in academia?  Oh, yeah.  They are all over the place, they are a big problem, and something must be done. Hopefully, you know by now that "the Stanford prison experiment" was a fraud.  Here's a quick write-up from Vox , which even addresses education .  The "experiment" was staged and scripted.  Philip Zimbardo, the "scholar" behind the con, was unmasked as a con artist almost two years ago.  How did Zimbardo keep the con going for so long?  Simple.  The premise of the con was that the "prison" he set up among his students at Stanford deteriorated into abusive behavior so quickly that the "experiment" had to be shut down almost immediately.  What does that mean?  It means that any attempt to replicate it would be rejected by any...

Tony Rice, "Doin' My Time," from Guitar .  I had a... "hard time"... [get it?] choosing a version of this tune.  There are so many great options.  In the end, though, it's just hard to beat Tony Rice.

"The Move," from New York Stories .  Bunch o' great musicians.

Nancy Pelosi's decision to delay sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate suggests an interesting possibility.  Continue that delay indefinitely. I have maintained the following position, consistently.  An impeachment followed by a Senate acquittal will backfire on the Democrats. So, what if there's no acquittal because there's no trial?  Trump would complain-- semi-legitimately-- that he has been denied due process, by the same argument Mueller used in his refusal to make a determination of criminality when a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime, and hence cannot be cleared of the accusation.  However, when McConnell announces that he is coordinating the trial plans with the White House and that he has no plans to be impartial, such a complaint would ring hollow at best. Politically, an impeachment without the trial-and-acquittal may be the Democrats' best move, and avoid what I see as the means by which impeachment backfires. Hmmm....

I have a bunch of long-form science fiction-related commentary in the works, but I want to take the time to get my thoughts in order on it.  So, here's this. Anyway, the big Congress news is that Rep. Jeff Van Drew from New Jersey is about to switch parties .  He was one of only two Democrats to vote against the formal impeachment inquiry  procedural thingamajig that Nancy Pelosi held a while back, and he'll vote against the articles of impeachment themselves.  Right now, that's a non-starter in the Democratic Party.  As Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI) was driven out of the Republican Party for supporting  impeachment, Van Drew is being run out of the Democratic Party for opposing it. Pure party line, no deviations will be accepted. So, here's something interesting.  Timothy Nokken has a long line of research on people in Congress who switch parties.  You know what happens?  Their general voting behavior changes.  Like, a lot . ...

This is the kind of thing I didn't post when I locked myself into genre-based music selections with the last blog.  Whatever. Gyan Riley, Part 1 from "The Changes Stay The Same."  Melismantra .

This is happening.  House Democrats are going to pass articles of impeachment.  But, in case you missed the variations of the most informative headline ever ... check this variant.  I just picked an anodyne-seeming one.  " McConnell, coordinating with White House, lays plans for impeachment trial ."  It doesn't matter how guilty the ham sandwich is, there's no point indicting it when it will be coordinating the trial with the judge and jury. What happens after the most thoroughly-rigged jury in history acquits Trump?  The 2020 election.  Will the impeachment acquittal help, hurt, or do nothing to 2020? Beware the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.  After this, therefore because of this.  Either Trump wins or loses.  Whether he steps down upon losing is another matter... (the answer is "no"), but either he wins or loses. If he wins, will that be because  he was impeached and acquitted?  If he loses, will that be because ...

Jazz-ish.  Reggae-jazz.  Because you always need more jazz in your life. Ernest Ranglin.  The title cut from Below the Bassline .

Doug Wamble, "I Needn't Try," from Doug Wamble .

Time for a music digression. It has become something of a cliche to say that we live in a post-truth era.  Lies and their proliferation have degraded peoples' ability to distinguish fact from fiction, and the internet has facilitated the spread of lies in a way that no previous medium has.  Not.  Very.  Original. And yes, even music has been hit by the post-truth thing.  What's old-hat here is nonsense like "auto-tune," and similar software.  If you have any awareness of music, you probably know that most of the people whom you  think are singers are actually having the pitch of their voices modulated by computers to make them sound like they are in tune.  In reality, they can't hold a tune.  It gets worse.  Now, there is software to make all of the beats hit their marks in each measure, perfectly .  Nobody is singing or playing anything anymore in popular music. OK, though, I knew that.  I grumble about popular music all...

Something real.  Perhaps the greatest virtuoso in the history of any instrument. When Charlie Parker heard Art Tatum, he decided there was no point playing piano.  That's why he picked up the saxophone.  The legend of Art's encounter with Sergei Rachmaninoff is that when Rachmaninoff heard Tatum, he said, I can play the same notes as you, sir, but not at that tempo. Rachmaninoff. Art didn't need trickery.  He was just the best in the history of the instrument.  Nobody before, nobody since.  Art Tatum.

As hinted last week, it's time for an update from Bright Line Watch.  I strongly encourage everyone to pay attention to their updates on the state of democracy in America.  I'll do so with an eye on this past week's impeachment hearings from the Judiciary Committee. First, the preliminaries, which need to be restated for reasons that I do not fully understand.  Nevertheless, since I am regularly asked, even by the same people, I will restate them.  Right now, the odds of Trump being impeached -- meaning, the odds of the House passing "articles of impeachment"-- are quite high.  Trump will not  be convicted by the Senate, and he will not  be removed from office.  That requires a supermajority in the Senate, and there won't even be a majority to convict.  The probability of acquittal in the Senate is precisely 1.  It is the most certain thing in the history of politics.  It is not even something to be described probabilistically....