In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Many things are good for cultivating a sense of analytical detachment.  Reading and writing are both just generally good, but they are also multipurpose activities.  I do not indulge in the personal in this blog, nor anywhere else, not having social media profiles, yet this morning, I continue to ponder yesterday's actions by an unfortunate shitbag whom I do not have the power to remove from my life.  So what wisdom can be gleaned from observing the behavior of shitbags? I will return to some of the bigger themes in tomorrow's science fiction/fantasy post, for RF Kuang's The Poppy War , as ideas connect to ideas, but here is the core observation. There are circumstances when conflict can be resolved, and circumstances when it cannot, and continued conflict is inevitable.  "Two sides to every story, blame on both sides, blah, blah," yes, we all know the platitudes, and in some cases, conflicts can be described in this way without doing damage to empirical realit...

 Today, something a bit personal.  Today was a lousy day.  An absolutely terrible person, who has been absolutely terrible to me, year after year after year, did a typically terrible thing.  Unprompted.  Out of nowhere.  In front of witnesses. Jazz makes things better. Louis Armstrong & King Oliver, "Of All The Terrible Things You've Done To Me."

 During the Trump administration, someone coined the following phrase to summarize the sociopathy at the core of Donald Trump and his appeal to a certain type of person:  the cruelty is the point.  Perhaps it truly was Adam Serwer, who wrote a book using that as the title, and at a certain point, tracking a phrase becomes difficult.  As my grad school advisor, Nelson W. Polsby used to say, famous sayings migrate into famous mouths.  Let's give it to Serwer anyway, for lack of my interest in tracking the full history of the phrase.  Regardless, it was clear from the beginning of Trump's political career that a) he was/is a sociopath in the clinical sense of the term, and b) those who worship him as a cult leader do so precisely because of his sociopathy. Let us turn, though, to Kevin McCarthy.  When tapes started to surface, again, of McCarthy admitting the rot at the core of the GOP and trash-talking Trump, I posted something suggesting that his ascens...

 Earlier in the week, I wrote a sort of "wait and see" post about Florida's decision to reject a set of math  textbooks-- yes, math  textbooks-- citing their new ban on materials related to "critical race theory" and associated concepts.  In that post, I noted that while Florida is not exactly to be trusted, there actually are examples of critical race theory insinuating itself into math instruction.  Hence my entreaty:  Don't trust, just verify.  We now have a handful of examples from Florida about the offending passages.  We have four examples, which you can see here , if you have not yet examined them.  This is not complicated material. Upon examination, what can we say?  First, of the four images we have seen, one stands out as particularly problematic.  Let's discuss. As a technical point, the "Application Exercise" is not rooted in critical race theory.  Implicit bias is a concept from cognitive psychology, and it falls u...

 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice .  I still like this book.  It is still the most compelling and coherent argument about how to assess the moral defensibility of a system.  Rawls, recall, presented us with the idea of the veil of ignorance, wherein we place ourselves behind the veil and evaluate a system by imagining that we do not know what place we might occupy within a system.  Would we find the system "just," not knowing which role we might play?  Freedom for me, but not for thee arguments cannot be sustained by Rawls, but of course, the world is complex beyond that. Consider the "corporation," a word I place within scare-quotes because lefties have no idea what a corporation is.  Corpus.  Body.  Incorporate. Most businesses fail.  This is not merely because most people do not know what they are doing, although that is true.  The business world is unforgiving.  There is variation by sector, but most businesses fail.  S...

 Quick story.  Remember John Boehner?  I liked that guy.  Many moons ago, he was Speaker of the House, and a damned-good one, although under-appreciated because he had the challenging task of trying to wrangle what looked, at the time, like a caucus of crazy people.  Little did we know...  Anywho, Boehner's problem was that he was a sane institutionalist trying to lead a party in a downward spiral of loony.  He was fired, and I wrote a piece for The Monkey Cage  about the internal dynamics of the Republican Party.  The timing was a little awkward.  You may recall that Boehner was succeeded by some douchebro with an Ayn Rand fixation (Paul Ryan), but that was actually not what was "supposed" to happen.  Next in line, to the degree that that means anything, was a fellow named Kevin McCarthy. When I wrote my article, I was less than convinced that McCarthy would get the job.  The problem was that McCarthy is what we call, in techn...

 McCoy Tyner, "Speak Low," from Inception .

 A federal judge struck down the TSA's mandate to wear masks on planes and public transportation, and as I now read the ruling, the ruling demonstrates not merely an ideological crusade against masks from the right, but something more fundamental.  As I regularly write, law is a bullshit discipline, with a core problem based on its undergraduate feeder-major, philosophy.  Philosophy is also a bullshit discipline. Judge Mizelle claimed that masks do not count as "sanitation" under the 1944 statute because they do not actively clean anything, but merely prevent the spread of particulate matter and droplets.  Yes, that's right, a federal judge just made health policy on the basis of a strict interpretation of the deep, philosophical meaning of the trolley problem, which is bullshit navel-gazing. For those who have managed to cleanse their brains of this worthless nonsense, the trolley problem goes as follows.  A train goes down a track, and if a switch is not pulle...

 Today is a day ending in "-y," which means that something polarizing and inflammatory is happening in Florida, and while it has to do with schools, at least today's news has nothing to do with a teacher diddling a kid.  To my knowledge.  Rather, Florida passed a prohibition on "critical race theory" instruction in public schools, and over the weekend, the state announced that 41% of textbooks failed to meet their guidelines, including 54 math  textbooks.  According to the state, the books referenced CRT in some form.  Meaning... what?  I do not know.  I would very much like to see, and this overlaps with much of my recent reading.  You may be wondering one of two things.  First, could math textbooks actually have any critical race theory component?  Second, why would math textbooks reference race at all? In answer to the first question, yes.  Yes, they might.  Recall some of the documents circulating around about "anti-ra...

The 2022 Hugo Award nominations have been announced, and as long as I am doing Sunday posts analyzing science fiction, I may as well comment on these, for all anyone cares, which is "not at all," as nobody reads this pretentious, little blog anyway.  Moving right along.  I only really "care" about the best-novel category, with sarcasm-quotes around the word, "care," because I have nothing at stake.  Except that that's only kind of true, and I'll get to that.  The nominations for best novel are: A Desolation Called Peace , by Arkady Martine The Galaxy, and the Ground Within , by Becky Chambers Light From Uncommon Stars , by Ryka Aoki A Master of Djinn , by P. Djèlí Clark Project Hail Mary , by Andy Weir She Who Became the Sun , by Shelley Parker-Chan If we're doing the Sesame Street  game, "One of these books is not like the others," or even more clearly, one of these authors is not like the others, that's Andy Weir, and Project Ha...

 One of the more terrifying notions with which the modern world is now confronted is the proposition that Vladimir Putin, frustrated and unable to impose Russian control on Ukraine, may resort to "tactical nuclear weapons."  Two questions:  will he do it, and how should the US respond?  In response to the first question, the probability is much higher than I would like, and in response to the second question, unfortunately, we need to escalate the threat against Russia now.  We need to threaten military action against Russia.  Direct military action.  Yeah, we need to threaten that in order to avoid  it.  Game theory.  Remember the basic point about threats.  The purpose of a threat is to induce a change in one's opponent's behavior, so that it need not be carried out, and our problem right now is that Putin is insufficiently afraid that we will carry out a threat.  That needs to change.  If it doesn't, nukes are on the ta...

 The continued drip of information from the January 6 investigation can be difficult to follow, but it is worth taking a moment to point out something important from the latest texts to surface, thanks to Mark Meadows.  The big news has been the reveal that Meadows, himself, probably committed voter fraud, and that he has now been purged from the voter rolls for having done so, which is what we call, in technical terms, "a little rich."  Yet, the more substantively important point comes from Mike Lee:  "This fight is about the fundamental fairness and integrity of our election system.  The nation is depending upon your continued resolve.  Stay strong and keep fighting Mr. President."  What do we learn from this text?  Lee actually believed The Big Lie.  He actually believed they were fighting for the integrity of the vote, and all that.  People lie a lot, but remember that most people want to think of themselves as good.  Only a tru...

 The RNC has withdrawn from the Commission on Presidential Debates, based on reasons ranging from minor to disingenuous, and all I can say is... hip-hip-HURRAY.  Begone, Commission, I banish thee to the fiery pits of hell from whence thou came!  If this means I never have to suffer through another presidential debate, then every debate I have ever watched is nothing more than a bad memory of time wasted that could have been better spent counting strands of lint in my navel.  Not removing  those strands, but merely counting them.  Even counting  those lint strands would still be time better spent than watching any presidential debate ever.  So let us all take a moment to thank... Donald Trump  for his constant lying, belligerence, and over-the-top assholery, as demonstrated in 2020, when he walked into the debate stage, contagious with COVID-19, lying about his status, and yelling so much that he finally got the Commission to introduce a mute ...

 When faced with problems of information, and the limits of knowledge, do not seek wisdom in Michel Foucault, nor any postmodern philosopher.  Rather, seek insight in Stanislaw Lem.  On several occasions lately, my comments have been bounded by the limits of observation, inference and deduction.  We are not stumbling blindly through a void, yet we will not answer every question, and some questions can never be answered, with the problem being that we cannot know the difference, in advance, between a question that cannot be answered and one that has not yet, but will be answered with sufficient effort, appropriately directed.  Such frustration always sends me, not to Foucault, but to Lem, and this morning, to His Master's Voice , which Lem published in 1968. The premise is as follows.  "Spoilers" make little sense here, because there is not much of a plot.  The novel is not a conventional novel.  Rather, it is a fictional memoire for a mathematicia...