The Political Animal

Aristotle insists that man is either a political animal (the natural state) or an outcast like a “bird which flies alone” (4thC BC)

 In his Politics, Aristotle believed man was a "political animal" because he is a social creature with the power of speech and moral reasoning:

Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it; he is the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homera denounces—the outcast who is a lover of war; he may be compared to a bird which flies alone.

Aristotle’s statement that man is a “political animal” can be taken in a number of ways. One reading is to say that man is naturally sociable (the Pufendorf-Grotius line) and that they are naturally drawn to various political associations in order to satisfy their social needs. Another reading, which sees the word “political” in a less charitable light, might state that, since politics is based upon violence and threats of violence, the phrase emphasises the “animal” side of human nature rather than its rational and cooperative side. Those who turn their back on the violence inherent in politics, in Aristotle’s view, also turn their back on society - they declare themselves to be outlaws, without a “tribe”, and without a heart. His likening them to a “bird which flies alone” reminds me of the Rudyard Kipling story in The Just So Stories (1902) about “The Cat who walked by Himself”, because he of all the wild animals refused to be domesticated by human beings. Of course, there is also Robert Frost’s poem “The Road not Taken” (1920) with the line about choosing “the one less traveled by”. Is this such a bad thing?

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/aristotle-insists-that-man-is-either-a-political-animal-the-natural-state-or-an-outcast-like-a-bird-which-flies-alone-4thc-bc

Thoughts about the California gerrymander

Some years ago, California voted to put redistricting in the hands of a non-partisan commission. Over time that did reduce voter disenfranchisement. I voted for that ballot measure and was happy when it passed.

Now, I've changed my mind. I want to get rid of the independent commission and let the Dem party gerrymander every elected Republican out of every local, state and federal office where a Republican can be gerrymandered out of office. The Republican threat to democracy, elections, the rule of law and civil liberties is too high to give up this partisan weapon in this state. 

According to FiveThirtyEight, with California's current non-partisan districting, the state looks like this:

9 highly competitive House voting districts

7 republican districts

37 democratic districts

Under Democratic gerrymandering, CA would look like this:

0 highly competitive House voting districts

6 republican districts

47 democratic districts

That is why I changed my mind about the gerrymander. CA alone has unilaterally conceded 10 safe Democratic House seats for the sake of voter enfranchisement. That alone could be enough to give the Republican Party control of the House in 2022 and 2024, which in turn could be enough to allow the Republican Party to mostly or completely kill American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties.

Question: 

1. Should CA go back to partisan gerrymandering?

Looking ahead…

All of us here on Dissident Politics pay pretty close attention to the ongoing political news.  I like to think of such as “a continuing soap opera for news junkies,” aka “As the World Stomach Turns.”  Okay, enough joking around. Here comes the serious stuff:

Regarding the ongoing investigations of the 1/6 Committee, new revelations are really piling up now, hitting the airwaves fast and furiously.  Like a bank account, these revelations seem to be compounding/snowballing daily, with some 475 witness interviews (according to one of the committee members), back and forth memos discussing ways to subvert the Electoral College count, phone calls, White House meetings to discuss the tactics of a coup, fake EC electors, contemplating the seizing of voting machines, preemptive pardons by Trump if he gets re-elected, and I can’t even remember all of the nefarious antics now coming out.  You almost have to be a recluse (or At the Mall®) to not be aware of what was going on in that buildup to the Jan 6^th insurrection.  And the hits just keep on comin’. 😨

From these revelations, it’s looking more and more like Trump was quite involved in helping coordinate/mastermind the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.  Wow.  The idea of a previous U.S. President being sent to prison seems like Twilight Zone material. Things like that just do not happen, here in “the shining city on a hill” America.

When all the facts finally come out, if the DoJ finds that Trump was indeed at the forefront of these activities, doesn’t he have to be held accountable in some way? Can we let such subversive activities stand, with no repercussions?  Many rioters have been jailed. If they can be charged with sedition, shouldn’t the mastermind(s) of such get the same punishment?  Wouldn’t that be the fair thing to do?

And what happens if Trump is sent to prison?  Will even more violence ensue, and attempts at more corruption be the result? 

How does this all play out??

Give us your thoughts on any of the above.

The rising maelstrom of Republican malevolence

As some folks may have noticed, things aren't improving politically speaking. Unfortunately, things continue to deteriorate. The fever hasn't broken yet. Radical right propaganda continues to thrive in a toxic soil of lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning. 

For example, the National Butterfly Center had to close due to repeated threats against this evil organization. The threats are that sex-trafficking is going on amongst the butterflies. False sex-trafficking claims have become a recurring radical right crackpot conspiracy theory. The Washington Post writes:

The National Butterfly Center in South Texas will be closed “for the immediate future” because of baseless attacks stemming from a clash over immigration enforcement at the nearby U.S.-Mexico border, the organization said Wednesday.

The nonprofit center in Mission has endured a firestorm in recent years amid an ongoing lawsuit against the former Trump administration, which sought to build part of a border wall on its property, and the fundraising organization We Build the Wall. Right-wing groups have falsely claimed the butterfly center illegally smuggles people into the United States and facilitates sex trafficking. 

The indefinite closure comes shortly after the center shut down for three days last weekend, citing “credible threats” regarding a nearby border security rally. The We Stand America event in McAllen featured Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, and other Trump administration officials.

The butterfly center said it became aware of the rally on Jan. 21, when a congressional candidate from Virginia demanded to access the Rio Grande from the center’s property to “see the rafts with the illegal crossing.” The center alleged that the candidate and her friend knocked down its executive director, Marianna Trevino-Wright, and tried to run her son over with a car.  

The center alleged that a former Texas official, whom it did not identify, later advised Trevino-Wright to be armed or leave town during the rally because protesters would probably stop at the preserve during a caravan to the border. Later, the center said, someone tore down a state-erected sign marking the preserve’s location.  

At least some participants in the We Stand America rally do appear to have stopped at the butterfly center. Ben Bergquam, of the Stephen K. Bannon-affiliated network Real America’s Voice, recorded himself in front of the preserve’s sign, holding a child’s shoe and a wristband he says belonged to a trafficking victim. Lynz Piper-Loomis, a South Carolina congressional candidate, shared a video of herself and a friend at the center allegingchildren had been trafficked there.  

Although Trevino-Wright said police had increased their presence at the center, she said she doubted that those harassing the preserve would stop.

“There’s no consequences for any of them,” she said, “so it’s just going to get worse.”

Obviously, that congressional candidate from Virginia, a standard-issue Republican crackpot no doubt, was threatened by the existence of other people and merely standing her ground when she tried to run over a boy with her car. Alleging child sex-trafficking is quite popular among Republican crackpots these days. 

In my humble opinion, Republicans alleging sex-trafficking just cannot help but project their secret repressed desires onto others. They need professional medical treatment. 

The butterfly people's problem stem from a 2017 lawsuit the preserve file against the Trump administration in 2017. The lawsuit alleged that federal officials wanted to build a border wall on the center’s property without complying with existing law. 

Safety tip, don't sue the Trump administration for anything. Only sex-traffickers do that.

In other maelstrom of malevolence news, the GOP is still enthusiastic about RINO hunting Republican traitors in the party into irrelevance. The GOP is hoping to push Liz Cheney out of congress. The WaPo writes:

SALT LAKE CITY — Republican leaders forged an agreement this week to potentially fund a challenger to Rep. Liz Cheney in Wyoming, and party members are expected to formally condemn her for her work on the Jan. 6 committee Friday, an unprecedented rebuke of an incumbent member of Congress.

As the party met in Salt Lake City this week, the leaders of the Wyoming GOP privately signed a special letter that would allow the national party to financially support Harriet Hageman, Cheney’s primary challenger. The letter officially recognizes Hageman as the presumptive nominee for the seat.

In response to the party passing the “Rule 11” resolution that could fund Cheney’s challenger, a spokesman for Cheney said: “Wyoming Party Chairman Frank Eathorne and the Republican National Committee are trying to assert their will and take away the voice of the people of Wyoming before a single vote has even been cast.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel also worked behind the scenes with David Bossie, a top Trump ally, to author and push a resolution that attacked Cheney’s work on the committee, called her a “destructive” force in the GOP and vowed the party would no longer support her.  

“We’ve had two members engage in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse. This has gone beyond their original intent. They are not sticking up for hard-working Republicans,” McDaniel said in a joint interview with Bossie at a Salt Lake City hotel where the party is holding its winter meeting.

It is worth noting that Cheney really is a destructive force in the GOP. That is because she still stands for democracy and some semblance of truth about the fact that T**** was and still is a mendacious, corrupt anti-democracy tyrant-autocrat. On at least those issues, Cheney stands for the opposite of what the GOP stands for. 

Other recent reporting indicates that at present, Republicans who voted in the 2nd impeachment to impeach the corrupt, anti-democracy tyrant-autocrat are doing better in fund raising than the people the enraged GOP and ex-president have endorsed to replace them for their treasonous vote to defend democracy. Whether that will make any difference remains to be seen. 

Let’s talk about time.

Here’s a common philosophical question I ran across on the internet:

“Is time a construct of man or a rule of nature?”

From Wikipedia:

Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions. [Emphases mine]

So, in a nutshell, I’d say “time” means/is defined by “change”; change in any way of any thing, no matter how minuscule that change.  Even a change in one atom’s situation can validate/verify the existence of the phenomenon of time.

The phrase “intervals between them [events]” in the Wiki definition is interesting because it implies that, were the/our universe, and all that is it, should ever stop dead in its tracks, time could still exist in theory, awaiting the next interval of some change.  Okay, getting too deep into the weeds/hole here.  I’ll wrap this up. 

So, to you, what is time?  How do you define it? 

A man-made invention to keep track of our place in the universe? A relative scale? A calculation of existence? An ever-flowing river of events? A fourth dimension? The engine that prevents the universe from remaining static? An undefinable phenomenon that morphs depending on an infinite number of factors? A phenomenon/result of consciousness?  A scheme to sell watches? 😁 All of the above?  Other, and then some?  I really don’t care, why do you?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

On election subversion: Some people think the possibility is significant

The following is from the abstract of a draft paper (in peer review), Identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections in the Contemporary United States:

The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules. The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: usurpation of voter choices for President by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority to do so, possibly blessed by a partisan-divided Supreme Court and acquiesced to by Republicans in Congress; fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes, or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate.

Until recently, it would have been absurd to raise the possibility of such election subversion or a stolen election in the United States. Few cases have emerged in at least the last 50 years in the United States of actual election subversion by election officials, leading to an election loser being declared the election winner, despite other unique pathologies of American election administration.

Ironically, the conduct of former President Donald J. Trump in repeatedly and falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen has markedly raised the potential for an actual stolen election in the United States. Millions of Trump’s Republican supporters now believe the false claim of a stolen election, and some Republican elected officials have pursued bogus sham “audits” and taken other steps that undermine voter confidence in the fairness of the election process. Threats of violence and intimidation have led to unprecedented attrition among election administrators, and some exiting officials are being replaced by those who may not have allegiance to the integrity of the election system. Those Republican election officials who stood up to Trump in 2020 and saved the United States from a potential constitutional and political crisis have been censured, stripped of power, and challenged for office by those embracing the “Big Lie.” Together, these actions serve both to delegitimate the election of Democrats including President Joe Biden in 2020 and to open the door to election manipulation in future elections. Elected officials, election officials, and others believing or purporting to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen may seek to justify subverting future election results in response to earlier purported fraud.

The solutions to these problems are both legal and political. Legal changes should include: (1) paper ballot, chain-of-custody, and transparency requirements, including risk-limiting audits of election results; (2) rules limiting the discretion of those who certify the votes, including Congress through reform of the Electoral Count Act; (3) rules limiting the over-politicization of election administration, especially by state legislatures; (4) increased criminal penalties imposed on those who tamper with federal elections or commit violence or intimidation of voters, elected officials, or elected candidates; and (5) rules countering disinformation about elections, particularly disinformation about when, where, and how people vote. In addition, it will be necessary to organize for political action to reenforce rule-of-law norms in elections. This means advocating for laws that deter election subversion and against laws making stolen elections easier; politically opposing would-be election administrators who embrace false claims about stolen elections; and preparing for mass, peaceful protests in the event of attempts to subvert fair election outcomes.

Unrelated: A surprise in a naughty book

On an unrelated note, the following is a 30 sec. video about banning naughty books in public schools that was posted on Tik Tok. That was my first visit to Tik Tok and my first upload here of a video from my computer. I'm just full of technology today. 😜

Is he wearing a MAGA hat?