Sam Johnson can joke about dropping a nuclear bomb on Syria WHILE IN CHURCH, and this all passes away like it never happened, but Dick Durbin makes one comment, and it's hanging time.

There is nothing any Republican can say, no moral horror they could call for that would cause them any sense of shame *ever*

The Republican party has no business condemning Durbin. And Democrats have no good reason to take any criticism from Republicans on their rhetorical tactics. Not for another thousand years.

Don't fall for the criticism. Tell the Republicans to go to hell, and keep the focus where is belongs. On torture, on the fact that our troops have been made into torturers, on the fact that our government now proclaims it has the right to 'disappear' anyone anywhere, never give them a trial, and execute them if desired.

Don't give up on the focus.

It's the silence that scares me. I don't know if it's media bias and there's an un-covered rising swell of anger and disgust, or if the public truly is indifferent.

Sales of headache remedies to theologians and philosophers must be going through the roof these days.

ADL to Senator Durbin: Inappropriate Comparison to Nazi Tactics Unacceptable

New York, NY, June 16, 2005 ... "The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today called on Senator Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) to repudiate his remarks and apologize to the American people for distorting an important issue, with an inappropriate comparison to Nazi tactics."

"In a speech on the Senate floor on June 14th on the situation at Guantanamo Bay he likened American treatment of prisoners to what 'must have been done by Nazis... that had no concern for human beings....'"

London mayor not sorry for Nazi jibe
Tuesday, February 15, 2005 Posted: 7:55 AM EST (1255 GMT)
LONDON, England -- Defiant London Mayor Ken Livingstone has again refused to apologize for a tirade in which he accused a Jewish reporter of behaving like a Nazi concentration camp guard.

With International Olympic Committee inspectors arriving in London Tuesday to assess the city's bid for the 2012 Games, there are fears the row could damage Britain's chances.

Jewish community leaders and Holocaust survivors have demanded an apology from the Labour Party mayor.

However, at his weekly press conference at City Hall Tuesday, Livingstone again refused to say sorry.

"You may think my remarks to that reporter -- and many over the years -- are offensive," he said. "That is purely a matter of judgment. If you think they are racist I think you are wrong.

Welcome to the war on image
By Diana West
Jewish World Review June 17, 2005 / 10 Sivan, 5765
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
Finally, our guards at Guantanamo Bay are getting the hang of showing "reverence and respect" toward that "fragile piece of delicate art" (military-speak for the Quran), and, wouldn't you know it, our politicians and pundits, from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to Tom Friedman and Bill Kristol, are angling to put a lock on Gitmo.

Why? It's an "international embarrassment," says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who should know. His colleague, Sen. Richard Durbin, (D-Ill.), is himself so internationally embarrassed that he compared the terrorist detainee facility to Nazi deaths camps, Communist gulags and Khmer Rouge killing fields.

The Silver-Lined Gitmo Commode
By Demosophist
May 19, 2005

"Well, I'm frankly puzzled by this whole Koran-flushing thing. I understand how a people steeped in a vengeful literature for a thousand years might get upset when a few red infidels use laser-guided bombs to blow up their neighborhoods while we're liberating them from tyranny. And I grasp the idea of the shame of a proud people when inferior mongrel troops are sent into a place like Fallujah or Ramadi to uncover baby Auschwitz slaughterhouses with shaky plaintive notes from the victims scrawled on the walls in their own blood, or when we bomb Baghdad in 'Shock and Awe' while they stand on their rooftops so as not to miss anything, or when a group of our miscreants discomfit captives guilty of far worse, with the cultural indignities of plebe hazing. I understand that, and it sorta makes sense. But why do they wait until they think we might have flushed a [holy] book down the crapper before instigating an Ummah-wide lethal street uprising? Why now, and not then?"

"I asked some people I know, including some Muslims, about this, because I'm stumped. I related the story of how Sir Ernest Shackleton tore up the pages of the Bible when the Endurance was stranded at the South Pole, to impress upon his men the necessity of leaving some things behind for the march across Antarctica. A Jewish friend observed that a Jew, at least an Orthodox Jew, would probably not have done what Shackleton did with the Torah. But she also said that they probably wouldn't have rioted had someone flushed it, either...."

You can't have civil discourse and discussion about the administration's policies regarding torture, or prisoners of war, or the environment, or, well, anything. The administration lies about what the policies are, then it lies about what it said the policies were, and our side is the only side expected to play by the rules and be civil. That isn't discourse. I'm tired of being civil. I'm not civil to people who lie to me as a matter of course.

Well, I guess the rant is just an angrier, long and drawn out version of what I just said. So I won't stress about finding it.

2. Watching this whole thing is like watching a disaster on tape in slo-mo: we can see it coming, we know what would be needed to prevent it, and, so far, nothing we do makes a difference.

3. There's an aspect of faith to the "conservative" pundits belief in the current radical-right leadership; no matter what the leadership does, it is for the greater good. If that lot were to lose its faith, it would make a real difference. Every failure, every death is one more step towards that loss, but why should innocents suffer to be their lesson?

4. If the independent mass media were to turn against the radical right, now, much might yet be saved.

The real way Bush et al. are like the Nazis is in their ability to dehumanize (in their minds) those who are most different from them. The way they're like the Allies is being like the Allies of WWI-- sowing the wind by impoverishing and victimizing Iraqis the way the Allies did Germany at the end of the first World War.

Good point. I missed that. Thank you.

"Are we different enough?" This implies a metric of how distant two political positions, call them A and B, are from each other. Call that distance d(A,B). I've got to be able to imagine drawing a picture on graph paper, and making the dges of appropriate length.

To add a little rational structure to the discussion, I'd think that we can all agree on these axioms for the Political Metric Space:

(1) d(A,A) = 0 [the distance from any position to itself is zero, no difference]

(2) If d(A,B) = 0 then A=B [If there's no difference in positions, it's the same position, maybe just labelled differently]

(3) d(A,B) = d(B,A) [the distance between any two positions does not depend on which one you start with)

(4) d(A,B) + d(B,C) >= d(A,C) [the tricky one, called the "triangle inequality."] Example: the difference between the US position and the former USSR position, plus the difference between the the former USSR position and the Nazi position, is at least as great as the difference between the US position and the Nazi position. Bill Clinton obliquely referred to this in his theory of "triangulating." It governs strange bedfellows and enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend."

I have to think of it this way once Durbin invokes Nazi deaths camps, Communist gulags and Khmer Rouge killing fields. Now I have to measure, by my own standards, what the distance is between Gitmo and Nazi deaths camps; Gitmo and Communist gulags; Gitmo and Khmer Rouge killing fields; Nazi deaths camps and Communist gulags; Nazi deaths camps and Khmer Rouge killing fields; and Communist gulags and Khmer Rouge killing fields.

Why? Because I want to be self-consistent, or else I'll be prey to trolls who want to point out the mote in my eyes while neglecting the phaser beam in theirs.

I'm not trying to do Math for its own sake, or to be weird, Patrick. I'm trying to give rules for the debate, if it is to be rational. For example, I think we're slightly farther from Killing Fields than from Nazi death camps, if only because 1/3 of cambodians were liquidated, and the Khmer Rouge went after teachers, writers, and anyone wearing glasses because they could read books. I'm an eyeglass-wearing writer and teacher. I might see things differently if, for instance, I were gay.

To put it another way: I agree that we're on the slippery slope. Question is, how slippery, how much slope, and are we goping straight downhill?

Note that Matt A. is making a similar (albeit partial) structuring of the debate.

To stay on focus, is it better to say: "this reminds me of the Nazis" or "this goes against everhthing we stand for"? Is it better to say "we don't want to do what the Soviets did" or "it is a time-honored US tradition to object to torture"?

Similarities are (obviously) there. So are differences. Unless we want to stand on the deck of the Liberty and go down arguing the finer points of history, we had better use the better part of valor.

And JVP, your comment about what "Jews" do is uninformed by current discourse in Israel, where "like the Nazis" is a common slur. Recently, Joseph Lapid (minister of Justice at the time) cast that at the ultra-orthodox, and said something along the lines of being able to understand why that kind of Jews were targeted for abuse. Not to be outdone, one of the leading Jewish politicians of North African descent was quoted as saying that the people deciding about the disengagement (which involves a population transfer of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip back into Israel) were "like the Nazis" and could/should be resisted appropriately.

Yes, in Israel, the Nazi comparison is alive and well, and tends to be used by all sides of the (Jewish) political spectrum.

(Uprooting Bushes? The weed of tyranny? Oh the 'umanity!)

I am uninformed in that way. I thank you for politely and convincingly correcting me.

Is there any pattern to Israeli measurements of the distance between Gitmo and Nazi deaths camps; Gitmo and Communist gulags; Gitmo and Khmer Rouge killing fields; Nazi deaths camps and Communist gulags; Nazi deaths camps and Khmer Rouge killing fields; and Communist gulags and Khmer Rouge killing fields?

The exact same thing could have been said of Germany in the early '30s. Indeed it has. Many times. By Germans, no less, and not just the left either.

I think that a hijacking of the political right by an extremist faction that advocates the routine use of extra-legal measures in the name of national security just begs for the comparison of neo-Conservatism with National Socialism.

In general, Israelis will tend to pull out the Nazi card whenever they mean "really bad and diabolically clever about it". "Medium bad and a little stupid" seems to draw the Arab card (with an emphasis on Syrians). In 30 years in Israel (and the nearly five years since I've been back in the US and only monitoring Israeli communiation via the Internet) I've heard no vilification of the gulags or of the Khmer Rouge.

What I've heard all too frequently in the past decade has been justification of genocides or mass murders. In particular, "The US did the same thing to the Indians [sic] and the blacks [sic, again], Israel is morally justified to repeat, with any means justifying the end". Between that sort of statement and my own lawyer using the phrase "we need a final solution" to describe his hopes for a change in the demographic balance between Jews and Palestinians in Israel+territories, I have a permanent chill down my spine.

In this context I should probably quote the statement that chilled me above all others. Situation - a Saturday lunch at a Tel-Aviv cafe, with my then-mate and his father (a prominent lawyer) and father's girlfriend. The girlfriend, as normative a woman as you can find, was objecting to the waves of immigration from the former Soviet Union. "Most of them don't even have Jewish blood!" she said.
The chilling bit is that not one person understood my outrage at that phrasing for about half a year.

This is because the starting point, the "A" in JVP's diagram is a United States that has chosen to commit torture, whatever its rationale.

There is no place for a zero-option on JVP's chart, a point representing a United States that has chosen NOT to commit torture. (There may be a mathematical symbol for points preceding "A" in math notation, but I don't know what it would be.)

I submit that the moral distance between a USA that has chosen to NOT commit torture and a USA that has chosen TO commit torture is... infinite.

(That may be too extreme a view. So I'll compromise: half-infinite.)

Slight variant: "We shouldn't be criticized because we mean well".

Other variant: "We shouldn't be criticized because anyone who criticizes us thereby proves they're really bad."

Mr. Bush failed to note that we were not attacked by the Iraqis.

Had Mr. Bush not ducked out of his military service he might have learned that it's vital to define your victory conditions before you start an action.

Of course. Because, for better or for worse, you're not allowed to say mean things about us -- defined, of course, as "people who agree with the right-wing position" -- whereas you're allowed to say whatever the hell you want about other countries.

Jonathan: (4) d(A,B) + d(B,C) >= d(A,C) [the tricky one, called the "triangle inequality."] Example: the difference between the US position and the former USSR position, plus the difference between the the former USSR position and the Nazi position, is at least as great as the difference between the US position and the Nazi position. Bill Clinton obliquely referred to this in his theory of "triangulating." It governs strange bedfellows and enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend."

Don't buy it at all. "Enemy of my enemy is my friend" simply isn't true; oftentimes the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, or even both my friend and my enemy. I'll bet you could, if you were so inclined, come up with some sort of meaningful topology on the space but I'll also bet that it isn't Hausdorff and probably not even T1. In fact, I'd argue that at some quasi-mathematico-philosophical level, the difficulties in political calculations arise precisely because of (or precisely induce, depending on which way around you're looking at things) the failure of the separation axioms.

But the ONLY DIFFERENCE between the good people and the bad people is what they do. There is no essential nature that makes some people good and some people bad.

Shunra:

Patrick, the problem is not whether it is morally reprehensible or not. The problem is that comparing what we're doing to regimes/groups branded evil sidetracks a discussion that should not be side tracked.

To stay on focus, is it better to say: "this reminds me of the Nazis" or "this goes against everhthing we stand for"? Is it better to say "we don't want to do what the Soviets did" or "it is a time-honored US tradition to object to torture"?

If Durban hadn't brought up the Nazis, Bush's apologists would have found something else to quote out of context in his report and beat him about the head and shoulders with it.

My Mathematical Biology of the day is on father's Day, in Open Thread 42. But interesting comment.

Shunra:

A very cogent answer! Thank you.

Bruce Arthurs:

"There is no place for a zero-option on JVP's chart, a point representing a United States that has chosen NOT to commit torture."

That was, I thought, implicit in my treatment. But thanks for making is evident. The precise question is "how far is our current position from where we OUGHT to be?" Related: "Just how far have we slid down the slippery slope from our position in year X?"

Anarch:

"'Enemy of my enemy is my friend' simply isn't true." I agree, but there's always the problem of having to explain that someone ill-read in military strategy and realpolitik.

In general, your more technical comment is deeply brilliant, albeit over the heads of most readers. In fact, so insightful that I'll shut up for several hours while I ponder it. I think you actually said something publishable, as a profound analysis of my rather trivial definition. Really. But where to submit it? Too political for most Math journals, too mathematical for most political commentary journals. But really outstanding! Oh, I know. Get comments from Vernor Vinge and Rudy Rucker, and sell it to Analog!

I think he, and his handlers, did. The victory conditions are "Total and utter control of the United States of America." And, so far, they're doing a pretty damn good job.

Iraq is doing very well for them. It keeps the Army busy, lets them shove billions into thier wholly owned subsidiaries, and lets them brand anyone who opposes them with as godless traitors, which means, of course, violence against them is for the good.

The reason Bush can say that he'll settle for nothing less than Victory is that anything but means he left something of value in the United States.

Amen to that. I've been trying to hammer that sort of thing home most of my life, having grown up as an American ex-pat and thus immune to most of our jingoistic blandishments: we're the good guys only when we do good things, and we're the bad guys when we do bad things. I keep hoping against hope that it'll stick but I doubt it ever will.

JVP: Um, cool? Keep me posted :)

I had more to say, but I can't say it anymore. After watching Cheney defend Gitmo, then the Administration announcing that Halliburton was just award a no bid contract to expand the prison there, I just broke down. It's not even at the level of bad alternate history anymore. I cannot even stand to read the news anymore.

I wanted to fight, years ago. Everyone else just said "No, we can do this through the law."

Yeah. Nice law.

After all, the insurgents are doing it, but they're the bad guys. We're the good guys, so regardless of how much evidence there is as to bad acts at Guantanmo, it's not as bad as what the Iraqis do to each other, so what we're doing must be good, or at least excusable.

(Sorry for the bad construction, it's hard to form a proper sentence while you're waiting for the news to give you a stroke.)

The radical right isn't doing the prep work for anything other than killing anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.

Why would you think non-violence resistance would work? You need near-unity to pull that off; general strikes take something like 90% of the population to go along with them. The use of grapeshot takes maybe 10%. A good 30% of the American population has a bedrock axiom that collective action is a sin.

Changing that would take really bad economic conditions for a long time, but such economic conditions will be used to apply repressive control measures in defense of established wealth.

See Duncan Black for extensive or perhaps exhaustive (pick your own meaning) treatment (one of his books is well worth a read for its introduction to Dodgson (of Alice in Wonderland) as a voting theorist).

Starting with a left right dichotomy - a line, we associate a point(s) with a political position - then see e.g. Jerry Pournelle (obs sf) we go to a plane and observe that the points on the plane may be distant and might also be quite close projected on the line. Then expand to a surface with hills and valleys then notice that further distinctions might be drawn so more dimensions are useful.

In fact, I'd argue that at some quasi-mathematico-philosophical level, the difficulties in political calculations arise precisely because of (or precisely induce, depending on which way around you're looking at things) the failure of the separation axioms.

The separation axioms fail when the number of dimensions is inapt for the discussion - as when everything is projected on a line. This is frequently remarked on as wrapping the line so that left overlaps right - see e,g, Mussolini (from the beginning of linear analysis left right Mountain is perhaps already 2 dimensions and so it goes).

More generally in terms of political discourse - cf Arrow's independent of irrelevant alternatives condition which might be taken as a proxy for depth of feeling - folks will disagree on what belongs in the relevant space. I might suggest that I see a big difference between Mein Kampf and Contract with American along an axis I find meaningful; another might suggest they are quite close along their choice of axis(es).

I don't see why that's the case; higher-dimensional spaces can still have a metric on them (e.g. the standard Pythagorean metric on R^n). In fact, any subspace of R^n (or even R^w) is metrizable and hence Hausdorff &c -- so I guess a corollary to my claim there is that there's no possible embedding of the type of which JVP spoke into any type of real manifold. Line, circle, Klein bottle, Hilbert cube, it doesn't matter: politics, to me, simply doesn't work like that.

[I think you're talking about a different kind of classification/metrization than JVP so I don't think what you're saying is necessarily wrong, just inapplicable to the prior discussion.]

"To add a little rational structure to the discussion..."

Hmm. "Why, yes, that's exactly the most apalling thing you could have said."

It's far from original with Pres. Scudder & Co., but in their case I think the general cultural tendency has been fused with a belief in a literal Elect consisting of all "true" Americans.

There are also sexual politics in it, especially as practised by Dick Cheney: 'We are willing to do the things we must do because the fate of the Nation is at stake at all times, and any reference to restraint is just plain femmy."

linked text

There isn't an official transcript, but there are the unofficial ones:

linked text

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4472727.stm

http://web.telia.com/~u70316236/tpon/

Okay, I've thought about your points, the way I usually do. That is, I drafted a 3,650 word article which quotes the salient points from this thread, my attempt to metrize politics, your objections, and the background concepts in topology. Now I ask of you this favor: letting me know if you'd like me to email you the Word file, or just the straight ASCII (I wrote it in almost pure ASCII) so that I may see if I correctly understood you.

If I have, or can be corrected, then I can ask Rucker and Vinge, and perhaps get a paper out of this which may or may not include you as paid coauthor, depending on the extent of the amount of work that you need to do to clarify your position, and the percentage of your words used. I'd rather not annoy this blog with my questions to you posed in terms of Etale space or Zariski topology, right?

But thanks to all, starting with Patrick, for forcing me to shut up for a while and think, which is (alas) not so easy to do.

Take the Pournelle chart as familiar to everybody here and available on the Baen site. Take the surface as given and rotate the axes an arbitrary amount by repeated stochastic process. Distribute a different axis to each member of the class. Invite them to talk political distances.

politics, to me, simply doesn't work like that.

I'd like to think that's sort of my point. That is I think we do agree that could, if you were so inclined, come up with some sort of meaningful topology on the space

I suggest/agreee that such a model would of necessity model only a politics so constrained as to be incomplete.

Perhaps the political actors do not perceive the real distance along an axis where the enemy of my enemy is my enemy and do perceive a false closeness along the axis the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We of course have perfect perception but no power to act.

To put it another way I am saying that the model which follows commonly accepted (but not the only possible) laws fails when we each (in our ordinary discourse where symbols are poorly defined and relationships are murky) start taking some distances as more meaningful to us than other distances - close along one of the Pournelle axes if you will but distant along the other. That is how political coalitions are formed and politics is played - the computer doesn't freeze the game: Victory Conditions Karl Rove.

Like defining science fiction, at the corner cases we always disagree (I once hoped for an accepted definition of science fiction because Zelazny had promised to immediately write an SF story that violated said definition) so too we will inevitably disagree that any one person's political model matches another person's reality.

FREX in economics we assume smooth well behaved everywhere diffentiable functions - see all the current oil supply oil demand graphs - the model is clearly unrealistic in the sense that the world doesn't work like that. Second approximation the world is not continuous. There are whole books and even publishing industries Samuelson/Anti-Samuelson because neither model is quite right.

Similarly I would say that we must constrain our definition of politics or of political terms to make any mapping work over time. Time is inherent in any slippery slope arguemnt I think.

For instance I would argue that:
(3) d(A,B) = d(B,A) [the distance between any two positions does not depend on which one you start with) does not apply to people moving between positions (analogy inertia). Does that invalidate a given mapping? Only sometimes.

Finally I wanted not so much to argue as to say there is nothing new under the sun - the whole slippery slope topology modeling was pretty well covered 25-30 years ago when Catastrophe Theory (Thom) was commonly viewed as the next big thing. obs sf IIRC Samuel R. Delany did a clever graphic novel in which the McGuffin was jewels in the various shapes - proper understanding of which would lead to world domination.(In a 4-dimensional world there are 7 types of elementary catastrophes)
In sum: JVP (as I understand him) is right but not completely original. Further the research dead ended before so it needs a lot of work to make fresh progress. In particular from my perspective values/positions are either arbitrary or different from what I might assign.
You're right, the model is defective (but so are all models, we learn much from the defects)
My point we look at different models even when we think they are the same unless we write it ALL down.

Finally I would agree that ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in effect that 3 generations of idiots is enough in order to resolve a fraudulent case that the United States has been and is closer to eugenics than to killing eggheads.

Several good points. I assumed enough folks here knew the Pournelle Political Plane. But Catastrophe Theory is in Real Euclidean Space, and I think that interesting things can happen in more general topologies.

Your Inertia Analogy is interesting. It is intuitive, at first blush, that a person's political position tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by a political force. But, then, does that person's political position tends to remain in motion in the direction of that force? Some viscosity here, I think. Also, it is easier to flip someone's position 180 degrees than give a slight midcourse correction. Leftists becoming neocons. Rightist bullies becoming leftist bullies, and vice versa.

I agree that differentiability is a nonstarter in politics or oil (oddly coincident in Middle East and Vietnam), and hence differential equations don't apply well to politics, hence the F = mA inertia thing falls apart. What is it that diplomats do when they "split the difference" between two positions? Isn't that support for my metric space approach? What did Hitler or Stalin do when they compromised someone slightly along one axis, gave up nothing real, then compromised them again further in the same direction? "Peace in our generation" doesn't work, then, right? Doesn't that relate to the other thread here recently, as to whether Progressives should stoop to astroturf in meeting the Right? I'm reduced to questions, less certain than I was when I started. Or, perhaps, more open minded.

Matt, do you not watch Buffy, or are you asking about something else?

MKK

We clearly went to different Hebrew schools.

Besides newspaper forums, letters need to go to Congressmen and other elected/appointed officials. Common KoolAid drinkers aren't the primary target. (I still believe that cartoons/songs/stories/poems have the potential to affect some of these people, along with larger and larger headlines and shifts in what the TV shows them.)

Truth eventually trumps lies and propaganda; but blogs and Internet notwithstanding, the process is a lot slower than we want it to be.

Did I describe the Manichean Heresy?

Maybe folks could actually read what he said.

It's really very good, very thoughtful, and also -- not surprisingly -- moderate.

But google? google doesn't reference Durbin's words at all. Google almost entirely references right-wing denunciations of what the senator didn't actually say.

That, I think, is something we have to work on.

He left out my favorite pragmatic argument, though--would you rather have the other side surrender or fight to the death?

Eddge: GÖDEL AND THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL TRUTH [6.8.05]
A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein

"... Between the two world wars, Vienna was a place of intellectual ferment. There was disappointment and disillusionment with the old ways of doing things. The horrors of World War I were still a current memory and there was an attempt to throw off the old ways, to rethink things, in many areas. So we see psychoanalysis starting there, and the modernist architecture of Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schoenberg with his atonal music. There was a lot of intercultural, interdisciplinary dialogue. The logical positivists were very much part of this. They tried to rethink the foundations of knowledge, to rethink the foundations of language. They claimed that if we purify language we'll be able to purify knowledge."

"As the logical positivist would have it, so much of the horror that had resulted in the Great War had come from confused thinking. People claimed to know things they couldn't possibly know. The political concerns gave a fervor to the movement. If we were more modest in our claims to knowledge, perhaps we'd avoid some of the tragedy that our species is prone to. A lot of them—Neurath and Carnap certainly—had left-leaning politics as well. They toned this down when they got to America. But in Vienna, when Gödel was there, there was a fervor in trying to rethink language and the limits of what we can say."

"Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. He had written the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the trenches of World War I. In that book, published in 1922, he tried to delineate the outer reaches of language and show that language has a border around it. There are rules that allow us to say what's sayable, and there's a great deal that lies on the other side. Most of the important things, he notes, can't be said."

"But there he disagreed with the positivists. The positivists fought about the other side of the divide; outside of the sayable there was nothing at all. Beyond that which we can say there's nothing. But Wittgenstein in fact believed that the most important thing, what he referred to as 'the mystical,' is merely unsayable, not that it doesn't exist at all. If we try to say it we will utter nonsense. But it's important nonsense."

"OK, I'll object to the title: topology is the study of space *without* a metric."

Dr. George Hockney wrote:
"I agree with Geoff. For topology, one needs balls, open sets, and closure. Politics lacks at least two out of three."

That seems to be the main reason the whole left-right thing persists; not because it's a useful description of the political space, but because at the end of the day there's mostly two choices on the ballot.

"I haven't overrun my math quota yet, so I will ask JvP et al. what happens to their n-dimensional political space when it collapses to a basically binary choice in the voting booth?"

Dr. Geoffrey A. Landis also wrote:

"When we talk about having a "position" on a political question, we inherently are referring to a geometrical metaphor. An interesting question is, how many axes are needed to plot political opinions? One is clearly the American social conversation (with plus and minus x axes labelled 'right' and 'left'), is clearly inadequate, but (unexpectedly) characterizes American politics remarkably well. (I was interested in such things long ago. I vaguely recall that something like 85% of the variance in political opinion can be captured by a single axis, but long ago have forgotten the reference.)"

Next, let me post what my son emailed me on this:

"I agree that we cannot perfectly map political opinion onto a metric space. As an approximation though I think a mapping could work wonders, especially given how difficult it is to come by the merest approximation of fact in politics. For now using the word 'topology' in the title seems feasible because we can't even decide yet on whether a metric can exist for this theoretical 'political space'. I also feel that there has to be directionality and a set of political stances in a negative position on the spectrum, be it as the converse of some other stance, or merely because we must define the political space in this way so that we contain the span of a basis set of political beliefs. An interesting point someone made is that we may want to reserve the ability to make some stances infinitely far apart, as with disconnected subgraphs with weighted distances rather than a metric space, although we lose a lot of tools of analysis by using the more generic mapping to a weighted graph."

Today's New York Times Science Section has an amazing article "Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes," by Benedict Carey, citing the report in the current issue of The American Political Science Review, the profession's premiere journal, which uses genetics to help answer several open questions in Political Science.

Now, I knew this research was being done. See, for instance, Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (Rutgers Series on Human Evolution) by Paul H. Rubin, Rutgers University Press (2002). But this new work by Dr. John Hibbing [U. Nebraska], Dr. John Alford [Ruce U.], and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk [Virginia Commonwealth] combined data from two ongoing studies including over 8,000 sets of identical twins.

By asking participants whether they are for, against, or uncertain about each of several topics, and calculating the rate at which identical twins agree, and subtracting the rate at which fraternal twins agree, researchers get a rough estimate of how much the differences in opinion are explained by genetic inheritance.

Here's a list of topics, with genetic contribution to variance in opinion:

School prayer: 41%
Property tax: 41%
Moral Majority: 40%
Capitalism: 39%
The draft: 38%
Pacificism: 38%
Unions: 37%
Socialism: 36%
Foreign aid: 35%
X-rated movies: 35%
Immigration: 33%
Death penalty: 32%
Censorship: 30%
Gay rights: 28%
Segregation: 27%
Divorce: 26%
Abortion: 25%

The researchers claim that gut-level response is strongly influenced by genetics, while environment pays a larger role in part affiliation. Combing these helps explain defection from the party in which one was raised, why some campaigns (USA presidential 2004) get so ugly, and carefully excludes artefacts from, for instance, people tending to marry others whose political positions are "close." Closeness of positions is where I started on this topic.

Consider, Doug, the recent result in Science Magazine that 1-second exposure to photographs of unrecognized candidates produced gut-level feelings on "competence" and "trustworthiness" and "likeability" which overwhelm the slower "rational" analysis of positions.

So what happens when you are in the polling booth and it comes down to two candidates? I'm intentionally avoiding Arrow's Paradox and other things that happen when there are 3 candidates, and you can prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A.

What happens combines rational, irrational, genetics, upbringing, party loyalty, and exposure to ads, especially on TV and in print.

There is a vast literature on Mathematical Biology. Waddington's analysis of "Fitness Landscape" tells us something about the topology of genetics. There is a vast literature on Mathematical Psychology. There is a vast literature on the effects of advertising (including neurological). Aristotle's comparison of the 300+ constitutions of Greek City States was the most influential mapping of political topology for over a millennium.

What happens in the polling booth is fascinating, complicated, and central to Democracy itself. I am not deliberately annoying the Math-challenged with deconstructing "Topology of Politics." It is an old Hacker saying: "Topology IS Politics." They mean network topology (who is in the center of the social network, as with Kevin Bacon or Paul Erdos or Isaac Asimov) and who is shoved to the fringe. But the distributed topology of the intenet does NOT mean that it is 'democratic" -- that's part of our discussion on the efficacy of blogging.

Mainstream advisors and press clearly do NOT grok the topology of the curret American Democratic constituency. They also miss the point that Dean changes that topology.

But I'm going on too long here. Your question is acute. I never said that political position space is n-dimensional. I'm not sure that it is. There are other, much weirder spaces, as Anarch has suggested. There are spaces where the triangle inequalit is NOT valid (non-Archimedean spaces, such as p-adic numbers). The issue of projecting down to a binary choice is central to Rule of Law, and opposed to (say) a Culture of Honor. The Middle East is mostly Culture of Honor. America claims to be a Culture of Law. Gitmo and so forth -- that deeply undercuts our claim to be a Culture of Law. That's part of my topology matters, and part of why Bush has changed American topology, so vastly as to be (in my humble opinion) a traitor.

Noted without comment.

The trouble with mentioning the Nazis is that there are some who can look at the historic facts on the ground and others who want to use the name as a generic boogyman of unsurpassed evil such that comparing someone to Hitler is to say that they're Satan.

Still, it was a good comparison, especially since Durbin use the "You would have thought it was the -X-" construction.

Reading the description blind, I would have thought it was Jeff Dahlmer or some other serial killer.

Sitemeter, Technorati, etc. let the authors know who links to them. E-mail speeds up the process. Posting a link inside a comment to a post that was linked is NOT deemed either spam or bad manners any more, except by very few old-time purist fogies.

Deleting the link prevented the readers of this blog from reading a post that directly references (and approves of) this post, as well as the Durbin post. We are bloggers, we are ahead of the times - do not allow yourself yo get stuck in 2001 blogging practices.

I stand by my decision.

Two identical posts, two minutes apart, consisting only of the single word Trackback formatted as a link to some othr site, posted by someone who had never previously posted here. It failed the walks like a duck/talks like a duck test.

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Coturnix, if you want to join the discussion, please feel free. Post your on-topic comments. Include a link to your site for your further thoughts. Just please don't imitate the folks who want Googlejuice for their Texas Hold'em and Pr0n sites: No one with any sense clicks on a link like that to start with.

And I still like this blog (despite rude welcome) though it is new to me. I found you via Slacktivist, and intend to keep an eye on you in the future.

-- Burton J. Lee III, President G.H.W. Bush's Presidential physician