I have not voted for any Presidential candidate since the 1988 General Election, and I will not be voting for any Presidential candidate in the 2024 General Election.

As I and very many people before me have noted, my vote or non-vote in any present election of significance has no effect on the outcome that election. The margin by which any candidate in such an election wins or loses is always in the thousands of vote, so that an individual vote could be given to a different candidate or simply not cast, without a different winner resulting. But, as I have also noted, a vote cast or withheld in a present election has some effect, albeït usually very small, on the subsequent behavior of those active in the political process, as they have a sense of what they can't, can, or must do to win the next election, based upon the margins of victory and votes altogether withheld.

The least effective thing that a potential voter can do is to vote for a candidate whom he or she dislikes.

[…]

The most effective thing that a potential voter as such can do is to vote for a candidate of whom that voter approves, even if that candidate has no chance of winning, or to submit a ballot from which no candidate receives a vote.

I endorse submitting a ballot in which no Presidential candidate is selected. Where not given a better option to reject all candidates explicitly, a voter should enter something such as [ALL CANDIDATES REJECTED!] as-if a write-in vote, to prevent a poll-worker or election official otherwise taking advantage of the opportunity to check a box for his or her preferred candidate.

In the General Elections after 1988 and through 2020, I considered the Presidential nominees of the Libertarian Party, but rejected each. When, in 2020, Jo Jorgensen joined the pile on top of those who lost their jobs for saying all lives matter, I decided that I would not vote for any subsequent Presidential nominee of that party unless he or she unequivocally denounced Jorgensen and this later nominee's campaign acted to make Jorgensen's victims whole. Of course, I considered the chances of a nominee's taking such responsibility to be negligible.

Then, in August of 2021, Rebecca Lau, Chairman of the Manhattan Libertarian Party from 18 June 2021 to 10 October 2023, wrote My opinion is that the unvaccinated should die. This declaration began a cascade of fifteen-minute problems, with the Manhattan Libertarian Party, then the New York Libertarian Party, then the Libertarian Party National Committee, and finally all the remaining parties affilitated with the LPNC not effecting solutions. I consequently vowed never again to vote for any candidate of these parties for any office.

For many years, every manga that I had ever encountered was simply lousy. I came to have little expectation that any were not, but I was aware of Sturgeon's Revelation,[1] and so I would still occasionally look at manga. Eventually, I found some that were quite good, and even a few that were brilliant. I'd like to mention two that I find very interesting as works of philosophy.

Philosophy in general is sometimes characterized as consideration of the True, of the Good, and of the Beautiful. I don't know of a manga to which I'd point as a worthwhile meditation on the Beautiful, but I can point to one manga that has interesting ideas about the True, and another that is a wonderful meditation on the Good.

The official English-language title of the light novel 紫色のクオリア [Murasakiiro no Qualia], by Ueo Hisamitsu, and of its manga adaptation (by Ueo with illustrations by Tsunashima Shirou) is Qualia the Purple, but a better rendering would be Purple's Qualia or The Qualia of Purple. The story is marketted as yuri (work with a theme of romantic love or sexual attraction between females), and it has some elements of that theme, but most readers primarily seeking that theme are going to be generally frustrated.

The actual primary theme of the story is the uniqueness of the epistemics of each person. In response to the same stimuli, we have different sensations, and construct models that are very different not only in these building blocks but in subsequent structure. In the best cases, our models of the external world correspond very well to reality, and thus indirectly the models of one person correspond well to the models of another. But the maps are not the territories, and my maps are not your maps.

In Murasakiiro no Qualia, the character Yukari does not model animals and machines as fundamentally different. However, unlike a couple of other characters, Yukari does not think any less of living creatures for being machines; she treats machines with genuine affection and sometimes love. Moreover, within the framework of the story, Yukari's model works. (I deliberately refrain here from providing examples.) Another character, Alice Foyle, produces what appear to be child-like drawings but contain solutions to challenging mathematic problems.

Ueo doesn't simply write of characters with special abilities flowing from looking at the world differently. Ueo proposes the idea that personal identity itself is located exactly in our respective internal differences of sensation and of all that we build from sensation.

The story also involves elements of speculative science fiction, to which I impute no value except as plot devices. I'm rather more interested in how the protagonist, Gakku, obsessively fights Fate, much as does Homura in Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika.

The official English-language title of 葬送のフリーレン [Sousou no Frieren], by Yamada Kanehito with excellent illustrations by Abe Tsukasa, is Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, though the pirate translations began with the closer translation Frieren at the Funeral; either of these titles is appropriate. (A more literal translation would be Frieren of the Funeral.) This series has become a huge critical and commercial success, and its anime adaptation has likewise become a huge critical and commercial success. (At this time, I've watched only clips of the anime.) Frieren begins with the return of a party of four adventurers after they have saved the world from a Demon King, a quest that they accepted a decade earlier.

The eponymous Frieren is an Elven maga, who had lived a quiet, meandering life for more than a millennium before joining the party, and who can expect to live many millennia more. During the celebration, Frieren casually makes plans to meet the other members of the party, in another fifty years. The significance to human beings of half a century does not begin to register with her until she returns, and finds Himmel, the once youthful leader of the party, to be an old man. And, when not much later Himmel dies, Frieren struggles to understand both how someone with whom she had spent only ten years could have come to mean so much to her, and how she could have failed to recognize that she had only another fifty or so years which she could have spent with him and did not.

Thereafter, Frieren is the story of the further adventures of this Elf, with occasional flashbacks to her time with the party who defeated the Demon King. What's really being delivered is both a bitter-sweet love story — as Frieren comes over decades to recognize that Himmel was the great love of her life — and an extended meditation on the importance of relationships, on the meaning of life, and on the nature of ethics. (The other commentary that I've encountered has missed both the point that Frieren loved and loves Himmel, and the consideration of ethics.)

As to ethics, I'll note that Himmel implicitly rejected the Utilitarian calculus and anything like it, and within the story the ethics that he instead embodied have, since the time of the quest, been propagating. Humans and Dwarves explain their acts of local goodness by saying That's what Himmel would have done. The world of Frieren continues to grow more humane, because of Himmel, long after his death.

Sousou no Frieren is a story that has more than once made me laugh aloud, not because of any jest, but because the author has made some excellent choice, often in having a character do something very right, but sometimes the author's choice involves other things. At least twice, his choice has concerned the rôle of Fate — once to challenge a character, and at another time to treat two of the characters with love.

[1] Ninety percent of everything is crud. Sturgeon did not claim that 10% of everything is not crud; the ninety percent is merely a lower bound. (And a metaphoric one at that, though I encountered one fool who tried to argue as if the legitimacy of Sturgeon's Revelation hung upon a literal interpretation of ninety percent.)

In the case of what has been called long COVID, two opposing camps are lost in a confusion of name with description.

The idea that SarsCoV-2 would have peculiar long-term effects upon health was immediately popular in some circles for appalling reasons, and thus viewed in other circles with strong inclination to disbelief.

Eventually, a cluster of persistent symptoms came to be widely associated with SarsCoV-2. Some of these symptoms are clearly present in some people, and not psychosomatic. But a very reasonable question is that of whether these symptoms are actually caused by SarsCoV-2, or have some other cause or causes. For some months now, the evidence has strongly indicated that, no, these are, variously, not effects of SarsCoV-2, or are common to respiratory or viral illness more generally. As a description, long COVID has been falsified, but it has lingered as a name.

I continue to encounter recent articles in prestigious, allegedly scientific journals that simply treat as given that these symptoms are caused by SarsCoV-2. An established name is treated as if it were a description. Now some institutions are beginning to insist reasonably that the name long COVID be abandoned, as inapt. But I'm encountering journalists and pundits who thence infer and claim that long COVID does not exists.

That inference doesn't follow if by long COVID is meant a cluster of symptoms, which symptoms are exactly what have been investigated under the name. Only if long COVID is taken to be defined as these symptoms resulting from SarsCoV-2 could we say that nothing fits the concept corresponding to the name.

I doubt that any Briton defined the French disease as especially French. In any case, telling a typical Briton that what he called the French disease did not exist would be tantamount to telling him that syphilis did not exist. What he should instead have been told was that syphilis were not particularly French, and ought to be called something else.

Likewise, the declarations should not be that long COVID does not exist.

As far as I'm concerned, any generation of people who produce a generation of fuck-ups is itself a generation of fuck-ups.

Gen Z was produced by Generations X and Y. Generation Y was produced by the Boomers and by Generation X. Generation X was produced by the Silent Generation and by the Boomers. The Boomers were produced by the Greatest Generation and by the Silent Generation. The Silent Generation was produced by the Lost Generation and by the Greatest Generation. And so on back.

Any general condemnation of Gen Z is a general condemnation of all these prior generations. Personally, I'm prepared to make those condemnations. Most people of my generation are fuck-ups.

I often use the expression 15-minute problem in reference to a problem that could be or could have been solved very quickly (epitomally in as little as fifteen minutes), but won't be or wasn't solved quickly, and perhaps wasn't solved at all, because those who could have solved it didn't want to pay the cost of solving it, and indeed may have regarded solving it in any manner to be itself a cost, rather than a benefit.

Some standard dictionaries do not acknowledge the most common uses of the terms dimension and intuition. I don't subscribe to the doctrine — often accepted dogmatically — that common use is the ultimate arbiter of proper use. Moreover, I think that the most common use of dimension (which use arose in ignorant pomposity) is lousy and that the most common use of intuition invites needless confusion. Still, I'm surprised to have the most common use of the former missed altogether, and the most common use of the latter only found glancingly in a definition of another term.

The word dimension originally referred to a measurement between [two things]. When scientists and mathematicians use the singular dimension in reference to space, they mean one of some set of measures or measurements such that a set of these dimensions can jointly identify a position in that space or the extent of something occupying that space. When they declare time to be a fourth dimension, what they mean is that the relationship of time to what we ordinarily regard as space is such that we may as well treat time with space as a single continuum of four measures. When they use dimension to refer to something not meant to be regarded as a measure of this space-time continuum, they mean for it to be treated as none-the-less a measure or measurement, as if it might be graphed.

Some people listening to the scientists and mathematicians, especially as discussion of Einstein's Theories of Relativity began exciting them, tried to figure-out the meaning of dimension from context; other people just faked an understanding, with no real concern for proper meaning. A result was that in the popular imagination, the word dimension came to mean a system that would ordinarily seem to be an independent universe. Extraordinary means would be required to travel from one of these things called a dimension to any other, if such travel were at all possible.

This use was well established in popular fantasy and in science fiction before Rod Serling began presenting The Twilight Zone, but the use and the confusion whence it arose is reflected in some of his prologues, such as this:

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.

In any case, grab a copy of the OED, of the SOED, or of a Merriam-Webster dictionary; you simply won't find a definition matching this most common use.

You will find at least recent editions of the AHD offering A realm of existence, as in a work of fiction, that is physically separate from another such realm. But you won't find that dictionary actually supporting the most common use of the word intuition.

The word intuition originally referred to direct apprehension. To claim intuition was to claim knowledge without intermediation by anything. The word gained some slightly less breath-taking meanings, but in all cases referred to knowledge, rather than to fallible belief.

But, when the ordinary person uses the word intuition, he or she is not making a claim of infallibility. Rather, intuition is used to refer to inclination of belief, for which no defense is offered in terms of a careful chain of reasoning.

One also doesn't find that more common and more modest use acknowledged in the entries for intuition in the OED, in the SOED, or in a Merriam-Webster dictionary. But I note that in the SOED entry for hunch, the definition is in terms of intuition, yet the two examples given refer each to fallible belief, one overtly. (The other previously mentioned dictionaries also refer to intuition in defining hunch. I've not checked the examples in the OED entry for hunch.)

On 19 January, I received an expected desk-rejection of my paper on Sraffa from the journal to which I'd submitted it a day or two earlier. The editor wrote that he'd enjoyed looking at the paper but that it were not the style of work that the journal published. I don't feel slighted by the lack of an explanation, but I'm more unhappy with something that might be mistaken for an explanation that doesn't actually explain anything.

(My paper on indecision was more than once rejected without explanation for the rejection, but with meta-explanation that providing an explanation would delay my submitting to some other journal.)

Upon receiving the rejection, I looked for another journal. What otherwise might have seemed the best choice required a €100 submission fee, not refunded in the event of a desk-rejection. I instead chose a different journal, in part because it is headquartered in Italy, where I expect more attention is paid to Sraffa even by mainstream economists.

The submission process was stalled by a failure of the software used by the journal's publisher, and a weekend had to pass before that failure was corrected. In the early morning of 23 January, I completed the process. Since then, the reported status of the paper has stood at Submitted to Journal. That report is supposed to change when the paper is assigned to a specific editor.

Once more, a desk-rejection is highly likely. Most papers that are sent to reviewers are rejected by the reviewers. Most papers that are not rejected are returned to the authors for revision. Most papers returned for revision are accepted after revision, but not always.

The term cultural relativism gets used for more than one concept.

The term can refer to the practice of attempting to adopt the perspective of another culture in viewing that other culture, in viewing one's own culture, or in viewing some third culture. This practice is a healthy one. One should not simply presume that any deviation from one's own customs is deficient, nor even that one's own culture does everything at least equally as well as does any other culture. And, even in cases in which one's own culture is doing something better than does another, it is good to develop an understanding of why things seem as they do to people not from one's own culture.

But cultural relativism is also used to refer to the doctrine that every culture is every bit as reasonable as is every other culture. The rejection of presumption of superiority of one's own culture is replaced by a presumption of equality of cultures. This doctrine is madness, as is swiftly shown by exposing the self-contradiction in claiming that cultures that reject that very doctrine are every bit as reasonable as those cultures that embrace it.

Indeed, a cultural relativist of that sort could not even find logical standing to disagree with a single person who rejected cultural relativism. A culture is a set of customs, broadly conceptualized, of some group of persons who, if more than one person, are connected by interaction. A subculture is itself a culture, of a group contained within some large cultural group. When we say group, we naturally think of a set with more than one member, and some people might insist that the term culture cannot properly refer to customs peculiar to just one person; that insistence would be just a matter of arbitrary taxonomy; the customs of a group of two are no more magically different from the customs of single person than the customs of three are magically different from the customs of two.

Often times, people who advance that second notion of cultural relativism employ something of a motte-and-bailey argument. The motte is the earlier point, that one should not simply presume that any deviation from one's own customs is deficient, or even that one's own culture does everything at least equally well as any other culture. The bailey is that every other culture is just as good, overall or perhaps even in each particular. Of course, most of these cultural relativists will look-away from those cultures that make the relativists or their audiences uncomfortable. Mind you that a significant share of these relativists are not consciously employing a motte-and-bailey argument, and many of them are not conscious that they are averting their gazes from self-contradictions and from the cases of cultures that almost no one wants to defend. Most of these relativists just got thoughtlessly swept up and psychologically over-committed.

When the bailey that every other culture is just as good is unchallenged, it often is treated as a motte for a new bailey that is still worse. The idea that every other culture is just as good is quietly replaced with the idea that every other culture is at least as good, and then it is argued that some cultures are in some ways better than our own. Indeed some cultures are in some ways better than our own, if not necessarily in just any way that a particular critic might claim. But, coupling that point with the spurious proposition that these other cultures are in every other way at least as good, these relativists arrive at a conclusion that ours is necessarily an inferior culture — no better in any way, and worse in some.

Thus, the practice of seeking to free oneself from cultural presumption is perverted first into a new and foolish presumption, and thence into a sophistic attack on our culture.

This entry deals with a Constitutional question that is only technical, and of trivial importance.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified and adopted on 10 February 1967. Section 1 reads

In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

which would be rather peculiar, if the Constitution had already said as much. But what the Constitution had actually said, in Article II Section 1 Paragraph 6, was

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

(Underscores mine.) A friend once reported to me that, after the death of William Henry Harrison, on the first occasion when Congress sent a bill to John Tyler, they addressed him as Acting President; Tyler returned the bill neither signed nor vetoed, asserting that he were not mere Acting President, but simply President. Congress returned the bill, addressing him as President, and Tyler signed it. Thereäfter, it was almost perfectly accepted that the Vice President became indeed the President after a President resigned or died or were removed. But, had the acceptance been indeed perfect, then Section 1 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would have been perfectly superfluous. However, I don't think that it properly were superfluous.

My primary argument is fairly straight-forward. The Constitution did not say that the Vice President became President. Indeed, the section lists Inability alongside the other conditions under which the Powers and Duties devolve, and declares that devolution revoked in cases in which the Disability be removed; if the same words about devolution mean taking the Office in other cases, we would have to take it that the Vice President became President during these times of temporary disability, only to lose the Office itself when the prior fellow recovered. Adlai Ewing Stevenson would briefly have been President in July of 1893; Richard Milhous Nixon repeatedly in the 1950s, as Eisenhower had a heart attack and then a stroke, and still later underwent surgery and its aftermath. Whenever a President got drunk and until he sobered-up, the Vice President would be President.

My secondary argument is more novel, but more subject to challenge. Until passage of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, no mechanism was provided for filling a vacancy in the Office of the Vice President. In cases in which a vacancy does not obtain, no mechanism for filling it is needed, so the lack of a mechanism suggests at the vacancy were not felt. Someone might reasonably argue against my secondary reason, by noting that, prior to the adoption of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, eight Vice Presidents left office before the ends of their terms — John C[aldwell] Calhoun resigned, the other seven died — leaving the Office vacant. In the case of William R[ufus DeVane] King (7 April 1786 – 18 April 1853) the vacancy was 1416 days. So perhaps what weren't acutely felt were just the needs for a spare and for a tie-breaker. (Note that Section 1 of Article II did provide for Congress to deal with a joint vacancy by appointing an Officer to act as President.) Still, the primary argument would hold.

I began with an admission that the question is only technical and trivial. If the Office of the Vice President remained that of the Vice President, but with the Powers and Duties of the Office of the President, then we are merely discussing a title, bragging rights.

Before 1967, four Vice Presidents took-on the Powers and Duties of the Office of the President without themselves ever winning election to that Office. These were John Tyler, Millard Filmore, Andrew Johnson, and Chester A[lan] Arthur. I say that we include them out.

Google Ngram chart of economic inequality and economic equality for the years 1901 through 2019

During my lifetime, the notion that material inequality, as such, is an ill has been made a dogma of the mainstream narrative.

Before this proposition was a dogma advanced from the commanding heights of our culture, I seldom encountered any argument for it; and, when I did encounter an argument, it was just one of two.

The less infrequent argument was one of a crude utilitarianism. Like any utilitarianism, it assumed that utility were a quantity (or measurable by a quantity) commensurable across persons, the interpersonal sum of which quantity ought to be maximized; the argument further assumed that the marginal utility of wealth diminished at rates sufficiently close between any two persons that one could be assured that, by playing Robin Hood, one would generally increase that interpersonal sum. This argument could not have won the day, because its distinctive assumptions wither and die as they are dragged into the light.

The remaining argument was that material inequality impeded growth or even caused economic decline. Still less discussion was provided as to how material inequality brought-about these effects on growth; but, when discussion was provided, that discussion was characterized by confirmation-bias in the interpretation of correlation, by an unstated presumption that unconsumed wealth tends just to be warehoused (rather than invested), and by hand-waving.

However, instead of relying much upon these two arguments or upon some alternative, journalists and others increasingly began treating the idea that material inequality were bad as if it were obvious and unquestionable and in no need of argument; indeed, it was not explicitly stated, but insinuated, in expressions such as the problem of rising economic inequality. I expect that, if pressed and unable simply to dismiss a challenger as wicked or as stupid, the typical subscriber to this egalitarianism would grope his or her way to the old utilitarian argument or something very much like it, or would grab with relief at the claim that inequality undermines growth. But the typical subscriber simply is not pressed; she is in a bubble in which the proposition is just not challenged, and not even stated so that she might imagine challenge.