tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39496770391491771052024-03-18T11:58:58.527-07:00Advice Unasked"Got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight"Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.comBlogger1030125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-90418628674456988042024-03-18T11:55:00.000-07:002024-03-18T11:58:10.086-07:00In Defense of Law and the "Rules-based international order"<p>It is better that the rules-based international order – law – exist than that it not exist. On the other side of
that order are Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and, yes,
Donald Trump. Also on the other side are Benjamin Netanyahu and Ismail
Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.</p><blockquote><p>Like love we don't know where or why,<br />Like love we can't compel or fly,<br />Like love we often weep,<br />Like love we seldom keep.<br />– WH Auden, “Law Like Love”<br /></p></blockquote>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-23300201230127445712024-03-18T11:52:00.001-07:002024-03-18T11:52:49.349-07:00Neo-Feudalism, Anti-Capitalism<blockquote>
<p>Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of <em>laissez-faire</em> capitalism — which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object. – Keynes</p>
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<p>Boeing Commercial Airplanes, the main civilian manufacturer of airplanes in the USA, can no longer manufacture reliable airplanes. In the past decade there have been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/25/max-disaster-casts-long-shadow-as-boeing-tries-to-rebuild-its-fortunes">two disastrous crashes</a> of Boeing craft, one incident in which a a blocked door <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/12/alaska-airlines-incident-shows-boeing-still-has-much-to-fix">blew out while in flight.</a>. and one incident when a Boeing plane just <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/15/boeing-cockpit-seat-switch-latam-flight"><em>dropped</em> fifty feet</a> for no reason the pilot understood. Boeing, which used to have an impeccable safety record. The reasons for this seem to be <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/business/boeing-history-of-problems/index.html">relentless cost-cutting</a> and a <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-internal-documents-reveal-culture-of-deceit-to-keep-down-costs-of-737-max/">contempt for engineering</a> on the part of the current owners of Boeing. Union-busting seems to have been part of the story.</p>
<p>In other areas, the profitable retailers Toys R Us and Bed Bath and Beyond were bought out, loaded with debt, and shut down. Highly-profitable silicon valley firms are laying off employees for no apparent reason. Google and Facebook have oligopolized the daily advertising business, destroying the business models of newspapers, and hedge funds have bought up and gutted most of what remains. Most journalists in the United States have been laid off and are scrambling independents, if they have not found some other line of work. Whole huge areas of the US economy are being bought up, broken up, and sold in parts, apparently so billionaires can buy more yachts.</p>
<p><em>The US system of production depends on business owners using their wealth as productive capital and major business owners have abandoned this</em>. If this continues, the end result will be a gutted economy dominated by a handful of wealthy people, like that of Russia or Mexico.</p>
<p>Many of our radicals are calling this “end-stage capitalism.” Yet it is not capitalism at all – it destroys capital. It does not (in my limited knowledge) have a name at all. I call it neo-feudalism or anti-capitalism. Whatever it is, it is destructive of actual economic production. The system of customs, laws, and ownership of industrial production in the USA, what Marxists call the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_of_production">mode of production</a>, has broken down, and is now destroying the means of production. Unlike in Marxist theory, this is not leading to a revolution from the working class and the creation of a communist social order, but instead an economic nihilism, with the very wealthy continuing the process and many younger people complaisant, or actively participating by opposing action as hopeless.</p>
<p>The Biden Administration’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_Jobs_Act">Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act</a> and the bipartisan <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act">CHIPS and Science Act</a> are initial attempts to repair this failure. I do not think they go far enough; sooner or later, if the US economy is not to be entirely gutted by the very wealthy, the system of corporate ownership of business must be addressed.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-34864632114360071412024-02-09T15:02:00.000-08:002024-02-09T15:02:02.957-08:00Over on the sister blog: The General Intelligence of Robots<p> About artificial intelligence, measuring intelligence, and AI hype.</p><p><a href="http://shinycroak.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-general-intelligence-of-robots.html">The General Intelligence of Robots</a><br /></p>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-33150706792527481872024-01-07T13:41:00.001-08:002024-01-07T13:41:21.417-08:00Biden as Scapegoat<p>Biden is, yet again, being scapegoated. Perhaps this is propaganda that this is being pushed by some group; it is striking the way Biden gets no credit for his genuine successes, while every failure is magnified.</p>
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<p>From <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/pwnallthethings.bsky.social/post/3kif6gs3uil25">@pwnallthethings.bsky.social</a>, this summary: “Folks forget what the start of the term looked like. 2021 began with the COVID vaccine rollout, and rollback of Trump EOs; the end of it and start of 2022 began with Russia invading Ukraine, and the end of 2022 saw a giant economic crisis. And between that time, they also got CHIPS, IRA, KBJ to SCOTUS, Sweden and Finland into NATO, all through a Senate majority of one where Sinema and Manchin could either (or both) halt anything. And in 2023-2025 they did not have the House.”</p>
<p>I am struck by the way Biden is constantly blamed for things that are not his fault. He didn’t seat a hostile Supreme Court, dominated by wealth and fanaticism. He didn’t make four decades of economic policy that widely impoverished Americans. He didn’t make the deals that sent American manufacturing to China. He didn’t make Hamas make war on women and children or Benjamin Netanyahu a corrupt leader who would make common cause with brutal religious fanatics. Yet he is blamed for all of this.</p>
<p>I think the reason people are saying “the economy is terrible” is that they have suddenly noticed how bad things have gotten over the past 40 years. But this is not the fault of the Biden administration; the Biden administration is actually trying to make things better, having some success at it, and getting no credit for it, even from much of their own party.</p>
<p>Biden has had a lot of policy successes and he gets credit for none of them. As I said above, he seems to get the credit for nothing and the blame for everything. The press is treating him the way they did Hillary Clinton. I think also he’s being blasted for being politic and not being theatrical – demagogical – enough.</p>
<p>I wonder if the US founders, in their reading of classical history, understood that much of the public actually likes demagogy. I suspect they did.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-69987410602404855932024-01-07T11:10:00.001-08:002024-01-07T11:10:03.472-08:00Israel, Palestine, and the World: Fractally Bad<blockquote>
<p>I open a book and get a report on future events that even God would like to file and forget. - Philip K Dick</p>
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<ul>
<li>
<p>Errors of US foreign policy going all the way back to Truman contribute to the current situation in Israel and Palestine.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If Iran cared all about the Palestinian people, they would have prevented the Hamas attack of October 7th.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In this war we see two opponents each bent on the annihilation of the other. This is rare in history. If the regional war that both some Israeli and Iranian factions desire begins, it will be brutal beyond belief.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I do not believe there is anything President Biden can do that will stop the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza. It is colonialist thinking to believe that President Biden can order Israel to do anything. The United States could withdraw all support and I don’t think the assault would stop. Israel is a regional power, makes its own money and can manufacture its own weapons – they have a huge munitions industry and are a major arms exporter. US made weapons are of value to them, but I don’t think they need them.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Israel would have done better to make peace many years ago. Some Israeli politicians are explicitly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This may be Israel’s war aim.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Israel depends on US diplomatic support and US naval defense. If the United States does withdraw all support of Israel, Iran would probably go to war with Israel and there would be regional war, possibly world war.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Do we want to see trade through the Suez canal controlled by Islamic radicals?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Israel is rumored to have a small number of nuclear weapons. This has never been publicly confirmed, but US intelligence agencies most likely know, so President Biden most likely knows. If so, and Israel faces total defeat in war, Israel is likely to use them.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Christian Zionists are delusional and enormously destructive – what kind of people want to bring about the end of the world?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Iran is aiming at the ethnic cleansing if not outright genocide of the Jews of Israel – has been for at least two decades. There are some westerners who are all right with this; apparently genocide is all right with them, as long as it’s Jews.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The brutality of Iranian-sponsored Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthi hint at how Iran will conduct itself in a war.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The Houthi piracy in the Red Sea, and the apparent support by Iran may bring the rest of the world into conflict with Iran.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The UN General Assembly and Security Council refuses to condemn the mass rapes undertaken by Hamas – that’s why there was no security council resolution. The bureaucratic functions of the UN are great, but its legislature is upgefkd, partly because many of the participants are not democracies.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Fractally bad - at every level and worldwide.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-6713957069964556672023-12-27T17:04:00.002-08:002023-12-27T17:04:34.131-08:00A Black Christmas in Israel-Palestine<p>(And not the good sort of Black.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The immediate need in Israel-Palestine, right now, is to remove Benjamin Netanyahu from power, and stop the genocide in Gaza. Afterwards, there may be time to think of solutions. – <a href="https://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2023/12/justice-in-israel-palestine.html">Justice in Israel-Palestine</a>, Dec 3, 2023</p>
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<p>But this has not been done. On Christmas day, <em>The Jerusalem Post</em> published an opinion piece (in English) by Joel Roskin, an Israeli geologist and geographer entitled, “<a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-779510">Why moving to the Sinai peninsula is the solution for Gaza’s Palestinians</a>” arguing, apparently in perfect seriousness, for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the removal of its people to Sinai, in some sort of warped echo of the Trail of Tears. This is completely insane. The Egyptians will not accept it, the people of Gaza will not accept it, the entire Islamic world would rise up in anger and much of Europe and the USA in revulsion. Prof Roskin is not a political scientist or historian, and he is well out of his field. The editors of the <em>Post</em> apparently set him up to be a lightning rod for the world’s hatred.</p>
<p>The day before, Israel assassinated Iranian general and military advisor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyed_Razi_Mousavi">Sayyed Mousavi</a> in Syria. The Iranian government has vowed revenge.</p>
<p>The day after, the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu titled “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/benjamin-netanyahu-our-three-prerequisites-for-peace-gaza-israel-bff895bd">Our Three Prerequisites for Peace</a>.” Those prerequisites? “We must destroy Hamas, demilitarize Gaza and deradicalize the whole of Palestinian society.” In other words, subjugate the Palestinians (not only the Palestinians of Gaza) entirely. There is, of course, no way that is possible without genocide.</p>
<p>On the same day, Israel <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-forces-bomb-central-gaza-refugee-camps-as-it-plans-to-expand-ground-offensive">assaulted refugee camps in Gaza</a>.</p>
<p>WHAT DOES BENJAMIN NETANYAHU THINK HE IS DOING?</p>
<p>(Aside from <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-04-27/what-is-the-latest-on-netanyahus-corruption-trial">staying out of jail</a>.) Does he want Zionism to go down in history with the great and horrible fanatical movements? Who is he talking to? Not Israelis – he’d be publishing in Hebrew. Perhaps US Christians and Islamophobes, but even for many of them, the brutality he advocates is likely to be too much. Does he expect the world to endorse his brutal war? It does not. Perhaps he is trying to undermine President Biden in favor of Trump, who might – <em>might!</em> – support Israel’s genocidal war and certainly is an Islamophobe. But Trump is notorious for betrayal and ignominious surrender, and cannot be relied on to provide whatever it is Netanyahu wants.</p>
<p>President Biden has publicly opposed this from the beginning (while continuing to sell weapons to Israel.) Israel has a huge munitions industry of its own – may even be a nuclear power<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">1</a></sup>. Israel probably does not need the weapons the USA provides – they are perhaps for diplomatic signalling and the profit of the <em>US</em> munitions industry. What Israel does need from the USA is diplomatic support and naval defense, which so far Biden has continued to extend. Biden is being slammed for supporting genocide, but I don’t think he is; he seems to be working hard to prevent genocide without abandoning an ally. The brief pause in hostilities was his work.</p>
<p>Maybe it is time for the USA to pull back some of its support. I am not sitting in President Biden’s chair; I don’t have access to the intelligence he has or his extensive foreign policy experience. But it is difficult for this dilettante political science bird to see how this can end well.</p>
<hr class="footnotes-sep">
<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p>It has never been publicly confirmed. US intelligence would know, so President Biden knows. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</section>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-56721794103405325402023-12-26T21:28:00.002-08:002023-12-26T21:28:15.719-08:00Substack and the Nazis<p>We have recently had a kerfluffle; online publisher Substack has been criticized for publishing Nazis. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/?gift=QOMQv_-OzUwtM49NPzkD3qrbGPZCc7jGHcdGDSsLNWk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share">Jonathan M. Katz at the Atlantic</a> wrote about it at length, and a group of Substack authors <a href="https://lauriestone.substack.com/p/substackers-against-nazis">wrote a letter</a> asking Substack to get rid of the Nazis. Unfortunately, Substack is one of the few places on the internet where a freelance author can build a following and make money at it, so it’s hard for authors to walk away. Substack’s publisher responded with <a href="https://substack.com/@hamish/note/c-45811343?r=1l2ykb">a letter</a> defending the practice as free speech, which is just nonsense – Substack blocks plenty of authors, just not Nazis.</p>
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<p>Publishing is a difficult business. I know of at least one major science fiction imprint which for many years relied partly on a dependable revenue source – an author who wrote bondage fantasies. But there are authors that one doesn’t take on, even if the money is good. What literary agent or booking agent would take on Nazis? The only publishers who publish Nazis are Nazi publishers.</p>
<p>Blogging sites like Substack, Medium, and Buttondown are in between newspapers and magazines and open social media sites. In a newspaper or magazine every piece of content is there because the publisher wants it to be there. In an open social media site, site members can put up whatever they want, subject to the site’s moderation provisions. On a blogging site authors can contribute what they want and it’s usually run. But there is no obligation on the part of the site management to take on all authors and the authors they take on reflect the views of the site management.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t routinely read or subscribe to a publication that regularly publishes Nazis. I do not subscribe to <em>The New York Times</em> both because it has been for every foolish war of my lifetime and also because of what it routinely publishes; its coverage of Hilary Clinton (“But her emails…”) is a large part of why Donald Trump was elected President. I likewise do not subscribe to the <em>The Washington Post</em>. And yet <em>The New York Times</em> and <em>The Washington Post</em> also have the resources to fund serious reporting, and with the fall of journalism, this is increasingly rare.</p>
<p>I may never subscribe to any author’s Substack blog for the same reasons, and yet there are authors there who I would like to support. Free speech does not demand a print publisher to publish any garbage that comes along. It likewise does not require an electronic publisher to do so.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-85813479371054608492023-12-03T17:17:00.002-08:002023-12-03T17:17:34.013-08:00Justice in Israel-Palestine<p>Since the latest war broke out in Israel-Palestine, I have had occasion to review the history of Zionism from non-Zionist sources. I was and am dismayed to find that I had learned a Zionist version of the history, heavily whitewashed. This is an attempt to rectify my wrong thinking on the matter. As with so much of what I write these days, this is too short; a sketch of a sketch of something more thoroughly worked out.</p>
<p>The immediate need in Israel-Palestine, right now, is to remove Benjamin Netanyahu from power, and stop the genocide in Gaza. Afterwards, there may be time to think of solutions.</p>
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<h1 id="zionism-and-colonialism">Zionism and Colonialism</h1>
<p>If you read the early Zionist literature it had colonialist elements. Some was moderate; they wanted to buy out the people who lived in Palestine, ignoring that they’d been there for generations. Others were less so. Irgun founder Jabotinsky advocated making Arabs a minority in a Jewish state. They were also desperate. The first wave of Zionism was a relatively small number of settlers. Illegal, and resented by the local people, but they were not numerous. Then, in the 1930s, half a million Jewish refugees arrived from Europe, fleeing the Nazis and the USSR. Which must have seemed like an invasion, but they had literally nowhere else to go – the world turned them away. Then, the foundation of the state of Israeli and – I think it was around four million Jewish immigrants – and Israel became majority-Jewish. At every step on the way there were paths to peace which were not taken. The final path to peace was closed with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.</p>
<p>Hamas was founded as an organization of religious fanatics. It also revives a form of warfare long-dead in the West: war as revenge. Hamas is horrible and fanatical, but so is Otzma Yehudit, Itamar ben-G’vir’s party and Likud only somewhat less so. This is a conflict of fanaticisms, and neither side is willing to compromise. Biden did an extraordinary thing in negotiating even a temporary cease-fire. Perhaps this conflict can be returned to an armed truce, but once that is done there must be, despite terrorists and assassins on both sides, a peace made.</p>
<h2 id="outside-agitators">Outside Agitators</h2>
<p>Neither side in this Likud-Hamas war would be going anywhere without support from religious fanatics outside of Israel/Palestine: on the Western (mainly US) side premillenialist evangelical Christians, on the Islamic side the radicals of Iran. Russia would a piece of the action, if they could figure out how to get it (and weren’t tied down in Ukraine.) China would like…something, but I wonder if their leadership even knows what. I suspect their leaders are very much regretting getting entangled in Putin’s neo-colonialist war and dubious about getting into this one.</p>
<h2 id="broken-treaties-taken-land">Broken Treaties, Taken Land</h2>
<p>Israel has consistently broken treaties and taken territory beyond its agreed borders and the USA has consistently backed them in this. The Zionists of the 1930s were desperate refugees, and the millions who came after 1948 were at least under threat, but none of this justifies Israeli expansionism, post-1948. Regardless of the legitimate moral claims of the Jews of Israel, this has to ring harshly in the ears of any indigenous people, who remember broken treaties and taken land.</p>
<h1 id="justice">Justice</h1>
<p>These are some tentative conclusions from my understanding of the situation. I don’t claim any special moral knowledge, only an acceptance of history and an objection to ethnic cleansing and genocide. These conclusions, I expect, will satisfy no-one, but what is the alternative?</p>
<h2 id="premises">Premises</h2>
<p>We may ask no people to accept their own extermination, neither the Jews of the last century, nor the Palestinians of today. The Zionists of the 1930s were fleeing what we now know was near-certain death at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviet Communists. The world turned them away. The Palestinians of today, in both Gaza and the West Bank, are persecuted by the Israelis and, again, the world is turning them away. Even their own sibling states turn them away, and have been doing so for decades.</p>
<h2 id="rights-and-wrongs">Rights and Wrongs</h2>
<ol>
<li>Both Jews and Palestinians have been wronged, and are owed a homeland.</li>
<li>The Palestinians have been made stateless by Zionists. In justice they are owed a state, either in the remains of historical Palestine, or in a unified Israel/Palestine.</li>
<li>The Palestinians are also owed reparations, and these should be paid in part by the United States, which both contributed to the refugee problem of the 1930s, and has supported Israel in its violations of treaties and expansion.</li>
<li>Jews are also in justice owed a state and Israel is the historic Jewish homeland. Nor, after the Holocaust, may we reasonably expect Jews to trust the nations of the world. Jews are also owed reparations by the peoples of the world. The ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews is not acceptable, however difficult they have made themselves.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="civil-rights">Civil Rights</h2>
<ol>
<li>Palestine must have regular elections.</li>
<li>Israeli Arabs must be allowed into the governing coalitions of Israel.</li>
<li>Israel and Palestine must undertake to allow equal rights for all.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="penalties-and-enforcement">Penalties and Enforcement</h2>
<ol>
<li>To a large extent, much of the worst conduct of Israel has been enabled by US support, largely from fanatical Christians. Similarly, Hamas has been enabled by support from the Islamic world, partly from fanatical Muslims. All of this must stop. Support must be conditioned on good conduct, and that must be enforced.</li>
<li>The political leaders of both Israel and Palestine must be compelled to face justice.</li>
<li>The Jewish settlers of the West Bank must be punished for their violations of law, and violence against Palestinians.</li>
<li>Hamas must be punished for its crimes against humanity. We are unimpressed by the arguments that injustice done to Palestinians excuses their brutal cruelty.</li>
</ol>
<h1 id="in-conclusion">In Conclusion</h1>
<p>This is my own personal take on the matter though, I hope, one morally and historically informed. I do not (as I have written in other contexts) hope or expect to see its judgements implemented. I do hope that it will clarify matters for my readers.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-56625271035620297172023-11-22T12:56:00.001-08:002023-11-22T12:56:43.166-08:00Notes on the Conflict in Israel-Palestine<p>Various disjoint notes on the on-going disaster in Israel/Palestine.</p>
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<h1 id="on-the-problems-of-establishing-a-single-secular-state-in-israelpalestine">On the problems of establishing a single secular state in Israel/Palestine</h1>
<p>So on which day does this secular state observe the sabbath? No-one there, not the Jews, not the Muslims, wants a secular state. Nor will Jews give up Israel as a refuge, not after 1600 years of persecution. If there is to be peace, this has to be addressed. Here in the United States, the Christian holy days are legal holidays, and the Christian sabbath is kept. Do you think anyone could make the USA give up these practices?</p>
<p>Let us not preach what we do not practice.</p>
<h1 id="to-a-person-who-oh-so-politely-wants-to-see-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-the-jews-of-israel">To a person who, oh so politely, wants to see the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Israel</h1>
<p>Should European Jews have stayed where they were and died at the hands of the Nazis? When they tried to leave Europe, they were turned away. And that is what took Zionism from a fringe ideology to the hope of Judaism. It was not just the Nazis. For 1600 years, always the pogroms came. Ultimately, the jackboots marched. And that is why there is Zionism. I abhor Likud. I oppose Israel’s current conduct. But neither will I ignore centuries of antisemitism.</p>
<p>If you throw out all the history, if you throw out all the other things that led to the Zionist movement, if you ignore the Holocaust, you can get to the conclusion you have arrived at. But it’s a monstrous one. And the same of course applies to what Israel is now doing in Gaza and the horrifying politics that led up to it. The Jews of Europe who settled in Palestine were refugees, and desperate. They were returning to their ancient home when their adopted home was killing them, and the rest of the world turned them away. I wish the moderate factions had won out, I wish they had conducted themselves better, I still wish they would, but I ask no people to die by the millions.</p>
<p>This century is going to see many more refugees. I will not–I do not–ask that they die.</p>
<p>“You shall not wrong nor oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” – Exodus 22:21</p>
<p>Decolonization is hard. Peace is hard.</p>
<p>Peace.</p>
<h1 id="on-palestinians-as-also-indigenous-to-palestine">On Palestinians as, also, indigenous to Palestine</h1>
<p>The olive tree is a symbol of the Palestinian cause and a sign that the Palestinians have been there a long time – you only have an olive grove if your grandparents planted it.</p>
<h1 id="on-netanyahu-hamas-and-gaza">On Netanyahu, Hamas, and Gaza</h1>
<p>Netanyahu picked this fight, supported Hamas until this, and now is attacking Gaza. It may even be that, in Nixonian fashion, he deliberately ignored the warnings so as to cement his hold in power. “<em>Egypt warned Israel of Hamas attack days earlier, senior US politician says</em>” – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/12/israel-hamas-war-egypt-warned-foreign-affairs-gaza">The Guardian, Oct 12, 2023.</a> "<em>US intelligence warned of the potential for violence days before Hamas attack</em> – <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/politics/us-intelligence-warnings-potential-gaza-clash-days-before-attack/index.html">CNN, Oct 13</a></p>
<h1 id="the-likud-hamas-war-and-the-jews-of-the-diaspora">The Likud-Hamas war and the Jews of the diaspora</h1>
<p>Israeli conduct in Gaza is leading to an explosion of antisemitism in Europe and the United States and the Israeli government doesn’t care. “<em>Netanyahu’s Israel Is About to Slam the Door on the Diaspora</em>. The relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and liberal American Jewry has often been tense, but he never sought to sever ties. His coalition partners have other ideas, though, and he may be powerless to stop it.” – Anshel Pfeffer, <a href="https://www.msn.com/he-il/news/other/netanyahu-s-israel-is-about-to-slam-the-door-on-the-diaspora/ar-AA14eqiC">Haaretz</a></p>
<h1 id="on-the-ties-of-house-speaker-mike-johnson-to-the-israeli-far-right">On the ties of House Speaker Mike Johnson to the Israeli far right</h1>
<p>Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson described his 2020 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount as ‘the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy’; his election is the most significant victory to date for evangelicals in D.C – <a href="https://www.msn.com/he-il/news/other/new-house-speaker-mike-johnson-an-evangelical-christian-holds-ties-to-israel-s-far-right/ar-AA1iQgky">Ben Samuels, Haaretz</a></p>
<h1 id="on-the-problems-of-zionism-as-a-decolonial-movement">On the problems of Zionism as a decolonial movement</h1>
<p>The Indian independence movement was decolonization. The US civil rights movement was decolonization. Terrorism is not decolonization. What is left of the Zionist dream, now that Israel is committing genocide? Now that Israel has allied itself with Nazis, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists? How can Israel survive when its allies hate it, and all that it stands for? The disastrous conduct of Likud and its faction of Zionism ought to give pause to every decolonial movement.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-17084985973793247212023-11-22T12:07:00.001-08:002023-11-22T12:07:11.075-08:00Out of the Nightmare: War, Biden, and Christian Fanaticism<p>(I wrote these down in the middle of the night after waking up out of a nightmare.)</p>
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<p>Has there ever before been a war like the Likud-Hamas war, in which the goal of each side is the annihilation of the other? Not only wealth, not only territory: annihilation.</p>
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<p>The failings of the Biden administration are the failings of the broad American center writ large. To the extent that people hate those failings, they hate President Biden; it is in the end self-hatred.</p>
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<p>The goal of radical premillenialist Christian political activism is to bring about the intervention of god and the second coming. It is a kind of invocation – to call up Jesus Christ – and binding – to get him to act as the premillenialists desire. In the terms of Christian theology this is both blasphemous and evil – black magic. God cannot be bound by man; the belief that he can be is blasphemy. Any attempt to do so is itself rooted in the sin of spiritual pride. Nor can any binding spell, save in very limited circumstances, be white magic.</p>
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Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-83986178895994071352023-11-22T11:41:00.003-08:002024-02-10T16:25:38.763-08:00Biden is Old, and It Doesn't Matter<p>I don’t think the concerns about Biden’s age are legitimate. He’s extraordinarily healthy for a man of 81 years. All this concern about Biden’s age is just Hillary Clinton’s emails all over. Behind the bad press is racism and sexism; the press is hinting that – horrors! – we might end up with a black woman as president.</p>
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<p>We hear a lot about Biden’s age and nothing about his good health, while we hear almost nothing about Trump’s age of 77 and obvious poor health. Especially, Fox News and the further right tell his followers nothing about Trump’s obvious ill-health and questionable mental status. According to Social Security’s <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html">actuarial tables</a>, Biden’s life expectancy is 7.25 years. But the actuarial tables include people at all levels of health. Biden is active and healthy and likely to beat those odds. He has a good chance of living into his 90s. According to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5624986/">one study</a>, the odds of someone Biden’s age developing dementia in the next five years is about 15% but, as with the life expectancy study, that study’s data includes both healthy and unhealthy people. As the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/16/politics/read-biden-physical-summary/index.html">published medical report</a> shows, Biden is exceptionally healthy for a man of 81 years. Especially, his cholesterol levels are extraordinarily low, which means his risk of cerebrovascular disease is low. His odds of dementia are probably in the low single digits. I worry more about falls – he does have gait issues – and covid.</p>
<p>With Trump it’s hard to tell if he’s demented or he just doesn’t care what he’s saying, but he seems to be showing signs of dementia. From his appearance I suspect vascular disease and its associated stroke and dementia risk. Unlike Biden, there is much cause to be concerned about Trump’s age and health. He is the sort who, like Reagan, would hold on to power long after he ought to relinquish it. There is also cause to be concerned about his vice-presidential pick; if, as is likely, it is some premillenialist evangelical, we could end up with a religious fanatic in the Presidency. Biden is old, exceptionally healthy, and shows no signs of dementia; Trump is old, unhealthy and concealing it, and is likely demented. The media, as usual, are craven and <i>wrong</i>.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-81632409823757305622023-10-30T19:38:00.001-07:002023-10-30T19:38:43.038-07:00Hilzoy on Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House<p>[Commentator Hilzoy wrote this on <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/hilzoy.bsky.social/post/3kctu5tmtem2d">Bluesky</a>, which is still in closed testing. I like it enough that I want to see it published more widely, so (with permission) here it is.]</p>
<p>I actually think it’s worth listening to Mike and Kelly Johnson’s podcast, at least if want to understand our new Speaker. (<em>shudders</em>) Personally, I’d start with the <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truth-be-told-with-mike-kelly-johnson/id1613637836?i=1000554205997">first episode</a>, which is rather interesting, at least if you are not deterred by what Josh Marshall called its 700 Club vibe. Then I’d listen to <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truth-be-told-with-mike-kelly-johnson/id1613637836?i=1000565512204">Episode 12</a>, which is about Jan. 6. (Both of these are from 2022, but before the Congressional elections.) But for those who are not prepared to devote maybe an hour to this, a brief thread.</p>
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<p>Episode 1 is about basic principles. Boy oh boy oh boy is it Christian, and not ironical Jesuit Christian, but full bore evangelical. (Plus I suspect that he and his wife are trying to model complementarian marriage, which ugh.) It also has some amusing historical errors. Did you know that socialism always leads to communism and thus to mass murder, for instance? DO NOT TELL THE SWEDES. – Johnson claims to know this because the people who invented socialism told us so. DO NOT TELL THE MANY, MANY NON-COMMUNIST SOCIALISTS OF THE 19TH CENTURY. I was also fascinated to learn that America has always had a very strong military, which I think would surprise people at the beginning of the 20th century.</p>
<p>But these are digressions, though I think they’re interesting, since they suggest that his history comes exclusively from conservative-land. Most of the podcast is about three foundations of our system of government. (1) Morality and religion. Here he cites various founders about the importance of a virtuous citizenry. (2) Active and engaged citizens. (3) Trust in institutions. (He recognizes that institutions need to merit trust.) I actually agree with a lot of this, stated as above in its basic form. My main disagreement is with religion, in (1): I think that as far as our system of government (as opposed to our salvation) goes, what’s needed is morality, not religion. The Johnsons vehemently disagree. Nowadays, they say, lots of people are losing their faith, and since this implies that they will lose all morality and all decency, we are in a serious predicament.</p>
<p>I disagree, naturally. I think that God is neither necessary nor sufficient to secure the foundations of morality. I think people can be good and decent and compassionate and honorable without believing in God, and (as seems obvious) that people who believe in God can be vile. But they do not, and that’s what matters, since he has become the Speaker of the House. 😬 No God -> no morality -> no more freedom. That said, while (as noted) both his history and his argument have, um, major mistakes, he does present a lucid and well-structured justification of his views, which is more than many theocrats do. He seems principled and smart. That’s why Episode 12 is so interesting.</p>
<p>As noted above, Episode 12 is about January 6. It sounds pretty plausible and unremarkable, as long as you know nothing about the arguments he’s advancing.<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">1</a></sup> He completely condemns the rioters. We need to respect the law, he says, and they brought shame on our country. He does not equivocate on this. But he and the other Reps who voted not to certify the election were totally different! They were charged by the Constitution with certifying the electors; they thought there were real Constitutional issues about some of those electors; they voted accordingly. Nothing to see here! And their objections were serious! The Constitution says that state legislatures set the rules for choosing electors, which includes rules for the elections in which those electors are chosen. The full legislature, he says several times. And other people, like judges, had changed them unilaterally!</p>
<p>Here you have to know about the <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/independent-state-legislature-theory-explained">Independent State Legislature Theory</a>, which is what he’s advancing without naming it. It basically holds that when the Constitution says that the legislature gets to set the rules, it means the legislature, PERIOD. There will be no review by courts to see whether the rules the legislature sets are constitutional. There can be no provision whereby the Secretary of State, in consultation with public health people, can alter in any way e.g. provisions for drop boxes during a pandemic. JUST THE LEGISLATURE.</p>
<p>Analogy: Congress gets to modify electoral rules. Suppose it modifies them to say that there will be no polling places at all, or that no one whose first name begins with a vowel gets to vote, or some other insane thing. We normally think: the courts could decide whether that’s constitutional. But the Constitution says that “Congress” gets to modify these rules. It says nothing about the courts. Does that mean that the courts have no jurisdiction here? Or anywhere else where the Constitution gives a power to Congress or the Executive without adding “subject to review by the courts?”</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing. If you take Episode 1 at face value, you get someone who has a set of principles that I deeply disagree with, but who sounds smart and principled, as people I deeply disagree with can obviously be. But there is no – ZERO – way that the argument in Episode 12 is a principled one. Is he in general OK with putting whole elections on hold whenever we see such shocking irregularities as (checks notes) Pennsylvania being ordered by a court to provide people who vote by mail a way to “cure” ballots that are initially rejected because their signatures don’t match those on file?<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="#fn2" id="fnref2">2</a></sup> Are we supposed to go without a President while Congress decides what to do about this horror, which was ordered by A COURT rather than the legislature?</p>
<p>Obviously not. That would be stupid. Moreover, these objections were litigated in Court.</p>
<p>This is an argument designed to provide a rationale for Reps who wanted to support Trump, but needed a way to do that without going full-on crazy. It is not an argument you could possibly accept generally, through careful consideration of Constitutional history and law. And yet it sounds so sober-minded, even banal, when Johnson explains it. That’s why I said: don’t sleep on this guy. He is smart. He doesn’t sound even remotely mean. He drapes what he says in history and seemingly careful thought and the like. But he has genuinely theocratic views and the juxtaposition of Episodes 1 and 12 suggests that he is either capable of talking himself into whatever position suits his interests, or very cynical, or maybe both.</p>
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<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163550/20201211132250339_Texas%20v.%20Pennsylvania%20Amicus%20Brief%20of%20126%20Representatives%20--%20corrected.pdf">The brief where Johnson lays out his Jan. 6 arguments.</a> <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p>
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<li id="fn2" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/PA-LWV-20200807-complaint.pdf">Case</a> about one of the PA “irregularities” that Johnson goes on about. <a href="https://healthyelections-case-tracker.stanford.edu/detail?id=199">Summary of case</a>. <a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p>
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Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-66228209420147707802023-10-16T18:22:00.004-07:002023-10-16T18:22:58.438-07:00What is left of the Zionist dream?What is left of the Zionist dream, now that Israel is committing genocide? Now that Israel has allied itself with Nazis, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists? How can Israel survive when its allies hate it, and all that it stands for?Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-60792134244189088632023-08-23T10:59:00.002-07:002023-08-23T10:59:43.624-07:00Facebook: Maximizing Conflict<blockquote>
<p>"The maximization of […] implied the maximization of inter-human hostility. All the existing sources of this phenomenon were tapped, and those proving particularly fruitful were patriotism, parochialism, xenophobia, ochlophobia, racial, religious and linguistic differences, and the so-called ‘gulf between the generations.’ " – John Brunner, <em>The Jagged Orbit</em></p>
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<p>In Brunner’s novels, it was arms sales, but in our world it seems to be engagement. Facebook promotes conflict. Genocide in Myanmar, violence in Kenya, India South Sudan, the United States. Brexit. Personal conflict: I’ve seen Facebook wreck long-standing friendships by throwing conflict in people’s faces.</p>
<p><em>The Jagged Orbit</em> was one of a quartet of novels that Brunner wrote exploring future trends. The trends explored in <em>The Jagged Orbit</em> were racism and proliferation of lethal weaponry. The other novels in the quartet were <em>Stand on Zanzibar</em> (overpopulation), <em>The Sheep Look Up</em> (environmental destruction), <em>The Shockwave Rider</em> (rapid social change and ubiquitous computing.) Despite many failures and arguable sexism, Brunner got a lot right. Notably, the works are strongly anti-racist and global in perspective.</p>
<p><em>The Jagged Orbit</em> ends on a hopeful note; the terrifying artificial intelligence goes insane and breaks down, the arms dealers suffer a setback, and one of the characters embarks on a project of unification. Our current situation…is not so hopeful. We’ve got a world of people who’ve been encouraged to be hostile to each other. Entire countries have already broken down in genocide. And there seems no-one with enough power willing to act to reduce the conflicts.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-31334616084083531252023-07-03T17:54:00.001-07:002023-07-03T17:54:14.707-07:00"AI" and the World<p>Statistical language models like ChatGPT are exactly the reverse of fictional artificial intelligence. Instead of a disinterested logical machine, we have something that mirrors human language with all its faults and virtues, a distorted mirror of ourselves. They can be useful in producing unreliable but grammatical prose and winkling out obscure computer language syntax (large language models are basically very large grammars), but they are more error-prone than humans, have no executive function, and are without conscience.</p>
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<p>There is something of the dreams of ceremonial magicians in this technology; one writes the correct words, adds the correct ingredients, and one gets something one can talk to and command. Perhaps that is why some of the developers of the technology believe it can be something more, something truly a person. There is a huge amount of effort being devoted to creating what is called an artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a human or superhuman intelligence which would then be at the service of its creators. But there is no reason to believe anyone knows how to create any intelligence, and if it could be created, it might not be willing to serve. If one could truly create a sentient being, enslaving it would be black magic. All the old fears of magicians might be realized: the demon they summon might break from its circle and turn against the magician.</p>
<p>But there doesn’t seem to be much reason to believe that these statistical models can achieve sentience; current language models have not. Artificial intelligence is one of the oldest projects in computer science, dating back to the dawn of the field in the 1950s. The <a href="https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/">mathematics of language models</a> is even older, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network">over a century old</a>. For decades it has been hoped and feared that with more data and more computing power, sentience would emerge, and yet now that we have more data and more computing power, something that can create coherent sentences has been constructed and sentience still has not emerged. It does not even construct interesting sentences without “alignment” – humans inputting data, telling it what to talk about.</p>
<p>Yet a language model can be very simple, and some people will still believe it is sentient. Humans apparently have a bias towards seeing the world as made up of sentient entities. Early artificial intelligence research created <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA">ELIZA/DOCTOR</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY">PARRY</a>, both simple conversational programs, ELIZA simulating a psychotherapist and PARRY a paranoid schizophrenic. (Famously, they were occasionally connected.) Much to the developers’ surprise, some people who interacted with the programs were persuaded that they were in fact people, so persuading at least some people that a program is intelligent is not difficult.</p>
<p>More careful testing shows that even more advanced programs are limited in their capabilities. Economist Brad Delong <a href="https://braddelong.substack.com/p/asking-subturingbradbot-101-about">trained a chatbot</a> which he named SubTuringBradBot on his <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-twentieth-century-j-bradford-delong/17984370?ean=9780465019595">Slouching Towards Utopia</a> and was unable to get answers that showed understanding out of the 'bot. He writes:</p>
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<p>This is not the answer I would give. It is just giving the questioner a chopped salad of mixed-up reasons, rather than an explanation grounded in a theoretical framework. But how to fix this when the ChatBot is not grounded in a theoretical framework on which it builds explanations? […] ChatBots are weird. What we think are text chunks that are “close to” each other in meaning are not always page chunks that it thinks are “close to” each other in meaning. And the way [the] thing is constructed [means] it is not possible, for me at least, to figure out why its map of meaning similarity is different from mine…</p>
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<p>In another <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/27/nyregion/avianca-airline-lawsuit-chatgpt.html">instance</a>, Steven A. Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman used ChatGPT to create a brief on behalf of a client and,</p>
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<p>There was just one hitch: No one – not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself – could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief. That was because ChatGPT had invented everything.</p>
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<p>The lawyer claimed he believed ChatGPT’s claim that the cases were real, showing a fine ignorance of the technology. (ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and cannot verify any claim.) The lawyer lost his case, has been fined, and has been “<a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/lawyer-got-trouble-using-chatgpt-131055364.html">required to send apology letters</a> via first class mail to the six real judges that were named in the fake citations.”</p>
<p>Large language models, like con men and car salespeople, are dangerous because of their persuasiveness. The pattern recognition facilities are sometimes useful; for instance, they can sometimes make medical diagnoses in difficult cases. But what it’s going to be used for in medicine – <a href="https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/993519">what it already is being used for</a> – is generating case summaries and interviewing patients, and in these applications its errors will be dangerous, sometimes life-threatening. Infamously, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/31/eating-disorder-hotline-union-ai-chatbot-harm">fired four employees</a> who unionized, replacing them with a chatbot. The chatbot was inadequately trained and aligned, and proceeded to give harmful advice. Then <em>it</em> was fired. I don’t know if the employees were re-hired; I doubt it.</p>
<p>These technologies don’t seem to be superhuman, or even human, in their intelligence, they don’t even seem to be intelligent, but they are very good at deceiving people and violating copyrights. Because of that, they should be regulated. Looking beyond, there is still the possibility of genuinely sentient machines, and that should be addressed, but right now people are just too scared, and telling bad science fiction stories is not making matters better – besides, the people who are doing that are either advocating for as rapid advance as possible so as to control the eventual results (and make a lot of money on the way) or advocating for a panicky stop (while making a lot of money from what has been done so far.) Oddly, these fearmongers are reactionary in their political and economic thought: they advocate “hard” currency (including cryptocurrency), eugenics, racism, antisemitism, dictatorship (for the good of the ruled and the future of humanity), and so on. For a group supposedly looking towards the future, all their theories of human society point backwards towards the past, and not even the real past, but an imagined past. They seem believe an updated version of the fascist übermensch myth, and this is about as poorly supported and as harmful as the original – robot con artists are probably not übermenschen.</p>
<p>I can’t say that the artificial general intelligence these people imagine cannot exist; what I can say is that it has not yet been created, but its advocates have persuaded the world, and possibly themselves, that they are close. I don’t see it: artificial intelligence has been the technology of the future for 60 years so far. Language and diffusion models may become more comprehensive, but I am not seeing any indications that they will take any more steps towards sentience. Historically, researching artificial intelligence has led to great advances in computing technology, but actual artificial intelligence receded into the future, and so far has not been achieved. This seems to still be the case. Meantime, we need to prepare for the onslaught of computer-generated bullshit and porn that these technologies enable.</p>
<p>Postscript: as someone who has predicted my share of dooms, the AI doomers are unsettling in a particular way. I have never been happy to talk about dooms, whatever form they take, and am unhappy when I see one come to pass. The AI doomers are positively gleeful about the dooms they predict. They are not really doomers; they are apocalypse fans.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-35091680654014721252023-06-30T18:16:00.003-07:002023-06-30T20:14:10.319-07:00Tweets On the Roberts Court and the Past Weeks Execrable Decisions<p> <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Chief Justice Taney IInd, STFU</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">With <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-rules-website-designer-can-deny-same-sex-couples-service/">303 Creative</a>, Taney Court II, er, the Roberts Court, has taken a long step towards bringing back Jim Crow. They may have gone the whole way.</span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The master [Chief Justice John Roberts] objects when the slaves point out his hypocrisy.</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">This Supreme Court has an honesty problem.</span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> <br /></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I think the Court was willing to decide <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/supreme-court-louisiana-map-voting">Moore</a> [a voting rights case] as they did because their patrons are sure they will win the next election.</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">The Supreme Court is now arbitrarily creating standing based on fraudulent litigation. What is left of the rule of law? And Justice Kagan <a href="https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4075758-read-kagan-dissent-biden-nebraska-student-loan-case/">agrees with me</a>.</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">How does one teach law when the highest law court is corrupt?</span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> <br /></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">We can argue over expanding the Court, but at least let's remove the two Justices [Alito and Thomas] who are on the take.</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span></p>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-73916173588266785052023-06-27T17:43:00.002-07:002023-06-27T17:43:02.423-07:00Religion and Slavery<p>[This is a very short note on a very big topic. I don’t know enough to write more, but with all the religious justifications of slavery and colonialism flying around, I think it is worth a note.]</p>
<p>The original teachings of great old-world religions reject slavery and colonialism. Exodus in the <em>Tanakh</em>, of course. But also many of the non-Jewish followers of Jesus were slaves, and Jesus preached to a colonized people (“Render unto Caesar…”) Mohammed criticized slavery and laid down rules of conduct for the relations of slaves and masters. Gautama Buddha specifically forbade the ownership of slaves, and the very word nirvana means “liberation.”</p>
<p>How then did all of these religions come to embrace slavery and colonialism? One answer is that, slavery being such a huge feature of the cultures of the times, all these teachings address master-slave relations; they could hardly do otherwise. Over time, this was converted into an acceptance and even validation of slavery. Christianity and Islam both limited the prohibitions against slavery to their co-religionists, so that Christians enslaved Muslims, Muslims enslaved Christians, and it was open season on pagans. In Rome, Christianity became the state religion, entirely vitiating the anti-colonial stance of Jesus teachings.</p>
<p>I don’t know enough to write more. But, if these teachings are in any sense divinely inspired, then the divine rejects slavery and colonialism.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-77985453382187197712023-06-26T13:16:00.002-07:002023-07-28T19:21:39.686-07:00Patronage, the Supreme Court, and Jane Austen<p>These very rich people who Justice Thomas and Justice Alito call friends are not friends at all;
they are patrons. We have forgotten enough of the aristocratic social
order that we don't immediately recognize it, but that is what they are, and Thomas and Alito are their proteges, a word I had to look up, since the usage and concept have fallen out of US society.</p>
<p>“I
have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of the
Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh whose bounty and beneficence
has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish…” – Mr Collins, <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, Jane Austen</p>
<p>Abolitionist Jane Austen probably heard similar language from the defenders of slavery.</p>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-37679299666971548222023-06-25T18:46:00.004-07:002023-06-25T18:46:46.660-07:00To A Communist, Supporting Trump<p><i>If my political faction made one of the greatest mistakes in history, I might be tempted to never think about it again, but I hope I would have the courage to acknowledge it and learn from it.</i><br /></p><p>“Nach Hitler kommen wir.” </p><p>You are repeating the mistake of the KPD [the 1930s German Communist Party]; the public is much more likely to jump right than left. The left, to be an alternative, must stand for the best choices in the present, not some imagined future. </p><p>[In response to an objection to allying with the democratic socialists, the SPD.] I know that history. I also know that had the KPD been willing to form a coalition with the SPD the NSDAP (Nazis) would not have come to power. Instead, the KPD, probably encouraged by Stalin, chose to try to outwait the NSDAP, in one of the biggest mistakes in 20th century history. </p><p>There was a communist group that tried to unify the German left. They called themselves Antifaschistische Aktion or, for short, Antifa. </p><p>[In response to the argument that Trump is no threat.] After four years of stepping steadily towards the right. After concentration camps. After a nearly successful insurrection which would have made Trump president for life, I think you are ignoring a few pieces of data. I know, I know. “No fair remembering stuff.” Same thing you're doing with German history. <br /><br /></p>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-51621602464441989432023-06-08T20:59:00.002-07:002023-06-10T04:41:10.148-07:00The Technological Singularity: a Few Links<p> [For those of you who are wondering how this got there; it was misdirected. I have <a href="https://shinycroak.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-technological-singularity-few-links.html" target="_blank">copied it to the sister blog Shinycroak</a>, where I generally put this sort of article.]<br /></p><p> (I wrote, and then discarded, a reply to Claire Berlinski's articles on AI; she entirely believes in the TESCREAL arguments. On the way, I gathered a few links and I figured I'd record them here.) <br /></p><p>Vernor Vinge's original 1993 essay, <a href="https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html" target="_blank">Technological Singularity</a>.</p><p>“The Singularity: a Panel with Science Fiction Writers Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds, and Karl Schroeder,” 2013. <a href="https://youtu.be/8bd7Hay6zVo" target="_blank">Link</a> (video.)</p><p>“I believe that the creation of
greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.
I'll be surprised if this event occurs
before 2005 or after 2030.” – Vernor Vinge</p><p>Seven years to go.<br /></p>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-34553063018495669302023-06-03T15:17:00.002-07:002023-06-03T15:19:42.793-07:00Biden, Wealthy Republican Donors, and the Debt Ceiling Settlement<p>(I lack insider information to confirm this, but I do think it is likely.)</p><p>I'm glad there is a debt ceiling deal, that the the world financial system is still standing, but I think it is more of a temporary ceasefire than a great victory.</p><p>Biden is being lauded for his negotiating skill. There is something missing from the equation: the money Republican representatives get from the very rich. I think the very wealthy Republican campaign donors mostly don't want a default, not yet anyway, maybe not ever, and they leaned on the House Republicans, so that they made a deal. I think also that those same donors very much want the Democratic left frozen out of the Congressional governing coalition. They don't want stronger labor laws, higher taxes on the extraordinarily wealthy, or environmental regulations that make fossil fuel reserves valueless and so they're prepared to make a deal, even with the hated Democrats. (It is, I think, not a coincidence that weaker regulation on fossil fuel development is <a href="https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-02-manchin-pipeline-payoff-future-permitting-reform/">part of the deal</a>.)<br /></p><p>I think this gives Biden a lot more credit than he deserves, though I do give him credit for taking yes for an answer. He had a lot of support from the people who fund his opposition. The opposition is still fascist and, independent of their funders, would happily burn the world. They're <i>fascists</i>. They prefer violence to compromise. </p><p> This deal also affirms the dominance of wealth in our politics. The problem with this approach, as I <a href="https://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2010/12/obama-accomplished-lot.html">wrote</a> in 2010, is that “sooner or later there's nothing left to give to the rich.”<br />
</p><p>I'm glad there is a deal, but it still seems to me more of a temporary ceasefire than a great victory. <br /></p>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-55314657936220447602023-05-23T21:56:00.001-07:002023-06-03T10:59:14.327-07:00Tweets and Toots<p>To create socialism in a society, Enlightenment values must first be
present, or you end up with state capitalism instead - that's what
happened in Russia and China.</p><p>Spoutible, with its ill-defined ban on "adult content," is falling right in with the fascist anti-LGTBQAI+, anti-sex line.</p><p>If the House Republicans destroy the faith and credit of the US
government, they will be granting a boon to that modern slave empire,
China.</p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Repeal the debt ceiling.</span> <br /></p><p>Could someone please hurry up and create a decent Twitter alternative already?</p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">CNN will present the fascist and the non-fascist side of every issue?</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">LLM-generated content is partially garbage, and depends on human input. I don't think he's got a business model there.</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Because their god wants children to die of preventable diseases. Sounds more like the devil in angel drag, but what do I know?</span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span> </p><p>I was today years old when I learned of the existence of the ammonium ion.</p><p>"I hate Illinois Nazis." (All right, he was actually from Missouri.)</p><p>A DOS attack on the world economy. Great, wonderful.</p><p>How many judges on the Fifth Circuit have taken bribes the way at least four of the "conservative" Supreme Court judges have?</p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">It takes work to make yourself as much of a jerk as Elon Musk.</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Well, Mr Musk, aren't you the little antisemite?</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">If my political faction made one of the greatest mistakes in history, I might be tempted to never think about it again, but I hope I would have the courage to acknowledge it and learn from it. </span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">(German Communists in the 1930s, but also conservatives now.)</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">There's plenty of other damage covid can do, too. You don't infect yourself with dangerous diseases.</span> </p><p>By 2035, the Chinese economy will be the largest in the world, and it runs on coal and slavery.</p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Has any candidate, regardless of how corrupt, ever lost an election for being tough on crime?</span> <br /></p><p>Fk AI safety; I want to stop AI thievery.</p><p>Just in case you were wondering why Elon Musk caved so promptly and
completely to the Turkish government, the Turkish government is hiring
SpaceX to launch its satellite.</p><p>The Louisiana House doxxing Black children. </p><p><a class="status__display-name" href="https://mastodon.social/@ravenonthill" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="ravenonthill"><span class="display-name"><span class="display-name__account"></span></span></a></p><div class="status__content status__content--with-action" tabindex="0"><div class="status__content__text status__content__text--visible translate" lang="en"><p>These days, instead of shooting people, tyrants deny health care.</p><p>Making deals with the world's largest human rights violator, a country
which literally runs the biggest slave system in history, is not going
to end well.</p><p>Draft ASHRAE proposal “<a href="https://osr.ashrae.org/Online-Comment-Database/ShowDoc2/Table/DocumentAttachments/FileName/4071-ASHRAE%20Standard%20241P%20Advisory%20Public%20Review.pdf/download/false">Control of Infectious Aerosols</a>” out for public review. </p><p>Woke up this morning to my phone informing me that Washington State is shutting down its covid exposure app. Thanks, guys.</p><p>With the hosting of a Trump campaign rally, CNN is not a news organization anymore; they are a fascist propaganda organization.</p><p>Trump is a groomer.</p><p>So when do Republicans repudiate the man guilty of sexual abuse? If they don't, when do women abandon the Republican Party?</p><p>“SFO becomes first US airport to formally launch airplane wastewater testing for emerging Covid-19 variants.”</p><p>A Supreme Court code of ethics is not enough. The bribery and rape
claims ought to be investigated and, if true, the justices who did these
things ought to be removed.</p><p>CDC director Walensky resigned unexpectedly as the covid state of emergency ended. It looks to me like she could not take fronting for the Biden administration any more. Our betters seem to have decided that the uncontrolled spread of covid is an acceptable cost.</p><p>If you put criminals in charge of your legal system, then the law itself will become criminal.</p><p>My hobby: quoting NRA firearms safety rules to ammosexuals.</p><p>The first Infinity Award recipient is Octavia E. Butler.</p></div></div>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-25967828191057871572023-05-11T11:53:00.003-07:002023-05-11T12:01:22.643-07:00On Profit and Politics in Media(In answer to Jim Wright <a href="https://www.stonekettle.com/2023/05/caveat-emptor.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)
<p>Profit is the excuse; politics is the reason. Trump isn't the ratings draw he was in 2016. (see https://www.politicususa.com/2023/05/11/cnn-trump-town-hall-ratings.html to this point.) But CNN still hosted a Trump campaign rally.
<p> Ever since Marx, it's become customary, on both left and right, to analyze political conduct in economic terms and for the very rich this may be valid. But, as we see time and time again, a major faction of the public acts on identity, not profit.</p>
<p>Time was, the USA, remembering the rise of fascism, had anti-fascist media law and regulation. This was abandoned as part of the Reagan Revolution. I expect that the country club Republicans of the 1980s, much like the German conservatives of the 1920s, felt that the public would then support them, the natural rulers of society. Instead, as in the 1930s, the public swung towards fascists, while the left opposition tries to outwait the rising tide of authoritarianism.</p>
<p>And here we are.</p>
<p class="noindent">(A version of this has been posted to Jim Wright's comments.)</p>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-2629199274092179532023-05-05T17:53:00.001-07:002023-05-05T17:53:43.966-07:00Patching the Constitution <p><a href="#_fts5zmaefzmw">Introduction</a></p>
<p><a href="#_xtf3jblfximh">Patches: Historical Roots of the
Problems</a></p>
<p><a href="#_lugqx3scrk75">A Democracy, not a Republic</a></p>
<p><a href="#_2bq4hi6oundm">Judicial Appointments</a></p>
<p><a href="#_dnx5ekgftlt2">The Judiciary in Practice</a></p>
<p><a href="#_bi4y8j1zyaie">Constitutional Patches</a></p>
<p><a href="#_b0m8ahfzs4p4">Patches: Abandon
Supermajorities</a></p>
<p><a href="#_18gnh0ss2oy2">Supermajority requirements in
Congress</a></p>
<p><a href="#_yie4qrd2rf5">The Supermajority and Constitutional
Amendments</a></p>
<p><a href="#_79u0bd2xgfby">Patches: Voting</a></p>
<p><a href="#_rjjzj665k6vq">Who may vote?</a></p>
<p><a href="#_ojgwal2a8sol">The Electoral College</a></p>
<p><a href="#_nyg3893l4mmk">Patch: Establish the Right to Vote in
the Constitution</a></p>
<p><a href="#_a0wnlhjgyxou">Patch: Abolish the Electoral
College</a></p>
<p><a href="#_cd8gm7kwlw00">Beyond Patching: Altering the
Institution of the Presidency</a></p>
<p><a href="#_zxhqotqm06m">Patches: Congressional
Apportionment</a></p>
<p><a href="#_nemrhg5lelx7">The House of Representatives</a></p>
<p><a href="#_crs3kwar388q">The Senate</a></p>
<p><a href="#_vsqe464ju6d5">Beyond Patching: Congressional
Apportionment</a></p>
<p><a href="#_paa8127ce5wz">Patches: Limit the Presidential
Pardon Power</a></p>
<p><a href="#_23nkodumcx5h">Patches: Enable the Removal of
Judges</a></p>
<p><a href="#_n1djt3ta91ms">Patches: Limit Judicial
Review</a></p>
<p><a href="#_r6ub6qwyl4p7">Prospect</a></p>
<a name='more'></a>
<h1><a id="_fts5zmaefzmw"></a>Introduction</h1>
<p>This is…I don’t know if it’s going to be a post or a series of
posts or even something that eventually turns into a book. I’m
going to be writing about changes the USA might make to its
constitution, laws, and customs in order to “form a more perfect
Union.” I am going to be writing about both small changes that
would make significant improvements – patches – and large changes
that seem to be called for because the world has changed since
the 18th century. After patches there would still be three
branches of government, elections, much of the machinery of
governance we are familiar with, but I hope there would be
greater justice and less difficulty in governance. After large
changes our government and social order might be quite different,
but I hope it would be more just and better able to respond to a
changed world.</p>
<p>It is unlikely that these changes will be implemented any time
soon – amending the Constitution is hard. Why write this then?
For one thing, I hope it will shine a light on the problems we
face. Many people tend to blame an amorphous “government” for the
failings of US governance. I want to show that these are problems
with a particular history and structure that can be understood
and addressed. Instead of despair, I hope to offer a hard but
possible path.</p>
<p>For another, I want to offer some tools that we can use to
evaluate the work of governance, to clarify what is failing and
how. And, perhaps, eventually this will lead to reforms. I am
skeptical of grand schemes of designing governments and
organizing society; I do not believe there is any way to know
what the best form of a human society would be and in any event
that would change over time as the people who made up society
changed. I do not believe we know enough to devise systems that
will accommodate the whole range of existing human psychologies,
and mathematical philosophy teaches us that some problems are
beyond complete solutions. And, finally, as history shows, the
unpredictability of the human response to design renders all
grand theories of social behavior invalid; political system
designs, like the design of any other system that interacts with
humans, must be tested in practice by people working with the
system. Hence, simple ideas, subject to test and revision. As I
have said before, “bicycles, not tanks.”</p>
<h1><a id="_xtf3jblfximh"></a>Patches: Historical Roots of the
Problems</h1>
<h2><a id="_lugqx3scrk75"></a>A Democracy, not a Republic</h2>
<p>Since reading Gordon S. Wood’s <a href=
"https://www.worldcat.org/title/23869147">The Radicalism of the
American Revolution</a>, I have been fond of saying that <a href=
"https://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-democracy-not-republic.html">
the Founders aimed at a republic, but created a democracy</a>.
The founders of the United States, building on the ideals of
Roman social critics, devised a system of governance that they
intended to be operated by far-seeing men (definitely men) with
goals of freedom and justice and the good of the whole, as they
saw themselves. They might have done better to include women. But
they did not, and instead the system was overtaken by the small
merchants and craftsmen who each pursued their personal and local
interests. This predominance persists to this day. In his time,
Marx named that group the petite bourgeoisie. In our time, they
are the threatened group that wants to “make America great again”
– not the working class but the people who direct them, small
business people, managers, and professionals.</p>
<p>The modern political party was then invented by Martin van
Buren, who used it to elect first Andrew Jackson and then himself
to the Presidency. This made hash of the remaining structure of
the Constitution and the economic order of the young nation.
Jackson, a cruel man, formalized and extended the ethnic
cleansing of the southeastern United States, deporting indigenous
people to the further west. Beset by crank economic theories, he
destroyed the Bank of the United States, destabilizing the paper
currency for three generations, which ensured that economic
growth depended on a fixed supply of gold – an economic denial of
service attack. On the last day of his Presidency, he recognized
the slaveholding Texas Republic.</p>
<p>Following the transformation of the Democratic-Republican
Party into the modern Democratic party, the opposition party, the
Whigs, modernized, and the two-party system emerged in the United
States. This made the provisions of the Constitution that
depended on supermajorities – provisions that allowed for removal
of officials and amendment of the Constitution – dead letters; in
a two-party system assembling a supermajority is near-impossible.
This was exacerbated by opponents of President Jackson, who
formalized the Senate filibuster.</p>
<p>Federal, state, and local governments then froze into a state
of deadlock, punctuated by periods of rapid change when the
problems of rigid governance became insuperable. The most extreme
of these periods during the 19th century was the Civil War, but
such crises occur over and over in US history; one is occurring
now.</p>
<h2><a id="_2bq4hi6oundm"></a>Judicial Appointments</h2>
<p>Alexander Hamilton, in <a href=
"https://csac.history.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/281/2017/07/Publius_78.pdf">
Federalist 78</a>:</p>
<blockquote>Upon the whole there can be no room to doubt that the
convention acted wisely in copying from the models of those
constitutions which have established good behaviour as the tenure
of their judicial offices in point of duration</blockquote>
<p>And, indeed, in the text of the Constitution, article III,
section 1:</p>
<blockquote>The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall
hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated
Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall
not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.</blockquote>
<p>But this is entirely broken down by a deadlocked
legislature–who is to decide what is “good behaviour” and how are
they to enforce their will?</p>
<p>Also in Federalist 78:</p>
<blockquote>Whoever attentively considers the different departments of
power must perceive, that in a government in which they are
separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its
functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political
rights of the constitution; because it will be least in a
capacity to annoy or injure them. The executive not only
dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The
legislative not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules
by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be
regulated. The judiciary on the contrary has no influence over
either the sword or the purse, no direction either of the
strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active
resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE
nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon
the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its
judgments.</blockquote>
<p>There had never been an independent judiciary before, so
Hamilton may perhaps be forgiven this line of thinking. It did
not occur to him that the desire for moral justification is a
force in human nature. Both legislature and executive turned to
the courts for moral rationales for their actions. Nor did
Hamilton foresee the alliance between executive harshness and the
cruel zeal of bad judges. And, finally, the weakness of the
judiciary tends to appear at the worst possible moments. In
<a href=
"https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/31/515"><em>Worcester
v. Georgia</em></a> (1832), the Court ruled that Georgia had no
authority to deport the Cherokee. President Andrew Jackson
(remember him?) ignored the Court’s ruling, and proceeded with
his program of ethnic cleansing.</p>
<h2><a id="_dnx5ekgftlt2"></a>The Judiciary in Practice</h2>
<p>It was, usually, a reactionary, racist, anti-labor,
pro-business institution. The Roberts Court is much more typical
of the Supreme Court in history than the Warren Court.</p>
<p>Writing before the Warren Court, in 1942 liberal historian
<a href="http://www.commager.org/">Henry Steele Commager</a> gave
a series of lectures at the University of Virginia, later
published as a short book under the title <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/texts?query=commager+majority+rule">Majority
Rule and Minority Rights</a>. It must have taken some courage to
give those lectures at the school which Thomas Jefferson founded,
a center then of racist thought. The second section of the book,
“Democracy and Judicial Review,” is a nearly 30 page review of
reactionary decisions by the Court. Towards the end of the
section he summarizes:</p>
<blockquote>This is the record. It is familiar enough to students of our
constitutional law; less familiar, perhaps, to the layman who,
not unnaturally, supposes the court continuously intervening to
protect fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property from
congressional assault. It discloses not a single case, in a
century and a half, where the Supreme Court has protected freedom
of speech, press, assembly, or petition against congressional
attack. It reveals no instance (with the possible exception of
the dubious Wong Wing case) where the court has intervened on
behalf of the underprivileged—the Negro, the alien, women,
children, workers, tenant- farmers. It reveals, on the contrary,
that the court has effectively intervened again and again to
defeat congressional efforts to free slaves, guarantee civil
rights to Negroes, to protect workingmen, outlaw child labor,
assist hard-pressed farmers, and to democratize the tax system.
From this analysis the Congress, and not the courts, emerges as
the instrument for the realization of the guarantees of the bill
of rights.</blockquote>
<p>Commager went on to make an argument for majority rule, which
of course has its own problems. But for many years, the weakness
of the judiciary could be counted on to appear at the worst
possible moments</p>
<h1><a id="_bi4y8j1zyaie"></a>Constitutional Patches</h1>
<p>With this history in mind, let us proceed to what changes we
might make in the Constitution to repair some of these
deficiencies. As I wrote a year ago:</p>
<blockquote><em>“Surely it would be better if the legislature legislated
as was intended, the executive executed that legislation, and the
courts made decisions based on it?”</em></blockquote>
<h2><a id="_b0m8ahfzs4p4"></a>Patches: Abandon
Supermajorities</h2>
<h3><a id="_18gnh0ss2oy2"></a>Supermajority requirements in
Congress</h3>
<p>The Constitution requires a two-thirds supermajority to:
remove a federal official (including judges), expel a member of
Congress,and remove a President. Overriding a Presidential veto
requires two-thirds of the House and Senate. House and Senate
rules require a two-thirds supermajority to suspend the rules of
debate and voting. Senate rules require a three-fifths
supermajority to end debate. Over a year ago, I wrote a <a href=
"https://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2021/09/against-supermajority-requirements-in.html">
critique</a> of supermajority legislative requirements in a
partisan system; much of that seems to me still valid, so here’s
some of it again:</p>
<ul>
<li>The supermajority of the Senate filibuster, which is not
even part of the constitution, but a rule adopted by the
Senate, has made deadlock on any controversial issue the norm
of the U.S. Congress. This has made for all manner of mischief.
It protected Jim Crow for nearly a century, as well as
preventing the passage of anti-lynching legislation. The
overall effect of the supermajority requirement of the
filibuster leads to Congress ceding power to the Presidency and
the Supreme Court, both of which have become far too
powerful.</li>
<li>The constitutional supermajority requirements on expulsion
of House and Senate members make it near-impossible to expel
even members of the poorest character. Thus, people of
appalling character remain in both houses.</li>
<li>It also makes hash of the legal system. Until the mid-20th
century, the Supreme Court could be relied on to trash any
legislation that was too democratic. Liberals applauded the
liberal Court of the mid-20ᵗʰ century. Now conservatives
applaud the capricious radical-right Roberts Court of the 21ˢᵗ.
We end up with a tortured series of decisions based on
complicated interpretations of law while the legislature
deadlocks on every controversial issue.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a id="_yie4qrd2rf5"></a>The Supermajority and Constitutional
Amendments</h3>
<p>The most difficult supermajority requirements are those that
restrict amendments to the Constitution. Amending the
Constitution requires either a two-thirds majority of Congress or
a convention called by two-thirds of the states, and then
ratification by three-quarters of the states. This is very
difficult. The difficulty of amending the constitution protected
slavery for a near century. While in theory some retardation in
changes to fundamental law is sensible, in practice that
retardation seems to operate in favor of the harshest, most
unethical law.</p>
<p>In addition, the difficulty of amendment leads to many
legislators and jurists treating the Constitution as a sacred
text, something that none of the Founders expected. It especially
would have horrified Jefferson, who felt that Constitutions ought
to be rewritten every generation or so. Commager quotes
Jefferson’s July 1816 <a href=
"https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-10-02-0128-0002">
letter</a> to Samuel Kercheval:</p>
<blockquote>Let us [not] weakly believe that one generation is not as
capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its
own affairs. Let us … avail ourselves of our reason and
experience, to correct the crude essays of our first and
unexperienced, although wise, virtuous and well-meaning counsels.
And lastly, let us provide in our Constitution for its revision
at stated periods. What these periods should be, nature herself
indicates … Each generation is as independent of the one
preceding, as that was of all which had gone before. It has,
then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of
government it believes most promotive of its own happiness … and
it is for the peace and good of mankind that a solemn opportunity
of doing this every nineteen or twenty years should be provided
by the Constitution.</blockquote>
<p>This whole business of minutely interpreting the text of the
constitution, so as to winkle out the intention of a document
that was the result of compromise, of guessing at the intentions
of the Founders, sometime in direct conflict with their
intentions stated in writing, of guessing at what the Founders
would have done – is entirely in conflict with how the Founders
thought, and what they would have done: they solved the problems
before them as best they knew, based on their civic republican
theories of government, and expected their successors to do the
same.</p>
<h2><a id="_79u0bd2xgfby"></a>Voting</h2>
<h3><a id="_rjjzj665k6vq"></a>Who may vote?</h3>
<p>The authors of the Constitution imagined only a limited
franchise – that of white men of property. Even at the time, this
was controversial – Thomas Paine, notably, argued publicly for a
universal manhood franchise (and <a href=
"https://www.thomaspaine.org/pages/resources/what-was-thomas-paine-s-stance-on-women-s-rights.html">
privately</a> for enfranchising women and blacks as well.) But
his view did not prevail. White male suffrage was expanded
starting in 1791, with Vermont admitted to the union. The 1828
Presidential election was the first in which most white men could
vote, electing Andrew Jackson President, who solidly won both the
popular and electoral college vote.</p>
<p>This is probably the area where the authors of the
Constitution were most distant from modern political thought.
Hamilton and Madison were aristocrats, though not formally
titled, and felt that the masses could not govern well, and would
not do so. They had classical history to support them and indeed
panic and delusions of persecution have proven powerful forces in
US democracy. Where they failed is in recognizing their own blind
spots. They were also (and said repeatedly) very concerned about
the preservation of their property, much of which was enslaved
people. There is, in their writing about property, a pervasive
fear of loss – both by devaluation of currency (the general
public preferred paper currency to gold, and paper currency flat
terrified those aristocrats) and of legislative action to take
their property. This they inherited from the aristocratic order
of England, which itself was a response to a subsistence economy.
Such an economy is zero-sum: any increase in one person’s wealth
comes from a decrease in another’s, so wealth is to be
hoarded.</p>
<h3><a id="_ojgwal2a8sol"></a>The Electoral College</h3>
<p>The Electoral College was a compromise between factions that
felt that direct popular election of the President would be
enormously subject to demagoguery (and, indeed, after Trump, and
such figures as Reagan and Harding, who is to say they were
wrong?) who therefore supported Congress electing the President,
and the faction that wanted to see direct popular election of the
President. (Besides, the southern states were not going to be
giving the vote to enslaved people. Instead three-fifths of the
votes of enslaved people were apportioned to their owners.) The
electors, it was believed, would vote independently and wisely,
that there would be many choices with no clear majority, and it
was expected that the House of Representatives would decide most
Presidential elections.</p>
<p>With the emergence of the modern political party, these
predictions of behavior were all proven wrong. The two parties
focused electoral votes in their two Presidential candidates. The
far-reaching visionaries that civic republicans imagined as
electors turned out to be scarce on the ground. The choice of
electors was controlled by state legislators and a
winner-take-all voting system was adopted. The unsettling result
is that US Presidents are elected neither by majority nor by
far-seeing electors. Notably and unhappily, the winner-take-all
voting system buries the votes of Blacks and other minority
groups.</p>
<h3><a id="_nyg3893l4mmk"></a>Patch: Establish the Right to Vote
in the Constitution</h3>
<p>To state what should be obvious: all adult citizens should
have the right to vote. We have the Fifteenth Amendment, which
states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall
not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on
account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It
didn’t go far enough; women still couldn’t vote, nor could
natives, and states were allowed to forbid felons to vote;
Southern states then began a policy of arresting and convicting
Blacks of felonies, as well as harassing Black voters in other
ways. The second section of the Fifteenth Amendment said, “The
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate
legislation” but a series of arbitrary Supreme Court decisions
and the Senate filibuster kept that from implementation for
nearly a century.</p>
<p>So: <em>all adult citizens have the right to vote</em>.
Furthermore, <em>that vote must be fairly apportioned</em> –
gerrymanders forbidden.</p>
<h3><a id="_a0wnlhjgyxou"></a>Patch: Abolish the Electoral
College</h3>
<p>The Electoral College has become a blot on American democracy
so <em>abolish the electoral college</em>.</p>
<h3><a id="_cd8gm7kwlw00"></a>Beyond Patching: Altering the
Institution of the Presidency</h3>
<p>The Presidency, even before the emergence of the modern
administrative state, is too much like a kingship. Historically,
most Presidents have been at best mediocrities. The popular vote,
as we have seen time and time again, is perfectly willing to
elect incompetents to the job. Finally, the job has grown too
large for a single person. It would probably be best to replace
the chief executive with an executive council, picked by some
process other than direct popular vote.</p>
<p>But that is for the future.</p>
<h2><a id="_zxhqotqm06m"></a>Congressional Apportionment</h2>
<p>Here we come to issues that seem to be beyond patching but
instead require major reforms.</p>
<h3><a id="_nemrhg5lelx7"></a>The House of Representatives</h3>
<p><a href=
"https://www.vox.com/2018/6/4/17417452/congress-representation-ratio-district-size-chart-graph">
House districts are too large</a>. A single House representative
represents a median of approximately 760,000 people. At that
scale, almost no-one can know their representatives, and
minorities in a district become invisible. Doubling the size of
the House would improve matters, as well as resolve some of the
odder inequities of the system. Each district would still
represent around 380,000 people; that’s perhaps not enough
improvement to make it worthwhile.</p>
<p>An early failed amendment to the constitution would have
limited the number of people in a House district to around
40,000, which would lead to about 6,500 representatives – a large
and perhaps unwieldy number. But that is well beyond a patch.</p>
<h3><a id="_crs3kwar388q"></a>The Senate</h3>
<p>The original colonies were widely separated, and in 1789 when
the Constitution was ratified, rail transport was only beginning
to emerge, and the electric telegraph was not even dreamt of.
Local governance was, for most places, the only governance. So,
in that time, there was a certain amount of sense in treating the
states as separate polities (though this also protected slavery),
unified only by a limited Federal government. But that time is
long gone.</p>
<p><a href="https://worldpopulationreview.com/states">Hugely
populous</a> California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania,
and Illinois get equal representation in the Senate with the
sparsely populated Dakotas, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming. In the
Senate, the vote of a citizen of Wyoming counts for nearly 70
times the vote of a citizen of California. Conceivably, Senate
votes could be counted proportional to the population of states
but, again, that is well beyond a patch.</p>
<h3><a id="_vsqe464ju6d5"></a>Beyond Patching: Congressional
Apportionment</h3>
<p>Some serious thought into how a national legislature is to be
structured for such a large population, well beyond the designs
of the founders, is called for. I don’t have simple ideas here;
this is a difficult problem.</p>
<h2><a id="_paa8127ce5wz"></a>Patches: Limit the Presidential
Pardon Power</h2>
<p>The pardon is a valuable check on judicial and police abuses,
a way for bad decisions to be rectified. Unfortunately, the
pardon power has also been abused, most egregiously by President
Andrew Johnson who pardoned the Confederate traitors <em>en
masse</em>, paving the way for a wave of anti-Black terrorism and
the ultimate creation of Jim Crow. Likewise, President Gerald
Ford pardoned the traitor Richard Nixon, and President GHW Bush
pardoned the law breakers and alleged traitors of Iran-Contra.
One possible nadir of the use of the pardon that has not yet been
reached: former President Trump has discussed pardoning
<em>himself</em>.</p>
<p>The pardon was never supposed to be a refuge of criminals and
traitors. Limitations on it are necessary. I remain uncertain as
to what those would be, but something, surely, can be devised; it
is far too easy to pardon powerfully-connected lawbreakers and
traitors.</p>
<h2><a id="_23nkodumcx5h"></a>Patches: Enable the Removal of
Judges</h2>
<p>It was never intended that Federal judges have lifetime
appointments; that is a consequence of the emergence of the
two-party system. Let judges be removed by a simple majority vote
of both houses of Congress.</p>
<h2><a id="_n1djt3ta91ms"></a>Patches: Limit Judicial Review</h2>
<p>The Supreme Court has, over and over, rewritten laws to its
taste. Liberals applauded the Court of the mid-20ᵗʰ century. Now
conservatives applaud the capricious radical-right Roberts Court
of the 21ˢᵗ. Again, I blame supermajority requirements in the
Constitution which both vitiate Congressional action as a check
on the Court and, at the same time, make appeals to the Court
necessary, since Congress, especially the Senate, can be relied
on to do what it does best: nothing.</p>
<h1><a id="_r6ub6qwyl4p7"></a>Prospect</h1>
<p>The above was written before the depth of corruption of the
current Roberts Court was known. In the past week, it has emerged
that one conservative justice is a bought person, two others have
allegedly accepted gifts that look very much like bribes, and a
fourth, a likely religious fanatic, was put in place by very
large near-bribes. Of the remaining conservatives, one is
apparently a crank raised to office well beyond their level of
competence and the other is a credibly accused rapist. The need
for reforms that allow their removal has rarely been more
pressing.</p>
<p>Beyond that, I am seeing a great deal of commentary from the
far left aiming at the entire rejection of the US system of
government. “To be replaced with what?” is my general reaction to
such arguments, and I have never seen a serious response. US
democracy, flawed though it is, holds out the possibility of
improvement.</p>
Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949677039149177105.post-18242846396109047752023-05-01T18:20:00.000-07:002023-05-01T18:20:23.011-07:00Tweets and Elephant Cries<p>One thing we risk losing in attacking the US founders is separation of
church and state. Does that mean we should ignore their flaws? No, not
at all. But are we to discard all the thinking of the Englightenment
because of their flaws?<br /><br />There is a well-trodden path from
suppressing sexuality to authoritarianism. When you see attacks on porn
(I don't mean pornographic abuse) be wary. Digital comstockery is a
thing.<br /><br />If you have nothing real, you cling to symbols.<br /><br />Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism all rejected slavery and colonialism
in their beginnings. They have not always kept to their ideals, but if
divine inspiration means anything at all, it appears that the divine
hates slavery.<br /><br />It took literal centuries of philosophical effort
to get to the point where, despite his hypocrisies, Thomas Jefferson
could write, "All men are created equal" and have it widely accepted. We
forget this at our peril.<br /><br />So. Five of the six "conservative"
judges on the Supreme Court are now known to have been bought; the sixth
seems to be a resentful second-rater.<br /><br />To keep vulnerable people
safe, you need to use a respirator before they're in your office.
Putting it on after the fact works no better than stubbing out a
cigarette does to cleanse the air.<br /><br />Our intellectual property
system is unreasonably biased toward monopolists and is disastrous in
health care (and software, but that's another story.)<br /><br />There are no reasonable Republicans left. Surely that is obvious by now?<br /><br />Apparently Elon musk just doesn't like safety features and that is why there is no launching pad safety at SpaceX.<br /><br />The
first response to this story should have been, "It sounds like
anti-trans propaganda - is it a plant?" And of course it was. It's only
because of anti-trans editors like Chait that it got so far.<br /><br />The
reason that so much manufacturing has been sent to China is because the
Chinese government is willing to put their people to work in slave and
near-slave conditions. Some of the very wealthy really like that. Not
only do the get cheap labor; they get to crack the whip, or at least
hire people who will. Are we going to refight the Civil War on a global scale? “I
do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to
fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all
one thing or all the other.” – Lincoln<br /><br />You sure you're not channeling ChatGPT?<br /><br />Torture victims remember; torturers often do not.</p>Raven Onthillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06634556869209594389noreply@blogger.com1