Binary

Dichotomous versus continuous

The self-styled right-thinking citizens of the world have cleared their throats and found something to say. These haters of hatred despise “Trump supporters”, sincere Christians, people who go to school and go to work and pay taxes and get married to a member of the opposite sex and follow the rules. They have hitched their wagon to an unruly mob who are their dupes in destroying the middle class. To appease the mob’s rage, the world citizens permit their barking dogs a few seditious, insurrectionist rallies, which are “mostly peaceful”. Then they declaim: “It is time for a cease-fire in Israel-Palestine.”

Oddly enough, they do not call for a cease-fire while jihadists are busy murdering Jews or Westerners. I have to wonder why. I do recall from 2020 that it was considered offensive to assert that “All lives matter.” In the current context, that offense begins to make sense, as the enlightened world citizens respond to genocidal anti-Semitic mania with a program to prevent Islamophobia.

All of this “nuance” is lost on the “far right-wing nationalist” government of Binyamin Netanyahu, of course. If only there were a more pacific government in Israel, like the ones led by Rabin, Peres, Barak, and so on. Oh wait; there were such governments. Why could they not secure peace agreements with the Palestinian Arabs? Because the latter have made their goal clear since 1964: the absolute eradication of Israel.

Liberal Westerners posing as friends of Israel do not understand the goal of jihad. They believe that the conflict around Israel revolves around the location of a boundary line. Just negotiate enough, and we can find a mutually satisfactory solution. Bill Clinton believed that, as did George W. Bush, and even Donald MAGA Trump.

You cannot negotiate away your existence. There isn’t a small number of terrorist murders that the Israeli government is willing to accept. Nor is there a limit to the territorial ambitions of the Palestinian-Arabs. How many times have you heard this: “From the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea, Palestine will be free”? Free of what? “Occupation”? No! Free of Jews - completely!

In statistics, we always prefer to have more information. A dichotomous variable (did the stock market go up or down today?) is less informative than a continuous variable (how much did the stock market change today?). This has caused statisticians to toy with continuous decision rules, in which there is a degree of truth, rather than dichotomous decision rules, in which we choose one option or the other.

I have been fighting against this trend in statistics, observing that many real-life situations require yes-no decisions. Examples include deciding whether a credit-card transaction is fraudulent, whether to extend a loan, whether to have an operation or take a medication, and so on.

The year 1964 was infamous for the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, three years before the Six-Day War (and this should clarify that the goal of the Palestinian-Arabs has nothing to do with “occupation”). But 1964 was also the year of a great speech by Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing”. The text linked below, from the Reagan Library, includes a link to a YouTube video.

https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/time-choosing-speech-october-27-1964

We are living in a time of choosing. Regrettably, many prominent, popular leaders in the conservative movement have backed into a corner, assuring their fans that they need not do the hard work of choosing and supporting that choice. In a future post, I will name names and survey the world situation. See you next time.