Book Review: On Tyranny

'People Would Revolt' if Trump is Impeached is Not His Opinion, it's an Instruction to commit violence

Historian Timothy Snyder's 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century, is a warning aimed directly at President Trump and his now obvious political goal of establishing anti-democratic, right wing tyranny in America. There's nothing subtle about this short, easy to read book (126 pages). It gets right to the point by comparing the tactics, rhetoric and mindset of 20th century tyrants like Hitler and Stalin to what Trump is doing today in America. Each of the twenty lessons constitute a short chapter. It can be read in a several hours. What Snyder is arguing here is generally in accord with how some others, e.g., Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, have described the 20th century's political monsters.

Unilateral surrender: Snyder's first lesson, do not obey in advance, makes the point that in the face of the tyrant or tyrant wannabe, many people simply let their own freedom go. Power flows from the people to the tyrant. Snyder writes: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. . . . . A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." Examples include a willing transfer of power by the people to Hitler in Germany in 1932 and to the communist tyrants in Czechoslovakia in 1946.

Institutional defense: Snyder argues that democratic institutions do not defend themselves, people defend them: "We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government." Snyder asserts that many Americans are making this same mistake again today. He suggests people pick an institution such as a pro-democracy law, a court, a newspaper or a labor union and defend it publicly.

It is worth noting that a court or labor union would need to be defended. Courts strike many as a rock solid and unassailable institution. However, Trump and senate republicans are packing the federal courts with radical authoritarian ideologue judges. The time is coming when more temperate courts and court decisions will be attacked and the tyrant will foment both public and executive branch resistance to those courts, judges and decisions. We are seeing the beginnings of that right now.

Also consider the proposition that, unless they are co-opted and/or corrupted, labor unions are pro-democratic institutions. Powerful, persuasive arguments by other careful observers make this case. Both Nancy MacLean in her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America, and Jane Mayer in her 2016 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, make it clear that a key target of anti-democratic authoritarians is labor unions. Powerful billionaires exemplified by the radical right political movement built and still funded by the Koch brothers have a raging, visceral hate of labor unions. Labor unions allow collective action, which is pro-democratic in that they represent some collective power and wealth. That literally enrages the radical libertarian, authoritarian right. Before reading Snyder on this point, the idea of labor unions being a democratic institution seemed out of synch with reality for me at least. But on reflection, Snyder makes an excellent point. He's right.

Resist toleration of violence: Some of Snyder's lessons seem far-fetched. But on consideration, maybe they are not far fetched at all. His lesson six, be wary of paramilitaries, brings this point home: "When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. . . . . For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics." Snyder points out that non-authoritarian governments try to hold a monopoly on violence mediated by official police, secret services and sometimes the military, but always constrained by the rule of law. Snyder defines a paramilitary broadly, and it can include an authoritarian leader's personal bodyguard. People in Germany and Austria made the grave mistake of tolerating paramilitary intimidation and violence, and many of the survivors among them came to regret it.

Snyder points to Trump as an example: "As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. . . . . . At one campaign rally [Trump] said, 'There's a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out." When the pro-Trump mob tried to do that, Trump was pleased, saying: "Isn't this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it's fun." Other recent events have made it clear that Trump is actively fomenting violence by his supporters against political opposition.

So, after announcing his candidacy for president in 2020, Joe Biden's opening attack on Trump led with "Charlottesville", referring to the fascist, white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, South Carolina, he was directly attacking a core tyrant tactic. Trump had defended the fascists by calling them 'good people'. Biden threw that directly back in Trump's face as he should have.

Snyder's book is useful to help put tyranny and Trump in better historical and current context. It makes Trump look even more threatening than viewing him without the context.

Power Is Flowing Away From Individuals

Monday, April 29, 2019


Age discrimination: A couple of changes from court decisions indicate that the long-running flow of power from individuals to businesses is continuing. Some years ago, federal courts made it more difficult to win age discrimination lawsuits against an employer. In a 2017 decision, the Supreme Court held that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) protected only existing employees of a business, not job applicants. That greatly expanded the scope of exceptions the ADEA did not cover. When originally passed in 1967, the ADEA was supposed to protect all persons over 40 years of age. In general, the courts now tend to defer to employers, making winning an age-discrimination lawsuit a rare event. Despite the ADEA, age discrimination is in employment common. And even when the discrimination is blatant, it is usually impossible to win a lawsuit.

Class arbitration lawsuits: Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled in Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela that employees cannot file a class arbitration lawsuit against an employer who has harmed a group of employees. To be susceptible to such a lawsuit, the company must agree in writing in advance to accept such a lawsuit. The implications of that lawsuit are clear. Probably no employer has ever expressly consented in writing to any class arbitration lawsuit. And in the future, the few exceptions that may exist to that will make sure their employee agreements will remove that clause from the agreement. There are probably no exceptions.

Arbitration: The Lamps Plus lawsuit highlights the matter of forced arbitration. Forced arbitration clauses are the norm for employee agreements, credit card agreements, service agreements and essentially everything that can come under the scope of arbitration, which is essentially everything. Forced arbitration has been dominant for decades. Very few consumers and employees have the individual power to avoid forced arbitration. Arbitration clauses invariably include a requirement that decisions are to remain confidential.

The net effect of forced arbitration is a massive shift of power to companies and wealthy individuals. Companies and individuals, e.g., Trump and Trump companies, can and do act badly and if caught, they use arbitration to shield their bad acts in secrecy. The public is kept in the dark and fed nothing. In Lamps Plus, the Supreme Court argued that while arbitration has procedural advantages, which is arguably mostly a lie for consumers and employees most of the time, those advantages are absent from class lawsuits and that creates a potential for “procedural morass.”

The massive power advantage that forced arbitration affords companies and wealthy individuals and the secrecy that shields the underlying bad and illegal actions and settlements, constitutes a shadow system of law that sometimes operates outside the law without any means for society to know. For example, when a company or wealthy person has injured many people and one of them is forced into arbitration and a secret settlement arises, other injured people may never know of their injury or the amount of money the company paid. Essentially all advantage goes to the company or wealthy person.

From my point of view, forced arbitration constitutes a major assault on the rule of law. In essence, one can see forced arbitration as a powerful anti-democratic, authoritarian tool to keep the masses ignorant and in check, while the rich and powerful remain free to continue their bad and illegal acts with impunity most or nearly all of the time.

Orig B&B: 4/29/19

Proposal: An Open Primary for Everyone

Saturday, April 27, 2019

The IVN (Independent Voter Network) has long been dissatisfied with the grip on electoral power the two parties exert. A new proposal suggests a primary for independent voters in view of the failure of the existing two-party system. IVN rejects the argument that although some candidates say that if we elect them, they will unite the country and solve our problems. IVN rejects that rhetoric as empty.

The group argues that our election system incentivizes partisanship by making candidates, regardless of party, accountable to the voters in their party, not to the electorate in general. Therefore, unless a candidate intends to unrig the system, calls for unity are just empty rhetoric.

In proposing a primary for all voters, IVN points out that taxpayers, not the parties, fund primary elections. The proposal is called nonpartisan and would open voting up to any voter, regardless of party, and allow voting for any candidate.

IVN comments:

Bottom Line: Let the parties keep their own ballots. Let the parties exclude or include whoever they want. Let the parties decide their own rules of nomination. BUT, give every voter their fundamental right to participate at every stage of the taxpayer-funded public election process.

The Science of Time

Saturday, April 26, 2019


What "time" is, is a very basic and fundamental question. And contrary to the "science is complete, or near complete" advocates, I think we are FAR from understanding our universe if we don't have a clue on such a basic feature of it.

If folks here aren't familiar with the issue -- there are to my knowledge 3 primary models of time.

The most common model for most of history was to treat time as just a convenient metric to refer to sequential state changes. This is often called the "A" model of time, or Presentism in philosophy. In this model, "time" doesn't really exist -- it is an invented concept by us to refer to the history of state sequences, and to project future state sequences. The only things that actually exist are the things of the universe, and they only exist in their "present" state -- hence"presentism".

The more common model among physicists today is Block time, or the "B" model of time. This model treats time as a dimension of a 4-D Space-time continuum. This is Einstein's model behind General Relativity. In Block Time -- the past, present, and future all have the same status -- there is no special feature to the present. And the future is already set.

A third model is Growing Time -- which treats the PAST as in Block time, but the future does not yet exist. The present has a special status as the edge of Growing Time. Growing time was developed as a "fusion" model -- an effort to find away to incorporate the best features of Block time and presentism in a better model.

Several recent books advocating for one or another of these time models:

https://www.amazon.com/Now-Physics-Time-Richard-Muller/dp/0393354814/ref=sr_1_21?qid=1554052463&s=books&sr=1-21

https://www.amazon.com/Singular-Universe-Reality-Time-Philosophy/dp/1107074061/ref=pd_sim_14_3/142-1644542-8390269?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1107074061&pd_rd_r=e0f49f8f-53d8-11e9-b6b9-cd59af5e4b95&pd_rd_w=C6bGd&pd_rd_wg=435Rj&pf_rd_p=90485860-83e9-4fd9-b838-b28a9b7fda30&pf_rd_r=A4MCG724N1CV7NYNAZE6&psc=1&refRID=A4MCG724N1CV7NYNAZE6

https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Black-Holes/dp/0816147736/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=a+brief+history+of+time&qid=1554052738&s=books&sr=1-2

These books provided fairly effective criticisms of the competing models of time:

* Block time provides no explanation of our sense of the present -- a theory of time which fails to predict or usefully understand the primary feature of time -- is a remarkably weak "theory".

* Block time is in conflict with all indeterministic models of Quantum Mechanics (which is most, or arguably all of them).

* Presentism appears to be in conflict with actual physics, in which all events and interactions have duration -- an infinitesimal approach to time's extent -- cannot usefully address how our universe seems to be coupled into longer periods than an instant.

* Block time is very useful in both relativity, and in modeling the outcomes of QM interactions, while presentism cannot support either. Using the "indirect inference to reality" model of science -- this is strong evidence for block time over presentism.

* Growing time gives the present a special status, addressing one flaw of Block time, but in growing time the present is absolutely SECONDARY to the past. But we don't seem to be able to interact with the past -- and the present seems to be far far more important than the past -- so a model that declared the inaccessible past to be "real", and the present is special in only a minor derivative way -- is still not a particularly useful model. Growing time also does not address the thick time problem for an instantaneous present.

My takeaway from my reading is -- we don't have ANY good time models.

B&B orig: 4/1/19

Is Deceit Almost as Bad as Violence?

Saturday, April 27, 2019

One observer makes these comments about lies and deceit:

When evaluating the social costs of deception, we need to consider all of the misdeeds -- premeditated murders, terrorist atrocities, genocides, Ponzi schemes[1] -- that must be nurtured and shored up, at every turn, by lies. Viewed in this wider context, deception lends itself, perhaps even above violence, as the principal enemy of human cooperation. Imagine how the world would change if, when the truth really mattered, it became impossible to lie. What would international relations be like if every time a person shaded the truth on the floor of the United Nations an alarm went off throughout the building? . . . . We can be sure that a dependable method of lie detection would produce similar transformations, on far more consequential subjects.[2] . . . . Methodological problems notwithstanding, it is difficult to exaggerate how fully our world would change if lie detectors ever became reliable, affordable and unobtrusive.

When viewed this way, the act of deceit broadly seen, e.g., lying, misinforming, hiding truth, emotionally manipulating people to impair their conscious reasoning capacity, etc., does look to be almost as bad as overt violence. Deceit seems to accompany violence almost every time it happens. Exceptions, e.g., self-defense, are rare.

Maybe violence itself should be more broadly seen to include non-violent acts (soft violence?) such as theft, Ponzi schemes, and tax evasion (illegal tax cheating).

Deceit tactics such as lying and hiding truth are probably much more immoral and socially harmful than most people think.

Footnotes:

1. Also, these, for example: white collar crimes, political lies, political misinformation, tax cheating (currently running at about $400-$600 billion/year in the US, domestic violence, all gun violence (about $229 billion/year), rape ('It was consensual'), racism (I didn't discriminate against that job applicant'), etc.

2. Referring to Bill Clinton’s thundering silence when he learned that “a semen-stained dress was en route to the lab.” Before he was aware of that imminent proof of his lies, Clinton was indignantly denying any sexual improprieties. The prospect of a DNA test shut him up real quick: “The mere threat of a DNA analysis produced what no grand jury ever could -- instantaneous communication with the great man’s conscience which appeared to be located in another galaxy.”

Lobbyists: Writing Laws for a Good Return On Investment

Saturday, April 27, 2019

The Sunlight Foundation published a study on the return on investment (ROI) that lobbying can generate. The study, Fixed Fortunes: Biggest corporate political interests spend billions, get trillions, suggests ROI can be pretty good: “After examining 14 million records, including data on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, we found that, on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government.”

That ROI is so good that it beats making and selling essentially all other goods and services. That assumes lobbying is a service and their work product is a good. Lobbying can be more profitable than doing just about anything else, maybe with the exception of some white collar crimes.

The average US Senator needs to raise about $14,000/day to stay in office. That is why lobbyists are far more important than individual voters.

Another source writes: “In many cases, lobbyists write our laws — literally.

For an example, look at the 2014 omnibus budget deal. Congress used the deal to secretly put taxpayers back on the hook for bank bailouts. That’s right – in 2014, our representatives repealed a law that prevented the American people from bailing out big banks that engage in risky derivatives trading. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

The New York Times reports that 70 of the 85 lines in the language that killed the derivatives bill came from a piece of model legislation drafted by Citigroup lobbyists. Yes, that Citigroup – the bank that played a major role in the 2008 crisis and also received billions of federal stimulus dollars.”