Miscellany

A fairly substantial Republican win across the board (here in Illinois excepted). Kerry shouldn’t mount quixotic legal challenges in Ohio. It’s a completely different situation from Florida four years ago; not only is Bush’s lead more substantial, but he also won a decisive victory in the national popular vote. The country doesn’t want to see a long fight in the courts, and the Democrats are just going to look bad by dragging it out to the legal limit. Face it, Bush won.

It’s an emotionally draining defeat for liberals, who are going to find it hard to accept that the President will come out of this actually more powerful than when he went in, with a mandate from the popular vote and better majorities in Congress. Look for an extremely aggressive agenda from the Republicans — cutting taxes, reshaping the judiciary at all levels, privatizing Social Security, drilling in Alaska and elsewhere. Not to mention continuing to feed the epidemic of anti-American sentiment worldwide. There will be little that Democrats can do to stop them.

Looks like a values-based defeat. By most surveys, a majority of Americans agreed with Kerry more than Bush on the actual issues; they mostly didn’t approve (by now) of the war in Iraq; and they consistently voted against their economic self-interest. But the Bush supporters just thought he was a better human being, and therefore a better leader; not only is he more resolute and sure of his convictions, but on the key issues of God/guns/gays the Democrats have no hope of ever attracting these voters. It’s sobering to think that the last non-Southern Democrat to win the White House was Kennedy in 1960.

How can we fix it? There isn’t any easy way. A Democrat may very well have an good chance of winning in 2008, just because voters get sick of the ruling party fairly quickly. But the longer-term diagnosis isn’t great. Ultimately we will have to fight values with values. I honestly think we have to figure out a way to convince more rural, heartland Americans to think like good secular liberals — i.e., to come to celebrate (or at least accept) differences in race, sexual preference, religious belief, and so on. (I said it wouldn’t be easy.)

In other words, we have to recharge the liberal-humanist agenda, both in putting forward new ideas and in making the good old ideas more attractive. How do you convince a rancher in Montana that it’s okay to be non-Christian, non-white, non-straight? More abstractly: how do you convince them that there is value in nuance and ambiguity, in seeing the world in shades of grey? I suspect that deep down there is an economic/class-based undercurrent even to the values issues; people don’t like to think that elitist snobs on the coasts are pushing beliefs down their throats. So somehow we have to repackage liberal ideals, which are really just contemporary versions of the same philosophies on which the country was founded, so that they are compelling to folks in the red states. Don’t ask me how, but I think that has to be the long-term goal.

Frustrated progressives will grumble about moving to Canada. Not me; I’m going to stay home and fight.

Congratulations to my good buddy Barack Obama, who squeaked by Alan Keyes with only about 80% of the vote, it seems.

Since I don’t want to be a downer, I’ll stick with that news, and not point you to the horrible news here or here.

By Muriel Rukeyser.

This has nothing
to do with
propagating

The species
is continued
as so many are
(among the smaller creatures)
by fission

(and this species
is very small
next in order to
the amoeba, the beginning one)

The paramecium
achieves, then,
immortality
by dividing

But when
the paramecium
desires renewal
strength another joy
this is what
the paramecium does:

The paramecium
lies down beside
another paramecium

Slowly inexplicably
the exchange
takes place
in which
some bits
of the nucleus of each
are exchanged

for some bits
of the nucleus
of the other

This is called
the conjugation of the paramecium.

What, you were expecting something about the election? Don’t forget to vote.

As the Green Bay Packers have essentially guaranteed a Kerry victory, we may not have George W. Bush to kick around for much longer. So as a final parting shot, let’s just dwell on this quote from Donald Rumsfeld (speaking in a rare moment of honesty) that I found in an article by Jason Epstein in the New York Review:

people don’t want to go to war…. But, after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

Oh no, wait a minute. That wasn’t Rumsfeld at all — it was Hermann Goering, speaking at the Nuremberg trials. So this wasn’t really a damaging quote, it was just a cheap-shot comparison with the Nazis! Sorry about that.

I don’t want to linger too long in the already-disturbed hornet’s nest of competition, gender, and physics, but I do want to point to some thoughtful articles by Maire that are worth reading: here, here, and here. We’re basically on the same wavelength, but she has the patience to get into some of the details.

Whenever anyone is quick to leap from a fact of our current social arrangements (underrepresentation of group X in occupation Y) to a conclusion about biological inevitability (X’s just don’t have what it takes to succeed in Y), I can’t help but think of the SPHA’s — the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association. The SPHA’s were a dominant basketball team back in the 1930’s. Indeed, at the time a significant percentage of the best basketball players were Jewish. Are we surprised to learn that it was common for people to attribute this success to the intrinsic superiority of Hebrews when it came to the skills of basketball? From Jon Entine, quoted by Michael Shermer:

“The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background,” wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News and one of the premier sports writers of the 1930s, “is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.”

Jews were also thought to possess the genetic advantage of being short, enabling them to dart past the gangly Gentiles for easy buckets. Of course, these days we are enlightened enough to realize that it is actually blacks who are genetically predisposed to have game, not those sneaky Hebrews. Progress marches on.

Maybe I just haven’t noticed, but has anyone pointed out the most obvious possibility? The Bin Laden tape is the October Surprise. Think about it: a good October Surprise will make people rally around the incumbent, without having any obvious fingerprints of political maneuvering all over it. And we don’t know where Al-Jazeera got the tape from. Karl Rove is as likely a source as any.

Jack Balkin talks about different sorts of faith, and I nit-pick him on definitions. But it’s worth reading.

From the LA Times, via The Poor Man:

WASHINGTON — Bush administration lawyers argued in three closely contested states last week that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act, which was passed in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 election.

Veteran voting-rights lawyers expressed surprise at the government’s action, saying that closing the courthouse door to aspiring voters would reverse decades of precedent.

Because, of course, the only person with the requisite wisdom and objectivity to protect the American voter would be John Ashcroft.

Another example of DeLong’s Law: The Bush Administration is always worse than one imagines, even when taking into account DeLong’s Law.

No, I’m not talking about politicians — it’s about physicists.

Sometimes, you see a hornet’s nest, and some wise part of you knows that you shouldn’t go poking it with a stick. But if you were smart enough to resist, you wouldn’t have a blog, would you? Peter Woit mentions a recent colloquium at Fermilab by Howard Georgi, in which Georgi discusses the lamentable under-representation of women in physics. Peter says some sensible things about how complicated the problem is, but being a provocateur, he can’t resist getting in a dig at Lubos Motl at the end of it. Lubos, getting into the Halloween spirit, dons his caveman costume and responds with an explanation of the situation, which seems to rely on hormones and the fact that women have fewer neurons than men. (He mentions, generously, that women can be both smart and beautiful; this is only fair, as he frequently mentions how this or that male physicist is kind of dreamy.)

I’ve chatted before about the issue of gender disparity in physics, but there is a separate but related issue worth remarking on: the arrogance, aggressiveness, and competitiveness of many physicists. Of course such a characterization is a careless over-generalization, but there is enough truth to it that it’s worth exploring. The fact is, many physicists can be overbearingly macho about their field. Why is that? Is it also true in other fields, to the same extent? My limited experience seems to indicate that other parts of academia are just as competitive as physics is, but somehow don’t have quite the arrogance that we often do. I know that academics in the social sciences or humanities will find this hard to believe, but I really do think that physicists are even worse, on average.

We could indulge in some cheap psychology here. Most of these physicists, after all, were not exactly quarterbacking the football team in high school. It would not be a stretch to imagine that many of them were — what do we say — kind of nerdy. We may just be dealing with a certain amount of overcompensation. Finding themselves in a relatively isolated community of like-minded folks, where the ability to do integrals is more prized than the ability to do push-ups, it might be natural to deal with some lingering resentment about being picked on as a child by picking on others as a somewhat-developed adult. In other words, the macho posturing of physicists (scoring points by ridiculing the ideas of others, angling to shout the loudest during seminars, looking disdainfully at any sign of weakness or lack of knowledge) may be the same phenomenon that creates schoolyard bullies, played out in a very different arena.

Admittedly, that is some really cheap psychology indeed, and the truth is undoubtedly more complex. For one thing, the field is competitive, whether we like it or not, for the most basic of reasons: too many people chasing too few goods. In the case the goods are positions of various forms — acceptance at the best graduate schools, getting good postdocs and faculty jobs, winning awards. There are many more people who want to be scientists than there are jobs for them, so competition is inevitable. And that creates an unfortunate situation where everyone is constantly evaluating the worthiness of everyone else, estimating in their own minds where they deserve to be in the hierarchy of desirable goods. I don’t see any way to possibly escape that syndrome — even if we lived in a utopia of wealth where everyone received a substantial stipend to pursue their individual passions, there would still be competition to get located in the best places, which are limited by definition.

But there’s a difference between competing for jobs (sad but inevitable) and acting as if doing physics were itself a competition (sad and untrue). Nature is a big complicated thing that is smarter than any of us, and we should all be in this together. Almost everyone will admit under examination that cooperation is a more effective way of doing science than pure competition. And although becoming a professional physicist is by necessity a difficult task, it doesn’t have to be torture, or even unfriendly. Too often in my field we mistake aggressiveness for intelligence, or at least refuse to make the effort to nurture talented people who don’t push themselves forward as shamelessly as some of their colleagues. Perhaps it’s gradually changing for the better, but I have no way of knowing.

I suspect that a large number of people (of any gender) leave the field simply because they look around and think to themselves, “Wow, a substantial number of my colleagues are hyper-competitive jerks, this really isn’t worth it.” And that’s too bad. Fortunately, along with the jerks are a large number of very sweet and supportive individuals who I am happy to call my friends. So if anyone out there is a friendly non-competitive person with a passion and talent for physics — stick with it, we need more like you.

John Holbo points to a post by Jim Henley on why libertarians should vote for Kerry. Part of the argument is kind of obvious — general fears of big-government Democrats aside, why would any libertarian think that George W. Bush would be better? Apart from the general incompetence of the administration at just about everything, they haven’t demonstrated any particular tendency toward small government, aside from cutting taxes. Spending is up, foreign policy is willfully interventionist, the deficit is out of control, civil liberties are under assault as never in the past fifty years, and no special effort has been made to promote free trade. But the particular emphasis of Henley’s piece is the unrealistic attitude of the administration to the war on terror. Which, although I agree with the critique, raises an interesting rhetorical point, and a valid criticism against both Kerry and Bush.

“Terror” is a tactic, not an enemy. You can’t “win” the “war” on it, the notion is absurd. The best you can hope to do is to minimize the danger, so that concerns about terror are reasonably contained, just as we hope to do with countless other dramatic dangers. Everybody in their right minds knows this, certainly both candidates do. But you aren’t allowed to admit it out loud. It is taken as a given that we must pretend that the goal is to crush terrorism out of existence, and that each candidate has a plan for doing so within four years. The problem is, campaigning is hard and people get tired, so both candidates will occasionally slip. They will admit in moments of weakness that the fight against terror is likely to go on forever, and that really the goal is to minimize the danger. Within minutes the other campaign will be all over them, accusing the momentarily honest politician of insufficient manliness to lead our nation through these perilous times.

Only a few more days before the recounts and court challenges begin in earnest.