Do we have a crisis among young men?

 

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Authoritarian Republican legal wars are just as radical, irrational and bad faith as its political wars

Vanity Fair writes:

When [Trump] Judge Aileen Cannon [a/k/a/ Loose Cannon] granted Donald Trump’s request for a special master to review the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI in August, blocking prosecutors from using those documents in their investigation until that review was complete, the legal community did not hold back in its assessment of the decision. “To any lawyer with serious federal criminal court experience who is being honest, this ruling is laughably bad, and the written justification is even flimsier,” Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor, told The New York Times. Judge Cannon’s decision “was utterly lawless. She has disgraced her position as an Article III judge,” constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted. “This special master opinion is so bad it’s hard to know where to begin,” wrote former US acting solicitor general Neal Katyal. “Frankly, any of my first year law students would have written a better opinion.”

Cannon’s bizarre decision was largely based on the (very flawed) thinking that because some of Trump’s personal items were seized along with the large volume of classified material, the DOJ could no longer, for the time being, use said classified material in its criminal investigation. Which is a lot like someone saying a murder investigation couldn’t move forward because the police took one of the suspect’s favorite T-shirts, in addition to a knife with the victim’s blood on it, when they searched his house. Obviously, this logic makes zero sense, which is why the Department of Justice is giving Cannon a few days to come to her senses. 

Vanity Fair quotes Politico on the possibility that Loose Cannon would reverse her corrupt, crackpot ruling:

The offer to Cannon presents her with a difficult choice. Her opinion was criticized for failing to fully grapple with the government’s argument that Trump doesn’t own the classified documents he stored at Mar-a-Lago. She lumped all of the seized property together as potentially Trump’s, and gave enormous weight to the argument that any of the documents seized could potentially be subject to privilege claims. She was essentially saying that DOJ couldn’t be trusted and that the special master should sort things out.

From what we’ve seen so far, our bet is that Cannon doesn’t accept this deal outright. Doing so would require her to reverse arguments that she’s already made about potential privilege claims and her (widely criticized) position that Trump could suffer irreparable harm from the investigation itself.

The Republican war is fully engaged 

Let’s face it. The Republican Party autocrat-kleptocrat-theocrat assault on democracy, inconvenient truth, inconvenient reasoning, the rule of law and civil liberties are just as intense, bad faith, mendacious and morally corrupt as its political and social attacks. The war is now fully engaged on all major fronts by the entire GOP.

That most rank and file Republicans see little or none of this and support with their votes it is now a major part of the threat. It used to be the elites were leading the charge and were the major threat. But now that all the propaganda, lies, crackpottery and slanders have sunk in, the rank and file is fully engaged. Evidence? There’s this analysis from FiveThirtyEight, for example:

60 Percent Of Americans Will Have An Election Denier On The Ballot This Fall

There are a lot of election deniers on the ballot. Out of 540 total Republican nominees running for office, we found 199 who FULLY DENIED the legitimacy of the 2020 election. These candidates either clearly stated that the election was stolen from Trump or took legal action to overturn the results, such as voting not to certify election results or joining lawsuits that sought to overturn the election.

.... 118 election deniers and eight election doubters have at least a 95 percent chance of winning.

Republican Party election denier map

Election denial = radical right

autocrat-kleptocrat-theocrat

Proof...

Let’s examine the concept of “proof” with some specific, really difficult philosophical questions:

1. Define proof in your own words.
2. Is proof a variable (meaning “not consistent or having a fixed pattern”)?  If no, not a variable, why not? If yes, a variable, how so?
3. What kind of evidence does it take to prove something (categorical, circumstantial, quantitative, observable, repeatable, unfailing, a combination, etc.)?
4. How much evidence does it take to prove something? (50.0001%, 99%,100%)

Debate these questions among your fellow posters.

Some observers’ thoughts on America’s broken society

The New York Times published a couple of fairly long, complicated articles on this issue. These observations are not new, but they come from thoughtful people who are carefully watching what America is going through. The first article focuses on observations of a long time war correspondent Luke Mogelson, a journalist for The New Yorker. Mogelson sees deep fear grounded mostly in mirages as a major polarizing force in American politics and society. He is incredulous that mere vaporware (propaganda, lies, slanders, etc.) can foment such intense emotion and social damage. The NYT writes:

Living in Paris in the spring of 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, he was jarred by photos of armed lockdown protesters in Michigan. “The images of men in desert camo, flak jackets and ammo vests, carrying military-style carbines through American cities, portrayed a country I no longer recognized,” he writes in his new book, “The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible.”

So Mogelson flew back to the United States, where he reported on months of turmoil leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. “I had never doubted that the U.S., under the wrong circumstances, could succumb to spiraling cycles of violence as intractable as any I’d seen abroad,” he writes. “But what were those circumstances?”

I wanted to know whether Mogelson, who has witnessed real war, sees auguries of it here. The answer is complicated. At one point he writes, “Increasing talk on both the left and the right about the possibility of civil war left me somewhat bemused.” At the same time, he draws trenchant comparisons between ISIS in Syria and certain parts of the American right. And he recognizes something familiar in the growing sense among Americans of many different political persuasions that their government can’t protect them.

“This breakdown of confidence in sources of stability long taken for granted intimated the kind of social fracturing I’d covered overseas,” he writes.

“Every civil conflict that I’ve covered has been rooted in real injury and grievance,” he said. “In Iraq, for example, I was spending time with soldiers who had the scars to prove their suffering at the hands of the people they were fighting against.”

In America, by contrast, the right’s enemies tend to be either wild exaggerations or outright fantasies — antifa supersoldiers, totalitarian globalists, satanic pedophiles. “Whether or not the very real fear of these very unreal threats would be enough to sustain a hot conflict and people killing and dying for those projections of their own paranoias, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen that.”  

“There’s a difference between the complexities of those long-running conflicts [Iraq, Syria, Liberia, etc.], and how certain people become radicalized in those environments, and what we have in the U.S., which would just be large-scale violence based from the get-go on lies,” he said.

The second article focuses on the effect that social media algorithms have on many Americans. The author finds the same thing about the neuroscience of morality that I came to see. Simply put, we can’t explain morality yet. That’s true despite billionaire blowhards (Zuckerberg, Thiel) arrogantly telling us they know how to fix what ails us, while actually making us more polarized and sicker. The gist of the article is that the algorithms feed into and amplify feelings of moral outrage, hate and fear. That generates revenue and profit.

[Max] Fisher, a New York Times journalist who has reported on horrific violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, offers firsthand accounts from each side of a global conflict, focusing on the role Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube play in fomenting genocidal hate. Alongside descriptions of stomach-churning brutality, he details the viral disinformation that feeds it, the invented accusations, often against minorities, of espionage, murder, rape and pedophilia. But he’s careful not to assume causality where there may be mere correlation. [Fisher's] book explores deeply the question of whether specific features of social media are truly responsible for conjuring mass fear and anger.

The enjoyment of moral outrage is one of the key sentiments Fisher sees being exploited by algorithms devised by Google (for YouTube) and Meta (for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), which discovered they could monetize this impulse by having their algorithms promote hyperpartisanship. Divisiveness drives engagement, which in turn drives advertising revenues.  

The lesson of Fisher’s book is surely that we don’t need more celestial inspirations for ambitious projects of human transformation. Rather, we need to make individual members of societies resistant to such efforts. We have the means to do so if the political will is strong enough, and if our political system hasn’t yet been wrecked by the chaos machine.