Radical right GOP attacks on elections continue

No, the Republican Party is not done yet passing laws to suppress votes, rig elections in their favor and undermine confidence in elections and democracy generally. All the ducks will be in line in time for the 2022 elections. The New York Times writes:

A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022, as the G.O.P. puts forward proposals ranging from a requirement that ballots be hand-counted in New Hampshire to the creation of a law enforcement unit in Florida to investigate allegations of voting fraud.

The Republican drive, motivated in part by a widespread denial of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat last year, includes both voting restrictions and measures that could sow public confusion or undermine confidence in fair elections, and will significantly raise the stakes of the 2022 midterms.

After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In over 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that works to expand access to the ballot.

In many places, Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican-controlled legislatures. G.O.P. state lawmakers across the country have enacted wide-ranging cutbacks to voting access this year and have used aggressive gerrymandering to lock in the party’s statehouse power for the next decade.

But the left remains short of options, leaving many candidates, voters and activists worried about the potential effects in 2022 and beyond, and increasingly frustrated with Democrats’ inability to pass federal voting protections in Washington.

“What we are facing now is a very real and acute case of democratic subversion,” Ms. Abrams said in an interview, adding that the country needed a Senate willing to “protect our democracy regardless of the partisanship of those who would oppose it.”  

Republicans say the bills are needed to preserve what they call election integrity, though electoral fraud remains exceedingly rare in American elections. 

G.O.P. lawmakers in at least five states have put forward legislation to review the 2020 election and institute new procedures for investigating the results of future elections.

Many of the other bills are similar to those passed this year, which aim to limit access to mail-in voting; reduce the use of drop boxes; enact harsher penalties for election officials who are found to have broken rules; expand the authority of partisan poll watchers; and shift oversight of elections from independent officials and commissions to state legislatures.

This is more clear and undeniable evidence that the republican Party is authoritarian and out to subvert elections and democracy. The authoritarian's intent cannot be clearer, despite their claims of just wanting to insure “election integrity.” Their laws target democrats, minorities, college students and poll workers. 

At this point, the situation for Democrats looks bleak. Republicans can and are subverting future elections in states where they can. All the Republican anti-election measures might be sufficient to make it almost impossible for Democrats to ever gain control of government again as it has now. Maybe a backlash among Democratic voters could increase turnout, but odds of that possibility is unclear. Democrats tend not to vote compared to Republicans, especially in non-presidential election years. 

It also need to be kept in mind that the Republicans do not need to suppress a large number of votes in Senate and Presidential races. All they need to do is disenfranchise a small number to win a close race. 

Questions: 

1. It is reasonable and evidence-based to believe that the Republican Party is (i) authoritarian (or fascist), and (ii) intent on subverting elections and public trust in them? If the answer to (i) is no, how much more and what kind of evidence is needed to draw the opposite conclusion?

2. How much responsibility each do the ex-president and the Republican Party bear for the party's turn to solidly anti-democratic authoritarianism, assuming one believes that has happened, e.g., about equal, mostly ex-president or mostly GOP?

Radical Christian legal reasoning to overturn or gut Roe v. Wade

A New York Time opinion piece discusses some of the oral arguments that the Republican Christian nationalist judges were making last week as they reasoned their way to their forgone conclusion about gutting abortion rights, probably overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in the process. They need a rationale to rely on to make their decision look like gutting abortion rights isn't political. 

A couple of key concepts about how courts decide cases helps with understanding what is going on here. 

Sorry for the length and complexity of this. This post just got away from me because I wanted to try to be very clear about how Republican Christian nationalism is working in the Supreme Court. 

Holding vs. dictum

In a court decision, the decision about the law is called the holding. Sometimes a court just states the holding without calling it the holding. The holding in the Roe case is exceptionally long, but it includes this: 

Held: . . . . . 

3. State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a 'compelling' point at various stages of the woman's approach to term. 

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician. 

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health. (this is the viability standard that a later Supreme Court decision relied on and that the Republicans on the court desperately want to see overturned) 

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother. (note the exemption, "except where necessary" . . . .)  

At the end of its decision, the Roe court added a sentence that reads, "To summarize and to repeat:" and then repeats part of 3 and all of (a), (b) and (c) from the holding. I do not recall any other Supreme Case that summarized and repeated parts of the holding. At the least, this was unusual. 

The other things that cases usually contain is dicta, sometimes a lot of it. By contrast with a holding, a dictum is not binding law. One law source defines dicta like this:

A remark, statement, or observation of a judge that is not a necessary part of the legal reasoning needed to reach the decision in a case. Although dictum may be cited in a legal argument, it is not binding as legal precedent, meaning that other courts are not required to accept it.

The start of the holding in Roe v. Wade

Parts 3, 3(a), 3(b) and 3(c) of the holding protecting the right to an abortion until fetal viability, which in 1973 was at the end of the second trimester; 

the first trimester ends at week 12 and the second trimester ends at week 26;

now fetuses at age 21 weeks can sometimes be saved outside the womb, maybe marking the current line for viability 

Legal rationalization based on facts first, 

decision second based on the law & facts 

The rule of law is supposed to work in the US by a two-step process. Analysis of the facts and law goes first, and then the legal decision gets expressed in the holding. When judges are political, incompetent and/or ignorant of the law, they decide first and then work backward to build a legal rational that supports the decision they wanted to get right from the get go. Obviously, this turns the role of law from something intended to be at least semi-objective into something mostly or completely subjective. The law can be completely political when judges are motivated to be political, especially when there is complexity and/or ambiguity at play. 

Complexity and ambiguity are the playgrounds of political judges. They afford all the flexibility needed to get the pre-ordained decisions they want, while still pretending to be neutral.

As discussed here before, the US Supreme Court court operates in secrecy to generate their decisions "for obvious reasons." No judge has ever articulated the obvious reasons. The reasons appear to be either a national security or state secret or non-existent. For decades, legal observers have been criticizing the court [1] for deciding cases first and then working backward to the legal reasoning. That is the "obvious reasons" the US Supreme Court demands the decision-making process is cloaked in secrecy. 

The NYT opinion piece

The NYT writes:

There are many reasons for dismay over the Supreme Court argument in the Mississippi abortion case, but it was the nonstop gaslighting that really got to me.

First there was Justice Clarence Thomas, pretending by his questions actually to be interested in how the Constitution might be interpreted to provide for the right to abortion, a right he has denounced and schemed to overturn since professing to the Senate Judiciary Committee 30 years ago that he never even thought about the matter.

Then there was Chief Justice John Roberts, mischaracterizing an internal memo that Justice Harry Blackmun wrote to his colleagues as the Roe v. Wade majority was discussing how best to structure the opinion Justice Blackmun was working on. The chief justice was trying to delegitimize the place of fetal viability in the court’s abortion jurisprudence, where for nearly 50 years, viability has been the unbreached firewall protecting the right of a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy.

“It’s an unfortunate source, but it’s there,” he said, referring to Justice Blackmun’s papers, on file and open to the public at the Library of Congress. “In his papers, Justice Blackmun said that the viability line was — actually was dicta.”

“Dicta” is a dismissive word that refers to asides in an opinion that are not actually part of the court’s holding. The entry in the Blackmun papers to which the chief justice was most likely referring was a memo of Nov. 21, 1972 that the author of Roe v. Wade sent along with a new draft opinion to the other justices, noting: “In its present form it contains dictum but I suspect that in this area some dictum is indicated and not to be avoided.”

In that memo, of course referring to what was still a work in progress, Justice Blackmun proposed that the right to abortion be fully protected only until the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. “This is arbitrary,” he wrote, “but perhaps any other selected point, such as quickening or viability, is equally arbitrary.”

But two weeks later, after consulting with other justices, including Lewis Powell and Thurgood Marshall, Justice Blackmun circulated another memo endorsing the viability line. Far from describing this determination as arbitrary, he wrote in a memo dated Dec. 11, 1972, that viability “has logical and biological justifications,” namely, that “few could argue, or would argue, that a state’s interest by the time of viability, when independent life is presumably possible, is not sufficiently developed to justify appropriate regulation.”

In other words, by the time the court issued the final opinion in January 1973, viability was not dicta but rather an essential element of the decision. Chief Justice Roberts may not like viability — as clearly he doesn’t, observing to Julie Rikelman, the lawyer for the Mississippi clinic challenging the state’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, that “viability, it seems to me, doesn’t have anything to do with choice” — but he was flatly wrong to suggest that it was an unconsidered aspect of Roe v. Wade.  

In fact, as the second Blackmun memo makes clear, the court that decided Roe saw a direct link between the viability line and a woman’s ability to choose abortion. In that second memo, Justice Blackmun referred to the “practical aspect” of the viability line, observing that “there are many pregnant women, particularly younger girls, who may refuse to face the fact of pregnancy and who, for one reason or another, do not get around to medical consultation until the end of the first trimester is upon them or, indeed, has passed.”  

And then there was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who rattled off a list of “the most consequential cases in this court’s history” that resulted from overruling prior decisions. If the court had adhered, for example, to the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson rather than overruling that precedent in Brown v. Board of Education “the country would be a much different place,” he told Ms. Rikelman. “I assume you agree with most, if not all, the cases I listed there, where the court overruled the precedent,” Justice Kavanaugh continued. Why then, he asked, should the court stick with a case it now regarded as wrongly decided?

More gaslighting: The superficial plausibility of Justice Kavanaugh’s analogy between Plessy v. Ferguson and Roe v. Wade dissolves with a second’s contemplation. For one thing, Plessy negated individual liberty, while Roe expanded it. For another, Justice Kavanaugh’s list could have been 1,000 cases long without casting any light on whether today’s Supreme Court should repudiate Roe v. Wade.

But the justice’s goal was not to invite contemplation. It was to normalize the deeply abnormal scene playing out in the courtroom. President Donald Trump vowed to end the right to abortion, and the three justices he put on the court — Neil Gorsuch, to a seat that was not legitimately Mr. Trump’s to fill; Amy Coney Barrett, whose election-eve nomination and confirmation broke long settled norms; and Justice Kavanaugh — appear determined to do just that.

Question: Is the NYT opinion piece merely, unjustified, over-the-top partisan whining about how the Republicans on the court are going about their business? In other words, are the Christian nationalists on the court, i.e., the Republicans, looking for ways to gut abortion rights while searching for a legal rational to do exactly what they were put on the court to do?

Footnote: 

1. That 1973 article comments: 

Our thesis may be simply stated: basic democratic theory requires that there be knowledge not only of who governs but of how policy decisions are made. Only if it can be demonstrated that certain other fundamental Values are jeopardized or transgressed should secrecy continue to be the norm. We maintain that the secrecy which pervades Congress, the executive branch and the courts is itself the enemy.   

A third reason for the failure of an opinion to depict the process may be found in the probability that judges work back from conclusions to principles rather than "forward" from principles to conclusions. Jerome Frank once said that this conception of the judicial process is so heretical that it seldom finds expression." The "so-called opinions," he explained, will not reveal anything remotely resembling a statement of the actual judging process because decision takes place by an intuitive flash rather than conscious application of formal logic of ratiocination. This intuitive approach to decision making, by nature and definition, precludes full explanation of the decision-maker's experience, for it is not made up of "little bricks of sight, sound, taste, and touch." 

Having made bland assertions that secrecy is absolutely essential for the performance of their tasks, the Justices have not offered a cogent explanation of the reason for the essentiality. Justice Tom Clark maintained that without absolute secrecy, decisions would become prematurely known and "the whole process of decision destroyed." But this does not explain why maintenance of secrecy must be continued after the decision is taken or why judges suffer from "judicial lockjaw. ' Justice W. J. Brennan states that the conferences are carried out in "absolute secrecy" for "obvious reasons" and avoids any further elucidation of the matter. These assertions suggest that there is in the secrecy of the Supreme Court something of a semi-holy arcanum, something untouchable on which the very efficiency of the Court's functioning depends. It is the validity of that notion that is challenged in this article.

Let's reflect...

            

“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

That was one of JFK’s signature lines from his inauguration in 1961.  And it’s a great suggestion.

So I’ve been thinking, what is it what we want FROM our government, here in the U.S. (or if you are somewhere else in the world, in your own government), and what is it that we can do FOR our government.

I’ve been jotting down some ideas off the top of my head.  So far I have:

FROM our government, we want:

• Healthcare
• Military safety
• Police force
• Food safety
• Fair taxation
• Judicial arbitration
• Higher education (min community college or tech school)
• Environmental oversight
• Safety nets including Social Security

 

FOR our government, we should:

• Pay our fair share of taxes
• Operate within/follow civil laws
• Do some sort of community service/participation (could be jury duty, voting, military, volunteering for something, charities support, other)

 

Granted, the devil is in the details of what is fair, what is legal, what constitutes h/c, etc.  But let's just speak in generalities for now.

Help me expand my generic lists.  What are some missing items?

Thanks for posting and recommending!

The Republican plan for women, the LGBQT community, and their rights

In several posts here about fundamentalist, radical right Christian nationalism (CN) I've written about sacred CN dogma related to women and the LGBQT community. Experts agree that women are to be subordinate to men, especially White men. The White race stands above all others and are chosen and destined by God to rule over all races. LGBQT people are ranked below heterosexual women and they are to be condemned in public and discriminated against by law. These infallible dogmas are a matter of God's will and not open to debate among CN elites and leaders. These core CN dogmas will be forced by laws onto society whether society wants them or not.

Thom Hartmann, a well-known liberal TV and radio talk show host with apparently expanding public reach, produces commentary and analyses of various issues. A new liberal politics radio station here in San Diego county has started broadcasting some of Hartman's programming. His content is biased to the left, but it is mostly fact-based from what I have seen so far. I am coming to trust his analyses and opinions.  

In response to the Supreme Court taking up a Mississippi case that significantly restricts abortion rights, Hartmann wrote an essay that he calls a daily rant. The Mississippi case seems to be set to either overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortions (most likely outcome IMO), or leave Roe nominally intact but eliminate the fetus viability standard (about 24 weeks) as the line that cannot be crossed (next most likely outcome). Either way, the six Republican CN judges on the Supreme Court are set to significantly limit or completely eliminate abortion rights in states where CN Republicans control state legislatures. 

Much less likely is a court decision that makes all or nearly all abortions illegal in all states. The logic is that a fetus has full rights from the second the egg is fertilized and therefore all Constitutional rights and protection attach from the moment of conception. That is another bit of infallible CN dogma. 

But, radical right CN social engineering is likely going to get much worse than just loss of abortion rights. The CN agenda is aiming to gut and kill secular American society and fix it by forcing fundamentalist Christianity on everyone in the US. Hartmann writes in yesterday's daily rant: 

Once the GOP is done with birth control they're coming for gay marriage & ultimately, civil rights laws themselves including the rights to assembly, free-speech & due process.

In about six months, women in thirty Republican-controlled states will probably lose their right to get an abortion.

The Supreme Court and the Constitution don't “grant” or “give” Americans rights: they recognize rights and define the extent to which they can be infringed upon by our government, theoretically balancing private rights against the public good.

That said, the Court can take away rights, although throughout their 240+ year history they've only done it in a big way once: in 1896 with their Plessy v Ferguson decision that, until they reversed it in 1954 in Brown v Board, took away the freedom and voting rights of African Americans for half a century.

In the case of Roe v Wade, the Court ruled in 1973 that women have both the 14th Amendment “liberty” right to control their own bodies and the 4th Amendment “privacy” right to keep it between themselves and their physicians.

But that’s just the first of a series of ideas Republicans have to regulate women’s behavior and roll back the clock to the early 1960s when women couldn’t get a credit card without their father’s or husband’s permission, had no legal right to birth control in some states, and faced fully legal discrimination in housing, education and employment.

Next up on the GOP’s agenda to strip women of political and economic power will be banning most forms of birth control used today, including birth control pills and the IUD.

Step one is to hyper-regulate “morning after pills.”

While Texas’s 100% GOP SB8 law that puts $10,000 bounties on friends of women who get abortions receives all the attention, that same week the Texas legislature passed SB4.

This particularly insidious law makes it a crime for women to be prescribed abortion-inducing Mifeprex (works up to 70 days after the last menstrual period), Cytotec (works up to the 13th week of pregnancy) and methotrexate (works up to the 9th week of pregnancy) any later than three weeks after missing a period.

The law specifically criminalizes physicians and healthcare institutions who prescribe or provide these drugs outside of that parameter. When reporter Lauren Windsor asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott straight up if he’d be able to ban birth all control pills in Texas he suggested it was still possible.

Which, of course, is step two in the GOP’s War on Women.

Republicans — most famously Rick Santorum — have run for president saying that states have the right to ban birth control pills, and multiple states are pushing so-called “personhood” bills that specify that human life begins at the moment of fertilization in the fallopian tubes.

“Personhood” bills that would define any birth control method that prevents the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall — which includes IUDs and all birth control pills — have passed at least one legislative branch in Montana, Kansas, Virginia, Tennessee, North Dakota, Arkansas, and Mississippi and been introduced by Republicans in Ohio, Georgia, Maine, Texas, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Iowa and in the US Congress.

The Personhood Alliance has affiliates all across the country, and a huge network of activists: once Roe v Wade is dead next summer, expect an explosion of activity in this next level of the GOP’s War on Women. Many Catholic leaders and multiple hard-right white evangelical denominations are on board as well.

And, as today’s “personhood” advocates will enthusiastically tell you, the roots of this situation are not recent:

• Pandora opened a box and humanity suffered; Eve ate the apple and her god has been angry with humans ever since.

• St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, “wives be subject to your husbands,” a single phrase that became the foundation of British and American law for centuries.

• In the 4th century, St. Jerome, one of the most influential patriarchs of the early Roman Catholic Church wrote, “Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word a perilous object.”

• Almost a thousand years later, Thomas Aquinas wrote that woman was “created to be man’s helpmeet, but her unique role is in conception…since for other purposes men would better be assisted by other men.”

And now the GOP’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice is on its way. It’s not as if we weren’t warned:

• During Mike Pence’s first year as governor of Indiana, his state put a young woman in prison for having a miscarriage, alleging that she’d taken an abortion-causing drug. Purvi Patel didn’t have a trace of such a drug in her system, but Pence’s state sentenced her to 20 years in prison anyway.

• Just a few years earlier, Indiana had also held Bei Bei Shuai for 435 days in the brutal maximum security Marion County prison, facing 45 years to life for trying to kill herself and, in the process, causing the death of her 33-week fetus.

• Utah charged 28-year-old Melissa Ann Rowland with murder because she refused a C-section, preferring vaginal birth for her twins, and one of them died.

• Sixteen-year-old Rennie Gibbs was charged by the state of Mississippi with “depraved heart murder” when her baby was born dead because his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck: her crime was that she had cocaine in her bloodstream, according to prosecutors.

• Angela Carder was ordered to have a C-section to deliver her baby before she died of cancer; both she and the baby died from the procedure.

These cases have exploded in recent years, as the GOP and the nation’s law enforcement system have embraced the American “Christian” version of Sharia law which dictates that women are the property of men and their principal purpose for existence is reproduction.

According to Duke University’s Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, there were 413 documented—and probably thousands of lesser-known—cases of women being prosecuted for having miscarriages or attempting abortions between the time Roe v. Wade became the law of the land and 2005.

When Governor Mike Pence proudly signed Indiana’s abortion restrictions in 2016, women across the state noted that it required that miscarried fetuses (along with aborted fetuses) be “interred [buried in a cemetery] or cremated,” no matter whether the pregnancy was six or sixteen weeks along when the miscarriage happened.

It led to a movement across the state called “Periods for Pence,” in which women tweeted or called the governor’s office to tell him when their periods had started and ended, so the state wouldn’t mistake a normal menstrual period for a miscarriage. [In Saudi Arabia, there is an app for women to report their periods]

The press treated it as funny at the time; nobody’s laughing now.

And this is just the start. Today the Court is hearing a case out of Maine that could require states to pay for the tuition of all students attending religious schools, using taxpayer money that normally funds public schools. This would include forcing states to pay for religious schools that openly discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and staff, and teach children that being gay is a sin.

Once Republicans are done with birth control they’ll be coming for gay marriage and, ultimately, broader civil rights laws themselves including, like in Hungary (their new role model), ending the rights to assembly, free-speech, and due process.

And if you think that’s an over-the-top concern, consider: Just a few months ago, Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that provides immunity to drivers who plow their cars into protesters, if those protestors are on a public street. They’re already going after our right of public assembly.

Here is some data from April of 2020 on how Americans feel about the Bible influencing American laws:

Questions: 

1. Is it likely that the theocratic fundamentalist Christian authoritarianism described here is what the Republican Party wants to do to American society, civil liberties and the law in general? 

2. Is it fair to see the Republican Party as a necessary but willing part of a powerful Christian Sharia political movement? [to my knowledge, no major Democratic Party politician talks like this or advocates making extremist Christian views into actual laws]

3. Is teaching critical race theory and/or BLM protests more of a threat to democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties than the rise of Christian Sharia in the Republican Party and on the Supreme Court? 

American plastic waste: We're #1!!

The new normal for some beaches

American exceptionalism is on display in a recent scientific report on global plastic waste. As usual, special interests wanting to defend their profits are chiming in (and secretly donating money to Joe Manchin and other pro-pollution politicians). The Washington Post writes:

The United States ranks as the world’s leading contributor of plastic waste and needs a national strategy to combat the issue, according to a congressionally mandated report released Tuesday.

“The developing plastic waste crisis has been building for decades,” the National Academy of Sciences study said, noting the world’s current predicament stems from years of technological advances. “The success of the 20th century miracle invention of plastics has also produced a global scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look.”

The United States contributes more to this deluge than any other nation, according to the analysis, generating about 287 pounds of plastics per person. Overall, the United States produced 42 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2016 — almost twice as much as China, and more than the entire European Union combined.

The researchers estimated that between 1.13 million to 2.24 million metric tons of the United States’ plastic waste leak into the environment each year. About 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean a year, and under the current trajectory that number could climb to 53 million by the end of the decade.

That amount of waste would be the equivalent to “roughly half of the total weight of fish caught from the ocean annually,” the report said.

The EPA recently released a national recycling strategy, which some critics faulted for not taking aim at the current level of plastics production. Today’s recycling system, scientists found in the new report, is “grossly insufficient to manage the diversity, complexity, and quantity of plastic waste in the United States.”

“A lot of U.S. focus to date has been on the cleaning it up part,” said Spring. “There needs to be more attention to the creation of plastic.”

The American Chemistry Council, a trade association, endorsed the idea of a national approach but said it opposed efforts to curtail the use of plastics in society.

“Plastic is a valuable resource that should be kept in our economy and out of our environment,” said the group’s vice president of plastics, Joshua Baca, in a statement. “Unfortunately, the report also suggests restricting plastic production to reduce marine debris. This is misguided and would lead to supply chain disruptions.”

 Despite the chemical and plastics industry claim that it wants to keep plastics out of the environment, the industry falsely claimed for decades that plastics were recyclable and would be recycled. That was just another of the endless capitalist, profit-motivated lies the American people are fed. It still is a lie. Only about 9% of all plastics are recycled. As discussed here before, the entire recycling scheme was a fraud right from the get go.

Symbols of deceit: ~91% of it isn't recyclable, arguably 

making this chemical industry 'public relations' campaign a 100% lie

Questions:

1. Are Americans too spoiled and/or lazy to give up their massive reliance on single-use plastic containers, especially the endless stream of plastic water bottles?

2. Does the chemical industry care about the environment and plastic pollution, or is its squeaks of concern sincere expressions of social conscience?

3. Will Republicans in congress protect the affected public interest here or the affected special interests, especially the chemical and oil industries?

Destined for a beach or ocean near you!

See, told 'ya so

The problem with combatting dark free speech

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

Dark free speech: Constitutionally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism, and (4) ideologically-driven motivated reasoning and other ideologically-driven biases that unreasonably distort reality and reason. (my label and definition)

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a shield that protects online sources from liability for damage from dark free speech (DFS) that the owner or users post on searchable platforms. Algorithms that Facebook, Twitter and the like use tend to amplify DFS by highlighting it in online searches. Lies, hate, outrage, crackpottery and the like pop up and then spread much more than truth, clam and reason. 

This is a reflection of how the human mind generally works. Humans are made to quickly feel and react or decide, not to slowly think and react or decide. Feeling and reacting-deciding fast is usually a lot more fun and easier than doing it more slowly.

The New York Times writes that congress is wrestling with how to deal with the problem of algorithms spreading DFS and causing damage in the process. The NYT writes:

Lawmakers have spent years investigating how hate speech, misinformation and bullying on social media sites can lead to real-world harm. Increasingly, they have pointed a finger at the algorithms powering sites like Facebook and Twitter, the software that decides what content users will see and when they see it.

Some lawmakers from both parties argue that when social media sites boost the performance of hateful or violent posts, the sites become accomplices. And they have proposed bills to strip the companies of a legal shield that allows them to fend off lawsuits over most content posted by their users, in cases when the platform amplified a harmful post’s reach.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee discussed several of the proposals at a hearing on Wednesday. The hearing also included testimony from Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who recently leaked a trove of revealing internal documents from the company.

Removing the legal shield, known as Section 230, would mean a sea change for the internet, because it has long enabled the vast scale of social media websites. Ms. Haugen has said she supports changing Section 230, which is a part of the Communications Decency Act, so that it no longer covers certain decisions made by algorithms at tech platforms.

But what, exactly, counts as algorithmic amplification? And what, exactly, is the definition of harmful? The proposals offer far different answers to these crucial questions. And how they answer them may determine whether the courts find the bills constitutional.

The congressional attempt to reign in DFS is so complex that it may not be possible. Some proposed laws define the behavior they want to regulate in general terms. One proposal exposes a platform to lawsuits if it “promotes” algorithmic spread of public health misinformation. Social media platforms would be safe if their algorithms promote content in a “neutral” way, for example, ranking posts in chronological order. 

Other proposed legislation is tries to be more specific. One proposal defines dangerous amplification as doing anything to “rank, order, promote, recommend, amplify or similarly alter the delivery or display of information.” Think about how that might be implemented and enforced. 

The NYT points out that companies already use people's personal information to target DFS content to them if they are inclined to receive it, e.g., conspiracy theory crackpots who want to get crackpottery and lies from QAnon. Contemplated legal exemptions from liability for DFS-caused damage include (i) exempting sites with five million or fewer monthly users, and (ii) posts that show up when a user finds it in a search, even if the algorithm ranks bad content higher than the more honest stuff. The concern is negative unintended consequences.

Most of the proposals the NYT discussed come from democrats in congress. Given how critically necessary the free flow of DFS is to the Republican Party, Christian nationalism and laissez-faire capitalists, it is hard to imagine that any regulation of DFS will pass out of congress. We are probably locked onto the current status quo for a long time to come.

Free speech absolutists generally argue that more speech is better and people will figure out for themselves what is truth and what isn't. From that point of view, there is no reason to even try to regulate any speech, dark or honest. Clearly, that line is reasoning is false. Tens of millions of adult Americans are deceived, bamboozled and manipulated by political partisan lies and crackpottery all the time. It may be the rule, not the exception.

One expert commented: “The issue becomes: Can the government directly ban algorithmic amplification? It’s going to be hard, especially if you’re trying to say you can’t amplify certain types of speech.” At least the matter of damage that DFS causes is on the minds of some people. That is a lot better than most everyone seeing all speech, dark or honest, as equal.

Questions: 

1. Does the social cost-benefit indicate that it is better to try to limit DFS knowing that some honest speech will be collateral damage and some online sources might go out of business? Or, is there enough value inherent in DFS that it should just be left alone, even if it means the end of democracy and the rule of law as we now know it? 

2. Is it possible to regulate DFS without violating free speech law?

3. Compared to purveyors of honest speech, how much power does the combination of DFS on social media and algorithms that promote it transfer to people and interests who routinely rely on DFS, e.g., Russia, Exxon-Mobile, the GOP, kleptocrats, dictators, etc.?