I’m feeling a bit achy today, in part because I got my covid and flu shots yesterday. It’s weird that this rudimentary bit of public health is also deeply political.
Category: et cetera
To paraphrase Voltaire
Set aside the fact that Charlie Kirk was a vile bigot.1 Set aside the question of what motivated his killer.2
It is a performative contradiction to claim simultaneously that his legacy is one of free speech and open debate and that anybody who says bad things about him should be fired from their job. Such vehement rhetoric is incoherent on its face.
A true champion of free speech might wholly disapprove of what someone says, but would defend in their death the right to say it.
Four!
A correction to an earlier post, confirming my suspicion from the post before: A recent collaboration, when published, will reduce my Erdős Number to 4.
This required running the query on a different database, one which included more of computer science connections.
Five degrees of separation
In a footnote to the previous post, I suggested that a recent collaboration would lower my Erdős Number to 5.
On the basis of having checked a long time ago, I knew that my Erdős Number was at most 6 on account of having coauthored with Craig Callender.
Since then, however, Craig has also collaborated with more people. So his Erdős Number went down to 4 years ago, meaning that mine was already 5 or less. The new paper just means that there are multiple paths by which I’m entitled to an Erdős Number of 5.3
A Trumpian fallacy redux
During the first Trump administration, I pointed out that his thinking about immigration committed the fallacy of conflating within-group and between-group differences. In an on-line discussion today, I realized that Trump’s tariff policy is guilty of it as well.4
Continue reading “A Trumpian fallacy redux”The futility of fine distinctions
It is now commonplace to point out that economic exchange can and should be positive-sum: When it works well, both buyers and sellers get more value than they would by not participating. This is followed up by saying that Trump thinks of exchange as zero-sum: Any time one side gets value, then they must be taking it from the other. It now seems to me that this is wrong about Trump— not unfair, but wrong.
The current tariff strategy is, even in his vision for it, a negative-sum gambit. He is willing to crash the whole plane, because he thinks that he and the USA will be on the top of the hierarchy among the people scrambling for survival among the wreckage.
The ones who walk away from sound medical advice
Someone goes to the doctor. Patient says: Doc, I’m depressed. Life seems harsh and cruel. I feel alone in a threatening world.
Doctor says: You should go to Omelas. They have this kid chained up in the basement which makes life awesome and great in the city. Some time there will pep you right up.
Patient says: But Doctor… I am the kid chained in the basement.
Everybody laughs. Drum roll. Curtains.
Death by a thousand cuts
It is clear that the federal layoffs and budget cuts are indiscriminate, made without regard to the content of the jobs and programs being eliminated. Some of it is made at targets of opportunity, firing people hired in the last year because they are nominally in a probationary period. Some of it is illegal, done on the assumption that the courts can’t stop all the malfeasance— if courts can stop any of it.
Continue reading “Death by a thousand cuts”When the dog whistle is a middle C
President Trump has cut aid to South Africa because (he says) the government is persecuting the white minority. It’s easy enough to see Trump as a puppet here, with the hand up his backside belonging to Elon Musk— a white South African who grew up under apartheid and is salty about social justice.
Moreover, Trump has offered asylum to white Afrikaners who want to follow Musk to the US. Given Trump’s hostile rhetoric about immigration, the contrast is clear: He’s not really against immigrants as such, he’s against immigrants who are people of color.
Why foreground the fact that he’s a white-supremacist president doing the bidding of another, unelectable white-supremacist? Maybe the flagrant racism is a distraction from more subtle evils they’re doing, and there are plenty of those. But maybe they are just throwing all the shit at the fan to see what sticks.
