THE SOUL OF THE ELITE LOGICIAN: The look and feel of professional logic!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2018

The chains of Marley's ghost: Where have all the logicians gone? We asked that question last week.

Our society has badly needed their help over the course of the past thirty years. But every time we waited for rescue, no logician arrived on the scene.

"Hold on!" the voices angrily cry. Academic logicians, those in the academy, don't waste their time on the trifling disputes which form the public discourse!

People die all over the world when our "public logic" fails. But our elite logicians are occupied with loftier concerns, such as the ones which emerge in a passage from Professor Hart's 2010 book, The Evolution of Logic.

We're basically quoting this passage at random. It appears at the start of Chapter 3, Expeditions: Which Sets Exist?

One more point should be made clear. We've selected Hart's book, not because we think it's lousy work, but because we assume it's technically competent, good:

HART (page 59): Frege layered functions. A first-level function assigns objects to objects: doubling is a first-level function that assigns six to three; and the concept:green is a first-level function that assigns truth to all and only the green things. The derivative of the square function is the doubling function, while that of the sine is the cosine, so differentiation is a second-order function. In another example, Frege reads "There are carrots," so its subject is the concept:carrot and its predicate is the concept:existence. Existence is thus a second-level concept whose value is truth at all and only the first-level concepts under which something falls. This allows Frege to refine Kant's criticism of the ontological argument for the existence of God. Kant said that existence is not a predicate, which is heroic, or even quixotic, grammar. Frege could say that since existence is a second-level predicate, it is at the wrong level to be a defining feature of an object like God.

There! That's a taste of what "logic" is like on the modern professional level. Involved in lofty discussions like this, the elite logician has little time for the minor errors which may decide presidential elections and with them the use of deadly force against children all over the world.

Professor Hart's book is part of a six-volume series, The Evolution of Modern Philosophy. The series is published by the Cambridge University Press, the world's oldest publishing house.

As noted, we chose Hart's book because we assume it represents a competent example of modern high logic. The publisher describes the book like this:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS: Examines the relations between logic and philosophy over the last 150 years. Logic underwent a major renaissance beginning in the nineteenth century. Cantor almost tamed the infinite, and Frege aimed to undercut Kant by reducing mathematics to logic. These achievements were threatened by the paradoxes, like Russell's. This ferment generated excellent philosophy (and mathematics) by excellent philosophers (and mathematicians) up to World War II. This book provides a selective, critical history of the collaboration between logic and philosophy during this period. After World War II, mathematical logic became a recognized subdiscipline in mathematics departments, and consequently but unfortunately philosophers have lost touch with its monuments. This book aims to make four of them (consistency and independence of the continuum hypothesis, Post's problem, and Morley's theorem) more accessible to philosophers, making available the tools necessary for modern scholars of philosophy to renew a productive dialogue between logic and philosophy.

According to that blurb, mathematical logic became a recognized subdiscipline in mathematics departments. As an unexplained consequence, philosophers lost touch with its monuments.

That said:

Especially at this time of year, we typically try to stress the distinction between Morley's theorem and Marley's ghost. The distinction tends to be lost on those who lack interest in logic as well as literature.

Is something gained from modern high logic as practiced down through all those years? We're not sure how to answer your thoughtful question.

Plainly, something is lost when a society's logicians ignore the failed logic of daily life, focusing solely on loftier topics. Then too, a question arises when we review the sweep of the upper-end work the Cambridge University Press blurb describes:

Is it possible, just perhaps ever so slenderly possible, that our greatest logicians have never been all that sharp? We can't stop ourselves from asking such questions when we read a book like Rebecca Goldstein's favorably-blurbed 2005 volume, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel.

As we've noted in the past, Goldstein is a highly-regarded novelist, but she's also a ranking philosophy professor. Her book was favorably blurbed by a trio of ranking figures—by Stephen Pinker, by Brian Greene, and also by Alan Lightman.

After that, the book was favorably reviewed by Jim Holt in The New Yorker.

Writing with a novelist's flair, Goldstein discusses the work of Godel, who she describes as "the greatest logician since Aristotle." She also describes Godel's interactions with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose later work was very hot until, according to Professor Horwich, the professional world whose work he critiqued decided to turn him out.

How sharp have our greatest logicians been? We'll scan Goldstein's portraits all week.

Tomorrow: Aping Wittgenstein's tics

Also this: A footnote is appended to the part of Hart's text which we've highlighted. The footnote reads like this:

Perhaps more generally a quantifier is a second-level function whose value at an (n + 1)-ary first-level concept is an n-ary concept, unless n is zero, in which case its value is a truth value, an object. In that case, quantifiers would be second-level functions sometimes having first-level concepts as values and sometimes objects as values. When the value of a first-level concept at an object is truth, Frege says the object falls under the concept. Perhaps the concept:falls-under is a binary second-level concept whose first argument is an object and whose second is a first-level concept. In that case, second-level concepts could also have arguments of different levels.

We selected this book because Hart's fully competent. This is high order "logic" at work.

BREAKING: The soul of the new stampede!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2018

"Lock him up" versus "move on:" We start today with a front-page report from yesterday's New York Times.

The report, by Baker and Fandos, seems accurate and well reasoned. It's the content of this accurate report that pretty much blows our weak minds.

The report concerns "the latest revelations" by special counsel Robert Mueller and by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. It concerns "the portrait" those officials are currently sketching.

The headline goes like this:

Prosecutors Effectively Accuse Trump of Defrauding Voters. What Does It Mean?

Since claims of felonies are involved, that question needs to be answered. In the following passages, Baker and Fandos start to describe the claims those prosecutors are making—claims they're advancing with the help of tiny violins:

BAKER AND FANDOS (12/9/18): In the narrative that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and New York prosecutors are building, Mr. Trump continued to secretly seek to do business in Russia deep into his presidential campaign even as Russian agents made more efforts to influence him. At the same time, in this account [Trump] ordered hush payments to two women to suppress stories of impropriety in violation of campaign finance law.

The prosecutors made clear in a sentencing memo filed on Friday that they viewed efforts by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to squelch the stories as nothing less than a perversion of a democratic election—and by extension they effectively accused the president of defrauding voters, questioning the legitimacy of his victory.

[...]

In the memo in the case of Mr. Cohen, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York depicted Mr. Trump, identified only as “Individual-1,” as an accomplice in the hush payments. While Mr. Trump was not charged, the reference echoed Watergate, when President Richard M. Nixon was named an unindicted co-conspirator by a grand jury investigating the cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic headquarters.

“While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows,” the prosecutors wrote.

“He did so by orchestrating secret and illegal payments to silence two women who otherwise would have made public their alleged extramarital affairs with Individual-1,” they continued. “In the process, Cohen deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election.”

The lawmen sawed on their violins concerning phone banks and door-to-door visits by unpaid campaign workers. Their complaint against Cohen (and Trump) was this:

Through his payments to two women, Cohen "hid alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election.”

We agree with the lawmen in one way. It's possible that the "alleged facts" in question could have had an effect on the way voters decided to vote.

It's precisely for that reason that we have suggested that Michael Cohen receive highest national honors for what he did in this instance. (He could still be sent to jail for the tax evasion in which he engaged, and for his shady conduct in running his taxicab business.)

Why should Cohen receive highest honors? Why do we feel a bit contemptuous of the portrait painted by the high-minded prosecutors in the Southern District?

Again, you're asking good questions! As we start to answer, consider one of the "alleged facts" lying at the heart of this brain-dead sex chase.

Stephanie Clifford alleges that she had consensual sex with Donald J. Trump on exactly one occasion, back in 2006. (He says it didn't happen. That explains the word "alleged.")

Not too long after Clifford did or didn't engage in this one consensual act, she began trolling about, looking for ways to acquire cash for telling the exciting story of her exciting adventure.

Eventually, a presidential election was under way, thus raising the presumptive value of Clifford's exciting story about this exciting act. As Election Day neared in 2016, she tried to score some cash from Slate, then ended up taking $130,000 from Barrister Cohen.

Can we talk? We're among the laypeople who don't understand why Clifford isn't being charged with extortion. There may be a very good legal reason, but we don't know what it is, and the question will never be raised on our own tribe's corporate cable channels.

That said, it's hard to avoid being scornful of those high-minded prosecutors in Gotham. Apparently, they actually want American citizens to cast their votes on the basis of pointless slimy bullshit like this, rather than on the more substantial considerations our culture's elites love to downplay and avoid.

In 2016, Stephanie Clifford was saying that she had had sex, on one occasion ten years before, with Candidate Donald J. Trump. According to the Southern District, this is what we should be thinking about when we select our presidents.

In our view, it's hard to have sufficient contempt for the mindset which pimps such conclusions. To which we'll only add this key point:

It's all anthropology now!

This brings us to something which happened on yesterday's Kasie DC program. To watch the segment in question, click here, then click again on "Court filings reveal Trump as key figure in federal investigation."

Steve Kornacki was guest hosting for Kasie Hunt. At one point, breaking every rule in the book, he asked a skeptical question as he spoke with MoveOn.org's Karine Jean-Pierre:

KORNACKI (12/9/18): Let's take the Cohen campaign finance piece of this.

MoveOn.org—the foundation of MoveOn as an organization was twenty years ago when the president of the United States, at that time Bill Clinton, was accused of committing a felony, of lying under oath, committing perjury to cover up a politically damaging extramarital affair. And MoveOn.org came into being by saying, "You should not be impeached over this. You should not be impeached over committing a felony to cover up an affair. You should be censured and we should all move on from that."

...I'm just asking specifically about Cohen, campaign finance violations, Trump and women. Does that apply here as well?

Uh-oh! If we were supposed to "move on" when Clinton covered up an affair, why should we call out the dogs when Trump does something similar—in the case of Clifford, concerning one consensual act?

So Kornacki surprisingly asked! And in a brilliant non-response, the wonderfully presentable Jean-Pierre spoke for roughly 50 seconds, addressing every conceivable question except the one her host had raised.

At home, we tribals weren't supposed to notice the fact that Kornacki's question had been completely avoided. As for Kornacki himself, he simply "moved on" to a different question. Such behavior is required by Partisan Cable Law.

Every scripted liberal journalist is now jumping up and down about the felony Trump is said to have committed by shutting up a bald-faced hustler who was trying to hijack a White House election. We're expected to be as excited as Charles Blow is at the start of his new column:

BLOW (12/10/18): It is very possible that the president of the United States is a criminal. And it is very possible that his criminality aided and abetted his assumption of the position. Let that sink in. It is a profound revelation.

Last week, prosecutors made clear in a sentencing memo for Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, that Trump himself had directed Cohen to break campaign finance laws.

[...]

[W]e now have an actual, and one assumes provable, crime. A federal crime. And the president is its architect.

Please note: Like all good liberals, Blow now takes allegations by federal prosecutors and treats them as established facts. This is one of the things we "humans" do when we stage a stampede.

Do we now have "an actual federal crime," as Blow thunders today? It's true that Cohen has pled to a crime in this matter. But that's where Alan Dershowitz's recent statements come in.

As everyone knows, violations of campaign finance laws have rarely been prosecuted as felonies. It's also true that Al Capone was pursued on a highly convenient income tax rap.

Blow goes on and on and on, thundering about this "actual crime" and assuming the accuracy of everything any prosecutor has ever said anywhere on earth. This brings us back to the fact that Cohen has pled guilty to a felony in this matter.

Here's what Dershowitz would probably say. And no, this isn't crazy:

Cohen was seeking leniency in his sentencing. For that reason, he pled guilty to the crime the prosecutors wanted him to plead to.

The fact that Cohen pled to that crime doesn't mean that any jury would ever convict that behavior as criminal. As everyone knows (but Blow doesn't say), when John Edwards was prosecuted in a similar way, the jury refused to convict.

That said, we liberals are on a stampede, chasing convenient sex acts. In truth, we're trying to get Donald Trump locked up because we we're too lazy, uncaring and unattractive to create a winning politics.

Have 28,000 children starved to death in a U.S.-linked war in Yemen? As Rachel Maddow proves every night, we liberals don't care about that. We like to chase The Others around. Our species had always been like this.

(Are children being starved to death in your name? See Nicholas Kristof's Sunday column, "Your Tax Dollars Help Starve Children." And no, we won't see this column discussed by our favorite stars tonight. Despite our tribe's famously lofty ideals, it simply isn't done.)

At present, we're trying to reward a two-bit hustler like Clifford for trying to hijack a presidential election. Trust us:

If we keep playing the game this way, before too long our federal elections will be about nothing except the candidates' sex acts, actual or alleged. Beyond that, our system will cease to run on elections. It will run on impeachments instead, and soon it won't run at all.

Men and women will come forward talking about consensual sex acts with Candidate X, Y or Z. Some of these people will be lying and some will be telling the truth, but you can forget those starving children. We'll be entertaining ourselves to death with this excitement instead, much as we're doing today.

Our species is strongly inclined to be silly, unintelligent, fatuous, tribal and low. Within the realm of the mainstream press, we've been proving that for at least thirty years. (In 1987, top journalists literally hid in the bushes to try to catch Gary Hart.)

How silly can our species get? We give you the Dimmesdales of the Southern District, conning us good as they play their silly sad though high-minded songs on their small violins. They care about those phone bank folks, or so they may even believe.

Extra-credit assignment: Our prisons are full of innocent people. Making reference to the current excitement, compare, contrast, analyze, dice, puree, dissect and discuss.

THE MISSING LOGICIANS FILE: Digest of reports!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2018

New chapter starts tomorrow: Where have all the logicians gone over the course of the past thirty years? Why haven't logicians stepped forward to help as our discourse has floundered and failed?

You're asking some very good questions! Below, you see links to last week's reports from the missing logicians file:

Tuesday, December 4: A la recherche des logiciens perdus! When 7 plus 5 equaled 12.

Wednesday, December 5: Russell and Wittgenstein, up in a tree! An anecdote runs through it.

Thursday, December 6: Acolytes aped Wittgenstein! Years later, the Horwich Conjecture.

Friday, December 7: He built upon the logic of Frege and Russell! But what kind of "logic" was that?

Tomorrow, we'll start a new report. We'll call it the paradox file.

It will take us back to Professor Goldstein's book about "the greatest logician since Aristotle." We won't talk much about Godel himself. Instead, we'll review Goldstein's work.

None of this will actually matter, of course. It seems to be maybe too late for that—and we humans don't seem so inclined.

BREAKING: The anthropology of public discourse!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2018

The way our minds tend to work: Just how "rational" are we humans? How do our minds seem to work?

It's all part of the anthropology of the modern public discourse! Two basic questions are involved:

What sorts of topics do we choose to talk about? And when we talk about those topics, what kind of sense do we make?

Answers! In the journalistic realm, we often talk about topics which are inane—about pork rinds, earth tones, broccoli, personal notes and such. Then too, when we talk about serious topics, our efforts are often quite feeble.

On balance, just how "rational" are we? We'll look at three current examples.

Colbert King on the state of the schools:

Is his weekly column in today's Washington Post, Colbert King discusses a serious topic—the state of the D. C. Public Schools. But when he discusses Lewis Ferebee, the mayor's nominee to be the new chancellor, he very weirdly says this:

KING (12/8/18): Which gets us back to Ferebee and the challenges he faces should he get the post. He would be the city’s sixth permanent school leader since 2000, The Post reported. There’s a reason for the turnover. The job’s a killer. Not only must the chancellor tackle the daunting problem of the wide achievement gap between students from affluent households and low-income families (a problem that remains unsolved in the Indianapolis public school system that Ferebee led for the past five years), he also will encounter a governance structure so indirect and complicated that it only could have been designed by a Rube Goldberg devotee.

According to King, "the daunting problem of the wide achievement gap" between affluent kids and low-income kids "remains unsolved in the Indianapolis public school system that Ferebee led for the past five years."

That's a very strange thing to say. It's also typical of the way our upper-end journalists have talked about low-income schools for at least the past fifty years.

King seems to suggest that Ferebee should have solved that daunting problem during his five years in Indy. In fact, that daunting problem has "remained unsolved" all over the United States for as long as anyone has bothered to track such matters.

That daunting achievement gap has been a deeply intractable problem. Despite this blindingly obvious fact, cosseted journalistic elites love to pretend that the problem exists because people like Ferebee have weirdly failed to wave their magic wands at it.

(This was the full platform of former chancellor Rhee. By her reckoning, she would stamp her feet and yell at the teachers about this problem and they would magically fix it.)

Remarks of this type make no earthly sense. They betray a deeply detached insouciance which dates to the court of Marie Antoinette.

Despite this fairly obvious fact, uncaring journalistic elites love to offer such "analyses." This low-IQ posturing has dominated upper-end journalism for the pats fifty years.

Quinta Jurecic spots the collusion:

Quinta Jurecic is managing editor of Lawfare, the high-profile legal affairs blog of the Brookings Institution. As such, she writes from the top of the legal pile within Insider Washington.

Last Sunday, Jurecic offered a puzzling analysis piece in the New York Times Sunday Review. Could her reasoning have been any fuzzier? All the way down, we'd say no.

Alas! A stampede is currently under way, and when we humans stage a stampede, we tend to abandon our intellectual standards, such as they were to begin with. Jurecic is looking for guilt in the warrens of Trump, and so, she reasons like this:

JURECIC (12/2/18): From the day the Mueller investigation began, opponents of the president have hungered for that report, or an indictment waiting just around the corner, as the source text for an incantation to whisk Mr. Trump out of office and set everything back to normal again. The evidence that the special counsel has so far made public is damning enough. Yet even as the investigation seems to gather momentum, it has become increasingly clear that whatever findings Mr. Mueller reaches will be only a small piece of a much larger political puzzle.

The special counsel's office has already produced a hefty pile of evidence. The indictments of a Russian ''troll farm'' called the Internet Research Agency and of Russian military intelligence officers involved in the hacking of Democratic Party emails told a detailed story of a Russian effort to stir up American political passions. The documents revealed by Mr. Corsi suggest that he and Mr. Stone—who was in regular contact with Mr. Trump at the time—might have known in advance of planned releases by WikiLeaks of hacked documents.

Not enough collusion for you? Consider Mr. Cohen's latest plea agreement...

To what extent is intellectual rigor thrown away when public stampedes occur? Consider what Jurecic says there:

Jurecic says that some documents suggest that Corsi and Stone might have known in advance of planned releases by WikiLeaks of hacked documents. At this point, she blows right past the words "suggest" and "might" to say this constitutes "collusion."

By the way, collusion in what? Jurecic doesn't say.

Without forgetting "suggests" and "might," let us ask a question. Would there be anything legally wrong with foreknowledge of the type which might have occurred? Jurecic doesn't address that point.

Instead, she acts like this state of affairs, which might obtain, would constitute major collusion. It seems to us that she reasons in similar slipshod ways all the way through her piece.

This comes from the top of our legal elite. But so we humans tend to behave when one of our stampedes is on.

Brian snarks again:

Last evening, Brian Williams gave us liberal viewers something we very much like. He aimed some pleasing snark at The Others—in particular, at one such man.

Brian had his snark pants on. He spoke with legal analyst Joyce Vance:

WILLIAMS (12/7/18): Hey, Joyce, on all of this, the sum total of all of this, I'm not trying to get you in a tussle with a Harvard law professor whose back may be sore after the water weight from carrying the water for this president, it`s been observed of late. But here now we`ll talk about on the other side Alan Dershowitz on his view of the sum total of today.

DERSHOWITZ (videotape): Well, I think we`re seeing a coming attraction to what the report will be. And I think the report will set out a circumstantial case based on all the lying that's taking place. A circumstantial case for arguably political sins. But I don't see any crimes.

WILLIAMS: Joyce, he doesn't see any crimes. Do you?

So cool and so utterly pleasing! Instead of debating this Harvard professor in person, Brian decided to open a big can of snark and shoot it all over the place.

Helping things along, he edited down what the offensive Trump-lover had said.

For what it's worth, we watched Dershowitz's entire segment with Tucker Carlson last night. All in all, we thought the professor's varied remarks made fairly decent sense.

By the way, has Dershowitz been "carrying water" for Trunp? As part of that varied presentation, Fox viewers were actually allowed to hear this:

CARLSON (12/7/18): We may be losing perspective of this. I just want to remind our viewers on our way out that you are not a figure on the right, you were not a Trump voter, you're merely defending what you think is our tradition of law. And, and I appreciate that.

DERSHOWITZ: And I've been saying the same thing for 55 years. I—

CARLSON: Yes. I've noticed.

DERSHOWITZ: I've been saying the same thing for 55 years. I've expressed the same criticism of prosecutors whether they go after Democrats or Republicans.

CARLSON: Amen.

Elsewhere, Dershowitz has routinely said that he didn't vote for Candidate Trump; that he donated money to Candidate Clinton; and that he approves of virtually none of President Trump's policies or behaviors.

Dershowitz doesn't have many good things to say about Donald J. Trump. But when we humans stage a stampede, we like our demons undiluted, the flavor Brian served.

Just for the record, back in 1999 and 2000, Brian kept playing these reindeer games against the psychiatrically shaky Candidate Gore, who was said to be wearing too many polo shirts out on the trail. This was said to be a fiendish play for female voters and a sign of a disordered mind.

That's what Brian's owner wanted back then (GE CEO Jack Welch). Last night's snark was what the new owners want from Brian now.

By the way, this is the way Vance responded to Brian:

WILLIAMS: Joyce, he doesn't see any crimes. Do you?

VANCE: You know, I disagree with him very strongly. I think that there are all sorts of crimes here, including a crime that lands at the president's doorstep.

And this issue of well, there's only circumstantial evidence is absolutely silly, because prosecutors rely on circumstantial evidence all the time...Prosecutors use circumstantial evidence all the time. You don`t have to have a smoking gun in every case.

Here, where you've got witness after witness lining up, and where you've now got evidence that there wasn't just suddenly a Trump Tower meeting out of the blue with Russians in 2016 but rather a course of conduct between folks in the Trump campaign and the Russian government, or at least government-linked, that spanned years, it's not so much smoke and mirrors. It's looking like hard evidence.

"It's looking like hard evidence," Vance said. But hard evidence of what crime? For whatever reason, Vance didn't say, and Brian didn't bother to ask.

This is the kind of cable product you're served after a stampede starts. The low-IQ conduct is so common that viewers will rarely notice.

For ourselves, we'd love to see Brian interview Dershowitz and Vance at the same time. Instead, you were given a barrel of snark last night, just like the snark this big baboon aimed at the wardrobe of Candidate Gore so many times in the past.

Children are dead all over Iraq. In his service to CEO Welch, Brian worked hard toward that end.

That said, it's all anthropology now. What kind of animals are we really? What sorts of things do we do?

BREAKING: Tiffany Kapanda goes to college!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2018

How much can you see in a face? We were lucky enough to see the last segment of last evening's The Last Word. After a bit of videotape, Lawrence started as shown:

VIDEOTAPE (12/6/18): My name is Tiffany Kapanda and I'm 18 years old. Now I have a chance at college, studying bachelor of arts in political science.

O'DONNELL: I met Tiffany two years ago when she was in high school in Malawi. Tiffany was attending one of the best high schools in Malawi, a boarding school where I also met Joyce Juzali, who recited a poem for us that many of you might remember.

Joyce also came to the United States earlier this year and joined me here on the set in New York. I saw Joyce again on my recent trip to Malawi during Thanksgiving week.

Joyce is still doing very well in high school thanks to the scholarship that you have helped provide with your generous contributions to the K.I.N.D Fund, the partnership that I created with MSNBC and UNICEF to provide desks to schools in Malawi and scholarships for girls to attend high school in Malawi, where the girls' graduation rate is much lower than the boys'.

To watch the whole segment, click here.

We strongly suggest that you watch the videotape of Tiffany Kapanda. Also the tape of her grandmother, Rose Nathenda, by whom she's being raised.

What can you see in two people's faces? We'll suggest you'll see things you won't often see over here in the States.

Be sure to watch all the way to the end: Be sure to watch all the way to the end. It's hard not to like what you'll see there:

O'DONNELL: I asked Tiffany what it feels like now to be a role model for students back at her high school who are hoping to go to college.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAPANDA: It feels great, and they also motivate me. I feel like I can do better so that I can encourage them much better, much greater than just being a college student. I can go to work and tell them that here I am.

O'DONNELL: Yes. Do you think a lot of girls don't realize that this is possible if they work hard enough?

KAPANDA: Yes, there are a lot of them out there. You know, in Malawi, there is the issue of women not being able to do well at college. So most of them, they look down on themselves. They think they cannot do it. They think they don't deserve going to college. They just want to get married and move on in life.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'DONNELL: Tiffany is on her way, thanks to her hard work in high school and thanks to her grandmother, who made her a dedicated student.

You'll see exceptional faces during last evening's segment, reflecting the fuller range of the possibilities of our planet-wide human life.

WHERE HAS ALL THE LOGIC GONE: He built on the logic of Frege and Russell!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2018

But what kind of logic was that? In yesterday's report, we reintroduced The Horwich Conjecture—a naughty claim by Professor Horwich, he of NYU.

Oof! According to Horwich, Wittgenstein has fallen into disfavor among "professional philosophers" (Horwich's term) because of the inconvenient conclusions he reached.

According to Horwich, Wittgenstein voiced "extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy—perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject" at all.

According to Horwich, Wittgenstein came to believe that "the whole idea of" philosophy, as traditionally practiced and understood, was "based on confusion and wishful thinking."

The field's traditional problems were actually "mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking." Or so Wittgenstein is said to have said.

According to Professor Horwich, Wittgenstein basically said that the traditional field had never really existed at all, except inside the muddled minds of its traditional giants, a group which included an earlier version of himself. In the passage shown below, Horwich completes his conjecture:

HORWICH (3/3/13): Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy—perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject—it is hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her life’s work is confused and pointless?

According to Horwich, Wittgenstein said their work was confused and pointless. And so they turned him out.

Horwich lives inside the academy; here on our own sprawling campus, we don't have that type of access. That said, we'd long wondered if some such syndrome helped explain Wittgenstein's apparent declining visibility and influence within the professional guild.

More significantly, we think Horwich is basically right in his account of what Wittgenstein came to allege. And we're inclined to think that Wittgenstein was basically right in saying goodbye to all that in the way Horwich describes.

Key point! Horwich is speaking here of "the later Wittgenstein," the author of the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953). He isn't speaking of "the early Wittgenstein, author of the briskly titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the 1921 text which established him as an international star when he was still quite young.

(By most accounts, Wittgenstein finished writing the Tractatus in 1918, the year he turned 29.)

If Horwich is right, it's the later Wittgenstein the academy has dispatched, not the early version. Meanwhile, concerning that lone text by the earlier Wittgenstein, we'll offer a possibly comical point:

When Professor Kenny wrote his 1973 book, Wittgenstein, it had been twenty years since the appearance of Philosophical Investigations. That was the later Wittgenstein's definitive text--but as he started his book, Kenny described the way Wittgenstein's views were being aired in philosophy departments worldwide.

Through a quote by Professor Ryle, Kenny even alluded to the comical way Wittgenstein's eccentric mannerisms were being widely aped by acolytes within the field. The later Wittgenstein was still very hot. Today, Horwich says that has all changed.

Today, we want to call your attention to a tiny, possibly comical paradox concerning the early Wittgenstein's famous book. We'll start with some of the eccentric conduct which always set Wittgenstein apart.

In the first chapter of his 1973 text, Kenny notes that the early Wittgenstein thought he had solved all philosophical problems when he published the Tractatus in 1921. This seems like a peculiar idea, but it seems fairly clear that that's what Wittgenstein thought.

"With perfect consistency, once he had completed the book he gave up philosophy," Kenny notes, echoing what Professor Von Wright had written in his 1958 Biographical Sketch.

(Von Wright: "The author of the Tractatus thought he had solved all philosophical problems. It was consistent with this idea that he should give up philosophy.")

Wittgenstein gave up philosophy. Kenny writes that, after leaving Cambridge, Wittgenstein gave away his (very) large inheritance and worked as a village schoolteacher for six years. After that, he "gave up schoolteaching to work for a while as a monastery gardener."

He then spent two years designing a house for his sister in Vienna. (Apparently, she hadn't given away her inheritance.) But uh-oh! Here's what happened next:

KENNY (page 9): During this period he was introduced to Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University [in Vienna] and future founder of the Vienna Circle. With him, and with Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann and Herbert Feigl, he began once again to discuss philosophy...

Wittgenstein had by now grown dissatisfied with some of the doctrines of the Tractatus, and in 1929 he returned to Cambridge to continue his philosophical work as a research student. He submitted the Tractatus–already internationally recognized as a classic–as a Ph.D. dissertation; and after a unique viva voce examination conducted by Russell and Moore he was awarded the degree.

As of 1929, the Tractatus was "already internationally recognized as a classic." This could perhaps be seen as odd because of something Kenny had already said about the book:

KENNY (page 4): The twenty thousand words of the Tractatus can be read in an afternoon, but few would claim to understand them thoroughly even after years of study. The book is not divided into chapters in the normal way, but consists of a series of numbered paragraphs, often containing no more than a single sentence. The two most famous are the first ("The world is all that is the case") and the last ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"). Some of them have proved easier to set to music, or to illustrate in sculpture, than to paraphrase. The style of the paragraphs is concise and economical, devoid of decoration, sparing in examples. By comparing the text with the Notebooks and the Prototractatus we can see how Wittgenstein refined and refined his thought to the essential elements. The result is austerely beautiful, but uncommonly difficult to comprehend.

As of 1929, the book had already been recognized as a classic. But as of 1973, when Kenny wrote his book about Wittgenstein, the Tractatus was still "uncommonly difficult to comprehend."

Even in 1973, some parts of the Tractatus were still "easier to set to music...than to paraphrase," Kenny said. But so what? Forty-four years earlier, the world of professional philosophy had agreed on the greatness of the text. This might suggest the possibility that there's a tiny kernel of truth to the naughty things Horwich has said.

In fairness, we're proceeding from two characterizations by Professor Kenny. That said, Kenny goes on to say that "the central doctrine [the Tractatus] conveys is the famous picture theory of meaning"—a famous doctrine he proceeds to describe in a manner which takes us several leagues beyond the realm of complete total incoherence. Within the realm which Horwich describes, this is how the greats tend to roll.

(How incoherent is Kenny's account? For details, just click here. After that, just click this.)

Question:

What kind of establishment hails as a "classic" a text which no one can understand or paraphrase even some forty years later? Based upon the pair of portraits offered by Professor Kenny, a skeptic might suggest there's a hint of truth to the picture Professor Horwich painted in 2013, in which the world of professional philosophy is built upon "the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking"—and is willing to settle for "classic" texts it can neither paraphrase nor comprehend.

Is it true, what Horwich says? Have the bulk of professional philosophers come to regard the later Wittgenstein as a bit of a joke? Have they adopted this view because he wanted to throw their work away? Because he renounced his own earlier work, puzzling work the philosophy world had seen as a "classic" text?

Answers to these questions lurk in Rebecca Goldstein's 2005 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. Justifiably, Goldstein mocks the Wittgenstein acolytes who began imitating his eccentric mannerism as early as the 1930s.

That said, Goldstein seems to adopt a lightly mocking tone toward Wittgenstein himself. As she does, she frequently buys into the puzzling types of work his later efforts tended to undermine.

That early work was built upon the efforts of Frege and Russell. But dear lord, we have a question:

What kind of "logic" were they constructing? Was there ever any good reason to build upon Frege and Russell?

We're telling this story with a sigh many years hence in the age of Trump. For thirty years or more, we've badly needed the help of logicians as our mainstream journalists have cavorted and played and created a reign of misstatement, confusion, inanity.

Our discourse has been sliding toward the sea, but here have all the logicians been? Out here in the public realm, we've badly needed the help of such figures. But they've been off in their own tiny worlds, discussing "the set of all sets" and the logic of 2 plus 2 magically equaling 4.

Where have all the logicians been as we've slid into the era of Trump? And when we consider the muddled work from which the later Wittgenstein finally departed, is it possible that our greatest logicians were never especially sharp?

Coming: "The set of all sets not members of themselves" and other peculiar concerns

BREAKING: Bernie Sanders gets it right!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2018

The values of our tribe: Last night, speaking with Anderson Cooper, Bernie Sanders got it right.

This almost never happens on cable. Asked about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, here's what Sanders said:

COOPER (12/5/18): Joining me now is Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Sanders, thank you so much for being with us. Why do you think the president won't admit the crown prince was involved in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi?

SANDERS: Well, I think the president, sadly enough, has a great fondness for authoritarian-type leaders around the world, whether it's Putin in Russia or Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, or other authoritarian leaders.

Second of all, it is possible that the president, himself, through Trump enterprises, may have some financial dealings in Saudi Arabia.

But Anderson, I think I agree with, you know, what the other senators have said, what Graham and the other senator, Corker, have said. But here is the more important point.

What MBS did, and what the Saudis did, to Jamal Khashoggi is unspeakable and an absolute disgrace. But I will tell you what is even worse, which we don't talk about enough, is what the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen has done to 28 million people in that country, all right?

Khashoggi's death was terrible. But in the last three years, 85,000 children have starved to death. And according to the United Nations, you got millions of people who are facing imminent starvation. There are 10,000 new cases of cholera breaking out every single week.

And the resolution that I authored along with Senator Mike Lee and Senator Chris Murphy which I hope will come up tomorrow or next week, we got it out of committee, basically says that the United States has got to end its participation in this horrible, destructive war led by Saudi Arabia.

Have 85,000 children (been) starved to death in Yemen? From way back on November 22, here's the relevant news report in the New York Times.

The most interesting part of Sanders' statement was this: "We don't talk about [this] enough." Perhaps more accurately, we don't talk about things like this at all, not even Over Here within our own self-impressed tribe.

When that Times report appeared, it rated one single passing remark on MSNBC programs from 5 PM through midnight.

(Those are the only programs MSNBC transcribes. The one remark occurred on the November 21 Hardball.)

When a Senate vote about the Yemen war occurred on November 28, three MSNBC shows gave the matter of the mass starvation a mention (Lawrence, Chris Hayes, Hardball). Meanwhile:

As we reported a few weeks ago, Yemen simply doesn't exist on the Maddow Show. The utterly pointless, past behavior of Spiro T. Agnew does.

We keep insisting that we're the good people. Tribal enthrallment is like that.

Let's take a look at the record: According to Nexis, Yemen has been mentioned on the Maddow Show only two times this whole year (August 15, November 19).

In each instance, Yemen was mentioned in passing by one of the top program's guests. Stating what is blindingly obvious, these are corporate values at work.

Discussing Agnew is pleasing and fun. Big stars are paid millions to do it.

WHERE HAS ALL THE LOGIC GONE: Acolytes aped Wittgenstein!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2018

Years later, The Horwich Conjecture: At the start of his 1973 book, Professor Kenny offered a quick overview of his subject.

Kenny was a ranking player in the world of academic philosophy. His book, which bore a one-word title, was published by Harvard University Press.

The book was simply called Wittgenstein. In his opening paragraph, Kenny offered this:

KENNY (page 1): "The philosopher," wrote Wittgenstein, "is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher." Throughout his life Wittgenstein stood outside philosophical schools and despised contemporary fashions of thought; by his own work, whether he wished to or not, he created a new community of ideas. He published very little and avoided any kind of publicity; but the problems he discussed with a small group of pupils are now aired in universities throughout the world. "Philosophers who never met him," Gilbert Ryle wrote at the time of his death in 1951, "can be heard talking philosophy in his tone of voice; and students who can barely spell his name now wrinkle up their noses at things which had a bad smell for him." In the two decades since 1951 nine posthumous volumes of writings have been published, and the bibliography of studies of them contains well over a thousand titles.

We'll call attention to several parts of that thumbnail portrait.

On the one hand, Kenny is presenting Wittgenstein as a highly influential figure—and yes, Wittgenstein is often called a "logician," including by Kenny himself.

Wittgenstein "created a new community of ideas," Professor Kenny said. In the years since Wittgenstein's death in 1951, nine new volumes of his writing had been published. Well over a thousand studies of his works had appeared.

In our experience, Wittgenstein was very hot at this general point in time. When we ourselves were a college student, we took the undergraduate Wittgenstein course as a junior, in the spring of 1968.

We took the graduate seminar on Wittgenstein as a senior. We did our senior thesis on one part of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations that same year.

Philosophical Investigations was the one volume the later Wittgenstein had agreed to publish before his death from cancer. As of the general time in question, Wittgenstein was very hot within the world we knew.

That said, had Wittgenstein really "created a new community of ideas?" We'd be reluctant to say that.

For the most part, the later Wittgenstein's published work was puzzling and hard to explain. Before his death, he himself seemed to feel that his ideas were constantly misunderstood.

("I should have liked to produce a good book," he wrote in his introduction to Philosophical Investigations. "This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.")

That said, if Wittgenstein hadn't produced a truly "good book" or a set of ideas which others could parse, he did seem to have produced a world of imitators. Professor Kenny suggested as much with the quote from Ryle which refers to the many "philosophers" who could "be heard talking philosophy in [Wittgenstein's] tone of voice."

Ryle published that observation in 1971. By then, or so it's said, Wittgenstein's tortured, eccentric mannerisms were being widely aped all around the somewhat unimpressive world of philosophy graduate students.

We ourselves were struck, in the graduate seminar we took, by how little the Harvard graduate students brought to the study of Wittgenstein as of 1969. On the other hand, it's widely said that acolytes were widely imitating his behaviors. In her 2005 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, Rebecca Goldstein offers many amusing accounts of this cultish behavior.

Such conduct is hardly unknown. At one point in the early 1990s, the comedy world was full of young male performers who sounded exactly like Jerry Seinfeld—but Ryle was describing the cultish conduct of the world's allegedly brightest minds.

Should the western world's future logicians conduct themselves like aspiring comedians? As a basic anthropological point, is it possible that our sharpest minds have never been all that sharp?

At any rate, Kenny gave the clear impression that Wittgenstein had been highly influential. At the start of his 1958 "Biographical Sketch" of Wittgenstein, Professor Georg Hendrik Von Wright voiced the same idea:

VON WRIGHT: On 20 April 1951 there died at Cambridge, England, one of the greatest and most influential philosophers of our time, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Kenny used Von Wright's essay as the primary source for his own opening chapter. Von Wright said Wittgenstein was highly influential. Kenny said the same thing.

That said, was Wittgenstein influential in some significant way? When we look around at our failing, deeply dangerous discourse, we'd say he plainly was not.

Philosophical Investigations, his definitive later text, is a highly opaque piece of work. That said, it contains techniques of clarification which have gone almost wholly unexplored and unapplied, even as the public discourse has disintegrated around us.

When we read Goldstein's 2005 book, we were amazed to think that a ranking philosophy professor could adopt some of the approaches she took some 52 years after the Investigations appeared. To our eye, it wasn't that Wittgenstein's techniques of clarification hadn't entered the general culture. These important tools didn't seem to have penetrated the philosophy world itself.

Then too, there's what Professor Horwich said. We'll call it The Horwich Conjecture.

He spoke in 2013, in an essay for the New York Times "philosophy" blog, The Stone. By now, we'd wondered about this point for decades. Below, you see the start of what the professor said:

HORWICH (3/3/13): The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy—what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject—concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them—a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others.

Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment—certainly not many professional philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on—and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking...

Oof! According to Horwich, Wittgenstein was "influential" no more, not even within the business.

Uh-oh! According to Horwich, Wittgenstein held that classic philosophical problems "are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking." In fairness, this echoes the suspicions of college freshmen down through the annals of time. But within the industry, Horwich said, Wittgenstein's work is now regarded with contempt because of the way he rejected its age-old standard practices.

Presumably, "philosophers" were imitating his mannerisms no more! According to Horwich, the thrust of his thinking had sunk in at some point, producing this general outlook:

HORWICH: Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy—perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject—it is hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her life’s work is confused and pointless? Thus, even Bertrand Russell, his early teacher and enthusiastic supporter, was eventually led to complain peevishly that Wittgenstein seems to have “grown tired of serious thinking and invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.”

Is Professor Horwich allowed to say that? Along the way, he even took an undisguised shot at Lord Russell!

According to Horwich, the industry has rejected the man who challenged its foundations. By that time, we'd been wondering about this possibility for a long time. We'd even tried to bring this premise onto the comedy stage, quickly discarding it as too complex for the medium.

Now, a major professor had risen to say that Wittgenstein had been discarded so that other professors could just keep teaching their conceptually muddled old courses. When people respond to clarification this way, its potential benefits are unlikely to spread.

Back in the day, they'd aped his mannerisms. According to Professor Horwich, they ended up throwing him under the bus.

This leaves us where we are today. For at least the past three decades "the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking" have come to rule the childish work of the upper-end mainstream press corps.

Our upper-end press corps just isn't real sharp. Again and again, then again and again, we've needed the help of the nation's logicians.

But alas! Like "the greatest logician since Aristotle," some of these unhelpful players are still working on 2 + 2. Horwich says the rest of the gang decided to save their careers.

Tomorrow: But why did they want to do that?

BREAKING: Twice-a-day negativity hurts!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2018

But tribal true belief kills: We've reached the point where it's painful to be negative two times a day. For that reason, we're having a hard time forcing ourselves to work from the current play list we're maintaining for our afternoon slot.

On that list:

This Atlantic report by Annie Lowery is pitiful, sad, astounding, fully dementedly tribal. There's no way Lowery doesn't know better. The Atlantic should be ashamed of itself for publishing this pitiful tribal narcotic in the form it took.

Last Friday night, Rachel Maddow's report on K. T. McFarland was absolutely astounding. In the September report from which Maddow worked, two Washington Post reporters reported this about McFarland, a former aide to Michael Flynn:

"McFarland and her lawyer Robert Giuffra convinced the FBI that she had not intentionally misled the bureau..."

Also this:

"Mueller's team appears to be satisfied with McFarland's revised account."

In short, the FBI and the Mueller team are OK with McFarland's conduct. But at times of tribal war, so what? Maddow just kept insisting last Friday night that McFarland "lied" to these orgs, even after reading that copy from her sole source report. To watch her do this, click here.

In the realm of Maddow, The Others are always dishonest and bad. No other conclusion will ever be reached. Our warlike species is wired this way, but few are wired as strongly as strongly this way as our own corporate hound from Hell.

(Just a guess: Her consultant-directed grinning and chuckling is designed to hide this part of her temperament.)

The largest event in the current press is the novelization of the late President Bush. We expect to look at that topic next week.

But inside our species' pre-rational brains, it's always novels all the way down. We live to build worlds of Us and Them. Within the childish world of our upper-end press, Trump has made Bush a clear "Us."

Is man [sic] really "the rational animal?" Just take a look around:

No.

It figures: Lawrence can't stop telling Rachel how great her report really was.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE LOGICIANS GONE: Russell and Wittgenstein, up in a tree!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2018

An anecdote runs through it: Just for the record, Bertrand Russell, the 3rd Earl Russell, led a complex, varied life. The leading authority on that life starts its account like this:

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense." Russell was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom.

In the early 20th century, Russell led the British "revolt against idealism." He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics...

In Principia Mathematica, Russell wanted "to create a logical basis for mathematics." But why would you want to do that?

We'll set that question aside for another day. For now, we'll note a few basic points:

Very few general readers will have any idea what it means to say that Russell led "the British 'revolt against idealism.' " Suffice to say that "idealism" is a technical term in that statement, and that the leading authority defines British idealism as follows, if only in part:

Though much more variegated than some commentaries would seem to suggest, British idealism was generally marked by several broad tendencies: a belief in an Absolute (a single all-encompassing reality that in some sense formed a coherent and all-inclusive system); the assignment of a high place to reason as both the faculty by which the Absolute's structure is grasped and as that structure itself; and a fundamental unwillingness to accept a dichotomy between thought and object, reality consisting of thought-and-object together in a strongly coherent unity.

There! The "idealism" against which the future Lord Russell staged a 20th century jailbreak involved "a fundamental unwillingness to accept a dichotomy between thought and object, reality consisting of thought-and-object together in a strongly coherent unity."

Does reality really consist of thought-and-object together in a strongly coherent unity? If you think you have any idea what that particular puddle means, we think you may have a lot to learn!

As do we all, of course.

At any rate, Russell reportedly helped to stage a revolt against those "idealist" doctrines. As you can see from the first chunk of text we've posted, he is reportedly "widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians."

It's said that he, along with several others, "is considered to be one of the founders of analytic philosophy." Ludwig Wittgenstein's name gets mentioned as one of Russell's fellow founders.

An anecdote is lurking there. Some silliness may run through it.

The anecdote comes from Russell's 1956 memoir, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays. In the anecdote, he describes an early exchange between himself and Wittgenstein, a younger man who had come to Cambridge to study under the already famous logician.

Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1912, at age 22 or 23. We'd have to say that, at least to our ear, Russell's anecdote has a somewhat silly, perhaps even slightly upper-class feel:

RUSSELL: At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said: "Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?" I replied, "My dear fellow, I don't know. Why are you asking me?" He said, "Because, if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher." I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was a complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term he brought me the fulfillment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence, I said to him: "No, you must not become an aeronaut."

That anecdote appears at the start of Professor Kenny's 1973 book, Wittgenstein. We'll confess that, at least to us, the anecdote sounds perhaps a bit silly. Might it open a window into the less-than-perfect world of our "greatest logicians?"

The various portraits in Russell's book are advertised as having been drawn "from memory." Sometimes, memory takes real world events and turns them into stories which are perfectly shaped.

For us, this anecdote has that feel. Consider:

Did Russell really make his judgment about Wittgenstein's future on the basis of having read one sentence? In fairness, it makes a wonderful tale. But what could that one sentence possibly have said?

Did Russell really say to Wittgenstein, "My dear fellow, I don't know" [if you are a complete idiot]? To us, that has a slightly silly feel, but perhaps that's the way the premier logicians in Cambridge spoke back then.

Kenny presented this anecdote at the start of a book published by the Harvard University Press in 1974. He didn't seem to think the anecdote was silly, strange or sculpted.

He also didn't include the place Lord Russell's anecdote went next. Russell's text continues as follows:

RUSSELL (continuing directly): After reading only one sentence, I said to him: "No, you must not become an aeronaut." And he didn't. He was not, however, altogether easy to deal with. He used to come to my rooms at midnight, and for hours he would walk backward and forward like a caged tiger. On arrival, he would announce that when he left my rooms he would commit suicide. So, in spite of getting sleepy, I did not like to turn him out. On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, "Wittgenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?" "Both," he said, and then reverted to silence.

We now seem to be dealing with a tragic state of affairs—with a problem we'll name below.

At any rate, as Russell's story continues, he reverts, at least to our ear, to that slightly detached, slightly unfeeling, perhaps slightly upper-class air. He tells a tale about a world that's different from those where you live:

RUSSELL (continuing directly): However, we did not meet only at night. I used to take him long walks in the country round Cambridge. On one occasion I induced him to trespass with me in Madingley Wood where, to my surprise, he climbed a tree. When he had got a long way up a gamekeeper with a gun turned up and protested to me about the trespass. I called up to Wittgenstein and said the man had promised not to shoot if Wittgenstein got down within a minute. He believed me, and did so.

This has the air of the perfectly sculpted uber-celebrity tale, brilliant logician edition. For our money, Lord Russell blows right past a state of affairs cited by Professor Von Wright in his "Biographical Sketch" of Wittgenstein, a person he knew as a friend.

Von Wright's sketch appeared as part of Norman Malcolm's 1958 book, Wittgenstein: A Memoir. At one point, Von Wright says this about his friend:

VON WRIGHT: It is probably true that he lived on the border of mental illness. A fear of being driven across it followed him throughout his life.

It seems to us that Russell is perhaps a bit flip about this state of affairs. Then too, we've always felt that our tortured geniuses should get their torments attended to, then come back and be geniuses later, when they were happy and well.

Russell and Wittgenstein are listed among the last century's greatest logicians. Godel "has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle," but he died of self-starvation, having spent his life wondering about the perfect timeless existence of circles and the logic of 2 plus 2 somehow equaling 4.

We raise the question of great logicians in the context of Donald J. Trump—but also in the context of the gruesome, deeply destructive "mainstream journalism" of the past thirty years. When we've needed the help of persuasive logicians, we've routinely been met with a vast cold silence, like something out of the most despairing Bergman film.

This has happened again and again, leading us toward this dangerous place. Dearest citizens, is it possible?

Could it be that our lordly and tormented "greatest logicians" have perhaps never been all that?

Tomorrow: A current professor's conjecture

BREAKING: How do we know about 7 + 5?

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2018

Goldstein got it right: In this morning's report, we reminisced about our introduction to the problems, or perhaps to the alleged problems, of academic philosophy.

Eventually, the later Wittgenstein would suggest that most of these apparent problems are simply the product of conceptual confusion—even that there may be no such discipline as "philosophy" at all.

Setting that aside for another day, let's return to the particular "problem" we cited this morning:

How can we know that 7 + 5 = 12?

In late September, back before the Kavanaugh hearings dragged us back in, we posted Rebecca Goldstein's answer to that question. Quick background:

When Jim Holt wrote his New Yorker essay about "the greatest logician since Aristotle," he was reviewing Goldstein's 2005 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. This morning, we posted the passage by Holt which we love—the passage in which Holt describes Godel's love of "Platonism," along with his concern about the mysteries of 2 + 2.

We had read Goldstein's book in real time. When we did, we were surprised to think that a ranking philosophy professor could take many of the approaches she took some 52 years after the publication of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

That said, Goldstein addressed the question about 2 + 2 (and 7 + 5) early on in her book. As we noted in late September, her presentation went exactly like this, and we thought it was largely spot on:

GOLDSTEIN (page 17): The rigor and certainty of the mathematician is arrived at a priori, meaning that the mathematician neither resorts to any observations in arriving at his or her mathematical insights nor do these mathematical insights, in and of themselves, entail observations, so that nothing we experience can undermine the grounds we have for knowing them. No experience would count as grounds for revising, for example, that 5 + 7 = 12. Were we to add up 5 things and 7 things, and get 13 things, we would recount. Should we still, after repeated recountings, get 13 things we would assume that one of the 12 things had split or that we were seeing double or dreaming or even going mad. The truth is that 5 + 7 = 12 is used to evaluate counting experiences, not the other way around.

We think that's basically right. Back in that late September post, we simplified this eternal question by discussing the logic of 1 + 1 = 2. Same basic idea!

How was this matter presented to us college freshmen back in the fall of 1965? We'd love to see film of those unloved lectures. We have no idea what was said.

One other philosophical problem: We're fairly sure that Professor Nozick exposed us to six "problems in philosophy."

We can't recall what most of those alleged problems were. One, though, involved "free will."

How do you solve the philosophical problem of free will? First, you'd have to see the specific way the problem was being presented.

Having said that, one beginning approach to the philosophical problem of free will goes something like this, and no, we aren't joking:

Free will? People in prison don't have it.

Our nation was heading toward Vietnam. As a point of curiosity, what were the nation's many logicians discussing and doing that year?

Going back to Godel and those he followed, were the world's greatest logicians doing things which actually mattered? Moving ahead to the later Wittgenstein, did their ruminations about the timeless existence of circles and numbers even make any real sense?

We pitiful freshmen were skeptics that year. Did we pitiful scrubs get it right?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE LOGICIANS GONE: A la recherche des logiciens perdus!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2018

When 7 plus 5 equaled 12: Where have our logicians been?

You're asking a very good question! We've badly needed the help of logicians as our public discourse has steadily slid to its current dangerous place.

In the mid-1990s, we needed help untangling the semantic pseudo-discussion which passed, for almost two years, as the "Medicare debate" which was driving Newt Gingrich along.

Starting in March 1999, we needed help with the logic of paraphrase as mainstream journalists kept inventing strange, psychiatrically troubling misstatements by Candidate Gore. This bullshit went on for twenty straight months and sent George Bush to the White House.

Right now, at this very juncture, we could use the help of a J. L. Austin type (Sense and Sensibilia; How to Do Things With Words) concerning the logic of terms which (falsely) appear to be synonyms.

What does it mean when every misstatement is lustily turned into a lie? Among other things, it means we're trying to start tribal war, at a time when a person who seems to be mentally ill controls all the ultimate weapons.

(Beyond that, we're rejecting the wisdom of thousands of years of "crowdsourcing" among the many generation who created the verbal distinctions we now, in our lusty tribal pique, lustily throw away. But so it goes among our self-impressed kind—among us sub-rational animals.)

Where have the logicians been as this downward spiral has occurred? Could it be they've been working, not in the garden, but tragicomically deep in the weeds?

Could it be that they've been in the weeds? Because we love the passage so much, we're going to post it again today. It comes from "made man" science writer Jim Holt, explaining in The New Yorker (and also, this year, in a new book) what "the greatest logician since Aristotle" was worried about as of the 1930s:

HOLT (page 8): Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians. In the philosophical world of nineteen-twenties Vienna, however, it was considered distinctly old-fashioned. Among the many intellectual movements that flourished in the city’s rich café culture, one of the most prominent was the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers united in their belief that philosophy must be cleansed of metaphysics and made over in the image of science. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, their reluctant guru, the members of the Vienna Circle regarded mathematics as a game played with symbols, a more intricate version of chess. What made a proposition like “2 + 2 = 4” true, they held, was not that it correctly described some abstract world of numbers but that it could be derived in a logical system according to certain rules.

Less than a century ago, our greatest logician since Aristotle had been "seduced by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind."

For that reason, he was involved in a great debate with other major logicians. They were fighting about how we can know that 2 plus 2 equals 4.

The world was proceeding toward its second "great war." Our logicians were thus occupied.

Should it seem strange to think that our greatest logician had been seduced by such a strange idea, was locked in such an oddball debate? We'll explore that question as our essays proceed. But for today, we add an autobiographical note:

Long ago and far away, we confronted a version of this "philosophical question" as a mere college freshman.

It was the fall of 1965. Planning to major in philosophy, we took the introductory course—Phil 3, "Problems in philosophy."

Our professor was 26 years old; he may have looked a bit younger. Meanwhile, one of the "problems" we studied was this:

How can we know that 7 plus 5 equals 12?

We'll admit that this happened at Harvard. This may account for the harder arithmetic problem we were asked to review.

That said, this was our introduction to the types of "problems" which constitute the world of academic philosophy. Possibly owing to widespread ignorance, many students in the class seemed unhappy with this young professor, who, just to complete the record, seemed like the nicest guy in the world.

In the Harvard of that day, students were supposed to applaud at the end of every lecture. At the end of the semester's final lecture, students were supposed to deliver a standing ovation, as if to wonder what their worthless lives could have been like before they were lucky enough to take transformative course.

That didn't happen in this instance. As the lectures dragged along, the applause lessened from class to class. Eventually, it totally died.

Most strikingly, no one applauded even after the final lecture. We remember feeling bad for our very nice but extremely young professor. We remember thinking that we were watching this young man's career implode.

Students in that introductory class tended to think that we were pursuing fairly ridiculous "problems." Years later, we occasionally treated the problem of 7 plus 5 equaling 12 in the occasional comedy venue.

We would recall the anguish of our teaching assistant, Mr. [NAME WITHHELD], who truly seemed to be tortured by the question of 7 plus 5 adding up to 12.

Who are these "problems" problems for? we would wittily ask at such times. It all depends on the delivery, of course, but we still like that line.

Full disclosure! The career of that very pleasant, extremely young professor wasn't imploding that year. That good-natured fellow was the late Robert Nozick. Within a few years, he was the biggest thing in American philosophy, though we've never quite understood why.

Like several others, we decided we wouldn't major in philosophy after taking that course. We majored in History and Lit for one miserable year, then returned to the fold at the start of our junior year.

That spring, we took the undergraduate Wittgenstein class. The gentleman's name is mentioned in the passage from Holt which we've posted above. We'll briefly touch on the work of "the later Wittgenstein" before this week's foofaw is done.

That said, some questions remain:

Who was that problem a problem for? And why in the world was our greatest logician involved in "Platonist" thoughts about where numbers and circles reside? Why were others fighting with him about this? Does any of this make sense?

Our logicians have left us on our own. This has helped lead us to Trump.

Meanwhile, Professor Harari has said an odd thing about our warlike species. He has said this in his giant best-seller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Harari has said that our "intolerant," possibly "genocidal" species runs on gossip and fiction. Is it possible that our greatest logicians have just never been all that sharp?

Tomorrow: Lord Russell's anecdote

Another passing tradition: At that time, students had to wear a coat and tie to eat in the college's dining halls. One day, we encountered a freshman debating the working-class Cambridge woman who checked students in for meals.

For his jacket, he wore a windbreaker. Beneath it, he was wearing a white t-shirt. A shoelace draped around his neck constituted his "tie."

The woman wasn't letting him in. "How do you know that isn't a tie?" he was officiously asking.

That working-class Cambridge woman was a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife. That horrible kid had a lot to learn (as do we all). But which were the courses for that?

BREAKING: Comparing the greatest House victory margins!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2018

Three years out of college: Democrats won control of the House in last month's elections. That said:

Was it the biggest such victory ever? In an admittedly snarky performance, that's what we liberals were told:

MAJOR CABLE NEWS HOST (11/28/18): The reason I'm being a little snarky is because all this comes just as Nancy Pelosi led her party to an electoral victory that will return them to power in the House with the largest margin of victory in the popular vote of any party ever in the midterm election. No party ever in the history of the country has won a midterm election by a larger margin than Pelosi's Democrats just did in the House.

Is that true? Did Democrats win the House "with the largest margin victory in the popular vote of any party ever in a midterm election?" Is it true that "no party ever...has won a midterm election by a larger margin?"

In even a slightly rational world, no, it isn't true. According to the leading authority, here's where this year's numbers currently stand:

Popular vote, 2018 House elections:
Democrats: 60.2 million votes (53.3%)
Republicans: 50.8 millions votes (44.9%)
Margin of victory: Roughly 9.4 million votes (8.4%)

That was a substantial victory margin. But in quite a few earlier midterm elections, Democrats won the popular vote for the House by even larger margins:

Victory margin for Democrats, mid-term House elections:
1958: 12.4%
1970: 8.7%
1974: 16.8%
1978: 8.9%
1982: 11.8%
1986: 9.9%

We've checked, and all those years were part of American history. Democrats won by a substantial margin last month. But they won midterm House elections by larger margins in each of those earlier years.

(None of this actually matters, of course. Unless you dislike getting conned.)

You'll note that we're going by percentage of the vote, not by the total number of votes. We're doing that for an obvious reason:

As the U.S. population grows, the electorate gets bigger every year. It doesn't make sense to compare the total vote in 2018 (population approaching 330 million) to the total vote in 1970 (205.1 million).

That would be like comparing dollar amounts down through the years without adjusting for inflation. As a general matter, it makes no sense to perform such comparisons.

Why then did a cable news star offer that pleasing message? Simple! She was providing the kind of tribal happy talk which brings viewers back for more.

Then too, her staff may have been working from this NBC News news report, in which a youngish NBC journalist performed the pointless, inadvisable "total vote" comparison.

That youngish journalist compared the total number of votes in House elections down through the years, not the victory margin by percentages. Statistically, this procedure makes no sense. But the journalist in question is only three years out of college.

The journalist in question is on the youngish, less experienced side. Such hiring tends to keep labor costs down and corporate profits high. This allows NBC to pay its dissembling cable stars millions of dollars per year, although you aren't allowed to know how big their salaries actually are.

That cable star was feeding viewers a big dish of happy talk. The Democrats' win had been substantial; she said it had been historic.

She went on to offer a silly complaint about some reporting on the House election done by the New York Times. She was comparing an apple to an orange, but her result was pleasing and therefore good. But then, perhaps due to all the wealth and fame, the work performed by this cable star has been sliding for a very long time.

(To watch the whole segment, click this.)

We liberals! We're being pandered to all the way down. Does anybody actually think this repetitive conduct makes sense?

More such tribal foofaw tomorrow. In these highly tribal times, such bullsh*t by us "rational animals" pretty much never stops.

WE RESUME OUR PREVIOUS JAILBREAK: It's all the absence of logic now!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2018

The silence of the logicians: Back in the fall—back in September—we were in the process of staging a personal jailbreak.

In effect, we were saying goodbye to most of this.

We were finally giving up the ghost! We were abandoning a badly failed idea—the idea that there's some conceivable point to critiquing the work of the press corps.

By the fall of 1997, we thought the situation was so bad that we decided to start this site. We could say that we were prophetic—we could say it, but it would be wrong.

When we started planning this site, we thought things were extremely bad—so bad that, not unlike Howard Beale, we just couldn't take it any more.

That said, we had no idea how bad things were going to get.

In the shorter run, we had no idea that the press corps' conduct could descend to the level displayed all through Campaign 2000. We refer to the "war against Gore" the mainstream press waged for twenty straight months, starting in March 1999.

We had no idea that the mainstream press could engage in conduct that awful. We certainly had no idea that this rancid, brain-dead "journalistic" culture could be sustained and furthered to the point where we'd end up with a President Trump, the situation which came to pass in the wake of Campaign 2016.

Back in 1997, a true Cassandra might have seen these slow trains coming. Around here, we did not. We already thought the corps' conduct was stunningly bad. We had no idea that it could get as bad as it quickly did.

Along the way, this site did manage to prove one thing. We proved that there are certain situations, and certain facts, which, in accord with Hard Pundit Law, will never be discussed or examined by the mainstream press.

(We think this is what Chomsky describes as "manufactured consent," though we haven't read the book and therefore aren't real sure.)

We aren't the only ones who have proven that there are certain facts and situations the press will never report, discuss or acknowledge. We think others have made this same demonstration, among them Gene Lyons, Lyons and Conason, Paul Krugman, Kevin Drum.

As if by rule of law, certain extremely basic data will never be reported. Certain situations will never be described.

What explains this peculiar state of affairs? We'll let Kreugman explain it as only he can. In early August 2004, he started a column like this:

KRUGMAN (8/3/04): A message to my fellow journalists: check out media watch sites like campaigndesk.org, mediamatters.org and dailyhowler.com. It's good to see ourselves as others see us. I've been finding The Daily Howler's concept of a media ''script,'' a story line that shapes coverage, often in the teeth of the evidence, particularly helpful in understanding cable news.

For example, last summer, when growth briefly broke into a gallop, cable news decided that the economy was booming. The gallop soon slowed to a trot, and then to a walk. But judging from the mail I recently got after writing about the slowing economy, the script never changed...

Krugman's example to the side, the basic point he stated that day was accurate. Much of what we read in the mainstream press is, in fact, a product of novelization and "script."

To an astounding degree, our upper-end journalists do work from "story lines that shapes coverage, often in the teeth of the evidence." When the preferred story line is contradicted by even the most basic evidence, the evidence, by force of law, is going to disappear.

These facts are highly counterintuitive, but they're facts nonetheless.

No matter how basic the evidence may be, the evidence will disappear. This explains why you've never seen a competent presentation of public school test score data, whether in the domestic or the international arena.

It explains why you never see the data concerning our country's astonishing per person health care spending. It explains why Drum's discussions of lead exposure couldn't find their way into the national discourse surrounding events in Flint.

It explains why you'll never read a real discussion of the press corps' conduct in Campaign 2000. It explain why Rachel Maddow took a dive on one key topic after another during the campaign which sent Donald J. Trump to the White House.

(This dates to the fall of 2012, when Maddow took a dive on Benghazi. For years later, the Maddow Show applauded Comey when he savaged Candidate Clinton in July 2016! Maddow ducked the emails for two solid years.)

How many times did Krugman explain that Paul Ryan is "The Flimflam Man?" For the first such column, just click here. He followed up many times.

But good grief! Even writing from the nation's highest platform, Krugman couldn't get other liberal pundits to follow him down that disallowed path. In a similar vein, consider today's puzzling column by Jon Meacham, which we'll likely discuss later on this week.

(Why was Bush the admirable upstanding guy? Why wasn't it Dukakis?)

Similarly, Comey was a "made man" among Washington insiders. This explains why the Maddow Show, along with everyone else, refused to take him on.

(Remember when she interviewed Colin Powell and forgot to ask him about his U.N. presentation regarding Iraq? Same basic idea!)

"It's not at all that I dislike Mr. Trump," Maddow said in June 2015, in the fourth year of Trump's reign as king of the nation's birthers. "It's not qualitative at all." Later, she tried to sell us on the greatness of her drinking buddy, "the great Greta can Susteren," queen of Trump's Fox News enablers during those grotesque, hideous years.

These are the kinds of plays our corporate hustlers make. This explains why you've never seen a serious analysis of the long years of gong-show work by such influential press corps figures as Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd. There's nothing such players can say or do will will ever get discussed.

However counterintuitive they may be, these patterns of conduct are very real. And make no mistake:

Unlike every other corporate or professional guild, the mainstream press corps is in position to control what gets said about itself. For this reason, we should have accepted a basic fact a long time ago:

Criticism of the mainstream press is fundamentally pointless. The guild is going to type what it will—after which, the Jeffrey Toobins will go on TV to offer their fake mea culpas.

It was on this basis that we said, at the start of the year, that "it's all anthropology now." Various guilds are going to tell us the stories they like. Nothing will ever change that.

All that remains is a study of the reasons why our various guilds and tribes choose to toy with basic facts in the ways they do. What makes us flounder and flail in the particular ways we do? It's all anthropology now!

By the middle of the year, we were adding a second question: Why have we received so little help from the nation's many logicians?

Campaign 2000 turned on the logic of paraphrase. No one stepped forward to comment.

Before that, the endless Gingrich-Clinton Medicare debate was a fully semantic pseudo-discussion. That fell in the province of the logicians. No one emitted a sound.

Nothing is going to stop our descent toward Mister Trump's War, which may take various forms in the months and years ahead. For ourselves, as we wait for the shoes to drop—for Adam Schiff's subpoenas to be ignored; for Supreme Court rulings to be ignored; for elections to be postponed or cancelled—we're going to return to a question we were asking this fall:

Where the Sam Hill are the nation's logicians? Where have these people been?

What have the logicians been? In an unintentionally comical effort, "Best Book of the Year" author Jim Holt gave us part of the answer in a new collection of essays this year. In the middle of the last century, "the greatest logician since Aristotle" was trying to explain the logic of 2 + 2 = 4!

Then, along came the later Wittgenstein. Tomorrow, we'll start turning our lonely eyes back towards him.

How do we know that 2 + 2 = 4? All across our universities, the logicians and the philosophers are diddling with such manifest nonsense.

Where have the logicians been? Tomorrow, we'll return to that topic. We'll be working in the garden, as Luther is said to have said!

For today, we recommend Charles Blow's new column, in which he lists the kinds of disasters which may be headed our way in the next two years.

We had no idea it could get this bad—and at the time, it had already gotten so bad that we decided to start this site. It's all the absence of logic now! We'll return to this topic tomorrow.

Full disclosure: We're aware of two serious critiques of Maureen Dowd's influential work.

In 1992, Katherine Boo really did play the Cassandra role in her prescient Washington Monthly essay, "Creeping Dowdism."

Before too long, Boo found her way out of daily journalism. She now writes serious books, the kind that everyone gives awards and no one reads or discusses.

Sixteen years later, Clark Hoyt savaged Dowd for her endless gender-crazy attacks on Candidate Hillary Clinton. Referring to an article about sexist political coverage, Hoyt offered this about Dowd:

HOYT (6/22/08): I think a fair reading suggests that The Times did a reasonably good job in its news articles. But Dowd's columns about Clinton's campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, [William] Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

There was more, but you get the idea. For ourselves, we think Clinton was a fairly lousy candidate in the last campaign. But twenty-four years of crackpot garbage from people like Dowd explains why Trump's in the White House.

Writing at the end of a long, distinguished career, Hoyt was serving as the New York Times' public editor when he wrote his piece about Dowd. You saw no follow-up discussion anywhere else.

Dearest darlings, it just isn't done—and it never will be. It's all anthropology now—plus the absence of logic.

BREAKING: The pleasurable embellishment rules!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2018

Goodbye to [most of] this: We raised this question yesterday, at the end of our post.

Is the highlighted statement true? That was the question we asked:

"The reason I'm being a little snarky is because all this comes just as Nancy Pelosi led her party to an electoral victory that will return them to power in the House with the largest margin victory in the popular vote of any party ever in the midterm election. No party ever in the history of the country has won a midterm election by a larger margin than Pelosi's Democrats just did in the House."

Is the highlighted statement accurate? Setting Pelosi's role to the side, did Democrats just record "the largest margin victory in the popular vote of any party ever in the midterm election?"

(Asking our question a different way, is that second formulation true? Is it true that "no party ever in the history of the country has won a midterm election by a larger margin than the Democrats just did in the House?")

For the record, it doesn't exactly matter if those statements are true. Nothing is ever going to turn on the question raised by those statements.

That said, we'd say that those statements reflect the unfortunate culture of endless tribal embellishment. At best, we'd call those statements bogus. If we live in even a mildly rational world, we'd say that they're simply false.

The culture of casual reflexive embellishment has been with us for a long time. At the time we started this site, it dominated the work of the upper-end mainstream press corps.

Twenty years later, it plays an increasingly significant role in the frequently unimpressive culture of our own liberal/progressive world. It also dominates the culture found over there at Fox.

We don't think this widespread culture is helpful, smart, constructive, respectful or wise. That said, it's utterly pointless to oppose this culture.

Rather plainly, embellishment and novelization are what we rational animals like. That culture won't be going away. We tend to take numbers and stand in line in order to consume it.

On Monday, we're going to flip the focus of this site back in a different direction. But even as we're saying good-bye to [most of] this, we'll show you the times, in modern history, when a party recorded higher victory margins in House midterm elections than the Democrats did this year.

One of our two major parties did so in these midterm elections: 1958, 1970, 1974, 1978, 1982 and 1986. (That same party came very close in 2006.) Those elections were part of "the history of the country," no matter what you've been told.

(For what it's worth, that same party achieved a higher victory margin in these presidential-year House elections: 1960, 1964 and 2008.)

Pleasing embellishment makes us feel good. It's part of the porridge "cable news" pours down our rational throats.

That said, this form of pleasing embellishment, on the part of the press, sent George W. Bush to the White House in 2000. He proceeded to send the U. S. army to Iraq.

Embellishment can be a deadly disease. But dear lord! How good it can feel!

Like rust, it never sleeps: The desire for tribal pleasure never sleeps. We expect to discuss this recent professional-level stretcher next week, though only in our badly devalued afternoon slot.

Only 49 cents on the dollar! That said, do you see the way the methodology works? Is some sort of actual gain actually lurking in this?