House of Eratosthenes

So we’ve gone from “Russia Russia Russia” to “Nazis Nazis Nazis” to “Statues Statues Statues”…now we’re all going to veer sharply away from our prior silly deliberations about “hate speech” versus free speech, and whether it’s okay to acknowledge more than one side in a dispute is bigoted & hateful and has violent intent, when one of those sides has something to do with Nazis. And with the desperate plight of our fellow country-persons in Texas and the gut-wrenching, life-altering crisis they face, re-focus on what really matters. Melania Trump’s shoes.

Well, if I may; just a parting though or two about the “peaceful” protests. The argument that it’s somehow wrong to call out hatred and bigotry on both sides when it does indeed exist on both sides, has failed. The phrase “peaceful protest” is way past overused; it has failed too. Those protests were not peaceful. They weren’t even protests, they were riots. And the protests themselves have failed. The protesters did not succeed in making their point because they did not have a point to make. “I’m unhappy with the way things are going and I want things to be different” is a gripe, not a point.

But Her Shoes This is all very black-and-white thinking. These days I hear a lot about how certain people, myself included, are doing a grave disservice to ourselves and to others by engaging in this simplistic, binary thinking, so I’ll consume the balance of my writing-space here to address that directly. It isn’t a lack of comprehension that dissuades me from reacting to these “shades of gray” I seem to be ignoring. It’s experience. I can’t play the shades-of-gray game. I know better.

It first became popularized when a certain presidential candidate got nailed in the arena of public discourse, quite correctly, for being an indecisive “waffler.” Since he was a democrat, the media set about quickly to help rehabilitate his image, and plied us with a bunch of pablum like…get your puke bucket ready…this, for example.

Watching [then-Senator John] Kerry debate an issue can be “a little bit like at a tennis match, watching the ball going back and forth,” says David Leiter, his former chief of staff. “He is curious. … He’s engaged and thoughtful. He always struggles to get it right.”

Adds Blakely Bundy: “He doesn’t think in black and white. He thinks in shades of gray because he is so knowledgeable.”

The nuance that typifies Kerry’s public statements is there as well in his life portrait, which is painted with blended colors and dappled brushstrokes rather than sharp lines.

The whole rest of Kerry’s campaign went like that, which provides some valuable insight into why he lost. Americans, on both sides of the aisle, elect leaders because they’ve picked up some sense of confidence that once the leader is a leader, he’ll vote the way they themselves would’ve voted on…something. For some voters it’s a single-issue, for others it’s many issues, with some sort of value system or priority scheme riveting it all together. The Kerry campaign tried to make it into an asset that their candidate was altogether missing this; reliably hard-left on the coarser decisions, but on the finer ones, reliable as a bouncing football and that was somehow supposed to be desirable. It went over about as well as Walter Mondale’s promise to raise taxes.

But over the rusted and long-derelict ruins of the sale, the pitch lives onward. Me and my homies are sleek, sophisticated, fashionable, and capable of seeing these shades of gray; you’re just a dumb throwback, sitting in your mud hut banging rocks together, comprehending only absolutes. It doesn’t seem to be within the capacity of Mr. Kerry’s fan base to understand, that this paradigm in & of itself is an exercise in binary thinking. If they do realize it, it certainly doesn’t slow them down much. Good decision making, we are still counseled in ways subtle and out-proud in-your-face, involves forsaking the endpoints on a given spectrum for a more enlightened contemplation about the many increments in between. Like President Kerry would’ve done. He would have found some excuse to do-nothing with Iraq. And then we wouldn’t have been there. In 2004, the pitch did have its source of appeal.

This old question takes me back a great many years, to a long-forgotten memory of my report card in my high school sophomore year. What’s “P”?? It looks like an F! I got a “P” in driver’s ed and I don’t know what that means! Is my life ruined? Well, no…that was my first Pass/Fail course. The years that came & went since then, have taught me life is like that. You passed, or you failed. Earning an “A” in something, that actually counts in some meaningful way as something better than a “B”, is such a rare blessing. It’s wrong to expect it in our everyday happenings, and it may be noble to pursue the situation in one’s vocation, but it’s hard to bring it about in that setting too.

So much of life is Yoda-mode, do-or-do-not. Fulfill the previously defined objectives, or kick the can down the road.

Make a decision that makes sense, or make a decision to make yourself feel good about something.

Immediate gratification vs. delayed gratification. This one is a biggie. The nobodies who don’t read my Blog That Nobody Reads, have seen me discuss this a great many times over the years. It isn’t something I made up, it’s a real thing. You can make a plan and follow through, or just make it up as you go along. You can make a budget and get all stressed out about money earlier rather than later; or, you can get stressed out about money so late that you can’t do anything about it anymore. You can elect leaders with the correct values and vision, or settle on these well-dressed sophisticated-types who give good speeches and display the correct mannerisms.

My point here is to distinguish between these fine, precise discussions about direction, vs. stop-points. The former are useful, the latter are not, they’re like quibbling over what shapes are being made by the clouds. Here’s a great example of what I mean: A threat, versus an actual danger. Are those two the same: The answer is, no…but, they’re both meaningful concepts. Once something is identified as a threat, there isn’t a lot of use to be had in deliberating endlessly about “more of a threat than this thing over here, but not as much of one as that other thing over there.” Worthy questions to ask might be: How is it we think we know, what we think we know, about what makes this a threat? How imminent of a threat? And to what? What’s the cost of doing nothing? What’s the proposal? And what are the viable alternatives? This is adult thinking; but it isn’t shades-of-gray thinking.

A lot of adult thinking has to do with teasing out the fine distinctions between these directions, like on the face of a compass — but, not about teasing out stop-points between the extremes. Is creativity the same thing as resourcefulness? (The answer is no.) Is mass the same as weight? (No.) Life-experience has a way of helping you see that, after awhile. It is not at all like making lots of crazy twisty-turns through town, in your car, getting into & backing out of cul de sacs, to get to an airstrip; strapping yourself in, waiting for clearance on a runway, taking off and gaining some altitude. With the experience/altitude, things change, and now it’s all about direction. That’s the metamorphosis. “We need to go East” might mean going East a hundred miles, or five hundred miles…in the moment it doesn’t matter, the heading has to be East. We’ve reached the destination or else we haven’t. If we haven’t, we go East.

As I’m often fond of noting: My house is somewhere East of Arden Fair Mall. But, it’s West of Folsom Dam. This is information you need to have if you’re flying a plane to my house — if your plane (or drone) is somewhere in between the mall and the dam. The observation does not make East and West the same thing. Just as, I am warmer than an ice cube but I am cooler than a campfire. That makes me a stop-point somewhere between hot and cold. It does not make hot & cold the same thing. Thus it is with all these teased-out compass directions. With all these observed increments between the extremes, the extremes remain, relative to each other, exactly what they are without the increments being noticed. Or existing at all. Opposites.

This is a very old issue. It’s one of Aristotle’s fundamental Rules of Thought. You might think it so self-evidently true that it is hardly even worth stating, that for a given proposition, truth is either in alignment with the proposition, in which case it is true, or it isn’t in which case it’s not. But, some of our “clean hands people” have managed to go through quite a stretch of time and “earn” impressive amounts of money, without doing any actual work; and I notice we are continually reminded of the Law Of Either-Or when we’re doing work. Not when we’re espousing a bunch of highbrow ideas about the work. When we’re actually doing it. The simplistic metaphor I have come to favor, is that once the wrench is slipped around the head of the bolt, the two things that may be done right afterward are righty-tighty or lefty-loosy. One or the other, those are your choices. And not both. Now yes, if you want to cloud the issue and waste time pondering a lot of silly stuff, there’s some idle and off-topic maneuvering that can take place. You can reef on it all cockeyed, wear down the corners on the bolt head, break the bolt, ruin the wrench. Give up, go inside and watch cartoons. Pee on it. But practically, the two things you can do are opposite from each other. Most of life is like that…when you’re doing actual work.

So why the disagreement about this? Why the hesitation? I mentioned up above that Kerry’s pitch had some appeal back in the day. War is always like this. We had body bags coming back from Iraq. Those who saw Kerry as the proper antidote against the hated poison that was war, saw fit to advance this “nuanced thinking” as quality decision-making. But that was dishonest. The truth is that Kerry would have done nothing, and then given a bunch of speeches to make it appear palatable to do nothing. More truth: America is already quite experienced at electing so-called “leaders” who make so-called “decisions” this way. Mmmmm yes, that’s a bad thing that guy is doing…mmmm…yes…put it all in a bag, shake it up with my super-sophisticated and super-secret decision-making signature-style, and ABRACADABRA SHAZZA DAZZA DUZZIT!! The answer is, can do nothing at this time, try again later.

More truth: The results of this are consistently disastrous.

But there I go with my black-and-white thinking again. Noticing the wrong things.

People are inclined to dislike binary thinking, even though it is necessary to get actual work done. When you engage in it and say, such-and-such a thing is so — there are three ugly ramifications to it. The first is reproducibility. For example, if I lay out my design with all its computations, and take into account the correct measurements of board thickness, gap size, etc. and conclude “This is where I want to cut the board”; you should be able to undertake the same task, and come to the same conclusion. The only way it’ll come out differently, is if you forget something, or I do. Or if you make an incorrect measurement, or math error, or I do. “I’ve got a super-sophisticated and super-secret decision-making algorithm with eleven secret herbs and spices,” on the other hand, protects against that. Cut here! Who’s to say why? I got elected, I’m super duper smart, that’s what I’ve decided. We know it’ll work! Except, you’ll notice, these types never seem to hang around long enough to survey, and answer for, the final results. If you watch closely you’ll notice there’s no real consequence against making the mark on the wrong spot on the board, or cutting in the wrong place. This is something you learn after watching politicians awhile. The super-sophisticated decision-making algorithm with the secret herbs and spices, is just…guessing. With some interest groups allowed to put a heavy thumb on the scale.

The second ramification is mutual exclusivity. As Aristotle pointed out himself, if p, then this logically excludes the possibility of not-p. If you are turning the bolt clockwise to tighten, then you cannot turn it counter-clockwise to loosen at the same time. It’s one or the other. Well, people don’t like that. And who can blame them? It isn’t fun to say, “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it” and then see subsequent events prove, with no room for doubt whatsoever, that this was the wrong decision. But in real life, these are the decisions that drive work, that precede genuine progress, and we rarely enjoy the luxury of knowing they’re all all-the-way correct, all of the time.

The third ramification is all of the other natural consequences, apart from the thing mentioned above about mutual exclusivity. IF we are going to save money by ending our subscription to this service, THEN we are going to have to go without that service. This is the trickiest one. A lot of people who shun binary thinking, opting for this shades-of-gray nonsense, simply don’t want to appear disloyal. They don’t want any narratives to be developed about how they don’t value this-or-that thing. The irony here is, they’re the ones failing to appreciate shades-of-gray when it really matters, since it’s perfectly reasonable and even respectable to say: “Yes, I do place a value on X, but I place a value on something else that’s a bit higher.” Or: “Yes, I do place a value on both of those things, but this one will have to come before that one, because if we try to do it the other way we’ll end up with neither one.”

There are other reasons people try to find these excuses to get away from binary thinking, lacking the courage at critical times to say such-and-such a thing is obviously so. One is the fear of failure. Homer Simpson said it best: “Trying is the first step toward failure.” It’s funny because it’s true. A lot of people have this problem, looking at everything like jumping across the Grand Canyon. Since you might not make it, it’s far better to not try. In that situation, this makes sense. In others? Not so much.

Another reason is the opposite, the fear of success. If you’re a liberal politician pinning your hopes for re-election on calling out some sort of “ism” like racism or sexism, and you’ve got a plan to vanquish these ills everywhere & forever — you would have to hope, for the longer term, this doesn’t work. Right? With no more racism, sexism, income inequality, etc….sooner or later we run out of reasons to vote for liberal politicians. So small wonder that the liberal politicians are the ones pushing for moral relativity, shades-of-gray thinking, and anything else that can muddy up an otherwise clear equation.

Passive voice vs. active voice is the ultimate either-or. A sentence that has a verb in it, can be one or the other of these, not both. An active-voice sentence has a subject; it identifies the thing that is doing the thing to the other thing. As lefty social-justice movements have become more sophisticated in recent years, they’ve taken to use “society” as a sort of null-placeholder, using sentences that are grammatically structured to be active-voice, to convey passive-voice ideas. Make it look like they have some actual goals in mind, when they really don’t. My favorite example of this is that “society imposes unrealistic beauty standards on women.” Well…yes. Society has lots of people living in it, and as such it imposes all sorts of beauty standards. In my lifetime, I’ve met exactly two straight, perpetually horny men who don’t like tits. One liked them flat-chested and pencil-thin, able to see her own toes without bending over he said…the other one was fixated on “the dumper.” Other guys have similar tastes, here & there, but the majority is somewhere else. I think. Point is, guys like what they like, no social-justice movement is ever going to change that. And a lot of “beauty standards imposed on women” don’t even come from guys. So when you say “society does this all wrong,” you’re talking about…whom? Do you even know?

“Black people are seen as scofflaws,” “Mexicans are seen as lazy,” “When a man is assertive he’s seen as a strong leader, when a woman is the same way she’s seen as a bitch.” These are passive voice…and, as such, don’t say anything. Even though they’re all undoubtedly true. Name a silly idea, a dumb perception for someone to have…without breaking a sweat, I can find someone who subscribes to it. “A is seen as B” is always true…and, never actually proves anything.

What we’re doing with all this squishy, shades-of-gray thinking is not advancing, not becoming more sophisticated. It’s the opposite. We’re regressing to childhood with this stuff. This is the way kids think, when they haven’t reached the point of discovering critical thought, when the biggest factor in all their important decision-making is peer pressure, or things closely connected with it. It’s all about the social stature. You can tell it’s happening when the “thinking” is done by way of association. Confederate statues…are to be associated with…NAZIS. Like that.

We’ve been dragged through it, these past several weeks, because in politics it is a potent force. People in high positions of power have to start asking themselves, “If I say such-and-such a thing…I will be associated with…THEM.” What we just saw, was this middle-school-level thinking being made into a weapon. “Speak out about what happened in Charlottesville, and speak out about it the way we want you to speak out about it, or we’ll call you a Nazi.”

I’m reminded of the “ten reasons I’m no longer a leftist” essay one woman wrote, particularly the passage about the whole world being divided up into these not-very-nuanced roles:

…I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation…

There’s some irony for you. It starts with being super-suave and sophisticated like John F. Kerry, being able to tease out these subtle demarcations between the extreme points, seeing blends, shades of gray…and it ends with this pigeonholing exercise, sorting everybody with an identity into one of these three silos.

From having watched them awhile, I would say it’s four: Oppressors, victims, activists who do this championing-of-the-oppressed thing…and then Hillary’s deplorables. Those who don’t do any actual victimizing or oppressing, but get in the way of the reform. Don’t vote the correct way, don’t use the right pronouns…you know, the Archie Bunkers.

Another of Aristotle’s fundamental rules, by the way, is the rule of non-contradiction. I have noticed that violating the one about either-or, tends to inexorably lead to violating the one about non-contradiction. One example that comes to mind is that the oppressors have all of the power…but, at the same time, they have none. The activists are going to win, and the victims are going to have all the power. It’s a done deal already. But, if it’s a done deal already, then what’s left of the old order? How is it that the oppressors still have power? You see this contradiction played out most egregiously with the women-versus-men thing. Men have all the power. But thanks to these reforms, women are making inroads…this woman or that woman is a powerful voice, not to be trifled with, the way she says it’s gonna be is the way it’s gonna be. And women are enrolling in higher education at a faster clip than men. Graduating in greater numbers. Been that way for awhile! So…? Which is it?

Some progressives explain this away by way of their tenuous grasp on the concept of time. A revolutionary moment is coming, they say…the entrenched power classes have the power right now, but after the tipping point has been reached it will be all different. But this brings on another contradiction: It’s inevitable. In fact, unstoppable. WE MUST SACRIFICE EVERYTHING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN…

How do we get so easily duped?

The answer is, in my opinion — work. There aren’t enough people doing it. Sure they have jobs. Our unemployment rate is very low now. But a lot of jobs don’t involve actual work. I’m not talking about getting your hands dirty, although I am talking about something closely connected with that. I’m talking about the making of decisions. When you make a decision in the course of doing a job, it’s a healthy thing because the possibility exists that the decision you make will be the wrong one. But if it’s necessary to get work done, it is exceedingly likely you’ll find out, and in a great big hurry, that your decision was wrong. This is how we learn. Well…that’s been on a down-slide for awhile. Simple fact is, “shades of gray” sloppy-thinking flies, most of the time, because no one is starving to death from having lost their jobs after making wrong decisions.

This infatuation with higher education is not helping. As Severian wrote lately,

The university is a Liberal’s natural habitat. Give them complete administrative control, an unlimited budget, and the ability to impose admission requirements, and you get a place where you can’t find a non-foodie restaurant and none of the milk comes from cows. There are twelve coffee shops per bookstore, and the bookstores outnumber the auto mechanics by about 15:1. And, of course, everything of consequence is run by white people, but the nice Diverse ladies who are such fun at cocktail parties make $300K per year chairing make-work departments that do nothing but issue unread Diversity memos. Everyone’s gay, or wishes he was, and the days are spent squawking about outrages that happen far, far over the horizon.

It’s static — by design. If you want a real challenge, head to the nearest college town and try finding something to do that doesn’t involve sitting and staring at a glowing screen. All the ballyhooed urban boho “nightlife and culture” is really just the Brownian movement of shallow people drifting from bar to coffee shop to bookstore to fusion restaurant to experimental theater performance, all the while twittering and facebooking about how wonderful and uplifting and educational it all is. The only emotion they experience is the dopamine hit that comes from being outraged about stuff, which confirms their smug superiority to the unwashed masses out in Flyover Country.

You could accomplish the same thing propped up in a hospital bed with one of those IV pez dispensers full of morphine, and again, that’s by design.

That’s why I call them Medicators. They really are medicating, in a way. Making decisions more to go through the motions of making decisions, than to make a good one; acting, first & foremost, as stewards of their own emotional state. Getting a lot of what they call “work” done, but it isn’t work the way real-people define it. There’s no object changing states, everything involved is very much the same at the end of the work, as it was before the work started.

And here we come back to my original point. If your decision-making method is so sophisticated and so pre-destined to come to the right decision, but your “work” doesn’t involve a change of state to anything, leaves everything pretty much undisturbed from the way it was before…how do you know your decisions are any good? How can you do any learning? The answer is, you can’t. There’s no lead-in for that oh so enlightening, “Golly gee, I was just so sure the pea would be under this shell” moment. Such failures are how we learn.

[…] I’ve noticed that I’m not hearing anything about Russia from my FauxFacebookFriends who are stricken with “TrumpTourettes.” I sorta miss that nuttiness: “So we’ve gone from “Russia Russia Russia” to “Nazis Nazis Nazis” to “Statues Statues Statues”…now we’re all going to veer sharply away from our prior silly deliberations about “hate speech” versus free speech, and whether it’s okay to acknowledge more than one side in a dispute is bigoted & hateful and has violent intent, when one of those sides has something to do with Nazis. And with the desperate plight of our fellow country-persons in Texas and the gut-wrenching, life-altering crisis they face, re-focus on what really matters. Melania Trump’s shoes.” House of Eratosthenes […]
- The Lumpenproletariat of the Labyrinth - American Digest | 09/01/2017 @ 09:44
I’ll give Lenin, Mao, and the rest of the Bolshevik mass murderers credit for one thing: They knew what to do with intellectuals. Mao loved “sending them down to the country,” to labor side-by-side in a rice paddy with the Proletariat. Lenin made ’em “shock workers,” building factories and canals and whatnot with hand tools. Those who didn’t find the experience sufficiently enlightened were persuaded by more, ummm, vigorous methods.

Even a stint as a burger-flipper would do your average “antifa” a world of good. The patty must be on the grill exactly two minutes, no more, no less. You get thirty minutes for lunch, no more, no less. It doesn’t matter what elaborate “theory” you have about it, or if the special sauce has “privilege” over the fries; you assemble the damn thing in the correct order, on time, or you’re gone.

I would venture that everyone currently wearing a black mask, and/or with a secondary degree, hasn’t worked a day in xzheyr life. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get them to “help” with the sugarcane harvest this year? Venceremos!
- Severian | 09/01/2017 @ 15:46
Meh, ALSO SEE:
“The Secret Knowledge”- On the dismantling of American Culture..
by reformed leftist David Mamet.
- CaptDMO | 09/02/2017 @ 05:19

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On Binary ThinkingThursday, August 31st, 2017

On Binary Thinking
Thursday, August 31st, 2017