Russian Meddling in the U.S. Presidential Election

No no no, not the Trump/Putin thing -- I know no more about it than you do.  Talking about historical precedents and parallels here.

At their summit on 3 June 1961,  the boss of the USSR told JFK:

“We cast the deciding vote  when you beat that son-of-a-bitch Nixon,” Khrushchev said.

“How?”
“We waited to release the spy pilots until after the election.  So Nixon could not claim he knew how to deal with the Russians.”

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p.  159

That account closely matches Khrushchev’s own recollections of his first meeting with JFK:

I joked with him that we had cast the deciding ballot in his election to the Presidency over that son-of-a-bitch Richard Nixon.  When he asked me what I meant, I explained that, by waiting to release the U-2 pilot Gary Powers until after the American election, we kept Nixon from being able to claim that he could deal with the Russians:  our ploy made a difference of at least half a million votes, which gave Kennedy the edge he needed.

-- Khrushchev Remembers (Eng. translation 1970), p. 458

The election was indeed a squeaker.   Whether Khrushchev’s move was as helpful to Kennedy as that attributed to Chicago mayor Richard Daley, may never be determined:

Nixon, for one, always believed that Daley’s help included rounding up a few thousand crucial votes, just enough to carry Illinois, from Democrats who had died between presidential elections.

-- Reeves, op. cit., p. 110

Note that something quite similar occurred in 1980, this time  to aid the Republican candidate, when Iran waited to release the U.S. hostages until shortly after Reagan’s election, out of venom for President Carter.  Reagan just smilingly received the credit that he in no way deserved.  (And repaid the favor later, in the kowtowing to Iran and its client Lebanese Hezbollah, in the Iran-Contra affair.)

Principle of Sufficient Reason

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

together with its Corollary,

that All is Right with the World

“An object has been posited:
 a cat.”
 -- W.V.O. Quine

The cat is there

to be a cat.

And we are here

to greet that cat.

Non cogito -- sed sum

(QED)

Sunrise monostichs

   the poplar trees   threw shadows

   longer than themselves

[Source: Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (1925), p. 249]

And compare:

From the crest of the Ciminian mountains

they first saw the sun.

[id., p. 331]

On patrol in Vietnam, with the Marines:

The largest sun I’ve ever seen

was beginning to rise   from the edge of the earth.

It was dark orange,

as sharply defined as the full moon  
but enormously larger.

-- Daniel Ellsberg,  Secrets (2002), p. 163

A Day of Memorial

With fortuitous appropriateness, I’ve been spending part of today taking in an audiobook of the 1959 novel A Separate Peace, a high-school staple, which I read one summer at -- again appropriately -- a New England prep school (Mount Hermon, in this case).   I was about the same age (fifteen vs. sixteen) as the protagonists of that book.   And again, looming large in the background  a war was going on (Vietnam vs. WWII):  and like those young men, I was temporarily sheltered.

Since that summer I never re-read the book, nor thought about it much, though it is an ingredient in any young reader’s formative character.

The book’s main action takes place in 1942-43;  but it opens with its narrator, now twice his age of the time of the fateful events, revisiting his old campus in New Hampshire.    He returns with a sense of melancholy and dread.

Thus too I, now fully four times the age I was when I read it, return, not to the physical grounds of the tale, but to my own teen mind as it once received and grew inside it;  and with this, a sudden pang of unexpected dread as well.

The phrase of the title, “a separate peace”, would have been self-explanatory to anyone living through the second World War, and remembering the first;  it the context of the novel, it had a second resonance, in individual psychology.   The latter is now still readily available;  but young readers today, unschooled in diplomatic history, might miss the original significance.

The end of World War Two marked a sharp break in our nation’s history.  With it began a period of practical ahistory -- forgetting the recent conflict (my parents never spoke of it, never reminisced) -- while young families grew, and focused on making the world as pleasant as possible for their children.   Then the Vietnam conflict spread ever more darkly over us, affecting everyone, but draft-age young men especially.  These two factors somehow spawned what is to me still largely an enigma, even though I was a physical participant in all of the times’ events:  how a generation that had been (for the most part) very well treated indeed by their society, and by their parents in particular, came to contemptuously reject their birthright.

Cat's Eye nebula

Ceiling Cat iz watching U

Fun factoid:

No field has benefited more from the computer revolution  than astronomy.

-- J. Richard Gott, The Cosmic Web (2016), p. 144

Gott’s book, handsomely produced by Princeton University Press, is at opposite poles from the usual popular “If it’s Tuesday, these must be black holes” (or even dinosaurs) breezy overview of cosmology.   He focuses on a single research interest -- the statistical distribution of stars, galaxies, supergalaxies etc. -- and gives us a lab-bench look at it (or at least, as per the above, a computer-screen view -- heavy reliance on simulations).   Despite the sexy title, “Cosmic Web”, the book is very far from “Physics porn”, since it really is about the cosmos, and the stellar distributions do indeed resemble a web -- or rather a sponge (a Sierpinski sponge, so to speak).

A view from the atrium of Sierpinski Tower

Nonetheless, he does, without fanfare  and towards the very end of the book (p. 210), finally arrive at the payoff you have all been waiting for:

The Fate of the Universe

Turns out the whole thing hangs on a little parameter dubbed w. 

W !!!!

W (artist’s rendering; not shown actual size)

This he defines as “the ratio between the pressure associated with dark energy  and the energy density of dark energy”.  

Now, given that nobody really has a clue what ‘dark energy’ may be (it is likely not reducible to any of our extant physical categories), the idea that your destiny hangs upon the ratio of two of its purported aspects  does rather bemuse.   Nevertheless, experts have been able to conclude, that one of the following three fates await you, based upon that ratio:

w > -1 :  Temperature drops as universe becomes virtually empty

:-(

w = -1 : Universe approaches a constant temperature.
Intelligent life dies out.

:-(  :-(

w < -1 :  Planets, then atoms, are torn apart.

:-(  :-(  :-(

Take your pick.

Meanwhile, shelter in place.

 ~

 [Update]    For more on "Astral Physics", try this scholarly contribution:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2017/may/29/physics-casper-friendly-ghost-cartoon-twitter
  “He exists both as a particle and as a wave,” proffered @stunt_penguin.



[Update]

The pageview count on this blog has frankly been dismal of late.  In an effort to goose the stats and attract roving eyeballs, we here publish the following sensational astronomical discovery.

World of Dr Justice^TM discovers a new constellation!

The Astrophysical Squadron® of the World of Dr Justice©  (headquarters: Geneva) has announced a major new denizen of the night sky.  Already celebrated in physical circles for his discovery of the Higgs boson,  the reclusive Doctor, heading up a team of scantily-clad researchers at his mountaintop mansion, and aiming up a supersized telescope (longer than yours),  has revealed the following, slightly blurry but still impressive astral image:

The new entity has been christened

the “Aurelie Delvaux nebula”,
after the noted Belgian astronomiss

Using algorithmic filtering and in-silico techniques, the team was able to evoke, from a seemingly random distribution of bright dots, an outline that, seen from a certain angle and in a certain light, strikes some observers as vaguely resembling a human female.

(Or perhaps a camel.  Yes, very like a camel.  A Bactrian camel -- the kind with two humps.)

“Refutation” inflation

The present note is an exercise in logic and linguistic hygiene.  It is not political per se, and in particular is agnostic as to the facts and merits of the tangled case under discussion.]

One of the top stories in today’s crowded news:

The family of slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich rejected Fox News reports that he had leaked work e-mails to WikiLeaks before he was fatally shot last year in the District.

The reports, which gained traction on social media, said an FBI forensics examination showed Rich transferred 44,053 DNC e-mails and 17,761 attachments to a now-deceased WikiLeaks director.

Rich’s parents, Joel and Mary Ann, said Tuesday through a spokesman that they do not believe their son gave any information to WikiLeaks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/family-of-slain-seth-rich-says-reports-he-fed-wikileaks-dnc-info-are-untrue/2017/05/16/9b32ef9c-3a46-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html?utm_term=.f0f43ca07a0f

That is admirably and neutrally stated.  However, some news sources are reporting the same facts with headlines like “Seth Rich Parents Refute New Claims On Wikileaks Contact”.   Therein lies a confusion.

To refute is (in its original, non-catachrestic sense) to disprove.  The allegations in question are perfectly precise and emprical, subject to either (partial) refutation or (partial) confirmation.

But the only party in a position to refute the allegations is someone who professionally and forensically examined the laptop in question.    Does it contain such material, or does it not?  The family is in no position to “refute” the allegation, however false it may be.  Indeed, on the Post account, they cannot really be said even to have denied the allegations;  they simply said they don’t believe them.  A perfectly rational stance; but not exactly a denial (for after all, how would they know -- if their son had been secretly betraying his employer, why would he inform his family?), and certainly not a refutation.

Increasingly, the less careful media uses refute where deny would be appropriate.  Part of this may be simple semantic weakness on the journalists’ part (to which many other technical terms, like impeach, are subject), but partly also to the fact that deny has accumulated invidious connotations, as though anyone who “denies” X  is himself shady in some way.   That is a legitimate worry;  other synonyms are available (the family discounted/pooh-poohed/scoffed at/… the allegations) which lack such connotations.  Better to use these than to induce a crucial ambiguity in the verb refute, in a way that renders it inapt for precise usage.

Part of the problem in the fluidity of use of refute  might be  not political, but cognitive and linguistic:  confusion with the paronym rebut.

A further semantic distinction:  re discussions within the first Nixon administration, of Kevin Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority:

Phillips had not been refuted by the West Wing,  but his thesis had been rejected.
--  Patrick Buchanan,  Nixon’s White House Wars (2017), p. 146

Note:  There are other ways of disposing of an allegation, other than outright refutation:  you may undermine, or infirm, or discredit it, in various ways.   Thus, if a witness presenting himself as Dr. Smith (M.D. Harvard) testifies that the deceased died of psoriasis, another doctor (or team thereof) might refute that testimony (on its own ground) by presenting evidence that the deceased had a huge malignant brain tumor but had never had a skin condition.  But anyone -- say, a lowly clerk at Harvard Medical School -- could discredit the testimony on entirely other grounds, by showing that Smith never attended Harvard Medical School, nor (with a bit of extra digging) ever so much as finished high school.  That would be devastating counter-evidence, but not a “refutation” in the technical sense.  (Logically, Smith might nonetheless have blundered upon the correct explanation of the demise.)

One can’t help suspecting that the media’s terminological laxity might be connected to an epistemological weakness:  presenting counter-allegations as evidentially telling (whether or not they are actually awarded the accolade “refutation”) although (consider the source) they are suspect or undermined at the outset, as coming from the accused's family, or attorney, or partner in crime.  Some of these are treated with great journalistic reverence, and actually pass into folklore  --“he was hoping to go to college”, “he was starting to turn his life around”,  “he didn’t have a gun” (though one was found in his possession, surrounded by spent cartridges).

~

A particularly piquant use of the term “refutation” occurs in the mathematical polylogue by Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (1976).  The title impishly echoes that of Karl Popper’s better-known Conjectures and Refutations (1962).  But whereas that title reflected the expection rough-and-tumble of normal science, Lakotos’ phrase produces a double-take:  if a “proof” gets “refuted”, it wasn’t really a proof to begin with, but only a purported proof.  But Lakatos is not referring to those (relatively rare) instances of purported proofs that turned out to be fatally flawed, and left no progeny in mathematics.  Rather, he considers mathematical demonstrations that were all right so far as they went, but which contained hidden assumptions.  These being unearthed in a “refutation”, the original proof, or something much like it, gets deepened, until further unsuspected subtleties become revealed.    He offers a dialectic analysis of the process of mathematizing.   The result does not demote mathematical truth to a mere just-so story, as among nihilists and relativists.  It rather offers a more epistemologically modest picture of the mathematical enterprise (the fallible human excavation of a transcendental reality, a Platonist would say), in which the notions of “proof” and “refutation” both get toned down a bit, and the process becomes a bit more like developing a software package, finding and fixing bugs along the way.  The result is real progress.

For a more technical discussion of refutation and its semantic field, try

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/01/refutation-vs-disconfirmation.html

~

The flip side of the coin, by which the media use artificially strengthened language when presenting the allegations of the victim class, is artificial down-grading when the allegations come from the authorities.   As, headline from a moment ago:

South San Francisco police officers on Wednesday morning shot and killed a man who they say was allegedly armed with a shotgun.

Either “they say” or “allegedly” would be an adequate and appropriate editorial distancing from the official police statement.    Together, they are at best redundant, or, if taken literally, false:  the police did not state “He was allegedly armed with a shotgun”;  such a statement would be in place if, say, the police had not actually seen the shotgun, but a bystander reported such possession of a shotgun (which had  been abstracted from the crime scene by the time the police arrived).  

[Update:  This essay is updated here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/04/refutation-inflation-re-updated.html ]

The Trolley Problem: a new variant

What is currently commonly known as “the Trolley Problem” is an old chestnut in moral philosophy.  History and variants here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

In today’s superheated psychosocial climate, a new variant has arisen:

A child is lying unconscious across the trolley track.  Donald Trump is standing nearby, oblivious, thinking about his ratings.  A trolley is rapidly bearing down on the scene. You only have time to do one of two things:

(a)  Pull the child off the track to safety

(b)  Push Trump in front of the trolley

Which do you do?

Word of the Day: “Appropriation”

The latest catchphrase from the “trigger-warnings” crowd  is:  “cultural appropriation.”   Snowflakes are melting in the heat of the phrase.
The current epicenter of this kerfuffle is Canada.  Since Canada doesn't get to be the epicenter of all that much, we'll put the maple-leaf links front & center:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/writers-union-of-canada-apology-cultural-appropriation-1.4109186

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-cultural-appropriation-should-be-debated-too-bad-canadas-writers-union-instead-chose-to-debase-itself

http://www.newsweek.com/cultural-appropriation-outcry-succeeds-cancelling-gallery-show-white-painter-594924

Additionally:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-lefts-misguided-obsession-with-cultural-appropriation/2017/05/12/59e518bc-3672-11e7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html?utm_term=.f04e49efef68

Bad, bad  Bard !

Take an example: Logically, if an author is male, there could be no female characters in his book.  He couldn't possibly present their inner truth -- and if he did, it would be even worse:  appropriation.

Quickly running the classics through the mind, the only novel that passes the test is Moby Dick.  All others, by male authors, must be burned.

It's okay -- a male whale

 

For more about our lovable subaqueous sea-chum, try these

~ Moby-Dick monostichs ~

[Update] This just in:  PETA has demanded the censorship of Moby Dick.

HarperCollins is preparing a new P.C. edition, minus the whale.

(/ satire.  Not worth analyzing.  We have not to get down in the sandbox with the bisounours, to wrangle over such notions.  As Hegel (or someone) once wittily put it:  “When you hear the terms ‘safe space’ or ‘appropriation’ -- entsichern Sie ihren Glock.”)

~

A generation ago, a somewhat related notion was that of coöptation.   The Establishment (that was the “They”, back Then) would dangle a carrot; and if you took it, you’d been co-opted.

~

Although lists of huffy demands by aggrieved poetical Eskimos  have little resonance outside a certain milieu, there is a deeper and much more general issue hiding behind it, one discussed  over the decades  under such rubrics as “The Uses of the Past”.

An especially subtle one is offered by the historian Tony Judt, in his wide-ranging pre-post-mortem exposition Thinking the Twentieth Century.   Here he refers to the “misappropriation” of the Holocaust narrative, by a motley assortment of factions.

~

Related vocabulary:

Film critic Anthony Lane, recalling Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie”:

… Hoffman playing an actor playing an actress.  That isn’t mimicry, it’s an identity heist.

-- “Folies à deux”, in The New Yorker, 1 June 2020, p. 71