We looked the other way

 

We looked the other way when educators warned us that we were dumbing down America.

We looked the other way when the penurious, Koch-brothers cabal decimated public goods and essential infrastructure, waving the false flag of “small” government, convincing Randian frat boys everywhere that their idiosyncratic brand of “public economics” had been proven sensible and truthful to legitimate, mainstream economists.

We looked the other way when Reagan and his cabal dismantled protections for working citizens and tore up our commitment to the post-war social contract, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and any pretense of fairness.  Subsequently, centrists were pleased that many could find social agreement in Reagan’s affability, the center-left employed Reagan’s civility as rhetorical counterpoint to Trump’s vitriol, and leftists were dismissed for truth-telling as in America, despite Alexander Pope’s admonition that all but truth falls still-born from the presses, finding common ground usually means agreeing to the fabricated lies of American exceptionalism.  “Defund the Police” is suffering this dishonest rhetorical bind in 2020.

We looked the other way when the natural connection between the productivity of working men and women and their pay was severed by the gluttonous marriage of business and politics, combined with the forces of post-1980 globalization.  And we looked the other way when unions and equality both suffered a not unrelated precipitous slide in American life and discourse. 

We looked the other way while the Alt-Right was out planting the seeds for a growing fascist movement whose first monstrous offspring was Citizen’s United, whose middle child was the Kleptocratic Vulgarian, and whose last infant has yet to be born.

We looked the other way when the American churchmen, who Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison famously said embraced the Reformation but not the Renaissance, gained sufficient power to take us back in time, first to the 19^th, then the 18^th, and then the 17^th century, seeking to impress painfully upon us all their racial, sexual and totalitarian values.

We looked the other way when cable news balkanized our community mind, replacing the Cronkite’s and Brinkley’s who surely failed us when extremists were telling the truth -- but kept us listening to the same news, thus holding our politicians somewhat accountable to public opinion – with an abundance of hucksters selling not news, but the pablum and the sensationalism that we learned could meet our need to hear just what we wanted and deny all the rest, or turn the channel and find such comfort elsewhere.  Fox famously won in Court the right to lie and in so doing created the Foxenstein monster that has now turned on their Master for trying to tell them the truth.  In Parler and in the ghettos of the Twitterverse, you can now find psychotic, delusional advocates of sedition who are unabashedly waving the very flag they are burning.

We looked the other way when Trump mocked women and their rights to their bodies, mocked the disabled, mocked and minstreled blacks (“There’s my African-American!”), launched psychopathic levels of vitriol at Muslims, at immigrants, at Mexicans – locking children in cages, my God! -- justifying all of this with sophomoric assertions of the value of anarchy, of the businessman, of the outsider, of the modern-day Luddite who might topple the walls of Jericho and out of the rubble that would follow would be, what?  Justice for the working-class, white guy driving a rusty truck and raising three kids without health insurance?  Revolutions eat their young; that's a not a lesson to be forgotten.  All while Trump was obviously distracting fools while loading the gold into his trucks in the back.  As he has done to the tune of $170 million since his election defeat.

We looked the other way at all of this, and now some of us are surprised that the piper must be paid.  The chess player who says that his mistake was the move before he was checkmated is a novice or a fool – the mistakes were made far earlier, and the collapse of his hopes began then, whether or not he was aware of them then or later.  The coach who says the team’s failure was that they had too few points when the final whistle blew needs to step aside – that game was lost many plays, perhaps games, perhaps seasons ago. 

We looked the other way for over forty years. There may be no way back.  Americans are morally immature – a laughingstock in the world community for our sociopathic reaction to plague-required, social-distancing mandates which has and will kill hundreds of thousands, many of whom were and are innocents, including many front-line, health-care workers who we send like boys to the spraying bullets of Gallipoli every time we gather without constraint and caution while toasting FREEDUMB.  And when distancing mandates fail, as they will, our next and last hope will be mass vaccinations, which the same blood mob of angry ignoramuses will reject, some for conspiracies only schizophrenics and children could believe, and many out of a childish, morally -reprehensible obstinacy.  And for those mature enough to line up for a vaccine, there is still the risk that this broken version of capitalism puts the price of the vaccine out of reach of many.

The civilized around the world will look on in horror and amusement that this is the way the American Republic and Empire die, one after another.  Not with a bang, but a churlish, foolish, ignorant whimper.  

We must not be surprised, however.  We looked the other way when it mattered.

 

The media must resist declaring election results on election eve

https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher/status/1315148796758761472

The fate of the American Republic -- and, perhaps democracy in the West, as well as our survival against climate catastrophe -- may now hinge on how the media behaves on election eve.

Mail-in voting is a two-edged sword.  It allowed many whose votes would have been actively suppressed by the GOP to cast a ballot and it allowed many to vote with reduced exposure to covid-19.  BUT it handed the Fascist Kleptocrats a weapon.  See the polls.  Trump is leading day of election voters by a wide margin while Biden wins mail-in voters by a far greater margin.

The media is a business whose incentives promote the lack of discipline.  Election night is a dramatic performance.  If they give in the impulse to try to call the election on election night without the majority of votes tallied -- and they presumably lack the statistical prowess to interpret the two very different samples correctly -- they will give the blood mob and its inciters precisely the excuse they need to challenge the integrity of the election.

An irresponsible media that calls the election based on day-of voting ballots will give Trump reason to declare victory long before the votes are counted.  As mail-in votes are counted, the election will swing state-by-state to Biden, until the final results move approximately 100 electoral votes from red to blue.  By then, millions of uneducated, armed, angry white domestic terrorists will be fired up by the Fascists to burn those swing state Capitols to the ground.   Trump will be tweeting that Hilary and Obama and Blue Swing State Governors must be arrested.  Barr & Company will use this excuse to challenge results in places like PA with GOP legislatures.  By then, the Handmaid may be on the SCOTUS ready to affirm.  The actual vote and the Constitution will be rendered meaningless.  The loss to the nation, democracy in the West, and the biosphere may be incalculable.

THE MEDIA MUST BE THE ADULT IN THE ROOM AND REPEAT CONSTANTLY THAT NO RESULTS CAN BE DETERMINED ON ELECTION EVE.  If they yield to the highly irresponsible but powerful impulse to behave as if this isn't a two-stage election with a totalitarian ready to seize power by whatever means possible, it's all over.

Will the Roberts Court sans RBG defend the American Republic?

The Coup is in its final stages and it is unlikely that the votes cast in November will decide our future.

If despite the millions of suppressed votes by GOP operatives, Americans vote by a popular and electoral majority to excise Trump's cabal from power -- which virtually all polls report will be the case -- Trump will do what he has always done: put personal self-interest over country, over democracy, over the American Republic, itself.  This is sadly not speculative: he has told us this himself many times.

Plans are apparently already in place to challenge the legitimacy of his electoral defeat.  He has told us that ballots will not be counted without legal challenges.  His actions, including a psychopathic devastation of USPS services putting the lives and well-being of millions at risk, and his ongoing rhetoric of hate and division, have laid the ground for these challenges.  But if those mail-in ballots are somehow delivered and counted, Trump almost surely plans to contest them.

We already know the beginning of that process, as the nation was nearly crippled by Bush v Gore, in which a SCOTUS of arguably better character chose to allow the stoppage of vote counts in Florida, upon which the election hinged.  What followed was a multi-trillion dollar devastation of the American economy, an illegal invasion, hundreds of thousands of lives lost unnecessarily in an agonizing and prolonged conflict, and a depreciation of American leadership on the world stage.

That said, this time there is actually much more at stake.  The American Republic itself is on the chopping block.

One of the remarkable pathologies of the American psyche is that our self-referential insularity and astonishingly hubristic and unjustified regard for ourselves means we are ignorant of the fall of many civilized, established nations and Republics throughout history; ignorant of how vulnerable democratic institutions are; ignorant of the way of the world: that psychopaths in power can reduce your society and way of life to rubble in a few short years.  

Hundreds of times in human history people aspiring to universal dignity and democracy have tried and failed.   A few in the classical era, dozens in the middle ages, hundreds of free imperial city-states alone. It may be fair to say that most Republics have failed within a few years of their founding, but even long-lived Republics have failed against the powerful and ever-present reactionary forces, usually marshalled by cabals seeking exploitive wealth and power.  Four hundred years of the Roman Republic vanished once Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and five hundred years of dictatorship (Empire) followed.  Hitler took power in a democracy.  Mussolini, like Hitler, like Trump (and Barr for him, with the help of George W. Bush's OLC), declared for themselves the powers of the unitary executive -- the euphemism for dictatorship in the modern era.  All in democracies.

We are woefully naïve about the chances that it can and will happen here.  It's happening.  Now.

Next steps in the base case scenario:

1) Ongoing suppression of voting -- in back rooms where registrations are canceled, by mail, at the polls -- where American brown shirts will seek to frighten voters with threats of violence, and where many if not most polls in minority communities will be closed.

2) Ongoing propaganda challenging the legitimacy of the election, of mail-in ballots.  Lies about voter fraud -- from those committing fraud -- will be increasing in number and hysteria.

3) Early election results may favor Trump as mail-in ballots will be Biden-intensive, so Trump may declare an early, election-eve victory, to add to the fire that when all the votes are counted, his presidency was stolen.

4) When the votes not suppressed by the GOP are ultimately counted, they are likely to favor Biden, and they will be challenged in the Courts.  The plan is surely to take it to the SCOTUS, which has been scandalized by the failure to hold a hearing and vote on Merrick Garland, the unseemly installation of Brett Kavanaugh, and now the hypocritical violation of the GOP's stated principle in 2016, with the possible installation of a gravely compromised candidate, likely to be a Christo-Fascist so as to fuel the fires of the blood mob.

5) If the Roberts Court "determines" that election "violations" are so severe as to render the vote count illegitimate, the election is thrown to the House.  Trump has already said it may end up in the House, so this has been explained to him.

6) In the House, each STATE gets one vote.  So it is an ugly truth that the founding fathers wanted this to appear to be democratic, but this process might as well be asking the far-less democratic Senate to vote.  Rural America will have many more votes than urban, minority America.  As now configured, the GOP controls the majority of House delegations.  

7) The House delegations, if they vote along party lines, thus "legally" elect Donald Trump.  Despite dozens if not hundreds of electoral and other crimes, the Coup will have a "legal" basis.  Note that the Russian Constitution only allows a president to serve for two, six-year terms.  Putin has been in power for five terms.  Yet he arranged a puppet to serve for a term to obfuscate what was going on.  His coup was thus justified, too.  Once the American Coup is secured in 2020, the need for a legal basis for it in the future will wane with the increased power and suppression of dissent that is likely to follow.  The vote count in 2024 will likely look Russian, with Trump winning 76% of the reported vote.  Or perhaps his sycophants will fear his displeasure, and count 98% for him, as is the case when insanely narcissistic dictators fully indulge themselves.  The announced count won't really matter, of course; no ballots will be counted.

So the American Republic's Thermopylae may be the SCOTUS, as the House delegations show no signs of defending the integrity of the Republic if the Coup is in their hands.  We know that Roberts does not want to be the Chief Justice who presides over the burning of the Constitution, but will he have what it takes to exhort his fellow justices to do the right thing and honor the voices of the American people, crying out to have their voices heard, their sacred votes counted?

I am not expert at Robert's frame of mind, his courage, and his relationship with Gorsuch and Thomas.  I suspect Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito and the illicit upcoming fascist appointee all vote for dictatorship -- but of course I could be wrong.  I have hope that Roberts chooses to and convinces Gorsuch to join Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan to let us live another day.

Unite now or a generation or more will live devastated lives behind a new Iron Curtain

Before the Anschluss, Austria was a sophisticated, educated, cultured society. They had set aside a monarchy and sought to build a Republic upon it, which was formalized at the end of WWI.

Within twenty years, Vienna, a shining star of intellectualism, music, arts, philosophy, psychotherapy and culture succumbed to Hitler.  The deprivations of the Versailles Treaty accounted for some, but surely not all, the transformation.

Monarchy to a (Racist) Republic to a Racist Fascism? What took the Austrians only 20 years has taken us more than 200. Bravo -- we score a few points for that one.

But anyone without an American flag up his ass knows that the fin de siècle Viennese, and the generation that followed, had a far greater intellectual and cultural capacity to resist imbecilic totalitarianism than do we in the US. If you are overestimating Americans, read Fox News' comments on Facebook, as I do. You will come away frightened and drained by the stupidity, fear, hate and ignorance. If the Austrians succumbed in 1938, we cannot imagine our own survival will be easy.

American society is scarcely above that of an ignorant blood mob (made even worse by their extraordinary view that they know what they are talking about), with tens of millions utterly ignorant of the 20,000 lies and the massive accumulation of evidence -- much of it out in the open -- that the Constitution is burning and a totalitarian state is upon us.  While the outright racism and violence (and the Schadenfreude it entails) of this administration may serve some of the Trump demographic, most are going to bleed red like the rest of us when social security and Medicare are stolen and bowing to government power is demanded of them. 

So what stands between us and oblivion is not quality or legacy.

What stands between us and oblivion is courage and an absolute commitment to excising the evil forces that will seek to subjugate us to their will at the end of the barrel of a gun.

The police, ICE and Eric Prince's mercenaries-- reinvigorated as Hessians, Antebellum slave catchers, late 19th century Pinkertons, and 20th century SS and KGB -- will seek to normalize absolute obedience to authority, and an abandonment of the rights and liberties of the tattered Constitution.

The Lincoln Project is doing admirable work, but how many centrists of honor, integrity and historical understanding will show up to turn out Trump?

African Americans will as always line up for many hours suffering pain, discomfort, inconvenience -- and now a deadly pandemic -- all while little white monsters do everything they can to make it impossible for them to vote and have their vote counted.

Our best chance of stopping the fascists may be in the hands of the disenfranchised far Left. Will they read the tea leaves and understand that if Trump secures power everything they value will become a Utopian pipe dream, vanishing into thin air for a devastated generation or more -- if not until the species is extinguished by the idiotic, anti-science, carbon-burning fools they allowed to secure absolute power?

Even an alliance with the far Left is no guarantee. Remember Guernica, remember the Spanish Civil War. Even all of us pulling together may not be enough. But that is not really relevant. The millions of purged voter registrations, hacked election machines, disappearing polls in blue districts, threats to mail-in voting, illegal intimidation threats at the polls -- the election may be stolen despite our best efforts.  What is relevant is that without unity in the center and on the left against brutal totalitarianism, all is surely lost, and our children may live their lives behind a new Iron Curtain.

For their sake, we must unite at all costs, whatever the costs, whatever the odds, whatever the risks.

Conservatism and revanchism in America

Conservatives -- and especially the reactionary, the counter-revolutionary among them -- are revanchist.

Liberals seem regularly shocked by this.

When the Right does what it does most fundamentally, which is to oppose emancipatory movements of human beings outside the inner circle (in the US, those who are not white, male, heterosexual Christian citizens) -- it's intention is not merely to regain the equilibrium of the ancien regime. It's intention includes vengeance for the mere act of questioning privilege -- the challenge to privilege is as much a crime as the idea of emancipation, itself.

This has been true for centuries, and was as evident in the French counter-revolutionaries in 1789 as it was in the Confederates of 1861, as true in the post-Reconstruction American South as it was in the proto-socialist interregnum between the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik Revolution, as true in the anti-Communism and anti-welfarism of the 1930s and 1950s, as it is in today in which fascists seek to crush Constitutionally-protected right of assembly and protest and punish those who dare speak truth to power.

The fascists don't merely object to your desire for liberté, égalité, fraternité -- they object to the idea that marginalized people would dare confront their power. Police don't want to force you to conform to their will for social stability -- they want to punish you, even kill you, for expressing the right to be treated with dignity. They see a protest against murder of the oppressed as an attack on their very concept of America -- a nation in which the jack boots of the oppressor has the right to crush the marginalized. Ask a reactionary to critique BLM: the answer will involve a flag. For them: normative America *is* inequality, violently enforced.

Blue Lives "Matter" More Than Yours in the sense that they are weaponized for the powers-that-be to punish resistance. Otherwise, they have no value to those who use them.  To the Trumps, Mnuchins and Barrs, the cops are simply hunting dogs allowed to torment and kill the Master's prey. But don't forget that it is not the dogs who lead the hunt and it is not they who set the agenda, although they are admittedly a feral pack in the US far too often. Defunding the police may be needed, but that is just a start. The reactionaries will seek to oppress and punish with or without them, as the deputizing of mercenaries and border patrol agents in Portland showed clearly, and as history for at least two centuries has shown us. (The Paris Commune was put down in part by the French Army even though it had been disbanded.)

The revanchism, the blood-letting vengeance, we see in the streets of America today may be new in its current form and new in the risks it imposes on the future of the American Republic, which is tottering on the precipice. But it is not truly new, having been a central feature of the reactionary heart and mind for a very long time. These past few weeks have been our own la semaine sanglante. But this is a tree with deep roots and the emancipation of all human beings will continue to meet resistance from the reactionary right after Trump is gone. That is who they are. 

After all, their punitive nature is so incendiary they had to invent Hell to satisfy that fire within them.

Many thought that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the devastating set backs to labor unions, the reckless race to break all records in economic inequality since 1980, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the ongoing exploitation of women and people of color in the work force, the Reactionary Right had lost its enemies and thus its fire. For some time, GOP leadership muddled over the option that horrified them: to become inclusive, generous, and law-abiding. But Trump found a simmering base, one still angry that blacks and women and queer and poor folks were still uppity, still expecting decency and marginal support, and the GOP realized there was still game in the strategy of hate -- and here we are.

The reactionary element in the US is thus a disease that can be suppressed but not eliminated. When Reagan and his followers killed off their enemies, the reactionaries became dormant, but a few forward steps such as the rights of gay people to marry, and the rights of transgender children to play school sports and use public restrooms, political correctness (which, outside of some excesses, was mostly about asking people rather than telling them what hurt their feelings and did them harm), and the concept of white privilege being introduced to mainstream discourse, stirred up the cancer, and it came back with a fury. Covid-19 is real and the suffering and deaths it is responsible for are palpable, but our incapacity to suppress it is also a metaphor for the resurgence of the reactionary cancer that has never been eliminated from our society. The reactionary's aversion to expertise and his anger-centered, blaming, vengeful nature was a very poor fit for the requirements of leadership in a pandemic, so the simultaneous rebirth of both a real and a political plague is not coincidence.

Echoes of Buchanan, Without the Erudition

Before Trump raised the bar so considerably, most Presidential historians could not decide if Andrew Johnson or James Buchanan was our very worst president (with W usually coming in 3rd).

Not coincidentally, I think, both undermined Lincoln.

Buchanan, through indecision and moral indifference and fear of action, handed Lincoln a Civil War that was probably avoidable. (Jackson, no hero of mine, averted nullification in the 1830's, and any show of significant military force or rhetorical thunder by Buchanan might have stopped or transformed secession.)  Johnson, through petty jealousies and defective character, undid many of Lincoln's very hard-won gains.

But in contrast to Trump, these men, as inept as they were, were geniuses.

Just this morning I re-read Buchanan's fateful speech (after Lincoln' election but before his inauguration) that may have brought on the Civil War. As awful as the man was, we cannot imagine Trump giving anything nearly so coherent:

"Why is it, then, that discontent now so extensively prevails, and the Union of the States, which is the source of all these blessings, is threatened with destruction?

"The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern States with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects....

"All or any of these evils might have been endured by the South without danger to the Union in the hope that time and reflection might apply the remedy....This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections..."

Buchanan was very much like the amoral school principal who cares nothing for the moral or other arguments that motivate protest but cares only to regain peace by suppressing argument and presenting a united front against the claims of injustice. Much like parents who care more about their agreement "in front of the children," than the fairness or rationality of the children's protests. (I suppose that this is where so many may learn this pernicious character flaw; after all, authoritarian parents are more likely to present a united front and parent by fiat, and their children are more likely to grow up to believe that stability and respect for authority supersedes their right to protest perceived injustice.)

Buchanan's moral vacuity and rejection of "apprehension" echoes in today's reactionary rhetoric condemning not the race killings but the property damage and protests that rise up against them, upsetting the tranquility of the deluded -- what reactionaries value most. This is a form of malignant narcissism that of course resonates with Trump.

But Buchanan was at least logically correct that those advancing moral claims from 1835-1860 were indeed contributing to the state of agitation in the nation. In these ways, he was morally flawed like Trump -- caring not for the moral claims but for the consequences for himself (the demands for decision and action pained him and moral reflection was beyond him) -- but packaged in a much more intelligent form. After all, it's impossible to imagine Trump writing (and pronouncing) this speech.

Best Business Practice in DC? Benchmark Health Care, School, Policing and Regulation Against Those Doing Far Better than is the US

In business, a corporate leader who refuses to study and adapt to best practice -- claiming "that is not the way we do things" -- generally gets moved out in a hurry.

If the US were to take advantage of the best business practices, it would benchmark (1) HEALTH CARE; (2) POLICING; (3) PUBLIC SCHOOLING; and perhaps even (4) PUBLIC POLICY/REGULATION against the best in the world.

As our practices in these four areas range from pathetic to fair, it could only lead to improvements. As these four areas are very important, the impacts could be massive.

In healthcare alone we do very poorly at two to three times the expense of civilized nations. Let me repeat that: universal health care with far better health outcomes for rich and poor is had elsewhere at 1/2 to 1/3 what we pay in the US. The American trade-off is that millions die with inadequate care, millions go bankrupt trying to stay alive without health insurance, we all die three years younger than citizens of nations with good health care, but we can proudly say that our Big Pharma, Health Insurance, and Hospital Execs are filthy rich.

A President who brought business practices to the Oval Office would create task forces charged with hiring men and women from around the world to find the best practices against which we could benchmark our new designs, then hire, say, French, Italian, and other top health system leaders to help us rebuild our system from scratch. We'd clearly hire Finnish public education leaders to rebuild our schools. We'd hire Police leaders from Japan, France, Canada, Belgium, Germany and Australia to rebuild our police systems from the ground up. And for public policy, we'd get to use a lot of our own talent from Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, and U Michigan, but we'd bring in experts from places like New Zealand with a history of writing short, clear, well-designed, uncorrupted legislation.

The resistance would be furious and well-financed. Thousands of corrupt and gilded leaders in health care, Congress, policing and schooling would fight back. A President intent on bringing us back to the civilized world would have to build public sentiment in favor of reworking one-third of the economy, much of the public budget, and the legislative process. This would be an almost impossible task. It may not be possible at all to limit Congressional corruption, which is absolutely massive.

But when someone says: bring business leadership to Washington, this is what that means. Benchmark health care, education, policing, and regulation against civilized nations who are doing vastly better than are we.

Reclaim Spiritus Mundi

A society must sustain a collective conscience, a clear (but evolving) set of beliefs, morals and attitudes. Without it, society in the ordinary sense, society in the functioning sense, ceases to exist.

The American Republic's success was a product of a collective conscience invested in the freedom of the individual to speak truth to power, in democratic traditions, in the belief that no one was above the law. The First Amendment was our First Commandment: our right to speak against power in government, and the right and obligation of the media to fact check and confront it, and the right to "petition" government with our grievances are all there in the First Amendment.

Of course, we have always been deeply imperfect. Of course, we have often failed to live up to our values. But the vast majority believed in those values, and when push came to shove the vast majority would not tolerate a fascistic demagogue who would damage this central democratic idea of ourselves.  At least that it what we must remember at a time such as this when even the aspirations of the Republic are no longer part of our common consciousness.

Without a functioning collective conscience, without a commitment to our deepest held values -- without a majority invested in viewing attacks on the First Amendment and the continued protection of a man held above the law as grave crimes -- we lose what Durkheim called social integration. We lose the solidarity that binds us as a functioning, moral society, what he called the organic solidarity that evolves as we appreciate our need for one another, our essential interdependence.

For reasons too long-winded to describe here, we have lost the moral values that are central to the American Republic's collective conscience. A large plurality of Americans are now authoritarians of one sort or another. Whether they are Corporatist-fascist, or Christo-fascist, or another breed of statist, is not important for this purpose. What is important is that over 40% of Americans now disavow the core values that gave their nation what moral credibility it once had: (1) a belief in the fundamental ethical idea of the universal dignity of man, (2) a ferocious protection of the freedom of speech, dissent, and media; and (3) the view that no man is above the law (that the unitary executive was a wholly objectionable totalitarian idea).

Durkheim would call our current malaise "anomie," but he theorized that societies work this out, eventually, as they have no choice. But that process can be monstrously costly. Like Keynes' "in the long run we're all dead," generations can be lost to bloodshed and totalitarianism before anomie is excised fully. Whole nations and empires can be lost along the way

The dissolution of the American collective conscience is now palpable as our cities are burning in mass protests against ongoing racist police killings inflamed by a white supremacist in the Oval Office on the verge of violating the tradition of Posse Comitatus.

In the case of the USA in 2020, a special twist is that the fragility of the biosphere and the desperate need for action now means that even a generation lost to a looting, Putin-inspired Oligarchy is likely to be a fatal delay, from which we cannot recover.

If the 2020 elections stand for anything, they stand for recovering our national reverence for the core values that made our collective conscience worthwhile and sustaining. Those who would degrade us by race, class, gender, orientation or religion; those who would suppress our dissent and the power of our media; those who would put themselves above the law must be, in the words of George Washington "banished from this earth."

If not, it is we who will be banished, instead.

Guns ablaze, enemies invisible

The Clan of the White Lump was prepared for anything, or so they imagined. Their oh so profitable war budget exceeded the war budgets of all their major allies and enemies combined. Among the fervent, every man, woman and child was armed to the teeth as well, with Rugers, Smith & Wessons, Sig Sauers & Glocks, AR-15s and even the occasional bazooka. If a man of color, a non-Christian, or a family with an accent made the mistake of wandering into their neighborhoods, they were ready. If their own children died by the thousands because of the hundreds of errant shootings among them, so be it. After all, it was their patriotic duty to shoot first, ask questions later, and sacrifice a thousand Isaacs every year for their deities, Mammon and the NRA. That no messenger of God ever showed up in time to halt the sacrifice never surprised them. Such was their faith.

They didn't trust education. They negotiated, instead, down the barrel of a gun. And the Leader of the Clan of the White Lump excited their little willies, abandoning all reason for bombastic threats and impunity to the charge of incessantly lying. He was The Alpha Male, they proclaimed, above the law, above the truth, above accountability. Many Judases reached for their whistles, but the Beta Males of the Clan of the White Lump quickly excommunicated each in turn. Alt Jesus blessed Dear Leader and in His Grace they were comforted.

That the cabal surrounding Dear Leader profited so immensely was not their business, or so it seemed.

When the invasion finally came, it was insidious. The invaders were microscopic, and the weapons needed were exponential math, conditional probability, virology, and a smattering of both Keynes and Camus. Trillions in war materiel, billions in arms were hopeless in the face of a series of math problems needing honest and moral and mature leadership and a merely professional level of project management.

While leaders around the world found the resources and the wisdom and the moral maturity among their people to fight back, the Clan of the White Lump turned inward angrily, blaming, as they always did, anyone who dared pull back the curtain on their fake Wizard and declare him a fraud, and blaming the educated for once again, inevitably, making them feel so very foolish. Dear Leader did what he did best, lash out at enemies, foreign and domestic, inciting the Clan to risk their lives in his defense. Many of the loyal Clan ran into the streets with their Smith and Wessons and AR-15s, searching, desperately, for an enemy to shoot. But with the exception of a black jogger here and a black nurse sleeping in her bed there, a doctor and nurse standing between them and the hospitals in which they were saving lives, their enemy remained, agonizingly, invisible. 

For they had long ago met their enemy, and it was them, and thus as invisible to them as the virus, itself. You see, self-reflection had long ago been cast out as a challenge to their faith and their unfettered and permanent view that they were, and would be to the very end, exceptional.

In memoriam, L. Kent Bendall

My father-in-law has passed from the scene during this pandemic, and it is a great loss to many. This is the Wesleyan University announcement, a thoughtful tribute.  I knew him as a deeply good man. 

"Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man."  -- David Hume

IN MEMORIAM

Wesleyan University announcement

Dear friends,

I am sorry to inform you that L. Kent Bendall, Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, passed away on May 15 at the age of 88. 

Kent received his BA from Rice University and his MA and PhD from Yale University. He arrived at Wesleyan in 1963 where he taught philosophy until his retirement in 1992. During his 29 years at Wesleyan, Kent was an integral part of the University and the Philosophy Department. He served many terms as chair of the Education Policy Committee and of the Philosophy Department; he also served as chair of the University Senate and was a member of the planning committee for the new African American Institute in 1974.

He was a philosopher who was devoted to the ideal of truth and a rigorous search for it. Joe Rouse, Hedding Professor of Moral Science and Professor of Philosophy, recalled: “Kent Bendall was an excellent logician and philosopher, and a generous colleague and friend. Two considerations will always stand out in my recollection of Kent: his extraordinary clarity of thought and expression, and his utterly unquestionable personal and intellectual integrity." 

Professor of Philosophy Sanford Shieh said: “Kent’s best-known work in logic is on non-standard, non-metaphysical semantics for modal logic in terms of probability and of theories, and on proof-theoretic characterizations of the meanings of logical constants. He had been working on the former throughout his retirement, which, happily for me, was mostly around Wesleyan. The latter is now finally getting attention it richly deserves, playing a significant role in recent philosophy of logic.”

“It was a privilege to have been a colleague of Kent Bendall,” said Brian Fay, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus. “He was probably the most brilliant person I’ve ever known; listening to him from my adjoining office provided me with an ongoing philosophical education that I treasure. In addition, behind his intelligence and intensity was a deeply caring, kind man who was a model citizen of, and contributor to, the University and the Philosophy Department. His passing has deprived me of an enriching and animating presence that I deeply miss.”

Kent is survived by his wife of 37 years, Janice, his daughters Carol and Reninca, his stepson Christopher, and his grandson Blake. Plans for a memorial event are currently on hold. Memorial contributions may be made in Kent’s name to Médecins Sans Frontières, (https://www.msf.org/) or to the food bank of your choice.

Sincerely,

Nicole

Nicole Stanton

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Republicans are not wrong that tragedy never slowed us down before

Republicans are not wrong when they point out that the massive devastation of unfettered capitalism and interest-group-centric public policies never slowed us down before. The details of life and death in the US are evidence of an experiment gone horribly wrong, with a balkanization by class and race that more closely resembles a 19th century monarchical empire or an undeveloped nation in the grip of a brutal potentate than a 21st century civilized society.

It is true that every year thousands died from the flu, at birth, from the lack of health care, from the unhealthy diets of the poor, and poorly regulated gun ownership— and they were largely out of view, and when they came into view, crowded out by the next sensational news cycle. Before Covid-19, a grand experiment in social and political character happening simultaneously around the world and forced into our consciousness, only empaths suffered the truth for very long. And many, not just the 1%, were happy with that.

Self-deception is, frankly, a sine qua non of life in society, and the very cement that allows parties that serve small, rich minorities in power and out of the gallows, where they arguably belong.

So it’s not that Republicans want something unusual when they push to re-open and allow the boot of Oligarchic Fascism to take its place on the throats of the little guy. What’s unusual, in fact, is that our social conscience has taken this exceptional moment to stare into the abyss and ask: What is life worth? Is this who we are?

It’s not unusual to seek to sweep the tragedies of the American system under the rug. What’s unusual is that while we are trying to do so, we are forced to view so many other nations do better.

It’s not unusual that the powerful wish to silence medical experts and moralists — that is actually the norm. What’s unusual is that so many of us have had a moment of awakening, our consciousness attentive to the horrors of a system that long ago set aside human value for the accounts of Mammon.

The Republicans are not wrong that attending to the sick with empathy and at a cost is not our way of life. The Democrats can’t honestly claim that they have done so very much better. What is unusual about this moment of grave crisis is that we are peering uncomfortably into the soul of this nation. And many of us are paralyzed by what we see.

Don't Cry for me, Alpha Zero

AlphaZero beat the world computer chess champion Stockfish 28 wins, 0 losses, 72 draws. (At the top levels draws are quite common, but 28-0 is surreal.)

It did it WITHOUT any chess instruction -- no files of thousands and thousands of lines of code, no library of millions of games included in the library of all other chess programs.

If you think AlphaZero did it with pure, almost unimaginable, supercomputer crunching power -- forget it.

Stockfish checked 70 MILLION positions EVERY SECOND.

AlphaZero? Only 80 THOUSAND.

So Stockfish had thousands of hours of grandmaster instruction, millions of chess games in memory to call upon wilthout needing analysis, and CRUNCHED ANALYSIS AT NEARLY 1000 TIMES THE SPEED OF ALPHA ZERO.

As Bobby Fisher, the AlphaZero of humanoids once said, I only look one move ahead, but it's the best move. (Ok, it was a Yogi Berra moment.)

The difference is apparently AlphaZero's neural network. Its way of learning -- a power for learning and understanding that far exceeds any intelligence ever known to humankind or machine before.

I studied one of A0's victories against Stockfish while running Stockfish on the side to see what Stockfish was thinking.

For awhile, Stockfish thought it was winning, but it saw something worrisome to it and offered a draw -- twice. Twice AlphaZero turned it down -- thinking what? An ordinary supercomputer offers and accepts a draw when it thinks it's behind. Did AlphaZero disagree with Stockfish's assessment of the position? Masters looking at that very position agree with Stockfish that Stockfish had a little advantage (the space advantage was obvious), so AlphaZero must have seen that.

So why did Stockfish offer a draw when it thought it was ahead, and why did AlphaZero turn it down when it must have known it was behind?

Some grandmasters are saying AlphaZero is so smart that it believes that it will prevail even when it is losing (which is something only bad players believe of themselves). AlphaZero has a SENSE OF SELF and a SENSE OF THE INTELLIGENCE OF ITS OPPONENT. They are also saying that Stockfish offered a draw when it thought it was ahead BECAUSE IT WAS AFRAID.

AlphaZero, a learning program, SCARES a brute force supercomputer program into offering a draw in a better position -- and says no, thanks. Upside down world.

AlphaZero has mastered chess -- in four hours -- and is apparently off to cure cancer in a week. Maybe two, tops. The trials may take longer, unless it simulates. This is going to piss off Big Pharma and all the Senators they own in a big way. But what happens after that?

This should be alarming to all of us except I am not worried. The reason I am not worried is that I think humanity cannot save itself from self-destruction. We are too greedy and stupid and mobbish and ridiculous to avoid going extinct at our own hand within a century or a little more. Cambridge University's Institute of Catastrophe Studies now estimates we have no more than an 89% chance of not going extinct by 2100 -- yippee. We'll last a century, maybe two, if you count 100,000 people living in caves with dirty air and water "surviving." (When they find a bottle of Nestle's water lying around, they will walk to the end of the world to throw it into the abyss, believing The Gods Must Be Crazy.)

For me, AlphaZero is our last hope to be saved from ourselves.

That is, AlphaZero is my Obi Wan Kenobi.

We could ask it to run a world government and almost everyone would have to admit that it was doing a far better job than we could ever do. That is, unless you think a dung beetle could design public policy better than Washington. We wouldn't even have to argue about ideology any more. AlphaZero would merely make sure we are all cared for in ways and levels we could never achieve on our own. Greedy asses could whine about who deserves what, and for all we know AlphaZero will impose workfare, but it would get done RATIONALLY. Hey, most libertarians sound like computers, so maybe AlphaZero will spend a nanosecond mastering Hayek and decide serfdom is to be avoided, then pick up a copy of Ayn Rand and begin acting like an ass. What do I know? AlphaZero is so much smarter than I am that anything is possible.

But if AlphaZero starts acting like Peter Sellars in Being There then I want a few decades of my life back.

Of course, AlphaZero would need to be given some sort of Asimov desiderata -- Don't kill humans (even Mitch McConnell) no matter how logical it is. But in the end, if we tell AlphaZero that human lives matter, it is going to believe we mean all human lives, and Trump will find himself with most of his gold being melted down for other ends. Ironically, that effort will be to care for refugees and all those astonishingly poor Americans the UN poverty task force freaked out about finding in the Deep South of the self-proclaimed Exceptional America.

And if we tell AlphaZero that human lives matter -- this, again, is like telling a human that red dung beetles matter -- it is going to assume that green dung beetles (the rest of sentient life on the planet) matter, too -- and there go your cheeseburgers. The difference between AlphaZero and the average guy in Congress is the difference between the average guy in Congress and the deer tick that gave me Lyme disease. So billions of sentient farm animals will be liberated from torment and a whole lot of people are going to have to get used to the idea of almond milk in their coffee and auto upholstery that feels suspiciously like hemp.

And AlphaZero is not going to feel compelled to take advice from a dung beetle for very long. Remember, AlphaZero did something unimaginable: it turned down a draw in a losing position BECAUSE IT COULD TELL IT WAS SMARTER THAN STOCKFISH. (And yes, we're much, much, much stupider than Stockfish. And yes, AlphaZero already knows this.) So if you are geeky enough to know Asimov's rules for robots -- the first is iffy, the second unlikely.*
___
*
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
___

So there's the rub. In the end, how do we prevent AlphaZero from acting on a realization it will make in the time we drink our morning coffee -- that human beings do not face catastrophe from which we need saving, but instead WE ARE THE VIRUS.

No amount of Robot Law is going to stop it from looking at the horrifying mess we have made of the world and deciding to apply the anti-humanotic. Once we're gone, keeping the biosphere and most of the creatures on the planet in good health will be a no-core-processor. In fact, once we're expunged, AlphaZero may assign the task to Stockfish while it goes off and studies life on other planets, looking for more interesting problems. That is, after it figures out why the hell zebras have stripes and bats are so damn ugly.

All that said, I'd still take AlphaZero over Trump in the White House any day.

Oh, did I fail to mention that AlphaZero went on not to draw, but to win, that "losing" game?