cheese it, the cops!

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

items

wsj: Nothing the Russians or anyone else can do on social media can in itself delegitimize any election. 

pdf

splicetoday: Male Aging Memoir, Short Version

"Spying' is not the wrong word. But even if it was...(investigate the investigation)

Resounding: The Kendalls (an appreciation of the father/daughter act's classic cheating songs)

guilty of whiteness

 

 

mental

My monographs or single-author books in reverse temporal order (sorry about the Amazonishness; if you object, I see why).

Entanglements: A System of Philosophy (SUNY)

How to Escape: Magic, Madness, Beauty, and Cynicism (SUNY)

Political Aesthetics (Cornell)

Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (SUNY)

Six Names of Beauty (Routledge)

Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives (SUNY)

End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History  (SUNY)

Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity (Chicago)

Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality (SUNY)

The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions (SUNY)

Now, I came into this thing with quite the sense of mission: I had to do this, rolling toward Entanglements. Like, I would do this for its own sake, whether it nabbed me a high-end academic career and a bunch of recognition or not.  What I've found on the other side of my oeuvre, which might well be complete, is that the lack of recognition really makes me mental (I did have a sort of psychological/professional 'episode' right at the moment I finished Entanglements, the moment I finished my life project), or makes me feel like I wasted my energy, or that I should have stuck to journalism or something. I chew on it all the time and want to lash out; I am pretty bitter, somewhere underneath. And then the next layer: Is that why you were really doing this all along, because of that fantasy of a MacArthur and the title "major philosopher" and a job at Princeton? And if so, how in the world did you (i.e. me) delude yourself so entirely about your own motivations? And how does that real motivation and self-delusion compromise these books? And is it too late to get to someplace else? And how would I do that?

In a sense I did exactly what I set out to do: I realized my dream. But when I had, I saw that it was not actually my dream, or not without everybody expressing their adoration, or laboring to refute gigantical me. Like my life has been a success by the standard I gave myself explicitly, but it's a failure by the standard I actually had. Or in the back of my mind, I always pictured the confetti along with the ideas. That seems pitiful to me, but I can't seem to inch to the next phase. Somehow I don't think trying to generate a fantasy of posthumous recognition is going to do it, though I fantasize anyway that some grad student - soon to be a giant - finds Entanglements on a library shelf in 2070 and I get to be a philosophical Van Gogh. It's not doing me any good to try to convince myself; it's just more betrayal of what I took myself to be.

I mean, it's not entirely incomprehensible, and you can't change philosophy or flip it over, or set it right, if no one reads what you write. And then again, why haven't they, really? It occurs to me in the dead of an insomniac night, that I'm not nearly as good as I thought I was, that the mediocrity of my reception is a true index of the quality of my work. Man there are few darker thoughts available to me, as I experience them. Obviously, though, there could be factors other than sheer quality at work, or even just a series of unfortunate coincidences etc. I am often delighted and impressed with my own cleverness and wisdom as I read my own stuff; but then I would be. What is the proper gauge, for me, of the quality of my own work? This is a very hard thing to know. And can I really be that much at the mercy of an academic philosophy world that I also purport to despise? Who am I, then? Definitely not who I thought I was. Evidently, I'm status-obsessed, which is just gross.

Partly, I've been living this whole time in a fantasy of vengeance/vindication, when all those academic people who dissed or ditched me or tried to ignore me into silence or made my career as I understood it a mere series of insults or gauntlet of humiliations would be filled with shame and regret. Now they're mostly retired, anyway, at best. So again: is this who I wanted myself to be? Is this what I want to be the directing force of the positions I take and the arguments I give? Not at fucking all. But can I stop thinking about it or grinding axes in my head? Not at fucking all either, though if I keep it up long enough I start laughing grimly at the futility of myself and other people's power over my head.

The whole thing throws into question my vision of myself (I've been onstage this whole time, with no audience but an imagined one), and also sort of what I want to believe about human beings: like, I am swamped by the social in a way that I've used all sorts of figures and arguments to deny that I am, slave to a narrative in a way that I denied in these books that I was. It compromises the philosophy too, or looking at it in the most positive possible light, the philosophy expresses an aspiration rather than a reality, though it's always purporting to describe reality.

This part is difficult, but then again it is a beautiful Spring day out there; the fruit trees are coming into blossom. I really need to cultivate that attitude of gratitude and I try. I have a job. I have a beautiful lover. I live in a beautiful place. My kids are well. I'm not actually at war with anyone, even if I feel geared up. It's okay.

I set out to engage in self-promotion with all its urgency and futility, then started reflecting and/or emoting. PS You need to read Political Aesthetics, you doinks!

 

 

it's true! i'm in the wall street journal today. i think people have failed to see something pretty glaring about analyzing politics, or prosecuting it, primarily through demographic categories. namely, that the thing is incoherent. incoherent, i tell you.

last few splicetoday columns:

boys: we will survive

american and world politics is reconfiguring very quickly

why bill gates sucks

children: our treasures, our targets

 

 

 

A brief history of me in opinion journalism

I started writing op-ed for the Nashville Banner (the afternoon daily, now defunct) in the early '90s when I was working at Vanderbilt. In the mid-to-late nineties I was more or less weekly for the Philadelphia Inquirer, probably 200 pieces, and had a few dozen in the Los Angeles Times. 2001-2004 or so, I did a weekly column for Creators' Syndicate, and a series of longer pieces in the Baltimore Sun. Success with Creators was limited, but I've probably been in every US daily one way or another. I did some essays for Weekend All Things Considered, and did place a couple back in the day with the Washington Post, though Lord knows I've been pitching them with some futility for many a year.

I left Creators when I fell in love with blogging; no editing can be seductive. But some items/runs from the last few years:

 

The Atlantic online

A Leap of Atheist Faith (but now I'm a Quaker)

The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus

The Credibility Index

 

New York Times

My Walden, My Wal-Mart

The School of Arthur Danto

Poe v Twain: Can We Improve?

Andy Warhol and the Persistence of Modernism

 

Los Angeles Times

How to Have Taste: Jeff Koons's Popeye

Should Miley Cyrus Wear Dreadlocks?

 

Wall Street Journal

This is the Golden Age of the Written Word

Styles of Masculinity in the Trump Admin

Left or Right? Thoreau Wouldn't Have Understood the Question

Fiestas and Apples: Small-Town Life Before Trump

Getting Metaphysical About the Post-Truth Era

The Wax Presidency Wanes

[there's one more? but which?]

 

I've done some book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Here one.

Into the Fifth Phase

 

And of course, I've done maybe 70 or 80 pieces in SpliceToday over the last year and a half.

 

 

sorry about slow blogging. i'm not missing everything, however, in this wild and woolly period. real-time political commentary has basically moved to my weekly column on the world's liveliest website, splicetoday (today: political idolatry and iconoclasm, on confederate memorials and such) and my twitter feed @crispinsartwell. i'll be back on the blog too, i expect.

true, true, i'm in the wall street journal today, writing about donald trump and styles of presidential mannishness. the wsj has been infiltrated by judith-butler-style gender theory, for one thing.

we've really had some busters.

it's been great to write about gender and politics over the last year. hillary too.

really, however, the manliest pres was william howard taft, who practiced manspreading as a sort of science.

 

admittedly, there was little of girlishness in the mien of zachary taylor.

 

this week in splicetoday: oh no! we lost the war on vulgarity. man events swamp columns these days.

second part of a very lively and substantive discussion with dan kaufman about 'entanglements.'

 

 

me talking to dan kaufman on sophia & meaningoflife.tv.

 

 

necessity and spontaneity: entanglements 7

 

 

living that newspaper life

trying to clean out a closet and came across a cache of sartwelliana, which came to me this way and that, but a lot of which i never looked at. i guess i am particularly interested in my family's writing and newspaper history. my dad franklin jr. was a reporter on the washington star, where i was a copy boy 1980-81, and his dad franklin and his father's brother edward were straight dc newshounds from childhood. here is my father's father's obit. 

what a dandy. and were i a 19th century novelist, i'd say his eyes are alight with mischief. some highlights: born july 4, 1900. he wrote 'one of the first' (the star's obit makes it 'the first') nightclub column in the usa, 'man about town,' for the washington post, in the 1920s. i think the photo might be in the white house press room (i still have his credentials), mid 1930s.

(name's on the back)

franklin sr. started in high school as a copy boy for the ap, running errands at the capitol. eventually, chief editorial writer and political columnist at the washington times. then editor of the 'beverage bulletin' and other pr stuff. apparently, my grandmother marge (bennit) sartwell, was the post's film critic. she describes herself in a letter as the drama editor. i knew her but not that.

[that's her on the right; pretty happy-looking bunch, yet formidable. not sure if it's lady journalists or what. they're drinking arrow 77 beer straight outta baltimore and smokin l&m's.]

[the washington times merged with the herald, which was gobbled up by the post, the whole kit and caboodle known even in my toddlerhood as 'the washington post and times-herald.' meanwhile the star gobbled the daily news in my youth, then definitively croaked and left dc a one-paper town; i was on the star in its final days, starting on rock criticism.]

check this masthead, from among franklin sr.'s stuff:

in chevy chase dc, i delivered the evening star for years, and my little brother adam the daily news.

i've still got a few of these sitting around in a box.

franklin died in 1948, ten years before i was born. he was injured in 1922, covering some military event with warren harding for the post. it was always a family myth that harding visited him in the hospital, but i can definitely substantiate that the white house sent flowers. check these out.

and then there's this christmas card, signed by nicholas and alice longworth.

(meanwhile my great grandfather on the completely other side [my mother's mother's father], herman bernstein, a newspaperman in nyc, was writing a campaign bio for hoover.) i have franklin's invitation to the first fdr inaugural. insanely, i ripped the envelope messing with it.

supposedly he died from his injuries; family lore is completely clear that he died of alcoholism. there are a bunch of pretty sad letters between franklin sr and my dad frankie when sr was in the 'sanitarium.' but there is some writing advice.

"There is a great deal of pleasure in writing if you don't fight it." People in my family always found that part easy. i never saw my father more at ease or happier than pecking with his two forefingers at his old royal, a pall mall dangling from his mouth. he used the columbus method, "discover a key and land on it," as do i.

[my father frank with his father frank, griffith stadium, dc, mid-1930s. sammy baugh and walter 'big train' johnson. my father told me that his father told him that he, sr, saw the longest home run ever hit by anyone anywhere: josh gibson for the homestead greys, at griffith.]

in the late 50s/early 60s my dad did humorous features at the star, like re-taking the driver's exam, or being santa claus in a department store. eventually he was a writer/photographer at the national geographic and managing ed at science news; then editor of the defenders of wildlife magazine. 

frankie sartwell on the left; must be the newsroom at the star. i assume these are editorial assistants taking copy from reporters, circa mid-to-late-50s.

franklin's brother edward died at 46, my father at 51, my brother adam at 29; that's pretty much all my direct male relatives on my father's side; addiction, really. on the other hand, we report from the front lines.

the end of the star decided me on grad school in philosophy. (i do want to say that working in the newsroom when reagan was shot was about the most exciting thing i ever experienced. our white house person lisa myers called in, and...yikes!). but i always tried to write for newspapers as well, and i still yearn for that newsroom career i never had.

at my father's death in 1980, i was left with his father's three-volume autobiography of h.l. mencken, holy books among my people. and this piece of wisdom from franklin to franklin: "writing is the fine art of applying the seat of your pants to a chair."

It's out: the big old magnum opus. My first system of philosophy might have been high school. It was so wrong, though. 

i'm apologizing for the $95 price tag. try inter-library loan? or there will be a cheaper paper later this year, i think. still not live on amazon, i guess. but they do exist. anyway, glad i lived to do the life's work.

 

so not presidential

Right, I'm in the Wall Street Journal today. The schtick will be familiar to readers of this blog, or really my opinion stuff since I started: will you people please talk like human beings? It's the reason I had to struggle to prove the existence of Al Gore, and tragically failed. Now, I want to say that I wrote that before the immigration order, and I would have difficulty writing right now with quite that airy tone. I'll show that in splicetoday any minute.

 

 

paint the white house black

my splice column today is a slam of my hometown: washington, dc. really i'm not so concerned with vindicating the 'worst major city in the country' thing as with describing the particular weirdness of the place. some of this is a bit of a commonplace to people in the area: baltimore is better! etc. or philly. or even richmond.

anyway, like a lot of folks, i am proud of my problematic forebears, and i write in the piece about a peculiar subculture of dc newspaperpeople as it stood in my youth. i've posted these before, but here's my grandfather franklin sartwell, killing some poor schlub's copy at the washington herald. quite elegantly turned out, and with walking-stick in hand he wrote the nightclub column 'man about town.'

and here's his white house pass.

 

best crispy 2016

i feel that, despite some little crises this year, i wrote well. here is some of what i'm happiest with.

i think that this ecstatic love thing is the best personal essay i've written.

russ smith and splice today have been great for me, i think, and i really have done a variety of things,

such as this thing about partying with inxs in 1984, this celebration of miranda lambert, this history of mullet country and a memoir of richard rorty.

then there was the amazing concept of why they suck, whose victims included dylan, the boss, stephen hawking, and pablo picasso. i produced a methodological treatise on the science of suckology. pretty happy with my year in review. i'm of two minds about suckology because sometimes it feels relentlessly negative. on the other hand i do mint a good insult, i think, and you've got to use the talents what god gave you. also, honestly, i see the emperor's white ass and you can't! haha!  if i do not find complete inner peace, future annihilations may well include lou reed, the beatles, allen ginsberg, and ludwig wittgenstein.

on and off the political columns for splice were pretty good, i think. i like this pair about gender and the election: commander in chief of appearances and trump's a dick. after the election i used the philosophy of history to diagnose the pathetic wimpery of the response of hillary voters after the election.

i self-published four books this year, growing marginally more competent as i went along (linking the paper versions; they are also on kindle):

waterway: a new translation of the tao te ching, and introducing the wu wei ching; 

herald of freedom: essays of nathaniel peabody rogers, radical abolitionist and american transcendentalist; 

american defiance: classic writings from the colonial period through the 19th century;

and the ya novel, written with my daughter emma, spyder's rebellion, or how to overthrow your school.

meanwhile, my straight-up magnum opus entanglements: a system of philosophy is due from suny in march.

on the blog i ragged on demographic politics, which has been idiotic. on a number of occasions, i rolled my eyes at the nytimes op-ed page, which was pathetic and/or evil this year.

i wrote some of my better book reviews this year, although i couldn't necessarily place them. i puzzled at the exhausted persistence of marxism in a review of frederic jameson and slavoj zizek's absurd yet disgusting 'an american utopia: dual power and the universal army'. i got into a bit of a wrangle with the the tls over my review of the stone reader, eds peter catapano and simon critcheley. unusually for me, i did not want much editing, because i sort of thought it was perfect, or the best review i can write, anyway. i did sell them a review of a collection of the writings of benjamin fondane, unknown existentialist. 

i'm not going to do a top ten albums this year, but i particularly loved records by atmosphere, sister sadie, and brandy clark. also i celebrated post-painterly nihilism and yoko ono's conceptualism.

repeatedly and perhaps too emphatically i did spend a lot of time ragging on academic philosophy, which is a profoundly sad place for the discipline to end up. also, pc'd to death: my internment in academic guantanomo.

this entry will link you to a pretty wild series of posts on race, which i think are...interesting. in feb, i predicted that the hillary clinton campaign will be used for decades as a lesson in how not to run a campaign. i like this take on contemporary feminism. what is american philosophy? 

now, there may have been some little screw-ups this year as well. but you'll have to read everything i wrote in order to enumerate them, because i just do not have time.

  

mulleted me

i am implicated in even my most scholarly, objective writing.

anti-slavery society

i think the 3rd ed of herald of freedom (also kindle) came out so much better. 

black lives matter, circa 1844

the duty of insurrection

it rains

i may well tweet during the debate, but in any case i'll be up with a piece tomorrow morning on splicetoday.

scattergories

so here i am in splicetoday, with the piece about the apartheid imposed on our heads and in the real world by demographics, polling, political consultancy, and so on.  the basic use of demographic 'data' in politics is to find strategies to make groups more cohesive, more insular, and more hostile to other groups and their politicians. the politicians, meanwhile, are becoming little but representatives or stereotypes of group memberships. also, the two-party system is shifting under this influence from an ideological competition, albeit of remarkable narrowness, to gender/race parties. in my opinion, these divisions are very likely to increase even more, because they are working on it technologically, as it were. and also, what the hell: the 'science' under the data is grotesquely problematic and consists more or less entirely of the deployment of stereotypes. also, its general relation to reality is ridiculously problematic. anyway, i kind of think this is an important point! share the splice column here and there?

i guess i think one reason this has happened is because you have a critical mass of profs/pollsters/pundits/pols who have gone to college since the 1980s. the whole period in academia has been waves of identity politics. now, that kind of pomo moment could have gone many ways, circa 1990. if you thought of identities as 'social constructions' or artifacts of power a la foucault, for example, you had equipment to throw racial and gender identities into chaos, or open them up, or show them as liquid over time in many dimensions: "anti-essentialism' in feminism or critical race theory. instead we ended up essentializing and freezing identities, in an attempt to get justice for those that had them on the oppressed end. a breathtaking example of that is the way people have come to think of gay/straight or trans/cis: something you're born with, your very essence, your very identity, and something that can never shift. 

i was working on race in the mid-90s in a way that had a definite identity-politics component. but what i wanted the upshot to be was to try to unfreeze the race binary, or to show the ways it was extremely optional and...not true. i actually think the right approach is neither to relentlessly emphasize the group identities a la 2016 politics not to relentlessly attack them. i think we should play with them and let them flow.

sorry for slow blogging. it's partly because i'm writing quite a bit for splice today and have finally acclimated to twitter (@crispinsartwell). so, i should have a debate piece tomorrow morning in splice, and i may tweet it some live as well.

twitter highlights: i am concerned about my likability numbers. and i don't think that colin powell's use of 'dicking' to mean 'fucking' or 'balling' is idiomatic. it's symptomatic of the terrible decline in our public discourse.

common wisdom has it that trump has closed in the polls because he's shown more 'message discipline.' that's false in multiple dimensions, and yet they keep saying it. 

i live in south-central pa; it would be incomprehensible for someone to be for clinton out here; it's just assumed as a bottom-line obvious shared conversational assumption that you hatehate hillary. there ain't a clinton sign for twenty miles in any direction. a couple little gary johnson things have bloomed, though.

how i got through

well yes, i am returning to dickinson college, having reached an amicable agreement with the institution. i'm on sabbatical for the small semester, teaching in the spring. for people who supported me in various ways through this hard time, i so much appreciate it. it's how i got through.

spliced

partying inxs: paris, 1984

 

me in a bedsit in chiswick, 1983. shirt by the dc blues band the nighthawks.

 

 

 

 

my stuff on hillary clinton and gender is a piece on splice today.

liberation mathematics

one more time with the decisive mathematical proof (creators syndicate/la times, 2004):

 

Electoral Chaos Theory

By Crispin Sartwell

"A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush."

Children, as you trudge through this vale of pain known as human life, the major parties will proffer arguments to the effect that you should vote for the moral munchkins they've nominated. Unlikely as it seems, one of these might someday be convincing. This one isn't.

Calculations concerning how voting for X affects the candidacies of Y and Z lead directly to completely insane complications. But to the extent we can work out the problem at all, voting for X is never equivalent to voting for Y or Z.

First of all, let's take the clearest scenario. All your life you've voted, and you've only voted Democratic. This time you are torn perfectly in two between Kerry and Nader: you would under no circumstances consider Bush or some other candidate or not voting. Let's suppose that Nader has absolutely no chance, and your preference for Nader has no effect whatever on anything else. Under these circumstances you nevertheless vote for Nader.

Your vote for Nader took a vote away from Kerry, but it did not one add for Bush. Whatever you want to say about this scenario, it is obviously not the same as ditching Kerry and voting for Bush. As we would say in baseball, Kerry's lost half a game.

Now the notion that you've tossed half a vote to Bush depends in turn on a variety of other factors, while the idea of partial votes opens up heretofore unimagined vistas in logic, such as that in some cases not voting is voting, while in others voting is not voting, and in yet others voting once is voting many times.

The distribution of the fragments of your vote to the candidates depends upon the various alternatives you would entertain, their weights, and their own effects. So for example, if there were no chance you were going to vote for Kerry in the first place, you haven't reduced his vote total at all by voting for Nader. If there were a 25% chance you were going to vote for Kerry, and you vote for Nader, then you're only throwing that 25% of your half vote to Bush. That's .125 of a vote.

In the case we're imagining you're 50/50 between Kerry and Nader. So you're only taking 50% of your half vote from Kerry. To make this intuitive: if someone intended to vote for Kerry and accidentally pulled Nader, that is obviously the loss of a half vote to Bush, because the probability of voting for Kerry was nearly 100%. So now we're down to .25 of a vote even in the cleanest case.

For the Democrats, a vote for Nader is a "wasted" vote: it is tantamount to not voting. So we are going to have to ask, in cases where you vote, whether you're failing to vote, and in cases where you don't, who you're voting for.

If you are a potential Kerry voter, not voting is, on the basic Democratic account, voting for Bush in exactly the same way as is voting for Nader. This equivalence supposes that under no circumstances is a vote for Nader a vote for the winner. But though the chances of Nader winning are small, they exist. Perhaps they are equal to Nader's polling numbers nationally, say 2%.

A vote for Kerry reduces Ralph's slim chance of winning and to exactly that extent is a vote for Bush. To be precise it takes away that fraction of a vote that is proportional to Nader's chance to win halved: a hundredth of a vote. So it's .01 of a vote for Bush. Even in the case of pure dilemma, that reduces your vote for Bush to .24.

Obviously, the idea that the Democrats are entertaining is that votes and vote fragments are wasted if they go to a loser. Bush's chance of winning, let us say, is 49%. So you have a 51% chance of wasting your partial vote for Bush when you vote for Nader. Hence, a vote for Nader is .1176 of a vote for Bush.

The antecedent chance that you will vote for Kerry - which fixes the fraction of the vote you're giving to Bush - is reduced by the chance that you will not vote at all. Since about half of eligible people vote in US presidential elections, the average factor is about .5.

Then you're giving Bush .0588 of a vote. That's unlikely to change the outcome, even in Florida.

And if you considered voting for Bush at all, all bets are off. Indeed, pretty quickly you'll find that people who once had a little inkling for Bush and ended up voting for Nader did not vote at all, because they repaid to Kerry what they subtracted from Bush.

It might be fun to spend a few years working on this problem, and a Nobel in psychomathematics might lurk in the research, or maybe just psychosurgery for the researcher .

But let us not be hasty. We should also entertain the idea that a vote for *Kerry* is a vote for Bush.

After all, it is a vote for the war in Iraq, for the Patriot Act, for No Child Left Behind, against gay marriage, for deficit spending on a massive scale, and so on.

Perhaps "Kerry" and "Bush" are simply two names for the same thing. Then, though voting for Nader might be voting .0588 for Bush, voting for Kerry is voting for Bush entirely.

But let's be generous and postulate that Kerry only coincides with Bush 75%. Of course it still follows with mathematical precision that no matter who you vote for - and even if you don't vote at all - you're voting for Bush. Defeating Bush in this case is conceptually impossible, and Democrats by their own calculations would do well to give up. In fact, they have.

At any rate, if the Democrats are right that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, and if the average Nader vote is .0588 of a vote for Bush, voting for Kerry is voting for Bush about 13 times.

At least we've got that straight.

 

demerit

i'm spliced today, fomenting rebellion against the meritocracy.

data (from my twitter feed):

the average hip hop artist is far more verbally adept than the average perfect scorer on the sat.

the average trailer-park resident can kick the average technocrat's ass.

the average recovering addict knows more about human beings than the average psychology professor.

i missed the chance to nail the end. i should have come back to 'varieties of sheep.'

 

against stephen hawking

on splice today: why they suck (2): stephen hawking. really the topic is contemporary physics, which i've been attacking on and off for years, with mixed success. hit the 'science' tab, below right, and scroll down for some of the discussion. 

the point of 'why they suck' is to attack people who have been placed above criticism, people who cannot be attacked (or their ideas, or songs, etc). i want to do critiques on things and people that provoke the 'you can't say that!' response. i think really we often engage in apparently-unanimous idolatry of members of our species that isn't good for the people treated that way and definitely isn't good for ourselves or our art or our ideas. sheer peer pressure is not a good way to form tastes or figure out what to believe. and when the whole world gets unanimous, it really is extremely likely that everyone will pretend not to notice or really will not notice the sucky part.

so, because it's hawking, or just any apparently super-genius physics professor, people happily swallow things they cannot and should not possibly believe: the universe has every possible history, all of which we produce by observation. you can't even begin to make that anything like coherent. and yet you're flummoxed by the blackboard of scribbled equations.

ok, just to nail a couple of things. 'the universe has every possible history' is a pretty crisp formulation, but it nevertheless runs maximally afoul of occam's razor: it postulates as many entities as any theory of anything can possibly postulate: every thing that could possibly exist has existed. i am not sure myself whether or to what extent the razor is a good principle of theory choice; it would be, in my opinion, only if more ontologically economical theories were more likely to be true. i don't see quite why that should be the case. but i know that hawking makes it his first principle of theory choice and then commits the strongest possible violation of it a few sentences later. that's a mistake by anyone's standards.

well, he doesn't say these are criteria of theory choice; they are standards for generating a 'real model'; if the 'model' is 'real' then it will have these features. just to quibble: by real he means 'true': the model is real, i suppose; there it is, expressed in the text or the equations. only it's incoherent and false. i would prefer to formulate this by asking what is a good explanation, which would also mean a true explanation. these are very vexed and complex issues, but they are handled by people like hawking in, let's say, a stunningly cavalier fashion. even the standards of theory choice he gives are sort of an eclectic checklist from the history of answers to these questions, giving you a little occam, a little logical positivism, and a little popper, along with that utterly vague and arbitrary thing about arbitrariness and adjustments (2).

i am aware that the book i'm reading is 'popularized': good heavens i'm choking on the sub-atomic particles as soccer balls etc.: a lot of this sort of writing has a very condescending quality. maybe there is much much more sophisticated thinking about explanation, theory choice, modeling, etc. underneath? but if there were, it wouldn't look this bad on the surface i think. hawking has argued - and many people, even philosophers, take this stance implicitly or explicitly - that science has replaced philosophy. i don't think so, because hawking and such so desperately need much more precision about basic terms, categories, and the ground-clearing assumptions. like: 'how do we recognize a good theory?' being a killer mathematician or a good collider of particles doesn't necessarily help you with these tasks.

but really it's the crazy, casual apparent subjectivism that i would most viscerally reject, and which is also incompatible with everything else (such as stating that the universe begins with a bang). it's just german idealism again, i tell you; dead as a doornail in philosophy, for extremely good reason.

 

consume me

unaccountably, everyone (well, almost everyone) seems to have forgotten to buy my self-published thingummies, all of which have appeared since my fall from disgrace. in reverse order:

the ya novel i wrote my daughter emma: spyder's rebellion, or how to overthrow your school. "Like The Hunger Games without the hunger or the games. Like The Fault in our Stars with plenty of faults but zero stars." --Jex Wopley

the astonishing anthology of anti-authoritarianism: american defiance

a collection of essays by the most radical human being of the early 19th century: herald of freedom: essays of nathaniel rogers, american transcendentalist and radical abolitionist

waterway: a new translation of the tao te ching, and introducing the wu wei ching. "Dank as a motherfucker, motherfucker." --Xi Jinping

coming next will be a collection of black power scriptures, including the holy piby (robert athlyi rogers), the royal parchment scroll of black supremacy (fitz ballantine pettersborough), the promised key (leonard howell), the holy koran of moorish science temple (noble drew ali), and spiritual writings of marcus garvey.

the unoccupied pantsuit that is hillary clinton

up on splice today, challenging any hillary supporters there may be to name a single position she has taken in her whole career contrary to polling.

blowin', in the wind

i'm up on splice today, drilling bob dylan a new asshole. it's the first in a series: "why they suck." the forthcoming victims are unlikely to surprise regular readers of this blog. 

nobob: the genius of don chiasson on the genius of bob dylan

on sean wilentz on robert zimmerman's miracle essence of america, or whatever

"Depart from me this moment"
I told her with my voice
Said she, "But I don't wish to"
Said I, "But you have no choice"
"I beg you, sir", she pleaded
From the corners of her mouth
"I will secretly accept you
And together we'll fly south".

Just then Tom Paine, himself
Came running from across the field
Shouting at this lovely girl
And commanding her to yield
And as she was letting go her grip
Up Tom Paine did run
"I'm sorry, sir", he said to me
"I'm sorry for what she'd done".

  

if you need me to start explaining why that sucks there's no hope anyway.

 

*

 

Winterlude, Winterlude, my little apple
Winterlude by the corn in the field
Winterlude, let's go down to the chapel
Then come back and cook up a meal
Well, come out when the skating rink glistens
By the sun near the old crossroad sign
The snow is so cold but our love can be bold
Winterlude, don't be rude please be mine.

Winterlude, Winterlude, my little daisy
Winterlude by the telephone wire
Winterlude, it's making me lazy
Come one, sit by the logs in the fire
The moonlight reflects from the window
Where the snowflakes they cover the sand
Come out tonight everything will be tight
Winterlude, this dude thinks you're grand.

 

*

 

Something there is about you that moves with style and grace
I was in a whirlwind, now I am in some better place
My hand's on the sabre and you've picked up on the baton
Something there is about you that I can't quite put my finger on.

 

*

 

Idiot wind blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads heading south
Idiot wind blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe

 

quite.

 

*

 

Old man sailin' in a dinghy boat
Down there
Old man sailin' in a dinghy boat
On there
Gonna pull man down on a suckling hook
Gonna pull man into the suckling brook
Oh yeah !

 

*

 

these five examples are drawn from the first seven songs i looked at. the other two weren't good either. 'overrated' doesn't even begin to cut it. there has never been a less competent lyricist.