twc
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lBird says he not “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by plebiscite.
Are we to infer that he is “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by referendum?
By way of explanation…
The Australian government, since Federation, has held 19 referenda (on 44 proposals) and three plebiscites, and the Australian states hold their own referenda. What’s the technical difference?
- referendum — a binding ballot. A proposal passes into law upon a majority of YES votes.
- plebiscite — a non-binding, or ‘advisory’, referendum.
Governments frame their proposals politically, subject to the statutory requirement for a majority vote in a majority of states.
This requirement leaves proposals vulnerable to defeat by concerted opposition, particularly if they are opposed by the proposing majority government, as in the case of the 1999 Australian Republic Referendum.Perhaps, lBird is not “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by either referendum or by plebiscite, i.e., not by universal franchise.
Maybe, instead, lBird is “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by limited franchise, e.g., by interested or qualified electors only.
Alternatively, lBird may be “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by statistical sampling along the lines employed by Gallup.
Whatever the case, after countless years of “arguing for electing the Truth”, lBird should show us — his long-suffering readers — the courtesy of enlightening us, who hang upon his pronouncements with bated breath, just what incredibly ultra-democratic method for “electing the Truth” he is actually “arguing in favour of”.
lBird says he not “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by plebiscite.
Are we supposed to infer that he is instead “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by referendum?
By way of explanation…
The Australian government, since Federation, has held 19 referenda (on 44 proposals) and three plebiscites, and the Australian states hold their own referenda. What’s the technical difference?
- referendum — a binding ballot. A proposal passes into law upon majority affirmation.
- plebiscite — a non-binding, or purely ‘advisory’, referendum.
Naturally, Australian governments always frame their proposals politically subject to the statutory requirement for a majority vote in a majority of states. This requirement naturally leaves proposals vulnerable to defeat by concerted opposition, particularly if they are opposed by the proposing majority government, as in the case of the 1999 Australian Republic Referendum.
Perhaps, lBird is not “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by either referendum or plebiscite, i.e., not by universal franchise.
Perhaps he is instead “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by limited franchise, e.g., by interested or qualified electors only.
Alternatively, maybe lBird is “arguing in favour of electing the Truth” by statistical sampling along the lines employed by the trusted Gallup.
In whatever case, after countless years of “arguing for electing the Truth”, lBird should finally show us — his long-suffering readers — the courtesy of enlightening us, who hang upon his pronouncements with bated breath, exactly what incredibly super democratic method of “electing the Truth” he is actually “arguing in favour of”.
Philosophical idealists rarely prove capable of consistent idealism.
Here is lBird unconsciously lapsing into the “materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing”:
- “socio-historical circumstances (Liverpool being port city with intensely close contact for thousands with American 50s music development, together with the general prosperity post-war, better education beyond 14, more free time to think for many workers, and widespread music scene).”
Against his will, his idealist interpretation of Marx’s Thesis IV “divides society into two parts, one of which is superior to society” and — consistently — forces him to choose:
- “great men with genius inspiration (a few, very unusual, musical lads, ‘elite art school’ attenders)”.
An incautious lapse into materialist synthetic thought exposes the shameless insincerity of lBird’s elitism slanders against the SPGB, its members, its Object and its Declaration of Principles.
The Australian Government’s case against Facebook
News Corp Bargaining CodeVaccination efficacy
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50% vaccination efficacy = risk of infection after vaccination = 50%
- = 50 cases after vaccination for every 100 before (i.e. no inoculation)
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70% vaccination efficacy = risk of infection after vaccination = 30%
- = 30 cases after vaccination for every 100 before (i.e. no inoculation)
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90% vaccination efficacy = risk of infection after vaccination = 10%
- = 10 cases after vaccination for every 100 before (i.e. no inoculation)
Immunity is not guaranteed. Herd immunity is a way off.
Sabine Hossenfelder video on the roll-out of 5G (All you need to know to understand 5G)
Short summary.
- Energy — 5G photons are far too weak to damage our chemical bonds.
They don’t induce cancer in the manner of high-energy UV photons. - Health — 5G power attenuates over hundreds of metres, and so transmission towers are closely packed.
Any adverse effect of long-term exposure remains an open question.
No, lBird, I do not consider you a “jackass” — whether “cloven hooved” or merely “ass’s hooved”.
My considered assessment…
Anyone possessed of your fanaticism, who over five long years has continuously and perpetually advocated that
- science and mathematics are irredeemable class ideologies,
- and general scientific knowledge can solve the outstanding specialist problems of modern physics and modern mathematics
automatically places himself — totally without anyone else’s help through his own unaided determined efforts — into the venerable but immortal category of the tribe of
- circle squarers,
- rational π seekers
- or, as in your vaunted case, deniers of Planck’s constant.
The apposite epithet for such a crusader of such lost causes is, in your confused and unimaginative case, not the conceit “quixotic”, but sadly the humble word “crank”.
Negation of the negation. Apologies, Friederich Adolph Sorge almost certainly never associated with NYDT editors Bayard Taylor or Charles Dana. My recollection of Marx’s New York associations tricked me.
Nevertheless, Sorge would have appreciated Marx’s Faustian “cloven hoof” allusion to the devil, which was already fable to Shakespeare’s Othello “I look down towards his feet, but that’s a fable” (Othello Act 5, Scene 2).
To Frederick Engels on his 200th Birthday
Fred, humanity has disappointed you over the past 200 years.
It has failed to follow through on the head start you gave it on the road to socialism.
I take some comfort in the knowledge that you, above anyone, recognised humanity’s protracted rise from prehistory.
A little joy. After 200 years, it has become possible from mitochondrial analyses — a science unknown in your lifetime — to endorse your crucial view of hunter-gather matrilocal residence. I hear your jolly laughter.
I can dimly comprehend the pleasure you would have taken in learning that, 200 years on, the publication of Marx’s vast corpus of work is nearing completion, and that the greatest and most important of his works are widely available everywhere around the globe.
And now for the dialectics…
Fred, you might be utterly flabbergasted to find that 200 years after your birth — a period through which you lived over one-third; your lifetime being triumphantly longer than the dark ages through which the socialism-destroying bolsheviks ruled over capitalist Russia — you have been elevated, in superb Leftist contempt, to the “most reviled” (like Epicurus) and “best hated, calumniated” (like Marx) man of our times.
I feel your dismay, just as at first it dismayed me, but I also know that you would have borne all Leftist anti-socialist insults, honourably, with the contempt they deserve. Oh, on second thoughts, you would have treated them, correctly, as beneath contempt.
And so, on your bicentennial birthday, from one who is proud to proclaim myself “so poor as to do you reverence” …
Your time will come. And, with it, all humanity’s.
You paved our way …
For socialism, Fred 200!
Correction. I wrongly referred to Bayard Taylor (whose English translation of Goethe Marx probably thought a foredoomed failure).
The intended mutual acquaintance was Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Daily Tribune, who met Marx through Ferdinand Freiligrath, the poet of the “Farewell Words from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung” (NRZ), blazoned in red ink atop the NRZ’s suppressed final edition, and who later donated exiled Bakunin’s copy of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic to a grateful Marx while writing Capital.
Jackass
lBird “twc referred to me as a ‘jackass’.”
Not so.
I was referring, not to you, but to your ‘method’.
Karl Marx used an analogous reference “ass’s hoof”, in an 1881 letter to his long-time associate and First Internationalist, Adolf Sorge, living in New York, when commenting exasperatedly on the ostensibly pro-working class, but actually anti-working class, economic theories of American Henry George.
- This cloven hoof (at the same time ass’s hoof) is also unmistakably revealed in the declamations of Henry George.
Marx’s reference to “cloven hoof” is probably lost on you. But, it was music to the ears of a 19th century German who shared with Marx a supreme love for the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Goethe features as one of Marx’s favourite poets in his famous answers to the parlour game Confessions.
To explain…
Marx’s ‘cloven hoof’ refers to Mephistopheles’s sexual advances upon pure Gretchen — the eternal feminine — in Goethe’s Faust, Part One. Mephistopheles is, of course, the devil to whom Faust has sold his eternally damned soul.
Marx knew that Sorge would instantly pick up on the literary allusion, and enjoy the double entendre — sexual seduction plus asexual asininity — in pursuit of devilish duplicity.
You see, both of them personally knew the American translator of Goethe’s Faust, Bayard Taylor, who edited at the New-York Daily Tribune during Karl Marx’s sojourn as its London-based European correspondent.
I apologise for any confusion on your part:
It is your ‘method’ that is “jackass”.
lBird “the social problem of ‘scientific experts’ keeping the rest of us ‘un-informed’”.
Not so. The problem that faces anyone willing to learn a science is not the suppression by scientists of scientific information but the provision by scientists of a mind-boggling abundance of scientific information. The problem is how to tame the scientific information.
People probably start by firing up their search engine, Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo, or Wolfram Alpha for mathematics, and follow up on the results.
An alternative port-of-call is Wikipedia, for its hundreds of thousands of clearly written hyperlinked articles. Wikipedia’s scientific content ranks among its most reliable and informative.
Far from censoring scientific information, Wikipedia is a globally transparent open-source collaboration that throws its pages open to everyone for editing. It meticulously time-stamps and permanently logs each page’s revision history so that anyone, who wants to, can follow its genesis and development.
And, of course, there are the multi-talented web science broadcasters — who expand the proud tradition of Martin Gardner and Stephen Jay Gould — who have turned YouTube into the most imaginative vehicle for communicating mathematics and science.
In no special order, they include: Vsauce, SmarterEveryDay, Veritasium, MinutePhysics, 3Blue1Brown, PhysicsGirl, Sabine Hossenfelder, Numberphile, Stand-up Math, Tibees, Eddie Woo.
To put lBird’s ‘social problem’ into perspective, science is not being suppressed by scientists qua scientists. Where it is being suppressed, it is being done so out of commercial or political pressure.
Science, qua science, is irrepressible.
* * *
Open Problems
A general knowledge of science is totally inadequate for comprehending and adjudicating on most of the open problems science.
- A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep…
To exemplify the nature of the problem, here follows a shortened list of major open current research topics that defy comprehension and resolution by anything other than deep and thorough investigation. General scientific knowledge hasn’t a hope in hades.
Major Unsolved Physics Problems
- Theory of everything
- Arrow of time
- Interpretation of quantum mechanics
- Yang-Mills theory
- Color confinement
- Physical information
- Dimensionless physical constant
- Fine-tuned universe
- Quantum field theory
- Locality
- Unruly effect
- Problem of time
- Cosmic inflation
- Horizon problem
- Origin and future of the universe
- Size of universe
- Baryon asymmetry
- Cosmological constant pro
- Dark matter
- Dark energy
- Dark flow
- Axis of evil
- Shape of the universe
- Largest structures
- Extra dimensions
- Vacuum catastrophe
- Quantum gravity
- Black holes, information paradox
- Cosmic censorship hypothesis
- Hierarchy problem
- Planck particle
- Magnetic monopoles
- Neutron lifetime puzzle
- Proton decay and spin crisis
- Supersymmetry
- Generations of matter
- Neutrino mass
- String CP problem
- Anomalous magnetic dipole moment
- Proton radius puzzle
- Pentaquarks, exotic hadrons
- Mu problem
- Koide formula
- Solar cycle
- Coronal heating problem
- Astrophysical jet
- Diffuse interstellar bands
- Supermassive black holes
- Kuiper cliff
- Flyby anomaly
- Galaxy rotation problem
- Supernovae
- p-nuclei
- Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray
- Rotation rate of Saturn
- Origin of magnet are magnetic field
- Large-scale anisotropy
- Age-metallicity relation
- Lithium problem
- Ultraluminous X-ray sources
- Fast radio bursts
- Quantum chromodynamics
- Quark-gluon plasma
- Strangelets
- Quark-gluon formation
- Nuclei and nuclear astrophysics
- Abraham-Minkowski controversy
- Bose-Einstein condensation
- Gauge block wringing
- Scarnhorst effect
- Newtonian N-body problem
- Turbulent flow
- Upstream contamination
- High-temperature superconductors
- Amorphous solids
- Cryogenic electron emission
- Sonoluminescence
- Topological order
- Fractional Hall effect
- Liquid crystals
- Semiconductor nanocrystals
- Metal whiskering
- Superfluid transition in He-4
- Plasma physics and fusion power
- Injection problem: Fermi acceleration
- Solar-wind interaction with comets
- Alfvénic turbulence
- Stochasticity in gene expression
- Memory
- Quantitative studies of immune system
- Homochirality
- Magnetoreception in animals
Major Unsolved Mathematics Problems
There are hundreds of mathematical problems awaiting solution in fields including
- computer science,
- algebra,
- analysis,combinatorics,
- geometries — algebraic, differential, discrete, Euclidean
- theories — graph, group, model, number, set, Ramsey
- dynamical systems,
- partial differential equations
Millennium Prize Problems
- P versus NP
- Hodge conjecture
- Riemann hypothesis
- Yang–Mills existence and mass gap
- Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness
- Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture
- Poincaré conjecture — now solved; a generalization is still unsolved.
Coda
lBird, surely even you must finally admit that — at least for the humanly foreseeable future — the TRUTH of research problems in physics and mathematics cannot be adjudicated and declared by universal ballot.
A totally different criterion of objective scientific truth —that apparently lies beyond your kind — totally escapes you. That, sadly, is your loss.
As for your own jackass method…
Marx never in his wildest dreams ever thought so.
As an historical footnote to YMS, the supervisor has not necessarily been rewarded better.
On the large Roman estates that were worked by gangs of agricultural slaves under the lash of slave supervision, the means of subsistence were distributed appropriately to a slave mode of production — see Capital I, where Marx quotes Mommsen:
- Hence the Roman villicus, as overseer of the agricultural slaves, received “more meagre fare than working slaves, because his work was lighter.”
LBird “the same happens to me when I vote and lose.”
* * *
Not so.
The implications of voting for TRUTH and losing are utterly incommensurable with the implications of voting for the Labour Party — as you recommended, and no doubt have done — and losing.
If — and good things do happen under capitalism — the Labour Party should lose the election, you, as a Labour voter, just have to cop it sweet, while the Conservative Party, as majority, doesn’t (at least not yet) socially force you to switch your political allegiance to the winning side. You simply get on with your humdrum existence under a capitalism run by a different political party.
But, if I vote for the TRUTH in your ‘democratic socialist’ Utopia, and I happen to lose, I find myself socially in the WRONG relative to the expected norms of ‘democratic socialist’ Utopia.
My loss immediately casts me as a ‘democratic socialist’ pariah, who must be healed — brought into line, or “toe the line”.
By democratic ballot, I have been convicted of ‘democratic socialist’ deviation. I do not hold the correct ‘democratic socialist’ TRUTH.
Your utopian society has a ‘democratic socialist’ duty to change my mind to protect itself.
And I fully recognize that I stand in urgent need of mental transformation. I must accordingly submit to ‘democratic socialist’ Utopian mind-reversal. If that fails, I must willingly undergo further social re-education and, failing that, mental castration or blissful zombiefication.
Of course I gratefully understand that all these mind-bending operations are being sympathetically imposed upon my thought processes in the name of ‘democratic socialist’ necessity. And I also agree that they must be brought about by the ‘social democratic’ theory-and-practices outlined in the lBird Levelling Manifesto of a few posts back.
* * *
But, on second thoughts, surely changing my mind against my conviction runs counter to my will.
lBird, you probably don’t appreciate how closely your own idealist theory of cognition steers towards Schopenhauer’s for he, like you, held “the world is my representation”, and he also voluntaristically saw the world as will and representation. Change Schopenhauer’s ‘my’ for ‘our’ and you are halfway there.
Now, to change my representation of the world so that it conforms to the TRUE ‘democratic socialist’ Utopian representation of the world, you must first break my will. Hence your ‘democratic socialist’ rack and pinion. We all agree now comrades, don’t we?
* * *
If Hegel and Marx know anything about human thinking, they agree that it proceeds by opposition.
Hence, for ‘democratic socialist’ Utopia to force me to think the TRUTH is, unbeknownst to its anti-dialectical self, simultaneously an unguarded invitation for me to actively explore ways to undermine it.
Heroic acts of human defiance in the teeth of torture tell us something ennobling about human integrity before thought compelled against conviction. We lesser humans stand in admiration of those whose mental spirit refuses to be broken.
But, instead, take what we know about normal, less heroic, humans — I am not referring to the imaginary humans, presumably modeled on the behaviour of your former comrades, that you a-historically plonk into your artificial ‘democratic socialist’ Utopia to function as vile exemplars of your malicious ‘democratic socialist’ humanity — normal humans are going to defy thought compelled against their inner conviction.
Normal humans rightly feel affronted and insulted by your imaginary need to run socialism by compulsion. Compulsion accords with the only way a class society can be run. But compulsion is the vile action that socialism transcends because, in a cooperative commonwealth, it is superfluous.
* * *
In your compelled society, humans will unite in defiance against your reign of terror — a terror, not of the body but, appropriate to the dyed-in-the-wool idealist you are, a far more dire reign of terror — a terrifying terror of the mind.
Thought is dynamic, and cannot be compelled.
