Life in two dimensions

Logic in the hands of a totalitarian, as Arendt reminds us, is a hammer rather than a chisel. I’ve read the following paragraph (link) several times, and find it so riddled with perceptual flaws as to be useless.

You’ve all taken high school math, right?  If you want a function to move in a desired direction, you don’t remove a moderating variable.  You remove the extremes.  It is that simple.  Remove the far right and you have a median that resembles more the country in representation.  The center right party already contains those who are of the left.  Destroy the far right, and you can’t help but have a policy forwarded that better favors the middle and lower classes.  More to the point, you have a starting position for moving policy and politics towards the left.  This isn’t that goddamned difficult.  Remove people like Skees, Burnett and Rehberg and you are left with people who are more pliant to your needs.  Start from the center right, and you’re  one helluva lot closer to where you want to go than giving the game away to the far right, as we liberals* did in 2010.

Not kidding here – the guy has reduced politics to a straight line. I’ve noted this about him in the past, that he cannot deal in nuance, and this pretty well seals that argument.

Politics in the real world

But let’s move from a high school math to high school geometry and a concept that destroys his argument: Triangulation. In a triangulated environment, the enemies that have to be removed from the picture are not Skees and Rehberg, but rather Tester, Baucus and Obama. That would create a vacuum into which would flow a real alternative to our two right wing parties. (Extreme right and “center right” parties are both pursuing identical objectives. How do you decide which is which? That’s laughable!)

Of course, politics is neither a straight line nor a triangle. It is a chaotic system with many unknowns and where events can have many unpredictable outcomes. And that is the world that most ex-party people like myself live in. My friend Ladybug, who frequently comments here, thrives in a chaotic environment, and looks for opportunity to achieve his objectives without regard to D’s and R’s. He thinks solely in terms of means to ends, and is not confused by surface phenomena. Another man who thinks in terms of clever maneuvering in a chaotic environment is Helena attorney Jonathon Motl. These are people making a difference.

Hammers and bullheaded logic are useless in politics. Useless.
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*Both he and his brother are content to be “liberals” without ever actually defining what the hell that word means.
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PS: I should not do this, that is, engage in indirect dialogue with the dickhead, but this is rich: He goes into a tedious diatribe hammering out his arithmetic [credit where due - algebraic] interpretation of politics, and then at the end confuses chaotic with random. (Link)

Chaotic simply means that small actions can have large and unpredictable effects, but this is not beyond analysis. Chaos theory deals with this issue in particle physics, and others are now applying it to economics. Meteorology and weather forecasting are getting better because of the mathematics of chaotic analysis. It’s all beyond me, as I can’t even grasp calculus, or moving equations, but that is the starting point for chaos. It is the old butterfly idea, too trite to repeat, but I just did.

Random is a coin toss. That’s where linear thinker thinks I am at.

Politics is chaotic, but not random. The most potent driving force is concentrated wealth, financing “both” parties and managing perceptions as well. But even as that force is applied, the future is uncertain. We do not know how the applied force will create its own forces of resistance. OWS is one unforeseen consequence, Obama’s signing of the detention bill the corporate response. What is next? I will surely be surprised.

I’m dealing with a blockhead. He reminds me of Ayn Randian architecture – square and imposing and without creative substance or inspiration.
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PPS: As with his brother, I am both polite and kind, handing him his hat and cleaning his clock, and all I get is shit.