Frites de Todd
Geopolitical fast-foods, yummy
Had to comment on Jeff Rich’s outline of Frenchie1 intellectual Emmanuel Todd’s critique of The West here. Why? Oh for no damn reason except the mathematical physics is hurting my brain, so thought I’d hit myself over the other side of my head with other intellectual nonsense for fairness and balance.2
I like Jeff, and find Todd to be (mostly) sensible and thoughtful. Not all fast-food is bad, and Todd is really delivering haute cuisine compared to some. But he seems a bit nerdy and misses the spiritual dimension imho.
The Critique is of Anti-Religion
Around @10:00 in to the webinar Jeff mentions the usual leftist analysis of decline of religion blah, blah, blah. I could not resist firing a knee jerk reaction to contribute to the forgotten digits that sink down the youtube comments black hole. (It is quite possible later on Jeff would agree with me, but I never let a good kneejerk go to waste. May was well Hawking radiate it back out into substack.
He's got that wrong at least linguistically. (Although I'm going to use a non-standard lexicon.🤣) There is never “zero religion” in any society. Religion is in most basic uncorrupted terms a source of The Good — practice of compassion, kindness, trustworthiness. No one decent in the West has lost this, but it is suppressed by needless state-imposed economic precarity. The cultural traditions surrounding organized pseudo-religion border on being anti-religion.
Why I say I am “non-standard in lexicon” is obvious, people these days think “religion” is crud. Even my beautiful daughters. But they’ve got it backwards. The crud is what gets labelled as religious but which is deeply anti-religious.
(“You just try telling tha’ to the kids of tooodahy and they woon’t believe ya!”)
When that right ꕗ𖧳𖧥𖨚𖢧𖧥𖦪𖦧 Nietzsche claimed “god is dead” he was talking about the loss of a true conception of the true God, maybe he thought there was no such entity to point at, but if so he was wrong. But he was correct that the true concept of God was lost, hence “dead-ish.” It is a tough thing to honestly believe (have faith in the existence of, and all the consequences thereof) in God if you cannot ever know what God is, I mean the true God. The One you cannot point at, but can know only that It exists. By the most honest accounts I’ve ever known about, which you’d also know just from learning a bit of mathematics — objective mathematics, not fantasy inventions of the subjective mind — is that the Infinite is Unknowable, and Absolutely Unknowable.
On existence: I cannot tell you how often I’ve encountered dummies who still think an existence proof is impossible if you do not know of the entity or phenomenon. I try to…
… because it distresses me people with loud opinions can be so stupid. Know-it-Alls are dime a dozen. It takes a true genius to admit they know next to nothing. The ratio of two infinitesimal hyppereals is a finite real.
Also, anyone using the name or concept of “religion” for oppression and control is a total 𒁀𒋻𒔼𒈦𒋻𒇲𒁓, pardon my Greek. They practice anti-religion and call it “divine providence.” Is there anything more evil? (Apart from Neoliberalism.)
On a last weird hopeful note (quantum entanglement of the NRx fibres) the USA fiscal flows from some reports seem to have not been halted. (I’ve stopped my AppliedMMT monitoring of the USA fiscal flows myself, and aim to pivot to NZ, to act local as they say is supposed to be good & healthy.) So the US macroeconomy is going to do ok provided the Debt Ceiling nonsense is by-passed again by the usual accounting gimmicks and then there’s just the GOP regular cycle of cutting spending programs. The macroeconomics is more like a sausage dog balloon you buffoons. You pinch one end and the automatic stabilizers bulge at the other, the highly regressive unemployment welfare benefits end. There is probably a limit to this, if there is a severe enough recession the gig will be up on both versions of neoliberalism… one would hope. No crystal ball forecast here. It’s just despite stupidity being rampant, people are not idiots. What’s that you say? “Contradiction in terms!” Well, people are not formal axiomatic systems. If you think we are then go invest in the next Ai Singularity hype bubble and see how that goes.
You cannot imagine an Occupy 2.0 will be as aimless and ignorant about What is to be done? Or can you?🤣
The sauce tomate on the Frites
I'm a dirtbag physicist you see, so always with old Einstein: “religion without science is blind, and science without religion is lame.”
What Todd, and many others on "the left" critique is not religion, they are critiquing anti-religion. When “the West” is defeated it is a good thing for “the people” of the West, since releasing the shackles of Neoliberalism opens up human capacity to act morally. Provided the long-term reaction is not NRx or techno-monarchy! (Which I just do not think is possible, it is short-run at best since those are ideologies born of mind-mush oozing from the unsustainable top 1% of right-wing ꕗ𖧳𖧥𖨚𖢧𖧥𖦪𖦧s, so like all top-down oppression in history: unsustainable.)
In overly crude terms: the way to defeat normie MAGA is to turn actual religion around on their false religions. Everyone (normies let’s say, not the Mars Kings) knows deep down it serves everyone better if we are kind and unselfish. But government imposed austerity forces otherwise decent people into financial precarity corners who then act like trapped selfish rats, mostly through no fault of their own except a little ignorance.
(Similar to how actual terrorism is defeated: remove the source of their grievances. Anyone remember Peter Bergen? — I recall CNN aired his (correct) views once upon a time? The grievances are always imposed by the truer ꕗ𖧳𖧥𖨚𖢧𖧥𖦪𖦧s. But oh how the voices of sanity fade when the owner of the news media is a billionaire exploiter of workers. Gosh! I wonder where the link is between terrorism and mistreatment of workers? Must’ve been totally made up by the dirty commies huh?)
Nihilism is Not an Option
Or so I do say! 🤣 No… seriously. Ordinary people I meet all the time have millions of “religious bones in their bodies” — which is to say in their nonphysical souls. Doing what is so-called “practicing a religion” does not necessarily strengthen those “bones”, and may down-right plague them with cancer. This is a simple way to see something is anti-religious. The relevant almost tautology is, By their fruits ye shall know them.
The leftist retreat to postmodernism and archaic marxism (thinking “gold” is “the money”), or any such retreat away from religion is the cancer. The cure for this is religion, genuine religion, and you can find it all around you in every simple act of kindness and compassion daily. It goes largely unreported in the “News” yet is the dominant activity in our lives. It is also a massively untapped resource that is boundless and infinite. Like Scott Cyclops Summers not using his eye beams when the baddies arrive.3
Before more people in society tap into this infinite resource who knows what carnage we will suffer in the interregnum. Probably “a lot” is the answer. The wormhole through from neoliberalism to some sort of social democracy requires some exotic matter. (Little easter egg there for later on.)
While I don’t habitually finish with nice music like Billy-Reggaenomics-Mitchell, I can offer some nice theoretical physics if that sort of thing resonates harmonically with your neurons.
The GOAT of Spacetime
Speaking of Einstein, I was able to recently compress a pretty good synopsis of how Einstein in fact triumphed over Neils Bohr in their great debate. It was from a phystube vlog about the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics. The dude from Physics but Awesome (here) did the whole standard orthodox spiel about spooky entanglement and non-locality, going through Bell’s Theorem &c. He did have a quote from John Stuart Bell at the end which I’d not heard before:
“Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure… and right.
Einstein was consistent, clear, down to earth… and wrong.”
This was why I had to waste a few minutes writing a comment. I hope youngsters see it. I won’t rant too long on postmodernism and all that cruft, but I have to say, these days people too easily get blinded and bedazzled by mysterianism. Postmodernism being some of the worst. Nietzschean and Heideggerian and Lacanian claptrap next.4 I’ll begrudgingly give Žižek a pass, though I know many Ōhanga Pai readers do not (and I don’t blame them). Way down the end of the crud spectrum is “Make X Great Again” for any country X. I will defend this ‘crudifikaton’5 spectral thesis if asked. MXGA is not neoreactionary. The people in the Mars King orbit exploiting MXGA are.
Heck bro, I am 100% Make Aotearoa Great Again. But also recognize the far-right and our nationalists like NZ First are incapable of doing so. The way to make NZ Great Again is to enhance our imports, take in refugees (adding to our greatest resources), and run domestic full employment, then fine tune a Job Guarantee so it is immune from all possible neoliberalization and maximizes human creativity and potential. Even an anarchist cannot be against this. So long as we have an imposed central government we must force It to support labour. Deliberately trying to burn down government is not genuine anarchy, it is neoreactionary, AnCap, and anti-worker.
What was my point?
My point was that everyone and his donkey thinks Neils Bohr defeated Einstein and so quantum weirdness and irreducible subjectivity reigns supreme and the entire Cosmos is an absurd joke. Well my friends, everyone and their donkeys are wrong.
Being a Planck scale tad anti-religious myself, I did the curt and rude “I am right, the experts are wrong!” comment bro thing. Look… I just don’t have time to waste thinking of how to write a one minute comment with all courtesy and humility. Wish I could. My advice is “take or leave it.”
This is false. @11:00 Bells Inequality (BI) can be violated while local realism is true. What Bell also assumed to derive the BI's is Reichenbach's principle of common causes: if the joint probability P(A,B) fails to factorize then there is a common cause C: P(A, B| C) = P(A|C) P(B|C). Dropping this principle means one cannot derive the BI's, nor any similar no go theorems. Hence local realism is compatible with QM if we admit non-Reichenbach common causes. See Jacob Barandes' work. It just means stochastic transitions have memory, or in the parlance of stochastic process theory they are Indivisible in QM (In the case there is entanglement or interference). Events breaking entanglement or similar coupling yield Divisible transition matrices and that's (memoryless, or Markovian) classical mechanics formulated as a stochastic process (statmech).
(Oops! My fingers slipped repeatedly on my keyboard there for 90 seconds.) OK, that was a bit over-the-top for a macroeconomics blog! Too bad. Hope you get the gist.
Disclaimer: I have an Ace up my sleeves here, which is that I know a spacetime model for quantum mechanics. But it is thoroughly unproven and not yet peer reviewed. When I say, “I know Einstein was right,” I only mean I 99% believe so. Belief is not certainty. Tomorrow my belief could plummet to 1%.
A further disclaimer is that I do not yet know for sure that the spacetime entanglement degrees of freedom are in fact non-Reichenbachian (cannot be integrated over) but something like this will be the case if Einstein was right. That is, if physical reality is local and real.
I continued writing to Physics But Awesome…
Nah. @12:00 the correct statement is that QM can have local real Hidden Variables (HV's), but they cannot be summed or integrated over, so are non-Reichenbach common causes. (Bohm Pilot Waves are not this type I think, but you can fact check that. Pilot Waves are dopey for all sorts of other reasons.)
@13:50 Einstein was likely right. GR admits non-Reichenbach common causes (as per my comments above). You go up against the great old Einstein at your peril, even long after his departure from this sacred Earth.
To be fair, Todd does not come across as a Frenchie.
FoxNews Corp Fyzixx.
If pop-culture references are good for Žižek they are doubly good for me.
Far worse in that it infects the “intellectual” Left. Entirely diverting effort from the actual war on the working class and the battles which we are losing daily. It might be fair that reading some “theory” can help with labour organizing, but you don’t need much theory for that, and can learn it on the job, and the leftisist academics have total theory rot, they’re worth nothing. All one need is a few comrades and a willingness to fight.
Crudification is quantized I guess. There is a Planck unit of crud.