Category Archives: Politics

The Seal is Broken

Friday’s SCOTUS decision to reverse Roe is utterly unprecedented. Yes, the court has reversed and overturned decisions, major monumental decisions, but never before has the court rescinded a legally recognized individual right. A week ago the people had X number of rights, today it is X-1. The long, arduous path that this nation had struggled on of slowly, inexorable, expanding individual rights has ended. The line has been crossed and it can never be uncrossed. For the rest of the nation’s existence the member of court will know that with enough cajoling and pressure they can remove any right that they find unpleasant. We know already that a member of the court is looking are more recently won rights as targets for elimination. “Cooler heads” tell us to not panic, that this lone voice on the bench has not the votes to imperil those rights. Well, for 50 years there was not the votes to imperil any individual rights and then there were. Precedent and legal traditions no longer stay the court’s hand from the political ends they wish to obtain and for those conservatives cheering you are far too short sighted. That abandoned respect of precedent and tradition can just as easily apply to Heller and MacDonald. Why should liberal justices have any more respect for you recently won rights as you had for theirs? You have initiated a no rules cage match where only victory matters and it will not end any time soon. The aged old guard of the liberal party has continued to play by rules that right has long abandoned but the next generation of liberal pols have watched and learned the lesson to whipped them with and the tables always turn.

I do not celebrate this, but I do welcome it. A return to politics with rules and norms can only be achieved if the right suffers, and suffers terribly, for the unrestricted warfare that they have unleased.

I dream, I hope, but sadly without a lot of faith that it will come to pass, that Friday represents the Right’s Pearl Harbor moment. A devastating attack that was meant to cripple an enemy but instead woke a slumbering giant and that brought about the attacker’s utter ruin.

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A Response to Jordan S Carroll’s Article Misunderstanding a Classic 60s SF Novel

 

On May 29th Jacobin.com published the ironically titled article To Understand Elon Musk, You Have to Understand This ’60s Sci-Fi Novel by Jordan S. Carroll in which the good professor misread or misrepresented the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert A. Heinlein as a guide to understanding Elon Musk.

I come here not to defend Heinlein’s novel, its philosophies, or its meaning but rather in protest the professor’s inaccuracies and omissions that create a strawman for his argument.

Here from the article is Carroll’s description of the novel core conflict.

It’s about a lunar colony that frees itself, via advanced and cleverly applied technology, from the resource-sucking parasitism of Earth and its welfare dependents.

 

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress depicts a moon colony forced by the centralized Lunar Authority to ship food to Earth where it goes to feed starving people in places like India. The lunar citizens, or Loonies, revolt against the state monopoly and establish a society characterized by free markets and minimal government.

 

Absent from this recounting and the entire article is the quite essential element that in the novel the moon is a penal colony. It is a prison removed from courts, laws, and governance. Exile to the moon is a one-way life sentence and even the guards and the despotic warden are, due to physiological changes wrought by prolonged life in 1/6 gravity, unable to return to Earth. People born on the moon are not technically prisoners but have no rights save whatever is granted by the warden’s generosity and can never live upon the Earth. It is a despotic, authoritarian dictatorship without any form of oversight. By omitting this element of the narrative Carroll is free to portray the people, for they are not citizens anywhere, of the moon as greedy libertarians indifferent to their fellow man.

The novel takes solutionism to the extreme when Mannie enlists the help of a sentient supercomputer named Mike to lead the overthrow of Earth’s colonial government on Luna

 

Here Professor Carroll has reversed the cause and effect of the novel’s progression. Mannie is not a revolutionary who enlisted the secret sentient computer into the revolution but rather it was the curious computer, Mike, that sent the apolitical Mannie into the revolutionary meeting because he had no way to listen in on the meeting. It is only after Mannie is won over by the revolutionaries and reveals to the pair that recruited him that the lunar colony’s central computer is aware that they decide to utilize this unique resource. Mike leads nothing, he is a tool and in many ways a child treating the revolt as a game.

When it comes to the revolution itself Carroll is no more careful in his representation that he was in depicting the conditions on the moon.

Mannie the computer technician, designs their clandestine cell system like a “computer diagram” or “neural network,” mapping out how information will flow between revolutionists. They determine the best way of organizing a cadre not through democratic deliberation or practical experience but through cybernetic principles.

 

Either Professor Carrol is ignorant or has chosen to ignore the history of Clandestine Cell Structure that has been used in resistance and revolutionary movements decades before the novel’s publications. In his haste to prove that everything from the novel that has apparently influenced Musk is tied to modern tech bro culture is has ignored or misrepresented actual history.

And here is another distortion of the novel’s events.

Even when it comes time to establish a constitution for the Luna Free State, the conspirators use clever procedural tricks to do an end run around everyone in the congress who is not a member of their clique. Smart individuals always win out over mass democracy in Heinlein’s fiction — and that’s a good thing.

 

First off, they did not ‘do an end run around’ the congress they established the congress with their command cell member occupying all the key positions. They attempted to create the impression of a representative government while retaining full control and that’s what happened — for a while.

The Lunar Congress, unaware that they were supposed to be rubber stamps and nothing more, formed a new government and with a stroke undid all of the revolutionaries careful plotting. Because this was not a revolution that shot the most capable revolutionaries after the victory, as so many in history has done, an actual representative government replaced the despotic tyranny of the penal colony. Not quite what Professor Carroll told people in his article.

And that brings me to the final and most critical blindness in the article and in people who hail the novel as a tale of a successful libertarian revolution.

In the novel the revolution failed.

Yes, the penal colony was freed, and a representative government replaced a dictatorship, but that government very quickly transitioned away from anything approaching pure libertarianism into a more conventional form. The novel opens with the Mannie bemoaning the coming of new taxes, and then once the flashback to the revolution is over, it ends with him contemplating immigration to some less populated area. The Libertarians lost the government. The moon did not become an outpost of pure unfettered capitalism and unregulated markets. It became Earth. If Musk thinks the novel points to an unregulated future, he has misread it as badly as Carroll.

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Quick Thoughts on the Leaker SCOTUS Draft

First off let me be plain, I am pro Choice on the issue of abortion. There are lots of arguments why but one I see too little of that to me is hugely determinative is that giving birth is life-threatening, particularly in the American health care system, especially so for people of color and poor economic resources. The decision to rick one’s life should only rest with the person whose life is being risked.

Alito’s leaked draft opinion is some 98 pages long and my summation of his argument will be both reductive and from a non-lawyer’s perspective. From what I can determine listening to sources both left and right his basic argument flows like this.

Abortion is not specifically named as a right in the constitution.

The constitution does protect right which are not specifically named. (The 9th Amendment.)

To determine if something is an unnamed right one looks to history and tradition as it was understood at the time of the 9th amendment and the 14th. (part of the legal dismantling of slavery following the civil war.)

In Alito’s view abortion was not part of the history and tradition of accepted rights in either the 18th or 19th centuries, therefor it could not be counted among the unnamed rights of the 9th amendment nor among the privileges and immunities of the 14th.

Given that Alito concludes that there is no right to abortion and at the time of the leak has persuaded four other conservative justices to agree to this reasoning, terminating, for the first time ever in American history, and individual right.

To me there are several philosophical troubles with this reasoning.

First it presumes that the unnamed rights of the constitution are a close set, limited in number, and restricted to only what could have been conceived of at the time by while male slavers. Rather than interpreting the galaxy of unnamed right to be an evolving set matching culture as it changed it is a static set but one without any definition to guide future person in that determination.

It relies upon reading minds, from a distance of more than two hundred years, of men who recognized no rights for women in self-determination to adjudicate the rights of people in the 21st century.

It presumes that the men who wrote and adopted the constitution were so limited in their minds and imagination that they were incapable of conceiving of rights not yet considered by history and tradition.

There is a school of thought, generally conservative, that rights are not granted by governments but rather recognized by them and that their true source is a divine power. But if you accept this theory on the source of rights then Alito’s opinion is even more insane. Alito is then saying though God, all knowing throughout all time, imbues people with rights he was incapable of granting rights fallen humans were unable to think of in 1789 or 1868.

In my opinion Alito conclusions, and the agreement of his fellow justices, is nothing more than highly motivated reasoning. This is something I have seen in my past time, tabletop gaming. A player has a predetermined conclusion that would benefit their game and suddenly the interpreting of rules becomes quite fluid and twisted logic is employed to arrive at the desired outcome. The conservatives want to overturn Roe and the method of getting there matters very little. As it has been said on one legal podcast the vibe is very much ‘Stare decisis is for suckers.’

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How a Conservative Columnist Displayed Both His Ignorance and His Bias

Elements of the geeky internet awoke yesterday when the ironically name conservative writer David Marcus (Also the name of the fictional son of Trek’s James T. Kirk) accused the new slate of shows of going where it has never gone before ‘woke’ politics.

Now many have already leapt into the conversation with numerous examples od how Star Trek from its very inception had always displayed a more liberal political viewpoint. However, I think that there is more interesting facet to examine in Marcus’ factually wrong essay that displays his own quite strong inherent bias.

First let’s look at a blatant factual inaccuracy. Marcus writes.

 “Since its creation in 1966 the franchise has had myriad iterations on big screen and small, basically invented the sci-fi convention, and has charmed audiences across every generation.”

This might be true of Media conventions but there were 29 World Science Fiction Conventions dispensing coveted award before the first large Star Trek convention. (Setting aside a smaller gather in a library conference room.) It is clear that the author has very little practical knowledge of fandom or its history.

Next Marcus takes issues with the casting of politician Stacey Abrams as the President of the United Federation of Planets in the streaming series Picard. Stunt casting is a long and stories tradition in Hollywood, when Babylon 5 moved to TNT there was pressure to cast some the networks wrestling stars in the series for cross promotion and Star Trek in its original 60’s incarnation cast famed celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli as a corrupting alien ghost. Star Trek: The Next Generation saw the casting of real-life astronaut Mae Jemison. This sort of stunt casting is hardly new and not at all new to Trek.

But apparently what set this essay in motion for Marcus, and that’s my opinion from reading the piece, is the brief video from the 2021 insurrection and riot at the US Capitol.

Again, from Marcus’ piece.

The second was a weird plot twist in the pilot of new show, Strange New Worlds in which the 2020 capitol riot is depicted and blamed for starting a Second American Civil War and the destruction of the planet. To put it more succinctly, Orange man bad.

It is illuminating that Marcus see it in this light when in the actual text of the show the character narrating the events is hopes of preventing an alien culture from engaging in a global extinction

CBS Ventures (Screen Cap)

level war describe the start as a ‘fight for freedoms,’ makes no mention who started what, or assigns any blame. Only that the fight grew and grew and grew until it nearly destroyed humanity. And there’s not even a the barest of refences to any currently politician.

The video footage from the insurrection lasts a total of six seconds. From this bit of lifted archival footage Marcus constructs an alternate reality worthy of the Daniels’ multiverse where humanity has hotdogs for fingers. He sees the shows creative team putting all the blame for Trek’sWorld War 3 cannon firmly on the conservative shoulders when the text makes nothing like that argument.

Why does he jump so readily to that conclusion?

To me the answer is plain but is to be fair conjecture. It is because he knows that the violence and death are the product of the modern conservative culture. He desperately wishes it were not so, he desperately, like all of us, wants to be the hero and not the villain. Facts are stubborn things, and the facts are clear it was conservatives that stormed the capitol with murderous intent unwilling to accept the legal, fair, and democratic process that had defeated them. It is far more soothing to the ego to point fingers, accuse others of propaganda, and play the victim than to look into the mirror recognize that you are the evil man.

Marcus’ histrionic response to six seconds of archival footage reveals that he is aware that his faction are the villains, and his response is deep and deadly denial.

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Why David French is Likely Wrong

David French, social conservative and never Trumper, has said for quite a while and reiterated his stance in the wake of the leak from SCOTUS, that overturning the precedent of Roe v Wade and its associated constitutional rights is far less consequential than most people assume. His argument is built upon three core legs and in each of these I think it is likely events will prove him wrong.

The three premises of his arguments are as thus:

  1. Few voters actually value the abortion issues highly
  2. The nation is already divided by the states into stable abortion zones.
  3. With the issues delegitimized as a right and returned to politics the compromise nature of politics will cool the waters and finalize into an agreed upon solution.

To support his premises that few voters actually care about the issues French often cites recent election data and he is particularly fond of Youngkin’s victory this year in Virginia. Exit polls do indeed show that few voters listed abortion as a driving factor in their decisions. However, this follows on decades of the issues being ‘settled law’ and if you are under 50 your entire life had been one in which this was a right. It is true that the storm has been gathering for some time and with the 3 justices appointed to SCOTUS by the previous administration this outcome was highly predicable. But I would contend that there is a vast emotional gulf between what is predicted and an event happening. A live example of this is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For months we have been warned that Russian was likely to invade it democratic neighbor. For weeks the US warned that the invasion was coming soon, not likely, not possible, but actually coming. The American electorate cared very little. Ukraine was not pressing political issue. And now it is. That seems very odd, we have quite clear polling that people really didn’t consider Ukraine very important, so they shouldn’t now when the easily predictable thing came to pass. But they do. Because it a very different thing to speak of possibilities and another to have reality come crashing into the consciousness. Being told smoking causes cancer and being told you have cancer are emotionally quite different in their impact and I think the same mechanism will be at work here. For decades people have been warned their rights are in danger and now those rights are gone. It is quite likely there will be a political firestorm.

Yes, the nation is already divided into states with abortion freedoms and those without. Far more abortions, even controlling for population, in California than Mississippi, but there is no reason to believe that will hold after the destruction of the right. Already liberal at the national level are scrambling in search of a way, probably in vain, to pass national legislation on this issue. I have no doubts that future government with the GOP in control will also attempt to pass laws criminalizing abortion nationally. After all, if you sincerely believe that this ‘murders children,’ a premise I do not accept, then how can you do nothing to stop it once you have cleared the barricade that has barred you from doing so? No, once Roe is dealt with the next objective will be a national legal movement. I am sure French would argue that it is against conservative principle to overrule the states with a national law. I will point out that there is no ‘conservative principle’ that held the GOP back from embracing and literally idolizing Trump. No ‘principle’ will stay their hand here.

And now we come to the most delusional and wish-casting section of his argument, that political compromise will be found.

We have a repeat of the trouble from the second premise, if someone believes that abortion is murder what possible compromise can that person make? How could they say, you may ‘murder these babies but not these?’ It’s preposterous but set that aside for the moment, either because it is untrue, the political movers and shakers do not hold this belief dear to their hearts or because it is impractical the third legs still collapses. Because of physical sorting and gerrymandering fewer and fewer political areas are competitive between the two camps, California is not going to compromises and give ground to the powerless GOP within the state and Mississippi will behave the same toward the Democrats there. As with every other issue before us there is absolutely no incentive for any political party to compromise. It only opens you up to attack from your more dedicated factions and wins you nothing in the contest. The battle has now crossed no man’s land and the two factions are going to be in hand-to-hand knifing fighting.

Of course, this will not stop with abortion. Yes, the leaked said that this reasoning doesn’t apply to anything else at all, but this is from the same liars who proclaimed Roe as ‘settled law.’ Sadly, the war only grows.

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Pluto and Our Sexual Politics

16 Years after its reclassification as a minor-planet discussion of Pluto as a planet can still kicked off spirited, heated, and intense debate. The faction that defies the International Astronomical Union’s classification in 2006 can be quite passionate about Pluto’s status as a planet even though the vast majority of that group are not astronomers or scientists. By and by they are laypeople and Pluto’s status as a planet or minor planet makes no material difference in any of their lives. Their paycheck, home equity, or personal freedoms are utterly unimpacted by the IAU’s decisions and declarations and yet they can be most vocal in defending that ‘Pluto is a planet!’

Of course, they never researched, observed, or studied Pluto. As children that learned that the Solar System has nine planets and talk of Kuiper Belts, or Trans-Neptunian Objects is uninteresting but the fact learned in grade school that there are nine planets these are their names became a foundational fragment of knowledge and something that undercuts something learned so completely as a child is on some level unsettling. Even if that fact has no bearing on their self, identity, or well-being.

A key simplistic fact we all learn as children, and one that is essential to many in their self-identification is that people are either boys or girls. There are no other categories, and like Pluto’s status as a planet, there is no doubt in the classifications, the declaration is the definition.

Unlike the debate surrounding Pluto the boy/girl classification is critical to many people’s sense of self. The classification of either girl or boy defined the roles one is expected to assume, the course of one’s life, the goals and objectives ones is expected to pursue, and can dictate everything from the clothing someone wears and the words they use to the nature of their loves and bonding commitments.

Is it really surprising then when the simplistic worldview imparted to children is redefined with new and enlarged with concepts such as trans or non-Binary that these expansions are met with fierce resistance, a resistance that is no more grounded in ‘fact’ or ‘science’ than those insisting that Pluto remains a planet simply because they were told this as a child? Particularly when so much of what so many people think of as their self-concept is tied to those first formative years when their classification was given and the course of their life ‘determined.’

None of this excuses the hatred, persecution, and prejudice that is heaped unjustly upon those who do not slot neatly into childish categories. To insist that everyone must live wholly within a category of either boy or girl with hard impermeable boundaries is as rational and defying of reality as to insist that that every has either Black hair or blond ignoring that everything nature does is a continuum, a spectrum, and the difference between girl and boy is as slippery as the difference between planet and not-planet.

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The Results of Trumps Endorsements are Irrelevant

Among the political reading and podcasts, I follow there has been a debate concerning if Trump is losing his grip upon the Republican party. For those assessing the environment and concluding that his influence is waning a key item of evidence is that Trump endorsed candidates are doing poorly in the GOP primaries and his win/loss record when the primaries are completed may be negative.

I think these people are wish-casting, seeing the outcomes as indicative of a political environment that want to be true not the reality that is before them.

Yes, many, perhaps even most, Trump endorsed candidates in the current Republican primaries are faring poorly and may be likely to lose. But they are not losing to candidates that repudiate Trump’s administrations, who plainly and cleanly recognize that the 2020 election was fair, free of any result altering fraud or corruption. The winning candidates from coast to coast all repeat the core conspiracy-ridden Trump approved accounts of the election and the mythical fraud. None stand athwart the conservative tide and shout STOP! None endorse Cheney and her election. They are all, with or without his endorsement, Trump’s people.

But if Trump backs losers, puts his finger on the scale and it matters not, doesn’t that prove his influence is not that great?

Here is rule one for Trump and politics, ignore it at your peril.

Objective reality does not matter to Trump and his political fortunes.

Hundreds of thousands dead from a pandemic he denied and dismissed? Inconsequential.

Massive Tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy when he campaigned otherwise? Meaningless.

Disparaging and disrupting alliances in favor of geopolitical enemies? Irrelevant.

Issuing directives against LGBTQ when he had promised to be their best friend? Trivial

What Trump does, as long as it does not directly contradict a white supremist narrative, is without any weight or meaning. Trump’s political power is not generated by policy, principle, position, or actions but solely from emotion. And that emotion is anger. Anger at the ‘other,’ anger at the ‘elite,’ anger at the world not catering to his voters’ whims. So what if Mandel wins the primary in Ohio over Vance, they are both stoking the anger, they are both bending the knee to the Orange God-King, they are both Trump’s men and he wins if either does.

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Apologies to My Firearm Enthusiasts Friends

I have friend that collect firearms and I have friends that trade in curio and collectable firearms to supplement their income. I understand that domination of the federal government, enough to expand the courts, kill the filibuster, and admit new states to the union, would also bring draconian and in all likelihood ineffective gun bans. But I must still work for and hope for that Democratic party achieves such a dominate position.

I must take this stand because I also have friends who are trans, who are gay, who are black, who are female, and the GOP has made it crystal clear for some time now that individuals of such categories value far less to them than tax breaks, deregulation, and cultural hegemony.

Categorically I classify as a cis white male, free from the GOP’s insidious targeting, so why should I really care?

Beyond the dear friends in the above-mentioned classifications, I have more than a gram of empathy and imagination. I can see and foresee what cruelty this is even if I myself am untouched directly by such wanton malice. It is also philosophically consistent with my world view that unless they are harming others should be free to live their lives, their one and only life, in the matter that brings them the most satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment and that they are the sole judge of what meets those needs.

But aren’t I turning a back on the friends for whom happiness and fulfillment comes from a diverse and interesting collection of firearms?

I cannot politically help both. I must choose one side or the other and while the firearm issue may be important to some it is not a core component of one’s identity. You are not born a firearm fan you choose to become one but for all these others there was no choice, no option, and that crushing their rights in my opinion is a greater crime. When these people are free and secure then I can turn my attention elsewhere.

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Can The World Please Stop Burning?

 

Man, the entire world seems to be a massive trash fire.

Russia, desiring to rebuild the former ‘glory’ of the Soviet Empire, more accurately Vladimir Putin, invaded the Ukraine. It is open, ugly, and deadly war. The West needs to be smart, cautious, and resolute if this is to have anything approaching a good ending with a free Ukraine and Baltic States.

It is looking more and more likely that the Supreme Court of the United States, with a conservative majority more than willing to tarnish the institution as an arm of one of the major political parties, will later this year overturn Roe v Wade marking what I think it the first time in American history that a recognized right will be repealed. There have been many rights that state and federal governments have failed to recognize but I think this is the first to be respected and then repealed.

Vast swaths of the Republican Party are now openly anti-democratic viewing elections not as the will of the populace but procedures to the hacked, manipulated, and subverted for their own benefit.

The Texas governor, not content with his citizens freezing to death while his senator evacuates to sunny Mexico, now wishes for the parents of trans children, and their existence is reality if you like or not, should possibly be investigated for child abuse if they support their child’s identity. As always with these people it is parental rights for me but not for thee.

 

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The Insurrection Pyramid

 

To any clear thinking unbiased observer it is obvious that last January individuals within the presidential administration attempted to prevent the transfer of power, overthrowing our democratic system of government, and act of open insurrection. However not all individuals that participated or wo supported, then or now, should be classified and treated the same. There are, in my mind, distinct tiers of insurrectionists and we need to be mindful of them when determining our course of action.

The lowest tier is those in the general population. Many of these people are working on the objectively false but passionately held belief that the election was stolen. Put aside the idea that people were dumb enough to steal an election for the president while allowing the legislature to come perilously close to changing hands. IF someone honestly thinks their government is being stolen, they are going to support those who are trying to ‘save’ it. These people are well meaning fools but in the end, they are also tools manipulated by higher tiers of the insurrectionists.

The middle tier, much smaller tan the lowest, is comprised of those intelligent enough to know the corruption and insurrection at play. Who know that the 2020 election was secure and fair but yet continue to support the past administration’s efforts to subvert and overthrow the legitimate government. Most of those in this tier are pulled to power like moths to flames. These are the Senators and Congress People that voice deep ‘concern’ but when the votes are counted protect the insurrectionists rather than risk or lose one erg of political power. It is also those wiser and more intelligent members of the electorate that can see the truth but set aside because they want some personally identifiable gain politically, such as greater firearm freedoms.

The highest tier, and the smallest, must face the most intense consequences for their actions. These are the instigators, the plotters and planners that knew full well what they did. Who knowing sought to overthrow our democracy. It is the inner circle of the past administration and its advisors, for these I think we must have stiff and long prison terms.

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