In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Both parties are insane and reprehensible, but while the Democratic Party's descent into lunacy and vileness has been a bottom-up process, driven by academia and activists motivated by the worst ideas in history "learned" from professors spreading those ideas like viruses to infect the body politic, the Republican Party's process has been top-down, with a few figures playing key roles.  Donald Trump is not only obvious for his ubiquity and toxicity.  He really did do tremendous damage to democracy by normalizing constant lying, over the top corruption, violent authoritarianism and just plain immorality.  Yet he could not have won a party nomination had that party not gone insane first.  A sane party does not nominate a man caught on tape bragging about his ability to get away with grabbing women's pussies, who constantly lusts after his own daughter, and that's just the most obvious, personal dimension of his grossness, indisputable to anyone.  The party h...

 Today seems like a good day to provide the correct definition of one of the most intentionally misused words in the English language.  Genocide.  I might blather about some non-events yesterday, or the decisions of some morally misguided people, but instead I shall intellectualize about the core.  "Geno-" and "-cide."  The suffix indicates the murder of, and the prefix is derived from the general, the category, rather than the specific.  You are undoubtedly familiar with genus species  as taxonomic nomenclature.  The nomenclature predates anything like modern, biological taxonomy by thousands of years.  It is the division between the general  and the specific .  See the derivation?  As I scan my desk for examples, consider pens.  Pens are the general .  The specific may be the Graf von Faber-Castell E-Motion fountain pen.  To kill the genus  of people, then, is to kill a category.  A group.  A ra...

 Peace, the cliche goes, is little more than a temporary pause between the wars.  We are prone to focus on the large scale effects of wars, the political shifts, the numbers, the forest rather than the trees.  After the wars, we ask "what now?"  What of the result?  The benefit of distance is the privilege to ask the abstract, bird's eye view questions.  At the ground level, the survivors find ways to move on, but what of the soldiers?  This morning, we consider another K.J. Parker novel, The Company , in which a group of soldiers fail to find life in peacetime. As with Parker's (Tom Holt's) other novels, the book takes place in a non-magical alternate world, pre-industrialization.  Faralia was involved in a long-running war with some enemy, it does not matter who nor how it started nor why, because this is the soldier's perspective.  A group of Faralians head off to War College, and because they are extraordinarily intelligent and adept, the...

 The dark side of the news is that news is dark.  Progress is slow, and that means that that which is good is slow, whereas the bad things are dramatic.  They catch our attention, and so when we consider what draws our attention and what seems to warrant commentary and analysis, it is the bad, the horrifying, the stupefying.  The conclusion we draw?  The world is dark and horrible.  I, of course, comment on the dark and the horrible because I comment on politics, being a Political Science professor, yet this morning, it is time once again to step back and consider the slow, the gradual, the incremental and the systematic.  Chances are that your life, in perspective, is pretty good.  The S&P closed at 5088.80 yesterday.  That was nice.  Those are some nice numbers. It is almost laughably easy to get rich in the United States of America in the 21st Century.  The stock market goes up.  There are downturns, and even crashes, bu...

 The Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling against IVF.  We return, then, to one of the more stupidly wrong claims in American politics.  Donald Trump is personally responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade !  Um, no.  He is not.  Let us clarify a few points.  First, Donald Trump's appointments to the Supreme Court deviated in no way from the appointments that would have been made by any other Republican.  (Perhaps he was a little extra fond of the rapist.)  Donald Trump is not, generally speaking, what we call "generic R."  In this one, small way, though, he actually is and was.  Indeed, the reason that some of the more aware moralists in the conservative movement sucked it up and voted for the most immoral man in the history of politics was their knowledge that he would be "generic R" when it came to the appointment of judges and justices.  Did Donald Trump, personally, cause Roe v. Wade  to fall?  No.  No...

 With so many consequential events in the world, it would be easy to miss the rather less serious business of the US House of Representatives, the study of which was the focus of my professional life when a) calling the institution "a joke" was, itself, a joke, and b) the problems of the world were proportionately less daunting.  In the intervening decades, the joke became a self-fulfilling prophesy, and as per my Sunday observations on Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground , some ignoble gentleman came to the stage, arms akimbo, and amid a time of prosperity, suggested that we scatter the whole thing to the winds to live according to our sweet foolish will.  Less poetically, everyone went batty, and no one more pettily than the US Congress.  After akimboman's impeachment (his first impeachment), the Republican Party announced that it would just turn around and conduct a revenge impeachment of the next Democrat.  So, after Trump was removed from the White Hous...

 Nobody enjoys losing, even when there are no real stakes.  Once upon a time, I enjoyed a nice game of chess.  The stakes are zero, but nobody enjoys losing.  The higher the stakes, the less enjoyable losing becomes.  What of surrender?  In game theoretic terms, we model "war of attrition" or "brinksmanship" with a "surrender" option such that a player strategically selects that option, and sacrifices something because the cost of surrendering is outweighed by the cost of continuing in the game.  Surrender can be rational, if unpleasant.  The irrational will fight past the point of rational surrender, for whatever reason.  A conception of honor, the perceived virtue of the cause, whatever.  Yet rationality will sometimes demand surrender, regardless of the virtue of your cause.  Confederacy apologists used to refer to "The Lost Cause," bitter about being forced to surrender, even though their cause was as evil as a cause can be....

  I apologize for my technological ineptitude.  The table and graph above should convey my point.  The sources are as follows.  The estimate of deaths in Gaza are roughly consistent across sources for the moment, although given an impending attack on Rafah, the number will increase.  Will it increase by enough to change the fundamental nature of the graph?  No. The sources for the other numbers are as follows.  The Syria death toll came from a quick search, leading to this Guardian piece .  The Yemeni figure came from a more reliable source-- this CFR piece .  The Darfur number came from the Holocaust Museum of Houston , although figures vary more given both the time frame and the challenge of counting in the region.  Still, this is tragedy and horror on a scale that makes me weep.  The malaria number comes from this WHO piece .  I always refer to malaria and waterborne pathogens as the sources of death at horrifying scale that...

 It is time, once again, to revisit Fyodor Dostoevsky.  My motivation for our reconsideration is the oh, so modern phenomenon of existential dread in the face of predictive algorithms, the coming AIpocalypse, and rebellion through irrationality.  Consider Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground .  The novel is somewhat less famous than his most prominent novels, and much darker than both Crime & Punishment , and The Brothers Karamazov , which are fundamentally about redemption.  Notes From The Underground  addresses self-destruction, to some degree in response to or in rebellion against the scientific modernism of the 19th Century, and its infringement on free will.  As with any Dostoevsky novel, one finds new and timely insights that Fyodor would not have predicted at the time, nor even would a reader have derived ten years earlier.  Perhaps not even a year earlier.  This is why we keep going back to Dostoevsky. The narrator begins by cr...

 Donald Trump has been ordered to pay $355 million, and he has been blocked from serving in any capacity in the State of New York on the boards of businesses.  He will appeal, of course, and one can never be certain what will happen on appeal, yet let us step back and ask what we should make of these verdicts.  It is tempting to take a moment of schadenfreude.  Those with moral clarity have always recognized what Donald Trump is.  Of course, moral clarity has always been difficult and rare, and I think that there will be a post soon on the challenges of moral clarity throughout history, taking the long view.  Yet here, now, is a man who has always flouted every principle because, as is obvious, he is a sociopath.  One is tempted, then, to enjoy his loss.  Yet to do so is to lose that moral clarity. There is some satisfaction in justice done.  Justice is not yet done, to be sure.  He has his appeals, and there are processes, but a right v...

 This may be a new feature.  There are terms that are either misused (often intentionally), or which clarify by naming concepts which we observe and understand upon defining the boundaries.  I will not write these every day, but perhaps semi-frequently, and my goal is to keep these short.  I suck at that. Colonialism.  Colonialism is the practice wherein an empire-building nation finds a resource-rich land outside its border, and sends its own people to that land to establish an operation there in order to extract resources.  If there is no existing population, the settlement or colony is easy to establish, but if there is a population, that population is usually required to accept governance by the colony established by the empire-building nation.  Crucially, the colony itself does not exist in economic independence of the empire-building nation.  It exists within a mercantilist network, required to trade within that mercantilist network because ...

 Donald did a Donald over the weekend.  Actually, he Donalded all over the floor several times, and someone needs to whack him on the nose with a newspaper, because Ole Oranger never was housebroken, and it is probably too late, but some of us are tired of him piddling on our nice rugs.  Bad  Donald!  No well done steak with ketchup!  The minor but repulsive demonstration of his Donald-ness was his comment about Nikki Haley's husband not being on the campaign trail.  Be... cause he is serving on active duty.  The more important comment was something that indicated what we knew, which was that if Donald gets another term, NATO dies.  He made up a 'sir' story, in which someone who would never call him "sir" calls him "sir," and the upshot was that he positively encouraged Vladimir Putin to invade NATO countries because he would renege on our Article 5 duties.  In his first term, he wanted to withdraw from NATO, but he was surrounded by en...

 This morning, we shall contemplate a bird.  A hummingbird.  Jeff VanderMeer is best known for the Southern Reach trilogy, the first book of which was, I suppose, movie-ized.  Why?  Because the movie industry can do nothing but remake or adapt.  (I have not seen a new movie in years.)  The book trilogy really was outstanding.  I also wholeheartedly recommended Borne , although the sequel, Dead Astronauts , was perhaps a bit too navel-gazy and experimental for the sake of experimentation.  Nevertheless, his stature as an author is generally well deserved, as one of the leading writers in "the new weird."  Yes, that's the term.  Hummingbird Salamander  is the first book that I have found disappointing from VanderMeer.  Yet, there are always observations to be made. Here is the set-up.  In the near future (although there are some technological throwbacks) a woman who works for a security consulting firm is sent some oh-s...