In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Suppose you have a choice.  You may have your childhood home and neighborhood, presuming you had the same home and neighborhood throughout your childhood.  You had assumed it to be a birthright.  You may have this, but no books.  Alternatively, you may be cast into a country you do not know, yet with access to every book ever written.  Which do you choose?  Your answer tells me what I must know about you.  There is, philosophically speaking, a correct answer.  It is not the answer which will be most common in a society in which few people read (nor really anywhere), but to my mind, it is no dilemma at all.  Think on this.  Muse .  Is that a hint?  It probably does not help.  I have no more talent for the creation of riddles than for anything else. Fine.  Musonius Rufus.  Get it?  Muse?  Musonius?  I told you, I suck at everything. Does your homeland, or any land mean anything to you?  I...

 If you think you recognize the author's name, you probably do.  She is most famous for Station Eleven , although in my opinion, as good as that book was, The Glass Hotel  was even better.  I have been consistently impressed with her work.  Her latest novella, Sea of Tranquility , was written and obviously influenced by COVID, and lockdowns.  This one is good, although not up to the bar Mandel had set for herself with her previous two books.  That would be an extraordinarily difficult standard to maintain, in all fairness.  If I am being blunt, the novella leans towards the self-indulgent and solipsistic, neither of which appeal to me.  There are some interesting ideas about moral duty and a few neat variations on time travel, making it worth consideration, and I will still recommend it, even if I will not categorize this one as required reading.  If you have not read The Glass Hotel , much of Sea of Tranquility will not make sense, and...

 As tragedy and horror continue to unfold in the Middle East, I turn as always to Lucius Seneca.  Seneca was among the clearest moral thinkers of his era, which is not to say that he was a perfect man, nor that he did not have blind spots, but to read his letters and texts, even thousands of years later is still to find wisdom lacking from those who claim leadership.  There are some aspects of Israel, Gaza, Hamas and the conflict with the Palestinians which should be simple.  Blinkered minds feign complication, but if you find yourself seeking to explain or excuse the use of rape and the decapitation of children as a weapon of war, you are beyond the reach of reason, as alas, so many are.  What is far more complicated is the challenge of how to respond when faced with an adversary no less evil than the nazis, but merely less capable due to a technological, logistic and numerical imbalance. No one asked the Allies to agonize over the civilian casualties in German...

 No one is coming to save you.  Tracing the origin of that aphorism is rather difficult at this point, but it contains more than a grain of wisdom.  It is worth remembering that nobody entered WWII to stop the Holocaust.  In Europe, the Allies were forced into the war by attack, and the United States avoided the war with nationalist and nazi-sympathetic factions until Japan forced the issue.  Nobody anywhere entered the war to stop the Holocaust.  Almost nobody cared.  Ending the concentration camps was almost incidental.  Since WWII, Europe and the United States have been somewhat friendlier to Jews than any other countries in history, and the US has been uniquely supportive of Israel.  Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories proliferate about Jews controlling the US government to that end, through our filthy, filthy money, with such pseudo-intellectual academics as Walt & Mearsheimer providing a veneer of academic credibility to anti-Semitic c...

 In a series of posts while the Republicans dithered and dickered over the selection of a replacement for Kevin McCarthy, I argued that the specific replacement mattered in no significant way.  The underlying tensions and pressures that made McCarthy's ouster inevitable and utterly predictable will similarly make any replacement's job impossible to perform.  In the history of the House of Representatives, there have been some truly brilliant legislative tacticians, some of whom have buildings named after them.  It is at least somewhat ironic that Joe Cannon, most famous among legislative scholars for the 1910 revolt against him, stripping him of his powers as Speaker, has a building named for him.  There's Rayburn.  You can look up the buildings, and then read about their namesakes.  Partisan animosity will prevent the mutual recognition of Nancy Pelosi's brilliance as Speaker, and John Boehner was difficult to assess for anyone not steeped in legislat...

 Amid so much other news, one may lose sight of the interesting fact that so many of Trump's closest, including Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and now, perhaps, Mark Meadows have flipped on Donald Trump.  The former two have pled guilty under the terms that they testify, and there are reports that Mark Meadows has an immunity deal with Jack Smith, having flipped.  What does this do to the probability of Trump being convicted on any of the charges?  I remain very skeptical of a Trump conviction.  Trump's attorneys will argue that anyone who flipped cannot be trusted because they are just playing games wherein they say whatever the prosecutors want in order to avoid a trial which would have created a nonzero chance of a prison term.  If there are any loyal Trumpists on the jury, that'll play.  No jury would have loyal Sidney Powell-ists, nor Jenna Ellis-ists, nor Mark Meadows-ists.  Were Trump in office, he might, in principle, pardon them, but as we sa...

 This is a bit of a hobbyhorse for me.  I suppose, technically, it is more than a hobbyhorse.  I wrote my first book, Hiring & Firing Public Officials: Rethinking the Purpose of Elections , about conceptual models of elections, and a professional obsession is something different from a hobbyhorse.  Regardless, what is an election, stripped of pomp and ceremony?  What are we doing, or trying to do? At the core of democracy, there is a mathematical problem, and a paradox, because what we are trying to do-- those of "us" who believe in the compound word created by demos-  and - kratia -- is trying to measure and aggregate the preferences of a group and find an outcome that reflects the preferences of the group.  The problem, on which I harp, turning democracy into a lyre [ducks rotten fruit], is that it is mathematically impossible to aggregate the preferences of a group in any multidimensional space.  Blah-blah, Kenneth Arrow, jargon-jargon, pro...

 Amid the greater chaos of political, economic, social and military tumult, throwing the livelihoods and lives of so many into a state to be considered with care and sober mind, let us never forget that the universe operates according to rules.  At the macro level, bodies move according to mechanical laws which we can describe by equations observed and derived by Newton and Einstein, with the greater puzzles of subatomic particles and their apparently probabilistic motion still perplexing the greatest minds in the world.  Yet those, too, can be observed experimentally, and the probabilistic equations that one finds in your standard physics textbook still seem to work with repeated experimentation.  And even in the social world, patterns can be observed.  The DDRR pattern in presidential elections holds true, with the twist that a sharp downturn in the economy, when measured in Q2 of the election year, will flip the result.  We can observe other patterns bey...