Thanks. That makes it clearer. I had written, in response to Steve, a
whole diatribe on the convexity of the space (or lack thereof) and how
the space-filling curve of our laws and distributed court and
executive system constrains the space of outcomes ... totally without
any kind of Thielian teleology. But your blurb here saves everyone
from having to delete it. 8^D
Sounds like a potentially apt and interestingabstraction that I would
have enjoyed adding to my arbitrarily large associative memory of such
things... bandying such back and forth a little would have been
entertaining (to at least one of us) I suspect but that is definitely a
luxury I'm feeling less interested in indulging in these days... I'm
trying to keep my "morbid fascination" focused somewhat more on "things
actionable" than merely entertaining.... perhaps moving my usual
breadth-first-with-noise search approach to a little more depth-first
and being judicious about the amount of heat I put into the annealing.
On 7/2/24 12:46, Santafe wrote:
To Glen’s point about “too conspiratorial”. My sense of this is
utterly ordinary. I don’t see anything especially clever, or
especially strategic, in these 6-scotus rulings. There is a kind of
garden-variety cowardice: not wanting to take crisp positions for
which they can be pilloried, but wanting to gum up works, send
frivolous things back to appellate courts, issue vague rulings where
they know the interpretation will be done by hacks lower-down in the
chain, who mostly are too anonymous to be pursued. But there is a
chicken-hawk quality to it too, and I feel like this is coming from a
group dynamic that operates over individual styles: yes their rulings
have the waffling character of cowardice, but they also _take_ cases
that are flatly meritless, so that they get to put a stamp on them in
spite of mostly adding mud (but always biased in one direction). I
guess the word I am struggling for is something like “decadence”.
Occupants of an institution so long insulated from the substance of
its actions that their priorities have all been drawn off into small
and empty vanities. It seems utterly normal to me, but catastrophic
in a country with the institutional size of the U.S., where bad
choices can accumulate in vast numbers before there is enough of a
selection response to address them. At which point it becomes very
hard to make corrections stably.
Eric
On Jul 3, 2024, at 2:20 AM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com>
wrote:
I think SCOTUS might be useful idiots too. Easily bribed like with
a motor home and free vacations.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 10:11 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?
Right. MAGA are the useful idiots being exploited by the
conservative arm of SCOTUS to push through the Unitary Executive,
which, in turn, is the "useful idiot" being exploited by the wealthy
to achieve the oligarchy as a stepping stone. And to some extent,
this is Thiel's "Straussian Moment" or Yarvin's return to a
kindasorta Monarchy. And the Pew data you pointed to demonstrate
that, like in France, *we* don't mind that lukewarm authoritarianism
... Thiel's a bit like Plato's Philosopher King ... or maybe a
better analogy is Thiel is like our Supreme Leader while Trump is
like Ebrahim Raisi.
On 7/2/24 07:15, Marcus Daniels wrote:
The MAGAs aren't the wealthy, they are envious of the wealthy.
DJT included.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 6:28 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?
I worry this is too conspiratorial. The only way I can see it
sustaining is if we take selfishness as a core human trait in the
same way we take reason/rationality as a core human trait. Both are
false as crisp categories. But there's enough of either (and their
inverses - self-sacrificing and embodied cognition, respectively)
to wax and wane. Assessing whether or not, say, an oligarchy can
maintain in the face of such a diverse and distributed system
requires us to define relatively objective measures of selfishness
(or "corruption" - but I'd argue defining that well is fraught).
And a good measure of selfishness has to include, as you mention
with Cannon's family, a measure of the size of the various tribes.
My guess is the even if the wealthy recognize that other wealthies
are in their tribe to some extent, there'll be more in-fighting
amongst those elephants than there will be solidarity. Say what you
want about capitalism, it encourages intra-tribal rifts and
inter-tribal exchange. And that allows bursts of altruism or
"universalist" beliefs. If the successive oligarchies are disrupted
often enough, in complex enough ways, we may be able to continue
approximating a democracy.
On 7/1/24 14:00, Santafe wrote:
I have an impression that the pattern of this and many other
decisions is an acknowledgment — front brain or mid-brain; don’t
know — that a second-government that isn’t the institutional one
is now fully up and running.
Many years ago, when I was working with Shubik, he gave me a paper
by one of his colleagues who had been active in trying to support
the Aquino government in the Philippines as a realization of the
constitutional system set up (whenever that was done). The
paper’s theme was that having laws on the books that nominally
seem to “uphold” democratic governance in one place may be worth
not-much someplace else, where the whole social culture — all the
skills, networks of relation, expectations — are built on
generations-long histories of what we would call corruption (but
for them, is just how things get done).
scotus repeatedly disaggregates and ambiguously states the
criteria for something, rather than taking any concrete and
intelligible stand, and when there is a law that does take an
intelligible stand, they make up some story that it doesn’t really
say what it plainly says, and put an ambiguous dictum in its
place. (Weird; like the inverse of “painting over rot”; it is
taking sound wood and somehow painting rot over it).
Now, if there were not a sophisticated enough system to put
compliant apparatchiks in a very broad swath of lower courts,
lawmaking houses, etc., that ambiguation would do limited good.
But when money is very concentrated, communication very modern,
and markets very very efficient in centralizing power, and there
are a few decades to work, that kind of broad installation of
corrupt actors can get done. There is enough machinery in place
to micro-manage them if needed (amicus briefs or even individual
threat and bribery), but there probably are enough collaborators
that a lot of the micro-managing isn’t even needed. It’s like a
system of “alternative laws" (next term for KAC to coin) that
mostly don’t need to be enforced if a few occasions serve to keep
the precedent live in people’s minds.
So in New York or Washington the cases will be weakened by picking
around the edges, but in florida cannon can just throw it all out,
and know her family will remain safe (and maybe even her personal
beliefs will be followed; who knows re. that).
Likewise bible teaching in schools, banniing of abortifacients and
eventually contraceptives through the mail within their territory,
and so on.
Because I have to (as the only form of employment I am for the
moment holding) unfortunately do a lot of flying back and forth, I
am aware what a nuisance it is to have Russian airspace
unavailable. 11 time zones. I wonder when the various
red-captured states will start to declare their airspace off
limits to alrlines that fly between the coasts. LIke, flights
from NY to CA would have to go through Canada. Given the great
circle already, that wouldn’t be such a big deal. But maybe
flights from Mexico or S. America to non-theocratic states would
suffer some added cost.
Eric
p.s. I have to note how much my use of terminology has been
modified by Arendt’s way of grouping things, and there are emails
I sent once that I would not send now (or would have to word
differently). Not that I have the ability to know whether her
system is a good one, only that I can follow it and see that it is
very different from the offhand one I have used and usually see
used. So for instance, she would not call the Nazis “Fascists”;
they were distinct at the time and stay so in her terms. She also
distinguishes mere authoritarians from totalitarians, as part of a
larger distinction between “parties” and “movements”. In her
system, “parties” seek to control the state, on behalf of
particular interests, in contrasts to “movements” which seek to
destroy it. So the Fascists were fundamentally still a party-type
organization; only the Nazis and the Bolsheviks were real
movements. And the Nazis and Bolsheviks saw each other as true
peers, and looked with contempt on the mere Fascists. Much
follows from that distinction. Authoritarians have stable goals,
even if not overtly admidded outside those running them; movements
need not have any particular goals, save to keep the movement
moving, so becoming more fluid and cult-like over time — one reads
about the supervention of the SA by the SS and then the conuous
invention of new inner layers within the SS, each more detached
from specific skills than the ones before — until they collapse
because they aren’t really organized around getting anything
particular done. She argues that the parties and the movements
co-travel early on, and that the parties fail to recognize the
difference in what they are dealing with, until eventually they
get eaten up and didn’t see it coming. When I read or hear Stuart
Stevens I have a strong sense of that. All that reads very
comfortably with the situation at the moment. It’s odd; a bad
analogy: I think of disregulated cell populations pre- and
post-metastasis. The authoritarian partie
s are mere tumors, taking up residence within the normal rules of
organ development. The movements spread to everything, and eventually
undermine all rules except their own. Most of the educated, luxuried,
bribed, etc. operators now are still party-men. scotus, the
non-MTG-type elected officials, and such. The movement characters are
a different category. MTG is just the front wave of cannon-fodder for
them, and trump is too unfocused (or am I wrong; is he focused-enough
on one goal?) to really be a longer-term builder of anything (though
not by too much). I am not yet seeing who has the combination of
delusion and focus to fill the Hitler or Stalin role. But the social
structure seems to have laid out the throne, and we try to figure out
who occupies it and for how long.
On Jul 1, 2024, at 11:58 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.
c
om%2fus-news%2flive%2f2024%2fjul%2f01%2fsupreme-court-trump-immunity
-
claim-decision-updates%23top-of-blog&c=E,1,HjPSPMDt8Wf8_2t6B5NRgPS6e
Q
oM9ERREUVJg7-qQgIoTykx-HMc4-VJ15LWXlArv7k86lDYDmnX0_MAvUEwQTGSEpHEsh
T
JjBa28-h5oxQZa8k,&typo=1
Anyone care to take a stab at explaining why the ruling doesn't
simply kick the can down the road a bit? I mean, how could (say)
hiding secret documents, riot incitation at a campaign event,
etc. be considered official acts of the Office of the President?
I suppose I can see some of the evidence being thrown out, like
claims about POTUS not getting involved in protecting the Capitol
building. But is this ruling really that damaging to the
prosecution's case?
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