White supremacist Richard Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute, a tiny white supremacist think tank, coined the term “Alternative Right” as the name for an online publication that debuted in 2010. The online publication changed hands in 2013 when Spencer shut it down. It was soon re-launched by Colin Liddell and Andy Nowicki, who were former writers for Alternative Right. Spencer went on to found another online journal, Radix. Both Alternative Right and Radix act as forums for racists, anti-Semites and others who identify with the Alt Right.
The term “Alt Right” is not the only term used to describe this movement. Some of its adherents use other, similar phrases, such as the “New Right” and the “Dissident Right.” They all refer to the same race-infused brand of extreme conservatism. Alt Right adherents identify with a range of different ideologies that put white identity at their centers. Many claim themselves as Identitarians, a term that originated in France with the founding of the Bloc Identitaire movement and its youth counterpart, Generation Identitaire. Identitarians espouse racism and intolerance under the guise of preserving the ethnic and cultural origins of their respective counties. American Identitarians such as Richard Spencer claim to want to preserve European-American (i.e., white) culture in the U.S. As Michael McGregor, a writer and editor for Radix wrote in an article in the publication, Identitarians want “the preservation of our identity–the cultural and genetic heritage that makes us who we are.” Identitarians reject multiculturalism or pluralism in any form.
Others in the Alt Right identify as so-called radical traditionalists, people who want to preserve what they claim are traditional Christian values but from a uniquely white supremacist perspective. The Traditionalist Youth Network is a group that espouses a white supremacist form of Christianity and promotes “family and folk” and separation of the races.
Others in the Alt Right simply identify as white nationalists, who want to preserve the white majority in the U.S., claiming that whites losing their majority status is equivalent to “white genocide.” They favor propaganda on subjects such as immigration and “black crime” as “evidence” of this ostensible ethnic cleansing of whites.
There are people with other beliefs who fall under the umbrella of the Alt Right but all share a fixation on white identity as central to their ideology. Different segments of the Alt Right may refer to themselves as neo-reactionaries (those who reject liberal democracy and ideas associated with the Enlightenment. Some neo-reactionaries refer to their theories as the “Dark Enlightenment.”) Others may call themselves “race realists” or alternately “HBD” advocates, a reference to human biodiversity (those who believe that one’s race governs traits such as behavior and intelligence—with non-whites being inferior to whites). However they define themselves, Alt Righters reject egalitarianism, democracy, universalism and multiculturalism.
A number of Alt Righters are also blatantly anti-Semitic and blame Jews for allegedly promoting anti-white policies such as immigration and diversity. Alt Righters mock conservative support of Israel as anti-white. The woman behind the Alt Right Twitter handle recently wrote, “I support ALL Jews living in Israel or a defined area.”
Day: March 5, 2017
India’s Banking Crisis is Made Worse by the Poor Performance of its Debt Recovery Tribunals, and What to Say About the Bankruptcy Code?
DRTs were created to help financial institutions recover dues speedily without being subjected to lengthy procedures of civil courts have fallen into the same trap precisely. In the words of Shaswat Sharma, partner, KPMG, India, “The functioning of DRTs needs to improve to ensure banks are able to recover their existing loans and offer fresh advances at cheaper rates…In the current scheme of things there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the tribunal disposes the case in a timely manner. There is a strong case to bring in more accountability for the DRT.” If dealing with the subject matter at hand with speed is the biggest challenge facing DRTs, any number of additional DRTs and Appellate Tribunals should address this problem convincingly as was outlined by the Finance Minister during his Budget Speech 16-17. The under performance is even keeping the RBI worried. In the words of Raghuram Rajan, Governor, RBI, “If bankers cannot get their money back, they are not going to give ou loans at cheap priceSo, making sure DRTs work better, making sure that you don’t have excess number of stays, excess number of appeals, is what needs to be focused on.”
Bankruptcy Code: Now with all the possible means exercised to constrain the rising debts, bad assets of financial institutions, the situation still seems far from under control, and its here that the proposed Bill on Bankruptcy with the vision to consolidate scattered laws relating to insolvency of companies makes a strong point. Recently, Finance Minister reiterated the commitment to introduce the Bill in the upcoming session of the Parliament. As with other mechanisms, the efficacy is still in hypothetical stage, but the Bill at least promises to accelerate the winding-up process of defaulting companies and opening up a quicker exit route for lenders. The draft of the code draws on may parallels to the US Bankruptcy Code, especially allowing companies to carry out businesses while simultaneously going through bankruptcy proceedings, while differing on management control, where, unlike in the US, the management control in India passes over to “insolvency resolution processes”. But, the question remains as to how would this Bill address the issue of NPAs? The impact felt is likely to be in,
a. The time frame of 180-day limit (an extension of a further 90 days in exceptional cases) would help lenders decide on the viability of the business, whereafter a liquidation process sets in.
b. Economic and financial viability of the debtor company is to be discussed in negotiations with the creditors facilitated by “insolvency experts” rather than courts lending the process more credibility.
c. Bill would have ample scope for early recognition of financial distress helping the process of easing out businesses under stress.
The success of the Bill would depend on how well it is implemented and whether setting up of an “insolvency regulator” would have the requisite powers to see its successful implementation. For the RBI, “an early clearance of the proposed insolvency and bankruptcy bill will play an important role in the face of mounting potential losses.”
Despite having a handful of measures to address the issues of NPAs and NPLs, few seem to be working positively, but are heavily relied upon and banked on for lack of a better alternative. What is really the need of the hour is to arm these mechanism to the teeth for results to flow out, and unless such is undertaken, the likelihood of policy paralysis would ensue.
Whitehead’s Non-Anthropocentric Quantum Field Ontology. Note Quote.
Whitehead builds also upon James’s claim that “The thought is itself the thinker”.
Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide them into components, but as immediately given they come totally or not at all. — William James.
If the quantum vacuum displays features that make it resemble a material, albeit a really special one, we can immediately ask: then what is this material made of? Is it a continuum, or are the “atoms” of vacuum? Is vacuum the primordial substance of which everything is made of? Let us start by decoupling the concept of vacuum from that of spacetime. The concept of vacuum as accepted and used in standard quantum field theory is tied with that of spacetime. This is important for the theory of quantum fields, because it leads to observable effects. It is the variation of geometry, either as a change in boundary conditions or as a change in the speed of light (and therefore the metric) which is responsible for the creation of particles. Now, one can legitimately go further and ask: which one is the fundamental “substance”, the space-time or the vacuum? Is the geometry fundamental in any way, or it is just a property of the empty space emerging from a deeper structure? That geometry and substance can be separated is of course not anything new for philosophers. Aristotle’s distinction between form and matter is one example. For Aristotle the “essence” becomes a true reality only when embodied in a form. Otherwise it is just a substratum of potentialities, somewhat similar to what quantum physics suggests. Immanuel Kant was even more radical: the forms, or in general the structures that we think of as either existing in or as being abstracted from the realm of noumena are actually innate categories of the mind, preconditions that make possible our experience of reality as phenomena. Structures such as space and time, causality, etc. are a priori forms of intuition – thus by nature very different from anything from the outside reality, and they are used to formulate synthetic a priori judgments. But almost everything that was discovered in modern physics is at odds with Kant’s view. In modern philosophy perhaps Whitehead’s process metaphysics provides the closest framework for formulating these problems. For Whitehead, potentialities are continuous, while the actualizations are discrete, much like in the quantum theory the unitary evolution is continuous, while the measurement is non-unitary and in some sense “discrete”. An important concept is the “extensive continuum”, defined as a “relational complex” containing all the possibilities of objectification. This continuum also contains the potentiality for division; this potentiality is effected in what Whitehead calls “actual entities (occasions)” – the basic blocks of his cosmology. The core issue for both Whiteheadian Process and Quantum Process is the emergence of the discrete from the continuous. But what fixes, or determines, the partitioning of the continuous whole into the discrete set of subsets? The orthodox answer is this: it is an intentional action of an experimenter that determines the partitioning! But, in Whiteheadian process the world of fixed and settled facts grows via a sequence actual occasions. The past actualities are the causal and structural inputs for the next actual occasion, which specifies a new space-time standpoint (region) from which the potentialities created by the past actualities will be prehended (grasped) by the current occasion. This basic autogenetic process creates the new actual entity, which, upon becoming actual, contributes to the potentialities for the succeeding actual occasions. For the pragmatic physicist, since the extensive continuum provides the space of possibilities from which the actual entities arise, it is tempting to identify it with the quantum vacuum. The actual entities are then assimilated with events in spacetime, as resulting from a quantum measurement, or simply with particles. The following caveat is however due: Whitehead’s extensive continuum is also devoid of geometrical content, while the quantum vacuum normally carries information about the geometry, be it flat or curved. Objective/absolute actuality consist of a sequence of psycho-physical quantum reduction events, identified as Whiteheadian actual entities/occasions. These happenings combine to create a growing “past” of fixed and settled “facts”. Each “fact” is specified by an actual occasion/entity that has a physical aspect (pole), and a region in space-time from which it views reality. The physical input is precisely the aspect of the physical state of the universe that is localized along the part of the contemporary space-like surface σ that constitutes the front of the standpoint region associated with the actual occasion. The physical output is reduced state ψ(σ) on this space-like surface σ. The mental pole consists of an input and an output. The mental inputs and outputs have the ontological character of thoughts, ideas, or feelings, and they play an essential dynamical role in unifying, evaluating, and selecting discrete classically conceivable activities from among the continuous range of potentialities offered by the operation of the physically describable laws. The paradigmatic example of an actual occasion is an event whose mental pole is experienced by a human being as an addition to his or her stream of conscious events, and whose output physical pole is the neural correlate of that experiential event. Such events are “high-grade” actual occasions. But the Whitehead/Quantum ontology postulates that simpler organisms will have fundamentally similar but lower-grade actual occasions, and that there can be actual occasions associated with any physical systems that possess a physical structure that will support physically effective mental interventions of the kind described above. Thus the Whitehead/Quantum ontology is essentially an ontologicalization of the structure of orthodox relativistic quantum field theory, stripped of its anthropocentric trappings. It identifies the essential physical and psychological aspects of contemporary orthodox relativistic quantum field theory, and lets them be essential features of a general non-anthropocentric ontology.
It is reasonable to expect that the continuous differentiable manifold that we use as spacetime in physics (and experience in our daily life) is a coarse-grained manifestation of a deeper reality, perhaps also of quantum (probabilistic) nature. This search for the underlying structure of spacetime is part of the wider effort of bringing together quantum physics and the theory of gravitation under the same conceptual umbrella. From various the- oretical considerations, it is inferred that this unification should account for physics at the incredibly small scale set by the Planck length, 10−35m, where the effects of gravitation and quantum physics would be comparable. What happens below this scale, which concepts will survive in the new description of the world, is not known. An important point is that, in order to incorporate the main conceptual innovation of general relativity, the the- ory should be background-independent. This contrasts with the case of the other fields (electromagnetic, Dirac, etc.) that live in the classical background provided by gravitation. The problem with quantizing gravitation is – if we believe that the general theory of relativity holds in the regime where quantum effects of gravitation would appear, that is, beyond the Planck scale – that there is no underlying background on which the gravitational field lives. There are several suggestions and models for a “pre-geometry” (a term introduced by Wheeler) that are currently actively investigated. This is a question of ongoing investigation and debate, and several research programs in quantum gravity (loops, spinfoams, noncommutative geometry, dynamical triangulations, etc.) have proposed different lines of attack. Spacetime would then be an emergent entity, an approximation valid only at scales much larger than the Planck length. Incidentally, nothing guarantees that background-independence itself is a fundamental concept that will survive in the new theory. For example, string theory is an approach to unifying the Standard Model of particle physics with gravitation which uses quantization in a fixed (non-dynamic) background. In string theory, gravitation is just another force, with the graviton (zero mass and spin 2) obtained as one of the string modes in the perturbative expansion. A background-independent formulation of string theory would be a great achievement, but so far it is not known if it can be achieved.
Galois Theor(y)/(em)
The most significant discovery of Galois is that under some hypotheses, there is a one-to-one correspondence between
1. subgroups of the Galois group Gal(E/F)
2. subfields M of E such that F ⊆ M.
The correspondence goes as follows:
To each intermediate subfield M, associate the group Gal(E/M) of all M-automorphisms of E:
G = Gal : {intermediate fields} → {subgroups of Gal(E/F)}
M → G(M) = Gal(E/M)
To each subgroup H of Gal(E/F), associate the fixed subfield F(H):
F : {subgroups of Gal(E/F )} → {intermediate fields}
H → F(H)
We will prove that, under the right hypotheses, we actually have a bijection (namely G is the inverse of F). For example.
Consider the field extension E = Q(i, √5)/Q. It has four Q-automorphisms, given by (it is enough to describe their actions on i and √5):
σ1 : i →i, √5 →√5
σ2 : i →−i, √5 →√5
σ3 : i →i, √5 →−√5
σ4 : i →−i, √5 →−√5
thus
Gal(E/Q) = {σ1, σ2, σ3, σ4}. The proper subgroups of Gal(E/Q) are {σ1}, {σ1, σ2}, {σ1, σ3}, {σ1, σ4} and their corresponding subfields are E, Q(√5), Q(i), Q(i√5). This yields the following diagram:
Theorem: Let E/F be a finite Galois extension with Galois group G.
- The map F is a bijection from subgroups to intermediate fields, with inverse G.
- Consider the intermediate field K = F(H) which is fixed by H, and σ ∈ G.Then the intermediate fieldσK = {σ(x), x∈K}
is fixed by σHσ−1, namely σK = F(σHσ−1)
Proof: 1. We first consider the composition of maps H → F(H) → GF(H).
We need to prove that GF(H) = H. Take σ in H, then σ fixes F(H) by definition and σ ∈ Gal(E/F(H)) = G(F(H)), showing that
H ⊆ GF(H).
To prove equality, we need to rule out the strict inclusion. If H were a proper subgroup of G(F(H)), by the above proposition the fixed field F(H) of H should properly contain the fixed field of GF(H) which is F(H) itself, a contradiction, showing that
H = GF(H)
Now consider the reverse composition of maps K → G(K) → FG(K)
This time we need to prove that K = FG(K). But FG(K) = fixed field by Gal(E/K) which is exactly K by the above proposition (its first point). It is enough to compute F(σHσ−1) and show that it is actually equal to
σK = σF(H).
F(σHσ−1) = {x ∈ E, στσ−1(x) = x ∀ τ ∈ H} = {x ∈ E, τσ−1(x)=σ−1(x) ∀ τ ∈ H}
= {x ∈ E, σ−1(x) ∈ F(H)}
= {x ∈ E, x ∈ σ(F(H))} = σ(F(H))
We now look at subextensions of the finite Galois extension E/F and ask about their respective Galois group.
Theorem: Let E/F be a finite Galois extension with Galois group G. Let K be an intermediate subfield, fixed by the subgroup H.
1. The extension E/K is Galois.
2. The extension K/F is normal if and only if H is a normal subgroup of G.
3. If H is a normal subgroup of G, then
Gal(K/F ) ≃ G/H = Gal(E/F )/Gal(E/K).
4. Whether K/F is normal or not, we have
[K : F] = [G : H]
Proof:
That E/K is Galois is immediate from the fact that a subextension E/K/F inherits normality and separability from E/F.
First note that σ is an F-monomorphism of K into E if and only if σ is the restriction to K of an element of G: if σ is an F -monomorphism of K into E, it can be extended to an F-monomorphism of E into itself thanks to the normality of E. Conversely, if τ is an F-automorphism of E, then σ = τ|K is surely a F-monomorphism of K into E.
Now, this time by a characterization of a normal extension, we have
K/F normal ⇐⇒ σ(K) = K ∀ σ ∈ G
Since K = F(H), we just rewrite
K/F normal ⇐⇒ σ(F(H)) = F(H) ∀ σ ∈ G.
Now by the above theorem, we know that σ(F(H)) = F(σHσ−1), and we have
K/F normal ⇐⇒ F(σHσ−1) = F(H) for all σ ∈ G
We now use again the above theorem that tells us that F is invertible, with inverse G, to get the conclusion:
K/F normal ⇐⇒ σHσ−1 =H ∀ σ ∈ G
To prove this isomorphism, we will use the 1st isomorphism Theorem for groups. Consider the group homomorphism
Gal(E/F)→Gal(K/F), σ →σ|K.
This map is surjective and its kernel is given by
Ker={σ, σ|K =1}=H =Gal(E/K).
Applying the first isomorphism Theorem for groups, we get
Gal(K/F ) ≃ Gal(E/F )/Gal(E/K)
Finally, by multiplicativity of the degrees:
[E :F]=[E :K][K :F]
Since E/F and E/K are Galois, we can rewrite |G| = |H|[K : F]. We conclude by Lagrange Theorem:
[G:H]=|G|/|H|=[K :F]
