Sunday, August 09, 2020

Poison fruit and why libertarians are tricked into hating civil servants more than tyrants.

I'll start with tools to pry libertarians out of fanaticism into negotiation. But if that bores you, skip ahead to where I demolish the fundamental premise of the current Senate hearings trying to demonize the FBI.

Note. Midweek I'll have a very important posting.

== Putting fundamentals to libertarians. Start with architecture! ==

A couple of months back I posted about how one of the recent campaigns by the New Confederacy was to rail against - and even crush - modern architecture. The far right's campaign includes demands for consistent fealty to Greco-Roman or plantation styles. At the time, I urged folks use this latest MAGA obsession in dealing with followers of Ayn Rand! 

Seriously, read THE FOUNTAINHEAD or watch the movie. (It’s Rand’s best and only bearable work of writing, actually making a few solid points about villainy in art & architecture, while keeping the rants under control.)  In fact, this is a matter of architectural innovation-repression is fundamental religion to Randians, spearing their very hearts!

This one fact alone - that MAGAts are ranting against creative freedom, exactly like The Fountainhead's villain Ellsworth Toohey, to demand orthodoxy-slavery of design — could actually sway some members of that wing of libertarians to realize something crucial… that confederates and inheritance brats and corporate looters are not 'lesser evils' than mere liberals. Where they are unmoved by the fact that Blue states are ending the damned Drug War, or that entrepreneurship flourishes under democrats and never Republicans... they cannot refuse to face this, when confronted!

== It can be worth the effort ==

Oh, most of us have libertarian friends. These range from some real freeping loonies all the way to truly sincere folks who see themselves fighting for the unique benefits of freedom and individualism, just as you are — though fearing Big Brother tendencies among bureaucrats. (And can you honestly assert that fear is always wrong?) 

There is a way to approach such folks. It’s not impossible! But like confronting most rigidly sanctimony-based systems, you need agility and judo. You start by making clear that you got no problems with the basic premise of many libertarianisms (and there are many)… the Adam Smith premise that competition is the greatest creative force in the universe, and hence that the widest variety of empowered, confident, knowledgeable and unafraid individuals and teams can - with competitive eagerness - come up with the most and best solutions to most problems.

Now comes the insane part. Almost no “libertarians” today ever actually use the C-Word… “competition”… anymore! They refuse to glance at 6000 years of the horror show called human history, and ask why flat-fair-open-creative competition failed in almost every other society, across all those dark eras. They don’t look and deliberately remain history ignoramuses, because any attention at all to facts would show that the destroyers of fair competition across 99% of those eras were kings, lords, priests, thugs and inheritance brats… almost never socialists or “bureaucrats.”

Oh, the latter can be another version of the same thing, power hungry mostly-males trying to build inheritable empires by suppressing others. The Soviet Union was essentially a czarist despotism slathered over with a thin veneer of egalitarian/socialist symbolism and incantations.

But to fixate only on bureaucrats, while ignoring the real enemies of freedom and competition across all those centuries?

That’s… just… stooopid. 

In fact, we got our spectacular (and spectacularly rare) renaissance of freedom, science, justice and vast productivity because we broke up centralizations of power and used bureaucrats carefully (as Adam Smith recommended) to make sure all children got at least a minimum of food and education and hence could actually start to… compete! 

Yes, compete even with the sons of the rich, those spoiled brats like Trump & Kushner who even Ayn Rand always portrayed as her chief villains. Let's repeat that. The top villains in every Rand tale weren't socialist saps but elite cheaters and inheritance brats. It's in your own sacred tomes, guys.

Dig it, Adam Smith would approve of most liberal “programs” that increase the number of competitors and lower the number of ignorant serfs. If it increases the number of skilled, competent and confidents competitors, it should be deemed "good" even by libertarian standards. And yes, that means a majority of 'liberal programs' should be deemed libertarian-good… though libertarians are welcome to offer alternative ways to achieve the same ends, with less complex bureaucratic meddling. (In that goal, I deem myself to be a libertarian!)

 And hence libertarians are utter hypocrites if they favor oligarchs over liberals. 

The latter differ with you over how to fill society with millions of vibrant competitors. The former disagree with the goal and will crush it with all their might.


== Their last refuge... The Fruit of a Poisoned Tree ==

The current Senate hearings of hypocrite (and blackmail victim) Lindsey Graham and other GOP shills is just more of the same baseless distraction. The essence is this: The FBI counter-intelligence division found plausible evidence that Russia was waging many kinds of information war on the U.S. including election meddling. The record shows that some agents expressed an eagerness to hunt down evidence of collaboration with those efforts by influential Americans. Because those officers expressed eagerness to find such evidence... all evidence that they subsequently found - including all proof of crimes - should be tossed out!

Yes, that is what the whole and entire 'logic' of the Foxite defense of the GOP and Trump amounts to. They should never have looked at all, because the investigators were biased! They wanted the investigation to succeed, therefore anything they found - including evidence of crimes and treason - must be tossed!

In essence, instead of defending the GOP and Trump for their actions, it is entirely "Don't look! Nobody look! Tax returns, Deutsche Bank, Russia, blackmail... don't anybody look!"

If your life depended on it, you cannot explain that logic. So it's never spelled out that explicitly. But syllogistically that is what it all boils down to.  "Never look!"  And the Roberts Court has supported ending 240 years of Congressional oversight. 

That is not how the principal of fruit from a poison tree works. And dig it, that is the ONLY straw that Fox has been able to clutch. And they extend it to mean: “We don’t want to know about any crimes that these FBI ‘deepstaters” might have been looking into!”

That's your "Obamagate." People charged with finding out if a crime is being committed... looked.  On receiving intel reports of secret dealings between the soon-to-be National Security Advisor and Kremlin spy handlers, they committed the criminal felony of glancing for fire under tons of smoke. They looked. Oh no! Criminal FBI!

But... but if there's no 'collusion' why the desperation not to let us - and congress - see the Deutsche Bank records, which clearly will show billions of Russian oligarch money flowing not just to Trump but McConnell and dozens of others? 

How can you side with obstruction of standard subpoenas and witnesses and 250 years of congressional oversight... After cheering for 25 years and half a billion dollars of "clinton investigations"?

"Investigations" that - after 25 years grilling every single Clinton aide and accountant and dog walker - offering millions of Koch dollars for 'whistle blowers'  - wound up finding nothingZip. Nada. Zilch.  The most-probed humans in history are proved to have been among the most-clean.

So now you defend ending 250 years of oversight when the flashlight is showing mountains of Republican turpitude? Why? What's the cult hiding?

125 comments:

Larry Hart said...

Dr Brin in the main post:

Seriously, read THE FOUNTAINHEAD or watch the movie. (It’s Rand’s best and only bearable work of writing, actually making a few solid points about villainy in art & architecture, while keeping the rants under control.) In fact, this is a matter of architectural innovation-repression is fundamental religion to Randians, spearing their very hearts!

This one fact alone - that MAGAts are ranting against creative freedom, exactly like The Fountainhead's villain Ellsworth Toohey, to demand orthodoxy-slavery of design — could actually sway some members of that wing of libertarians to realize something crucial… that confederates and inheritance brats and corporate looters are not 'lesser evils' than mere liberals. Where they are unmoved by the fact that Blue states are ending the damned Drug War, or that entrepreneurship flourishes under democrats and never Republicans... they cannot refuse to face this, when confronted!


You'd think so. But the fact that conservatives and Republicans so embrace religion doesn't turn Randroids against them, so I'm not sure this will either.

David Brin said...

A fsacinating article on Peter Thiel's conversion from libertarianism to neo-feudalist and how the Straussian yammerings of "Imperial America:" of the adbandoned and discarded and utterly discredited neoconservatives are coming roaring back.

https://reason.com/2020/08/02/wait-wasnt-peter-thiel-a-libertarian/?fbclid=IwAR3eefTr1AgtFj0ufsQ96Jbj-sSJmqXIPX6MdM_T7fNpR57F-rZ5L6apHaQ

David Brin said...

LH, this attack on modern architecture... almost word-for-word the rante of Rand's villains - is an attack upon THEIR religion.

Howard Brazee said...

What do libertarians think should have been done to prevent the explosion in Beirut?

Larry Hart said...

@Dr Brin,

I know that Randists should be outraged by direct opposition to their sacred tenets. I'm saying that they won't be. The Trumpist right-wing is dedicated treating 1984 as a how-to manual, and they've mastered the art of believing "Two plus two is whatever the Party says it is". Even when what the Party says doesn't make any sense, or contradicts itself from five minutes ago.

If Randists can believe that Ayn Rand would have supported Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, then they can certainly believe that we've always been at war with Eastasia, or that Ellsworth M Toohey was the hero of The Fountainhead.

Larry Hart said...

Howard Brazee:

What do libertarians think should have been done to prevent the explosion in Beirut?


Lower taxes and less regulation, of course.

scidata said...

Last month, nearly half of the Milne ice shelf broke off. The Arctic Seaway (actually south of Milne) is pretty much open water now. The historical name for this seaway is the Northwest Passage. It will easily support 100X the traffic of the Panama Canal, and with no practical limit on ship size.

If there's both open sea trade and an open solar system, Pax Americana will keep going strong for centuries, perhaps millennia. It would be a Terran civilization, maybe an Asimovian one someday. The puppet masters are not trying to bring down just the US.

Zepp Jamieson said...

LH: I can't even begin to imagine what McAfee is going on about. I'll see if I can contact them myself. I take it that aren't making any specific claims, like I may have downloaded PUPs or cookies to you?

Lorraine said...

What do libertarians think should have been done to prevent the explosion in Beirut?

They'd send a bat signal and one of Ragnar's pirate ships would sail to Beirut to recover the substance.

Dwight Williams said...

And the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the federal government of Canada are going to have words with anyone and everyone who insists on trying once again to make international waters out of what I was raised to call the Northwest Passage. Whether we're allowed to make them stick at all...?

We should have been re-arming as a country 20-30 years ago, but we didn't know to anticipate Trump, Putin and Xi back then, and it would have looked Real Damn Weird back then, right?

Dwight Williams said...

Speaking of would-be feudal lords: does Peter Thiel really expect to be allowed to live to be one of those feudal lords in the world he's trying to force into being?

Larry Hart said...

Zepp Jamieson:

I take it that aren't making any specific claims, like I may have downloaded PUPs or cookies to you?


Yeah, definitely something about PUPs? And no, to find out what they're specifically on about, I'd have to upgrade to a more expensive version.

Larry Hart said...

@Dwight Williams,

For fear of being taken as calling for something instead of merely predicting it, I'm going to self-censor and not reply as I would like to. But that reply would have had the word "guillotine" featured prominently.

scidata said...

Re: browser warnings
Blogger is inconsistent with its use of SSL. For example, it uses https in my Chrome browser, but then uses http in my Firefox.

Re: Northwest Passage
To be clear, those are indeed Canadian waters. By 'open' I didn't mean international, I meant controlled by the Rational West.

Tony Fisk said...

Speaking of bat signals, I gather the Libertarian POTUS nominee did not attend a recent rally because it clashed with her anti-rabies shot schedule from a bat bite she received last month.

I don't know whether or not the bat was radioactive...

And speaking of architecture, the White House has reached out to the SD Govt about enhancing Mt Rushmore.

Acacia H. said...

There is research into nontoxic explosive ammunition. It seems there are minute levels of lead in gunpowder. When you fire a gun, tiny amounts of lead particles escape into the air. Now let's think about that for a moment. When we stopped using leaded gasoline, crime rates declined in the next generation as fewer and fewer people suffered from low levels of lead poisoning that impacted their cognitive functions.

The police frequently do target practice. And many urban police are forced to use indoor targeting facilities. Well, where does all that lead from the explosives go? In the air. The police officers are slowly, minutely poisoning themselves. And over time their cognitive abilities are subtly damaged and they become increasingly paranoid until it seems like a good idea to just kick a prisoner when they are down.

How many of our police are functioning with minor cognitive defects caused by minute levels of lead poisoning? Might this be a reason why so many police end up increasingly violent with higher tendencies to be abusive in their family relations? And might the solution literally be providing police either with ammunition without lead in it... or with air guns that fire nonexplosive rounds that similarly do not use heavy metals?

Just a little something to consider.

Acacia

Donald Gisselbeck said...

"Make guillotines red again." Spray painted on a Wells Fargo sign in Missoula.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Larry: Yeah, I spent time on McAfee's website and learned that in order to get any useful information at all, I would have to sign up and buy their program, which I have zero interest in doing.

I did check my provider's settings and it seems I both have and done have SST. So I've left them an email asking what that's all about. I know that my site uses https, so I assumed I had it.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Tony: I couldn't resist wondering on Facebook as to whom got the rabies shots; the libertarian, or that poor bat.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Scidata: that may be what's going on with my site. I get a screen on my Cpanel that tells me I have certified SSL, and would I like to sign up for SSL.

Jon S. said...

"I don't know whether or not the bat was radioactive..."

Better not have been, or I'll send Cryptic Studios after her for trademark violation. That's part of the backstory of my Champions Online character Spider-Bat!

"Eccentric billionaire Peter Wayne was hunting rare spiders in the Amazon one day, when he was bitten by a rabid radioactive bat and became... a little confused."

(Tried to add the image of Spider-Bat here, but apparently that particular HTML isn't supported. It is, however, visible at https://ibb.co/jg1t5by.)

Tony Fisk said...

@acacia, that would be an interesting line of research, although I think a lot of the behavioural issues associated with lead stems from a young age (hence the 20 year lag time between the introduction of unleaded petrol and decreasing crime rates)

Howard Brazee said...

What is the Libertarian answer to the explosion in Beruit?

Larry Hart said...

If you want something done in this country...

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Aug10.html#item-2

There is one silver lining in this battle, however. If Biden wins and the Republicans in Congress come to believe it was due to Chinese interference, in 2021 they may suddenly be willing to invest very heavily in cybersecurity, something they have no interest at all in now because they believe that foreign interference helps them. As soon as they are convinced that it hurts them, then something has to be done about it pronto.

Hailey said...

@Acacia

Maybe some officers practice enough for that to happen, but on average they're only required to practice on the range 1-2 sessions per year.

Enthusiasts, however, are often at the range on a weekly basis. The real hardcore ones also make their own ammunition, and - at least anecdotally from the videos I've seen - they usually don't wear a respirator when handling the molten lead. So now you've got me wondering about the possibility of minute lead poisoning in that group of people.

Larry Hart said...

Tony Fisk:

I don't know whether or not the bat was radioactive...


That's not how DC heroes get their powers. :)

jim said...

Well David, your architecture argument may sway a few hundred Randroids (maybe a few thousand?) but I am sure that tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions) agree with Trump that public buildings should be beautiful not ugly modernist monstrosities. There are not really a whole lot of fans for soul crushing concrete Brutalist buildings or the disturbing unease created by deconstructionist architecture. Most post WWII architecture styles are aesthetically crappy, the only really good work is being done by the new urbanist and their whole shtick is to bring back pre-WWII style of urbanism.

Pappenheimer said...

I'm sorry, but the Libertarians I've met - 1 of them explicitly Randite, and all of them, now that I think on it, guys - never brought up architecture. It was always no taxes, no government interference, no government-funded education. Mind you, 3 of them were in the Air Force, and I always wondered how they expected to get paid in their promised land. Bake sales? Protection racket?

Larry Hart said...

jim:

but I am sure that tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions) agree with Trump that public buildings should be beautiful not ugly modernist monstrosities


I see. Another reason why Trump isn't all that bad, eh?

David Brin said...

jim you are such a grouch! You point at brutalist crap and declare that anything not graeco-roman classical is crap. How Rand-villain hyper conservative! In fact,Architecture should be competitive with the crap eventually falling aside. Some of the finest Western and European architects are designing amazing things for China, SIngapore and the Arab nations where cash is flush and where pride demands showy things. Take an aerial tour of AbuDhabi, Riyadh, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen...

A.F. Rey said...

It seems there are minute levels of lead in gunpowder. When you fire a gun, tiny amounts of lead particles escape into the air.

I would be curious to see how much lead escapes into the air from the gunpowder, compared to the amount scraped off the bullet by the barrel when it is fired. My guess would be that the percentage from the gunpower is quite small. Which means that unleaded gunpowder would not have much of an effect. :( The problem would still be all that lead that is hurdled from the barrel.

Atomsmith said...

>> Howard Brazee said: What do libertarians think should have been done to prevent the explosion in Beirut?

> Larry Hart said: Lower taxes and less regulation, of course.

Did you know that the Federal Government is actually responsible for more explosions in Beirut than any public or private corporation?

[Today's whataboutism was brought to you by the only response I ever got trying to get libertarians to explain how their ideal government will address problems of pollution & the commons in general.]

jim said...

Well David, I did not say that anything not graeco-roman classical is crap, I said most post WWII architectural styles are crap. Although for public buildings in Washington DC sticking with the existing graeco-roman style is good idea.


Here are some pre WWII public buildings in Cincinnati that are just beautiful and none of them are in the graeco-roman sytle.

Here is our City Hall - it is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside.
http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/cincinnati-city-hall-keith-
allen.jpg

And our Music Hall
https://archpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Cincinnati-Music-Hall-2-1.jpg

Here is Hughes High School
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5c/eb/cf/5cebcf4fcaa8c3c2fdd9fe70d7969f29.jpg

And the best example of Art Deco Architecture in the world - Union Terminal
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/CMC-Union_Terminal.jpg/1200px-CMC-Union_Terminal.jpg

As opposed to this craptacular award winning DAAP building. It is even worse if you walk though the place.
http://cdn.neonsky.com/4c70575cf14e6/images/JMWolf-14-9261-1.jpg

Zepp Jamieson said...

As I remember, Hitler was keen on beautiful and heroic public architecture, too.

Alfred Differ said...

Howard Brazee,

I don't know yet. Do we know what actually happened there... besides more than one explosion? I've heard speculations that are all over the map. The only one I discount right now is the silly one involving a nuke.

'The' libertarian response would depend on what actually went wrong. I'm hearing stories of corruption and foreknowledge, but not much of what was actually stored there. There were too many smaller flashes and bangs for me easily to believe simple stories.

Pappenheimer,

I get where you are going with the gender observation. However, our county party is almost evenly split between men and women. Our previous chair person was a woman. This time our vice-chair is... and she's a self-identified Rand fan.

If you went only by those of us who are very vocal, though, we would appear to be all guys. The women in our group can be just as stubborn and convinced of the 'rightness' of their own minds, but the guys are loud-mouthed about it, thus much more visible to non-libertarians.

As for serving in the Armed Forces, you'd be surprised how many of them lean libertarian. My father was like that all his life, but the woman he married was rather socialist... in the British sense. Both voted as Democrats, but couldn't stand Dixiecrats.

There is a lot more to serving one's community than the source of the paycheck. There is also the distinction some of us make between 'better' and 'best'. My father accepted an incremental path forward and I grew up to be quite a lot like him. He discouraged me from signing up, but not from the rest of it. Incremental improvement.

jim said...

Zepp you crack me up!
Hitler liked Carmina Bura as well, I guess only Nazis like that music.
He built publicly funded highways, just like Ike (who I guess was secretly a Nazi?)
He ate his vegetables! Just like all those other vegetable eating Nazis.
He wore shoes and drank beer! Don’t trust people with shoes on and drinking a beer, they mat be potential Nazis.

Just because Hitler had some aesthetic preferences does not make those preferences evil.

Alfred Differ said...

Tony Fisk,

Lots of us are out and about in support of her campaign. Many of us are even trying to do it without violating social norms involving masks and social distance. The candidate herself prefers her message to be about policy, so respecting community rules is the politically smart thing to do too.

Of the candidates we considered this time around, we could have offered you Justin Amash, Jacob Hornberger, or Vermin Supreme. The bat joke IS funny, but Jorgensen is a fourth ballot candidate, thus we had to negotiate with each other. Be amazed!

I don't expect any Democrats here to vote for her, but I REALLY would appreciate it if you dropped by her campaign site and figured out what she actually stands for... and then told your GOP friends and family they have a choice. They don't have to vote for a bastard.

A German Nurse said...

@Zepp Jamieson/Nazi Architecture:

Heroic, yes.

I wouldn't call it beautiful, though.

It is bombastic, graeco-roman kitsch.

Alfred Differ said...

Atomsmith,

I've seen decent suggestions for the pollution problem, but they all require quite a bit of change in the community that isn't in place yet. There is no way to jump there without people believing in the social norms that have to be in place to make the rules work.

For example, in a community where reputation doesn't suffer from breaking social rules, there is no point jumping there. When litigation combatants can settle and avoid blame when the community is fully aware of who IS to blame, there is no point jumping there. Basically, we don't know how (yet) to represent the community in a court battle that doesn't involve criminal law or class actions where most members of the class never notice.

Another issue is we have to make a distinction between 'laws' that determine the day-to-day actions of governments and 'laws' that determine what is unjust. We've muddied that distinction and allow our legislatures to do both using essentially the same rules.


We are missing important pieces to evolve our context toward more freedom for each of us. Without improvement in the context, the specific libertarian solutions to problems won't work. Think about the different kinds of anarchy possible. They range from raw tooth and claw to civilized respect in a community of individualists with few written rules. Large scale problems get solved in different ways across that continuum. One side involves a lot of death and suffering. The other involves non-coerced negotiation with end states involving a combination of agreement and exile.

So much of what is possible depends on context.

Atomsmith said...

On a more serious note, I have not read a far-right criticism of the form "Modern X is Crap" that wasn't in transparently bad faith. (Not saying this is you, Jim, but referring to David's link RE architecture). Two facts become immediately obvious whenever I start one of those articles: (1) the author knows crap about architecture (the "expert's" analysis amounts to "gee-wiz, it's awful!"), and (2) the goal is not architectural criticism for criticism's sake, but to provide an example of “what went wrong in the twentieth century” as evidence supporting their unstated axiom that nothing new can be beautiful, valuable, or just plain better. (And therefore, that we ought to return to the Old Ways.)

Alfred Differ said...

From the article in Reason (formatted a little different to make a couple of points)

Girard, then, saw Twitter's soul before it existed. His theory of mimetic desire leads to an important point:
1) The national conservative covets the progressive's cultural power,
2) while the progressive lusts after the national conservative's political power in the age of Trump.


Both using government power to "immanentize the eschaton".
…the good after-life as they see it, of course.
I can't imagine why I should believe any of them.


[Quote with bold emphasis added]
____________
So what are the new nationalists focusing on? Big-heave manifestos calling to empower the state and attack the woke left and its Big Tech enablers. In December 2019, a group of thinkers from The American Mind, The American Conservative, American Renewal, Human Events, and First Things jointly proposed a "Tech New Deal" to bring increased government oversight and management to U.S. technology companies in the name of "American greatness."

"The turbulence of the Trump administration has cleared away old conceptual brush and made room for clear-eyed perceptions of the world as it is, not as fanatics imagine it should be," the manifestoists proclaimed. The real fanatics, to them, are those who don't understand that the nation must forcibly harness innovation to "serve human ends." The essay makes a sly nod* toward Thiel himself, noting that only "billionaires" have the nerve to oppose "the creepiest transhumanists and posthumanists" in tech or to admit that "in the name of economic growth, human life is being diminished."
____________


Yah. There it is. 'I know better than you how to serve human ends.' I don't care which side claims this because I'll oppose all of them. No one is that smart, but we sure do want to believe we are. Why? It's adaptive.


* An understatement. That's more than a nod. That's more like an offer of fellatio.

David Brin said...

Re the Reason article. A plague on both their houses. Both the neo-feudalists and the big_L Libertarian critiquing them are waving airy-fairy justifications based on an absolute and culpable ignoring of human history. The fact the 99% of human societies across 6000 years on 6 continents were feudalist command societies that governed execrably and at-minimum thwarted human progress is THE salient fact.

Libertarians are raving imbeciles if they ignore the fact that the threat to freedom from that direction is vastly, vastly worse than from socialism (except those "socialist" nations that were utterly feudalist with modified symbols and incantations.)

The Neo-Feudalists are vastly worse. They demand a return to a system that is absolutely proved to lobotomize governance and any hope of justice or creativity or any other virtue.

What both share is the despicable trait of ingrates who wallow in the pleasures and plenty of the only civilization that ever made... libertarians. The only one that would have coddled the pathetic loonies described in the article, allowing them to fantacize they would be Top Dogs if it all came crashing down, instead of blatantly the fate of being kibble.

Criminy, read the Doherty article, whose perspective is fascinating, the neurotic appalled by a cousin who is psychotic.

Alfred Differ said...

Howard Brazee,

Your question prompted me to do some more reading about the explosion. It's tricky sorting through all the speculation right now, but I'm currently inclined to believe it was an explosion of the accidental/negligent sort involving ammonium nitrate and something nearby to provide the fire and sharp heat releases. It's probably not explosives due to the lack of an honest-to-goodness shock wave.

If explosives remain ruled-out, then governments role in this is probably limited to negligence and corruption. In other words, well known safety rules could be avoided by paying off the right people. I'm not saying that happened, but that is probably the limit of government involvement in the absence of high explosives.

No libertarian solution exists in a corruptible community because there isn't much of a sense of loyalty to community. Absent that loyalty, people limit their acceptance of personal responsibility. Libertarian ethics relies upon us being responsible for consequences of our actions... both good and bad. While I'm not responsible for YOUR actions, I am for mine. If I'm corruptible, all that flies out the window. That's why so many of us are purists and get upset at compromisers.

Alfred Differ said...

Philosophers are a dangerous lot.
I suppose I should look up Girard. Ugh.


The neo-feudalists are definitely worse. Anyone wanting to "forcibly harness innovation" is doing the work of feudalists, no matter how they self-identify politically. These folks I would fight in the streets.

Second worst is the group "forcibly limiting innovation". I'll tolerate them, but work against them politically when there are no larger opponents being viable threats.

I made it all the way through the Doherty article. It is well worth reading. Reminds me of a few other people I know.

Larry Hart said...

jim:

Just because Hitler had some aesthetic preferences does not make those preferences evil.


The point everyone else is making is not incompatible with that, but in the opposite direction. "Just because someone's aesthetic preferences are good doesn't mean he's not evil."

TCB said...

The talk upthread about lead contamination from gunpowder, or from the bullets it propels, leads me to propose a new subgenre:

GUNPUNK!

In gunpunk, all technology is driven by gunpowder. For example, cars and aeroplanes use rotary Gatling engines. Everyone is nearly deaf and they use sign language to communicate. Music consists of orchestrated fireworks. Children mix their own powder, and adults with ten fingers are viewed with suspicion.

Georges Méliès was a pioneer of gunpunk.

Zepp Jamieson said...

German Nurse: As is often the case, Hitler favoured what I call "tractor art"; ie, art bent toward promoting state propaganda. Is it bombastic? Does it idealise and stylise the nation and its people? Does it have a strong element of triumphalism? The Soviets carried this out to a ludicrous degree. London is peppered with the excesses of the Victorian Era, the best known of which is the utterly phony and profoundly ugly Tower bridge.

It isn't always ugly, though. China and Japan offer many fine examples.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Jim: First, I didn't intend to infer that your taste in architecture meant you were a nazi. I hope you didn't take it that way.
I was considering public art, which tends to be heroic and over-the-top. It's often ridiculous and frequently ugly.
The history of the Interstate is an interesting ones. Some of the conspiracy theories the John Birchers and others came up with were lurid and rivalled the crazy crap Qanon spews today. Ike apparently planed the Interstate system as a targeting aid to improve the accuracy of Soviet missiles. It's not quite clear why Ike would want to assist in the immolation of his country, but you know, he was a commie, and they can't really think, except for being infinitely crafty and devious.

A German Nurse said...

Jim, the autobahn was primarily build for two purposes: propaganda and war logistics. It was one of those measures that almost bankrupted the state prior to the war (and the occupation of other nations was one of the means to pay the bill).

Here ist additional info:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/the-myth-of-hitlers-role-in-building-the-autobahn/a-16144981

Carmina Burana, maybe. He was more into Wagner, and especially the Nibelungen Saga and all that blood and glory stuff. Romanticism was one of the roots of 20th century terrors, and might be still.

Tony Fisk said...

Looks like someone's picked up one of David's discussion points, this one about the perceived fragility of JIT in the time of Pandemic.

Daisyworld said...

"But to fixate only on bureaucrats, while ignoring the real enemies of freedom and competition across all those centuries?"

Bureaucracy is our only defense against a dictatorship.

Larry Hart said...


https://www.myjournalcourier.com/news/article/Lawsuit-Illinois-expanded-mail-voting-is-15472775.php

CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago-area Republicans filed a federal lawsuit Monday alleging Illinois’ expanded vote-by-mail program is a “partisan scheme” to help Democrats get votes and could open the door to election fraud.

The lawsuit is the latest GOP effort to curb mail-in voting, which President Donald Trump has called flawed and the greatest threat to his reelection.
...


Translation: "Allowing people to actually vote is a threat to Trump's re-election, and therefore must not be tolerated."

David Brin said...

"Bureaucracy is our only defense against a dictatorship." Well yes. Adam Smith thought so. But we'd be crazy not to recognize it can also be a TOOL of dictatorship and even a SOURCE.

Atomsmith said...

> Alfred Differ said: I've seen decent suggestions for the pollution problem, but they all require quite a bit of change in the community that isn't in place yet.

When Libertarians tell me about these solutions, i'm often reminded of Q's line to Geordie & Data when they were puzzling over how to save a planet on a collision course with a moon too massive for the Enterprise to significantly nudge: "Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe."

The subsequent conversations my objections start can often be summarized by Data & Q's lines a bit later in the script:

DATA: Geordi is trying to say that changing the gravitational constant of the universe is beyond our capabilities.

Q: Oh. In that case, never mind.

George Carty said...

Don't people prefer traditional architectural styles in general (not necessarily Greco-Roman in particular) because they include details on a wide range of length scales (similar to the fractal geometry of plant life) while modernist architecture is far more simple in its geometry, which makes it far more at odds with the natural world?

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/27/if-science-truly-won-the-era-of-modernist-architecture-would-be-over/

It is notable that the only pre-modern buildings to use simple geometry, were those which were designed to be intimidating: prisons, fortifications and the tombs of rulers (such as the pyramids of Egypt, or the Gonbad-e Qabus tower in Iran).

I also believe that in its late 19th- and early 20th-century heyday, modernist architecture did serve a real need in that it was much quicker to build (given the limited automation capabilities at the time) than more aesthetically pleasing styles: very important in a era where agricultural mechanization was driving unprecedentedly rapid rural-to-urban migration!

A German Nurse said...

Zepp Jamieson: Yes, the architecture of those times reflected the spirit and taste of their creators and especially their patrons. There are many similarities between Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini in the way they planned cities and promoted a specific type of art. (For the truly interested I recommend comparing the different approaches to urban planning and architecture of Albert Speer and his son.)

Taste is always a personal thing. I, personally, find the architectural and art style of the totalitarian era to be oppressive, dominating, and simplistic. To be tasteless kitsch.





TCB said...

Remember though: big-brother bureaucracy always leans hardest on the poor, on the outsiders, on the people at the bottom.

In lieu of a hundred examples, just this morning I saw a a meme which mentioned Jeff Bezos paying more than $16,000 in parking tickets for contractors working on his mansion in Washington, DC, contrasted with a nursing mother sent to jail over unpaid tickets. If you're rich, it went on to say, most crimes are not crimes but mere expenses.

Larry Hart said...

With apologies to Charles Dickens, "If the law doesn't permit the removal of an incompetent leader when competent leadership is most needed, then the law is a ass!"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/opinion/trump-coronavirus-social-security.html

...
This would be a really good time for presidential leadership. But what we have instead is a pitchman hawking miracle cures at his country club. In the process he may well have undermined whatever slim chance there was of reaching an even halfway decent deal to avert disaster.

As I said, I don’t think there’s any deep game here. Yes, Trump’s intentions are bad. But recent interviews and inside reporting make it clear that he really is completely out of his depth, with no understanding of either the epidemiological or the economic reality we face.

At a moment of crisis America is cursed with a president who is incompetent, deeply ignorant, yet so personally insecure that he surrounds himself with people who tell him he’s a universal genius.

Robert said...

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.

— Anatole France

David Brin said...

"Jeff Bezos paying more than $16,000 in parking tickets for contractors working on his mansion in Washington, DC, " If this kind of bite is substantial enough to hurt and to draw real funds, then there's an argument that Extra Privilege taxes on the rich could make sense, here and there.

Larry Hart said...

Atomsmith:

When Libertarians tell me about these solutions, i'm often reminded of Q's line to Geordie & Data when they were puzzling over how to save a planet on a collision course with a moon too massive for the Enterprise to significantly nudge: "Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe."


Dave Sim had a point when he condemned movements like communism and (what he called) feminism as requiring a fundamental change to human nature as a prerequisite.

He was wrong in considering that sort of thing to be a uniquely left-wing failure. As Alan Greenspan discovered when he was "shocked--shocked!" to discover that self-regulating industries had been cheating.

jim said...

Larry,
Why attack Trump on wanting public buildings to be beautiful? Most people agree and if you are honest, lots of public buildings are ugly buildings. Probably better to focus on Trumps corruption and incompetence.


George Caty-
I think your point about detail is spot on but your time line is off. The late 19th century and early 20th century is a fantastic time for good architecture things turn ugly after WWII.

Every one of the examples of good public buildings in Cincinnati that I posted came from that time.
Music Hall 1870’s
City Hall 1890’s
Hughes High School 1910’s
Union Terminal 1930’s

If anyone wants to play a game:
suggest post WWII music halls, city halls, high schools, or train stations that are a beautiful as the ones in Cincinnati that I have listed above. ( I am sure they are out there, but they seem to be pretty uncommon) We could have an American and a Global competition.

Larry Hart said...

Paul Krugman quoted above:

As I said, I don’t think there’s any deep game here. Yes, Trump’s intentions are bad. But recent interviews and inside reporting make it clear that he really is completely out of his depth, with no understanding of either the epidemiological or the economic reality we face.


I find this humorous only in the gallows humor that these times call for. In essence, he's saying, "Don't worry that the president's intentions might be bad. That fact is largely irrelevant in light of his incompetence. Even if his intentions were better, he'd still be causing permanent damage."

I feel so much better.

Larry Hart said...

I'm thinking that I'll vote in person if at all possible for just this reason...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/opinion/trump-election-day.html

...
If Trump is leading on election night, in other words, there’s a good chance he’ll try to disrupt and delegitimize the counting process. That way, if Joe Biden pulls ahead in the days (or weeks) after voting ends — if we experience a “blue shift” like the one in 2018, in which the Democratic majority in the House grew as votes came in — the president will have given himself grounds to reject the outcome as “fake news.”

The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery — going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box” — will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.
...

David Brin said...

"Human nature, Mr. Olnut, is what we were put on Earth to rise above."

Can anyone identify the scene and movie and great actress who spoke the line?

Human males did a majority of the innovations in making the very civilization that now requires we well-control our inherited inclinations and impulses, lest we be banished beyond the walls of the golden city that we built. We can do that.

Larry Hart said...

jim

Larry,
Why attack Trump on wanting public buildings to be beautiful?


I'm not.

I'm saying that even if the stopped clock is right on that particular issue, it doesn't make a Trump presidency better than a Biden one. And from some of your past postings, I assumed that was your point: "Here's one more reason why a Trump presidency might be preferable to that of a centrist Democrat."

Tim H. said...

A reference to Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen"?

Tim H. said...

Less seriously, the "Tangerine Shitgibbon's" habit of putting obsequiousness over talent in his hiring is damaging such efficiency that our Government had, I think it justifies an ugly compound word, "Kissastrophe".

scidata said...

In honour of Charlie Allnut, the tough-as-nails Canadian mechanic, I would put forward Toronto City Hall as an example of good civic architecture. I think it's meant to represent two nurturing hands. It appeared in one of the better episodes of TNG. Sorry, too busy/lazy to provide links.

A.F. Rey said...

Can anyone identify the scene and movie and great actress who spoke the line?

I am ashamed to admit I had to look it up. Any movie lover would know...

Katherine Hepburn spoke the line to Humphrey Bogart in John Ford's The African Queen.

Alas, I don't recall the scene. Probably when he was drinking himself to full intoxication. As penance, I will now have to watch the movie again. (Please don't throw me in the briar patch!) With my son, who hasn't seen it yet. I have so failed to properly educate that boy... :(

David Brin said...

Heh. I knew youse guys would get the reference... some of ya. The rest... watch that flick!

Larry Hart said...

A.F. Rey:

As penance, I will now have to watch the movie again. (Please don't throw me in the briar patch!) With my son, who hasn't seen it yet. I have so failed to properly educate that boy... :(


'Sok. I haven't yet induced my daughter to sit through Casablanca. But she's just approaching the age when I first saw it myself.

matthew said...

Alfred makes clear here that libertarianism (as he is defining it) has no relation to real people.
"No libertarian solution exists in a corruptible community because there isn't much of a sense of loyalty to community."

I would ask Alfred to identify a non-corruptible community. Just one, that has real citizens.

Every community is corruptible. That is the root of feudalism.
Our host has identified one way out of the trap of feudalism - radical reciprocal transparency. But transparency doesn't eliminate corruption - it gives a society a chance to identify corruption. There still must be an enforcement mechanism. Libertarians do not do well at "enforcement." Once again, if you disagree with my statement here, show a concrete real-world counter-example.

Libertarians *do* tend to be idealists, though. They idolize those with property and demonize those without it.

matthew said...

So Kamala Harris is Biden's pick for VP?
Good.

I wanted either Warren or Harris at the top of the ticket, with the other as VP.

After understanding a little more why Biden was the overwhelming choice of Black America (he showed that he was willing and able to be a 100%-all-in collaborator / junior partner with Obama), I see how Biden was a safe choice for the most reliable Democratic demographic.

I'm OK with this ticket.

Let's ride.

scidata said...

I spend considerable effort describing the depth and breadth of the world that Pax Americana has built. This ain't 1933. Perhaps an Aussie grokking Hendrix says it best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IINu-Ug4Go

David Brin said...

I preferred Warren & Rice. There's a 5% chance - I guess - that KH goes really sour. But 95% she's brilliant enough and trainable to be a mature and savvy mensch.

Zepp Jamieson said...

The Republicans are already painting Harris as a deep-state Trotskyite who will force women to eat their aborted fetuses and make your daughters date basketball players. So they won't be able to attack her on the one major issue that bothers Democrats--her record as A-G. Hard to claim she's tough on crime when she's demanding that Antifa take over teaching in the schools or whatever.
I would have preferred someone more to the left, but the political landscape that existed six months ago no longer exists, and we'll have to fight to survive, rather than debate what colour the fire hydrants ought to be painted.

Alfred Differ said...

Atomsmith,

(Quoting Q)
Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe.

Heh. You make it sound like an impossibility. Not the gravitational constant, but the social changes. It's not.

It's hard for the youngest to imagine, but not out of reach for the people here who are about my age and older. The world used to have many more intractable problems when I was young than it does today. We were on the brink of nuclear annihilation, world-spanning famine, and all the secondary problems that come of those two. Mothers were having babies at quite a clip. The US was in a constant state of war somewhere in the world. At least some of these were seen as impossible problems. Maybe we'd make a bit of progress, but it would take centuries to solve even one! Surely we'd annihilate ourselves first. Even the optimistic Star Trek 'history' had a third world war and centuries passing before the more pleasant Federation comes along.

Didn't work out that way. Not even close.

So… when it comes to the social changes necessary to make possible some libertarian approaches to problems, I don't accept 'impossible problems' as a reason for why we can't get there. When I was born there were about 3 billion people on the world and many slipping into starvation. Now we are approaching 8 billion and obesity is a bigger problem than famine.

So… No. This isn't out of reach for our civilization. It's just hard to imagine.

Alfred Differ said...

matthew,

You should know better. There is a difference between a community where some kids are raised to expect integrity and their parents are well off enough to not need an offered bribe to keep up and a community where one of these is missing.

One company I worked for back in the 90's had some ethical problems to put it mildly. They were a sub-prime lender making money hand over fist. Some of the employees were ripping them off and getting away with it too. I'm a bit of a boy scout when it comes to these things and like to think I'd report them and certainly not participate in the fraud. Did I? No. I conformed a bit. My thefts were tiny by comparison, but that fails to justify my actions.

Fast forward about 10 years and I worked for a company where integrity was expected. They'd fire your @#$ for small things because they needed to be able to trust you with bigger things. In my time there, I overlapped a sys admin from my previous employer and learned a lot more of the frauds that happened. Did I keep going with my small ones? No. In fact, I wrote scripts that kept logs of activities that could be used to double check the sys admins and db admins in case they were on the take. I QUIETLY wrote them. When a group of contractors were caught at a simple scheme, security made sure I was locked out of my stuff. Turns out I was one of the guys they contractors should have bought off to cover there tracks… but they didn't. My side logs never got used because they were rather inept, but I've never forgotten the lessons I learned with my first employer. I haven't forgotten my own ethical lapses either.

Let me return to my logs, though. I kept track of DB transactions that altered and inserted data, but not ones that watched people who merely looked. There were similar logs kept by sys and db admins. How does one catch them if they turn bad? That's where an app admin like I was comes in. I didn't have any enforcement authority bestowed on me, but I knew the culture well enough to know that evidence of wrong doing might be exculpatory for me AND result in enforcement against others. Turns out I didn't need any authority beyond what I already had as a 'trusted' employee. This happens to be the same mechanism in play when we pay some attention to what's going on around us in our community instead of tuning out or expecting the police to do it all. All that's needed is a general sense of expectation regarding personal integrity and some faith in the community and its desire to punish those who violate these norms. How they punish is a separate matter.

Culture matters AND there is no such thing as perfection. We don't need a perfectly incorruptible community for libertarian solutions to be workable, though. What we need is 'less' corruption. Quite a bit less when compared to many places in the world, but not so much here in the US or other parts of The West. What we need is closer to my second work environment than the first. We need people who are offended by corruption and take actions to detect and report it… in a community where such actions are respected and actionable.

Alfred Differ said...

Larry,

Dave Sim had a point when he condemned movements like communism and (what he called) feminism as requiring a fundamental change to human nature as a prerequisite.

I consider this approach to be valid criticism of almost every 'engineered' attempt to improve society. Libertarians are in danger here. Bigly even. Every Rand fan is already there.

If someone can make an argument that a particular change or solution won't work because it requires the human members of a community to behave in an inhuman manner, I have to take it seriously. However, I'll reject very similar arguments that require human members of a community to behave different than they already do. Change IS possible and supported by history. Conversion to something inhuman isn't… and is undesirable to boot.

Our host's critique of Rand's stories that avoid portrayal of children is one of those 'inhuman' warnings. We CANNOT reasonably expect people to behave as the heroes did in such stories AND expect them to remain human. What we can reasonably expect is for them to remain human and do things not mentioned in the stories… like having babies and ensuring inheritance rules apply. Human parents DO try to pass resources to their own children preferentially and their broader kin group when surpluses are large enough.


I have to be careful about lumping all 'engineering' attempts into the same category, though. There is less danger from your engineered solutions if you are not part of a group that amplifies your influence. You'll impact your kids and closest relatives without amplification, so I mostly confine my concerns to amplified efforts. Even then, I don't worry much unless a group uses coercion. Limiting the options of people around them is one thing. Forcing people to choose among limited options is another. Yes… there is a fine line between them.

TCB said...

@ Dr. Brin, in Finland, a speeding ticket is calculated as half a day's pay. Some people earn a LOT in a day:

In 2002, Anssi Vanjoki, a former Nokia director, was ordered to pay a fine of 116,000 euros ($103,600) after being caught driving 75km/h in a 50km/h zone on his motorbike.

Some other countries (Switzerland, UK, others) have fine systems that work in somewhat similar ways. In the Bezos case, if you added two zeros to the parking fine, he'd still scarcely notice.

TCB said...

So Kamala Harris is half Jamaican and half Indian (subcontinent, that is) descent. Looked up her wikipedia entry. Parents:

Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast-cancer scientist who had emigrated from India in 1960 to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology at UC Berkeley.[8] Her father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University emeritus professor of economics, who emigrated from British Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at UC Berkeley.[9][10]

Brilliant enuf to come out of that household? That'll do. That'll do nicely.

Larry Hart said...

Zepp Jamieson:

I would have preferred someone more to the left, but the political landscape that existed six months ago no longer exists, and we'll have to fight to survive, rather than debate what colour the fire hydrants ought to be painted.


Exactly. Which is why Biden was the right choice for the Democrats to run against Benedict Donald. Other candidates might have excited some Democrats more than Biden, but they would have driven other Democrats and anti-Trumpers away. Biden offends no one, and that's what the moment calls for.

David Brin said...

So long as he appoints 5000 sane adults to replace monsters, then moves on to my list of 31 desiderata.

George Carty said...

jim: "I think your point about detail is spot on but your time line is off. The late 19th century and early 20th century is a fantastic time for good architecture things turn ugly after WWII. Every one of the examples of good public buildings in Cincinnati that I posted came from that time."

I was thinking of the late-19th and early-20th century eras as those when the thinking behind modernist architecture was shaped (think of the Bauhaus, which was established in Weimar-era Germany), but you're right that most of the worst examples of modernism were built post-WWII. Perhaps the need which drove it wasn't that of accommodating migrants from the surrounding countryside, but rather that to quickly reconstruct cities wrecked by bombing?

Perhaps a more serious problem with the "attractive architecture is fractal" hypothesis is that the indisputably non-fractal Art Deco architecture is also much beloved?

Hailey said...

They're literally dismantling the post office now. Removing mail sorting machines:

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/11/901219097/how-are-postmaster-general-dejoys-changes-affecting-workers

Article is from Iowa, but in the reddit thread i found that on there are claims it's happening in other locations as well.

What do we do if/when this election is corrupted to the point of preventing any possibility of a free & fair process?

Robert said...

Alan Greenspan discovered when he was "shocked--shocked!" to discover that self-regulating industries had been cheating.

Alan Greenspan needs to learn some history. The FDA was created because the food industry failed at self-regulation, over a century ago.

https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a23169/poison-squad/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/poison-squad/

Likewise building codes, traffic laws…


Alternately, and more cynically, Greenspan knew damn well what self-regulation meant, and just didn't expect the cheaters to be so blatant as to bring the house of cards down.

Larry Hart said...

Trump essentially accuses Kamila Harris of trademark infringement...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-11/trump-calls-harris-meanest-and-most-horrible-u-s-senator

“I thought she was the meanest, the most horrible, the most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate,” Trump said

Larry Hart said...

This is an image, so I can't copy/paste from it, but it nicely puts many of the Republican misrepresentations of liberals all in one place.

https://twitter.com/DianeKovacs/status/1292912849564639241/photo/1

...
Democrats: We want cops to stop killing minorities
Republicans: Dems hate police.
...
Democrats: We kneel in protest of inequality
Republicans: Dems hate the flag, soldiers, and America.
...
Democrats: We want religious freedom for everyone.
Republicans: Dems want Sharia Law.
...


You get the idea.

matthew said...

Alfred, you said earlier that you needed a non-corruptible citizenry to make libertarianism work. When I quoted your earlier statement to you, you changed 100% of your stance in your reply.

Your second post made good sense. The first, quoted, diametrically opposed post was what elicited the response from me.

jim said...

Hi George
Good point about Art Deco. I think one difference is that art Deco still valued ornamentation and the more Modernist buildings (like the Toronto City Hall) have taken a Shaker like distaste for ornamentation, far too much bare concrete.

The Toronto City Hall is not that bad, it does a good job of incorporating parking into the complex, the general design is not bad - two large thin curving buildings centered around a smaller saucer like object (kind of reminds me of Mary and Joseph standing over Jesus in the manger). And the smaller saucer like building holds the city counsel chamber.

My problem with the building complex is barren lifeless and fails at the human scale. Also the two large buildings have a back that is nothing but ugly ribbed concrete, it seems like the city hall has turned its back on 2/3rd of the population of the city.

The addition of a green roof in 2009 was a big improvement, although it looks like they have chosen the stark beauty of the tundra, rather than a more traditional landscaping. And if they could add some interesting tile work at ground level that would help a lot too.

Carl M. said...

Form follows function:

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.4968086,-79.3110441,3a,75y,330.99h,92.2t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swdVbnL0NyeRT3BVWig3U5Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Larry Hart said...

The friggin' Birthers are out for Kamala Harris.

Even though she was born in the United States, they're trying to claim that since neither parent was a US Citizen at the time, it doesn't count. This despite the fact that she's a US Senator--a position whose qualifications include a number of years as a US Citizen. This despite the fact that the Trumpists go ape-shit over "birth tourism"--a practice of pregnant women traveling here to have their babies on US soil--which wouldn't be a thing at all if the Birther theory had any validity.

I no longer argue that these things aren't racist at the core. John McCain was acceptable as a "natural born citizen" even though he was born in Panama (in the US Canal Zone). Ted Cruz seems to be eligible, despite being born in Canada to a dual citizen, which makes him as much "not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers" as they're trying to say Kamala was.

But bringing up threats of foreign influence over the child of a Jamaican and an Indian whiel not mentioning Trump in the same sentence? That takes the same level of chutzpah that allows Mitch McConnell to bemoan "Democratic obstructionism".

Please tell me this can't go anywhere.

https://www.newsweek.com/some-questions-kamala-harris-about-eligibility-opinion-1524483

...
Were Harris' parents lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth? If so, then under the actual holding of Wong Kim Ark, she should be deemed a citizen at birth—that is, a natural-born citizen—and hence eligible. Or were they instead, as seems to be the case, merely temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas issued pursuant to Section 101(15)(F) of Title I of the 1952 Immigration Act? If the latter were indeed the case, then derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.
...
But the concerns about divided allegiance that led our nation's Founders to include the "natural-born citizen" requirement for the office of president and commander-in-chief remain important; indeed, with persistent threats from Russia, China and others to our sovereignty and electoral process, those concerns are perhaps even more important today.
...


https://www.newsweek.com/some-questions-kamala-harris-about-eligibility-opinion-1524483

Larry Hart said...

Just like we've always been at war with Eastasia...

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/08/12/us/biden-vs-trump

Hours after calling Ms. Harris the “most liberal” member of the Senate, the Republican National Committee sent out an email blast saying that progressives hated her because she was not progressive enough.

David Brin said...

Can a prophylactic disease help prevent a worse one? As Jenner found Cowpox protected against Smallpox? In HEART OF THE COMET I depicted a doctor's duty (in a 300 astronaut mission to Halley's Comet) as in part to regularly release "challenge pathogens" like colds to keep their immune systems tuned. Now, shall we skip the vaccine and find which cold viruses - which sniffles - confer some degree of partial immunity, and get THOSE super-spreading asap?



Don't do this yourself! Many colds are coronas but others are rhino-viruses that won't help at all, and meanwhile, you are taking terrible risks with your life and other's. But this certainly merits urgent research.

Larry Hart said...

FOX op-ed goes from "war with Eurasia" to "war with Eastasia" in the span of four sentences...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/kamala-harris-vp-pick-biden-justin-haskins

...
For example, she [Harris] previously opposed a statewide police body camera mandate, fought against a reduction to California’s mandatory minimum law, and opposed the legalization of marijuana -- a position she has since reversed.

She has a long, well-documented record of political opportunism and grandstanding, going all the way back to her days in San Francisco.

According to an SF Weekly report from 2009, “The cops, in turn, argue that District Attorney Kamala Harris, a striver and candidate for Attorney General, is loath to take difficult cases lest she blemish her political future with an embarrassing loss.”

But worst of all, Harris has in recent years adopted increasingly more radical policy positions, frequently aligning herself with socialist politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
...

TCB said...

The birthers are going after Kamala? GOOD. I guess. It didn't work last time either.

---------------------------------------

Conspiratorial thinking-cap time.

When I bought my rifle a couple of weeks ago, I filled out the form for the FBI background check. The dealer called it in, and got a green light within about a minute. I'm not a convicted felon, nor domestic abuser, nor ex-military with a dishonorable discharge, etc. Some background checks have been delayed but the dealer told me if they don't hear back after a few days, the sale can go ahead anyway.

Black people and liberals are now arming themselves too.

Assume, as I do, that Bill Barr has already begun creating a domestic enemies list, using (for example) party registration. This list could be very large already. Assume Trump keeps power into next year, illegitimately but there he still is. Assume a new DOJ directive tells gun dealers they may NOT sell unless the background check has returned. Now assume that the FBI background checks start getting run past the enemies list, which is technically trivial, and for SOME reason, the liberal/dissident/BLM/etc. applications are all "pending" and somehow, somehow, never emerge from background-check limbo. No sale.

My rule is, if I thought of it, someone else has too.

Robert said...

Larry, isn't "just asking questions" a trademark of the Q-Anon nutjobs?

jim said...

Carl M
Hilarious
Sombrero (form)
Mexican Restaurant (function)

Looks like a fun place to eat.

Alfred Differ said...

Matthew,

Were you keying off this sentence?

No libertarian solution exists in a corruptible community because there isn't much of a sense of loyalty to community.

If so, you took it much too far by turning it into
you needed a non-corruptible citizenry to make libertarianism work

An ideal solution doesn't exist with corruption in a community, but libertarianism isn't the ideal. It is more about how we get there. Same for liberalism and progressivism.

Libertarians aren't the only ones with impossible ideals reachable only if we abandon our humanity. Real humans reach toward those ideals in the limit, though, and the American Experiment shows how.

I don't mind owning the communication failure, though. 8)
Wouldn't be my first.

Tim H. said...

I found this interesting:

https://om.co/2020/08/13/gig-economy-work/

Basic minimum income and single payer healthcare could be the missing pieces required to minimize social damage when when employment can't pay enough to live here, either by the nature of the job, or "Almost a business plan".

Tim H. said...

These were also interesting:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/8/12/21361498/climate-change-air-pollution-us-india-china-deaths

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21349200/climate-change-fossil-fuels-rewiring-america-electrify

A few have noticed there's money to be made from the transition, I suspect more will join them.

Larry Hart said...

The new definition of chutzpah ...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Aug14.html#item-4

...
This did not stop Donald Trump from claiming that Biden would personally impose a mask requirement if he were to become president, and complaining that Biden thinks he can do whatever he wants with the stroke of a pen (pot, meet kettle).

Larry Hart said...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/politics/trump-postal-service-mail-voting.html


Mr. Trump has assailed the money-losing Postal Service in recent months, at the same time warning that voting by mail will lead to fraud, lost or stolen ballots and long delays in determining a winner.


So voting by mail will create long delays because of the roadblocks Trump himself is putting in the way. I guess that's like "We know Saddam has WMDs because we have the receipts from when we sold them to him."


(On Wednesday, both the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, were mailed ballots, Palm Beach County, Fla., election records show. It was first reported by The Palm Beach Post. Late Thursday, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, “The president supports absentee voting, not universal mail-in voting, which contain several safeguards that prevent fraud and abuse.”)


I've seen this recently in retcons about Trump's aversion to (emphasis added) "Universal mail-in voting". That's not what he said back when he started asserting that mail-in voting was bad, but absentee voting was good, and every pundit except those on FOX and OANN pointed out that those were the same thing.--like "Obamacare" and the ACA.

Now the Trumpists are saying that's not true, because absentee voting requires a request for the ballot, whereas universal mail-in voting does not. Well, first of all, it's only recently that they've apparently written the word "universal" into the conversation in crayon. More importantly, that's a red herring, because Democrats are not pushing for universal mail-in voting. That is, they're not after the elimination of in-person voting--just the availability of an alternative because of the pandemic.

Larry Hart said...

Stonekettle on Twitter:

They're going to fly a drone on another planet.

Sometimes it's good to remember there are still people out there doing amazing things every single day.

[referring to...]
@NASA

While on the way to the Red Planet, our Ingenuity @NASAMars helicopter had its batteries checked out and was powered up for the first time in space.

Rocket Keep up with the #CountdownToMars: https://go.nasa.gov/3iBKTtl

matthew said...

The GOP assault on mail-in voting is really an assault on paper ballots, that can be counted and checked. It is an assault on fair voting and an assault on our nation.

Russia and other state actors had the ability to change votes in 2016. They accessed websites that had the ability. It is thought that Russian did not change votes by most observers (though there are still doubts). It is believed that Obama threatening severe consequences to Russia if Putin ordered votes changed was the determining factor if Russia did not change votes.

Now we have the GOP actively, desperately, trying to stop mail-in ballots.

This is all about a paper trail.

Joe Biden should issue a statement, today, that any foreign attempts to tamper with the election would be seen as an act of war against the US by a future Biden administration.

And *every* GOP officeholder should be asked if they will sign on to such a statement. If they refuse, there should be follow-up questions.

And all of us need to start preparing for what we will do *if* Trump and the GOP steal the election.

I put chances that the GOP / Russia / Israel / UAE / Saudi / Turkish / Chinese / Iranian interference will make a non-legitimate election happen at about 75%.

The question is what will the US citizens do afterwards.

In the meantime, defend paper ballots. Defend the USPS.

And get angry. We are being attacked again.

Larry Hart said...

matthew:

Joe Biden should issue a statement, today, that any foreign attempts to tamper with the election would be seen as an act of war against the US by a future Biden administration.

And *every* GOP officeholder should be asked if they will sign on to such a statement. If they refuse, there should be follow-up questions.


Even that much seems like giving too much benefit of the doubt. The only thing in question would be whether they would lie about the answer, or admit that they are just fine with foreign interference as long as the foreign interference benefits them.

See, China and Iran might be said to prefer Biden to Trump (as would any sane government or individual), but Biden isn't out there soliciting covert aid from them. Trump is. McConnell and his flunkies in the Senate are. The idea that if they win, they'd be anything but grateful for the foreign aid that was necessary for that win is absurd.

Larry Hart said...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/california-high-capacity-magazines.html

California’s ban on high-capacity magazines violates the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.


Good to know my right to an RPG or a tactical nuclear weapon are intact.


Judge Kenneth K. Lee, who wrote the majority opinion, noted that California enacted the ban on large-capacity magazines, or LCMs, that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition after “heart-wrenching and highly publicized mass shootings.”

“But even well-intentioned laws must pass constitutional muster,” he wrote.


Obviously, that clause only applies to laws passed by Democrats. Republicans are allowed to treat the Constitution as a suggested rulebook.

Alfred Differ said...

The idea has been rattling about in my head for a few days.
Finally wrote it down.

Yah. Not all of Florida. We know which part, though, right? 8)


Florida man, Florida man
Stuck in the past and stays as he can
Loves his life suppressing the tan
Florida man

Is he repressed or should he confess?
Does he feel totally blameless?
Who teams up with Florida man?
Politics man & Triangle man

Larry Hart said...

TCB:

Assume a new DOJ directive tells gun dealers they may NOT sell unless the background check has returned. Now assume that the FBI background checks start getting run past the enemies list, which is technically trivial, and for SOME reason, the liberal/dissident/BLM/etc. applications are all "pending" and somehow, somehow, never emerge from background-check limbo. No sale.


This is what eventually happens to those who think they can rule indefinitely by force of arms:


District 7 forest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j972c-yynY

District 5 dam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y1EmA2CU04

And of course, the destruction of District 8:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X236AeHt5RY

"If we burn, you burn with us!"

TCB said...

As the mailman-in-residence, I can tell you that the elections mail for my city all goes to a post office box right here in the city. So, for the vast majority of ballot applications and cast ballots, we can simply throw them into a designated bucket on the loading dock which will go straight there, within 24 hours I assume, and not via the sorting facility some 50 miles away.

If I catch wind of any supervisor telling us NOT to do this, I will demand to know why in front of God and everybody.

Alfred Differ said...

Regarding the CA ban on LCM's, I urge patience.

The stay is still in effect and our AG has to decide whether to appeal. This was the usual '3 judge' ruling, so the next step is to take it to the entire court... if the AG feels we should.

This IS the ninth district, so it's important to note that if THEY have an issue with our law, there really might be an issue with it. If it goes down, it's not like the CA legislators won't be able to come together on another try.

Deuxglass said...

Alfred Differ,

Stick to writing prose. Your poetry sucks. Florida rocks.

A Florida resident and proud of his state.

Phaedrusnailfile said...

I dont know Deuxglass i thought Alfreds song was okay. If you put it to the tune of They Might Be Giants, "Particle Man" the similarities are uncanny.

Larry Hart said...

Alfred Differ:

This IS the ninth district, so it's important to note that if THEY have an issue with our law, there really might be an issue with it.


Is that still true? I had heard that Trump appointees had watered down the liberal-ness of the Ninth Circuit.

Larry Hart said...

Hey, wouldn't it be funny if there was such a blue wave that Biden was clearly winning on Election Night without even having counted all the absentee ballots? And then Biden sues to stop the counting, aping Trump's exact words about how we need to know the results that night, not days or weeks or years later?

I mean, the counting probably wouldn't actually stop (only Republicans have the power to do that), but it would be worth the humor value of watching them insist that every vote must be counted.

Deuxglass said...

Phaedrusnailfile,

If you think that insulting people just because they happen to live in a state you don't like is cool then you haven't lived. It can be excused if you are young but above a certain age it's worrisome. How old are you?

Larry Hart said...

According to radio commentator Hal Sparks, Louis DeJoy is a major stockholder in a company called XPO Logistics, which is a private contractor that the USPS uses during peak times like Christmas. So, if the postal service's capacity is diminished going into a busy season, whether the election or the Christmas season, DeJoy stands to reap a financial windfall.

I find it somewhat comforting that the motive here might be good old fashioned corruption rather than election fraud.

matthew said...

Alfred, Florida Man is brilliant.

TCB said...

Larry Hart sez: "I find it somewhat comforting that the motive here might be good old fashioned corruption rather than election fraud."

It's both. Good strategies often achieve more than one goal at a time. The GOP crowd are the scum of the earth, but they strategize well. Nothing short of their immolation ought to comfort us.

Alfred Differ said...

Deuxglass,

I'm very glad your part of Florida doesn't fit what I wrote.

I was debating using "Panhandle Man" instead, but the dismal state of American geography knowledge means the people most likely to understand it (besides commenters here) are the people of Florida who don't need to be told about their neighbors. They already know.

As for my knowledge of Florida, I admit I haven't been there in a while, but I HAVE been to almost every State in the US. My father was USAF. Lots of traveling. Most places I've lived have been out west, but my friends, cousins, aunts, and uncles aren't all over here.

... and ...

I see myself as American more than anything else, so I can spot Florida Man here in California too. 8)


Phaedrusnailfile,

It's a strait up imitation of that song. I was looking at the section for Person Man mostly as I did it. It's a bit unfair to the guys who wrote the original, though. They've made clear they didn't imply anyone in particular for any of the four characters. I obviously had someone specific in mind. I see them posting on Twitter fairly often. 8)

As for Twitter, that was my primary target for the snippet.



matthew,

Between us all, I'm sure we can cover more of the political spectrum. There are so many characters/subjects to describe. 8)

Donald Fan
Police Van
Immigrant Ban
etc

Alfred Differ said...

Larry,

...DeJoy stands to reap a financial windfall.

If that is his plan, he needs to hire a lawyer pronto. The next Congress and Administration could crucify him. He's taking a helluva risk.

liberal-ness of the Ninth Circuit

Don't worry yet. 'En banc' sessions are where it really matters with controversial material. I have no doubt the AG will be talking to a broad range of people to decide what they actually want to defend. Some quick response piece of law? Maybe. They might prefer to defend a follow up one made with cooler heads.

The issue is making currently owned LCM's illegal to own. There are other ways to approach the danger with LCM's and possibly better times to do it. For example, imagine defending a case in the not-so-distant future after NY rips the NRA to pieces.

Robert said...

I didn't know Florida Man was a thing. Learn something every day…

https://filmdaily.co/news/florida-man-memes/

TCB said...

Harharhar so every few months we at the post office get these anonymous Gallup employee surveys. Understand that these surveys are promulgated by management, and they're looking for sunshine and lollipops. Check boxes from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree) on thirteen statements (for example, No. 1 is "I know what is expected of me at work." A no-brainer, I marked it a 5. I deliver mail. That's expected of me.)

Then comes the newly formulated Essay Question: Please describe any positive changes you've seen on your work team.

Don't mind if I do! I wrote:

Many of us are positively aware that our new, innovative Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, was chosen by his boss, the traitor and career criminal Donald Trump, for his naked corruption, and is on assignment to destroy the United States Postal Service and help steal a second election, ending in dictatorship.

Spin that, ya management lickspittles. P.S. I've disapproved of at least one or two past PMG's, the late Marvin Runyon in particular, but I never saw one that was actually a crook until DeJoy.

David Brin said...

onward

onward