In 2018, he published “Why Liberalism Failed,” a scathing and sweeping critique that was attentively discussed by the very people (establishment politicians, Ivy League academics, mainstream journalists) he depicted as too ruthless and arrogant to care about the problems ravaging the country: ecological degradation, economic devastation, social isolation, deaths of despair. .... Multiple articles in this newspaper parsed his argument, precisely because it voiced some of the discontent that had helped propel Donald J. Trump into the highest office.Yet if Deneen’s new book, “Regime Change,” is any indication, he and his fellow social conservatives are feeling as persecuted as ever. Never mind that the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade last year, and statewide bans on abortions are proceeding apace. Or that red-state lawmakers are removing books on the barest pretext that they might offend conservative sensibilities. In “Regime Change,” Deneen .... depicts the current dispensation as not just inadequate but unbearable — so much so that he deigns to go beyond theorizing to propose what he would like to do about it.In the introduction, he gives a hint at what’s to come: “What is needed — and what most ordinary people instinctively seek — is stability, order, continuity and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word for it, is a conservatism that conserves.”The confidence (and condescension) is breathtaking, but it turns out that Deneen doesn’t believe that “ordinary people” are up to the task of effecting the necessary change. They have been too degraded by an “invasive progressive tyranny” to yield anything other than a populist movement that is “untutored and ill led,” he writes, alluding to Trump. After spending 150 pages disparaging the “elite,” Deneen goes on, in the last third of the book, to try to reclaim the word for a “self-conscious aristoi” who would dispense with all the liberal niceties about equality and freedom and instead serve as the vanguard of a muscular “aristopopulism.”The desired result, he says, would be a “mixed regime” or “mixed constitution.” Scholars have already discerned some traces of a mixed constitution in the American system’s separation of powers, but Deneen envisions something more radical (and less liberal) than “checks and balances.” He wants a “blending,” or “melding,” of the conservative elite with the (non-liberal) populace, their interests and sensibilities fusing into “one thing.” As much as he tries to dance around how such a profound transformation might come about .... he eventually admits what he believes it would take: “The raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism.”He gets misty-eyed reminiscing about the “quiet leadership” provided by “small-town doctors” and a Hollywood that produced movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It all sounds gentle and quaint except when Deneen erupts in demands for an “overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class.”Deneen offers a vague reassurance that the “raw assertion of political power” would somehow be wielded in a “peaceful but vigorous” way, proposing that the number of representatives in the House be expanded to a truly wild 6,000 and pointing to autocratic Hungary’s efforts “to increase family formation and birth rates” as exemplary. He also offers a vague reassurance that the postliberal future will not revive the prejudice and bigotry of the past. .... one way to make reading this book less of a slog would be to create a drinking game out of these labored attempts to cover his flank [ass].But Deenen’s fellow social conservatives can take heart that at least some prejudices — or “customs” — would remain, as Deneen decries what he calls an “effort to displace ‘traditional’ forms of marriage, family and sexual identity based in nature.” .... Deneen’s worldview is unrelentingly zero-sum. He says he seeks nothing less than the “renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”
And what if you don’t want to live in this regime — one that rejects “democratic pluralism” and sounds suspiciously like a theocracy? Well, that’s too bad for you. “The common good is always either served or undermined by a political order,” Deneen declares toward the end of his book. “There is no neutrality on the matter.” He wants to recreate “the authoritative claims of the village,” but on a national or even international scale — sidestepping the uncomfortable fact that such grand projects have had, to put it mildly, a troubling historical record. He calls on postliberals to aim big, “embracing, fostering and protecting not only the nation but that which is both smaller and larger than the nation.”
Underneath all the gemütlich [cozy, comforting] verbs lurks a suggestion that some readers may find chilling: a vision of the “common good” so obvious to Deneen that it’s not up for debate or discussion.
Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
How extremist right wing elites see liberals and liberalism
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
News bits: An advance in local realism theory; Etc.
This experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe work -- it's not even the first to do so with qubits.
But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made. And it did so by cooling a 30-meter-long aluminum wire to just a few milliKelvin [almost absolute zero].
If quantum mechanics were right, then a pair of entangled objects would behave as a single quantum system no matter how far apart the objects were. Altering the state of one of them should instantly alter the state of the second, with the change seemingly occurring faster than light could possibly travel between the two objects. This, Einstein argued, almost certainly had to be wrong.Getting rid of one of the major loopholes in these measurements is where things get difficult. You need to show that the correlation in the measurements could not have been mediated by information traveling at the speed of light. Since measurements require a bit of time to take place, that means you have to separate the two qubits by enough distance to allow the measurement to complete before light can travel between them. Based on how long the measurements take, the research team behind the new work, working at ETH Zürich, calculated 30 meters would be sufficient.
While that's barely down the hall in a typical lab building, 30 meters is extremely challenging because of the entanglement process, which involves using low-energy microwave photons, which are easily lost in a sea of environmental noise. In practice, this means that anything involved with these photons has to be kept at the same milliKelvin temperatures as the qubits themselves. So the entire 30 meters of aluminum wire that acts as a microwave waveguide needs to be chilled down to a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
In practice, this meant giving the entire assembly built to keep the wire cool access to the liquid helium refrigeration systems that housed the qubits at each end—and building a separate refrigeration system at the center point of the 30-meter tube. The system also needed flexible internal connections and exterior supports because the whole thing contracts significantly as it cools down.
Still, it all worked impressively well. Because of the performance of the qubits, the researchers could perform over a million individual trials in only 20 minutes. The resulting correlations ended up being above the limit set by Bell's equations by a staggering 22 standard deviations. Put in different terms, the p value of the result was below 10-108.
The question of whether quantum phenomena at the microscale in the brain play any role in influencing or even determining behavior at the human macroscale of experience is a controversial one1,2. Some researchers have proposed that quantum models of decision making fit experimental data better than classical models1,3, without suggesting physical causality from the microscale to the to the macroscale as possible explanation for this finding1,4. This avenue of research is labelled “quantum cognition”, and it is interested in applying principles and methods from quantum physics to the study of cognition as an abstract system, without concerning itself with the viability of the physical instantiation of the proposed quantum models in the brain. There are also several other claims about the possible existence of quantum phenomena in the brain that allegedly serve as the physical correlate of consciousness5,6,7, collectively referred to as the “quantum brain” hypothesis, but none of them has earned widespread acclaim.
FBI had reviewed, closed inquiry into Biden claims at center of Hill fight
Republican lawmaker James Comer said he will still seek to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress after viewing document in questionThe FBI and Justice Department under then-Attorney General William P. Barr reviewed allegations from a confidential informant about Joe Biden and his family, and they determined there were no grounds for further investigative steps, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and other people familiar with the investigation.After the two lawmakers reviewed the document in a secure area on Capitol Hill on Monday, Comer announced that House Republicans would still pursue holding FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in contempt of Congress.
“Americans have lost trust in the FBI’s ability to enforce the law impartially and demand answers, transparency and accountability,” Comer told reporters..... the allegation in the document came to the FBI through the Pittsburgh field office, where Barr had created a channel for allegations involving Ukraine. That included materials Rudy Giuliani — who was then President Donald Trump’s personal attorney — had gathered from Ukrainian sources claiming to have damaging information about Biden and his family.The allegation contained in the document was reviewed by the FBI at the time and was found to not be supported by facts, and the investigation was subsequently dropped with the Trump Justice Department’s sign-off, according to the people familiar with the investigation.
Comer and Raskin offered disparate accounts of their meeting with the FBI. Comer in a written statement said FBI officials told the lawmakers “that the unclassified, FBI-generated record has not been disproven.” Raskin said in a statement that DOJ officials signed off on closing the assessment of the information, “having found no evidence” to corroborate the allegations.
The FBI did not confirm Comer’s account of the meeting, but called his pursuit of a contempt vote “unwarranted.”
There are four possible charges in the mix, according to CNN. Two of these are misdemeanor charges about Hunter’s failure to file taxes, and a third is a felony tax evasion charge that would allege he over-reported business expenses. The fourth potential charge is about a false statement on a federal form Hunter filled out when buying a gun in 2018 (he claimed he was not a drug user).
That millennials voted more Democratic in Biden’s first midterm than they had in 2016 appeared to indicate that aging effects were essentially nil: Millennials were becoming no more conservative (and, perhaps, even a bit more liberal) as they got older. Which would suggest that generational replacement is poised to devastate the conservative movement.
Alas, the New York Times analyst Nate Cohn warns that the “emerging Democratic majority” on the horizon may be a mirage. Contrary to some recent reports, Cohn said millennials have in fact been moving right as they’ve aged; this reality has just been disguised by the changing composition of the millennial electorate. The millennial voting bloc of 2022 is not the same as that of 2008, as “six additional years of even more heavily Democratic millennials became eligible to vote” after Barack Obama’s initial election.
In their youth, older millennials (i.e., those born between 1981 and 1989) had produced the largest age gap in the modern history of U.S. elections: In 2008, voters under 30 were 16 points more Democratic than those over 30.But between the 2012 and 2020 elections, these millennials became more likely to vote Republican (and this was especially true of those born before 1985):
The use of whataboutisms
Criticize Jan. 6 - and you get "whatabout" BLM riots.
Criticize Trump - and you get "whatabout" Joe Biden sniffing hair or Hunter Biden's laptop.
Whataboutism is an argumentative tactic where a person or group responds to an accusation or difficult question by deflection. Instead of addressing the point made, they counter it with “but what about X?”.
https://flaglerlive.com/176623/whataboutism-explained/
But let's be honest, we all do it, sometimes subconsciously. Criticize Biden, "whatabout" Trump, or those Christian Fascists, etc.
So, first question: CAN IT BE a useful tool. Example - to point out hypocrisy? You say this about my guy but your guy does the same thing or worse. Or is there NO excuse for using whataboutisms?
Despite useful advice on how to counter whataboutisms, they usually don't work, or so I've found, but nevertheless, some suggestions found here:
https://www.careelite.de/en/whataboutism/
Finally, how about the "ok, let's talk about that" method? If you are talking Trump, and someone tries to whatabout mentioning Joe Biden, say to them "ok, what about Joe Biden? Can you point to something that Joe Biden did that equals what we are talking about concerning Trump?" Or will THAT just lead to a circular argument? My guy is worse than yours.
That leads to my 2nd question: When confronted with a whataboutism, how do YOU handle it?
Monday, June 5, 2023
News bits: A glimpse of extremist Republican governance; Tweaking the Standard Model of the universe; Etc.
Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, is expected to sign a bill in the next few days that would make it immeasurably more difficult for cities in the state to govern themselves. The bill would strip cities of the ability to set standards for local workplaces, to ensure civil rights, and to improve their environments, trampling on the rights of voters who elected local officials to do just that.
The bill, recently approved by the Texas House and Senate, would nullify any city ordinance or regulation that conflicts with existing state policy in those crucial areas, and would give private citizens or businesses the right to sue and seek damages if they believe there is a discrepancy between city and state. That means no city could prohibit discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. employees, as several Texas cities have done. No city could adopt new rules to limit predatory payday-lending practices. No city could restrict overgrown lots, or unsafe festivals, or inadequate waste storage. Cities would even be banned from enacting local worker protections, including requiring water breaks for laborers in the Texas heat, as Dallas, Austin and other cities have done following multiple deaths and injuries.
Business lobbyists and Republican legislators who have pushed the bill said its purpose was to rid the state of a patchwork of conflicting regulations.
Already the state won’t let cities ban discrimination against low-income renters, and it prohibits them from cutting their police budgets. Dozens of other bills have been introduced to restrict election reforms by Texas cities and counties, including one that would let an official, most likely a Republican, overturn election results in a single place: largely Democratic Harris County, which includes Houston.
The new isotope 39Na, the most neutron-rich sodium nucleus observed so far, was discovered at the RIKEN Nishina Center Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory using the projectile fragmentation of an intense 48Ca [calcium] beam at 345 MeV/nucleon on a beryllium target. Projectile fragments were separated and identified in flight with the large-acceptance two-stage separator BigRIPS. Nine 39Na events [atoms] have been unambiguously observed in this work and clearly establish the particle stability of 39Na. Furthermore, the lack of observation of 35,36Ne [neon] isotopes in this experiment significantly improves the overall confidence that 34Ne is the neutron dripline nucleus of neon. These results provide new key information to understand nuclear binding and nuclear structure under extremely neutron-rich conditions. The newly established stability of 39Na has a significant impact on nuclear models and theories predicting the neutron dripline and also provides a key to understanding the nuclear shell property of 39Na at the neutron number N=28, which is normally a magic number.
Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backslidingAround the world, citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish. Here we present evidence that this behavior is driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first. In an observational study (N = 1,973), we find that US partisans are willing to subvert democratic norms to the extent that they believe opposing partisans are willing to do the same. In experimental studies (N = 2,543, N = 1,848), we revealed to partisans that their opponents are more committed to democratic norms than they think. As a result, the partisans became more committed to upholding democratic norms themselves and less willing to vote for candidates who break these norms. These findings suggest that aspiring autocrats may instigate democratic backsliding by accusing their opponents of subverting democracy and that we can foster democratic stability by informing partisans about the other side’s commitment to democracy.Around the world, antidemocratic leaders are convincing their supporters to vote away their political rights. While 78% of the world’s population reports wanting to live in a representative democracy, democracies continue to erode, with 70% of the population living in autocracies. Citizens in Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary strongly endorsed democracy while casting votes for authoritarian leaders Chávez, Erdoğan and Orbán, respectively. In fact, in Venezuela, citizens who claimed to support democracy the most were no more likely to vote for a democratic candidate.
The puzzle deepens when one considers that the modal form of autocratization today is democratic backsliding, in which democracies die a slow death, leaving years for a democracy-loving public to hold their representatives accountable. Why, then, is democracy slipping away from so many citizens across various regions, cultures and socio-economic conditions?
In the US context, Donald Trump spread misinformation about Democrats subverting democracy from the start. Early in his 2016 campaign, his website stated, “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging this Election!”. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he repeated, “This is a rigged election”. These accusations continued through the 2020 election, and Fox News amplified this message, repeatedly proclaiming the existence of “an all-out effort to depress and suppress the pro-Trump vote”.
Sunday, June 4, 2023
News bits: The universe is going to evaporate; Etc.
Hawking's revised theory Predict Universal Evaporation, New study
Stephen Hawking's most famous theory about black holes has just been given a sinister update — one that proclaims that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate.
In 1974, Hawking proposed that black holes eventually evaporate by losing what's now known as Hawking radiation — a gradual draining of energy in the form of light particles that spring up around black holes' immensely powerful gravitational fields.
Now, a new update to the theory has suggested that Hawking radiation isn't just created by stealing energy from black holes, but from all objects with enough mass.
If the theory is true, it means that everything in the universe will eventually disappear, its energy slowly bled from it in the form of light.
"That means that objects without an event horizon [the gravitational point of no return beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole], such as the remnants of dead stars and other large objects in the universe, also have this sort of radiation," lead author Heino Falcke, a professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "And, after a very long period, that would lead to everything in the universe eventually evaporating, just like black holes. This changes not only our understanding of Hawking radiation but also our view of the universe and its future."
According to quantum field theory, there is no such thing as an empty vacuum. Space is instead teeming with tiny vibrations that, if imbued with enough energy, randomly burst into virtual particles, producing very-low-energy packets of light, or photons.
We present a new avenue to black hole evaporation using a heat-kernel approach analogous as for the Schwinger effect. Applying this method to an uncharged massless scalar field in a Schwarzschild spacetime, we show that spacetime curvature takes a similar role as the electric field strength in the Schwinger effect. We interpret our results as local pair production in a gravitational field and derive a radial production profile. The resulting emission peaks near the unstable photon orbit. Comparing the particle number and energy flux to the Hawking case, we find both effects to be of similar order. However, our pair production mechanism itself does not explicitly make use of the presence of a black hole event horizon.
In Russian Schools, It’s Recite Your ABC’sand ‘Love Your Army’
The curriculum for young Russians is increasingly emphasizing patriotism and the heroism of Moscow’s army, while demonizing the West as “gangsters.” One school features a “sniper”-themed math class.
A new version of the ABC’s in Russia’s Far East starts with “A is for Army, B is for Brotherhood” — and injects a snappy phrase with every letter, like, “Love your Army.”
A swim meet in the southern city of Magnitogorsk featured adolescents diving into the pool wearing camouflage uniforms, while other competitors slung model Kalashnikov rifles across their backs.
A very common argument for socialism that I have seen is ranting about how bad the US is.
But I don't think that makes much sense because many of the supposedly bad things the US does or has don't apply to many other capitalist countries (e.g. healthcare, wars, expensive college education, 2 party system etc.)
Often these are very US centric and specific elements.
More less socialists are saying they are unhappy with how the US is run, they want better healthcare and they hate their politicians.
But that does not justify socialism in any way as many other capitalist countries don't even have the same problems and socialism had rather poor outcomes so far.
So the rational response to this would be to fix issues in their own country instead of dreaming about an unrealistic socialist utopia that never existed.
A hypothesis about AI subverting elections: Clogger vs. Dogger
How AI could take over elections – and undermine democracyImagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election.
While platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube use forms of AI to get users to spend more time on their sites, Clogger’s AI would have a different objective: to change people’s voting behavior.As a political scientist and a legal scholar who study the intersection of technology and democracy, we believe that something like Clogger could use automation to dramatically increase the scale and potentially the effectiveness of behavior manipulation and microtargeting techniques that political campaigns have used since the early 2000s. Just as advertisers use your browsing and social media history to individually target commercial and political ads now, Clogger would pay attention to you – and hundreds of millions of other voters – individually.
It would offer three advances over the current state-of-the-art algorithmic behavior manipulation. First, its language model would generate messages — texts, social media and email, perhaps including images and videos — tailored to you personally. Whereas advertisers strategically place a relatively small number of ads, language models such as ChatGPT can generate countless unique messages for you personally – and millions for others – over the course of a campaign.
Second, Clogger would use a technique called reinforcement learning to generate a succession of messages that become increasingly more likely to change your vote. Reinforcement learning is a machine-learning, trial-and-error approach in which the computer takes actions and gets feedback about which work better in order to learn how to accomplish an objective. Machines that can play Go, Chess and many video games better than any human have used reinforcement learning.Third, over the course of a campaign, Clogger’s messages could evolve in order to take into account your responses to the machine’s prior dispatches and what it has learned about changing others’ minds. Clogger would be able to carry on dynamic “conversations” with you – and millions of other people – over time. Clogger’s messages would be similar to ads that follow you across different websites and social media.The messages that Clogger sends may or may not be political in content. The machine’s only goal is to maximize vote share, and it would likely devise strategies for achieving this goal that no human campaigner would have thought of.
One possibility is sending likely opponent voters information about nonpolitical passions that they have in sports or entertainment to bury the political messaging they receive. Another possibility is sending off-putting messages – for example incontinence advertisements – timed to coincide with opponents’ messaging. And another is manipulating voters’ social media friend groups to give the sense that their social circles support its candidate.
Clogger has no regard for truth. Indeed, it has no way of knowing what is true or false. Language model “hallucinations” are not a problem for this machine because its objective is to change your vote, not to provide accurate information.If the Republican presidential campaign were to deploy Clogger in 2024, the Democratic campaign would likely be compelled to respond in kind, perhaps with a similar machine. Call it Dogger. If the campaign managers thought that these machines were effective, the presidential contest might well come down to Clogger vs. Dogger, and the winner would be the client of the more effective machine.
Political scientists and pundits would have much to say about why one or the other AI prevailed, but likely no one would really know. The president will have been elected not because his or her policy proposals or political ideas persuaded more Americans, but because he or she had the more effective AI. The content that won the day would have come from an AI focused solely on victory, with no political ideas of its own, rather than from candidates or parties.
In this very important sense, a machine would have won the election rather than a person. The election would no longer be democratic, even though all of the ordinary activities of democracy – the speeches, the ads, the messages, the voting and the counting of votes – will have occurred.
The AI-elected president could then go one of two ways. He or she could use the mantle of election to pursue Republican or Democratic party policies. But because the party ideas may have had little to do with why people voted the way that they did – Clogger and Dogger don’t care about policy views – the president’s actions would not necessarily reflect the will of the voters. Voters would have been manipulated by the AI rather than freely choosing their political leaders and policies.
Another path is for the president to pursue the messages, behaviors and policies that the machine predicts will maximize the chances of reelection. On this path, the president would have no particular platform or agenda beyond maintaining power.
It would be possible to avoid AI election manipulation if candidates, campaigns and consultants all forswore the use of such political AI. We believe that is unlikely. If politically effective black boxes were developed, the temptation to use them would be almost irresistible. Indeed, political consultants might well see using these tools as required by their professional responsibility to help their candidates win. And once one candidate uses such an effective tool, the opponents could hardly be expected to resist by disarming unilaterally.
The possibility of a system like Clogger shows that the path toward human collective disempowerment may not require some superhuman artificial general intelligence. It might just require overeager campaigners and consultants who have powerful new tools that can effectively push millions of people’s many buttons.