A look ahead at the dismal political picture

.
I must make clear that, despite the gloomy title of this post, it is imperative that everyone takes as positive a view of the future as possible, merely as a survival strategy.  If you don't want to do that, you may as well stop reading!

Understand the situation
I, together with a lot of other liberals, have been going on autopilot for a long time.  We often look at others and deplore how they use rules of thumb to make most of their decisions.  It's often harder to stop doing that when we're doing it.  The two-party system encourages this Us/Them view of the political landscape, but unfortunately, multi-party political dynamics are less stable, and creating coalitions of several small parties, and holding the unwieldy coalition together is an art that takes a long time to learn, and seems to give very little return for the effort.

The present-day Republican and Democrat parties are also unhappy coalitions that are battling decades-long prejudices and misperceptions in order to hold together.  Just imagine these problem being aggravated by the coalitions reconfiguring themselves every new election!

Let's look at the Republicans.  It is the home to a large number of groups:
Fiscal Conservatives: these are opposed to big government spending, and high taxes.  Conceivably there are those who are only opposed to high taxes, and others who are only opposed to big government, but let's not worry about them.
Christian Fundamentalists: these are very confused people, on the whole, but there are some who are quite moderate and balanced in their outlook except that they insist on Biblical principles, protecting the Holy Land from infidels, they're against using artificial contraception (some of them), opposed to government sponsoring of abortions (some of them), opposed to teaching Evolution in science classes (a few of them), and opposed to the strict separation of Church and State (most of them).  So this is not a unified category of people, but they support each other and make common cause.
Hawks: these are the ones who want a very aggressive foreign policy.  Some of them are willing to pursue diplomacy a little further than others, but they take the fundamental position that the rights of Americans trumps the rights of all other groups.  They may not realize that this is what their various principles amounts to, but logically that is where it all flows from.  Some of these are driven by Business interests: we must back our economic interests with military might whenever necessary (or convenient).  Some of these are simply convinced that American supremacy is good for the whole planet, because we're the sanest, most enlightened nation on Earth, and everybody knows that.  We give women the most rights of any nation, etc, etc.
Libertarians: I'm lumping the Gun Enthusiasts, the Legalize Marijuana lobby, the Business First folks, and the Anti-Health-Care-Reform people into this group.  They not only want little or no government control over anything, but they don't want to pay any taxes either.  They are openly hostile to the Republicans, but they vote with them, because they view Democrats as generally favoring more government than the GOP.

Now let's look at the Democrats.  We don't often do this, but the time has come.
Pacifists: These are those of us who want to avoid military action at all costs.  The Democrats have often started wars; in fact, they have arguably got the US into more wars than the GOP.  But generally the Democrats have been viewed as more friendly towards pacifists.
Pro Choice Lobby:  Since the Christian Fundamentalists and the so-called Pro Lifers are in the opposite camp, the Pro Choicists have sought a home with the Dems.  This makes sense because the Democrats have generally stood for
Gender Equality: The GOP has traditionally opposed the progress of equal rights legislation (and they're opposing it now).  Gender equality should not be an issue in this day and age, but tragically, it is.
The Social Safety Net lobby:  Of all the principles of the Democrats that I support, this one is chief.  The basic requirements for life must be provided to everyone, regardless of how productive they are.  I will be satisfied with lower levels of support than most others, in terms of financial welfare payments.  But I support higher levels of free housing, education, food subsidy, healthcare, etc.
The Environmentalists and the Conservationists.  This group, too, should not have to exist today, but the Business First group keeps wanting to exploit energy resources at the cost of air and water quality, and the pro-environmentalists have nowhere to go but the Democrat Party.
Pro Gun-Control lobby.  The NRA has traditionally supported the GOP.
Rationalists.  These are the people who strongly favor separation of Church and State, teaching Evolution in school, supporting Historians in their attempts to revise traditional biases in US education, even at the price of embarrassing the White Majority.

In addition to the groups whom we can expect to vote with the two major parties fairly consistently, there are other groups who are less predictable.

Apoliticals. Many young friends have told me that they do not vote because they are confused about the options, or disgusted with the parties, or with particular personalities who dominate the political landscape at the local level.

Anti-intellectuals.  There has always been a stubborn group of people who are suspicious of anyone whom they regard as highly-educated.  They get confused by big words, and by political sophistry, and are suspicious of their local religious leaders, so they stay aloof from politics, unless they can be persuaded at the last minute.  Leaders from the two parties often make a deliberate play for these folks by using down-home language and ideas, though of course our political leaders are usually moderately well-educated, except in obvious cases like George W. Bush.

Be aware of the changes in the political process
One of the hugest changes we observe is the rise of apolitical political professionals.  They are found in the rank of pollsters, campaign managers, spin doctors and media specialists, lobbyists, and independent think-tanks.  It is not rare to find a campaign manager in one party leave it to join the campaign of another party.  I particularly detest the professionalization of politics, the increase in the size of Political Science departments in colleges and universities.  Students are increasingly viewing political science as a discipline which could lead to quick money right out of college, and possibly a lobbying job after that, and then an early retirement.  A significant majority of these are not particularly interested in the public welfare, as a political leader should be, in my mind.

The upshot of all this is that the political process has become objectivized and cynical.  We accused cynical politicians as adopting an attitude of The Ends Justify The Means.  But now it seems almost a universal attitude.  Let's face it: professional politicians are being viewed more unfavorably than at any time in history.  Decent politicians are getting out of politics, and rascals with get-rich-quick ideas and Fool-all-the-people-all-the-time ideas are getting in.  The kids who come forward in college as student leaders are tending toward slimeballicity.  Used car dealers are looking good, compared with politicians at any level.

Voting is just one major responsibility.  There are others
It is no less important today to vote than it was in the past.  But, since trustworthy candidates are so hard to find, and since media consultants are so effective at besmirching the name of anyone who they oppose, few people are willing to run for office.  We must come up with a plan to combat this; the simplest plan is to get better at training young people at candidacy, and at resisting the efforts of hostile media attacks.

This post is at least in part inspired by a recent video clip by Jon Stewart.  He was responding to an attack by Fox News that he distorted the facts and lied so often that he was beginning to make inroads on their viewer base.

In contrast, Jon Stewart is one of the most reliable news sources, and one who is most astute at discerning the implications of a particular event or action.  Unlike Fox News, I do not regard the political implications of events and actions as being in the eye of the beholder.  Some statements and actions are self-serving, and Jon Stewart has been effective at pointing these out.  He is consistent.  He is accurate.  He is generally moderate in his denouncements.  Compared to the excesses of the Fox News crew and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, Chris Christie and other Republican jokers, Jon Stewart is as decent and straight arrow as they come.  But Fox News accuses him of lying.

Other spin doctors are more subtle.  But one can easily see that the relentless onslaught of Fox News can succeed in intimidating any liberal from running for office.  So all altruistic young potential political leaders are running from office.

Money In Politics
The more money is allowed to pervade the political process, the more unscrupulous spin doctors can distort the facts, and distract the public away from issues, towards personalities.  The (GOP-voting) public has notoriously been forgetful of GOP gaffes, and gone on to worship their questionable candidates.  Mit Romney appears to be offering to run again, despite the statements he made that were video-recorded at a fundraiser, which one would have assumed would knock him out of politics for good.  But the sheer money brought to bear on the media distorts the facts; it becomes all about how skillfully the message is put together, not the core factual contents of the message, which might be vacuous.  The Supreme Court, to its everlasting shame, approved unlimited funds to be spent on Campaign Finances, which is a ruling that must be repealed.

[To be continued, if I have the energy, which I probably won't.]

A mathematical look at interpersonal interaction

.
This article: <http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/18/hannah-fry-the-mathematics-of-love/> is an interesting, and very plausible, attempt to model the sequence of interactions between two parties.

It is conceived of in terms of a pair of linked responses.  Let's look at it from the point of view of an interacting couple, H for husband, and W for wife, though no stereotypes have been applied, so the analysis is absolutely gender-neutral.  (In fact, they claim that the analysis applies even to the relationship between two nations.)

Suppose the husband has just said something, H(t) at time t, to which the wife replied with W(t).  Here H(t) and W(t) are not actually what they said, but the degree of positivity of the remark.

The husband next responds with H(t+1), to which the wife responds with W(t+1), and so on.  These sorts of things are well studied in mathematics, and the author quotes a pair of theoretical equations that define H(t+1) and W(t+1) in terms of the earlier H(t) and W(t).  The interesting question is what makes the sequence of remarks ---the conversation--- head upwards in tone, versus what makes it head downwards, into a spiral of negativity?

There is another interesting observation that I don't quite understand (because I did not read it carefully enough): that if you're looking for an assistant, for instance, and you're considering 100 applicants, the recipe is
(1) Reject the first 37 applicants.
(2) Accept the next applicant who is better than any of the ones you have seen.

If you only plan to consider 10, you would reject the first 3.7 applicants, and so on.

Happy reading!!!

Atheists deal with Death

“”—‘’
This is a timely and fascinating topic.

The main source for me would be here; please go and take a look, while I figure out what to write!

There seems to be no doubt that, when we are faced with the death of a loved one, those of us who believe in a life after death find more comfort in their beliefs than those of us who are atheists, and rationalists, and have no beliefs in the supernatural at all.  To us, the loved one is gone, and only the physical shell is left behind.

To us, of course, the physical shell is definitely a large part of what the person was; all the thoughts and attitudes and personality of the person was contained in the brain that now lies unfunctioning, and uncaring, in the lifeless body.  We should gaze on the body with more love, and more loss, than a religious person would; to them, the person was some indefinable thing that has fled, to what they deem to be a “happier place”, in what we would consider an act of sorry self-deception.

The writer of the article, however, has an angle on this that is interesting, and possibly useful.  To a materialist, who believes that matter can neither be created nor destroyed (except in very special circumstances), the loved one is never destroyed completely.  His or her matter continues to exist, and becomes part of the life of the planet.  In these sad times, however, because of how much space a body occupies in the ground, we tend to cremate our loved ones, which means they add to the pollution of the air, but in principle they fall to the ground in good time, and nourish other living things.  It is a more definite continued existence than the imaginary one postulated by the religious.

All of this does not serve to mitigate our grief very much; death is a more real thing to us atheists than it is to those who believe in an afterlife.  They are very firm about their claim that the belief in an afterlife is not merely a fiction that makes life and death easier for them.  They claim that the afterlife is real, and not merely a comfortable fairy tale.

Descartes worried about reality.  Is all our perception a mere dream in the mind of some being?  Are we all figments of someone’s imagination?  But ultimately Descartes reasoned that, if he was worrying about whether he was real, he must exist.  An imaginary thing cannot worry about its own existence; whoever is imagining it has to worry on its behalf.  So if we are real enough to be self-conscious, we are real enough for the purposes of philosophy.

On the other hand, unfortunately, if enough people imagine that there is an afterlife, that does not make it real.  We do not believe in an afterlife simply because there is no evidence for it.  We don’t find it useful to believe in anything for which there is no evidence, unless it is an actual abstract construct, such as the number 5, which is infinitely useful.  Perhaps someone can create an abstract construct which is the afterlife, but to claim that we can actually enter it is unreasonable.

So I offer no comfort, really; when they die, we lose them.  They exist as memories only, and they cannot respond to our actions or our love.  Whatever love we mean them to have, we must give it while they live.  Do not waste your time.

Arch

Passwords!

“”—‘’
At this point in history, almost everyone has a password for something or other; at least a PIN for an ATM (a Personal Identification Number for an Automatic Teller Machine).

If you stop to think about it, you can enter your password, or your PIN, in lots of places widely scattered throughout the world, and it can be checked.  Does that mean that your PIN or password is known all throughout the WORLD?  There are probably some who do believe that this is so, but being the innocent souls that they are, they probably think, “Oh well, the passwords are probably safe, right?  They have ways, don’t they, of keeping these things secret?”  Some others probably wonder how these passwords are verified.

As a matter of fact, passwords are not widely held, as far as I know; most reputable banks and computer systems keep the passwords of their users safe inside a certain file in their computer system.

Then how do they verify passwords?

It all depends on the fact that certain formulas in Math cannot be reversed.  What does this mean?  This means that you can put some number x into the formula and get some result y, but even a really clever mathematician, or even a clever computer, can’t tell you the original x if you give them the result y.

Make no mistake, some formulas can be solved backwards.  Suppose the formula is just x², or just “x squared.”  So suppose you put in 7 for your x, and you get 49.  Many of us know that, working backwards from 49, x has to be 7 (or maybe -7).

For all equations of degree 4 or smaller, you can always work backwards, and retrieve the original x.  But from degree 5 on upwards, people have proved, notably the mathematician Niels Henrik Abel Abel of Sweden, I believe, now dead of Tuberculosis around 1829, actually proved that there is at least one equation of every degree higher than degree four, that cannot be solved.  This means that we can create a formula such that if a number is put into the formula we have a definite result, but based on the result, the original number cannot be figured out.

So suppose you are asked to create a password for a new bank account, or a new e-mail service, or whatever.  You make a lovely password such as hold me kangaroo down, sport, or something like that, and they
(1) convert the whole password into a set of numbers.  This is not hard, because every symbol you can type on your keyboard is already a number.  ("a" is 97, "b" is 98, and so on.)
(2) they run each of these numbers through a formula, obviously of degree greater than 5.  This creates a new set of numbers, which they carefully store.  Now you have a password.
(3) Every time you enter your password, wherever you are, they run that through the same formula, and check the results.  Of course, they resulting number must match up with the numbers they have stored as "your password", though they can’t actually tell what the original password was.  But they can usually tell if somebody enters the wrong password.

The only reason I qualified the last sentence with “usually” is because they can use a formula for which two different x values could give you the same y value.  The likelihood of this could be very tiny indeed.  The chances that your entire password and a completely different word or phrase is converted into the same list of number is almost inconceivably small.

This also means that you could enter an obscene phrase as your password.  The computer systems should not be actually checking your password against a list of naughty words, because that really does compromise the security of the password system.  But a lot of password systems are managed by rank amateurs, so they could be looking at your passwords as they are created —with the best of intentions— to see whether you’re using an obscene phrase.  They really shouldn’t.  Checking to see whether your password has an uppercase letter, a number, a symbol, and Kim Kardashian’s middle initial, is probably OK.  But I wish they would get off that whole kick.

Arch

“”—‘’