Uncategorized – Greg Laden's Blog https://gregladen.com/blog Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:45:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 https://i0.wp.com/gregladen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Greg_Ladens_Blog_Favicon_black_GLb.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Uncategorized – Greg Laden's Blog https://gregladen.com/blog 32 32 77525483 It’s the philosophy, stupid! https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/14/its-the-philosophy-stupid/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/14/its-the-philosophy-stupid/#respond Sat, 14 Jun 2025 14:39:36 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35579 Strategy —> Tactics Before the philosophers in the forum go all Socretean, let me define what I mean here when I say “philosophy.” I mean it in the vernacular sense, as a world view. Strategy and tactics are how you do things, … Continue reading It’s the philosophy, stupid! →]]> It is the philosophy, not the method.

Consider this simple relationship:

Philosophy —> Strategy —> Tactics

Before the philosophers in the forum go all Socretean, let me define what I mean here when I say “philosophy.” I mean it in the vernacular sense, as a world view. Strategy and tactics are how you do things, with strategy being long term planning and tactics being the tools of the moment, the specific moves you make today or this week. Thinkin’ leads to plan which sets the moves. That should be clear.

CONTINUE READING HERE

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/14/its-the-philosophy-stupid/feed/ 0 35579 Now is my chance to tell you I went to Harvard https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/13/now-is-my-chance-to-tell-you-i-went-to-harvard/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/13/now-is-my-chance-to-tell-you-i-went-to-harvard/#respond Fri, 13 Jun 2025 14:39:29 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35578 Continue reading Now is my chance to tell you I went to Harvard →]]> The basic fact: I have a PhD from Harvard. Also, a Masters Degree. Oh, and by the way, it is sort of a double PhD because the program I was in combined two different fields, removing only one of several requirements from each (of my choice), but I actually pretty much met all the requirements anyway plus I studied a third field for the equivalent of about a year. I was then on the teaching staff there for a few years, including creating and teaching a class that was the required intro class for all students coming into the highly prestigious and difficult to get into “Mind Brain Behavior” program. And so on and so forth. Oh, and I and colleagues recreated a novel undergraduate program that others copied. Then we created a novel way to run a PhD program, and the lead of that effort later became the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and deployed our program across Harvard, which then of course caused many other graduate programs around the world to follow since that is what Harvard does — it leads. Etc. Etc. and you are welcome.

CONTINUE READING HERE

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/13/now-is-my-chance-to-tell-you-i-went-to-harvard/feed/ 0 35578 On those murdered South African farmers … https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/12/on-those-murdered-south-african-farmers/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/12/on-those-murdered-south-african-farmers/#respond Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:39:24 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35577 Continue reading On those murdered South African farmers … →]]> One of the first things anyone in South Africa ever told me was a story involving five or six “guys” (euphemism for a black South African man), a pile of leaves under which several people could hide, a broken down car, and a family of white farmers driving down the road. The story develops with an attempt at killing the white farmers in a surprise ambush, but the farmer, being smarter than the “guys,” manages to run over and kill the black South Africans. This was not told as a story about whites killing black, but rather, a story about an bungled attempt of blacks killing whites. Also, and importantly, the story had happened to the story teller’s close relative, just recently, very nearby where I was told it, and it was told as evidence of the dangers of a post-apartheid uprising among blacks and the overall threat to whites.

CONTINUE READING HERE.

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/12/on-those-murdered-south-african-farmers/feed/ 0 35577 The most beautiful place on the Earth https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/11/the-most-beautiful-place-on-the-earth/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/11/the-most-beautiful-place-on-the-earth/#respond Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:39:16 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35576 Continue reading The most beautiful place on the Earth →]]> There is a place in South Africa where a major river splits into numerous channels, one large, and several small. It does this because there is almost no sediment in the river valley, just rock, as is the case of much of South Africa, so when the river floods, the water just spreads out everywhere and can’t really change the channels around like rivers with soft mushy floodplains do. So, over the course of about 800 million years, the flooding river spread and found ancient “joints” — linear weak spots in the granite — and turned them into channels, and some of those channels have grown quite large.

CONTINUE READING HERE

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/11/the-most-beautiful-place-on-the-earth/feed/ 0 35576 Bass Fishing In Ameria https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/10/bass-fishing-in-ameria/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/10/bass-fishing-in-ameria/#respond Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:41:00 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35575 Continue reading Bass Fishing In Ameria →]]> People are perplexed. At times, Trump seems to be an idiot. At other times, people notice that he has pulled off a messaging coup indicating that he must be a genius. Sometimes we hear commentators caught in such a conundrum give up to say “or maybe people around him are really smart,” and this is why his messaging can be really good.

I have an entirely different take on the Donald Trump secret sauce to success.

Trump is a bass fisherman. Allow me to ‘splain.

CLICK HERE

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2025/06/10/bass-fishing-in-ameria/feed/ 0 35575 Two Things … about the election and our strategies. https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/13/two-things-about-the-election-and-our-strategies/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/13/two-things-about-the-election-and-our-strategies/#comments Thu, 14 Nov 2024 03:23:34 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35564 Continue reading Two Things … about the election and our strategies. →]]> Eschew the binary thinking
We all know that we are better off not falling into the trap of worshiping the binary. That is of course not always true, there are perfectly good binaries out there. But there is a kind of binary thinking that many fall into that isn’t recognized as binary thinking but is, and it can be damaging to our collective understanding of politics.

Here are two competing alternative statements. One is true, the other is not true (hey, there’s one of those binaries!):

The polling sucked in 2016, but the polling in 2020 was OK.

The polling in 2016 was OK, but the polling in 2020 sucked.

Most people remember the shock and horror of a Trump victory in 2016, and it is very common for people to claim that the polling was bad that year. Meanwhile, the polling in 2020 seemed to suggest a Biden win, and there was a Biden win, so therefore the polling in 2020 was fine.

This is a pernicious falsehood and this kind of falsehood is based on incorrect binary thinking. The binary in this case is who wins and who loses an election (our candidate won vs our candidate lost). This binary ignores very important numbers and changes in numbers underlying a victory or loss.

Here’s some data:

Read the rest here.

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/13/two-things-about-the-election-and-our-strategies/feed/ 1 35564 Please join me on BlueSky https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/13/please-join-me-on-bluesky/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/13/please-join-me-on-bluesky/#respond Thu, 14 Nov 2024 03:21:15 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35562 @gregladen.bsky.social

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/13/please-join-me-on-bluesky/feed/ 0 35562 What just happened and why? https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/08/what-just-happened-and-why/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/08/what-just-happened-and-why/#respond Sat, 09 Nov 2024 05:06:01 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35559 Continue reading What just happened and why? →]]> From the newsletter of my local Indivisible group:

Our first response to this loss must be humility. We fought, we lost, that is on us regardless of any explanatory framework that might eventually emerge.

Our other first response to this loss must be skepticism wrapped in patience. Nothing in politics is simple. Occam’s razor is a pernicious fallacy and a very poor guide to thinking about complex things. When your favorite football team loses a 34-33 game because the kicker missed the final field goal, that was not a problem with the kicker (exclusively). Single cause and simplistic explanations we hear people tout are more likely to be part of, rather than an explanation for, the problem. Did you know that there is a thing called “the voter files” assembled over weeks following an election and subsequently analyzed by groups like Pew Research? This is the corpus of data from which all experts draw verifiable conclusions about what actually happened during an election. This is a better resource than gut feeling or anecdotal data, and will produce a better analysis than that produced by the usual immediate lamentation and rending of cloth. Have patience.

Having said that, here are some preliminary thoughts on some of the things.

… CONTINUE READING HERE

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/11/08/what-just-happened-and-why/feed/ 0 35559 Trump Is Expected To Be The Next President https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/10/25/trump-is-expected-to-be-the-next-president/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/10/25/trump-is-expected-to-be-the-next-president/#respond Fri, 25 Oct 2024 13:40:39 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35555 Continue reading Trump Is Expected To Be The Next President →]]> … according the the most respected and usually accurate polling, out today.

The most current, just released, and final New York Times-Sienna poll has just come out and, alarmingly, Harris and Trump are tied at the national level. Normally, if a Democrat is tied at the national level, they will lose the electoral college. That basic math has been true for many cycles, and is almost certainly true today. Polls are not predictions of the future, but rather, samples of very recent thinking and behavior of a sample of voters. But we use them to predict the near term future, and based on this, we will be electing Donald Trump for a second term as President, and we as a nation will choose to end our democracy. Good people will be imprisoned or killed, bad people will rise to global domination, we will all suffer, and we will all ask ourselves, “why did we bring children in to this world.”

Read the rest on my Substack (and subscribe!)

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/10/25/trump-is-expected-to-be-the-next-president/feed/ 0 35555 Storm World https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/09/29/storm-world/ https://gregladen.com/blog/2024/09/29/storm-world/#respond Sun, 29 Sep 2024 21:23:33 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=35534 Continue reading Storm World →]]>

Hurricane Helene has left more than 3 million homes and businesses without power and there is a continuing threat of floods across the southeastern US. Major roads are impassable due to flooding.

At least 52 people were killed in 5 states.

On Friday, water overtopped the Lake… pic.twitter.com/SRMfflvNK0

— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) September 28, 2024

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