The “Idea” Idea (with an excursus on ideation and subvocalisation)

Much of the most important and vital work done in the last half-century  depends [not upon experiment or brute calculation, but] upon new ideas;  and new ideas are notoriously exceedingly difficult to grasp.

-- Louis J. Mordell, Reflections of a Mathematician (1959), p. 11

We previously stated that mathematics is best characterized as the science, not of number, but of structure (or of pattern -- at this level of generality, either term will do).   As MacLane phrases it:

This chapter introduces the idea of the formal  in terms of certain basic structures:  Set, transformation, group, order, and topology.  With Bourbaki, we hold that Mathematics deals with such “mother structures”.  Against the historical order, we hold that they arise directly from the basic stuff of Mathematics.

Saunders MacLane,  Mathematics:  Form and Function (1986), p. 7

That last bit, you will note, is unabashedly Platonist, counterposing contingent human praxis  to transcendent time-independent Truth.  (We discuss this contraposition here.)

But beyond that, or rather as an animating force within it,  and distinguishing mathematics from such structure- or pattern-centered enterprises as architecture or the plastic arts, is the central role of ideas. 

MacLane puts the matter well.  Re the derivation of Hamilton’s equations from Lagrange’s:

What appears as a trick is in fact an idea -- an idea which must have been clear to Hamilton when he did it.  But we claim that in general  most of the formal tricks appearing in Mathematics  are really ideas in disguise -- ideas presented as manipulations  because the manipulations can be made explicit, while the ideas are a bit nebulous.

-- Saunders MacLane,  Mathematics:  Form and Function (1986), p. 284

In a previous series of essays, we put forward certain particular “mother ideas”.  Here we reserve a meditation-space  for musing about “Ideas -- the very idea”.

~

Hadamard comments on Rodin’s testimony that, throughout the process of sculpting, he most keep the “global idea” in mind, even while working on the smallest details;  and that “this cannot be done without a very severe strain of thought.”

I do not feel that I have understood [a mathematical argument] as long as I do not succeed in grasping it in one global idea; and, unhappily, as with Rodin, this often requires a more or less paintul exertion of thought.

-- Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (1945), p. 65

Hadamard scoffs at the account given by Souriau in his Théorie de l’Invention:  “Does the algebraist know what becomes of his ideas when he introduces them, in the form of signs, into his formulae?  Undoubtedly not,”  but just turns the crank of mechanical calculation.  Apparently Souriau never consulted an actual mathematician, says Hadamard:  the mathematician trusts his idea, his insight, his intuition, more than he does his calculations, which after all are not infrequently in error  (Hadamard confesses that he, like Poincaré, was but an indifferent numerical calculator):  If these clash, you first redo the calculations, before tossing overboard the Idea that motivated the whole thing.

~

Ideation and subvocalisation

Hadamard then makes an excursus  rather off the path our our principle inquiry;  yet we shall follow him a little ways.  He confronts the question of whether language be the key to thought;   and waxes indignant at those who, like Max Müller, dogmatically assert that, without language, thought itself must needs collapse:

I had a first hint of this when I read in Le Temps (1911):  “The idea cannot be conceived otherwise than through the word, and only exists by the word.”  My feeling was that the ideas of the man who wrote that  were of a poor quality.

-- -- Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (1945), p. 66

Likewise, the behaviorist J.B. Watson says somewhere that “thinking is nothing but our talking to ourselves”.

The devotees of this position  point to the dual meaning of the early Greek word logos -- ‘word, language’ and ‘reason, thought’;  and would by implication deny that our diminutive and prickly friend, the humble hedgehog, could really know One Big Thing or even a little weentsy one.

Hadamard, by contrast, is virtually a militant in the opposite camp:  “I fully agree with Schopenhauer when he writes, ‘Thoughts die  the moment they are embodied in words.”  This even applies to algebraic symbolism:  too cumbersome to actually think with;  you mostly only use them when checking your work.

The Neothomist philosopher Etienne Gilson  seconds the opinion of his countryman:

Si un linguiste me dit que c’est notre langue qui modèle d’abord  le monde que nous pensons,  je sais qu’il ne me parle pas en linguiste, mais en philosophe, qui se dispenserait d’ailleurs de me donner aucune justification philosophique de son opinion.  Non seulement je ne sais pas si elle est vraie, mais je ne sais même pas pourquoi elle lui semble vraie.

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 51

A noted Freudian psychiatrist agrees:

Every single thought, before formulation, has gone through a prior wordless state.

-- Otto Fenichel,  The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945), p. 46

A contemporary philosopher goes even further:  some ideas may be not only pre-linguistic, but even pre-conscious:

We may not be aware of our ideas.  An idea  in this sense  is a tendency to accept routes of thought .. that we may not recognize in ourselves, or even be able to articulate.

-- Simon Blackburn, Being Good (2001), p. 3.

The epigram "We may not be aware of our ideas" is deliberately paradoxical.  Blackburn means "idea", not in the sense of the completely conscious  "I have an idea, let's...", but of something like the often tacit metaphysical underpinnings of mentation and investigation, which we treated of earlier.  -- Blackburn extends this notion (in a way reminiscent of, but antedating, Freud):  "A permanent strand in Christian thought  is that we have no insight, or even lie to ourselves, about our heart's desires." (id., p. 30)

We close this excursus with an epigram of William Hamilton  which Hadamard quotes:

Speech is thus not the mother,

but the godmother of knowledge.

~

The reason such musings lie off our main track, is that we are largely uninterested in psychology, or thought-processes, or any of the hunches & hiccups that fallen Man is heir to  as he struggles to comprehend all that His hand hath made.  With Hadamard, we conceive that there are cognitive activities for which vocalization is neither required nor especially helpful:  say, playing Go, or basketball.  

There is an epigram, variously ascribed, that has always fascinated me:

“How can I know what I think

 until I see what I say ?”

On the face of it, this would appear to be anecdotal evidence for the thought-needs-language thesis.  But upon nearer inspection, it might argue rather the opposite:  That thought rose from some wordless region of the self, and only became an object to critical consciousness after having been concretized by transformation into words.

For us, the key question is to what extent an Idea -- one worthy of the majuscule -- can even be adequately expressed in our language.   Certainly the higher mathematics cannot be expressed in ordinary human language.  It has invented for itself a more or less arcane system of signs, obeying no human syntax;  you may, if you like, par abus de langage, call that too a “language”, but it is no natural human language, but rather an aide-mémoire cobbled together to express ideas that observe their own semantics, call that language or not.   Hadamard himself attests that human language does not serve him especially well, when he must express mathematical ideas.  Whenever he must hold forth on a mathematical topic, even one of his own devising and thus, to him, abstractly clear as a bell, he must write out the text of his lecture beforehand, lest he be left gasping and groping for words.

There is another old adage, current among linguistic philosophers:

“Whatever can be meant

can be expressed.”

At this point we hear the shade of that crusty critic of Le Temps, growling:  All that you mean, maybe. 

~

Let us put the point even more starkly.  Ask Not  (we channel Kennedy here) whether our (necessarily human versions of) ideas  could be adequately communicated to some other rational species.  Ask whether the Idea, as pre-existent in Platonic paradise, has been adequately incarnated in us.

(There now swims within my vision  the image of a category-theoretic Universal Object, with arrows slanting downwards  this way and that, as in Blake’s great painting.)

~

This is becoming interesting.  Hoping that your appetite has been whetted as well, we link to a couple of math-related installments of the “Any Ideas?” series:

Induction

The free invention of structures

Actual Infinity

~

We have tried to outline a capitalized or pregnant sense of the everyday word idea, which in most contexts certainly does not bear such freight.  (“I’ve got an idea, let’s go get pizza.”)  There is, however, another sense, which is still scientific/intellectual, yet which bears no Platonic or foundational flavor:  what is sometimes called a “bright idea”.   A bright idea is what causes a light-bulb to appear over the cartoon character’s head.  And it does represent some genuine cleverness, though its success is by no means guaranteed (and in the case of Donald Duck, will almost certainly come to grief.)

This more powerful form of inductive construction  can be deduced rather simply from the older form.  The trick is to construct, not the sequence of values, but the sequence of partial functions…

-- Andrew Gleason,  Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis (1966), p. 145

A “trick” is to an idea  as tactics is to strategy. 

Similarly:

We could prove the inequality by a limit argument from the known inequality for finite sums, but the following reasoning involves a very interesting technical device.

-- Andrew Gleason,  Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis (1966), p. 195

~

We have noted before  that, once you set out to focus on Ideas per se, you keep winding up back in mathematics -- if only because there are so many of them there.  Yet more:  In our own lifetime, math itself has spawned a subfield  whose task, it would seem, is precisely the study and development of Ideas -- for their own sake, almost, and beyond such practicalities as computing the area of the field of Farmer Brown (or rather, Farmer Enkidu, since this concern goes back to Babylonia and beyond) or even its offspring, geometry, or the handmaiden of that, the calculus, or …  This field is called Category Theory, which (as faithful readers of this tragic blog will already know)  I do not personally understand:  but do note, that a recent introduction to same (subtitled “A first introduction to categories” -- the style of the title is that of children’s books;  and God willing, someday toddlers will study this stuff), by Lawvere & Schanuel, is titled:

Conceptual Mathematics

C’est un titre astutieux.  For again (this is a phenomenon which we have treated, in these essays, under the label “faux-naïf”), on the surface this might seem to be one of those liberal-feelgood substitutions for the actual hard work of thought, meant to bolster the self-esteem of slow-learners;  whereas in actual fact, it points at concepts -- what underlies such relatively superficial activities as real analysis, point-set topology, algebraic geometry (you with me, kids?), and all the rest.

[Excelsior]   There is a vast philosophical literature (and a smaller, but still substantial, linguistic literature) concerning the relations between language and thought.   To rehearse this would be pointless;  to attempt to enrich it, quixotic.   Still we may feel our way forwards, and conceivably (enventually) contribute some minim of value, by taking as our paradigm area of Thought -- mathematics, rather than cats being on mats, and that sort of thing.   And Language as comprising, not only natural human languages, but any attempt at symbolic and communicable representation of Thought. 

(For this quest, I request:  God’s guidance and Grace.  Since, sine qua, non.)

An initial linguistic bridge is provided by our remarks above about the notion idea in the sense of ‘bright idea’.   A bright idea is no mere clothing of a perception;  it is closer to an invention.   And the key term it brings us up next to is:  insight.

[TBC?  Solâ gratiâ … ]

Adventures in Autogynophilia

[An update to our earlier essay here.]

Well, well:  another Sunday, another New York Times Book Review.  Hoping against hope, I quickly scan the Nonfiction index;  but no:  out of five reviews, four would not even exist (or at least not be so packaged) without feminist assumptions, and the fifth was for Obama-bashing.

(Oh, almost forgot -- Happy Father’s Day.    Not.)

The front-page review is of What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire.   Nothing the matter there;  the book is apparently extensively researched, if perhaps rather hyped and breathy in places (as you would expect in a book from HarperCollins) -- but no more so than today’s typical popularization of cosmology.  And the review itself is level-headed, eminently sensible.   No, the problem once again is in the packaging, a point we examined at some length in an earlier essay (La nostalgie de la boue).   The page layout shows where the real priorities of the marketing department lie:  atop a squooshed sliver of text, only an inch and a half high, the entire rest of the front page is taken up with a soft-porn drawing of a woman experiencing orgasm.   The artist is apparently female, and indeed the whole aesthetic is designed, in a way difficult to put into words, to appeal to the fantasies of women, not to be cheesecake for men.  For one thing, she is primly made-up, her lipstick precise, unsmudged by any kisses;  she would seem to be, not in the arms of a lover (let alone a husband  -- Daddies?  We don't need no stinkin' daddies!), but having some private time with Mister Dildo.

Then comes a book about a scholarly topic, the solution of Linear B.   (The language turned out to be Mycenaean Greek.)   To be sure, the book is given a tawdry, Mayan-mysticism-sounding title, The Riddle of the Labyrinth:  The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (the publisher -- surprise, surprise -- HarperCollins).   But, soit.   A tale worth telling.  The principals in the discovery and solution, as a matter of historical fact, are Arthur Evans and Michael Ventris, and their tale has been oft told before.  But now our female author approaches the matter from a fresh perspective, that of the chip-on-the-shoulder “Rosalind Franklin syndrome”, focussing instead on one Alice Kober (likewise spotlighted by the Review, with a large photograph, the other principals not being depicted).   As near as I can tell from the review, Ms. Kober did not actually contribute a thing to the solution;  but, had she lived longer, we are told, she might have!   In short, but for narcissism and ressentiment, this book would not even exist.

And now it gets stranger.   The next book under respectful review is a memoir by … but let us give our pen a rest.   You’d likely forget the name anyway if you didn’t already know it, but you’ll not soon recall the color photograph that emblazens the review, physically elbowing the text aside.  The elbow belongs to an upraised right arm, terminating in a fist;  and the arm belongs to a shouting woman (the author), with the word “Vagina” written in huge letters across her chest, in hot pink.  Accompanying the photo, in large type, is a quotation from this luminary:  “The absence of a body against my body  created a gap, a hole, a hunger.”  (If a man were to attribute such words to a character in his book, he would be accused of mysogeny.)

We touch bottom at last with the final book of this dominical quartet:  Confessions of a Psychopath.   -- No but surely you are mistaken, this must be fiction, a work along the lines of the novel Await Your Reply.   -- But no, it is a memoir:  “A self-professed sociopath describes her charm, intelligence, and absence of emotion.”

It is no-one you have heard of.  She has supposedly not even committed any spectacular series of violent crimes, such as might normally tug at the public’s prurience.  Her accomplishments seem to be none;  her nature, spectacular, though only in her own self-assessment:  she was “so uniquely accomplished, talented and charming that I was naturally included on everyone’s list of people to know.”   Her only actual claim to our attention is being an unusually unpleasant and messed-up person.  And for this she gets a book deal, and a review in the New York Times.

Math Porn

As we remarked earlier (Mathsex) the intersection of mathematics and literal pornography is a set of measure zero.   (A perhaps/perhaps-not  related fact, is that mathematicians themselves are entirely sexless.   They certainly do not reproduce biologically;  in fact, they do not even reproduce academically, most great mathematicians having been lousy lecturers -- and I mean really, really bad.  Instead, each individual mathematician-to-be  receives an Annunciation -- from which archangel, I alas do not know, never having received one, despite fervent prayers.)

Even “porn” in the journalistic sense, not of actual pornography, but of tawdry crowd-pleasing shallow presentations of deep subjects, seldom if ever is to be found in the same bar-booth with Mathematics.  (For a list of subjects that do so lend themselves to marketplace exploitation, consult our definitive document:  Funporn.)

Yet it is now our sad duty to report, that we have, for the very first time in our young life (young with respect to the afterlife, that is;  w.r.t. any of you-all whippersnappers, ancient), encountered an actual specimen of “math porn” (although in a very limited sense, as we shall see):  Popular Lectures on Mathematical Logic (sic, sic, sic), published in English in 1981, by the philosopher-logician Hao Wang.

There is a long tradition of lectures to the general educated public on scientific topics, by men preëminent in their field.  These were often later collected and published as volumes, sometimes with “Popular Lectures” in the title, by such true luminaries as Mach, Kelvin, Helmholtz (these in physics, though, note;  not mathematics).  The heyday for this activity was the late nineteenth century.   Their success presupposed a pool of educated laymen keenly interested in learning more about the intellectual forefronts of the day.

In America, the tradition survives sparingly, in university towns.   While our family lived in Princeton, I used to attend evening lectures at the IAS, held in their largest lecture hall.  Occasionally the audience was overflowing -- standing, or sitting on window-ledges.

Wang’s book likewise originated in public lectures -- though not perhaps to the general public, since they were given at the Chinese Academy of Science  (in 1977; translated  and published in English  four years later).   But by no stretch of semantics do they qualify as “Popular Lectures”, nor even as “Introductory Lectures for Logic Majors”.   (Of course, Wang himself may not be responsible for the English title of his book;  it may have been cooked up by some hunchbaked, drooling drone in the marketing department.)   Already on the eighth page of the introductory lecture, we read this (typical) passage:

Around 1960, Hanf numbers appeared, and Scott proved that measurable cardinals yield nonconstructable sets.  Results often mentioned as being impressive  are Morley’s theorem on categoricity in power, and applications to algebraic problems by Ax and Kochen.

Solovay soon proved the consistency without dependent choice  of the proposition that every set of reals is Lebesgue measurable.  (He has to assume that there are inaccessible cardinals;  it remains an open problem whether this stronger assumption can be avoided.

(There is no definition of any of these terms, like “inaccessible cardinals”, in early pages.  You’re supposed to already know this stuff.)   Now, for a non-specialist, it will be hard to judge just where that passage stands in the spectrum of difficulty;  but as a thumbnail comparison:  at Harvard, I took introductory logic in the philosophy department, and then straight logic in the math department, and we never got anywhere near these topics.

Lest  for some reason  Wang might have shoved all the hard stuff into the very first lecture, so as to clear the auditorium of lightweights, and become more pedagogical later on, I opened the book at random, happening upon this:

Exercise 2.  Find a direct proof of Corollary 1.3 without appeal to Lemma 1.1

You do not pose such homework in a “popular lecture”.  The book’s title amounts to false advertising  -- publishing-fraud.

~

But it is now our happy privilege, likewise to report, that the other book occupying us this weekend, is precisely the opposite:  The title austere, uninviting;  the content as propaedeutic and intuitive as it is possible to be.  We refer, with reverence, to a book likewise originating in (semi-)public lectures (at UCLA, in the early 1980s):  Richard Feynman’s QED, published by Princeton in 1985.

The title might inspire a spurious sensation of familiarity:  quod erat demonstrandum, in which case it might fit a set of lectures on high school geometry.  But no, the acronym denotes something much more fearsome, something …. (but send the children to bed, before you scroll down)

…

…  nothing less than …

(horresco referense)

…

QUANTUM ELECTRO-DYNAMICS.

(shudder).

For years (decades, actually) I avoided this slender volume, though it stood on my shelves, owing to the misapprehension that, based on its subject matter (which presupposed basic quantum mechanics) it must be significantly more difficult than the Big Red books, aimed at physics-major freshmen, on which I was weaned.  Yet not so.  Feynman, a master of exposition, offers the most intuitive account possible, of a highly non-intuitive subject.   Intuitive, yet not dumbed-down:  it takes a genius to tackle that.

But nota bene:   He never endeavors to coax you into thinking something is easier than it is, nor to flatter you that you have understood something when you have not -- both being common expository strategies of popularizers of science in this Age of Self-Esteem.

Rhetorically -- engagingly -- Feynman adopts the opposite strategy, hinting at what you are up against, though not bullying.  In the opening of the introductory lecture, he makes the quite accurate though socially/intellectually scandalous observation that

Everybody who comes to a scientific lecture  knows they are not going to understand it, but maybe the lecturer has a nice, colored tie to look at.

The second lecture, raising this observation to the status of a meme, opens thus:

This is the second in a series of lectures about quantum electrodynamics, and since it’s clear that none of you were here last time (because I told everyone that they weren’t going to understand anything), I’ll briefly summarize the first lecture.

The next begins:

This is the third of four lectures on a rather difficult subject -- the theory of quantum electrodynamics -- and since there are obviously more people here tonight than there were before, some of you haven’t heard the other two lectures  and will find this lecture almost incomprehensible.  Those of you who have heard the other two lectures  will also find this lecture incomprehensible,  but you know that that’s all right:  as I explained in the first lecture, the way we have to describe Nature  is generally incomprehensible to us.

This stance, though fey in a way, is yet preferable to that of the Theory-of-Everything charlatans who babble on about Beauty, implying that they can share their vision by mere dermatological osmosis.   There was one such one NPR’s science show last week  -- a string theorist yet, which is to say:  a specialist in a fashionable but drastically unintuitive math-packed would-be-physical theory, which, additionally, may well be actually wrong as a description of the real world -- or, worse, “not even wrong”.  But the interviewer kowtowed and pandered, and the interviewee luxuriated in his 15 famous minutes, as in a warm bubble-bath, complete with yellow duck.

A far more prominent string-theorist, Frank Wilchek, of the IAS, has a similar piece in a recent issue of Nature / Physics (Nature, by the way, seems to be in some ways following Scientific American down the path of corruption), calling on us all to “celebrate Beauty”.  -- By all means, say I, let us do so, and preferably in the alltogether;  but don’t go calling it physics.

Tahrir, Taghyir, Taksim

So the ague-fever dreams of freedom have spread to Istanbul.   And once again, the spark was no economic development, but a spiritual imponderable, just as inTunisia:   The authorities had a sort of Stalinoid bureaucratic vision for transmogrifying a park -- “They paved Paradise, put up a parking-lot.”

It was like that in Berkeley, too, when I lived there:  People’s Park, nothing but a semi-vacant and highly unsightly lot off Telegraph Avenue, overrun by dogs and vagrants, but a symbol to the die-hards.

De Toqueville nailed it when he identified the Revolution from Rising Expectations, rather than objectively increasing tyranny.    The ground-shaking developments in the Muslim world  have no evident economic motivators -- none that were not equally in place  ten, twenty, fifty years ago.   Nor is it really the spread of ideas (these are surprisingly few;  emotions, rather), nor even Exemplary Action:  if anything, you would think that the dreadful results of the insurrection in Syria  would give potential insurrectionists pause.  Nor do Iraq, Egypt, Libya  or Tunisia  offer a hopeful model.  -- Likewise, you would have thought that Erdogan, contemplating the example of Assad (and Mubarak, and Gaddhafi) might thought twice about playing the tyrant card…

And so the Zeitgeist rolls, groans in its sleep.   And its brain-born feverdreams  people the planet.

~

Philological footnote:

The three names above look similar because each is in origin a verbal noun (masdar) of a form-II verb.  In each ease, the final vowel is long, and hence receives the stress:  tahh-REER, tagh-YEER, tak-SEEM.  (That “gh” is a gargling sound, similar to the Parisian “r”.)

Tahrîr means ‘liberation’;  Taghyîr means ‘change’ (click here for an explanation of why that square in San`aa is so named);  and Taksim …  well, taksim doesn’t necessarily mean anything, it’s just the Turkish spelling of a word borrowed from Arabic,

ميدان تقسيم

I have no idea why the square was named that.  Literally, taqsîm means ‘division’, quite at variance with the usual Mideast fetish for Tawhîd (‘unity, unification’; also ‘monotheism’).  

~

For a more generous collection of morphosemantic remarks about Arabic, check out this:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

~

A correspondent comments:

The real issue is the attraction of violence on the personal level, in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, etc.. Unstable societies with large components of young men with little to lose plus religious divisions and no protection for minority religious groups. But then most wars have always been holy wars.

My response:

That is a giant issue in societies generally, to be sure;  but, it by no means explains the movements symbolized by the three Squares here.

The current, potentially revolutionary situation in Turkey  was unleashed by a government plan to cut down some trees in a park, and the protestors are to a great extent women.   Nor does religion particularly figure in this one.

The very oddity and symbology of these "Square" protests are what make them intriguing.

Indeed, specifically in the Turkish case, the symbolism of that Square as the site for a militant ongoing sit-in, is especially piquant.  In the expert words of Wikipedia:

Taksim Square (Turkish: Taksim Meydanı), situated in the European part of Istanbul, Turkey, is a major tourist and leisure district famed for its restaurants, shops, and hotels. It is considered the heart of modern Istanbul

(And no, don’t imagine for a moment that the infallible Wikipedia, greatest of all the gods, has nodded here by so much as a jot or a tittle -- specifically, the jot or dot over the final vowel of Meydanı.   That is indeed orthographically a dotless “i”, its pronunciation comparable to that of the similar Russian vowel in non-palatal contexts.   Indeed, these vowels are not only phonetically but phonologically similar, since neither contrasts phonemically with the tenser variant, being rather conditioned by the palatal/nonpalatal environment.)

Bashar al-Assad: Orthography and Orthoëpy

As regards the current controversy over the actions of the Syrian President:  In the absence of capacity  materially to affect the direction of political debate (for which see our own poor efforts here), we can at lease advise the instruction-hungry public how to spell and say his name.   In this, we echo the immortal observation of Professor Henry Higgins, who in his learnèd treatise  Bella Damma Mea  observed:   “The French don’t care what they do actually, so long as they pronounce it properly.”

In a nutshell:  In Arabic, the sibilant in Assad is actually pronounced as single, and thus in principle should be so written.  The ‘shibilant’ in Bashar is, by contrast, a phonetically long (morphophonemically doubled) consonant, and ideally would be so transcribed.  In short, the usual spelling in English transcription has it exactly bassackwards.

[We intend to explain all this in more principled structural detail  after we have had time to consume our morning coffee, and to listen to the birds chirp, and to surf the online press  to scan the latest foibles and follies of humankind.]

[2 B Continued, if we are spared.  In the meantime, scroll down for a panoply of ludic and erudite delicacies, or click on the Label links for more about Arabic, pronunciation, or morphology.]
 

~

~ Celebrity Endorsement ~

“To distract my mind from current troubles,

I like to dig into a gritty mystery,

starring those tough-talking, two-fisted Private Eyes,

the lovable Murphy Brothers."

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(My name is Bashar al-Assad, and I approved this message.)

~

[Update, Saturday 10 a.m. 

Well, the birds are still chirping, and Lazycat is still lazily sunning himself; but the vivifying java has at last seeped sufficiently through the organism to tickle the tissues into some semblance of sentience.  And our Webbrowsing has not been without issue.  For a remarkable development in the whole Syrian-chemical-weapons charade,  a choice morsel for devotees of political rhetoric, check out the final paragraph of the essay raferenced above,

            Chemical Weapons  hide-and-go-seek  ]

[Resuming, Saturday evening.]

If you really wanted to be exact about it, you would transcribe Baššâr al-Asad. 

The given-name is not itself a dictionary word, but is an emphatic/frequentive form based on a root meaning “rejoice, good news”.  The surname means ‘lion’, and, in the Arabic context, connotes nobility and bravery.

As for the pronunciation:  bash-SHAR al-AH-sad (capitals representing stressed syllables).   Now, what do you immediately notice?

Unlike French or Turkish or Persian or many other languages -- and pace some American radio announcers -- Arabic wordstress is not fixed upon a given-positioned syllable (counting either from the front or from the rear).  Superficially, Arabic is like English or Russian, allowing free contrastive stress.  But in fact (speaking only of Classical Arabic here), it is instead like Latin:  the wordstress is predictable given knowledge of the sequence of long versus short syllables. Baššâr has a long vowel in the final syllable, and hence is oxytone; Asad, a short, and hence is a troche.

Syria: Logic vs. Victimology Porn

For many years, I subscribed to NPR.  For certain reasons, I no longer do;  but I still sometimes listen to their news broadcasts.   And a staple of their reporting over recent months has been tragical stories from refugee camps, recounting the woeful tales of the women and children.   The locations vary -- nations neighboring Syria, or  Sudan, or Somalia, or Iraq, or wherever, the details doubtless soon vanishing like mist from the listeners’ minds -- but always with one theme that, with repeated repetition, is reinforced rather than overwritten:   that the victims are women (and children;  but more prominently women, since it is they, rather than the children, who get interviewed). 

And one day it occurred to me:  Where are all the men, who are seldom if ever mentioned?   Off playing golf, or dining off room-service in some five-star hotel?  -- Given where folks have been fleeing from, more likely slain, or imprisoned and tortured.  But their fate, whatever it might be, does not excite the interest of the NPR reporters.

[Update Saturday, 15 June 2013, 12:07 p.m. EST]

Disclaimer:  There are indeed atrocities, particularly in that part of the world, which specifically target women;  the following being just the latest, which just now broke into the news:

Gunmen have attacked a hospital in the western Pakistani city of Quetta, hours after an explosion on a bus killed at least 11 female university students.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22920542

Actually, it turns out that even this superficially straightforward story  has layers.  Hearing this story the way it was reported on NPR (it was the top item, just moments  ago), listeners will naturally assume that this was an attack upon women students as such, in objection to female higher education;  such attacks have indeed been the practice of the Afghan Taliban (or at least reported to be so).  But the article goes on:

An extremist Sunni militant group, Laskar-e-Jhangvi, told the BBC it carried out both attacks.   A man calling himself spokesman for the group said they were a revenge for an earlier raid by security forces against the group in which a woman and children were killed.

So who knows what the real story is.  In any case, our point in this post  has nothing to do with the details of this tragedy or that, but with the way the media packages and spins the news, typically to specs that will serve the desired pre-existing narrative.

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Today’s big story has been the report that just came out, estimating the cumulative number of dead in Syria’s civil war  as 93 thousand -- “most of them,” NPR assures us, “civilians”, and many of them children; including "more than" so&so-many children under the age of whatever; including cute winsome towsel-haired dollie-clutching girlchildren.

These headlines were repeated throughout the day;  until, this evening, happening to flip the radio on towards the end of an hour’s broadcast, where some stories go into more detail, I heard the following.  The dead in that conflict are … 80% male.  To repeat:  eighty percent male.

The anchorwoman, not pausing for the bat of a mascara’d eyelash to digest this statement, which undermines the thrust (or rather spin) of their whole story as packaged for American p.c. consumption, rushed on to query the gal reporterperson about the percentages of children among the victims.  This elicited a bit of hemming and hawing, at which point I shut the receiver off in disgust.

Their slant is thus arithmetically impossible.  The warriors are almost a hundred percent male;  the civilians, therefore, fewer than fifty percent male (how much less -- call it X -- depends on the percentage of warfighters in the population).   If one hundred percent of the deaths were civilian, the percentage of male deaths would therefore be X -- less than half.   Plug in whatever numbers you like, you can’t get a majority of civilian deaths with 80 percent of the actual victims being male.

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The impulse to post this was purely logical, just one instance of the importance of statistical literacy for policy decisions.  (American Scientist has run some excellent articles on this theme, e.g. as regards the assessment of school performance.)  But there is indeed an invidious gender dimension to this story, all too characteristic of the way the world has turned in the past several decades.   For more, click here:

Medical scandal:  Women are dying like flies !!  (again with a statistical twist, and an NPR focus)

Gentlemen are requested to be seated  (you must be over 18 to click on this)

Divorced and derelict dads

Yet though what caught our eye was an arithmetical fallacy, the principle noxious effect of the NPR propaganda concerns neither statistical literacy nor the gender wars, but international politics.   For the point of the story was to add to the chorus calling for US arming the anti-Assad forces, or “rebels” as they are (to American tastes) comfortably known.  (Contrast “insurgents”, which means the same thing but has quite different connotations.)   The point was reinforced by a companion story, revealing that Washington has now concurred with France and Britain that Syria has used chemical weapons -- an action which the President had rather imprudently called a “red line”, so the obvious question now is, Whatcha gonna do about it?

For some time now, the noisy John McCain, his appetite for war against Muslim governments  still not slaked by Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, has been calling for just that.    Well and good;  but it is essential, before blundering in to yet another morass, to the sounds of drums and trumpets, to cast a cool eye on the facts, so far as these are known.

Nota bene:  I bear no brief either for or against President Assad;  and even if I did, this would not motivate my comments here, since  -- for very good reasons -- no-one cares about my political opinions (indeed, being vastly fallible contingencies relating to this transient world here below, they scarcely interest even me).  Accordingly, as per the WDJ Guidebook, I shall emphasize logical and statistical considerations, independent of party fervor.

And so to work.

(1)  A logical point.

The following allegation has garnered a fairish concensus:

   (a) Chemical weapons have been used in Syria

There are some forensic problems here, but  for present purposes  we can set those aside.  Note only that (a) is not logically equivalent to the following proposition, which is however, the one that pops into every American’s mind when he hears (a):

   (b) Chemical weapons have been used by the Syrian government

Nor, if true, does (b) logically entail (c):

   (c)  Chemical weapons have not been used by the Syrian opposition.

Yet, absent the truth of (c), calls for intervention based purely upon the alleged transgression of that “red line”  rest upon sand.

Some investigators have in fact concluded to the falsity of (c);  but that is an empirical question best left to the experts.  (And you internauts can find the reports more expertly than I.)  I here make merely a logico-rhetorical point, concerning implicit assumptions.

(2) A statistical point.

What percentage of those 93,000 deaths  do you suppose are due to chemical weapons?  Again, let us ignore the forensic difficulties (tests not being performed on the actual battlefield immediately subsequent to the alleged use, but on samples provided by one side or the other, which can be doctored), and just consider the numbers.  The maximum figure so far alleged, out of those 93 thousand, is …

… (check your own assumptions before scrolling down)

…

… …

somewhere upwards of a hundred.

Why then is sarin a red line, whereas indiscriminate bombardment of population centers is, say, pinkish?

(3)  The next point is neither logical nor statistical;  yet still apolitical and basic.

In addition to all the numbers being tossed around, there is a qualitative side to all this.  For, although empirically the conflict pits pro-government forces against anti-government forces (and even that is a simplification, since much “pro”-government sentiment is really anti-antigovernment), the texture, the flavor, cannot be captured by such a dichotomy.  And it is by no means simply that of Tyranny versus Democracy.  De facto, the war is increasingly confessional -- sectarian.

And what might these sects and confessions be?  Well, on one side, we have Shiites and Christians (and perhaps Kurds);  on the other Sunnis.   So, simply on that basis, which would Americans wish to support?  Which side would John McCain presumably support?

[Think I’ll pause here.  Check your own assumptions, and later scroll to the exciting conclusion.]

[Clock ticks;  time passes accordingly …]

[…]

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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Okay, the answer you’ve all been waiting for:  The government faction is largely Shiite and Christian.  So McCain is calling for support for the side that, should they win, are most likely to start slitting the throats of Christians.  (Witness Iraq, Egypt, and Boko Haram.)

Yet again nota bene:  I am not here  myself indulging in any sort of victimology porn -- I make no assumptions that a dead Christian is any more a tragedy than a dead Sunni or Shiite or whatever you wish.   The point is simply that, in ululating for intervention, most of John McCain’s partisans do not know what they are about.

Additionally, quite apart from the sectarian affiliations of either side, consider that the rebel forces have been significantly swelled by non-Syrian Salafi/takfiri carpetbaggers, largely organized by al-Qaeda in Iraq:  these currently constitute the ginger group.  However, recently the government side has been augmented by Hizbollah carpetbaggers from Lebanon, who have already proved their military might, man-for-man.  So from that aspect, it’s kind of a wash.

(4)  A logico-statistical point:

Given the caveats that have been raised about whether both sides may have used chemical weapons, an analogous question logically presents itself as regards that blood-curdling figure of 93,000 killed.

The way this story is spun leads unreflective members of the audience to assume that most or all of that total were killed by government forces.   To take just one story at random (this one from the Washington Post):

Nearly 93,000 people have been confirmed killed in the conflict in Syria, the United Nations said Thursday, as it warned that more bloodshed could be imminent in the northern city of Aleppo, where government troops have massed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/syria-conflict-has-killed-nearly-93000-un-says/2013/06/13/8bbd3656-d426-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html

Note the artful juxtaposition of two independent facts, suggesting a causal connection.

But then -- What have the rebels been up to, those we propose further to arm?  Apparently just distributing chewing-gum to children, and tossing flowers at government troops.

Again, I’m not arguing for one side or the other;  merely pointing out that this obvious question is typically not even posed.

(5)  Another logico-statistical point.

Let us bracket all the caveats above, and assume that, from an American perspective, a rebel victory in Syria is a consummation devoutly to be wished.  What follows from this?

Well, before you answer, “Barge in with both barrels blazing!”, consider than there are thousands if not millions of situations around the world in which we might fervently desire outcome X over outcome Y.   Yet  we do not always and everywhere  violently intervene, in part because (again bracketing the disasters that often follow good intentions, and the basic validity of meddling in other nations’ affairs) our resources are limited.   To justify the cost of intervening in venue Z (again assuming that we have a perfect right to do anything we please in the world, whenever it strikes our fancy), one criterion is essential:  a reasonable likelihood of success.

Now, the likely eventual success of the Syrian rebels (or rather, the anti-government forces in Syria, consisting of both Syrians and of foreign soldiers-of-fortune)  has long been paraded in the media as a given:  like the elusive Higgs boson, it is always just around the corner, and yet (like the procrastinating Monsieur Godot) never quite arriving.  Now, the London Review of Books this week has an interesting article by Patrick Cockburn on just this issue, which I commend to your attention,

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n11/patrick-cockburn/is-it-the-end-of-sykes-picot

pointing out an essential asymmetry in the YouTube wars.   Draw your own conclusions;  the matter, being empirical, is no part of our brief here.  Our only point is that such considerations matter.

(6)  One final observation, before I retire to my couch, for a night of blameless repose  and dreamless sleep -- and here we must stray far from our proper province of purely logical commentary, and wade into the swamps of subjectivity and geopolitical Fingerspitzengefühl:

Out of all the woes of this world, why would John “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” McCain  choose to focus on this one? 

(I am here channeling Humphrey Bogart’s similar question in “Casablanca”.  For more on the slippery  “bomb-bomb” faction, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/04/hillary-clinton-to-launch-third-mideast.html )

Anyone who has been following events over the last couple of decades -- or indeed, over the last hundred years -- has leave to doubt that the prime motivation here is the politically colorblind mission of promoting and spreading “Democracy”.   And even if you believe that such was indeed the motivation from Wilson down to Dubya, the actual results of our recent nation-building adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq  should give anyone pause, to say nothing of other venues of the Arab Spring.

Nay more -- democracy-transplants aside, it is not even apodictic that all these motions and maneuverings on the part of the interventionists  primarily concern Syria.   Recall the neocon watchword back in 2003:  “Everyone wants to go to Baghad;  real men want to go to Tehran.”   Refresh your memory with the equation:  Assad … Iran… Hizbollah … Shiites …  And consider (and here we definitely stray from anything simply logical or in any way uncontested) in whose interest our Mideast foreign policy has been conducted for many years … from the USS Liberty through Iran-Contra down to the bogus case against Iraq (long prepared by tools like William Safire) … and consider, coolly from the standpoint of Realpolitik, in whose primary interest it lies  to combat Assad, and Iran, and Hizbollah … ?

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

[Flash update, 15 June 2013]  It turns out this whole “red line” thing was just smoke ‘n’ mirrors, a tour de passe-passe in the Société du spectacle:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/decision-to-arm-syrian-rebels-was-reached-weeks-ago-us-officials-say/2013/06/14/3cc2d372-d51a-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html?hpid=z1

So funny.  -- In particular, we now are pleased to gallantly retract our earlier characterization of President Obama’s earlier “red line” remarks as “incautious”:  instead, they were cannily calculated.   While seemingly painting the Administration into a box (see our essay on pre-commitment), in actual fact it was a box they had already decided to occupy:  Rook to Knight’s Five!

(I thought of putting a link to this post in the Comments section of that WaPo article, but that bull(shitt)y pulpit of vox populi is already so bloated with idiotic repetitious fact-free Obama-bashing unrelated to the facts of the Syrian situation, and barely even nodding towards the ten-second hand-puppet popular version of events (since the conclusion to be reached is present in advance:  that Muslim Kenyan socialist in the Black House is the pits), that it would be worse than pointless.   Anyone relishing that loose-stool stream of inexpert invective, would scarce find himself at home in our own austere and ivied halls.)

~

~ Celebrity Endorsement ~

“I -- Vladimir Putin.  I say, is all booolsheet.

You want read good truthy “pravda” stuff,

you read this instead:”

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

[Kindle] [Nook]

~

The New York Times puts a slightly different spin on the story,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/us/politics/pressure-led-to-obamas-decision-on-syrian-arms.html?ref=global-home&_r=0

All this must, like the Watergate hearings, (less we lose our reason) simply be enjoyed as public theatre.  And here, from that article,  the culturally au-courant  telling detail:

His ambivalence about the decision seemed evident even in the way it was announced. Mr. Obama left it to a deputy national security adviser, Benjamin J. Rhodes, to declare Thursday evening that the president’s “red line” on chemical weapons had been crossed and that support to the opposition would be increased. At the time, Mr. Obama was addressing a gay pride event in the East Room.

O tempora, O fagedabouddit.

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~ ~ Посмертный Одобрение

"Если бы я был жив сегодня, и в настроении для тайны,

это то, что я хотел бы читать: "

Я не делаю случае развода

Мерфи на горе.

(Я Иосиф Сталин, и я одобрил это сообщение.)

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