Category Archives: Politics

The Racist Titration of the GOP

On a recent podcast I heard conservative commentator Mona Charen state that she was shocked at how quickly the GOP became Trump’s GOP. The host, Charlie Sykes, repeated his long-presented view that the racist authoritarian streak in the GOP had been a ‘recessive gene’ that has now become dominate but this is a terrible analogy for what has happened, absolving all those ‘good’ conservatives for their action and inaction that created the current condition. A better analogy is found in chemistry class: Titration.

In titration one liquid is slowly, drop by drop, added to another. The base liquid is clear and colorless and at first e3ach drop appears to do nothing. The swirl the mixture but it remains clear, colorless. Then after a number of drop colors appears but fades quickly away in the swirling returning to the clear colorless form. But at some point, a single drop transforms the mixture and now the flask is filled with a colored fluid that had just moments before been colorless. It has changed and seeming from a single drop but of course it was a process that had been carried out over time.

This is what has happened to the GOP. Listen to ‘Never Trumpers’ and after a short time someone will remind you that in the old days, they threw out the crazy Birchers, that the party used to enforce rationality. But that was in the early 60s by the late 60s Nixon played his Southern Strategy, inviting in the racists whom the Democrats had enraged with the Civil Right legislation of the great society. The drops of racism began to be added to the GOP, but it wasn’t much, and it didn’t really change the nature of the party. Then there was Nixon’s War on Drugs and that was quite deliberately not enforced equally across racial lines. More Drops into the mixture. Welfare Queens, Crack babies, and more and more drops added to the mixture, flashes of racist color but with enough swirling you could make them go away. Crime Bills and torture for brown people were more drops added to the liquid, along with ballot initiatives against ‘illegal immigrants’ that really targeted more brown people. Throughout this process the left ceased to be political opponents and were the enemy of the nation.

Trump didn’t ‘change the GOP,’ he was the final drops the completed its titration into a neo-fascist, racist, caricature of the party that had thrown out the Bircher only to crawl back into bed with them.

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Is The Dawn Beginning to Break in the East?

Yesterday, in Kansas a state that the former idiot won in 2020, after all the scandal, sadism, and incompetence of his presidency, by 14 points the voters went to the polls with an option of stripping abortion rights from the state’s constitution.

The evil Republicans had done everything in their power to advantage themselves in their quest to strip people of their rights. They had placed the ballot imitative on a primary schedule when turnout among Democrats would be low but high among their own base. They wrote the proposal in twisted, contorted language to obfuscate its meaning and effect. They even ran ads blatantly lying that the proposal would protect rights and choice.

And it availed them not.

By about 17 points, a spread greater than the Orange Man-baby’s victory in 2020, the citizens of Kansas rejected the lies, the deceit, and the cruelty of the Modern Republican Party defeating the proposal.

We are still in the clutches of the dreadful night of the insanity of the GOP. And that night is long and full of terrors but perhaps the very first, faint, glimmers of dawn’s light are breaking in the East with this victory. Perhaps the first stirrings of a great giant are rumbling from Kansas. Perhaps to paraphrase Gandalf ‘The Democrats are to going to wake up and realize that they are strong.’

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Abusing the Word Private

One of the recent controversial and in my opinion dishonest ruling from the Supreme Court of The United States is Kennedy v Bremerton School District which ruled that the school district violated Coach Kennedy’s right when it fired him for conducting prayers on the football field directly following games. I will not relitigate the case, there are numerous good sources to understand the legal issues in contention, but I want to point you towards a podcast, Advisory Opinion, where the lawyer representing Kennedy appeared and argued the case for the hosts and the public. Hiram Sasser abused the English language so thoroughly that words ceased to having meaning, particularly the word ‘private.’

Sasser argued that his client had engaged in private prayer which is Kennedy’s right to exercise and the school district trampled on his religiously liberty by firing him.

This ‘private’ prayer took place on the football field, immediately following the game. A field which just moments ago had been the focus of attention for a stadium full of people. It is difficult to conceive of a setting less private. Had Coach Kennedy strode out to the 50-yard line and begun masturbating I doubt a single conservative in the nation would have considered this a ‘private’ act. The abuse of the word continues. Members of the football team followed Kennedy to the field as asked if they could join him to which he reported replied ‘It’s a free Country.’ Call me a stickler for language but when you participate with other in an activity, others who members of the general population and not there by invitation, that is public and not ‘private.’ The continued abuse of the language in describing any of this as ‘private’ is nothing short of dishonest doublethink. In my personal opinion, clearly not private as I am stating it in the open and in full view Sasser, the Supreme Court engaged in deceptive contorted logic with selective facts to arrive at the conclusion that the conservatives had already decided was the one that they wanted.

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Monsters from the Id

In the classic SF film Forbidden Planet Professor Morbius enhanced by alien technology unleashes his Id as an indestructible monster to protect his paradise. In a very similar manner, the GOP crafted and unleashed their own Id when they struck the bargain in the Southern Strategy welcoming racists to win elections and now that monster is the party instead of the party’s beast. None of the those ‘wiser’ heads foresaw or intended for today’s Republican party. They had the very best of intentions, but forces unchained are quite difficult to contain.

Today I am seeing many on the left looking to their own monster to wield and that monster is violence. In their minds the recent and terrible court decisions are not a call to political action and work but rather a ‘justification’ to unleash the mob. hat rioting and violence are the bargains they would strike today.

I would ask them whose deaths are justified by their anger?

Thomas?

Roberts?

McConnel?

The Capitol Police person who just happens to be ‘in the way.’

Violence by its nature is uncontrolled and unruly. It will spread further then you ever intent and its final results are unforeseeable.

Violence is always justified in the first person and a crime in the third.

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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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