trump voters

I keep seeing people – of various stripes – talk about “Trump voters” in a way that seems off to me.  It seems like most of left and liberal America still hasn’t fully internalized the sheer normalcy of Trump voting in 2016.

People talk about “Trump voters” like they’re this specific, unusual demographic group, like Mormons, say, or furries (to take two random and very different examples).  They talk about “explaining” Trump voters (via economic factors, racism, or whatever), as though not voting for Trump is the normal, unmarked condition and “Trump voting” is a surprising deviation that needs special explanation.  Like we’re talking about the risk factors for a disease.  (We talk about risk factors for diabetes, not risk factors for “non-diabetes” – non-diabetes is the normal state, from which diabetes is a deviation.)

This is indeed how it feels.  On a gut level, I’m still confused that anyone voted for Trump, much less enough people to win him the presidency.  The pundits and comedians go on (rightly) mocking the man, reinforcing the sense that this guy is just obviously absurd, someone that no one would ever vote for without some special “risk factor” stepping in.  But although that’s how it feels, the fact is that voting for Trump was absolutely normal.  

Over 62 million people (nearly 63 million) voted for Trump.  We like to concentrate on swing states and states won by small margins, which reinforces the sense that the people “responsible for” Trump’s win are some specific identifiable group (the inhabitants of “Trump towns,” or whatever).  But if we switch the frame from “the people responsible for Trump’s win” to “the people who voted for him” – which is, after all, what the phrase “Trump voters” actually means – we don’t see specific groups in specific states.

We see about 63 million people, distributed across all 50 states and across all demographic groups – not equally, but in patterns similar to those we usually see in voters for Republican presidential candidates.  It helps, here, to focus on raw numbers rather than percentages or – especially – differences in percentages.  We were surprised when exit polls said that Latino support for Trump was comparable to that for Romney (28%, vs. 27% for Romney).  Later analysis revealed that the true number was much lower.  But even then, if we take the 15.8% number from that paper (pooled over 10 states) and multiply by Latino turnout, we get about 2 million Latinos who voted for Trump.

2 million Latinos.  31 million women.  4 and a half million Californians.  Etc., etc., etc.

I’m not saying anyone should be, I don’t know, less negative about Trump voters or something.  If you think something is rotten in the soul of “Trump voters,” and you mean something is rotten in the soul of those 63 million Americans, then sure, that’s a coherent position.  Just, if you say “Trump voters” and you’re talking about some special sinister cohort, some group that deviated from the “normal” pattern for some specific reason, you aren’t really talking about Trump voters in the usual sense of the phrase.  And you may not have truly internalized how normal it was – alas – to vote for Trump.

wirehead-wannabe replied to your post “If you know undergrad-level physics and want a nice pleasant unified…”

Does “undergrad physics” mean “having taken a couple physics classes in undergrad” or “having majored in physics”?

Probably the latter.  (My first reading, the one where I found it hard to follow, was right after I got an undergrad degree in physics, which can be taken as providing a lower bound on the book’s difficulty)

Really, though, all of the physics is built from the ground up (that’s the point), so the truly necessary background is mathematical.  The book will be probably accessible to a person iff that person has spent some time reading and understanding the sort of texts that contain sentences like this:

If you know undergrad-level physics and want a nice pleasant unified textbook about all the stuff you missed by not taking graduate physics coursework, I strongly recommend “A Unified Grand Tour of Theoretical Physics” by Ian Lawrie

Friendly (but not, you know, too friendly), concise but not too concise, explains and contextualizes things rather than just asserting them (but without the explanatory/contextual material crowding out the content), etc.

I tried reading this book right after undergrad and found it hard going – which was humiliating, as I’d just gotten a physics degree and had imagined I was the intended audience – but now, 7 years later, it’s not hard going at all.  I’m not sure what happened to me in the interim?  Maybe grad school just made me better at reading technical texts of any kind, or maybe I just got better at reading, period.

(Although I haven’t gotten to the gauge theory chapter yet, which is where I quit the first time, so we’ll see)

brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

I was talking last night about how I find the meta aspects of James Bond (actors, eras, books vs. films) fascinating even though I don’t like the books or movies themselves.  That led me to think about why I didn’t like the books or movies, which was not very interesting on the whole (there isn’t that much there to think about), but I did end up thinking there is something noteworthy about Bond’s “license to kill.”

As the audience of an action thriller, there is something strange about being told that the protagonist is licensed to kill.  In many action thrillers, the protagonists do kill other people at some point, but rarely (? I admit lack of familiarity w/ the genre) are we assured that they are legally allowed to do this.  When our hero is in a pulse-pounding life-or-death struggle with some aggressor, the questions foremost in our minds do not include “yes, but will he get away with it legally?” – not unless this is really a very different sort of story in disguise.

Ian Fleming is sometimes credited with creating the spy thriller genre, so maybe the license to kill is sort of an outdated artifact – something that seemed important to specify at first, but which turned out to be superfluous once the genre had been let loose on real audiences.  That’s the boring possibility.

What are the less boring possibilities?  Is this a fantasy about being able to commit murder with impunity?  Well, no, not straightforwardly.  Surveys show that lots of normal people have violent fantasies, and there are stories (like the movie God Bless America) about the fantasy of actually killing the people who inspire these fantasies.  But Bond doesn’t target people he viscerally hates, or even people who annoy him.  The Bond franchise puts little energy into making the audience actively loathe the villains, and many of the dead are henchmen who never even get personalities.

Another possibility: the license to kill is part of the core fantasy of the Bond character, which is (according to one theory) a combination of cruelty/sadism with social legitimacy.  A more familiar plot would grant moral legitimacy to cruelty/sadism: say, “we need to stop the terrorists whatever it takes, and in this case it takes hiring these crazy rebellious low-lifes with nothing to lose and tons of pent-up aggression; if they rack up a higher body count than necessary, well, the ends justify the means.”

In Bond, the ends are often pretty big (up to and including saving the world), but there is little focus on how Bond, or people like him, are necessary evils.  There’s little morality at all, even relative to the familiar sort of plot just mentioned, where even if it’s not at the forefront of conscious attention, there’s always the subtext (cf. the dicks/pussies/assholes speech from Team America) that society needs some guys like this.  No one, except the occasional conservative columnist, ever thinks about whether “society needs” guys like James Bond.

No, the Bond fantasy is about killing while being socially legitimate.  Being on top in man-on-man, life-or-death physical confrontations while also being on top of the social ladder – cool, rich, sexually irresistible, member of all the best clubs, studded with luxury goods and in perfect command of the vagaries of fashion.  The classic anti-Bond article is called “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism” and singles out the snobbery part as the key:

Moreover, both its hero and its author are unquestionably members of the Establishment. Bond is an ex-Royal Navy Commander and belongs to Blades, a sort-of super-White’s. Mr Fleming was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and is married to a prominent society hostess, the ex-wife of Lord Rothermere. He is the foreign manager of that austere and respectable newspaper, the Sunday Times, owned by an elderly fuddy-duddy called Lord Kemsley, who once tried to sell a popular tabloid with her slogan (or rather his wife’s slogan) of ‘clean and clever’. Fleming belongs to the Turf and Boodle’s and lists among his hobbies the collection of first editions. He is also the owner of Goldeneye, a house made famous by Sir Anthony Eden’s Retreat from Suez. […]

Orwell, in fact, was wrong. Snobbery is no protection: on the contrary, the social appeal of the dual Bond-Fleming personality has added an additional flavour to his brew of sex and sadism. Fleming’s novels are not only successful, like No Orchids; they are also smart. The Daily Express, pursuing its task of bringing glamour and sophistication to the masses, has serialised the last three. Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming’s poison.

An apotheosis of the smug head boy, authorized by some mega-Umbridge to commit the ultimate act of naughtiness while the administration looks the other way.  When James Bond kills you, will it be moral? beautiful?  Who cares?  It’ll be legal, legitimate, all the best sorts of people will be for it.  The fucking prick.

“licensed to kill” is not about the legal justification per se. it’s not an assurance the killing is moral and justified.

it’s about “the things this guy is doing are so dangerous and the stakes are so high that the fact he’s going to kill a bunch of dudes is something they had to work out ahead of time. it’s an expected part of his job.”

the license to kill is an entry permit for the World Of Super-Spydom, where you just know assassins are going to try and kill you in every hotel room you ever stay in and you’ll turn their own garrotes against them because you’re so fucking competent and cool.

Ah!  That makes perfect sense.  Thanks.

to expand a bit: James Bond, (at least until the Daniel Craig films which were muddy in more than one way) is basically hypercompetence porn. Bond is the best at everything and he’s so the best that nothing fazes him. His license to kill is a sign that dangerous, thrilling life-or-death situations are an ordinary expected thing for him – John McClane is heroically going beyond the line of duty and pushing himself to the limit, James Bond is just doing his normal thing. That’s why we keep getting action shots of him in neat and still-pressed suits, because he’s just so goddamned cool and on top of things gunfights don’t even get him messy. That’s not even getting into his superscience gadgets that can get him out of any sticky situation.

The moral dissonance is created when you notice the intersection of “this super cool guy kills attackers in dangerous, thrilling situations with no problem at all” and “this guy is so super cool and competent, he’s never uncertain or anxious”. If he’s always certain and assured, he can’t be questioning himself. If he can’t be questioning himself, the movie cannot bring the morality of his actions into doubt, because the fact he never questions his morality would make him a villain. So the movie has to present everything like “well of course you shouldn’t even question the morality of things, look how dramatically evil and flamboyant the bad guy is!” That’s not going to work for everyone, especially given modern audiences’ deconstructionism, and the fact that after you make 26 movies in a series you are gonna fuck it up a few times.

On a certain level, saying James Bond should feel bad about all the dudes he kills and that he’s a bad guy for all of the super-spying he gets up to, is like saying Batman shouldn’t dress up in a bat suit and should spend all that money on soup kitchens. A few steps removed from “musicals are unrealistic, people don’t sing that much”. It’s objecting to a baseline assumption the story has to have in order to fulfill its function. 

But on the other hand, it’s totally fair to say “I don’t like stories that are based on that assumption, and I don’t wanna read them”. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with that, and I’m not trying to argue you out of your stance or anything.

The modern Daniel Craig Bond films tried to make the character “darker” and “more realistic” on this axis among others. I’d love to be able to say that abandoning the thing that made the character work was the only thing that ruined the films, but Casino Royale was actually a very good movie on its own, and the next three had problems with leaden pacing and bloated runtimes and limp plots and utterly failed attempts at establishing personal stakes (The bad guy in Spectre claims to be responsible for every bad thing that happened in Bond’s life, and I wanted to scream “NO! YOU DIDN’T EARN THAT! YOU DIDN’T EARN A GOD DAMN THING!” but I was in a theater)

Again, this makes sense, although I’d argue that the hypercompetence and the “social legitimacy” are supposed to bleed into one another.  There are hypercompetent outsider characters (many supervillains fall into that category, at least until the moment they’re defeated), but Bond isn’t an outsider, he’s the ultimate insider (while the bad guys tend to be conspicuously weird, to contrast with him).  I don’t think I’m really disagreeing with you there, though.

Anyway, the reason I dislike the character is not really moral, but emotional.  I don’t relate to Bond or want to be him – instinctively, I want to hate him, in the way I expressed in the last paragraph of the OP.  When I see a character who is so unfazeable – not only does he dispatch the assassin, he does so without ruffling his suit, and has a perfect one-liner ready for the occasion – I want to see him taken down a peg.  But that isn’t what these stories are about (although Casino Royale had a bit of it, haven’t seen the other Daniel Craig movies).  So according to usual movie emotional logic, I should be eagerly awaiting this guy’s comeuppance, but instead he’s just the hero and I’m supposed to happily watch him do his thing without a hitch.

(via brazenautomaton)

brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

I was talking last night about how I find the meta aspects of James Bond (actors, eras, books vs. films) fascinating even though I don’t like the books or movies themselves.  That led me to think about why I didn’t like the books or movies, which was not very interesting on the whole (there isn’t that much there to think about), but I did end up thinking there is something noteworthy about Bond’s “license to kill.”

As the audience of an action thriller, there is something strange about being told that the protagonist is licensed to kill.  In many action thrillers, the protagonists do kill other people at some point, but rarely (? I admit lack of familiarity w/ the genre) are we assured that they are legally allowed to do this.  When our hero is in a pulse-pounding life-or-death struggle with some aggressor, the questions foremost in our minds do not include “yes, but will he get away with it legally?” – not unless this is really a very different sort of story in disguise.

Ian Fleming is sometimes credited with creating the spy thriller genre, so maybe the license to kill is sort of an outdated artifact – something that seemed important to specify at first, but which turned out to be superfluous once the genre had been let loose on real audiences.  That’s the boring possibility.

What are the less boring possibilities?  Is this a fantasy about being able to commit murder with impunity?  Well, no, not straightforwardly.  Surveys show that lots of normal people have violent fantasies, and there are stories (like the movie God Bless America) about the fantasy of actually killing the people who inspire these fantasies.  But Bond doesn’t target people he viscerally hates, or even people who annoy him.  The Bond franchise puts little energy into making the audience actively loathe the villains, and many of the dead are henchmen who never even get personalities.

Another possibility: the license to kill is part of the core fantasy of the Bond character, which is (according to one theory) a combination of cruelty/sadism with social legitimacy.  A more familiar plot would grant moral legitimacy to cruelty/sadism: say, “we need to stop the terrorists whatever it takes, and in this case it takes hiring these crazy rebellious low-lifes with nothing to lose and tons of pent-up aggression; if they rack up a higher body count than necessary, well, the ends justify the means.”

In Bond, the ends are often pretty big (up to and including saving the world), but there is little focus on how Bond, or people like him, are necessary evils.  There’s little morality at all, even relative to the familiar sort of plot just mentioned, where even if it’s not at the forefront of conscious attention, there’s always the subtext (cf. the dicks/pussies/assholes speech from Team America) that society needs some guys like this.  No one, except the occasional conservative columnist, ever thinks about whether “society needs” guys like James Bond.

No, the Bond fantasy is about killing while being socially legitimate.  Being on top in man-on-man, life-or-death physical confrontations while also being on top of the social ladder – cool, rich, sexually irresistible, member of all the best clubs, studded with luxury goods and in perfect command of the vagaries of fashion.  The classic anti-Bond article is called “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism” and singles out the snobbery part as the key:

Moreover, both its hero and its author are unquestionably members of the Establishment. Bond is an ex-Royal Navy Commander and belongs to Blades, a sort-of super-White’s. Mr Fleming was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and is married to a prominent society hostess, the ex-wife of Lord Rothermere. He is the foreign manager of that austere and respectable newspaper, the Sunday Times, owned by an elderly fuddy-duddy called Lord Kemsley, who once tried to sell a popular tabloid with her slogan (or rather his wife’s slogan) of ‘clean and clever’. Fleming belongs to the Turf and Boodle’s and lists among his hobbies the collection of first editions. He is also the owner of Goldeneye, a house made famous by Sir Anthony Eden’s Retreat from Suez. […]

Orwell, in fact, was wrong. Snobbery is no protection: on the contrary, the social appeal of the dual Bond-Fleming personality has added an additional flavour to his brew of sex and sadism. Fleming’s novels are not only successful, like No Orchids; they are also smart. The Daily Express, pursuing its task of bringing glamour and sophistication to the masses, has serialised the last three. Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming’s poison.

An apotheosis of the smug head boy, authorized by some mega-Umbridge to commit the ultimate act of naughtiness while the administration looks the other way.  When James Bond kills you, will it be moral? beautiful?  Who cares?  It’ll be legal, legitimate, all the best sorts of people will be for it.  The fucking prick.

“licensed to kill” is not about the legal justification per se. it’s not an assurance the killing is moral and justified.

it’s about “the things this guy is doing are so dangerous and the stakes are so high that the fact he’s going to kill a bunch of dudes is something they had to work out ahead of time. it’s an expected part of his job.”

the license to kill is an entry permit for the World Of Super-Spydom, where you just know assassins are going to try and kill you in every hotel room you ever stay in and you’ll turn their own garrotes against them because you’re so fucking competent and cool.

Ah!  That makes perfect sense.  Thanks.

(via brazenautomaton)

After reading this handout, you should take a look at your friends’ multivariable calculus books and convince yourself that we really have proven the classical theorems, with the added benefit that our approach to integration avoids the mysticism which surrounds the pseudo-“definitions” of integration over surfaces and curves with “area elements” and “line elements” as in the big thick multivariable calculus books. This is not a point to be dismissed lightly: it is crucial that we have not just created an elaborate machine which spits out theorems that formally look like the classical results. You must convince yourself that the intuition lying behind the classical approach to (trying to) define the integrals on both sides of the classical theorems really is accurately captured by our precise definitions of how to integrate via partitions of unity (keeping in mind that all such sums are finite in the case of compact manifolds). More specially, when our definition of integration of differential forms is combined with the vector calculus translation made possible by the Riemannian metric tensor, then you must convince yourself that the resulting precise definitions of surface integrals, etc. as in our general vector calculus theorems really does give what one intuitively wants to be working with in those multivariable calculus books. If you think about the recipes in those books for actually computing their fancy integrals in terms of local coordinate systems, you’ll see that it really is just our approach to integration in disguise (except that we don’t have any of the mathematical imprecision which is inherent in the obscure “definitions” of those books: such definitions are incapable of providing an adequate foundation to actually prove things in a convincing manner, and that’s why such books never present proofs for the classical theorems at a level of rigor that gets beyond a “plausibility argument”).

dude.  chill out

bambamramfan replied to your post “I was talking last night about how I find the meta aspects of James…”

Um. Did you see Skyfall or Spectre?

No.  Do they investigate this aspect of the character?  Overwrite it with something else?  (I take it you aren’t saying this view of the character is wrong just on the basis of those two movies, since they were made after he’d already existed for six decades.)

I was talking last night about how I find the meta aspects of James Bond (actors, eras, books vs. films) fascinating even though I don’t like the books or movies themselves.  That led me to think about why I didn’t like the books or movies, which was not very interesting on the whole (there isn’t that much there to think about), but I did end up thinking there is something noteworthy about Bond’s “license to kill.”

As the audience of an action thriller, there is something strange about being told that the protagonist is licensed to kill.  In many action thrillers, the protagonists do kill other people at some point, but rarely (? I admit lack of familiarity w/ the genre) are we assured that they are legally allowed to do this.  When our hero is in a pulse-pounding life-or-death struggle with some aggressor, the questions foremost in our minds do not include “yes, but will he get away with it legally?” – not unless this is really a very different sort of story in disguise.

Ian Fleming is sometimes credited with creating the spy thriller genre, so maybe the license to kill is sort of an outdated artifact – something that seemed important to specify at first, but which turned out to be superfluous once the genre had been let loose on real audiences.  That’s the boring possibility.

What are the less boring possibilities?  Is this a fantasy about being able to commit murder with impunity?  Well, no, not straightforwardly.  Surveys show that lots of normal people have violent fantasies, and there are stories (like the movie God Bless America) about the fantasy of actually killing the people who inspire these fantasies.  But Bond doesn’t target people he viscerally hates, or even people who annoy him.  The Bond franchise puts little energy into making the audience actively loathe the villains, and many of the dead are henchmen who never even get personalities.

Another possibility: the license to kill is part of the core fantasy of the Bond character, which is (according to one theory) a combination of cruelty/sadism with social legitimacy.  A more familiar plot would grant moral legitimacy to cruelty/sadism: say, “we need to stop the terrorists whatever it takes, and in this case it takes hiring these crazy rebellious low-lifes with nothing to lose and tons of pent-up aggression; if they rack up a higher body count than necessary, well, the ends justify the means.”

In Bond, the ends are often pretty big (up to and including saving the world), but there is little focus on how Bond, or people like him, are necessary evils.  There’s little morality at all, even relative to the familiar sort of plot just mentioned, where even if it’s not at the forefront of conscious attention, there’s always the subtext (cf. the dicks/pussies/assholes speech from Team America) that society needs some guys like this.  No one, except the occasional conservative columnist, ever thinks about whether “society needs” guys like James Bond.

No, the Bond fantasy is about killing while being socially legitimate.  Being on top in man-on-man, life-or-death physical confrontations while also being on top of the social ladder – cool, rich, sexually irresistible, member of all the best clubs, studded with luxury goods and in perfect command of the vagaries of fashion.  The classic anti-Bond article is called “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism” and singles out the snobbery part as the key:

Moreover, both its hero and its author are unquestionably members of the Establishment. Bond is an ex-Royal Navy Commander and belongs to Blades, a sort-of super-White’s. Mr Fleming was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and is married to a prominent society hostess, the ex-wife of Lord Rothermere. He is the foreign manager of that austere and respectable newspaper, the Sunday Times, owned by an elderly fuddy-duddy called Lord Kemsley, who once tried to sell a popular tabloid with her slogan (or rather his wife’s slogan) of ‘clean and clever’. Fleming belongs to the Turf and Boodle’s and lists among his hobbies the collection of first editions. He is also the owner of Goldeneye, a house made famous by Sir Anthony Eden’s Retreat from Suez. […]

Orwell, in fact, was wrong. Snobbery is no protection: on the contrary, the social appeal of the dual Bond-Fleming personality has added an additional flavour to his brew of sex and sadism. Fleming’s novels are not only successful, like No Orchids; they are also smart. The Daily Express, pursuing its task of bringing glamour and sophistication to the masses, has serialised the last three. Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming’s poison.

An apotheosis of the smug head boy, authorized by some mega-Umbridge to commit the ultimate act of naughtiness while the administration looks the other way.  When James Bond kills you, will it be moral? beautiful?  Who cares?  It’ll be legal, legitimate, all the best sorts of people will be for it.  The fucking prick.