The Rule of Law: Not Nearly as Objective as People Think

Cabbage on a Stick plants -- critically endangered because the moth that pollinated them is extinct and 1 plant is left in the wild on the Island of Kauai on a cliff edge - these are in the zoo and doing well being pollinated by hand

A New York Times article, Old Rape Kits Finally Got Tested. 64 Attackers Were Convicted., reports that a push to test old rape kits is leading to convictions of attackers and rapists.

Ms. Sudbeck’s [rape] case is one of thousands that have gotten a second look from investigators since the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., committed $38 million in forfeiture money to help other jurisdictions test rape kits. Since the grants began being distributed in 2015, the evidence kits have led to 165 prosecutions in cases that were all but forgotten. So far, 64 of those have resulted in convictions.

Rarely have public dollars from a local prosecutor’s office been so directly tied to results with such national implications. The initiative has paid to get about 55,000 rape kits tested in 32 law enforcement agencies in 20 states, among them the police departments in Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Miami, Memphis, Austin, Tex., and Kansas City, Mo.

Nearly half produced DNA matches strong enough to be added to the F.B.I.’s nationwide database of genetic profiles. About 9,200 of those matched with DNA profiles in the system, providing new leads and potential evidence.

Past failure to vindicate the rule of law by not testing rape kits is just one kind of subjectivity that suffuses the rule of law. It is a moral outrage and fairly common.

Recently House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated that it is not worth impeaching President Trump unless there is overwhelming evidence that could convince even congressional republicans. It is very likely that whatever evidence is available will not lead congressional republicans to vote to impeach Trump. Another congressional democrat commented that impeaching Trump can't be done unless there is a major public opinion shift to support impeachment. It is very likely that whatever evidence is available will not lead Trump supporters to want to see him impeached. All of that makes impeachment a subjective exercise in partisan politics, not something based on the rule of law, evidence or logic.

Convicted felon Paul Manafort received a 37-month sentence for 8 major felonies. Federal sentencing guidelines posited a 19-24 year sentence for what Manafort did. The federal judge in Manafort’s case was openly biased against and hostile to special counsel Mueller's prosecution of Manafort. In imposing the light sentence, the judge said that Manafort's life was “mostly blameless.” Since Manafort is a long term criminal, the judge’s sentence spared Manafort out of anger at Mueller, not based on the gravity of Manafort’s crimes. In this instance, the rule of law was almost purely subjective. It was heavily rigged in favor of white, white collar criminals.

Some political philosophy on the Rule of Law concept: In a paper, Is The Rule Of Law An Essentially ContestedConcept (In Florida)?, a researcher analyzed how the 2000 election was treated by the courts. The paper comments:

For legal and political philosophers, one item of particular interest was the constant reference in public appeals of almost all the participants to the venerable ideal we call “the rule of law.” The references were legion, and often at odds with one another. This was true of every phase of the debacle.

“One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the rule of law.” (dissent in the Supreme Court 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore

Vice President Gore took the high line that public criticism of the courts was precluded by the Rule of Law. Yet plainly, many on his side thought that in the circumstances they could do nothing better for the Rule of Law than to condemn the majority's decision as shameful.

The paper’s author, Jeremy Waldron, points out that even before the Bush v. Gore decision, theorists were inching toward the conclusion that the rule of law concept was meaningless. Quoting one theorist, Judith Shklar:

It would not be very difficult to show that the phrase “the Rule of Law” has become meaningless thanks to ideological abuse and general over-use. It may well have become just another one of those self-congratulatory rhetorical devices that grace the public utterances of Anglo-American politicians. No intellectual effort therefore need be wasted on this bit of ruling-class chatter.

Waldron goes on to write that on Shklar's view, invoking the Rule of Law as an authority is “incapable of driving one's argument very much further forward than the argument could have driven on its own. . . . . at the end of the day, many will have formed the impression that the utterance of those magic words meant precious little more than "Hooray for our side!”

Despite Shklar’s harsh assessment, Waldron points out that there might be real value in trying to rationalize the rule of law concept. The urgent, important problem that Waldron describes is how to make the law rule instead of having men rule using the law as an excuse to get what they want. Waldron's paper is complex, but it boils down to trying to find a solution to the problem of rule by men instead of by law. I think there are avenues to at least try that, but outcomes are not knowable without the necessary experimentation. That is for a different discussion focused on that issue.

For this discussion it is sufficient to assert that the Rule of Law related to political matters is often, maybe usually, as or more subjective (ideological or in-group vs out-group) than objective. That is a significant source of political and social polarization in American society, e.g., the 2015 Obergefell Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage. In turn, that polarization can arguably constitute an existential threat to liberal democracy and possibly modern civilization, and maybe even the fate of the human species.

Fixing the Rule of Law to at least some non-trivial extent seems to be a critically important task on the road to trying to rationalize politics relative to what it is now. That assumes partial rationalization is possible.

Political rationalization really has its work cut out for it.

Not Cabbage on a Stick

B&B orig: 3/13/19

Does Absolute Free Speech Mean Fairness, Objectivity and Impartiality?

“But it cannot be the duty, because it is not the right, of the state to protect the public against false doctrine. The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.” U.S. Supreme Court in Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516, 545 (1945)

Moderator message at the former Political Rhetoric Busters Disqus channel and its reincarnation as a Word Press blog

Some people advocate absolute free speech or something close to it. Some may even want to remove limits on speech that incites imminent violence, is defamatory, child porn, and/or false advertising. It is the case that allowing all speech, except what can now be punished or proscribed, is tantamount to being fair, objective and impartial? If so, that means that dark free speech[1] is fair, objective and impartial.

But on the other hand, facts, truths and logic are often bitterly contested. For example, people who deny that global warming is real or caused mostly by human activities disagree about the science, the data and its interpretation. They usually also attack the scientists as liars, incompetent, ignorant of basic science, and/ or enemies of the state. The two sides rely on different, incompatible sets of facts and logic. Minds do not change.

The Supreme Court made it clear that because judges have no idea of how to separate honest from dishonest speech, the Constitution protects dark free speech as much as honest free speech.

History, and cognitive and social sciences make it clear that dark speech is more persuasive than honest speech. Evolution hard-wired human brains to respond more strongly to threats and the negative emotions threat elicits. In practice, this means that dark speech is easily made to be stronger than honest speech, e.g., by lying, exaggerating and so forth. For example, President Trump’s claim that there is an emergency along the Mexico border is considered by most people to be a false alarm.[2] Nonetheless, that alarm is persuasive to many people, especially when people crossing the border are falsely portrayed as murdering, raping, pedophile narco terrorists.

Ban the speaker: The political right often criticizes the left as intolerant of opposing speech. They point to instances where speakers on college campuses are disinvited to speak. The left responds that the speakers are socially damaging in various ways, e.g., they are liars, or they foment unwarranted fear, hate, intolerance, etc.

In view of his past history of fomenting hate and racism, Australia canceled a visa for Milo Yiannopoulos to visit there. The Guardian reports: “Immigration minister David Coleman said on Saturday that comments about Islam made by Yiannopoulos in the wake of the Christchurch [New Zealand]massacre were ‘appalling and foment hatred and division’ and he would not be allowed in the country.”

The shooter in the Christchurch New Zealand mass murder was explicit in his ‘manifesto’ that he was murdering to divide people about guns and he used social media to spread his message of racist rage and hate while he slaughtered innocents and showed it online in real time.

Given history and human biology is it fair, objective and impartial to let people use dark free speech against the public? Or, because the courts have held there is no way to tell truth from lies, (1) allowing dark speech free reign is fair, objective and/or impartial, and (2) that’s the best that inherently flawed humans can do in view of their cognitive limitations?

Footnotes:
1. Dark free speech: lies, deceit, unwarranted emotional manipulation such as fomenting unwarranted fear, hate, anger, intolerance, bigotry or racism, unwarranted opacity to hide relevant facts or truths.

2. “Numerous polls suggest Trump’s decision was popular among his Republican base. But his decision to use executive authority to fund a wall along the southern border is opposed by a clear majority of the public.

That is reflected in six polls taken from early January to early March. By roughly a 2-to-1 margin, Americans oppose Trump’s decision to use emergency powers to build a border wall. That’s a wider margin than the Senate resolution to overturn Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, which passed 59 to 41.”

B&B orig: 3/16/19

The Subtle Power of Propaganda

In his short but mind blowing 1923 masterpiece on propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion, Edward Bernays describes his profession as a master propagandist. In his time, he was unsurpassed as a manipulator of mass public opinion. Bernays is considered by many historians to be one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century. He, along with a few other masters of 'public relations' (Bernays invented the term) transformed America from a needs based society to a desires based society. Bernays and a couple of other propagandists working for the US government coaxed a reluctant America to enter into the mindless slaughter of World War I, successfully using the powerful propaganda line of making the world safe for democracy. German Nazis learned their propaganda techniques from Bernays. After he learned that the Nazis were using his techniques to control public opinion and persecute people, he wrote this: They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.

Bernays invented the term 'public relations' for propaganda after the Nazis made the phrase synonymous with lies, deceit, trickery, baseless emotional manipulation and authoritarianism. He went to his grave believing that using propaganda or public relations techniques to manipulate public opinion was for social good because the real goal of 'proper' propaganda is always social. History has proven that he was wrong about this and propaganda or public relations is still seen by many or most people as essentially antisocial, not essentially social. What Bernays taught the world was how to manipulate mass public opinion for any purpose, not merely for social good.

Cigarettes and light bulbs: To sell more cigarettes, Bernays created an advertising campaign that made women who smoked in public seem to be empowered and independent creatures of wisdom and grace. He coined the phrase *'torches of freedom'* for cigarettes and successfully made it socially acceptable for women to smoke in public. Obviously, conning both men and women into accepting women smoking in public did little or nothing to empower women, but that didn't matter. Cigarette sales skyrocketed, which was the only point of the ad campaign. Bernays also turned public opinion to acceptance of private ownership of electrical utilities after powerful individuals saw the vast amounts of money they could make by selling electricity themselves instead of having governments control the sales. Bernays' propaganda was a critical factor is establishing America's current capitalist vision of very powerful, very self-interested electrical utility companies. Opinions will differ as to how that has played out for the public interest in the last century or so.

Politics, truth and propaganda: Despite his dubious claim that he used propaganda only for the public good, see cigarettes above, Bernays was no fool about exactly what terrors and mass slaughter it could unleash. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, was acutely aware of the science of his time. He understood people's minds as well as anyone, and far better than most. His comments in *Crystallizing Public Opinion* make that clear. He wrote:

“It is manifestly impossible for either side in [a political] dispute to obtain a totally unbiased point of view as to the other side. . . . . The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education’, really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda. . . . . Political, economic and moral judgments, as we have seen, are more often expressions of crowd psychology and herd reaction than the result of the calm exercise of judgment. . . . . Intolerance is almost inevitably accompanied by a natural and true inability to comprehend or make allowance for opposite points of view. . . . We find here with significant uniformity what one psychologist has called ‘logic-proof compartments.’ The logic-proof compartment has always been with us.”

His characterization of politics and truth strike this observer as stunningly accurate and deeply disturbing. Bernays clearly described in 1923 what is now the irrational and reality- and reason-untethered thing we call American politics in 2019. His comment on the relativity of truth depending on point of view is spot on. And, when a modern American politician or business mogul gets in hot water over some scandal, their usual first impulse is to call out a public relations folks to formulate the spin and lies they will use against the public to cool the water down so they can stay in power and effectively argue they never did what they did. That spin & lie trick is playing out with a vengeance right now in Washington politics. Propaganda lives. Propaganda works. President Trump is living proof.

A 4-hour documentary on Bernays' life and influence is here:



B&B orig: 3/20/19

Are Some Platforms Wising Up to Lies and Propaganda?

Medusa's Head - South Africa, euphorbia

Last month, Pinterest initiated a policy of cracking down on anti-vaccine content. The New York Times reported:

Pinterest, a digital platform popular with parents, took an unusual step to crack down on the proliferation of anti-vaccination propaganda: It purposefully hobbled its search box.

Type “vaccine” into its search bar and nothing pops up. “Vaccination” or “anti-vax”? Also nothing.

Pinterest, which allows people to save pictures on virtual pinboards, is often used to find recipes for picky toddlers, baby shower décor or fashion trends, but it has also become a platform for anti-vaccination activists who spread misinformation on social media.

But only Pinterest, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, has chosen to banish results associated with certain vaccine-related searches, regardless of whether the results might have been reputable.

In another reaction to propaganda about vaccines, Amazon announced that it will remove some books that contain vaccine misinformation, while Facebook and YouTube are similarly moving to shut false information down on their platforms.

The Washington Post writes:

YouTube said it was banning anti-vaccination channels from running online advertisements.

Facebook announced it was hiding certain content and turning away ads that contain misinformation about vaccines, and Pinterest said it was blocking “polluted” search terms, memes and pins from particular sites prompting anti-vaccine propaganda, according to news reports.

Amazon has now joined other companies navigating the line between doing business and censoring it, in an age when, experts say, misleading claims about health and science have a real impact on public health.

NBC News recently reported that Amazon was pulling books touting false information about autism “cures” and vaccines. The e-commerce giant confirmed Monday to The Washington Post that several books are no longer available, but it would not release more specific information.

Culture war explodes: People who believe false information and science including science of anthropogenic climate change have been adamant that their free speech rights includes the right to spread their views everywhere on an equal footing with real truth and established science. Proponents of false truth and false science vehemently argue they speak real truth and science to liberals, socialists, communists, corrupt corporations and other liars, deceivers and manipulators.

Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest and other social media are privately owned and therefore they can choose what content they allow and disallow on their platforms.

The point is this: Every person and company can choose to believe what is truth and valid science and what isn't. If a company chooses to block what it believes is lies and false science, that is its choice.

Dark free speech (DFS) forced this war: The rise of dark free speech[1] forced this situation. American conservative and populist politics is heavily infused with DFS. Independent fact checkers constantly reinforce this fact.

Whether these moves will significantly blunt the rise of DFS is unknowable. Maybe it is already too late. Regardless, these tentative steps are extremely welcome measures by the private sector in defense of liberal democracy, freedom and common decency. These mover are faint early signals that maybe significant portions of the private sector[2] in American is still on the side of truth, democracy, personal freedom and science.

An obvious question is this: Should DFS be suppressible by private entities because it is legal speech? DFS in public speech fora cannot be suppressed because that violates 1st Amendment free speech rights.

Footnote:
1. Dark free speech = lies, deceit, misinformation, unwarranted opacity, and fact and truth hiding, unwarranted emotional manipulation especially including fomenting unwarranted fear, rage, hate, intolerance, distrust, bigotry and racism, and etc.

2. Obviously not including the carbon energy sectors who continue to deny climate science to protect their profit margins and political power.

B&B: 3/21/19

Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris

Author: Mastriani the Machiavellian

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

Mostly, this is going to be letting the article speak for itself. For the most part, this poster is intending for the reader, if any and/or audience generally, if any, to search out their own deductions.

One commentary that cannot be avoided: when actual science, and the alleged professionals of the proposed disciplinary and academic set remain silent - it is nothing short of intending to utilize dark free speech to mount misinformation, disinformation, deceit, deception and the gross negligence of intentional harm upon the demonstrably ignorant populace.

Minus the typical expletives, profanities and obscenities that this poster prefers to use, there are quite simply no suitable adjectival terms, devices, phrasings or comportment that can remotely convey the disgust and repulsion that such an abrogation of responsibility confers.

In 1886, clark bell, the editor of the journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50-year career as a psychiatrist, Earle had developed curricula to teach medical students about mental disorders, co-founded the first professional organization of psychiatrists, and opened one of the first private psychiatric practices in the country.

But, as Earle knew, psychiatrists could not peer into a microscope to see the biological source of their patients’ suffering, which arose, they assumed, from the brain. They were stuck in the premodern past, dependent on “the apparent mental condition [his emphasis], as judged from the outward manifestations,” to devise diagnoses and treatments.

The protracted attempt to usher psychiatry into medicine’s modern era is the subject of Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. As her subtitle indicates, this is not a story of steady progress. Rather, it’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster.

Harrington is right to sigh over what has too often proved to be a yelling match between equally deaf opponents—members of an ambitious profession convinced that psychiatry is making strides toward understanding mental illness, and critics who believe it is at best a misguided attempt to help suffering people and at worst a pseudoscience enabling social control at the expense of human dignity. Indeed, since the sides first squared off, more than half a century ago, they seem to have learned little from each other.

Modern medicine pivots on the promise that portraying human suffering as biological disease will lead to insight and cures. Inescapably, this enterprise has a sociopolitical dimension. To say which of our travails can (and should) come under medicine’s purview is, implicitly if not explicitly, to present a vision of human agency, of the nature of the good life, of who deserves precious social resources like money and compassion. Such questions, of course, aren’t always pressing; the observation that a broken leg is a problem only in a society that requires mobility seems trivial.

But by virtue of its focus on our mental lives, and especially on our subjective experience of the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more directly than other medical specialties, implicates our conception of who we are and how our lives should be lived. It raises, in short, moral questions. If you convince people that their moods are merely electrochemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend to ease their pain.

A moment of commentary here: More than a portion of the rage this poster feels at the OP "situation" is most obviously not knowable by the reader and/or audience generally.

However it works out operationally, this poster was? is? an adopted simian. The adoptors didn't like, resemble, mirror or share commonality with the adopted, and the reverse being just as equally correct and accurate. But ethics are ethics, correct is correct and one's framework must inform them of what actions are appropriate regarding human suffering and their part in it or their part in minimizing it to their capacities.

The adoptive mother is currently institutionalized in the psychiatric wing of a nursing facility for advancing progressive Lewy Body dementia; the short of it being, her frontal lobes are functionally desiccating inside her skull, neuron by neuron. She was an educator for nearly 40 years, and the bitter irony of that should not be lost on any of the readership here. There is mercy in the ailment being of the frontal lobes, it prevents her from knowing that she is losing every identifying cognitive and affective mapping that made her who she ever was. I digress.

At the risk of being polemical, let me suggest that Harrington’s word disingenuous fails to describe the cynicism of Robert Spitzer, the editor of the DSM-3, who acknowledged to me that he was responding to the fact that “psychiatry was regarded as bogus,” and who told me that the book was a success because it “looks very scientific. If you open it up, it looks like they must know something.” Nor does ironic accurately describe the actions of an industry that touts its products’ power to cure biochemical imbalances that it no longer believes are the culprit. Plain bad faith is what’s on display, sometimes of outrageous proportion. And like all bad faith, it serves more than one master: not only the wish to help people, but also the wish to preserve and increase power and profits.

Robert Spitzer, exemplar of how academia can willingly shelter a charlatan, also purveyor of "homosexual therapy" To your own cognition and reading, to your own ends be it, but for this poster, it is long beyond past time to end this "faith based" propaganda campaign, and further overdue for the scientific community to excavate a spine from wherever lost pit it was first discarded. But as my closest friend, teacher and compatriot Schvagg reminds me, "monkey is gonna monkey, what can you do?"

B&B orig: 3/22/19

Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0

Author: dcleve

I found an interesting essay on political tribalism. These cultural anthropology groupings sometimes provide a useful framework to understand who we are and why our culture works as it does. I hope you find it of interest as well.

The future does not sound good based on this framework. Digital isolation in competing truth-camps look likely to continue and increase.

The authors seem to think the "violence" of meme-wars will be only digital.

If their model is right, I think it is reasonable to project physical political violence in the US. Yes, no?

Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0:

“Until the last few years, it made sense to talk in terms of a red tribe and a blue tribe when describing political affiliation. The red tribe was right-wing, populist, nationalist, religious, concerned by terrorism, and valued sexual purity. The blue tribe was left-wing, globalist, internationalist, secular, concerned by global warming, and valued sexual freedom. They had fundamental disagreements about what America (or the West) was, what it needed to become, and how to get there. They even had a culture war. However, this dichotomy no longer provides a sufficient map of the political territory we find ourselves in.

Enter memetic tribes. We define memetic tribes as a group of agents with a memeplex that directly or indirectly seeks to impose its distinct map of reality, along with its moral imperatives, upon other minds. These tribes are the active players in the new culture war. They possess a multiplicity of competing claims, interests, goals, and organizations. While the red and blue tribes were certainly far from monolithic, in the current decade any claim to unity is laughable. An establishment leftist who squabbles with the right must contend with mockery from the dirtbag left. Meanwhile, the Dirtbag Left endures critiques from Social Justice Activists (SJA), who in turn are criticized by the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). The trench warfare of the old culture war has become an all-out brawl.

Some have used the notion of “digital tribes”, which we might call pacifist memetic tribes, to understand the penchant of individuals to sort themselves into online groups that share interest and beliefs. But historians will see the era of digital tribes for what it was: A brief blip before somebody said, “Wait, guys, aren’t we forgetting something? We could be fighting other tribes right now!” Digital tribes could not sate a fundamental need for bloodshed. The Internet, ostensibly an opportunity for greater understanding, communication, and collaboration, has instead become the central theater of the new culture war. In the last decade a boundless field for the diffusion of kitten pictures, image macros, and insular forums transformed into a battleground for propaganda, doxxing, partisan podcasts, and public shaming campaigns. While digital tribes still exist, such as the speedrunners or the harmless furries, we have entered the age of memetic tribes.”

Essay continues at the link ...

B&B orig: 9/20/18