Recommend reading American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How The Republican Party Went Crazy by David Corn if you want to understand the threats to American Democracy go much deeper than Trump and have been decades in their development.
Blame conservatism, it has always been the problem. While the Democratic Party chose to stand for everyone, the GOP chose to stand for the wealthy elite, for their conservatives, it is that god granted wealth to the righteous and for the libertarians wealth is the result of their industriousness. Both groups react harshly against fairness because it refutes their belief in how the world should work. The GOP is those two cohorts and they oppose the inclusive democracy that the Democrats propose.
Eric meant to leave you a comment last week telling you I just loved the expression “free the name from the cage of quotation marks”. I am absolutely incorporating that into a sentence at work this week. Right up there with “smarty pants opinions”! Thanks for expanding my vocabulary — it shakes things up during an otherwise hum drum meeting
I thought "The Monty Hall problem" was settled math. Choosing 1 of 2 is 50%, 1 of 3 is 33%. Swapping your pick increases your odds by 17%. Seems simple to me.
The key is that Monty Hall knows what is behind each door. It's easier to understand if, let's say, there were 100 doors to start with. If he had shown you 98 goats, would you still hang onto your original choice?
That is an excellent way to think about it. I have used a similar thought experiment with an entire deck of cards. I put all 52 cards down, tell you to point to which one you think is the 8 of hearts. Monty, who knows where the card is, flips over 50 cards, none of them the 8 of hearts. There are two cards left. Do you stay or switch? Most people intuitively know to switch.
When practical, females should compete directly with males, with males being forced to behave themselves. So, she's correct, having separate competitions is damaging.
As for the Monty Hall problem, I leave that to the statisticians. It's actually a Schrodinger's Cat problem, but there is no alive or dead cat to the cat and so the car is behind the door that it is behind, but dealing with those probabilities is why I do not gamble. I don't do well with 50/50.
With respect to the Neil Steinberg discussion, for years the line was bleeped on regular cable channels in "Shawshank Redemption" where Red says "Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'... that's goddamn right." However, I've noticed in the last year or so, it is not bleeped, although they still bleep the word he uses to describe what river Andy swam through to escape.
"Indian Boundary" is a part of this area's local history, it being a bone of contention between Chief Black Hawk and the early settlers in Illinois. The Black Hawk War in northern Illinois was a defining conflict, where after the Native Americans (our current term for the Indians) were defeated, they were forced to move out of northern Illinois, notably all of DuPage County. So I think it is kind of neat that the golf course name serves as a memory of this. Here is what the 2022 edition of DuPage Roots says:
"The first European settlers in DuPage County found the Potawatomi a cooperative people who did not heed the call to join the Sauks during the 1832 Black Hawk War. Chief Black Hawk himself bore resentments as far back as 1803 because of the Treaty of St. Louis. Later, when the Indian Boundary Treaty was established in 1816, tensions were further heightened. The boundary was a ten-mile-wide stretch of land, dedicated to a future canal, starting from the shore of Lake Michigan and
extending southwest through the southeast section of what is now Downers Grove
I find the Marilyn Vos Savant phenomenon fascinating. She has the highest recorded IQ and her greatest achievement is a column in Parade magazine. Richard Feynman had an IQ of 125 and received a Nobel Prize in Physics,headed up the investigation into the Challenger disaster, and wrote 2 bestselling books. Makes ya wonder what IQ really measures.
As evidence for NOT bleeping 'goddam' I present: Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone. It is not possible to imagine a different word for goddam nor a version when goddam is bleeped. It is also not possible for me to want a world without that song in it.
"'American exceptionalism' — the comforting idea that our geography, our history, our political structure and our abundant resources exempts us from the fate that afflicts or has afflicted so many nations — is a dangerous myth. We are human and prone to the same destructive impulses that have given rise to tyranny and murderous civil strife. Superior self-regard makes us more susceptible to devolution, not less."
Well, "exempt" is certainly too strong, and I agree with adopting a vigilant attitude, but I think it's reasonable to take some comfort in American stability. Yes, Americans are obviously humans and obviously susceptible like any humans to radical or populist appeals, but history, culture, and political structures surely matter.
America is not old by world historical standards. Many states and empires lasted much longer. But America is old by modern standards. Its regime is arguably the oldest of any major country today. One of its parties is the oldest political party in the world. (Anglophiles might quibble with both claims, but the UK wasn't really any sort of democracy until the nineteenth century.) The U.S. is also wealthy and secure--still the richest large nation and the most powerful nation by far. These facts, "exceptional" or not, argue against a crackup.
Our political structures are no guarantor of continued success, of course. Madison, at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, asked rhetorically, "Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure."
But our political structures surely help. Chief among them is an independent judiciary with a strong rule-of-law ethos and and a political culture that gives it the last word on what the law says. This is why Trump-appointed judges didn't help him steal the last election and why Trump-appointed judges slapped down Aileen Cannon's misguided ruling on the purloined documents. It's why Eastman reportedly conceded that his cockamamie scheme would lose at the Supreme Court 9-0, or at least, 7-2. Yes, this institution is under some threat, hence vigilance and well-founded concern, but it's nowhere close to broken. The tendency among some to see it as already broken because a defensible conservative viewpoint on highly contested and fundamentally vague legal questions like abortion is now ascendant conflate "independent judiciary" with "moderate liberal judiciary," which can't be right.
Another feature is our decentralized power structure. Recent years have led me to a newfound patience with federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and veto points. Many have had the opposite reaction, bemoaning that a majority, albeit often a slim a majority, can't get what it wants. My counterargument is Trump. That garbage was actually president for four years, and he couldn't bring down the country. The worst he could do in his official capacity (as opposed to his capacity as cult leader) is what a nice fellow like Mitt Romney would have done -- pass a tax cut for the wealthy, block action on climate, and appoint three judges to the Supreme Court off the Federalist Society's list, any one of whom most likely would have voted to overturn Roe. Okay, Trump surely did many other bad things. But my point is that Trump was a stress test and, for all the talk of apocalypse, it hasn't really even come close to happening. Let's not confuse "closer" with "close." Yes, "closer" is alarming enough, but "close" is an exaggeration.
I'd even point to the two-party system as a benefit. Duverger's law says that a representative system characterized by single-member, plurality-wins districts tends to produce two and only two parties (because the system discourages spoilers), and this might not be a bad thing. We are spared destabilizing extremist parties of the sort now on the march in some of Europe's parliamentary democracies, which are winner-take-all affairs besides (i.e., legislative winners are, to oversimplify, also executive winners in any given election). The natural tendency of any party in a two-party system is to seek to become a majority party. At least, that's how they should act. In the '80s and '90s, both parties found success by internalizing this account of their best interests and by seeking to broaden their appeal. Goldwater was a true but unsuccessful representative of a resurgent intellectual right that saw Eisenhower/Rockefeller-style conservatism as basically moderate liberalism (which it was). It took reaching out to "Reagan Democrats" to turn the tide for them. And it took Clinton's moderation to bring the Democrats back from a wilderness where nearly all the states on the electoral map were red.
Today's Republicans and Democrats especially could take a lesson. Don't get me wrong. Republicans are the worse offenders here by far, having been largely taken hostage by minority nutjobbery. Democrats are far more sane, usually electing in their primaries normal candidates across the board and up to the top. So, this should be a great opportunity for them. But too many still cling to "excite the base" mode. As somebody said, and as I have repeated before, it's now easier, more cognitively available, for Democratic commentators to imagine either total collapse of the country on the one hand or wildly unlikely reforms of the system on the other than to imagine a Democrat winning a Senate race in Indiana. That's nuts. The solution to most of what ails us today is for the sane party to broaden its appeal.
On the excellent Burns documentary, I think Rick S. might have buried the lede. What struck me is that Trumpist elements have always existed and, indeed, their attitudes were more loathsome and more mainstream, and their influence was, in some ways, greater. The isolationist, anti-immigrant attitude, represented by the vicious quota system not undone until LBJ, was all out, unabashed, and highly popular. I took some comfort from the film that the U.S. has seen far uglier and has still gotten far better.
Lincoln famously reframed the Civil War as not just an American political battle by other means but as a test of whether a nation dedicated to equality, to, as we might put it now, human rights, "may long endure." Can a diverse liberal democracy survive and thrive? An ever open question, perhaps. But we're still doing alright, and I have a suspicion that the fact that we are a diverse liberal democracy is not, as some have it, an inherent vice but rather the secret to our success as a nation.
I think there is still a valid reason to have Best Male Actor and Best Female Actor awards at the Oscars. Movies have many different genres and male roles probably outweigh the number of substantive female roles. But I suggest a new award: Best Actor. Available to either gender.
In regards to goddamn; I guess it no more asks God to damn someone than calling someone a mother fucker is meant to imply that they have relations with their mom.
Regarding the Monty Hall problem, I think of this when someone says to trust the experts. In this case the experts are full of shit, so what other things could they be blowing smoke about?
I pick door 3 for 33% chance of winning. You reveal that door 2 has a donkey. I know know that door 1 has 50% chance of being the prize. But door 3 also has 50%. So changing or not doesn’t really matter. Both have same odds. But I am not convinced that the host has my best interest in mind. So when given the choice to change I probably would not.
In this experiment, the host ALWAYS shows you that one of the other doors does not have the prize. He has no motivation either way. The odds that the door you didn't pick conceals the prize now become 1 in 2, which the odds that the door you did pick conceals the prize remains at 1 in 3. You can show yourself this by making a grid of, say 15 trials and playing each one of them out.
Oscars are kind of the last stand for actor/actress but only because changing would piss off a lot of un-woke movie fans. Now “actor” for both sexes has become pretty standard in other award shows and in the media. But couple that with the virtual abandonment of Mr/Ms/Mrs and you’ve got a problem, especially with foreign names that don’t indicate gender to most Americans. I recently read a show biz story that had a single reference to “award winning Korean actor Youn Yuh-Jung.” At first I thought it was the male actor who’d just won an Emmy on “Squid Game.” Turns out Youn was the winner of the Oscar for best supporting actress for “Minari.” But I had to look it up. Why not just call her “actress”?
The Politically Correct Word Police are on the way.
Ordnance.
Yep.
Recommend reading American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How The Republican Party Went Crazy by David Corn if you want to understand the threats to American Democracy go much deeper than Trump and have been decades in their development.
Blame conservatism, it has always been the problem. While the Democratic Party chose to stand for everyone, the GOP chose to stand for the wealthy elite, for their conservatives, it is that god granted wealth to the righteous and for the libertarians wealth is the result of their industriousness. Both groups react harshly against fairness because it refutes their belief in how the world should work. The GOP is those two cohorts and they oppose the inclusive democracy that the Democrats propose.
Eric meant to leave you a comment last week telling you I just loved the expression “free the name from the cage of quotation marks”. I am absolutely incorporating that into a sentence at work this week. Right up there with “smarty pants opinions”! Thanks for expanding my vocabulary — it shakes things up during an otherwise hum drum meeting
How fun!
I thought "The Monty Hall problem" was settled math. Choosing 1 of 2 is 50%, 1 of 3 is 33%. Swapping your pick increases your odds by 17%. Seems simple to me.
Yes, but the problem totally vexes many people.
The key is that Monty Hall knows what is behind each door. It's easier to understand if, let's say, there were 100 doors to start with. If he had shown you 98 goats, would you still hang onto your original choice?
That is an excellent way to think about it. I have used a similar thought experiment with an entire deck of cards. I put all 52 cards down, tell you to point to which one you think is the 8 of hearts. Monty, who knows where the card is, flips over 50 cards, none of them the 8 of hearts. There are two cards left. Do you stay or switch? Most people intuitively know to switch.
When practical, females should compete directly with males, with males being forced to behave themselves. So, she's correct, having separate competitions is damaging.
As for the Monty Hall problem, I leave that to the statisticians. It's actually a Schrodinger's Cat problem, but there is no alive or dead cat to the cat and so the car is behind the door that it is behind, but dealing with those probabilities is why I do not gamble. I don't do well with 50/50.
With respect to the Neil Steinberg discussion, for years the line was bleeped on regular cable channels in "Shawshank Redemption" where Red says "Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'... that's goddamn right." However, I've noticed in the last year or so, it is not bleeped, although they still bleep the word he uses to describe what river Andy swam through to escape.
I could not choose one visual tweet. They all had me laughing too hard.
I really liked this week’s set, too.
Kathy and Eric! I so agree-the visuals are typically hysterical and this week--oh my gosh
"Indian Boundary" is a part of this area's local history, it being a bone of contention between Chief Black Hawk and the early settlers in Illinois. The Black Hawk War in northern Illinois was a defining conflict, where after the Native Americans (our current term for the Indians) were defeated, they were forced to move out of northern Illinois, notably all of DuPage County. So I think it is kind of neat that the golf course name serves as a memory of this. Here is what the 2022 edition of DuPage Roots says:
"The first European settlers in DuPage County found the Potawatomi a cooperative people who did not heed the call to join the Sauks during the 1832 Black Hawk War. Chief Black Hawk himself bore resentments as far back as 1803 because of the Treaty of St. Louis. Later, when the Indian Boundary Treaty was established in 1816, tensions were further heightened. The boundary was a ten-mile-wide stretch of land, dedicated to a future canal, starting from the shore of Lake Michigan and
extending southwest through the southeast section of what is now Downers Grove
Township and part of Lisle."
I find the Marilyn Vos Savant phenomenon fascinating. She has the highest recorded IQ and her greatest achievement is a column in Parade magazine. Richard Feynman had an IQ of 125 and received a Nobel Prize in Physics,headed up the investigation into the Challenger disaster, and wrote 2 bestselling books. Makes ya wonder what IQ really measures.
As evidence for NOT bleeping 'goddam' I present: Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone. It is not possible to imagine a different word for goddam nor a version when goddam is bleeped. It is also not possible for me to want a world without that song in it.
Thank you.
Kay
"'American exceptionalism' — the comforting idea that our geography, our history, our political structure and our abundant resources exempts us from the fate that afflicts or has afflicted so many nations — is a dangerous myth. We are human and prone to the same destructive impulses that have given rise to tyranny and murderous civil strife. Superior self-regard makes us more susceptible to devolution, not less."
Well, "exempt" is certainly too strong, and I agree with adopting a vigilant attitude, but I think it's reasonable to take some comfort in American stability. Yes, Americans are obviously humans and obviously susceptible like any humans to radical or populist appeals, but history, culture, and political structures surely matter.
America is not old by world historical standards. Many states and empires lasted much longer. But America is old by modern standards. Its regime is arguably the oldest of any major country today. One of its parties is the oldest political party in the world. (Anglophiles might quibble with both claims, but the UK wasn't really any sort of democracy until the nineteenth century.) The U.S. is also wealthy and secure--still the richest large nation and the most powerful nation by far. These facts, "exceptional" or not, argue against a crackup.
Our political structures are no guarantor of continued success, of course. Madison, at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, asked rhetorically, "Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure."
But our political structures surely help. Chief among them is an independent judiciary with a strong rule-of-law ethos and and a political culture that gives it the last word on what the law says. This is why Trump-appointed judges didn't help him steal the last election and why Trump-appointed judges slapped down Aileen Cannon's misguided ruling on the purloined documents. It's why Eastman reportedly conceded that his cockamamie scheme would lose at the Supreme Court 9-0, or at least, 7-2. Yes, this institution is under some threat, hence vigilance and well-founded concern, but it's nowhere close to broken. The tendency among some to see it as already broken because a defensible conservative viewpoint on highly contested and fundamentally vague legal questions like abortion is now ascendant conflate "independent judiciary" with "moderate liberal judiciary," which can't be right.
Another feature is our decentralized power structure. Recent years have led me to a newfound patience with federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and veto points. Many have had the opposite reaction, bemoaning that a majority, albeit often a slim a majority, can't get what it wants. My counterargument is Trump. That garbage was actually president for four years, and he couldn't bring down the country. The worst he could do in his official capacity (as opposed to his capacity as cult leader) is what a nice fellow like Mitt Romney would have done -- pass a tax cut for the wealthy, block action on climate, and appoint three judges to the Supreme Court off the Federalist Society's list, any one of whom most likely would have voted to overturn Roe. Okay, Trump surely did many other bad things. But my point is that Trump was a stress test and, for all the talk of apocalypse, it hasn't really even come close to happening. Let's not confuse "closer" with "close." Yes, "closer" is alarming enough, but "close" is an exaggeration.
I'd even point to the two-party system as a benefit. Duverger's law says that a representative system characterized by single-member, plurality-wins districts tends to produce two and only two parties (because the system discourages spoilers), and this might not be a bad thing. We are spared destabilizing extremist parties of the sort now on the march in some of Europe's parliamentary democracies, which are winner-take-all affairs besides (i.e., legislative winners are, to oversimplify, also executive winners in any given election). The natural tendency of any party in a two-party system is to seek to become a majority party. At least, that's how they should act. In the '80s and '90s, both parties found success by internalizing this account of their best interests and by seeking to broaden their appeal. Goldwater was a true but unsuccessful representative of a resurgent intellectual right that saw Eisenhower/Rockefeller-style conservatism as basically moderate liberalism (which it was). It took reaching out to "Reagan Democrats" to turn the tide for them. And it took Clinton's moderation to bring the Democrats back from a wilderness where nearly all the states on the electoral map were red.
Today's Republicans and Democrats especially could take a lesson. Don't get me wrong. Republicans are the worse offenders here by far, having been largely taken hostage by minority nutjobbery. Democrats are far more sane, usually electing in their primaries normal candidates across the board and up to the top. So, this should be a great opportunity for them. But too many still cling to "excite the base" mode. As somebody said, and as I have repeated before, it's now easier, more cognitively available, for Democratic commentators to imagine either total collapse of the country on the one hand or wildly unlikely reforms of the system on the other than to imagine a Democrat winning a Senate race in Indiana. That's nuts. The solution to most of what ails us today is for the sane party to broaden its appeal.
On the excellent Burns documentary, I think Rick S. might have buried the lede. What struck me is that Trumpist elements have always existed and, indeed, their attitudes were more loathsome and more mainstream, and their influence was, in some ways, greater. The isolationist, anti-immigrant attitude, represented by the vicious quota system not undone until LBJ, was all out, unabashed, and highly popular. I took some comfort from the film that the U.S. has seen far uglier and has still gotten far better.
Lincoln famously reframed the Civil War as not just an American political battle by other means but as a test of whether a nation dedicated to equality, to, as we might put it now, human rights, "may long endure." Can a diverse liberal democracy survive and thrive? An ever open question, perhaps. But we're still doing alright, and I have a suspicion that the fact that we are a diverse liberal democracy is not, as some have it, an inherent vice but rather the secret to our success as a nation.
I think there is still a valid reason to have Best Male Actor and Best Female Actor awards at the Oscars. Movies have many different genres and male roles probably outweigh the number of substantive female roles. But I suggest a new award: Best Actor. Available to either gender.
In regards to goddamn; I guess it no more asks God to damn someone than calling someone a mother fucker is meant to imply that they have relations with their mom.
Regarding the Monty Hall problem, I think of this when someone says to trust the experts. In this case the experts are full of shit, so what other things could they be blowing smoke about?
Are you implying that you think vos Savant is wrong? Or that you recognize that all the PhDs were wrong.
I pick door 3 for 33% chance of winning. You reveal that door 2 has a donkey. I know know that door 1 has 50% chance of being the prize. But door 3 also has 50%. So changing or not doesn’t really matter. Both have same odds. But I am not convinced that the host has my best interest in mind. So when given the choice to change I probably would not.
In this experiment, the host ALWAYS shows you that one of the other doors does not have the prize. He has no motivation either way. The odds that the door you didn't pick conceals the prize now become 1 in 2, which the odds that the door you did pick conceals the prize remains at 1 in 3. You can show yourself this by making a grid of, say 15 trials and playing each one of them out.
“Separate competitive categories for women outside of athletics ought to be permissible only for limited times ...”
permissible?
Oscars are kind of the last stand for actor/actress but only because changing would piss off a lot of un-woke movie fans. Now “actor” for both sexes has become pretty standard in other award shows and in the media. But couple that with the virtual abandonment of Mr/Ms/Mrs and you’ve got a problem, especially with foreign names that don’t indicate gender to most Americans. I recently read a show biz story that had a single reference to “award winning Korean actor Youn Yuh-Jung.” At first I thought it was the male actor who’d just won an Emmy on “Squid Game.” Turns out Youn was the winner of the Oscar for best supporting actress for “Minari.” But I had to look it up. Why not just call her “actress”?
The Politically Correct Word Police are on the way.