Conservative Thought? Where, Where?

I saw a post on Diane Ravitch’s blog with the title “North Carolina: Legislature Mandates Creation of a School for Conservative Thought at UNC. The topic was the extraordinary action of the North Carolina legislature to endow a new school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Of course, such a thing hadn’t been dome before, that is there was no historical precedent or history of such actions (a favorite justification of doing or not doing things legal by the current crop of conservatives).

Included in the fine print was the hiring of “at least 10 and no more than 20 faculty members from outside the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill” — all apparently with permanent tenure or eligibility for permanent tenure.

Apparently current conservative thought runs toward the dictatorial. Actually, “conservative thought” borders on oxymoronic status. Conservative thinking dropped to being a trickle in the Reagan administration (remember trickle down economics?), and the last real source of real conservative thought disappeared when William F. Buckley died in 2008.

I can’t wait until the political wags get hold of this one. Trump Sycophant U, perhaps?

Once Again Republican Definitions Shatter Common Sense

The Guardian recently published a report on Mr. Trump’s attacks upon his prosecutors. Of course, he is treating them as if they were persecutors, and thereby endangering their lives. The Guardian stated: “Trump has proclaimed he’s innocent in all these cases, and charged that the prosecutions are “witch-hunts” to hurt his campaign to become president again.”

Here is a meme running around that helps people understand the Republican notion of a Witch Hunt.

This can only be an implementation of Newspeak, an invention of George Orwell in his book 1984. Or possibly a combination of Newspeak and Humpty Dumpty speak, “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

What Do I Think of Human Beings

I was reading a discussion of what a physicist, Brian Greene, thought of humans. His description was that we were collections of many similar atoms. (I share this opinion. How could it be otherwise? We are all made of the same elements (oxygen (65 percent), carbon (18.5 percent), hydrogen (9.5 percent), and nitrogen (3.3 percent) which accounts for 96% of the weight of those elements in your body and mine), our only differences are that your atoms and my atoms are arranged differently (the atoms being identical).) But my thoughts regarding the original question ran differently.

So, what do I think of human beings?

I am basically an optimistic person, but I do not see us evolving or just changing enough over time to prevent our own destruction. Throughout human history, whenever a subgroup of human beings began to feel superior or even just “special,” the next step was always the oppression and even extermination of those who were considered “lesser” to the exalted status of the special group.

This country is an expression of white nationalism. (There were ten million or more Native Americans living here before the “white man” arrived. They had settled the country, thus obviating the need for “settlers.”) The “specialness” invoked was based upon appearance, since we now know that the term “race” is bankrupt. Columbus landed in the Caribbean and finding the natives unwilling slaves, the Spaniards decided to exterminate them, and they did, wiping out every last one. Then they moved on to Mexico, where they repeated the process on the Mayans. Since their church told them the “heathen natives” weren’t real people, they were allowed to enslave them and kill them for sport.

The Whities in North America did the same thing. In my home state of California, coming late to the party didn’t mean they would miss the fun, as the state government sponsored the extermination of the California Indian tribes. And, of course, the importation of Africans, who made better slaves than the Indians, by the “superior White race” is as shameful as it can be.

While we have made actual slavery illegal in most (not all!) countries we still have various forms of it being practiced, under the table and over: sex slavery is rampant, wage slavery is not a myth or a joke, and racial discrimination is rampant, as well as religious discrimination (and I am not talking about the phony persecution of Christians).

Men have been oppressing women for millennia. This constituters one half of humanity oppressing the other half, on top of the above.

Hillary Clinton said it best when referring to Trump supporters half of whom “belong in a basket of deplorables.” She missed the mark in limiting her comment to Trump supports, instead of all of humanity, and “half” is way under the true mark.

Of course, all the while we support religions that praise us ad nauseum. The churches know that they can’t just drum on us as being despicable, fallen souls. They appeal to our vanity right and left. (Shakespeare could have been writing for the church when he wrote “What a piece of worke is a man! How Noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In forme and mouing, how expresse and admirable! In Action, how like an Angel in apprehension, how like a God!”)

People, You Are Being Conned by the Rich . . . Again

The con is deceptively simple. The rich, through their networks of think tanks and conservative bloggers and writers have established a myth. That myth is that our public schools are failing. This was easy enough to do. Our public schools (are not a system, but . . . ) are a vast undertaking, so it was not hard to cherry pick examples of “failing” schools, schools struggling with infrastructure, budget, performance, etc. If you just plot any parameter regarding these schools you will get a Bell curve, with the bottom end being examples of “how our public schools are failing.” The reality? Our public schools could be better, but 75% of parents in polls rank their children’s schools as “good or very good.” The parents should know better than Republican operatives, no?

Then, the concept of vouchers for schools was revived with a focus on using them to help children of color to escape “failing schools.” Many children of color were in failing situations because schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods, for instance, had stringent budgets because many of those school districts had their funding based upon property taxes and we made sure that property values in Black neighborhoods were poor. Their performance was also impacted negatively by poverty. Studies show conclusively that hungry children do not learn well. And poor kids were often sent to school hungry. The reality? Of the voucher programs instituted so far, it seems that 75% of the vouchers were cashed in by students who had never attended public schools, that is they were already enrolled in private schools. And whose kids tend to be enrolled in private schools, boys and girls? That’s right, the children of very well to do parents. So, those vouchers are not making it possible for those students to attend “better” schools. They are lining the pockets of rich people by reimbursing them for funds they have already spent.

To cap it off, these people took some hoary “educational wisdom” namely that “private schools and colleges are better than public schools and colleges,” and rode that to a position that those poor kids of color will do better in a private school than a public school. The reality? This was never true; when controlled studies were done comparing student performance, corrected for socioeconomic status, students going to public schools and colleges did exactly as well as those in private schools and colleges. (The rich, of course, believe that if you spend more money on something, it has to be better than something less expensive (and we kind of buy into that, too).) To support the propaganda, voucher schools and charter schools play a vicious game. They arrange to expel or redirect poorly performing students, often students of color, out of their schools, leaving a better performing cadre of students to “show off.” When controlled for these hijinks, the voucher schools and charters perform no better than public schools. Studies of students leaving voucher schools and returning to public schools show them performing better that they were before (happier, too), but that may be due to the pressures applied to get those students to drop out.

The rich have long held the position that since they are paying to have their own children educated, they shouldn’t have to pay taxes to also have the great unwashed masses educated, too. We pointed out that childless couples pay education taxes, parents whose children have graduated out of the system pay taxes, too, etc. The reason is that having an educated population (of workers, voters, citizens, etc.) is a benefit to all. But, then the rich dislike any collective actions such as these because they always look at them as transfers of wealth from them to those who are unworthy. (Historically, conservatives supported public schools as a way to “Americanize” immigrants, but finally greed won out over patriotism . . . again.)

The rich are once again, transferring wealth from the poor and middle class into their own pockets and, in this case, are using a scam to do it. And legislators around the country are more than willing to facilitate those efforts for a campaign donation or two. And, who makes the most of those kinds of donations? If you answered “the rich” you were paying attention!

Eisenhower Was Right and the GOP Doesn’t Care

For those of you not old enough to remember that the Republican party had a liberal wing (and the Democrats had a conservative wing), Dwight Eisenhower, war hero or not, would never be accepted by today’s Republican party.

Here is why:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. — Dwight Eisenhower (1954)

Eisenhower was right, but today’s GOP is hell bent or removing any last traces of a “welfare system,” Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, adult labor laws, labor unions, and farm programs (except direct subsidies).

So, they are in direct conflict with a giant in GOP history, and since he was right, they are stupid.

So, why do they not care to follow his wise advice?

Because they are stupid.

The GOP deliberately went out and scoured the country to find the most stupid candidates they could find: Louie Gohmert in Texas, Marge Taylor (Ga.) (got divorced form Greene I heard and if I were him, I’d want my name back), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), and Donald J. Trump from New York, etc. They then appealed to the basest values of the less intellectually endowed segment of the voting public and voilà!

Ah, Now it Makes Sense

Sometimes when I am bored or have nothing to do I noodle around the Internet and occasionally encounter listicles. There is usually a teaser that is intriguing but it has no resolution so you wonder “How did that work out?” Lately I have noticed that the listicle doesn’t have the teaser on the list, so we never find out what happened. So, being a curious person (in more ways than one) I started to wonder about this practice.

Why would an intriguing item that could be on their listicle be left off?

Aye, that is the question.

I wondered at first if the teaser would be the last item on the list, leaving you scrolling the list looking for the answer, but no, it wasn’t last. Since these people apparently get paid by the page view, the strategy to me seems to be this: I might keep going down their listicle if I really want to see the resolution of the teaser. But if they did something logical, like put the teaser and its resolution last, someone logical, like me, would slide to bottom of the list, skipping over all of the things they want to dangle in front of my gaze. So, the desire to learn how the teaser worked out leads me to the end of the list and there is no way to shortcut the process if the teaser’s dénouement isn’t listed.

I have figure a way out of the dilemma—I have given up such lists in toto. They don’t respect me; I don’t respect them.

DJT the Salesman

Donald Trump is constantly selling: sell, sell, sell. What he is selling is simple: distrust and “you do not need to change.”

By selling distrust, it doesn’t matter that people do not trust in the GOP, as long as they do not trust Democrats. Oh, you can trust Mafia Don, however <sigh>. You can take his word for it. Just as he is a stable genius, Donald J. Trump is a trustworthy man.

The other big sell is “you do not need to change.” Change is awkward and downright distasteful to traditionalists, so the sell is easy. Climate change? It is a hoax, you do not have to give up any conveniences or pleasures. Accept “others” as equals? Nah, you don’t have to do that. If your culture or religion tells you to be prejudiced against any group of people, DJT and his hand-picked (not by DJT, btw) Supreme Court Justices will clear the way for you to exercise your prejudices.

The FBI, the DOJ, even the military . . . you cannot trust them.

COVID? It is a hoax and if it isn’t, it is an act of war by the Chinese and you don’t need to do anything: no masks, no shutdowns, no vaccinations.

This is all appealing to otherwise lazy Americans. Don’t get me wrong, we work really, really hard, but by rigging the rules, the filthy rich have fixed it so that we work so hard for so little that we have little energy outside of keeping our job to apply to the commonweal. People working two or even three jobs don’t have much time to volunteer at their kid’s schools. Oh, those public schools! All they do is groom and indoctrinate our children! Don’t pay any attention to those surveys of parents who seem to be very happy with their children’s schools. You don’t have time to read those polls and besides, you can’t trust them. (The biggest problem with public schools is no fat plutocrat is making fat profits off them, but don’t look behind the curtain, just keep watching Fox News and all will be well.

Sell, sell, sell . . . DJT is always selling, selling us down the river. That phrase came from the days when owning slaves was legal and no slave wanted to be sold down the river where conditions were much worse than where they were, but slavery is no longer legal so the filthy rich invented wage slavery and just kept on chooglin’.

Addendum DJT’s tactics are obvious. For example, by vilifying all of the judges and other court officers involved in his many cases, he is daring the judges to issue gag rules. When they do (as they must), DJY will claim, “See they don’t want me to speak because they know I am telling the truth. You cannot trust them!” and so it goes.

If We Don’t Wake Up and Stop Using Fairy Tales for Guidance, We Are Doomed

I was making a comment on another blog where I found myself typing the title above. It reminded me that back when I was teaching college chemistry, the textbook authors were encouraged to be “relevant” by including sidebar and larger discussions of current chemistry topics “in the news.” Something had to be displaced, however, because textbooks were already too large, too heavy and what went were what I called “stories.” These were stories from the history of chemistry, largely about people and the discoveries they made. These stories, however, were what lead to my love of the topic and so our textbooks had the human element wrung out of them. They became dry, tedious, etc.

It was at that point that I recognized that were evolutionarily primed to learn through stories.

Look at the typical “Sunday school” lessons of most Protestant Christian churches. What do they do? Do they teach dogma, christologies, theological fine points? Nope, those lessons are dominated by “Bible stories.” And because our society is so heavily larded with Christians, we are taught via fairy tales. (Please don’t take offense, Christians, it is your book that has tales of talking donkeys, casting demons into pigs, walking on water, turning water into wine, and faith healing of lepers, so fairy tales.)

Along comes an unscrupulous political party which decides to “teach” their flocks via fairy tales. They tell us, don’t believe your lying eyes (or facts, or polls, or data of any kind) believe our stories. The audience doesn’t draw a line at Jewish Space lasers creating fires in California, pharmaceutical companies, using their vaccines to inject microscopic tags into us, and that climate scientists invented climate change to get grants.

Each of these “stories” takes a tiny amount of fact and then embellishes it to the extreme. It is indeed true that scientists will jigger a few things to get a research grant. It has been known to happen. But also, one needs to recognize that scientists who fake data are ostracized, black-balled, never to hold a decent job in science for the rest of their lives. So, the idea that a whole cadre of scientists would perpetrate a massive worldwide hoax around climate change is ludicrous, especially since almost everyone of them would throw their grandmothers under a bus to expose a cheating competitor.

So, stories that claim a presidential candidate is running a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor, which doesn’t have a basement, need to be traced back to the source of that story and that source be shamed, discredited, etc. Stocks and pillories are not out of the question.

Stories are powerful. Their misuse, deliberate misuse to mislead for profit, should be a crime, in not in our courts, in the court of public opinion.

The UAW Strike

As a former union officer of long standing, I have to point out a few things about the UAW strike. The auto execs are clueless, but that is nothing new. The union leaders will be accused of all sorts of things and that is nothing new.

There was a maxim in union circles back in the day and that was “nobody wins from a strike.” Our strategies involved threats of a strike but we really never wanted to actually pull the trigger, because strikes are net losers.

Do realize, though, that back them there were regular strikes somewhere in the U.S. so there were reminders of the possibility of one in constant circulation. With decades of successful anti-union propaganda and legislation now, strikes are few and far between and executives have no experience one way or another with dealing with the threats of a strike or with a strike at all. So, the UAW strike is a good thing, while being a losing proposition, it establishes the willingness of unions to strike even big corporations.

I am not aware of all of the details, but basically back in the 2008 recession/mini-depression, the UAW made a number of concessions to the then struggling auto industry: wage concessions (incluing a two tier system in which new employees are paid less than established ones, a hated concept in union circles because it is divisive), retiree medical benefits, and more. Well, the auto industry recovered and has been making record profits, paying executives a lot more, and doing stock buybacks, which benefits shareholders and not many others. The UAW is saying “We were good partners. We made concessions when they were needed and now that they aren’t, we should be compensated appropriately.” Of course, what appropriately means varies.

Corporation executives are a self-centered lot. Consider when Google laid off (aka fired) 12,000 Googlers six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years. Because the executives benefit from such actions they are more inclined to those than “doing the right thing,” aka rewarding loyalty and good actions.

I had a very different experience. I relocated from one quite large community college district to another. Since I had some standing in the union community (of CCs), I received a phone call from the executive secretary of my new union, before my first day of work, asking me what office I would like to have. (I asked for a year to get my feet under me and a year to the day, I got another call.)

When I got involved on negotiating teams I was shocked that the union had forgone negotiating salary at all. This was shocking because the usual approach is to address non-salary issues first and then wield the “big hammer” of wage demands. This new district established salaries by formula! No salary negotiations at all, unless you wanted to change the formula. I was stunned, but it worked, gloriously well. The reason it worked is because the school district and the teacher’s union (and the other unions) had mutual respect. Good faith bargaining occurred on non-monetary issues and smaller monetary issues because that is what we did.

The auto industry hasn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell of operating this way as too much bad-faith acting has occurred over the years. (A sure sign there is little trust in a system is if they have seniority policies. There is no judgement that is trustworthy so a stand-in (seniority) is used.)

I will follow the news carefully and wish the UAW and the automakers well, but the path to progress is lined only with good intentions.

Hume’s Assumptions of Science

The Scottish philosopher David Hume critiqued science, pointing out that science had basic assumptions.

There are three main assumptions of science, Hume says:

1. One is that the present and future will behave like the past.
   2. The second is that we have impressions of causation that we see in the world cause and effect.
   3. And the third is that we can reason from effects that we perceive to the causes that produce those effects.

The author of the blog post I was reading about this said this as if it were a bad thing. But this is because we have our heads firmly up our asses. We keep looking for absolute truths and absolute surety, both of which do not exist and never will.

All fields of endeavor have foundational assumptions, so what? The question is “are they reliable/consistent?”

As to “the present and future will behave like the past” this has been tested over and over and over and over. It is a common assumption and if it is not correct, it would be noted. Since this assumption is highly trusted, it just means that many alternatives other than a disjunct from this would be considered before we consider a “violation” of this assumption. Consider Cosmic Inflation. This principle was invented because the Big Bang Theory didn’t work. So it was postulated that not only was space expanding as part of the Big Bang, but it expanded at a crazy high rate early on (even before the BB). So the expansion began crazy fast and then slowed to a more sedate pace. In other words, the universe behaved differently in the past than now. (This is, I consider, a very weak point in BBT because the reasons for the rapid expansion and the slowing are more than a little vague. And, of course, they detected that the expansion is accelerating again, now. Sheesh. And many people gloss over the claims because they say that this expansion of space only occurs between the galaxies, not within!)

Think of assumptions as “things to try first,” their only weakness is if you forget you have made them. In logic the surest way to get an argument to conclude as you wish is to get the conclusion accepted as a premise for your argument, like a forgotten assumption. Theists often do this in arguments for the existence of god. Here is an example:

Argument from Contingency

1. All contingent things have an explanation for their existence
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God
3. The universe is a contingent thing.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence.
5. Therefore, the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.

Note that Premise #2 defines God into existence so the conclusion cannot come out that God does not exist. All the argument claims is that the universe has an explanation for its existence and that is based upon a premise that is quite unproven (and probably untrue), #1.

So, how about Hume’s second and third assumptions? Hume is using the term “impressions” philosophically, it meaning the mental constructs we make to represent what we observe in the material universe. (As if the way we think about things is a thing that has a role to play in the behavior of those things.) Again, these are reasonable starting points until they aren’t. The “law of cause and effect” was taken very, very seriously until various phenomena were observed to which it seemed not to apply. So, instead of strict causation, we switched to probabilistic approaches, determining things like “the most likely thing to happen is . . .”

Regarding Assumption #1 Hume gives an example, claiming that we have no solid rational reason for our assumption that similarity of impressions equals similarity of identity. Just because a table looks like the table that you remember seeing before is not proof that it’s the same table. Someone could have taken away the previous table, switched it with a different table, and they may look the same, but they are not the same table.

This is a specious argument. If someone were to ask me “Is that the same table as was here yesterday?” I would probably say “It looks to be so.” If they then were to say “Would you bet your life on it?” I would answer, “No that is a stupid thing to bet one’s life upon. Do you care to put up a large sum of money, instead?” Basically, if it were really, really important to answer the question “Is that the same table as you saw yesterday?” I would want to examine it closer. Looking underneath I might find my initials carved where I carved them as a boy. I might find the table makers label with my father’s handwriting showing in the phrase “Date Purchased . . .” on the label (my father did such things). But what we are coming up against is the problem of identification. How many data points would be needed to establish that the table is indeed the same table and not a clever forgery? The answer is “an infinite number.” This shows up when trying to ascertain whether two things are “identical” or not. If you kept measuring the two and the measurements turned out to be identical (within the error of measurement), at what point do you give up and say “they are identical?” You don’t because it may be the case that you haven’t yet done the measurement that shows they are not identical. So, you say something scientific: they seem to be very close to being identical. (BTW, forgers know they do not have to be the same in an infinite number of ways, only in a large number, because most people don’t check more that a few points. This is how art forgeries are pulled off (over and over and . . . ), the forgeries are only discovered when “experts” who have a larger storehouse of data points as to how the thing should look, feel, and consist of, make a larger number of measurements.)

Regarding Hume’s example, the table is a perfect exact thing, but such things do not exist in nature, only in philosophy. There is an old joke about a guy selling the hatchet that George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree. He claimed that the handle had only been replaced twice and the head once. There is a serious philosophical argument about identity which is referred to as Theseus’ Paradox, which goes like this:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. ( Plutarch, Theseus)

Philosophers like to address absolutes, but those do not exist in nature and when they mix the two, they confuse themselves.