Right-wing support for left-wing candidates

Reports that Putin’s Russia has been attempting to load the electoral dice in favor of Bernie Sanders,  likely startled adherents of monolinear manicheanism, but that sort of thing is a time-tested gambit.  There is a notable parallel from the Presidential campaign of 1972.  A historian writes:

What all the 1972 dirty tricks that had become known as “Watergate” were intended to accomplish:  sabotaging all the other Democratic candidates  in order to leave Geroge McGovern, the field’s weakest link, as the last man standing.

-- Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge (2014), p. 170.

Additionally, Nixonian operatives went about “drumming up fake enthusiasm for the black female candidate Shirley Chisholm" (id., p. 171)

The strategy worked.   McGovern received the nomination, then a shellacking in the general election, losing in 49 states.

~

Hunter Thompson, describing the Democratic convention in his entertaining Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,  via interviews with the pols and pros of the delegate floor, describes considerably more byzantine maneuvers -- feints, pawn sacrifices, “shaving”, sitting-out a round, taking a dive, lowballing your vote-totals till the propitious time -- telos and kairos being the watchwords.

Attack of the Killer Crib-Monitors !!

On the heels of the third Presidential “debate”, there was much hand-wringing and finger-wagging against Trump, for refusing to commit himself in advance to not contesting the election, no matter how it turns out.  Actually no rational candidate should do that -- there is always the possibility of a squeaker, in which the seemingly-losing candidate may demand a recount (most recently and notably in Bush v. Gore).   But additionally, there exists a scenario, unfortunately not science-fictional, in which Hillary  not only would, but should, contest the results, and indeed demand something more thorough-going than a mere recount.

Namely, as the candidate herself maintains (very plausibly):

(1)  Russian state actors hacked the DNC data as well as that of the chairman of her Presidential campaign.

(2)  Putin is said to have it in for Mrs Clinton.

So -- what if a state actor were to hack the vote-count, and throw it to Trump?

When I mentioned this scenario to people at work, they mostly preferred to shrug it off and keep their fingers crossed.  And indeed,  (1) + (2) do not entail that Putin either would, or could, pull of a vote-fraud on that scale.  But the very next morning, two news items caught the world’s attention.

(3) Russia sent its fleet through the English Channel.  As they passed Dover, they trained their guns on England.

(4) A wide variety of very prominent (and, one would imagine, relatively well-defended) Web sites  were -- a thing unprecedented -- simultaneously unreachable.

(3):  Would (Putin is not reticent about flourishing power). 
(4):  Could (rather than attacking such sophisticated well-fortified sites as Amazon and the New York Times, he need only get past the defenses of the clueless retired librarians and what have you  who run the elections in Mississipi et cetera).

As it turns out, the attacks were not quite as concerning as one could have been led to believe by vague early media accounts.   The attackers didn’t manage to hack their way into the sites in question, where they would be in a position to make mischief (say, to order one billion copies of The Art of the Deal with next-day shipping to the Clinton campaign).    Rather, they merely flooded the servers of a somewhat obscure DNS company (one which originated, in Wikipedia’s phrase, as “a community-led student project” at Worcester Polytech), which performs the humble domain-name service for various sites.   By way of comparison:  Anyone can temporarily block access to Fort Knox by burning a semitrailer on the entrance road;  that is quite different from actually breaking in and making away with the gold.   Specifically as applied to electronic vote-counting,  all that a DDOS attack could do would be to disenfranchise that fraction of Alaskan voters (they won’t be missed) and overseas servicemen  who are allowed to vote via the internet;  it wouldn’t change their votes to a different candidate, nor those of non-Internet voters.

Nevertheless, the attack was significant for the novelty of its Denial-of-Service robot army,  relying in large measure on the “Internet of Things” -- “smart” (read: idiot-savant) devices like late-model thermostats and baby-monitors.

"Smart" refrigerator,  plotting evil

Now, I have long been annoyed, in a grumpy curmudgeonly way, with contra-Okhamian appliances and interfaces, that try to do so many things that they perform their core function less well, and have multiple points of failure.   But I had not realized their potential for active lethality, in concert, a sort of globe-girdling zombie army.  So I contacted my old friend  Песец из Канады,  surveying the bedraggled march of history  from his perch in the frozen north:

> As a guy who used to program for limited-memory ROMs serving closed,
> pre-circumscribed-purpose platforms, perhaps you can answer this:   How
> can a single-purpose device like a thermostat  have the capacity to
> store, and then launch upon instruction, malware used for DDOS ??

He replied:

Nowadays, "limited memory" means gigabytes.  It actually costs *more* to make a product that is only capable of doing what it needs to do and is not also a mass-produced general-purpose computer.

For the moment, people still tend to buy products that "connect to the Internet!!!"  As more of these IoT disasters unfold, I expect that eventually people will learn that they must never allow Internet access from any computer whose program they are prohibited from replacing.  First off, "connects to the Internet!" is just a bullet-point on the packaging; manufacturers don't really want to pay what it would actually cost to develop a *secure* product that connects to the Internet.  Second, there are considerable social forces acting on manufacturers to engage in frankly-evil acts -- and one evil act can build upon another, leading to a DDOS attack.

Example: Samsung used to sell a television set that recorded all your voice conversations (for no reason) and sent them to a central server (for no reason) over an Internet connection (that a TV doesn't really need).  It offered a menu item for turning off this behaviour, but the Samsung TV was programmed to lie to its "owner" and claim that it had stopped spying, while actually continuing to do so under orders from its manufacturer.  In a perfect world, Samsung's corporate charter should have been revoked for this.  Instead, TV's are joining thermostats as IoT objects that can be co-opted by terrorists.  Isn't it nice of us to provide them with this free ammunition?

Microsoft's Windows 10 has the same problem -- it spies on you, offers an option to turn off the spying, then continues to do it anyway.  Windows 10 should not be used on any computer connected to the Internet, especially by a person who holds a security clearance from any country.  A computer that has been programmed to accept orders from "our spies" over the Internet is a computer that can be co-opted by "their spies" over the Internet.

GM's "OnStar" vehicles have the same problem: a car that can be remotely shut down by police is a car that can be remotely shut down by an assassin or a terrorist.  Wouldn't it be interesting to find out if it's technically possible to convince all the GM-branded cars on the Beltway to simultaneously shut off their brakes and steering while travelling at highway speeds?

Speaking of computers inexplicably connected to the Internet, *why* do American e-voting machines have Internet connections?  The only obvious reason to do that would be to allow the government to disclaim the result of an election that doesn't go their way: the American people didn't *really* vote for Donald Trump, that was just the Russians hacking our voting machines because they're evil demons who do evil things for no reason -- after we give them the necessary tools for no reason.  How dare the Russians "interfere" with our election by publishing the emails that Hillary insisted on letting them have!  And why is it that we are preparing for cyberwar against Russia, when it always seems to be China conducting cyberwar against the USA?  That's like invading Iraq because some Saudi dissidents based in Afghanistan attacked New York City.

I'm voting for Stein.  Thankfully, I will not have to move to Canada after the election.

That assertion about Windows 10 was startling.  I did not wish to post anything so denigrating about the LOVELY, PEACEABLE, TOTALLY NON-LITIGIOUS ALL-POWERFUL MEGA-ENTITY MICROSOFT (who can crush poor bloggers like a bug) without some supporting footnotes, which my correspondent kindly supplied:

http://www.howtogeek.com/273513/why-you-shouldnt-use-anti-spying-tools-for-windows-10/
    "You can’t fully disable telemetry on Home or Professional editions of Windows 10...  If you have a major philosophical problem with the fact that Windows 10 doesn’t let you avoid non-security updates or disable telemetry, don’t try to fix it. Instead, just switch to another operating system, like Linux..."

http://www.disclose.tv/news/the_extent_of_windows_10_spying_software_is_revealed/127799
    A more alarmist article, claiming that even buying the Enterprise edition of Windows 10 still won't stop all the spying.

https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/70037/windows-10-keylogger
    Windows 10 keeps copies of everything you type and sends them to Microsoft's servers.  There is a button to turn this off, but Microsoft keeps sending out updates that turn it back on -- and you are not permitted to turn off those updates.

Those assertions are disputed elsewhere, e.g

http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-microsoft-is-not-spying-on-you-with-windows-10/

The dispute is way above the pay-grade of this peaceful, penguin-loving site, and we take no stand on the matter.

Wholesome penguins, lacking Internet access,
don’t worry about any of this

~

Miscellaneous musings:

(1)  In the case of weaponizable appliances, we are faced with a double-bladed Tragedy of the Commons.   It is simply not in the interests of the various cost-cutting Asian-tiger gadget manufacturers to add in security (which in any even would be swiftly obsoleted;  and nobody’s going to pay for ongoing anti-zombie tech-support for Net-connected blenders and toasters).  Nor does the individual consumer particularly care (save in so far as heroically public-minded) whether his electr(on)ic toothbruth or Web-connected hamburgerbun sesameseed-applicator  was out on the town last night, ravaging Reddit (though they do seem a bit hung-over this morning).

(2)  When the DNC hack was pinned on Putin, pundits wondered aloud (or rather, aprint) whether we should retaliate by deploying our own cyberattack tools.  That was ill-considered.

(a) First, sanctions, to have any point, must be publically announced -- a tariff, an embargo, a finger-wagging on the New York Times editorial page, or what not.   The virtue of cyber tools is that they can be used stealthily and (with luck) deniably -- exactly the wrong scenario here.

(b) Cyberwar is serious business, and its means stand on the forefront of (secret) research.  You want to minimize exposure of your tools until they are needed to be deployed for real, and not just as a petulant gesture.

To retaliate against Putin (or anyone else), you select that arrow from your quiver that best meets the case; you don’t limit yourself to mimicking his moves, doing exactly what he did (as the lex talionis enjoined).

Which raises the question:  In Friday’s attack, cui prodest?   On the face of it, nothing positive was accomplished, just a few hours of snail-slow connection times.   And the attackers lost the element of surprise as regards a next such attack:  defenders now know that, in estimating the power of the next DDOS attack, they must reckon-in the gadget-bot army.    But it might have been worth it to the attacker, to see how vulnerable a crucial node like a DNS would be.   The sally would thus be the cybernetic equivalent of a ferret flight.

(3)  From a conspiratorial standpoint, the beauty part is:  it is not even necessary actually to manage to hack the vote -- merely providing plausible reasons for people to imagine you might have, poisons national confidence.   Cf. the ridiculous episode of the Nigerian Underwear Bomber, who failed to bring down the plane he was riding on, managing only to boil his balls:  still, AQAP rejoiced, since it was enough to get TSA’s knickers in a twist.   Already burdensome security become more burdensome still -- though unlike the case of the Shoe Bomber, the incident did not lead to the targeting of a specific garment -- no Skivvies Inspections at the airports as yet.

[Update 28 October 2016]  And now, sailing in from left field, the bizarre carom-shot off  Anthony Weiner’s computer, announced today  out of nowhere  by a po-faced FBI director, somehow supposed to link up with the  in principle unrelated Hillary-computer-emails brouhaha.  Nothing substantive yet, nor will there be (he conceded) until after the election;  as Trump said recently in another connection, “I’ll keep you in suspense.”  (As a mysterywriter, I would hesitate to concoct so far-fetched a plot;  but reality recks not verisimilitude.)

Thus, it is not only Trump voters who have reason to question the legitimacy of this electoral season.

Note, though, that anyone maintaining that the timing of the announcement was calculated to maximize the damage to Mrs Clinton, should consider the fact that it was made at the least sensitive time in the news-cycle, Friday afternoon, the hours at which any business or administration prefers to release embarrassing news.

The Ontology of Sociology

The present post is simply a sort of by-trifle to The Ontology of Psychology.   It might alternatively be dubbed “The characterology of individual action in a multiperson structured setting”.

The unit of analysis  in Goffman’s accounts  is always the individual role-player  striving to effect his will  within a role-structuring situation.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  115

This put me curiosly in mind of the ‘sociology’ of chessmen.  (Here we speak, not of the vision of grandmasters, which is doubtless far more holistic, but of patzers, which is the only one I know.) 

Originally, the game was a metaphor or rather ‘video-game representation’ for medieval warfare.  Thrilling stuff.   And to a beginner, at least, it really does feel as though individual pieces are venturing out, or ignominiously retreating,  issuing powerful threats or just pushing pawnily along.   Sometimes, a noble warrior even ventures to be ‘sacrificed’ for the greater good.  I can testify that, as a scrappy lad first learning the rudiments, the queen, rather than just a factor among many, in a sort of multivariate algebraic equation,  was dizzying in her potential power -- “Wait’ll I sic my queen on ‘im!”  It was reminiscent of the culture of trading baseball cards -- Trajea a Mickle Mantle for a Yogi Berra plus a Roger Marris.    An archive of children’s chess-matches  would probably back this up, showing far more early-game forays by that dominating dame, than in expert play.

Compare, from Nabokov’s chess-novel:

…palpable pieces whose quaint shape and wooden materiality  always disturbed him, and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal shell  of exquisite, invisible chess forces.

…

Luzhin removed and placed on the table beside him  what was no longer an incoporeal force, but a heavy, yellow Pawn.

… The weightiest elements on the board  called to one another with trumpet voices, and again there was an exchange, and again two chess forces  were transformed into carved, brightly lacquered dummies.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense (1964)

~

In Go, by contrast, the counters are all blandly interchangeable in themselves.   They pop out of nowhere, one by one (indefinitely); and once placed, have no power to move from the spot.  A holistic view is imposed even on the beginner.

Mysteries of Cricket

Cricket matches occasionally end in a tie, and often in a draw;  but that does not make it a futile game;  if no side ever won, the game would lose its point.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 279

Assignment:  Distinguish tie from draw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6FdBZQw2zQ

I am at last resigned to the fact that I shall never understand String Theory;  and a grasp of cricket  must likewise remain  forever beyond my means.

Given that, Kipling’s dig about “the flannelled fools at the wicket” was quite unfair;  you practically have to be a barrister to make sense of the game.

~

More re the point of a given genre of game:

Within the vocabulary of chess, it makes no sense to say ‘That was the one and only move which would achieve checkmate, but was it the right move to make?’  … as someone might ask, whose purpose in playing chess  was to amuse a small child  rather than to win.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  125

(And what is the point, of this game of life? --  Perhaps, to amuse the gods.)

It would be interesting to imagine extragalactic sociologists or philosophers, provided with a complete, objective and uncommented, play-by-play record of every cricket game ever played, and every chess game ever played; we wonder whether, from these, they could deduce what the point was.  Cf. & contrast the card‘game’ that we children called ‘War’, in which again, the ‘point’ is to ‘win’,  only, each player’s moves being completely determined, the resemblance to any normal game is but feeble;  it’s really just a long-drawn-out, inefficient way  of staging a single coin-flip.

~

Back to cricket, with its arcane distinctions and welter of rules -- surely exceding those of tennis (let along ping-pong), basketball, soccer  and much else.    These come at a cost (we want to shout, Just play the game!), but indeed to such an extent, that what would, from a practical point of view, be counter-productive, must surely serve some sociopsychological purpose, delineating the cultural boundaries of the Tight Little Island.   Rather like the Japanese language, with its complex system of grammatical honorifics, which no-one can master who hasn’t grown up in the culture from birth.  Or Anglo-Catholic worship ritual: unlike in an evangelical church, where anyone can wander in off the street and fit right in, for an outsider to attempt to participate  is continually to find yourself sitting when (suddenly, inexplicably) everyone else is standing up,  or standing up when they are sitting down, or kneeling, or crossing themselves.

For an American analogue, we would suggest, not so much our National Pastime of baseball, which physically most resembles cricket, but American football, with its ever-expanding rulebook, its minute schedules of differing penalties for everything from twitching (on the offensive line -- “false motion” -- or the defensive -- “offsides”) to spiking the ball; and its many game-interrupting circumstances. -- What physically most resembles football is rugby;  but here the playing of the game -- the continuous unscripted motion, as in soccer or basketball -- quite trumps the courtly ceremony characteristic of football.

~

There is generally a core of rules that characterize the essence of a given kind of game.  As for the rest, they contribute to its aura of spectacle,  but are not constitutive of the game.

The essense of football is simply that one guy runs with the ball toward a goal, and the other guys try to stop him.   Early football (and kids’ football even today) was largely just that.   Then they added the possibility of a forward pass:  that was a significant addition to the core, constitutive of an extension of the game (Football  v. 2.0), but one in which the earlier nucleus remained aufgehoben:  after all, there are plenty of running plays even in the NFL, and if you laid them all end-to-end, you’d have a simulacrum of original football (though to be sure, they are subtly different, since each play is instinct with the possibility that someone might throw the ball).

The constitutive rules of chess are the powers of the pieces.   That much is sine qua non -- you couldn’t very well specify the moves of all the pieces except the knight, letting that fellow to joust around as the mood might move him.   But now you’ve got a game, which could just as well exist without niggling side-rules like that of castling, or capture en passant (let alone purely ceremonial, non-structural rules like “j’adoube”).

Bogus phrase of the day: “Routine traffic stop”

(1)  First, a logical point.

Semantically,  epistemologically, the expression routine traffic stop is comparable to successful candidate -- you don’t know until after the event that the candidate was successful, or the stop routine.  If the officer gets shot, turns out it wasn’t so routine after all.

The term “routine traffic stop” is currently deployed so as to load the political dice, much like “unarmed black teenager”:  until you have searched him, you do not know that he is unarmed.

(2)  Second, a statistical/criminological point.

Many traffic stops, especially at night, are a time of peril and tension for the officer involved.  For an example, we need seek no farther than this morning’s headlines:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/02/memphis-police-officer-shot-and-killed-during-traffic-stop/

The reader may wonder,  whether the media frenzy over the recent Cincinnati case, may not have sapped the officer’s vigilance, and thus contributed to his death.

(3)  Third, a rhetorical point.

Some traffic stops that the police themselves, with good reason, present as “routine”, in fact are a tactical pretext in the investigation of a crime scene in progress.  The police know for certain that a violent and dangerous individual is on the loose;  what they don’t know is whether the person in the vehicle (whose description loosely matches the necessarily provisional witness description of the perp and his getaway car) is the felon in question.   Until that is established, it makes plain operational sense  not to alert the suspect to the fact that he is under suspicion, so that he goes for his gun before backup can arrive.  Hand him a line about a tail-light, or a front license plate, or whatever, to buy time.

A dramatic illustration of this appeared yesterday on NPR.  They were interviewing a black DC lawyer who has just published a book about how the public should deal with police.  He presented what, on the face of it, was a plain case of wanton police profiling and overreaction.  While not speeding or otherwise infringing any traffic laws, he was pulled over, and told it was because he had tinted windows.   He did not, in fact, have tinted windows.  Several cops with guns drawn  swarmed the car.  After investigating, they let him go;  he filed a complaint with the city.

At this point, every listener would be siding strenuously with the motorist, and fuming at the DC police.  But as a result of the complaint process, the motorist eventually learned what had really been going on that night;  and he was man enough to share this with the audience.

A couple of blocks from the stop, shortly before, a murder had been committed.  The killer was on the loose; his description and that of his vehicle were within error-range of what the cops were confronted with here.  That bit about the tinted windows was simply the best the frontline cop could think up on the spot -- not very skillfully;  if it had indeed been the perp, the guy would have caught on to the ruse.

After this lesson in the basics of police technique, the lawyer still doesn’t quite get it.  He still holds it against the police that they didn’t give him the real explanation right on the spot.  But that was while the killer was still on the lam.   It would have been a gross operational infraction to divulge information on an operation in progress, to John Random Citizen, who then posts this exciting news on social media, potentially alerting the killer that the cops have a description of his vehicle so he’d better ditch it pronto. 

(4)  A game-theoretic perspective

The officer/motorist scenario is a case of ‘asymmetric warfare’:

Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton Jr., said late Saturday that the shooting “evidences the fact that there are so many guns on our streets in the wrong hands…At any given minute in a 24-hour day, [police officers] are dealing with folks who have no rules of engagement.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/police-widen-search-for-tennessee-officers-killer-person-of-interest-held-1438539422

(5)  The broader legal context

The lead article in this morning’s New York Times  profiles a trainer and researcher who focuses on exactly such matters, and often serves as an expert witness:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/training-officers-to-shoot-first-and-he-will-answer-questions-later.html?_r=0

[Update 8 Dec 2015]
The latest "routine traffic stop":
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/12/08/officer-involved-shooting-reported-in-denver/

Sky Wars

Tea-bagger types regularly deride the Obama administration’s (recently striking) foreign-policy achievements (Syria, Iran) by hooting that it’s all just to distract attention from “O-care”.   The danger, rather, is that press obsession with the latter will deflect attention from some potentially quite fraught developments around the world:  at present,  the quasi-confrontations in “Sino-Japanese” airspace, into which the U.S. Air Force has just now dared to tread.   For perspective -- imagine if China were to fly bombers (unannounced) over the water between New York and Martha’s Vinyard, blandly dismissing the provocation as a “routine exercise”.

If some drama of danger involves a passenger plane, Americans pay riveted attention;  but otherwise, if the aircraft are merely military, it perhaps strikes them as more like an airshow, with the romance of “Top Gun”:  War Games in the Sky.

This addlepated attitude is fine for moviegoers, but not for free men.    What do we do when China shoots down one of our planes?   As we inquired in the case of our proposed attack upon Syria (advocated by John McCain and his ilk, and successfully deflected by the President):  after the bugle-blaring curtain-opening, flags waving, what is the plan for the middle distance? [See Intervention in Syria: Cui Prodest?]  As we saw in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the Bush administration didn’t really have one.    But make no mistake about it:  the military and economic heft of China are in a whole different league from those of Afghanistan or Iraq.   Yet more, we never did go to war against those nations as a whole -- initially it was just supposed to be against the Taleban and the Sadaam Baathists;  later we got sucked in (surprised?),  but even after the quick victory over the announced targets of the invasion  and the rising of a much broader enemy caused by the invasions themselves,  we still were backed by significant segments of the local populations.   In a war against China, that would by no means be the case.

You might think it alarmist, even to use the phrase “War with China” in a sentence.  But we are now rattling sabres.   If you’re not prepared to use your sabre, why rattle it?

[Note:  I won’t comment about the merits of the Chinese move, having nothing of value to add.   But here is a seemingly even-handed summary: ]

This face-off marks the most worrying strategic escalation between the two countries since 1996, when China’s then president, Jiang Zemin, ordered a number of exclusion zones for missile tests in the Taiwan Strait, leading America to send two aircraft-carriers there.

Plenty of countries establish zones in which they require aircraft to identify themselves, but they tend not to be over other countries’ territory.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21590930-chinas-new-air-defence-zone-suggests-worrying-new-approach-region-face

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

~

There is another dimension to all this, quite apart from the game-theoretic calculations of diplomacy (a game of General Tso’s “Chicken”, you might say).  Consider this article from the morning’s press:

Japanese protesters have demanded that ethnic Koreans “go home or die,” disrupting the once-bustling neighborhood.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/new-enmity-between-japan-and-korea-plays-out-in-tokyos-koreatown/2013/11/28/974c91cc-528b-11e3-9ee6-2580086d8254_story.html?hpid=z1

This reminds us that the East Asian cauldron contains more antipathies than just a bilateral face-off between China and Japan.  Do we really want to stir that particular pot?

And not only Koreans are in the rifle-sights of an increasingly noisy fringe in our … ally … Japan.   Here, an animated crowd of Japanese welcome some Western visitors outside their hotel:

“White Pigs Go Home”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Veih24Dsg&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dr4Veih24Dsg&app=desktop

Imagine what things will be like if we get more deeply involved in their mess.

 

Add to these, Taiwanese sensibilities, and you have sixteen reasons (two-to-thefourth bilateral antagonisms) for us to stay out.

~

The whole region is a prickly thicket of mutual antipathies.   And he who toucheth pitch …   Indeed, already we have, in letting-in their populations, let in some of their meshugaas.  A reader of the WaPo article commented:

In the US in many school systems with Korean populations the Koreans have agitated for and gotten the school to change their geography maps. The Sea of Japan is now the Eastern Sea.

2 lessons to be learned here:
1) Americans of Korean decent have learned their community organizing liberal fascism well.
2) Our schools are more interested in politics, grievances and sensitivities than education.

[Update Sunday, 1 December 2013]  After months of taking the public pulse by wading through American readers’ comments, which, whatever the initial subject, generally devolve into Obamaphobic rants, it is almost refreshing to get a glimpse of the wedge-brained craziness that prevails in other arenas.  In a comment on this week’s Time blog on the subject of the Japan-China island dispute, one reader vents:

    The Diaoyu Islands are belong to China

You go, guy!   “R U basis is bewrong 2 Us !!!”

Actually, that post interestingly reveals, two of the wretched outcroppings actually bewrong, de facto, to US:

The eight barren isles — two of which are under control of the U.S. military — are called the Senkaku Islands (in Japan) and the Diaoyu Islands (in China). … Japanese citizens cannot land on either of the islands without first getting permission from the U.S. military

--  http://swampland.time.com/2013/11/25/meanwhile-3500-miles-from-iran/#ixzz2mEigS6Ds

Incidentally, that blogger as well is worried that this shadow-play of feints and parries, might spin out of control, for he headlines his post

China’s Restriction on Airspace Over Disputed Islets Could Lead to War

Weekend declaration by China ratchets up chances of conflict with Japan and the U.S.

If that were to happen, it could make the Korean War and the Vietnam War seem like a stroll by the carp-pond, a walk in the park.

~

The  U.S. intervention in this dispute, while morally and geopolitically understandable, smacks of brinksmanship:  Are we in fact willing to go over the brink?

The Sea of Japan is no stranger to provocative airborne incidents, fraught with peril for all concerned: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

At the time, there was considerable speculation in some quarters that the passenger plane that was shot down  may actually have been a ferret flight. (W-Allahu a`lamu…)

China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea, all facing off and snarling at each other.

And then, as though advancing a pawn, we place some of our own assets in harm’s way.   The analogies with Sarajevo are obvious.

Destiny -- your move.


(By the by, there is also North Korea, lurking in the wings.  So far they haven’t figured in this scenario, but their usual role is to act unexpectedly and Make Things Worse.)

~

It is actually reassuring that the Administration announced a  geostrategic “pivot to Asia”.  This means that the situation there has their full attention, and they are not just winging it, despite that gadfly distractions that daily buzz up from the Republicans, and the media’s obsession with mayflies.

And indeed, Obama recently pulled off a neat bit of brinksmanship in the Middle East, threatening the Syrian regime if it did not give up its chemical weapons.   Calling the bluff, al-Assad didn’t blink; but then the President turned around and called Congress’s bluff concerning the Right To Declare war, whereupon those playpen blowhards slunk off with their tails between their legs, and the adults got down to business, so far with stunning results.

~

This morning, as my wife set off for the gym, to abye her sins by trudging  for an hour on a treadmill in front of a TV screen (this would be reckoned cruel and unusual, had a court  ordered it), I requested that she check out Fox and CNN, to see how they were handling this story.

She reported back:   Neither had touched on it  during the hour she watched.  They spent the whole time covering a local train derailment.

So we turned to the foreign press.

France having had no colonial history with any of the four principle countries in this standoff,  we may look to commentary from that source  for a comparatively dispassionate summary of the basics of the case;  France knows that it is here just an onlooker.   Here is some that is well-phrased:

Chine-Japon : jeux dangereux en mer de Chine

Depuis plus de 40 ans, Japon et Chine se disputent un petit archipel inhabité en mer de Chine. Mais jamais la crise n'avait connu une telle escalade.

"Nouvelle incursion de bateaux chinois dans les eaux territoriales des Senkaku" : il ne se passe pas une semaine sans que ce titre ne barre la une des journaux nippons. Priés par les garde-côtes du Japon de quitter les parages de ces îles de mer de Chine orientale, les navires gouvernementaux chinois n'obtempèrent pas. "On n'a pas de raison de partir, on est chez nous", répondent-ils en substance.

La querelle ne date en effet pas d'hier, mais elle s'est intensifiée depuis le rachat en septembre 2012 par l'État nippon de trois des cinq principaux îlots Senkaku à leur propriétaire privé japonais. Cette nationalisation de fait a mis en rogne Pékin qui depuis multiplie comme jamais les actions provocatrices à l'égard de Tokyo.

La bataille autour des Senkaku est actuellement le point noir des relations sino-nippones, mais c'est surtout le symbole d'un conflit historique entre les deux nations qui se disputent la suprématie en Asie.

-- http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/chine-japon-jeux-dangereux-en-mer-de-chine-29-11-2013-1763289_24.php

.

Word of the Day: “pre-commitment” (latest update)

Freud was now getting tired, and also found it hard to steal an hour for the work;  so to force himself on, he announced a paper at the Society.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 352

In my youth, there were a handful of incidents, not especially dramatic on the face of it (for the children of that time  led a largely placid life, in the bosom of Eisenhower) but of which I was long ashamed, and mentioned to no-one.  Yet with the passage of years -- now decades -- these shrink in perspective, and fade to a uniform sepia hue.  They become …. almost picturesque.  And I shall share one with you now.

It was the summer of 1963.  I was visiting a Norwegian boy who had been my best friend for a time, while his family lived in our village in New Jersey.  In 1963 the father -- a shipping executive -- was recalled to Norway, and the family moved back permanently.  But before young Peter (we were both 13 at the time) had quite settled in to his new home -- new customs, new language -- nor quite said good-bye to his American interlude,  his family invited me to stay with them over the summer, first at their pleasant home in Oslo, and later at their even more pleasant fjord-side cottage in Lom.   I fear I did nothing for Peter’s acquisition of the Norwegian language, but it was a fine and memorable shared summer.

[Cue ominous music]

The scene shifts to the countryside around that fjord.  It was dramatically hilly, with challenging terrain for hikers.  Peter and I were energetically out and about, huffing and puffing a bit  since we were neither of us normally all that athletic.   And at one point we came to a sort of ledge, or mini-cliff, that simply defeated our attempts to scale it.  It didn’t look all that imposing -- no vertical rock-face or anything like that  -- and we felt foolish at our impotence before so apparently paltry an obstacle.   Now, I was durned if we were going to simply retreat with our tails between our legs -- surely, with a bit more effort, we would be up and over the top.   And so …  I … (pause) …  (the analyst, who had been writing quietly in the background, is now poised with his pen) …  I, taking my hiking-hat in hand ---------

[… and here I shall take a breather.   There simply is not time to develop all the ideas that are flowering in my head these days, as time’s winged chariot hastens on, and the Reaper nods knowingly.   So I’ll post down-payments, and finish-up those that excite reader interest.   The rest will “remain torsos”, to use a favorite expression of my teacher Yakov Malkiel.]

... To resume]

-- I … hurled the hat up over the lip of the ledge.  “Now we’ll have to climb it,” I said to Pete.

    To make a sad story short:  we tried mightily, but failed.  And withdrew, licking our bruises.  For all we know, the hat may lie there still.  God willing it served as a refuge for voles.

As mentioned, this trivial incident long seemed shameful.  Not so much because we plucky lads were unable to scale the face of Mount Miniature, but because the loss of the hat seemed so foolhardy.

Yet now, it would appear, I am in good company.  For in an excellent essay in this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki (the spelling of whose surname can serve as a sobriety test) reports a burgeoning new trend:   pre-commitment.  Not a very catchy name, but the idea is:  You commit to doing something (losing weight or whatever), and add some backbone to your spineless will  by offering a hostage to fortune:  Should you fail, sanctions will automatically kick in, at the hand of your referee or sponsor.

(By a happy coincidence, The World of Dr Justice  runs just such a public service.  Now, y’all need to lose five pounds by next month, y’hear?   If you fall short, send me a hundred dollars.)

Now, the logic of the thing requires that the sanction be neither too trivial nor too grave.  Sure, I could have motivated us even more by locking one end of a long chain to my ankle, and the other to a ticking bomb (defusible by hand), and tossed the bomb up instead of the hat.   But we still would not have been able to scramble up.

This game-of-Chicken-style logic was classically captured by Stanley Kubrick in “Dr Strangelove”.   The Soviet Union has created a “Doomsday machine”, which could not be defused, and would automatically blow up the planet  if triggered by a nuclear attack of anyone on anyone else;  it is still a secret.   Complications (as you might imagine) ensue.  A rogue element in the U.S. (an increasingly prevalent domestic species) launches such a strike.  The U.S. President plaintively admonishes his Soviet counterpart:  The whole point of such a device is that knowledge of its existence be made public.  “We had wanted to unveil it at the next May Day,” the Soviet leader miserably explains.

Surow… rowo…. (heck, it’s late;  you know whom I mean)  points out that Congress has recently embarked upon a similar pre-commitment:  the fiscal cliff.   If, by midnight on the last day of this year, Congress has not come up with so&so much savings in (carefully considered) budget cuts, then sequestration kicks in with the new year:  automatic massive cuts across the board, without regard to which make sense.   Now, true, I tossed an old hiking-hat irretrievably up a cliff;  but Congress is about to dump a trillion dollars over one.

The author further (for he is a connoisseur of social logic) observes that most House Republicans had already made a pre-commitment -- never to raise taxes -- that clashes with the broader pre-commitment to balance the budget.   In short, folks, we’re f*cked.

~

There’s a strategic, game-theoretical perspective to be taken on this thing.

Right now, the Dems and the Republicans are playing chicken with respect to the fiscal cliff.   And in any game of chicken, whoever is perceived as most reckless, most careless of consequences, wins.

Now, certain character-traits make the freshmen Republican Congressman absolutely unbeatable at that game:  they’re fanatics; they’re bonkers.  Very scary guys to drive towards head-on in your little deuce coupe out on the county-line road.  Their strategy (if we can dignify that stance as a strategy) might be dubbed

The Samson Gambit

“Fiat avaritia  et ruat respublica”

Republican freshmen, fine-tuning their fiscal policy

Thus, if these clowns have their way, we’re double-f*cked.

~

Not everyone in Congress, however, is a freshman House Republican.   So, setting aside the bitter-enders, what game-theoretic considerations will appeal to the rest?

Throughout Obama’s first term, the wrecker strategy appealed to virtually all Republicans, for the simple reason that they figured (quite correctly, the public being clueless) that this would help them in November 2012;  and for that high prize, they were willing to bear the psychic pain of watching other people (the lowly 47%) shuffle miserably along the unemployment line.  This pain they bore with remarkable stoicism.

Now, however, November is upon us.  The strategy splits in twain.

(Case 1)  Romney wins.

Contra-intuitively,  we may actually be more likely to obtain the necessary revenue increases (including raising taxes, and nixing some of the welfare payments that oil companies and agribusiness now enjoy) prior to the fiscal cliff  if Romney wins in November.  For, if they drive off that cliff, the nation goes back into recession, and Romney will look very foolish with the mess he inherits.

(Case 2)  Obama wins.

At first glance, here too the outlook is for a happy compromise in December, the main doubt having been removed.   True, the result, in helping the nation’s economy, would make Obama look good.  But after all, he’s won anyway, it’s too late, there’s no point.  Surely they wouldn’t keep up their wreckers strategy for four whole years? -- Well, thing is, they just did.

All things considered, the only favorable scenario is if one party or the other captures both the Presidency and a whopping majority in both houses of Congress.  Then we can actually have action  on policy and strategy, instead of deadlock.  True, if’s the Republicans, they’ll spend a lot of time catering to gambling magnates, speculators, and miscellaneous fatcats, but at least their goal won’t be to wreck the economy as a whole.  

Ditto the Dems.   True, there might be an upswing in transgender marriages among amputee-wannabes, but hey, to  each his own.

~

With this game-theoretic perspective, it is interesting to take a second look at the more common and less dramatic phenomenon that opens that essay of James Sur-o-wieki (you see, it’s Sunday morning now, and I have had my coffee), the scenario where a dieter locks in future sanctions against herself  should she fail to shed those pounds.   What effectively is going on is, her ego is playing a game of chicken with her own id.

Remarkable.

Personally, I see an id as a risky thing to get in the ring with.

~

At a simpler level, any oath or promise is a kind of pre-commitment, in the sense that, if you break your promise, a sanction does kick in:  namely, you acquire the reputation of a four-flusher, someone whose word is worthless.  (The difference of this everyday example  from the more elaborate ones above, is that you needn’t set up the sanction yourself in advance:  society has done that for you.)

Now, in the case of the competing pre-commitments of the House Republicans -- balance-the-budget BUT no-new-taxes --  the oaths were simply at variance, betraying cognitive disorientation.  But it is possible to stack pre-commitments in a more structured way, such that one trumps the other.  Let a noted psychoanalyst tell it:

Those ancient Jews were afraid of themselves and of the intensity of their passions.  They had a solemn religious formula in which they asked God to consider oaths spoken in moments of rage  as invalid.  They anticipated such outbreaks in themselves, and asked God not to oblige them to keep those  vows … That formula is called Kol Nidre.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

Reik’s observation occurs in the midst of a long associational analysis, ranging the length of his well-stocked literary larder, one link of which was the name Jephthah, which at first had no resonance for him, until placed in this larger context.  For Jephthah’s daughter was the victim of her father’s ill-considered pre-commitment:  in return for God’s granting him victory over the Ammonites, he had vowed to slaughter in sacrifice  the first creature that he should meet on his return.  And who should rush up to greet him but his blushful daughter?   “Hi, Dad-ddyyyyy!”  (“Oh…. shit.”)

This tale of Jephthah, judge of Israel, illustrates the truth, that not only vows made in blind anger should be excused of fulfilment, but also vows made by complete idiots -- village simpletons and House Republicans.

~

A curious sort of pre-commitment is seen in infant baptism or the bris.   Here the child is covenanted to the faith of his forefathers.   However, only the one baptised or circumcised can develop this vicarious pre-commitment into a genuine commitment of his own;  this occurs via ceremonies like the Bar Mitzvah or First Communion.