When is the Task Force not the Task Force?

In May 2020, with the coronavirus still raging, President Trump said he was ready to “turn the page on all that”, and announced that the covid Task Force that had been led (apparently at the bottom of a mine-shaft somewhere) by the Vice-President (whose name  escapes me at present, and shall continue to do so in future) was being “disbanded”.  (In the French press reports of the anouncement, this verb was rendered démantelé -- ‘dismantled’, which sounds even more alarming.)  That offhand ad-lib caused consternation, so he “re-spoke” himself (verb ©WoDJ 2020, All Rights Reserved).  He now states that the Task Force will continue "indefinitely" -- albeit with substitute members and different mission. -- The young reporter who was obliged to recount all this on NPR, noticed a certain “philosophical question” here, whether this would be the “same” task force or not.

The philosophical problem alluded to  is that of Continuity of Identity, with many ramifications ancient and modern.  We have touched on some examples in these posts:

  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/continuity%20of%20identity

Meanwhile, herewith a handful of miscellaneous quotations, illustrating the variety of concerns:

Simon Blackburn (Think (1999), p. 127) quotes the joke about Irish axe that had been in the family for generations, the head having been replaced three times and the helve six; and asks whether Theseus’ ship, rebuilt plank by plank over the course of the voyage until no original molecule remained, was the “same” ship; and if so, what if someone had saved all the discarded planks and built a replica, this with all the original molecules, was that the “same” ship as well.

.

A modern example, with wry phrasing:

The truck had been a Renault back in the twenties, but had become, over time, a collection of replacement parts  cannibalized from every sort of machine.

-- Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw (2008), p. 146

And with a quite different topology:

The Romans who traversed the plains of Hungary  supposed that they passed several navigable rivers .. but there is reason to suspect that the winding stream of the Theiss  … might present itself in different places  under different names.

-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788)

Of current concern among Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers:

Since these world-lines define the individuals we quantify over when we use modal logic (more accurately, when we ‘quantify into’ modal contexts), we do not have well-defined individuals at our disposal in any realistically quantified modal logic.

-- Jaakko Hintikka, “Quine on Who’s Who”, in Hahn & Schilpp, eds., The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (1986), p. 210

The Quinean position (on the "block universe" picture):

The space-time view helps one appreciate that there is no reason why my first and fifth decades should not, like my head and foot, count as parts of the same man, however dissimilar.  There need be no unchanging kernel  to constitute me the same man  in both decades,  any more than there need be  some peculiarly Quinian textural quality, common to the protoplasm of my head and feet;  though both are possible.

-- W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (1960), p. 171

Bonnet Blanc vs. Blanc Bonnet

Bonnet Blanc versus Blanc Bonnet

(Or, synonyms, at daggers drawn)

I once wrote an MA thesis called Linguistic Life on the Left, a historical-semantic survey of the Berkeley linguiscape during my time there as a graduate student.  It sifted out correlations between a sect’s self-expression,  and its (sometimes partly subconscious) ideology.  A favorite schematic example  was this  one:

Given that: Groups A, B, and C are all part of what popular or pre-theoretical conception would consider “the Left” (albeit that seeming Big Tent  turns out to be a granfalloon).

And that:  Group A denounces Group C as ‘pigs’, while Group B denounces group C as ‘swine’.

From this we can conclude: virtually nothing about Group C; but that Group A and Group B are bitter enemies, barely sharing any verbiferous ether that could even attempt to pass coherent messages between them.

For: Group A derived the epithet from the rants of the American Black Panthere; Group B derived theirs from the European Marxist polemical tradition (nineteenth century et seq.)  A vast host of incompatible cultural assumptions go with each.  In keeping with the expressive ethos of the two groups, we can call the vituperative practices of A as "badmouthing"; of B  as "the ironical-polemical style".  Both manners, when well done, can afford aesthetic pleasures.

~

And now we have the following situation, in the context of the controversy over illegal immigration.

Entity A described the immigrant-source regions as “shit-holes”.

Entity B described them rather as a ‘snake-pit’.

Once again, these two entities, along with their fanbases, are not on speaking, let alone reasoning terms.

Entity A is POTUS;  Entity B is a Circuit Court of California.  [My source for that was NPR’s All Things Considered; for some reason, a string-search in Google news is not turning up anything relevant.  Thus evanescent are the bubbles that burble from the media.]  From similar observations, A and B draw opposite conclusions.  A: Who would want to bring in people from such areas?  B: Who would be so unconscionable as to send people back to such areas?

There is another linguistic/political parallel between that case and the one described in the previous section.  In either case, one term of the “synonymic antithesis” is more populist in tone (pigs; shithole), the other more literary and traditional (swine; snake-pit).

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.

Fun Furlough Reading

Many of you may know some poor unfortunate Federal worker who has been reduced to a piteous and meaningless existence by the furlough.   What (you ask yourself) can You do to help??

Wonder no longer!  Here is a list of perfect Furlough Gifts -- thrilling reading to keep your loved-one functionary from drifting into senility and despair:

.

.

All of them available -- with free excerpts -- here:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html



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The Logic of Yea and Nay

The Senate has just shot itself in the foot;  with shrapnel ricocheting onto masses of bystanders.  The move might enter the annals as “Shumer’s Self-mate”.

In the face of such legislative absurdity, the Administration floated the idea of reducing the minimum to pass a Continuing Resolution  from 60%  to a bare majority.    Worth discussing;  but there is a more general logical point behind the whole debate, which seems to have garnered little or no notice in print.

The point is, across the board, the status quo is the default.   As the cock crows, the Senate (to take that as an example, but the point applies to any established body) begins its busy day with various activities.   Everyone shows up for work with teeth brushed and appropriately dressed (men as men, women as women);  there is some sort of opening ceremony (in my primary school, these were Flag Salute and Lord’s Prayer);  a roll-call is taken;  citizens are admitted to the visitors’ balcony; interviews are given to the press;  and so forth.   It would be legitimate to question any one of those activities:  require unisex attire; ban the prayer or the flag salute (some of this has already happened in this venue or that); skip the time-wasting roll-call; exclude spectators (for security, or whatever).  To do that, you introduce a bill, which for passage requires a majority of some weaker or stronger preponderance (say, 60%), depending on the nature of the proposed bill.   What is not required is that,  in order to continue to wear normal clothes, or salute the flag, or what have you, the body must, every morning as the cock crows, pass a brand-new bill (with the required 60%) to continue the status quo.   The burden is on those who would change or disrupt the status quo.

Now, allowing the government to continue putt-putting along, for better or worse, is simply the default, and should be so considered.  It’s the government’s job.   So it is truly not logical that Congress should be obliged to seek a super-majority, simply to keep the government open for business, fulfilling the promises made.    Anyone who would disrupt that scenario, at so fundamental a level, should be obliged to propose doing so, in a measure  -- say, the Government Shutdown Circular Firing-Squad bill -- that itself would require the supermajority.   Instead, the quite radical maneuvre of wrecking the government   is relieved of what should logically be its burden, as though that were the default.

[Update 22 Jan 2018]  The Washington Post today has a good article on the logical/structural parameters of such situations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/22/why-other-countries-dont-have-government-shutdowns-2/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_wv-shutdown-1105am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a67ef5b32d8a

 

 

 

 

 

The Double Truth

It is clear by now that the old Averroist doctrine of the “double truth” (veritas duplex)  must be revived:  this time, not along scientific-vs-theological lines, but political.  Radio talk-shows have long recognized the incommunicability of one set of truths, to partisans of the other, by offering separate Republican vs. Democrat call-in lines.

So, let us consider that simplest possible area of human belief and inquiry:  arithmetic, the discipline that offers up such hoary verities as “2 + 2 = 4”.  

In modern mathematics, the study of such numbers (called integers)  has exfoliated quite a bit, and indeed has bifurcated into named subdisciplines.   Thus we have, on the one hand, analytic number-theory,  which deals with such things as the Riemann hypothesis and the Goldbach conjecture, using techniques from complex analysis, and on the other, algebraic number-theory, involving extensions of the integers such as algebraic number-fields.   Both subfields have developed to such an extent, that specialists in the one will be scarcely able to understand, let alone prove, theorems in the other;  thus reproducing, unintentionally, a simulacrum of the current partisan Dialogue of the Deaf.

And now we have two new entrants to the disciplinary matrix:   Democratic number-theory and Republican number-theory.

Democratic number-theory is characterized (up to isomorphism) by its claim that all numbers are equal.   The denial of that doctrine is termed ‘fascism’.

Republican number-theory, by contrast, generalizes the ancient concept of a perfect number (equal to its aliquot sum) to that of the awesome numbers, which are greater than the sum of everybody else.  The leftovers are called the  pathetic numbers (also termed ‘losers’).  This theory focuses exclusively on the former subset (although the membership in this set  can vary capriciously  from day to day).

So far, neither body of theory has produced interesting theorems.

[Update 8 Jan 2018]   No sooner had I posted that would-be satirical thought-dream, than I happened upon this,  by the philosopher Stewart Shapiro:

Hartry Field takes mathematical language at face value.  Since he holds that mathematical objects do not exist, mathematical propositions have objective but vacuous truth-values.  For example, he maintains that ‘all natural numbers are prime’ is true, since there are no natural numbers.

-- Thinking about Mathematics (2000), p. 226

So once again, reality beggars satire.  (Apparently this Field fellow is some sort of an academic, rather than an inmate or homeless-person.)

Note, a propos, that the Fieldian assertion “all natural numbers are prime”  is actually an axiom of Democratic number-theory.   (“Everybody gets a trophy.  Everyone is special.”)

[Historical footnote]    If satire is the production of humor by clever exaggeration of a real situation, then here again the satire lacks its bite:  for such ideologically infected strains of the hard sciences  are already exemplified in history -- not merely in the musings of philosophical fantasists, but under dictators with the power of life or death.   Thus Hitlerian notions of Aryan science vs. Jewish science, or the various scientific orthodoxies under Stalin.    Under those two regimes, mathematics, fortunately, was relatively spared distortions of actual content (so long as the formulaic obeissances to ideology were packed into the preface),  though  in human terms  there were profound and pernicious effects on who was allowed to be mathematical practitioners.   The neo-Stalinoid zealots of “anti-racist mathematics” go further, prescribing severe limits to content and presentation as well.

Does the President lie through his teeth?

(Again, not this one; that one.)

January 1962 -- the silent escalation.

“Mr President, are American troops now in combat in Vietnam?”
“No.”
That was not true.  Vietnamese pilots sat next to the Americans so than any U.S. casualties could be announced as accidents on training missions.

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 280

A thin entering wedge.  The rest is history.

Does POTUS despise those he courted during the campaign?

No no, not the current guy -- the one campaigning in 1960:

Happy farmers were not a principal Kennedy goal.  … After his agricultural speech … at the South Dakota State Fair, he had remarked to Richard Goodwin:
“Well, that’s over.  Fuck the farmers after November.”

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 277

Do we even effectively have a President?

Again no no -- no reference to current controversies.  The time is July 1961; the speaker is Dean Acheson, President Truman’s Secretary of State, and a member of JFK’s executive committee during the Berlin crisis:

Acheson reacted to mention of Kennedy’s name by saying: “Gentlemen, you might as well face it.  This nation is without leadership."

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p.  196

(This precedent is also relevant to current gossip about “sniping at the President from within his own Administration".)

And, I.F. Stone, writing 1 Sept 1958,  during Eisenhower’s second term:

It is tragic that  just when another irrepressible crisis looms ahead  there should be such a nobody in the White House.

The I’s have it (or, ISIS it is)

A couple of years back, when the media was confused about the labels ISIL versus ISIS, I posted a politico-linguistic explanation:

   http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/isil-vs-isis.html

Summary:

(1)  The expert bodies that had been following the group from the start (State Department, IC) used ISIL, where the “L” stands for “Levant”, which is the closest equivalent to the term in the Arabic name for the group,  al-Shâm, which includes Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.

(2)  Since that is what he’d been hearing from his briefers, that is what President Obama said.

(3)  Possibly by confusion with the name of the goddess Isis, along with the unfamiliarity of the term Levant among the laity, the popular media took to using ISIS, despite the fact that this term singles out only Syria.   (As a sideshow to this, certain conspiracy-minded lo-info voters tried to read some nefarious significance into President Obama’s continued use of the term ISIL, that he and his discussion-mates had been using all along.)

But now we have a new POTUS -- one who, for most (or actually, still all) of his life, has paid more attention to the pop media, than to academia or the State Department.  And he says “ISIS” -- just like they do on TV.

Accordingly -- and gracefully -- government entities have bowed and followed suit:  where previously their briefing-papers used ISIL, now they use ISIS.

The IC thus arrives, by a circuitous route, at exactly the position advocated by The New Yorker a year ago:  to speak “ISIS” with the vulgar, but to maintain an academical-casuistical mental reservation, to the effect that the final “S” stands not for “Syria”, but for… al-Shâm.

 And thus does language evolve.

“Wes Brot ich ess’,  des Lied ich sing’.”

Given recognition at last

[Footnote:  An alternate explanation, that you’ll hear around town,

is that the use of ISIL was nixed because people couldn’t figure out how to pronounce it.  Some IC miscreants were even pronouncing the word to rhyme with pizzle.  (Look it up.)  And this, despite our wise guidance here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/isilisis-update-to-pronunciation-wars.html

Wa-Llahu-a`lamu.]

~

Actually -- there's a bright side to the switchover to “ISIS”:

(1)  That “Levant” business was always a stretch on ISIL’s part.  They never did get a real foothold outside Syria.

(2)  As for any association with the goddess Isis, that’s great:  any depiction of that goddess, ISIL would destroy on principle, so quasi-“naming them” after her  can only annoy them.   (For similar reasons, some people say Da’esh, since ISIL doesn’t like it.)

A propos of nothing at all;  added merely to annoy ISIS

. 

"Great Question"

Two flatulent practices relating to the posing of questions  have characterized political discourse in recent years, to the disbenefit of the polity.

(1)  Particularly associated with Donald Rumsfeld, though the maneuver antedates him, is posing ‘questions’ to oneself and immediately answering them.  Thus, let P and Q be propositions:  instead of saying simply

P.  Not-Q

the rhetorician draws it out into a monologue masquerading as a dialogue:

Is P true?  Sure it is!  Is Q true?   Absolutely not!

The advantages to the speaker are:

(a)  He gets to choose the ‘questions’, irrespective of whether anyone is interested in them or whether anyone would phrase the question in that manner.   As a result, they are invariably softball ‘questions’.

(b)  He gets to dwell in a bubble of his own voice.  Reporters, voters, maiden aunts, all fade into a kind of Meinongian subsistence;  and the Dialectic collapses to a trivial instantiation in the palaver of a single man.

Disadvantages to the audience include:

(c)  There is usually a substantive concern whether some proposition P be true, or what to do about it, or the like.   Yet by this slight-of-tongue, the bloviator poses instead some verbally related but substantively etiolated variant P-prime, and addresses that instead, thereby providing no real information or analysis, but leaving the impression that he has addressed P.

(d)  You have to listen to twice as much verbiage as for a straightforward “P” -- ten pounds of rhetoric in a five-pound bag.  And in time it gets freaking annoying.

(2)   In politically pre-sanitized settings like “town-halls” and related social Spectacles, an array of voters, carefully selected to represent each of the pressure groups to be pandered to, is permitted to pose a simple-minded, vaguely worded question, thus pushing a given button on the candidate’s library of prerecorded on-message speechlets.   But in a new development, the politician moves to snuggle-up to said Potemkin voter, with an enthusastic

   “Great question !!”

before launching in to her canned response.

The practice, repeated ad nauseam  (cf. SNL’s parody of Hillary Clinton’s use of this and similar maneuvers, in their satire of the Presidential ‘debates’), is distressing  even apart from its smarminess.    For the sort of low-info voter who most needs to be buttered-up and flattered, is least in position to actually pose a “great question”, or even a probing or pointed one.    Nor will, say, a scientist giving carefully-prepared, expert testimony on a complex subject  be patronized from the Congressional panel with a “Great question!”   The domains of “Great question!” and great questions, are virtually mutually exclusive.

Note:  The catchphrase “Great question!” is characteristically contemporary;  but the maneuvre is of longer date.   Speaking to a group,

Nixon would react to the most elementary question  as if he was hearing it for the first time.  He would ponder a bit, congratulate the questioner on his originality,  then give the answer he had given  hundreds of times before,  complete with some figures and a quotation,  as the citizen listened  in utter awe.
-- Stephen Ambrose, Nixon: the Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972 (1989), p. 139

~

And now, by an unhallowed congressus of these two tricks -- by Beelzebub out of Medusa -- comes the Great Rhetorical Question.  One came up this morning on NPR.

A Republican senator was touting Trump’s intention to

(i)  Increase spending (e.g. on infrastructure and defense)

and

(ii) Decrease taxes,

while

(iii) Holding down the deficit.

Now, this nation has been down that road many times before, both in speechifying and in practice;  so apart from the apparent logical incompatibility among those three desiderata, there is a track-record here, for anyone who cares to examine it.   That, however, is beyond the capacity of most pop journalists practicing today, as well as the attention-span of the average voter.    The substitute for critical inquiry, is a mere statement of undifferentiated unwillingness to be convinced -- the lazy-man’s lo-cal substitute for genuine skepticism (anatomized here).   In this case, the reporter’s Clarence-Darrow move was simply to ask, again, how (i)-(iii) might cohere.   But the politician was ready for it:

“Yes -- How can we address the problem of doing the things that need to be done, while holding the line on the deficit, without addressing the question of Entitlements? -- Great question!”

That may or may not be a Great Question, but the reporter had not posed it;  the rhetorician was congratulating himself.   And in so doing, bait-and-switched the subject from the incompatibility of (i)-(iii) to the problem of those pesky Entitlements.  A perfectly legitimate subject of debate, but here snuck-in via a side door.

~

The considerations above  recall to mind  what, for Europeans, must be the original Potemkin-“question” scam:  to wit, the Socratic dialogue.

The scenario has been solemnly sanctified,  countless times  over many years decades centuries.  The method has been dignified with the title  maieutic (etymologically relating to widwifery), whereby the savant or solon, by adroit interrogation, draws forth from the naïve listener (like a tapeworm from the bowel) innate knowledge  such that all might marvel that he hath.

As a build-up, this is terrific, only… You actually read the texts, and what you see is Socrates holding forth, more or less commendably, and harvesting the plaudits of uncomprehending minions or yes-men.

Thus, a demonstration of the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, via the Socratic method.

Socrates:  Let us, therefore, consider any topological space whatsoever, so that it have a countable basis.  You agree?

Minion: Sho’ nuff, boss!

Socrates: And may we not further stipulate, that said space be regular?  -- Surely that is not too much to ask!

Minion: True dat, Socrates!!

Socrates:  Whence it follows that, our space being regular, for any point thereof, we may define a continuous function  positive at that point, but vanishing outside of a neighborhood of that point. -- You agree?

Minion: Word up dawg, Socrates !!!!

Socrates: Whereupon we may plainly see, that by defining an infinite series of functions from said space, to …

(Socrates drones on;  the minion dozes, but his snores are taken as assent.)

Socrates: Whereupon we may plainly see, that our original space may be smoothly embedded into the countably-infinite Cartesian-product of the cube, which we earlier (you do recall this, don’t you, minion?) proved to be metrizable.  This metric is inherited by our embedded space in the subspace topology, thus proving the theorem.

Minion:  U da man, Socrates !!!

Socrates (beaming upon the evidently innate insight of his pupil):  Great answer !!!

Note:   We have it on good authority from the memoirs of Oxford dons, that any tutor who attempts to apply the Socratic “method” to draw wisdom out of the maws of wool-gathering undergraduates, comes up empty.

HYUUGE NEW HILLARY SCANDAL ROCKS COSMOS

One is bemused, hearing hoarse throats howling about a … server, and following with, “Lock Her Up!”  This time last year, few of them could even have told a server from a servomechanism, or a serviette;   but now the word is waved like a bloody shirt.   Why such uproar?

To answer the question, the meta-research division of the World of Dr Justice (headquarters:  Geneva) swung into action, using our unique Spatio-Temporal Traveler^TM (Patent pending) to check out the data in parallel universes (a key precaution this year, since much of the electorate now inhabits an alternate universe year-round).  And it turns out -- the mob was right!  Heinous Hillary is guilty of horrendous crimes, in every single universe we examined !!

Here are our findings.

(1)  Alternate Universe #3794008

In this universe, instead of having a law degree, Mrs Clinton earned a Master’s degree in English, before eventually running for the highest office in the land.   Her campaign seemed to be going well, until one evening  a policeman making the rounds in Rock Creek Park, came across a dangling participle, lying beside a stream as though it had been strangled.  Forensics identified the sentence it had come from, and traced it back to one of Mrs Clinton’s secret speeches to Goldman Sachs. 

Armed with this evidence, the Bureau was granted a warrant to seize all of the candidate’s communications dating back to college;  investigators were literally figuratively  struck dumb at the masses of split infinitives,  it’s instead of its,  “contact” used as a verb, and many other infractions against the basic decencies of English grammar.

Editorialists fulminate;  Republicans demand a special prosecutor.  And an angry mob gathers outside her Park Avenue hotel, calling for her blood.  Suddenly she steps forth upon the balcony of her suite, glares down at them, and snaps:

“This is something  up with which  I will not put!”

“Shall not -- shall not!”  retorts the furious crowd.

Mrs Clinton, in an alternate universe -- Still guilty as charged !

(2) Alternate Universe #497-668-5571

In this universe, Mrs Clinton is in her first term as President, when a bombshell breaks into the headlines.  Back when she was five years old, she borrowed a book, My Cuddly Bunny, from the kindergarten library… and did not return it on time.  Nor indeed did she return it later that year … or the next year … or the next … or indeed, ever!

Impeachment proceedings began immediately, under the slogan:

Thirty years of political experience --

Sixty-five years of crime !

A sampling of planets on which Hillary is guilty as sin

(3) Alt-alternate Universe  “Betelgeuse Bleu”

In this universe,  Hillary Rodman professionalized as a mathematician before meeting her future husband, one William Clinton, a vicar.    Dr Rodman is nearing the end of her seventh term as President, preparing to take over as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, when a careful examination of the “long form” of the dissertation that earned her a math Ph. D.  reveals that she once asserted the integral of the limit to equal the limit of the integrals, without first assuring uniform convergence!  An assault upon the most sacred principles of Real Analysis.

Thunder in the pulpits; the Security Council is convened.  A bloodthirsty mob floods the streets of Washington  and performs a series of outrages --   taking derivatives at singularities , dividing by zero, and using a Banach-Tarski maneuvre to disassemble Mrs Clinton and re-assemble her at half her former size.

[Update, Halloween 2016]  Our colleagues at the Pyesetz Institute for Cosmic Research  have explored this issue in some even more elaborate universes:
http://pyesetz.livejournal.com/140986.html

Thus, the results of our own research division  have been independently replicated.

[Upshot]  And so we have our theorem:

Thm.  Any transcosmic functor that leaves Hillary fixed, fixes guilt.

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.