Burying the Randian fantasy

I don't know if Ayn Rand's overwrought and overlong works still command respect anywhere but if they do, it's because her acolytes haven't been willing to look at the U.S. lately. And by "lately", I mean the last six or seven years.

In that time a self-proclaimed billionaire skillfully fed and rode a wave of nativism and racism into the U.S. presidency, while a verified billionaire impulsively offered to buy one of the highest-profile social media platforms, then was compelled by the courts to follow through on the offer even though he had a ton of buyer's remorse.

Rand in Atlas Shrugged envisioned the rich industrialists of her time losing patience with the deadweight they supported through their taxes and their factories. They would wall themselves off in their own little enclave where their work ethic would let them achieve greatness while the rest of the world went to hell. The message: the productive — as reflected by wealth — should be allowed to do as they pleased; only thus would paradise be achieved.

"President" Donald Trump — the quotation marks signify his all but total abdication of the responsibilities of the office, even as he availed himself of its privileges and powers — achieved exactly three things in office. He enabled the Republican-controlled Senate's installation of many federal judges; he enabled a Republican Congress' enacting of a massive tax cut whose benefits went overwhelmingly to the wealthy; and he somehow managed to oversee the creation of Operation Warp Speed, bringing us vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in hitherto unimaginably short time. I doubt he had any significant involvement in any of these things but he signed off on them, which was all that was legally required and all he was fit to do. Otherwise, his administration and he personally were mired in corruption, mismanagement, and lies from the moment he took office. His reelection bid was repudiated by the voting public. However, his post-presidency finds him wielding a massive segment of the population, actively hostile to institutions and facts and given to cult-like worship of him, like a rusty scalpel, infecting the country with toxic divisiveness and disinformation, corroding the foundations of democracy itself.

That's what happened when we let a rich man occupy the presidency: he remade our society for the worse.

However, Trump inherited his wealth and arguably has accomplished nothing in his life except becoming a savvy marketer of his family name. He isn't a rugged, no-nonsense industrialist of the sort Rand lionized; he didn't build anything from his own genius and turn it into a massively successful business. Rand would probably have consigned him to the bleating, unworthy masses exiled from her utopia of builders.

Elon Musk, on the surface, is different. He didn't inherit his money, he made it by running companies like PayPal and Tesla. He's reputed to be a smart man. (No one who has ever worked for or with Trump would say that about him.) His companies have created products that millions use; indeed, PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX can be said to have revolutionized their industries. (Trump's businesses have made nothing. Well, they've made him rich.)

Yet Musk isn't a great boss, by all accounts. He can be inspirational, yes, but he can be abusive almost to the point of illegality, too.

He also shares with Trump an apparently bottomless need for ego-stroking, a surprisingly thin skin, and a penchant for punishing his supposed enemies, including by turning his fanatical supporters against them. Musk's and Trump's thin skins also don't stop them from cruelly taunting others; apparently neither has ever heard the aphorism not to dish it out if you can't take it. (They're also comfortable with accommodating racism to a degree I find despicable but for this analysis that's a tangent.)

So it's no surprise to find that Musk, now sole proprietor of Twitter, is using his unfettered power there to reshape it in his image. His latest stunt (after he cashiered or drove off more than half the company's labor force and reinstated notorious trolls and disseminators of disinformation like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene) was to suspend the accounts of those who crossed him in some way. They included an account that reported the location of his private jet and accounts belonging to journalists who have been critical of him at times.

As of today he has reinstated some but not all of them based on one of his silly Twitter polls. "The people have spoken", he wrote, as if he were just "the people's" instrument.

That's how the man who was once the world's richest is spending his days. It's not exactly the kind of hard, creative, world-improving work Rand envisioned. Nothing Musk is doing at Twitter looks like it will encourage the kind of free speech that improves society. Rather, he's encouraging humanity's vilest instincts while trying to monetize the hell out of the company while he can.

Rand, I suspect, wouldn't have minded Trump's assault on democracy. I think she had authoritarian instincts and disdained "the people"; certainly she didn't think they should run things.

However, she would be embarrassed by how petty and self-sabotaging Trump and Musk are. They aren't the avatars of human progress she made out society's wealthiest to be. They're just extraordinarily flawed men (unusually devoid of empathy, by the way, rather like I imagine Rand was) who lucked into wealth (Elon didn't found his most successful companies, remember) and used that wealth to accumulate power. What they did with that power has been disastrous not just for "the people" Rand disdained, but more importantly, for themselves. Trump invited unprecedented scrutiny of his finances, scrutiny he'd avoided before his foray into politics. (He has always been a scofflaw but before 2015 regulators and the public largely didn't care.) Musk has seen his wealth, concentrated in Tesla stock, evaporate as the stock has been hammered since his takeover of Twitter.

These two rich men were given a lot of power. They have used it so badly that most of us would rather they just went away.

Ayn Rand's paradise run by rich people is as unserious a fantasy as any ever written. The trouble is, a lot of people who take themselves seriously, like former Congresscritter Paul Ryan, take her fantasy seriously, too.

Well, we tried it in the real world, and it has been a catastrophe. Time for even true believers to give it up and consign Rand to history's landfill.

The limits of startup culture

Elon Musk has only owned Twitter for two weeks. Given his spectacular success at Tesla and SpaceX, I'd be a fool to count him or Twitter out over the long haul. I loathe his public persona and what I know of his management methods but he has made both work for him at a business level.

Nevertheless, what he has done to and with Twitter in his two-week ownership stint is kind of sublimely moronic.

Anybody can have an idea to whose shortcomings he's blind. That's why most of us chew over the idea for a while, and/or discuss it with others, before we throw ourselves into making it happen.

When you're the world's richest man, though, and you own a business outright, you can put your pet uncooked idea into effect with a snap of your fingers. Constantly being hailed online as a genius also apparently dulls your sense of caution, the hard-won knowledge the rest of us have that we can and will make mistakes when we move too fast and don't think clearly enough.

"Move fast and break things" is a motto credited to Mark Zuckerberg. It's a natural follow-on to another risk-taking motto, "It's better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission". I've worked in bureaucracies and I get the appeal of both ideas.

I can also say, I've worked in bureaucracies and I've had to clean up after brash idiots who broke things they didn't understand and therefore weren't competent to fix when the breakage caused others to suffer.

Musk, like so many tech bros, is infatuated with himself and the "obvious" correctness of his own vision. What's worse, he has a proven track record of achievements and a cheering section that I can only call terrifyingly loyal. (His online supporters act like a bully's henchmen.)

Tech bro-dom is way, way, way overestimated as an expression of genius, especially by the bros. What's far worse, though, is that its culture elevates not giving a shit about other people to practically a holy commandment.

What Musk has demonstrated in his brief stint as Twitter's sole proprietor is the limit of startup culture, of tech bro-dom, as an operating philosophy. He can move fast and break things but he can't force everyone to stay in the building while he whacks at the foundations.

He has tried, to be sure, threatening to "name and shame" advertisers who have "paused" their advertising on Twitter until the long-term picture becomes clearer. That doesn't mean he'll get them all back on board, though. His pettiness isn't charming and it isn't a desirable trait in a CEO or business owner. Arrogance, which he also has in immeasurable quantity, isn't well-tolerated either, unless it's crowned with success.

If Twitter doesn't regain its footing under Musk, it will be because of his shortcomings as a manager and as a human being.

Latest question for Judge Cannon

Judge Aileen Cannon denied DOJ's request to exempt the classified documents DOJ identified in the materials removed from Mar-a-Lago from review by the special master.

Judge Cannon, in this latest decision you explicitly declared that Donald Trump is more trustworthy in your eyes than the Department of Justice. You prefer to believe Trump's uncorroborated and flatly nonsensical assertions that the documents in question could be unclassified, rather than the expert judgment of DOJ and FBI staffers that the documents are classified.

You're willing to let not only the special master you just appointed review these documents (which has no precedent because it's a terrible idea), but Trump's attorneys as well. Trump's attorneys, who, last I checked, did not have security clearances at all, much less clearances at the extraordinarily high levels that would be needed to review these documents if they were government workers.

So here's my question to you, Judge Cannon:

Why the fuck are you endangering our national security by granting access to even potentially highly sensitive documents to whoever the fuck Trump hires as his latest legal representative?

Actually, I have a second question which might be even more important:

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Here's where you stand. You are so fucking indifferent to national security that you're okay with obliging Trump far beyond the ethics of your profession. (Admittedly it's a profession to which you're extremely new, but you're not that new to it.) You're also playing fast and loose with information so sensitive, it led to an ongoing damage assessment.

The people who worry about national security are uniformly scared about what might have happened. Yet you aren't.

So again, what the fuck is wrong with you?

You're not just a Trump toady any more. You're now a threat to our national security — because you're so fucking willing to middle-finger the government, just to show your patron that your priority is what he wants rather than justice.

Judge Cannon erred

Judge Aileen Cannon unexpectedly threw a wrench into the Justice Department's criminal investigation of Donald Trump by ordering the appointment of a special master to sift through the documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022.

I went over the sequence of events that led up to the FBI's execution of a search warrant that day. Surprisingly, further revelations on an almost daily basis since then have not contradicted that basic timeline. Rather, they've only deepened the public's understanding of the reasons the Justice Department was driven to the extraordinary step of seeking a warrant against a former president of the United States.

An indisputable, well-documented fact at the heart of the investigation is, Trump repeatedly lied. He lied first to the National Archives and Records Administration, then to DOJ, by pretending on multiple occasions to comply with each organization's requests for the return of all documents that by law belong to the government, not to him. That's why DOJ had to keep returning to Mar-a-Lago and on each visit found more documents he illegally retained.

Trump has kept lying to the public, claiming variously that he declassified documents automatically (a claim all but two of his advisers will not substantiate and which, in any case, is not borne out by the documents themselves, which bear none of the legally required marks indicating they've been properly declassified) or simply that the documents rightly belong to him.

That latter claim is, to repeat, a lie. Nearly every document a president touches during his time in office is the property of the U.S. government. That's because the president is not a king, he is a public servant, like every other elected official, and what his administration produces belongs to the people.

Trump's lies have been in service of delegitimizing DOJ's criminal investigation of his mishandling of these illegally held documents. Now Judge Cannon has supported Trump's subversive campaign with her indefensible order.

She spends pages emphasizing that an ex-president is not a typical target of a criminal investigation, solemnly invoking the need to bend over backwards to ensure the appearance of justice in pursuing such an atypical target. She all but accuses the Justice Department of misconduct and treats Trump as a respectable figure for whom "reputational damage" looms large.

Her concern for his reputation is laughable. Remember, the world first learned of the FBI's 8 August entry to Mar-a-Lago from Donald Trump. He, not DOJ, attracted all the public attention.

However, that's a relatively minor defect of Cannon's bonkers decision. The much bigger problem with her order is that she bends over backwards to treat Trump with overweening deference neither he nor any ex-president deserves — certainly not when the ex-president has exhibited the bad faith Trump has.

The facts are clear. NARA and then DOJ did their level best to get Trump to comply with the law voluntarily and without undue publicity. He illegally kept hundreds of documents despite multiple attempts to gain his voluntary cooperation. Some of those documents seem to have been incredibly sensitive and their disclosure to other nations could be incredibly damaging to national security.

Judge Cannon's order disregards these outrageous and undisputed facts in favor of protecting hypothetical "rights" or "privileges" of an ex-president that the law does not recognize.

Judge Cannon doesn't state a single reason why an ex-president might legitimately claim "executive privilege" (which is understood to be the province of the current president, consistent with the idea that the privilege belongs to the office, not to its occupants individually). She merely asserts that such a claim might exist.

I can claim dragons might exist. For that to mean anything to you, though, you'd expect me to explain why. Since Judge Cannon can't be bothered to explain herself, the rest of us need not give her assertion any credence.

Even if we did, why should we deem that possibility more important than the possibility that Trump was engaged in criminal misconduct? That's exactly what Cannon does, in defiance of the balance of evidence for each — a lot of evidence for criminal misconduct, no evidence that anything Trump illegally retained somehow "belongs" to him rather than to the presidency by virtue of an unexplained "executive privilege" belonging to an ex-president.

Cannon also prioritizes the attorney-client privilege of a criminal investigation's presumed target above the national security of the United States, by putting the evidence the Office of the Director of National Intelligence needs to conduct its damage assessment in the hands of a special master. How can she expect the ODNI to share control of evidence with a third party whose mission is to remove any items from that evidence that the third party deems improperly seized? If the ODNI deems an item crucial to its damage assessment, can the special master nevertheless remove it from consideration by returning it to Trump? (Cannon's order is silent on any such conflict.) Moreover, according to a former general counsel for the FBI, the ODNI damage assessment requires assistance from the very DOJ and FBI officials whom the order forbids to review the evidence pending the completion of the special master's work!

Speaking of the special master, Judge Cannon's order totally disregards the extraordinary difficulty of finding suitable candidates. The special master in this case must be expert not just in attorney-client privilege but in executive privilege, and must have the highest security clearances or be qualified to receive them where they can only be given on a discretionary basis. Judge Cannon's disregard of the difficulty of finding a special master with these qualifications is a dereliction of her duty to safeguard the government's, and thus the public's, rights.

(By the way, that "attorney-client privilege" business raises an awkward question: why would Trump have so much attorney work product at his residence? Moreover, why would that attorney work product be intermingled with "souvenirs" from his presidency? I find it hard to believe either is normal, even for an ex-president.)

Finally, Judge Cannon suggests that both DOJ and the FBI treated Trump disrespectfully. She was bothered by the fact that the FBI allegedly seized items that it should not have, items of an indisputably personal nature. (The best-known were a couple of Trump's passports.) My understanding is that seizing items not actually covered by a search warrant is not unheard of while executing one; the mistakes are understood to have been made in good faith unless there's clear evidence of misconduct. Trump has not provided a scintilla of evidence that any misconduct occurred. By all appearances he was treated like any other investigative target, no better and no worse.

Trump was told precisely what he should not have kept from his time in office. He had ample time in which to sort those items out from his personal possessions: after all, he (illegally) had those materials for over eighteen months! If, when the FBI executed its search warrant, his personal possessions were still intermingled with those illegally retained materials (and were thus subject to seizure by the terms of the search warrant, an awkward fact Trump ignores), whose fault is that?

Judge Cannon's order rewards Trump for being a slob and a hoarder and for disregarding the plain terms of communications from NARA and DOJ, while it simultaneously ignores the terrifying danger to our national security that his disregard for the law and proper security presented (and may still present if he has more documents, or copies of the ones already removed).

Her order also rewards Trump's amply-demonstrated bad faith during this saga by treating him as if he presented clean hands and honest assertions. Indeed, her order is so inexplicably deferential to him and so heedless of his demonstrated misconduct that it calls into question her own faithfulness to the oath she took when she became a federal judge.

Without a signed confession, I can't say Judge Cannon's a zealot who was determined from the start to favor Trump no matter what. What I can say is, she erred. She erred egregiously, and to her everlasting discredit as a jurist.

[EDITED: I toned down the likely exaggeration of "thousands" of documents and "many" of them being sensitive. I also word-smithed other spots and added a citation for my assertion that the ODNI's assessment needs DOJ assistance.]

Trump, the national security threat

Donald Trump illegally kept records from his time as president.

Worse, after the National Archives discovered his illegal retention and he was asked nicely to hand the records over, he turned over some but not all of them. He could and should have turned over everything, but he didn't.

He has no defense for illegally retaining records. He has no defense for failing to comply in full with the Archives' polite request.

What he has is a manifest pattern of disregarding his obligations under the law.

The Department of Justice learned he still illegally held records and, understandably, the department could have little confidence he would comply fully with another "request". The only way to ensure that the records made their way back to their legally authorized custodians was for the federal government to take charge of the work.

The government first had to get permission from a federal judge. No federal judge will be eager to authorize a warrant for the FBI to enter the home of a former president. The government has to provide a hell of a good reason, or reasons. Evidently, it did.

That's the backstory for the FBI entering Mar-a-Lago under the terms of a search warrant.

In response to the FBI search (and resulting seizure of multiple boxes of documents), Trump has claimed either that he declassified any or all of the classified records he held or that there was no need for FBI agents to barge in and search, he would have been happy to comply with a request.

Trump's claims are nonsensical.

First, I very much doubt that declassifying something automatically and by itself gives even an ex-president the right to keep it. There are all kinds of unclassified records to which a private citizen has no right of access. As a private citizen an ex-president ought to have no right to have someone else's FBI file or Social Security number, for instance. So even if everything he held was declassified, he still almost certainly didn't have a right to keep it all.

Second, declassification doesn't just happen with a snap of a president's finger. As Asha Rangappa, Norman L. Eisen, and Bradley P. Moss explain in a detailed and careful piece for Just Security, declassification only takes effect after a careful and deliberate process:

If Trump did in fact order the declassification, he still needed to make sure his staff took the necessary next steps to modify the classification markings on the documents before he could actually handle and store the records (as a private citizen) as if they were unclassified. Under security classification rules, a classification marking on a document has to be treated as valid and binding unless and until a subsequent marking replaces it. Appropriate government staffers would have needed to cross out the classification markings in the headers and footers, and stamped “declassified” on the record noting when it was declassified, by whom and under what authority. Since that does not appear to have been done with the classified documents reportedly identified to date, the documents remain classified and had to be treated as classified for handling and storage purposes.

No matter what Trump claims, if the documents he held didn't go through the process described above, the documents remained classified. If they remained classified, he had no legal right to hold them since he is no longer president. (Even while president it would have been illegal to hold those records at Mar-a-Lago unless the resort had the right secure facilities. It's not clear that Mar-a-Lago did.)

As for Trump's plaint that all anyone had to do was to ask for the records the FBI found and seized, he doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

No honest, patriotic, and law-abiding person who attains the presidency will leave office believing he or she has a right to the records that cross the Resolute Desk; legal counsel will make clear that the law prohibits that. At most, one might imagine that personal notes of no consequence to the nation could be retained, and even that decision would have to be vetted by qualified experts.

Trump didn't hold onto just a couple of notes with sentimental value, either. The first round of records recovery from Mar-a-Lago in January netted fifteen boxes of documents. He showed no sense of responsibility, no sense of his obligation to the country by holding onto so much material he knew he had to right to keep.

It turned out that wasn't even all the material he had. Yet another DOJ visit in June sought (and got) the "voluntary" return of yet more records.

This time, though, Trump swore that was all he had. The New York Times reports that a Trump lawyer "signed a written statement in June [after the DOJ visit] asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government".

It's clear from the NYT piece, which lays out the history of the interactions between the Trump team and DOJ, that the government tried repeatedly to get Trump to cooperate voluntarily.

So when it became clear he still illegally held records after the June visit, it also became clear that he could not be trusted to comply with the law on his own.

His most ardent supporters will say he made a mistake. While that's hard to believe given what we know, it doesn't matter if they're right because it doesn't matter why he didn't return everything when informed of his "mistake" months ago. The bottom line is, he didn't, and neither the law nor the public is required to give him unlimited at-bats. It was time for the professionals to get the job done.

For the umpteenth time, let me ask ardent Trump supporters to picture a different scenario. Suppose Barack Obama had been found to hold dozens of boxes of sensitive and classified information from his time in office in his basement. When asked nicely to return them, he only sent back about half. Multiple followup visits revealed more material each time. Would you be willing to extend to him the courtesy of asking nicely forever? Of course not. You'd assume that he willfully failed to comply. Ex-president or no, you'd have no patience for an apparent willful disregard for the law.

(Trump, incidentally, has made the incendiary claim that Obama did take a ton of records, illegally, when he left office. The National Archives has flatly declared Obama did not do that. If you take the word of a serial liar like Trump over that of the National Archives — which, if pressed, will back up its statements under oath, something Trump has shown a marked disinclination to do — then we can't have a real discussion because you live in an alternate reality. I hope you find your way back to the real world.)

(By the way, the Republican politicians vehemently condemning the FBI, DOJ, and Attorney General Merrick Garland know all of this. The likes of Kevin McCarthy, who are threatening retribution against Garland and DOJ if Republicans take back the House in November, are contemptible, snivelling Trump toadies unfit to hold office.)

So, Trump illegally, willfully, and tenaciously held onto many documents from his time as president.

The big, hairy, unanswered question is, why?

The best case he could make for himself would be disorganization: "I had all this crud lying around the White House the night before the movers were due, so I ran around just dumping it into boxes. I figured I'd sort it out later."

It's an amusing image, to be sure, but do you buy it? I don't.

Trump's known for tearing up and disposing of documents once he has read them. A man with such a distaste for paperwork wouldn't burden himself with dozens of boxes of it, even if he never had to lift even one of those boxes himself. That is, he wouldn't burden himself with it unless he thought it would be worth his while.

Mar-a-Lago is visited by all sorts of people. While Trump was president, Mar-a-Lago was visited by a woman, a foreign citizen, bearing a thumb drive containing malware. Why did she attempt to enter? (She was stopped.) The obvious inference is that she was trying to spy — on Trump, his staff, and/or other guests — for her country.

Has anyone kept track of who has visited Mar-a-Lago since Trump left office?

The Secret Service's job is to protect Trump and his family from physical threats, not to safeguard whatever sensitive information might be on the premises. That information would only be as safe as Mar-a-Lago's private security could make it, and in any case, the information would be in Trump's apparent custody so he could do what he liked with it.

It's possible, then, that Trump has sold classified and/or sensitive information.

This is a staggeringly alarming possibility. It's one that we could not have imagined of any previous president. It's one that I frankly would rather not imagine even of Trump.

Yet an objective appraisal of Trump's behavior while in office (indeed, for his entire adult life) makes it impossible to discount that possibility. He has never hesitated to put his own interests above everyone else's. For example, it was unbelievably dangerous for him as president to have private talks with Vladimir Putin with no other American present, as he did at least once. (Putin's translator did double duty.) Subsequent to another Putin chat he confiscated the American translator's notes and forbade the translator to discuss the conversation. Those actions were not in the public interest; they endangered all of us by giving Putin incredible leverage over Trump. Trump has never explained why he acted with such breathtaking recklessness and indifference to the national interest.

Trump also, of course, engaged in more public and obvious displays of self-interest during his time in office, funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to his own businesses by, for instance, requiring the Secret Service to pay for accommodations at his properties. However, the Putin episodes demonstrated that Trump was perfectly willing to endanger the nation's security, too, if he thought it best suited him.

So we are faced with the real possibility that a former president of the United States knowingly and willfully sold, or wanted to sell, national-security secrets.

For all our sakes I hope he didn't. However, his behavior in office (and before) proved that he is selfish and immoral enough that the idea can't be disregarded.

The best way to approach politics

Courtesy of Steven Pinker's 2018 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, page 366:

Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

That's the takeaway, for those afflicted with tl;dr (too long; didn't read). However, that's the conclusion of a longer passage worth quoting for context and nuance:

The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism. The totalitarian governments of the 20th century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs. And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness. As we saw, no developed country runs on right-wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infiniely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals. A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. it is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. As Pat Paulsen noted, "If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles."

It's not that Goldilocks is always right and that the truth always falls halfway between extremes. it's that current societies have winnowed out the worst blunders of the past, so if a society is functioning halfway decently — if the streets aren't running with blood, if obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition, if the people who vote with their feet are clamoring to get in rather than racing for the exits — then its current institutions are probably a good starting point (itself a lesson we can take from Burkean conservatism). Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

I get as exercised as anyone when my own political beliefs are on the losing end of political contests, including when the U.S. Supreme Court goes against my cherished hopes and dreams. Yet it's all too easy to forget why we get exercised — that is, angry, frustrated, despondent, etc. — which is to say, we forget what really matters: the actions we take, or don't, as a society.

We're stumbling through this life together. We ought to commit ourselves to figuring out the best ways to do that, irrespective of party. Politics ain't beanbag, as the old saying goes. Well, it ain't football or baseball or any other sport, either. It's an ongoing experiment. Let's treat it like one, with care and respect — and with the sobering knowledge that we won't have the luxury of maintaining the status quo sometimes.

Arizona law protects police, not people

In September a new Arizona law will go into effect:

Under the law, it is illegal for someone to record law enforcement officers if the person is within eight feet of an area where the person knows, or should “reasonably” know, that law enforcement activity is occurring, or if they receive a verbal warning from an officer about the rule.

Law enforcement activity could include questioning a “suspicious” person, conducting an arrest or handling a disorderly person, according to the text of the bill. A violation is a misdemeanor offense, with a potential penalty of up to 30 days in jail and fines of up to $500.

There are exceptions for people on private property, in a vehicle stopped by the police, or those who are the subjects of police contact, as long as they do not interfere with officers’ actions. There are no exceptions for journalists.

Why was this law enacted?

State Representative John Kavanagh, the bill’s sponsor, said that there was little reason for bystanders to be within eight feet of an on-duty police officer and that the law would protect people from getting close to dangerous situations and prevent them from interfering from police work.

So according to the sponsor of the bill, the law is to protect people.

Then why doesn't it just call for people to stay eight feet away from police unless they're directly involved?

Why does the law limit its scope to recording police activity?

What is it about watching and recording police activity that constitutes interference with that activity?

These are rhetorical questions, of course, because we all know the answers.

This law isn't about protecting citizens, it's about protecting cops — from accountability.

Rep. Kavanagh, you and the other legislators who voted for this bill, and Gov. Ducey, are full of it.

Yo, Clarence!

In his concurrence to Samuel "Sammy the Bullshitter" Alito's abomination of a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that ends the federal right to abortion, Clarence Thomas writes:

... in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. ... After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

That's Thomas arguing for rolling back the rights to contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage, respectively.

(By the way, to support his views in his concurrence, Thomas nearly exclusively cites his own words from other decisions, dissents, and concurrences. That he seemingly can't cite other Justices suggests something rather, um, lonesome about his views, doesn't it? That's quite a position for a Supreme Court Justice to find himself in, unable to cite anyone who agrees with him. Even so, he's willing to impose his singular and unrepresentative views on 330-odd million of us. That's some humility and self-restraint you have there, Clarence.)

But I seem to recall another exceedingly controversial — indeed, once-illegal — marriage-adjacent practice, namely, marriage between "the races". What about that, Clarence?

I hear only deafening silence from your corner of the room. However, a bystander is whispering in my ear. What's that? You say Justice Thomas himself is married to a woman considered not of the same race as he? Ohhh. I can see why it might be exceedingly inconvenient for him to broach that topic. Mm, yes.

However, there is such a thing as principle, isn't there, Clarence? It scarcely befits you, a self-proclaimed impartial arbiter of the Constitution and the law, to exempt yourself from your own judgment of what does and doesn't pass Constitutional muster. That would hardly be equal treatment under the law, would it? In fact, exempting yourself from the logical consequences of your judicial principles would make you — perish the thought! — a hypocrite, wouldn't it? And not just any hypocrite, but a hypocrite who has the final word, more or less, on any legal controversy in the land. That's hypocrisy and self-dealing on a level to which most of us can never aspire.

I'm not the only one who noticed that Thomas left out any reference to interracial marriage:

Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff behind the Supreme Court's landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, said Friday that Justice Clarence Thomas omitted Loving v. Virginia on his list of Supreme Court decisions to "reconsider" because it "affects him personally."

"That affects him personally, but he doesn't care about the LGBTQ+ community," Obergefell said on MSNBC's "The Reid Out."

Harsh. But true, though, eh, Clarence?

In fact, it's not just that you don't care about the LGBTQ+ community, your hidebound religious sect positively loathes that community, doesn't it? You're fine with dumping on that community, or on any practice, like contraception, that offends your sect, aren't you? You and your fellow religious fanatics have no reason other than your religious strictures for going after these activities and people, do you?

Silly me, thinking that the very arbiters of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause would themselves honor that clause as binding on themselves. ("It only mentions Congress, and we're not Congress!!", I hear you cackle in glee.)

But I've wandered from the main point.

The Ninth Amendment of the Constitution states:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

As Justice Kennedy wrote in Lawrence v. Texas:

Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

However, as Scalia observed:

... the [Ninth Amendment’s] refusal to ‘deny or disparage’ other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even further removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges’ list against laws duly enacted by the people.

(cited in note 5 of that congress.gov page)

In short, a person with human feeling and empathy will find, as some Justices have, more rights for people in the current Constitutional text. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and their fellow reactionaries who recoil from "the manifold possibilities" of modern life will take those rights away on the grounds that they're not spelled out in the Constitution.

So the only long-term defense against the reactionaries on the Court is to list, with tedious specificity, the rights we want protected, via Constitutional amendments. Otherwise, there's no recourse against the Alitos of the world middle-fingering us.

That goes for your right to marry a woman of a different race, too, Clarence. Don't bet against other federal judges, including your five allies among the current Justices, revisiting that unenumerated right during your lifetime tenure. Even from your lofty perch you must have noticed that white supremacists are out, very loud, and very proud these days. They might like your wife, who puts out authoritarian-friendly noises they can construe to be supportive, but don't assume they like you. If you want your marriage to continue being recognized across state lines, I'd start gathering signatures if I were you. A judge is supposed to avoid political activism but you've never let that stand in your way, so go to it.

Baby steps toward gun sanity

As I previously wrote, gun owners have exactly the nation they want: one in which they're armed and the rest of us aren't.

So, do I want to disarm them?

No.

I want them to justify their guns — the really outrageous ones.

Why can't we ask someone, "Why do you need a semiautomatic rifle with a massive magazine?"

Okay, we can ask, and we do. The response is always either "hunting", "self-defense", or "fun". I'm no gun owner but it seems to me that if you're hunting for game, a semiautomatic weapon renders the target unfit for consumption, defeating the point of the exercise. I have a hard time imagining a rifle being a better self-defense weapon than a handgun in the close quarters where "self-defense' would be a concern. As for "fun", well, society doesn't have to permit all forms of fun. Shooting up heroin and shooting up a shopping mall each strikes some people as "fun" but we prohibit both anyway.

Why can't we require anyone who wants such a weapon to have a damned good reason for having it?

Why can't we bar anyone under, say, age 25 from buying or owning such a weapon? We don't allow anyone under that age to represent us in Congress. We should show at least as much care and good judgment when it comes to firearms ownership as we do when it comes to picking our representatives. (Actually, given some of the clowns in Congress, we need to show a lot more care and good judgment when it comes to firearms.)

What's so threatening about restricting ownership of and access to semiautomatic rifles and large magazines?

Next you'll come for the rest of our guns. The slippery slope, or mission creep, or whatever you call the phenomenon is a risk. However, I don't see a public appetite to go beyond semiautomatic rifles and large magazines right now. We are a long way from the possibility, much less the likelihood, of going further.

Unless, that is, the pro-gun lobby remains obdurate.

The longer pro-gun advocates resist any step to tighten our absurdly loose regulations, the more likely it is the rest of us will consider really drastic steps, including banning guns outright. The tree that won't bend will break, and all that.

The Second Amendment won't let you do that, so suck on it. That's true. Given the Supreme Court's reactionary majority that honors bloodless text over bloodied people, that ends the argument. For now.

However, the Second Amendment isn't a commandment from on high. The Constitution is ours. We get to fix it if it's broken — and it is.

Every day that the pro-gun lobby allows nothing to change, more of us embrace altering the Second Amendment.

I don't know what a modified Second Amendment should say. I do have some idea of what it should mean.

Firearms are dangerous tools. Society recognizes they have specific uses. Society can prohibit firearms whose capabilities exceed what's needed for those uses. Society can limit firearms ownership and use.

Reworking the Second Amendment would be drastic. However, I will consider any means to change the status quo.

I do not accept that we must tolerate bloodshed on a scale experienced by no other advanced nation because of unthinking obeisance to a part of the Constitution whose raison d'être is no longer obvious.

Why should we allow indiscriminate private ownership of firearms whose capabilities exceed the requirements for any legitimate use? Why should young people be able to buy such firearms before they can vote or drink?

We shouldn't, and they shouldn't.

Just acting on those two simple principles would represent progress toward sanity, and maybe even toward a less bloody future.

Gun owners have made the best possible country for themselves

When I hear pro-gun folks talk about "solutions" to mass shootings, I have a couple of visceral reactions.

First, "solution" is the wrong word. A solution is final: you solve equations, you solve puzzles. You can't "solve" human behavior.

Second, the pro-gun lobby always says that more guns and better mental health treatment are "the solution". See above re: "solution", but beyond the simplistic nature of the recommendation, the argument itself serves another purpose. By constraining our imaginations and our political responses to these options, the pro-gun lobby seeks to perpetuate a dreadful status quo.

From their rhetoric you might imagine that pro-gun activists envision a society in which everyone is armed. No bad guy would dare pull a gun to rob someone or to shoot up a school or concert because hundreds of good guys' guns would be trained on him before he could get away. (That has certainly been the vision my own imagination conjured up in the past when I wondered how a cop would tell the good guys from the bad guys in the wake of a mass shooting. I asked the same question when open-carry laws gained a higher public profile.)

However, there has never been a major nation in which all or nearly all of the population has been armed. It's only the aristocracy that is able to afford weapons, and the aristocracy never lets the peasants own effective weapons. Why would they? Some smart peasant would realize that they didn't have to take the lord of the manor's guff, and that would be that for the lord of the manor. No, the peasants, aka the great majority of the population, have always remained unarmed except in wartime.

So when I hear pro-gun activists arguing for more guns everywhere, I call bullshit.

Gun owners today are a kind of shadow aristocracy. They throw their weight around in politics a little more subtly than the medieval lord of the manor did, but they throw their weight around just the same. They've become dominant enough in the Republican Party that they don't need to threaten elected officials with guns: their interests can be secured at primary time by simply voting as a bloc.

However, when push comes to shove, gun owners are quite willing to remind everyone else that they're packing. Their possession of weaponry is their ultimate claim to political power. Under the ex-domestic Dear Leader they didn't hesitate to make "Second Amendment" a threat to their opponents rather than a right conferred by the Constitution to defend the nation.

If the vast majority of us were armed, current gun owners wouldn't be an aristocracy. Ours would be a nation full of highly armed people where any dispute would turn fatal very quickly.

That dystopian, nightmarish vision is repellent to most of us — and that's just how current gun owners like it.

When they call for more guns, they mean more guns for them. They don't want me to own one, or to learn how to use it effectively.

Gun owners have exactly the kind of nation they want: one in which they're armed and the rest of us aren't.

Thoughts on the Uvalde massacre

The gelling narrative around the Uvalde, Texas massacre is centered on law enforcement's hesitation to confront the shooter. In turn, attention now is squarely on the Uvalde school district's police chief. (If you were surprised to learn the school district has its own police force, join the club.)

However, to focus on one man's purported mistakes is to miss a larger picture.

First, although the shooter got his guns legally, nobody thinks he should have. That's a failing that preceded the massacre and has nothing to do with the law enforcement response.

Second, although the police chief's refusal to act might have allowed some victims to die from lack of access to medical care, by the time the chief made that decision a lot of people were already dead. The delay, if that's what happened, came after the greater part of the killing had already been done.

Making the public narrative — the one playing out in the press and online — all about what the police chief did or didn't do is a disservice to the public. The chief's actions or inaction didn't precipitate the killing. We need to address what did.

As I've processed the limited amount of pro-gun argumentation I can stomach in the wake of the massacre, I've found that pro-gun politicians (who at this point are exclusively Republican) have settled on two concrete ideas:

• Schools should be even better fortified.
• More armed persons, both teachers and school resource officers, should be present within schools.

If what I call the gelling narrative is, in fact, true, it's worth asking why more armed persons would help. If trained police officers weren't up to the task of confronting the shooter, why should we think an armed teacher — whose first job is supposed to be teaching, not police work — would fare any better?

As for better fortifying schools, I have to ask why we think school districts should divert even more money from education to making campuses into modern castles. It's a way of putting up barriers to more shootings, perhaps, but is it the best way?

We need to consider the costs and benefits of any given approach to making schools safer, and we haven't done that when it comes to the idea of fortifying them.

Apparently, one of the mistakes that allowed the shooter to enter the school was that a door was left unlocked. The reason seems to have been that a teacher needed to fetch something (a phone, I believe) from a car. It's easy enough to blame the teacher for that consequential security lapse, and I'm sure many will. Ask yourself, though: how often have you had to leave your office to fetch something you left in your car? How big a pain was it to get back inside? The more trouble it was, the more likely you are to have pondered subverting your own workplace's security measures. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, or more, nothing bad would happen.

Now, you might argue that the teacher should have considered that one-in-a-hundred, or one-in-a-million, or one-in-a-zillion chance of something terrible happening, and not subverted school security. But is that how we want everyone at schools to think and to behave?

Do you want your kids to think of school as a deadly, dangerous place?

Maybe you do. But what if other parents don't? What if other parents are concerned about the mental-health toll on kids of treating their places of learning as besieged camps?

Look at the incident from a different perspective. Was it necessary that the shooter be legally allowed to purchase semiautomatic rifles and large magazines at the age of 18? Is that a good public policy, or is it one that the legislature should revisit? What are the public policy interests that are so important, so weighty, that they outweigh even considering whether he should have been allowed to make his purchases?

I mean, we keep people from drinking until they're twenty-one. I'm sure there are some nineteen-year-olds out there who have better judgment than some who are twice their age, Even so, nobody argues that we must let those responsible nineteen-year-olds drink. We have a consensus that younger people, statistically speaking, are more apt to abuse the privilege of consuming alcohol.

Why doesn't that same logic inform ownership or use of semiautomatic rifles and large ammunition magazines? Why do we allow the exceptions to the rule to govern in that case?

I know, I know — it's because of the almighty Second Amendment. Well, I've already explained why that's a lazy, thoughtless reason.

The Second Amendment has outlived its usefulness

This is the text of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Much ink has been spilled arguing about this amendment in the last couple of decades. Yet the gulf between its words and the state of the law in this country has only grown.

A lot of us believed "well regulated Militia" ought to constrain the otherwise unbounded "right of the people to bear arms" — until, that is, the U.S. Supreme Court's benighted decision that essentially rendered the first phrase meaningless. Today, a private — that is, unaffiliated with any militia — right of gun ownership is regarded as inviolable, thanks to the Court and generations of reactionary paranoia that sees guns as your only real friends. "Well regulated", meanwhile, is allowed token recognition by the Court but in practical terms what we have is better called "barely regulated".

The rationale for the Second Amendment, meanwhile, has gotten lost over the centuries. As I previously wrote, any principle whose rationale we no longer understand must be revisited.

Now, you might think that the rationale hasn't been lost: I simply haven't paid attention. That's possible: I'm not a Constitutional scholar. However, if I've missed the airtight rationale, so have a lot of people. Frankly, I doubt that's the case.

A widespread assumption is that "the security of a free State" depends on "a well regulated Militia" not just to repel external threats but to thwart homegrown tyrants, too. That's a lovely theoretical idea but it's totally nonsensical in today's United States. For one thing, gun owners would have to act as a solid bloc to resist a tyrant at the federal level, and even given the ease of coordination using modern communications, it's all but impossible to imagine that hundreds of millions of gun owners could coordinate amongst themselves. Another, not entirely unrelated objection is that many if not most gun owners supported and still support the only president in our lifetimes who has come close to being a real tyrant, the orange-haired ignoramus and grifter who still refuses to accept the indisputably legitimate outcome of the 2020 election.

Given the chance to resist a genuine would-be authoritarian, guys, you backed him. So don't bleat to me that you're acting in defense of "liberty": you don't know what the word means.

The other major objection to civilian gun ownership as a bulwark against tyranny is, we have not just a standing army but significant police forces, too. Now, feel free to laugh at law enforcement for its supposed inability to suppress armed criminals, including insurrectionists. Understand, though, that when it's facing off against armed criminals, law enforcement generally seeks to preserve life. (That is, when the lives in question are white.) If police were motivated to take armed resistance seriously as insurrection, the rules of engagement would change.

If worse came to worst, it's not unimaginable that the military would be ordered to deal with armed insurrection, either. No semiautomatic rifle, even if modified to be fully automatic, would be much use against an armored vehicle.

That idea — that we civilians would be helpless against our own military — scares the hell out of us, and it should. However, we address it by insisting on a culture and a tradition within the military that it does not intervene in civilian affairs. And guess what? That culture of self-restraint has worked. That culture, not the delusional idea of a Second Amendment-fueled civilian "resistance", has kept the military subordinate to civilian authority.

So, again, why does the Second Amendment exist? What fundamental principle(s) is it intended to protect?

I'm not a gun owner but I understand the need for some to hunt game and to control wildlife that presents a danger to them. I respect the desire some have to protect themselves and their loved ones in their own homes. These would be solid bases for a Constitutional protection of gun ownership.

Is there a rational principle that justifies massive ammunition magazines or semiautomatic rifles, though? What about open-carry? Or for that matter, concealed-carry? Is there a good reason to carry a firearm for self-defense outside the home?

These and a lot of other questions are worth debating. I think I have good reasons for why most if not all should be answered in the negative but I'm willing to listen.

However, what none of us can tolerate is an unthinking, unreasonable, unbounded worship of the Second Amendment simply because it's there. It was written by men, not an infallible deity. We are free to question it — and in the wake of the intolerable bloodshed in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York and literally dozens or hundreds more smaller "mass" shootings, not to mention the incalculable number of "smaller" murder sprees and individual homicides, we goddamned well had better question it.

It's time for the great majority of us who don't regard the Second Amendment as holy writ to force the long-overdue argument about what gun ownership really should mean in this country. Then we need to set that out in plain, clear language that is more difficult for irresponsible Supreme Court Justices to distort.

It's time to retire the Second Amendment. The twisted way we've fetishized it is killing us.

The Constitution is ours, not the Founders'

It's long past time we confronted our blind fealty to the wishes and purported wisdom of the generation that birthed the U.S. Constitution.

The Founders did a remarkable job, to be sure. They gave us a document whose principles — most of them, anyway — have proven a sturdy and largely positive guide over a couple of hundred years' worth of sometimes turbulent history.

However, none of them would have wanted us, their literal and figurative descendants, to straitjacket ourselves to the exact model of government that suited them. They would have wanted us to figure out what was best for ourselves.

We have already repudiated the single most odious idea in the original document, slavery. No one with a brain and a conscience regrets that repudiation. Rather, we acknowledge that the Framers made that retrospectively immoral compromise because the alternative would have been disunion.

Repudiating slavery took an unbelievably bloody civil war. That's not how we must fix our governance, today or ever again.

We're stuck for now with the onerous high bar that the Constitution itself mandates to amend it. However, we would make better progress if we first tackled the mystical and unthinking respect we grant the Founders.

The Founders were not gods. We should never be afraid to challenge their legacy. To maintain a principle without understanding why you do so is at best foolish; at worst, it could be self-destructive. Ditto with respect to ignoring a principle that goes unmentioned in the Constitution. That the Founders didn't mention certain ideas, like privacy, doesn't mean we shouldn't consider them.

Looking backwards to "honor" the "original intentions" of those who wrote the words of the Constitution is an abdication of our shared responsibility to live according to its core principles. (That's true even if the words in question were written by later generations.)

If you flatter yourself that you are committed simultaneously to cherishing the Constitution and governing ourselves in accordance with its most important principles, then you must support at least one of the following options:

• Identifying the most important principles to us today, whether or not they're explicitly written in the Constitution, then interpreting the Constitution and our body of laws according to those principles; or
• Making it significantly easier for the modern United States to amend the Constitution so those unwritten but crucial principles are explictily written down.

Resist the urge to think of the Constitution as sacred, something to be kept inviolate because of the semidivine status of the Framers. The Framers aren't trying to muddle through the modern world, we are. It's our country and our Constitution now.

Overturning Roe is theocratic

The news has just broken in Politico: "Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows".

We can't say for sure whether the supposed draft opinion actually is what Politico's article claims, namely, work product of the U.S. Supreme Court. If it turns out to be a hoax, well, that will be that.

However, the idea of overturning Roe unquestionably is and has been for decades an obsession of social conservatives. The whole point of the sorry history of recent Court apppointments — and more to the point, denied appointments (the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Mitch McConnell's infamous and indefensible refusal to let Merrick Garland's nomination even be considered by the Senate) — has been for conservatives to appoint reliably anti-Roe Justices until a majority was in place to overturn that decision.

Now, my understanding from TV coverage is that the draft opinion attacks the "weak" Constitutional basis in the reasoning of Roe v. Wade. That has long been a criticism of social conservatives. However, it has always seemed to me a secondary excuse, one cobbled up by social conservatives to cover their real interest: they consider abortion nothing less than murder. That is why the issue is so motivational for them: nothing is as stark as the accusation that murder is being condoned under the law.

Is abortion murder, though?

Science can't tell us when (or if) a human life begins prior to a fetus leaving the womb. (At least, it can't tell us yet; I question if it ever will.) So to stake out the absolutist position that abortion is murder, one has to have a different basis for believing that an unborn fetus is alive.

The only basis for that belief is religion. Specific religious sects hold that abortion is murder.

However, not all religions or sects do. Nor, for that matter, do all nonbelievers. There is not widespread agreement, or even majority agreement, that abortion is murder. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans want abortion of some kind to be legal. Where to draw the line on times and procedures is hotly debated but the principle of access is not.

What will your good-faith belief that abortion is not murder be worth after this decision is issued? Even if that belief is grounded in your own religion's creed, too bad. The free exercise of your religious belief will be illegal.

This purported Supreme Court decision imposes nothing less than the religious beliefs of a minority on the entire population. It turns the logic of protection of minorities on its head — and it perverts the logic of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by enshrining the creed of a handful of religious sects as the law of the land.

That's theocracy.

"Putin Needs an Off-Ramp", Tom McTague

Tom McTague is not the first to point out that a cornered Putin is an extremely dangerous Putin but his Atlantic piece makes the case more clearly than other pieces.

It's true that Putin wants the West to worry about getting into a World War III-style conflict with Russia, and there's some wisdom in not rising to his bait. However, it's also true that if Putin feels Russia — and therefore he — is cornered, he will feel his own political and perhaps literal survival are at stake.

When a gambler has already lost so much that he will go bankrupt unless he can turn it around, the logical thing for him to do is to continue upping the stakes. This is the desperate opponent the West may now face. Worse: This is the opponent whose bloodstained debts the West may have to to write off.

Britain’s defense secretary has said that Putin “is a spent force in the world.” His French counterpart has declared, “Ukraine will win.” A consensus is building in Western capitals that Russia’s calamitous handling of the conflict means it may already have lost—indeed, that its political goals may never have been realizable in the first place, given the size of Ukraine and the opposition of its people to Russian control.

These statements, however, exhibit a dangerous combination of escalation, wish fulfillment, and, most worrying of all, truth.

The danger of escalation is by now obvious. "Wish fulfillment" refers to the evident hope among a lot of Westerners that Ukraine can defeat Russia simply by outlasting its offensive. Recent developments suggest that the Russian military is prepared to grind down Ukrainian resistance, however costly the effort will be. The danger for us is that our desperate wish will get in the way of finding an unpalatable but less bloody diplomatic solution, and that we'll cling to what might be an unrealistic image of Putin and Russia as paper tigers.

Finally, truth, which is to say, the possibility "that Putin’s regime really is as weak as people suggest". If that's the case, we are back to Putin feeling an existential threat to his rule and his life, with all the attendant danger his having nothing to lose carries.

McTague lists a few guidelines for the West to follow; I won't list them here because you really should read his piece. His main takeaway, though, is:

Ultimately, diplomacy will have to get each side to agree to a deal that allows each to save its dignity—even though one side does not deserve to have its dignity saved.

The Cuban missile crisis ended with Russian missiles turning back while the Americans agreed not to invade Cuba, and to remove their missiles from Turkey. Historians disagree over whether this maintained the status quo in terms of the overall balance of power between the two sides, or left Russia slightly better off than when the crisis began. Either way, it ended without catastrophic miscalculation and with a compromise balanced enough that both sides were able to save face.

Like it or not, Putin's invasion of Ukraine is not an opportunity for the West to depose him. The West also can't really hold him accountable, the way other autocrats have been held accountable for their crimes. These things are beyond our power because Russia is not Panama or Libya. All we can do is to make ending his invasion as much in his own interest as possible.

Stick it to Putin long-term

First, the obvious: Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine makes him and his cronies warmongers. If you support, condone, or simply remain silent about his malign obliteration of a peaceful neighbor, you have blood on your hands.

Second, our appetite for fossil fuels allows not just Putin, but other authoritarians like Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman (you know, the guy who ordered the literal butchery of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi), to maintain their power. If you can't bring yourself to accept that fossil fuels are finite ("renewing" them takes millions of years), if you haven't wanted to see that fossil fuels are the primary contributor to anthropogenic climate change, then at least face the truth that our thirst for fossil fuels carries a price that includes literal spilled blood.

Our need for fossil fuels also is a national-security threat. If you have any desire to end Putin's and likeminded fossil-fuel-enabled autocrats' extortionate grip over the rest of the world, it's time to lend your support to the search for renewable, nonpolluting energy sources. It's time to tell your elected representatives that "business as usual" on the renewable-energy front is not acceptable, and that you will be holding their feet to the fire until they push hard to get us off fossil fuels.

No more hemming and hawing about how hard it will be. Don't you believe we're up to a challenge like this? Where's your national pride?

No more cavilling that we haven't figured out how to eliminate fossil fuel use everywhere. We haven't licked that because we haven't made figuring that out a national priority. Now is the time to prioritize that!

No more mealymouthed bullshit about saving jobs that are already endangered (I'm talking to you, Joe Manchin). If you truly care about the people whose jobs are endangered, Congresscritters, get off your asses and work out a transition plan for them. None of this "let the market decide" crap. The brutality of the free market, unmitigated by support for laid-off workers, is why we have millions who have lost faith not just in government, but in democracy. The brutality of the free market is why we have millions in the grip of Dick a l'orange: the millions who have disengaged from democracy have latched onto a would-be authoritarian to set their world right. (He won't, incidentally, because he's corrupt, totally indifferent to other people's suffering, and a moron.)

Stop living in the fantasy that life can go on as our grandparents lived it. Fossil fuels are finite and we goddamned well had better have an economy that doesn't depend on them before they run out.

It's a huge challenge, and the time to start was yesterday. Actually, the time to start was a half-century ago, but let's not rehash our stupidity and shortsightedness again.

Not one more goddamned day of dithering.

Not one more goddamned day of procrastinating.

Not one more goddamned day of pretending.

Focus on the hard, time-consuming, expensive, and disruptive work of getting us off of fossil fuels.

A real and sustained push to end our fossil-fuel dependence will do more to weaken Putin and fellow petro-autocrats in the long run than any number of sanctions.

Justice Thomas, you are fooling no one

You might think United States Supreme Court Justices would be even more scrupulous about avoiding the appearance of impropriety than the average federal judge. You might think someone who had risen to one of the most powerful and prestigious positions in the judicial branch of the U.S. government would be conscientious enough to ensure the example he or she set was an honorable one.

In the case of Clarence Thomas, you'd be wrong.

In January the New Yorker published a lengthy article detailing Justice Thomas' wife Ginni's unprecedented and highly problematic political activism. Now, the New York Times has published its own piece on the Thomases, "The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas".

What does her activism have to do with her husband's day job? The Times gives an example:

... Ginni Thomas co-signed a letter in December [2021] calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the Jan. 6 committee. Thomas and her co-authors said the investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”

A few weeks later, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack. Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter.

Nor was the referenced letter Ginni Thomas' first foray into activism. It was only one of many actions she has taken in a long career as a conservative activist.

Her husband's pointed refusal to recuse himself from matters that clearly touch on her activities would have gotten him disciplined long ago if he were an ordinary federal judge. However, the only way to discipline a Supreme Court Justice is impeachment in the Senate, a heavy lift under the best of circumstances and inconceivable as long as the Republican Party is devoid of any principle save blind loyalty to the ex-domestic Dear Leader.

What does Clarence Thomas himself say to critics like me? Again, from the Times:

... Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that while there are no clear-cut rules outlining when justices need to recuse themselves, there are appearance concerns. “I’m sure there are justices’ spouses who have had strong opinions about politics,” Kerr said. “What’s unusual here is that Justice Thomas’s wife is an activist in politics. Historically, this is the first example of something like this that I can think of at the Supreme Court.”

Justice Thomas has flipped such criticisms on their head, saying that those who raise such issues were “bent on undermining” the court.

To repeat: Clarence Thomas says that doubters like me are "bent on undermining" the Court. His psychological projection would be laughable, were we not living in an age where brazen disregard for truth is taken for gospel in some benighted quarters.

Justice Thomas, you're full of it.

You're annoyed at being called out for actually undermining the Court's reputation, so you peddle this horse manure. Heck, you might even believe it.

The rest of us, however, don't. We know better. And we'll make sure history knows you tried to gaslight us.

You aren't fooling anyone.