SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2024
Plus, the 700 pages: Why did Candidate Harris (narrowly) lose this year's election after her (remarkably truncated) three-month campaign?
Given the way we humans are built, a large number of Blue American pundits have been offering simple, one-part explanations. With respect to any such effort, we'd offer two suggestions:
First, try to avoid explanations which don't even seem to make sense.
Also, try to get your pronouns in line. More specifically, try to avoid referring to us as them.
Last night, Jonathan Capehart sat in for Lawrence O'Donnell on The Last Word. At one point, this exchange occurred:
CAPEHART (11/22/24): You know, Speaker McClinton, there is this notion that Democrats lost because they leaned too far into identity politics, and that a stronger populist economic message was needed.
Do you agree with that assessment?
SPEAKER MCCLINTON: Absolutely not. We need to be honest. This nation does not want a woman in charge. That is what we need to agree upon.
We need to agree upon the fact that people understood everything our former president stood for, all of the promises he made on that campaign trail abut dismantling our democracy. The deadly insurrection that he provoked on the sixth of January in 2021.
Nevertheless, all of the things that occurred, they decided they didn't want what will probably be one of the most accomplished women to ever run to be the president—a former prosecutor both locally and at the state level, a member of the United States Senate, the first woman vice president.
That is what we need to acknowledge. This nation decided they [sic] didn't want that.
CAPEHART: How are you going to make sure they hear that?
And so on from there.
Who the heck is Speaker McClinton? To watch the full six-minute segment, you can just click this. To see the exchange in question, you should move ahead to the 2:40 mark.
According to Speaker McClinton, everyone who voted for Candidate Trump understood everything he ever said. And not only that—the 76.8 million people in question all understood the things he said in the same way she did!
Beyond that, we'll cite two historical facts:
In 2016, a preponderance of "this nation" did in fact vote to put "a woman in charge!" And in this year's election, the accomplished woman who was forced to conduct that shortened campaign came within a point and a half of winning the nationwide popular vote again.
Beyond that, we'll restate the point we made in the face of a recent statement by Bill Maher:
Blue Americans, when we refer to "America" or to "this nation," it probably helps to get our pronouns right. On an obvious political basis, it's better to refer to "this nation" as us—not to describe it as "them."
If you want to know who Speaker McClinton is, you can click right here. But so it frequently goes when those of us in Blue America continue laying the groundwork for additional future defeats/
We Blues! We tend to seek the one explanation for this year's (narrow) defeat. There can only be one such reason, and that reason doesn't have to make any obvious sense.
Also, the blame must all be laid directly on The Others—on the eternal Them. By the time we get through emitting our jumble, "this nation" won't even include the 74.4 million of Us!
Are we built for this line of work—for conducting a sensible discourse? For some time, we've been suggesting that the answer is no.
As further evidence from a different sphere, consider this wonderfully comical passage from Stephen Budiansky's book about the greatest logician since Aristotle. For background, see yesterday afternoon's post.
We focus here on a sidelight concerning Bertrand Russell. In the highlighted passage from page 108, Budiansky almost seems to be chuckling a bit at Lord Russell's expense:
Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
[...]
SHAKY FOUNDATIONS
In deciding to take on the fourth of the challenges Hilbert had put forth at the Congress of Mathematicians in 1928, Gödel placed himself at the very center of the storm over mathematical foundations, which had broken with a deeply unnerving discovery Bertrand Russell had made at the turn of the century while working on Principia Mathematica. Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems. The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."
Say what? Russell and Whitehead spent more than seven hundred pages proving the fact that 1 + 1 = 2?
Budiansky seems to be chuckling a bit at this point. On the next page, he describes the way Russell wrestled with the discovery which came to be known as "Russell's Paradox."
This new paradox brought Russell up short. It seems to us that Budiansky may be chuckling again:
"Russell's Paradox," as it came to be known, echoed paradoxes that had been around since antiquity. The prototype is the Liar's Paradox, attributed to Epimenides the Cretan, who asserted, "All Cretans are liars." Russell noted that this was akin to the conundrum posed by a piece of paper on which the sentence, "The statement on the other side of this paper is false" is written on one side, and the sentence "The statement on the other side of this paper is true" on the other.
"It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend his time on such trivialities," Russell later recalled, and "at first, I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradictions quite easily, and that there was some trivial error in the reasoning." The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was a flaw in the reasoning too deep to be ignored.
Alas! Russell decided the contradictions couldn't be overcome, which led to the 700 pages and to the remarkable weight of the eventual text. According to Budiansky, Russell and Whiehead's "massive manuscript, with its complex notation which could only be written out laboriously by hand, had to be carted in a four-wheeler cab to the offices of the Cambridge University Press when it was finally done."
Did any of this activity actually make any sense? We're speaking here of received intellectual giants, but Budiansky seems to be chuckling a bit, and we can't say the answer to our question is obvious.
At any rate, before Hitchcock filmed the 39 Steps; Russell had produced the 700 pages. Those pages were built upon an apparent conundrum which lurked within an ancient paradox which, to be perfectly honest, was and is the embarrassing equivalent of a silly parlor trick.
That said, we humans have always tended to reason in such ways, from our greatest scholars on down to our current political tribunes. It isn't clear, in any way, that we were built for this type of work.
Why did people vote for Trump? Given the tens of millions of people involved, there may be more than one answer to that question.
Last night, one tribune offered a remarkably simple story, much like Thom Hartmann before her. In our view, her story didn't even seem to make sense.
ReplyDelete"Why did "America" vote for Trump?"
Because America wants America made great again.
And also because America wants liberal perverts and liberal idiots out of its government.
Say what you will about Republican voters electing a self-admitted sexual predator to be the President, but you can't say it isn't perfectly "on-brand".
DeleteThe largest group of Americans are always the non-voters. They include the roughly 33% of voting-eligible public who didn't vote, but also the many people who are not eligible to vote and yet affected by our government. Less than half of Americans did not vote. What did those people want or understand? It is right for McClinton to be specific and to call Trump voters "they" and not "us."
DeleteHere is the meaning of the word "sic":
ReplyDelete"used in brackets after a copied or quoted word that appears odd or erroneous to show that the word is quoted exactly as it stands in the original"
Here is Somerby's use of the word today:
"This nation decided they [sic] didn't want that."
Somerby also says:
"Also, try to get your pronouns in line. More specifically, try to avoid referring to us as them."
So, Somerby disagrees with the author's use of the pronoun "they" and shows his disapproval by misusing the word [sic] to suggest that the author McClinton has made an error when he chooses deliberately to say "they" instead of "us" in his own writing.
That is inappropriate. If Somerby wishes to argue that we are all doing something, instead of some other group doing it, Somerby should make the argument explicitly. His cute suggestion that the author has made an error while saying exactly what he meant to say, is dirty pool. It is the way Somerby usually avoids taking responsibility for his own opinions, for explicitly saying what he means, instead of using language inappropriately to force readers toward a conclusion he has not argued.
This is annoying of Somerby but, more importantly, it is wrong to do this. It is a propaganda technique of the sort that Somerby himself used to highlight 20 years ago, but no uses himself, shamelessly, to manipulate readers. And no, it isn't funny or cute. It is just dishonest.
Funny how McClinton’s claim has evidence on offer, whereas Somerby routinely makes sweeping claims about “Blue America” and human behavior, without a shred of substantiation.
DeleteSomerby is a very sensitive person when it comes to issues like racism and sexism, preferring to put his head in the sand; he’s just another sad old man.
"According to Speaker McClinton, everyone who voted for Candidate Trump understood everything he ever said. And not only that—the 76.8 million people in question all understood the things he said in the same way she did!"
ReplyDeleteThis is unfair to McClinton, who merely says "people" understood, not ALL people. It is Somerby who has broadened her assertion to include all Trump voters, not some of them, as would be the normal understanding of someone listening to her speak.
When someone says "people who chew gum dispose of it irresponsibly" are they saying that each and every person who chews gum does this? Our common understanding would be that some or perhaps most who chew gum would follow the generalization, but not each and every person without exception, as Somerby claims about McClinton's statement. Somerby is violating the pragmatics of language use and attaching an unspoken modifier "all" to the word "people" which more commonly is understood as "some people" or perhaps "most" or "many people". How do we know what people understand? Linguists study such things. Has Somerby studied the literature about how quantitative modifiers are used or implied in speech? Of course he hasn't. This is again how Somerby plays dirty pool with language to criticize yet another black female (Speaker Joanna McClinton of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives) who Somerby doesn't bother to introduce to readers who didn't watch Capehart's show.
And this shows the way Somerby will climb out on the thinnest of limbs to malign a black woman (his favorite of all targets in his essays here) for saying them instead of us, while speaking of Trump voters. Are Trump voters really typical of the entire nation, with their less than 50% of the popular vote? No, but Somerby really really wants to assert that "they" (those Trump voters) are now "us" because Trump won an election on a slim margin. And why is Somerby fighting to preserve Trump's assumed mandate like this? You'll have to ask him, but he'll never tell you.
"Who the heck is Speaker McClinton? To watch the full six-minute segment, you can just click this."
ReplyDeleteMaking readers click through a link and watch a 6 minute segment just to find out who the woman is, is demeaning to her. She deserves to be identified in text with her full title, not glossed over as if her position does not matter. This is the kind of shabby treatment women and minorities receive, part of how we are kept in our place and diminished, even when we hold credentials that should be respected.
This is what a micro-aggression looks like. It isn't the same as being denied service at a lunch counter, but it is the way white men constantly remind black women that we don't matter, aren't "real" elected representatives, aren't worthy of being paid serious attention. Somerby should be ashamed of this behavior, but it is how he dog whistles to his white supremacist readers that he is one of them (yes, them).
"Why did people vote for Trump? Given the tens of millions of people involved, there may be more than one answer to that question."
ReplyDeleteAnd given that multitude of reasons for selecting Trump, how can they be called "us"?
"Are we built for this line of work—for conducting a sensible discourse? For some time, we've been suggesting that the answer is no. "
ReplyDeleteBecause Somerby has done no reading about what we people are like and how we think, he tends to base these conclusions on his own capacities. I am willing to allow that Somerby is not built for conducting sensible discourse, but I think he is atypical of the rest of humanity, being both elderly and perhaps never much of a thinker (failing philosophy course after course, by his own admission, while at Harvard). Now he struggles with Godel, in his late 70s, but wants to blame humanity, not his own personal limitations. That isn't sensible thinking at all.
"Russell produced the 700 pages. Just as it ever was, Blue America's "cable news" produced that last night's (well-intentioned) exchange.
ReplyDeleteWe humans! We love love love our simple stories. "
If it takes 700 pages for Russell to explain his theories, how simple can they be? Cable news fills up days of programming discussing complex issues from a variety of perspectives (at least on the center/left, perhaps just one perspective on the right). How simple are current events and news? Not very, based on cable news content and opinion. How can Somerby see the multitude of viewpoints, the body of facts, statistics, and ongoing disputes and call them one simply story that we all love? Talk about not making any sense! I suspect it is Somerby who is trying to impose simple stories on his readers, but unfortunately, he is too morose for his narrative to stick. Who on earth would want to believe the depressing mess that Somerby keeps peddling? Only the paid trolls and fanboys with their own agenda. The rest of "us" are not buying it.
When the poster comes here to remind you Republican voters only care about bigotry and white supremacy, let's all remember to act out-raged, call the poster names, and not provide one thing that could possibly make someone think the poster is incorrect.
ReplyDelete