No Future for the GOP?

Clinamenic said:

Brilliant illustration of this, comrade noocrat!

Yeah I agree that most officer's brains don't warrant their offices, but our standards can only be so high ultimately.

Although as an aside, I'd say the two smartest US public officials, that I'm aware of, both happen to be women. Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Jen Psaki, white house press secretary.

Haines has a degree in physics as it happens, and while I know nothing of Psaki's past from the two press conferences of hers I've seen, she's demonstrated what appears to be an exceptionally agile mind.

I could learn and be convinced otherwise, but I can't think of any male public officials in the US I'd place before them (edit: even near them), in terms of intelligence.

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The obvious conclusion is that physics graduates should rule the world as benign dictators.

Mr. Tea said:

The obvious conclusion is that physics graduates should rule the world as benign dictators.

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We could certainly do a lot worse. Haines also ran a bookshop in Baltimore, I believe.

Clinamenic said:

We could certainly do a lot worse. Haines also ran a bookshop in Baltimore, I believe.

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Angela Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry.

Now we all know chemistry isn't a proper science, but there was probably enough physics content that it just about counts.

Mr. Tea said:

Angela Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry.

Now we all know chemistry isn't a proper science, but there was probably enough physics content that it just about counts.

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I remember reading that on her wiki page maybe a year ago, and being surprised that there was enough discourse for a quantum chemistry program to begin with.

And are you serious about chemistry not being a proper science? I don’t understand it well enough to say myself.

Clinamenic said:

And are you serious about chemistry not being a proper science? I don’t understand it well enough to say myself.

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I think that was a failed mathematician physicist joke.

It seems like we have a robustly actionable understanding of how atomic nuclei interact and how molecules interact, so would you say this understanding just doesn’t go far enough?

Slothrop said:

I think that was a failed mathematician physicist joke.

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It's funny because it's true.

Scandals used to mean something for political candidates — torpedoing campaigns before they even got off the ground. But now, they’ve become just another part of the process. “In Missouri, Georgia, Ohio and now Nebraska, Republican men running for high office face significant allegations of domestic violence, stalking, even sexual assault — accusations that once would have derailed any run for office. But in an era of Republican politics when Donald J. Trump could survive and thrive amid accusations of sexual assault, opposing candidates are finding little traction in dwelling on the issues,” NYT’s Jonathan Weisman writes. “The candidates who do speak of their opponents’ domestic violence and assault allegations often raise them not as disqualifications in looming Republican primaries, but as matters ripe for exploitation by Democrats in the fall.”

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So the issue for GOP leaders isn't that they have some candidates who committed sexual assault or domestic violence, but instead that those would be things their Democrats opponents would focus on. The GOP can't criticize it, because it would be tantamount to criticizing Trump.

What a fucked up world.

It's the contradictions with this that get me, the lack of consistency where some people say the wrong thing on twitter and as a result are cancelled - lose work, get edited out of films, are hounded out of public life - whereas others are literally convicted of terrible crimes and it has no effect on their careers in high public office.

Not sure where to put this but I'm reading about how Florida has banned loads of maths text books cos they claim that they smuggle in progressive examples and such. Cue lots of jokes about how Floridians can't do maths and so on... but I'm interested in the actual content. I definitely remember that there was a point when I was about thirteen years old and... say a maths problem involved three people, previously they would have been called Adam, Brian and Clive, but now chances are one of them would be Anil or something. So I'm fairly sure that there had been some kind of directive to move towards inclusivity - a small step in itself there but I can well imagine it driving loads of BNP types into a frothing rage, and the main point is, lots of examples are not neutral, the names picked and the context of the problems to solve necessitate a choice from those setting them, and as soon as you need to make a choice, any idea of complete objective neutrality is gone.

So, what I'm saying here is, maths problems and examples are not totally neutral and I can easily believe that if they were being set by some kind of ideologue then there are loads and loads of things that could creep into the books. So, yeah, I do totally accept that, in theory, it would be possible for maths books to have loads of bias in them. And I guess it could be that if no-one was properly paying attention and then the governors looked at all the books and discovered that they had all been written with a massive (I dunno) pro Intelligent Design position or Anti-Brexit or I dunno what - it's theoretically possible.

Florida has just banned 41 percent of its maths books (setting up loads of jokes about how they had to get people from another state to work out that number for them). Like I said, it's possible that they are all ideological propaganda to make pupils into gay muslims... I also think it's possible that they are not and that many of these books had nothing wrong with them - or worse a load of GOP types got their knickers in a twist cos examples featured people called Anil. It seems to me that De Santis should be required to produce a list of the banned books and a reason in each case, until then his choice to do that and replace them all with books from just one (the highest number he can count to) supplier will look questionable.

Anyway, Americans, what your maths books like? Were they at all ideological? Is it possible that this photo doing the rounds is real? Surely not....

it's all political posturing to rile up the base, total BS. also ironic that the freedom/free speech-loving Republicans who rally against cancel culture are the ones doing the restricting and canceling.

btw, I'm always embarrassed that Americans say math instead of the more proper maths. it's short for mathematics, and there are various types of math: arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, etc. but we don't give a shit, it's all just math to us.

You'd have to think that if maths problems like that were being handed out regularly to students across the country we'd have heard an enormous outcry long before now. I mean, you'd hardly have to be a frothing at the mouth conservative to think that that question was a little... off would you?

In fact, that's what I like best about the whole thing; of course REPs would be shocked by this, but they have created a caricature of a lefty who wouldn't be at all - they are basically saying that if you are in favour of a free health service then you will automatically want your kids to read stories about pimps sexually abusing children while they study simultaneous equations.

Of course that should be obvious, but just in case some voters haven't realised it themselves it's best to help them along a bit by making them a fake homework sheet that illustrates a truth deeper than that they would have got from simply reading a real one.

Re maths/math - math always kinda sticks in the craw for me cos it's just not the word I grew up on, I find it uglier and less aesthetically pleasing -and actually I remember a lecturer once making that same point you make @Leo about how with an S on the end it more accurately conveys the multitudes that comprise the subject - but I'm not sure that follows does it? A plural doesn't necessarily require an S does it?

Then again, math is such an ugly stunted little thug of a word that I'd be glad to never hear it again so I'll go with your argument .

@IdleRich - did you hear about the time Republicans in - oh well it can only be Texas, can't it? Actually it could probably have been lots of states, but let's say Texas - criticised school math textbooks for teaching "postmodern math", by which they meant maths that uses letters as well as numbers... in other words, algebra...

Cue gags aplenty along the lines of "Wait till they hear about these so-called 'Arabic numerals'..."

What? Is that true? Are you saying that a real person in a position of seniority in the Texas Republican party was not aware of algebra? That seems rather hard to believe. I mean was it a performative thing he did for the benefit of red neck cowboys who would be happiest if reading and writing was banned altogether? You know what, send me a link and let me get myself to the bottom of this mystery.

To be honest, I reckon that a big part of the problem is the name. Al-Jebra and Al-karizmh are clearly words whose origin is Arabic.In fact, it's not just that these words are Arabic that's the problem, my guess is the fact that if anyone finds the above interesting enough to stick a few words into google they will quickly discover that the backwards barbarians of the head-chopping religion were in fact way ahead!

While the ancestors of Mr Tea were living in a cave desperately trying to forage for food and constantly rubbing two sticks together (at least, I think that's what they were doing) and the ancestors of Mixed Biscuits were crawling around in the mud outside shouting utter bollocks about how fire doesn't work* their cousins in what we now call the Middle East were inventing new types of abstract thought and taking mathematics forward in leaps and bounds.

Obviously the Muslim religion is based around the worship of a second hand god that was handed down to them by the Jews, so Christianity is clearly superior by dint of the fact that it was.... hang on a sec, oh, they also worship the exact same god handed down by the Jews (but credit where credit is due, that was years before the Muslims got their hands on him). And so after looking at a few diagrams and stuff, even the most inbred and ill-educated fundie can grasp that, although to them it's completely obvious that Christianity is simply just better than everything else, some people are strangely reluctant to take their word for it and so it doesn't hurt to demonstrate some of the more worldly achievements which they claim were due to Christianity. And one thing they often talk about is the achievements in both cultures in various fields such as science, maths, art etc etc Discovering that the Muslims were so innovative might be a bit of a blow to the belief system of yer average potential GOP member and so I can see that those on high deciding precisely what a young Republican needs to learn at school to best equip him for a life of voting Republican, firing guns and never challenging the status quo in anyway, might deem it unnecessary for the waters to be muddied by that little historical error that in which the baddies accidentally got ahead for a while until in good time we invented cars and youtube and kicked their arses back to the 19th century or thereabouts.






*I dunno why neither thought to get some tips from my ancestors who lived nearby in a perfectly good house with a roaring fire and a garage with several horse-drawn carts or, in fact, any of the rest of the people in western civilisation who were lagging only slightly behind their eastern counterparts.

@IdleRich - I dunno if you're being serious when you're expressing doubt about whether Republican lawmakers could be unaware of algebra, but bear in mind that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks that the increased prevalence of wildfires in California is due to the dastardly Jews and their devastating space laser, and is definitely not to do with climate change, which in any case is a con job perpetuated by a conspiracy of Democrats, liberals, scientists, the Chinese government, and - hell, why not? - probably also Jews.

Does she really think those things though? I mean, that's a real question, I don't know to what extent she believes in them and which she pretends to believe in when it's convenient. Which in itself is the terrifying thing - how did a society reach a point where it's sometimes convenient for a politician to pretend to believe in Jewish Space Lasers.

Omar Khayyam of Rubiyat fame, was also a great mathematician. I think he figured out a method for solving certain types of cubic equation. Obviously he didn't have a general algebraic solution (by which I mean if you have A x cubed + B x squared + C x + D = 0, can you write x in terms of A, B, C and D?) cos that was an absolute motherfucker to figure out and took people another 600 years or so before they got it. I think it required (or arguably led to) the invention/creation of complex numbers.

Why am I saying this? No reason at all, it's just the only fact I know about ancient Islamic maths (and also that some guy called Al-Kaharizmi or something gave his name to the algorithm, and is also considered to have invented Algebra I believe) and I've been hoping for years that I would get the chance to slip it in subtly to a relevant conversation. At least my chance came and I seized it.

IdleRich said:

Does she really think those things though? I mean, that's a real question, I don't know to what extent she believes in them and which she pretends to believe in when it's convenient. Which in itself is the terrifying thing - how did a society reach a point where it's sometimes convenient for a politician to pretend to believe in Jewish Space Lasers.

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Sure, I get you - same deal with Trump and a million idiotic things he's said, carcinogenic windmills or whatever. So the question is whether she really believes it (or at least considers it plausible), or knows it isn't but is saying it anyway because she believes it'll benefit her own career, the interests of the Republican Party in general, or both.

Either possibility is depressing but what's worse about the latter is that she may even be right.

I just tried to find an article about the Republicans who hadn't heard of algebra, but the search combination of "postmodern" and "math" just brought up loads of references to that book that claimed it was racist to emphasise that maths problems have a right and a wrong answer.