Chaos Theory and The End of Roe V Wade
“Chaos Theory and The End of Roe V Wade,” Econospeak, Barkley Rosser
Probably the most famous characteristic of chaotic dynamics is the phenomenon known formally as sensitive dependence on initial conditions, which is more popularly known as the “butterfly effect.” In such dynamics a small change in a starting value or a parameter value can rapidly lead to very different outcomes from what would have happened otherwise. It was first clearly identified and labeled by the climatologist, Edward Lorenz, in 1963 in a paper in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. While he showed it there, famously a matter of a sixth decimal place, it was much later that he provided the popular tale that “a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas.”
It was Deirdre McCloskey who pointed out to me a literary historical example of this from Shakespeare’s Richard III. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the hoof was lost; for want of hoof the horse was lost; for want of a horse the knight was lost; for want of the knight the battle was lost; for want of the battle, the kingdom was lost.”
So we have a version of this underlying the decision of the US Supreme Court to revoke the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that granted the right to have an abortion, not to mention the other decisions that have just come down involving guns and Miranda rights, and so on. I think I have figured out the equivalent of that nail in the Shakespeare line that amounts to the butterfly wing flap that led to this.
It gets down to a third-rate politician, the embarrassingly named Andrew Weiner, who could not restrain himself from taking photos (and videos?) of his own erections that he would send to various women. He happened to be the husband of Human Abedin, who unfortunately did not dump him earlier. They stuck together, even as he continued this nonsense. Even more unfortunately she was a top aide of Hillary Clinton through all this. And even more unfortunately somehow some of these photos got onto a phone of Abedin’s, a phone where there were emails from Hillary Clinton that should not have been sent.
So, 11 days before the 2016 presidential election, at a point when Hillary Clinton was leading Donald Trump in the race, FBI Director James Comey publicized a renewed investigation of how Hillary Clinton’s emails had inappropriately gotten on Abedin’s phone. The FBI became aware of this because they had been investigating Weiner’s photographic games with his weiner and found her emails. By the time of the election, it was determined that there was no there there, but the result of the publicity surrounding the renewal of this investigation set off a decline in Clinton’s polls, a decline that was sufficient to lead to Donald Trump winning the election.
And the rest is history, with him appointing the justices to the court who put these rulings over the line.
Barkley Rosser
I never bought the hilarious notion “a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas.” However, I do believe that one will only make love with a 400 pound gorilla for as long as said gorilla desires it, no more nor no less. Also, most ordinary rooms get crowded when an elephant enters them whether or not said elephant is discussed. Regardless of whom we may find to blame, then the institutions of our faux democratic really elitist republican political system of government will continue to vex all participants that seriously embrace said political realities holding any greater expectations than those exhibited in our last two hundred years of social experience, all fawning hero worship aside.
It wasn’t about butterflies flapping their wings. This was a long term project started in the 1970s that started to show signs of success in the 1980s. The current alliance between the billionaires and the right wing white evangelicals came together in the 1970s and slowly built strength. By the 1990s the process was rather obvious to anyone who bothered to look. The deal was the billionaires get everything they want, cheap labor, low taxes, minimal regulation and so on, and the evangelicals get everything they want, social repression, minority rule, their particular brand of religious law, the ability to designate and mistreat outsiders and so on.
The butterfly wing analogy ignores the strong, well funded, well directed efforts of those who have been working towards this end for decades.
Kaleberg,
Two things –
First the butterfly analogy sucked.
Second, looking at the long arc of US history, then the New Deal was the exception, which came at the cost of the Great Depression and WWII. Conservative rule did not begin in 1970, but rather reformed into something resembling its earlier incarnation which eventually spawned a progressive movement with a false start under T Roosevelt and an eventual full bloom under F Roosevelt. During the rest of US history, then the US Constitution worked exactly as designed by our founding conservative elitists, financiers, plantation owners, and early industrialists. The Bill of Rights was necessary to prevent another revolution, but an entirely calculated concession to those that fought in the last revolution.
The butterfly wing analogy ignores the strong, well funded, well directed efforts of those who have been working towards this end for decades.
Yes, the Powell memo and Paul Weyrich.
The Democratic Party failed to learn what the Republicans were teaching when DuKakis. Or, maybe I should say they learned a wrong lesson as they moved to the right from then on. Though they certainly should have gotten the lesson after Gore lost. How they missed it when Kerry was “swift boated” I’ll never understand.
Then again, 12 people on a jury were convinced that what they saw in the video of Rodney King was not what they saw.
The right has only 1 direction to go as the Democratic Party kept moving right in order to win elections. I believe because they were convinced by the media an the success of Fox that what they were seeing was not what they were seeing.
And it still took McConnell to steal at least one ( arguably two) seats, Kennedy agreeing to play ball by retiring when he did, RGB having the hubris to think she would outlive a GOP presidency AND, the Republicans having the discipline to make SCOTUS nominees a simple up/down vote. At the end of the day Americans have become extremely complacent about their lives— sort of like Afghans before the Taliban returned to power. I heard some young woman bitching on the radio that she was done with Democrats because they had not stopped SCOTUS from overturning Roe. I am an optimist but I fear this country’s days as a liberal democracy are numbered.
If the Dems had a chance to vote for their own SC nominee they would have killed the filibuster. Y’know, like they did for Federal Judges in 2013?
you are saying “ mighty oaks from little acorns grow!’
who’d a thunk it.
you mean things have beginnings? No!
from a tiny fetus… [just kidding]
personally, i think it all started with a Bang, but Hawking said he had no need for such a concept.
and truth to tell it was me who invented chaos theory in 1958 while arguing with a teacher that NO siblings had identical environments. the butterfly thing never happened. it was as if it had happened.
Coberly,
Hawking dismissed the Big Bang because it rhymed with god (even if not God). Our universe is very big thing in its own right, no strings attached. OTOH, we are just some bugs on a rock in tiny corner of that Universe which will still be there when humanity is long gone and even when that rock we call Earth is long gone. What bugged Hawking about God was that no just god would have let someone as great as him suffer from ALS, notwithstanding that Hawking only became that great after he began to suffer from ALS and he stopped wasting time.
Ron
you know more about Hawking that I do. starting with a Bang was meant to rhyme with Big Bang, but while i suppose the math and physcs of the Big Bang Theory are perfectly good, I am not at all sure they expalain “started.”
Neither do I think all physicists are sure the universe will still be here when they are no longer here to observe it. I tried to explain that once about Shroedinger’s cat, but I am not at all sure what Shroedinger meant. It seems to me most of the people who talk about it don’t get it that the cat most certainly know whether it is alive or not.* And as far as I am concerned the “trigger” most certainly observes the electron or neutron or whatever it is that sets it off. But physics left me in the dust a long time ago. It stopped being fun when even Feinman admitted ‘well, actually, no one understands it.”
I can understand Hawking having a grudge against god, but from what I think I know, I am sure it wasn’t personal. My reference was to what I thought was his explanation of why he didn’t need to bother with the concept of “beginning,” whih left me thinking that even geniuses come up against their limits
*Does the cat know? well, that is most certainly a question about the nature of the universe that is not dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.