if someone wanted to pull a george wallace and play electoral college spoiler, in the us of a of 2015, could it be done?

remember, the goal is not to build a large national base, but to actually win a plurality in some states. so, e.g., ross perot in ‘92 – by far the most successful third-party run under the current party system – received 19% of the vote nationally but didn’t even come close to winning any states. (he was only within single digits in maine.)

you’d need a good regional platform like the segregationist platform that wallace and, earlier, strom thurmond rode to such success. in other countries the role is usually played by regionalist or ethnic nationalist parties – the SNP or the TDP or the BQ. arguably this was exactly the formula that thurmond and wallace used – white southerners believed that the democratic party no longer had their interests at heart, and the dixiecrats and aip provided an alternative.

today’s white southerners are pretty well represented by the republican party. plus, of course, there’s no way you could run a successful campaign on the same ethnic regionalist grounds you could use 50 years ago. donald trump is trying something much weaker and the media is treating him literally as a joke. so that’s probably out of the question.

i don’t know if it would work but if you put a gun to my head and made me run a third-party spoiler campaign i’d go after white progressive ultraprotestants. bernie sanders, basically, with tammy baldwin as a running mate. it might be enough to win a good chunk of new england and maybe, like, oregon or something as well.

i don’t know if this is what bernie is doing. but if he is he’s smarter than i thought.

alexyar:

alexyar:

eka-mark:

[..]

i usually recommend Vickers’s book “Topology via Logic” to people who are new to topology but do have some math background - and especially to people with a computer science background

this book starts by pointing out that point-set topology is awful, and develops the theory from the localic point of view (which it later links to the point-set stuff), which imo makes more sense and does make good use of cat theory

(in particular Loc is much nicer than Top)

image

i’m going to reblog this again, just to make a point

the point being that there’s a reason why such an awful, terrible, “traditional course” still exists

unless,of course, you’re not a mathematician, but then do you really care about topology anyway?…

i’m told that there are cute statistics things that tie into algebraic topology somehow. i do not know anything about these cute statistics things, just that one of my profs once told me that they exist. (here is a review paper which i’m too lazy to read right now.) this is perhaps a reason to care about topology if you’re not a mathematician.

Source: the-irrationals

queenshulamit:

ozymandias271:

The source is this blogger in this thread who doesn’t seem to be a troll (a lot of their posts are normal SJ stuff).

Well fuck me sideways with a flower crown, sometimes tumblr is almost what tumblrinaction thinks it is.

Scott: “A concerted campaign to irrevocably identify an entire online community with a few atrocious actions by its worst members will succeed pretty much instantly.”

You gotta have some “worst members” for this to work, though. At least I can’t think of a counterexample. There were communists in the State Department, after all.

(And of course “worst members” is, as y’all LW types say, a two-place function. I’m sure that to some people I’d qualify as one of the worst people on Tumblr. Even though THEY WON’T SEND ME ANON HATE SO I DON’T KNOW IT)

Source: chillnatu

Q:You seem smart and knowledgeable, but I think you'd get your points across better with a bit less sarcasm/anger. Assuming your goal is to convince others, I guess.

Anonymous

severnayazemlya:

if you think i’m not straightforward, wait until you see a real continental

my gott, zjhe hedzjhemonic reign of reasjhon, pure ideology

(i had to tell nihilsupernum about zizek. he hadn’t heard of zizek. how can anyone not have heard of zizek)

friendly reminder that zizek has the exact same hair and beard as dan harmon

Q:[1/2] The LW rationalist community has some major issues, of course, but philosophy is NOT a well-defined game with a clear win condition. Physicists can settle a disagreement with experiments, mathematicians have proofs and counterexamples, but philosophers can endlessly elaborate on their disagreement without making any progress.

Anonymous

pluspluspangolin:

ogingat:

uncrediblehallq:

perversesheaf:

ogingat:

[2/2] Mathematics may seem superficially similar to philosophy, but the crucial difference is that philosophers try to reason about messy common-sense concepts instead of the simple, fully specified concepts of mathematics, and use messy human intuitions instead of axioms, so everything they say will always be fuzzy and vague, no matter how many greek letters you throw in. 

I agree that philosophy has aspects of fuzziness that aren’t present in chess or math. That said, philosophers do have proofs and counterexamples (and some philosophers think they have experiments), and philosophers are often able to agree on “win/loss conditions” in local debates. I think the apparent lack of philosophical progress goes away with the proper conception of philosophical expertise.

That said, it should definitely trouble philosophers that many of their questions are conceivably unanswerable. This is why I tend to think of the most important thing in philosophy as being its pedagogy. But few philosophers share that view. Many prefer to think they have robust research programs that will bear substantive fruit. Good for them if they do!

For example, I’m willing to defend Rawls’s A Theory of Justice as a piece of philosophical progress. It is a strikingly original work that made political philosophy better off.

Oh wow. I’ve always thought Rawls was an utter disaster. He almost invents an interesting argument for utilitarianism, then botches the job by choosing a bizare decision rule, then claims his argument also proves a bunch of other stuff which it obviously doesn’t because Rawls really wants to have an argument for his pre-philosophical prejudices. My view of Rawls is basically Eric Schwitzgebel’s view of Kant.

I avoid political philosophy near-pathologically, but I definitely know multiple people who think Rawls is the most important philosopher of the last, say, fifty years. I think this is a ridiculous view when Quine, Kripke, Lewis, and Putnam were active during that time, but, well, some people think that. I normally cite him for the veil of ignorance/original position stuff (which I can’t keep straight) and the concept/conception distinction (a really important one).

IIRC, ‘original position’ -> you don’t know who you are; ‘veil of ignorance’ -> you don’t know where you’ll end up (in the society you create the rules for)

do you know if anyone’s talked about what to do if those in the original position aren’t loss-minimizing agents?

That is, Rawls seems to be assuming that everyone in the original position would be following a minimax theory when designing the world, hence the overriding concern for the wellbeing of the absolute worst-off in society etc etc.

however, in what I’ve seen, at least, he never seems to put forth an argument for why those in the original position should follow this maximally avoidant approach, and so it seems plausible to me that those in the original position could take a more probabilistic approach and, eg, each say to themselves: “I’m ok with a epsilon chance of being fucked over, so let’s have an Omelas where one person has a terrible life and everyone else has a way better time that they could otherwise’

seconding this, i’ve never actually read ATOJ but this was always my concern as well.

(semi-related: when I was in high school I came up with a mathematical semi-formalization of politics, in which a society’s ~utility was determined as a function of the ~utilities of the people in the society. to high school!me, the obvious difference was in what function you chose. so “libertarians” aggregated with the L^1 norm, but progressives aggregated with something more like L^{-foo} norms, going all the way to rawls, who obviously used L^{-\infty}. [i did idly wonder what a politics based on the L^{\infty} norm might look like.] the fact that i thought that L^1 was obviously correct was a big part of the reason why i became a “libertarian” in high school. that and hayek.

anyway, point is, baby i was born this way)

Source: ogingat

nostalgebraist replied to your panorama: The used bookstore, a.k.a. Heaven on Earth

is that powell’s?

it is chamblin bookmine in jacksonville, fl

from which I bought Stanley Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say?, a book of lecture notes from a Wittgenstein course on aesthetics, and [professional book redacted for paranoia reasons] for like $40; they retail on amazon for a combined price of $120+.

If not for selfies I have no idea what I would have done in this situation – how do you prove you’re not somebody?(this guy called my mom’s house[!] asking for me, and when she offered to give him my number, he was like “nah, he knows how to reach me.” i  had no idea how to reach him, but i figured maybe he was someone i’d tutored or something so i got her to give him my number… this ensued)
Pop-up View Separately

If not for selfies I have no idea what I would have done in this situation – how do you prove you’re not somebody?

(this guy called my mom’s house[!] asking for me, and when she offered to give him my number, he was like “nah, he knows how to reach me.” i  had no idea how to reach him, but i figured maybe he was someone i’d tutored or something so i got her to give him my number… this ensued)