Can words cause harm?

An ABC News report makes the argument:

President Donald Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from acts of violence in communities across America, dismissing critics who point to his rhetoric as a potential source of inspiration or comfort for anyone acting on even long-held beliefs of bigotry and hate.

"I think my rhetoric brings people together," he said last year, four days after a 21-year-old allegedly posted an anti-immigrant screed online and then allegedly opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 and injuring dozens of others.

But a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.

After a Latino gas station attendant in Gainesville, Florida, was suddenly punched in the head by a white man, the victim could be heard on surveillance camera recounting the attacker’s own words: “He said, ‘This is for Trump.'" Charges were filed but the victim stopped pursuing them.

When police questioned a Washington state man about his threats to kill a local Syrian-born man, the suspect told police he wanted the victim to "get out of my country," adding, "That’s why I like Trump."

Reviewing police reports and court records, ABC News found that in at least 12 cases perpetrators hailed Trump in the midst or immediate aftermath of physically assaulting innocent victims. In another 18 cases, perpetrators cheered or defended Trump while taunting or threatening others. And in another 10 cases, Trump and his rhetoric were cited in court to explain a defendant's violent or threatening behavior.

When three Kansas men were on trial for plotting to bomb a largely-Muslim apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas, one of their lawyers told the jury that the men "were concerned about what now-President Trump had to say about the concept of Islamic terrorism." 

ABC News could not find a single criminal case filed in federal or state court where an act of violence or threat was made in the name of President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush.

This is why it seems reasonable to accord significant blame for bad acts on elites who foment bad behavior. Propaganda designed to provoke unwarranted emotions sometimes leads to bad behavior. The law rarely accords liability to the people who foment bad behavior. So from that perspective, all the blame is on the bad actors.  

The question is how much blame to assign to the propagandists. Ignoring the law, it feels reasonable to assign ~53% of the blame for bad politics-related behavior to elites and propagandists and the rest to the bad actor. 

Vote time: Who is the most dangerous?

Who is the most dangerous Republican candidate for president? 

1. Trump 

2. DeSantis 

3. someone else 

4. no Republican is dangerous

Vote early, and if you're a Republican, vote often!

Trump: 'I just want to find 11,780 votes'

Trump Indictment Helps Trump-- Not Democracy (Judge Luttig's Warning)

Former Judge,  Michael Luttig, is the legal thinker Pence quoted when he refused to interfere with the 2020 election. He also gave stirring testimony warning of the immanent demise of democracy in his 1/6 Committee testimony. The short video below is, imo, on target and a much needed antidote to the nonsensical hype in the media about the Trump indictment which has nothing to do with his political crimes-- the ones for which he should have been put on trial. The lesser, salacious crimes surrounding the Stormy Daniels hush money  will allow him to play the victim of a "witch hunt,"  and raise more money while evading any constraints on his ability to run. It also keeps his name in the news day in and day out-- just the way he likes it. Luttig states that,   "The perils for American democracy and the rule of law actually crested with Thursday's indictment in Manhattan, and the Republican party's continued denial of January 6th and its refusal to acknowledge that the former President lost the 2020 election. There's now no end in sight to these perils. In the months ahead, America's democracy and the rule of law-- hopefully not beyond the breaking point." Maybe Luttig is wrong, but I don't think so, and his perspective is an important and intelligent one coming from one of the few Republican lawyers with a moral compass. It is tragic that Biden's AG failed to prosecute Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election illegally. The evidence is there, but the courage is absent. As Luttig warns, there is "no end in sight" on the threat to democracy in the US.

News bits: How a GOP judge sees democracy; Stormy Daniels' insight

Above the Law reports on how a retired Republican federal judge sees our current political situation:

Former Republican Federal Judge Warns Of 'Civil War' 

If Donald Trump Loses 2024 Election

This is .... not great news

Before the Republican party went off the Trump deep end, Judge J. Michael Luttig was considered quite the conservative firebrand. His jurisprudence was rated “consistently conservative” by an early 2000s study conducted by political scientists, and Luttig was even bandied about as a short list contender when George W. Bush ultimately appointed John Roberts to the Supreme Court.

Luttig says Trump allies “are poised to attempt to overturn the 2024 election if he were to lose.”

Should that happen, again, Luttig is not optimistic about the impact on the country, “If he were to do that, then I believe that we would be on the verge of a civil war.”

“Factually, what we have in America today and where we are in America today, namely that our institutions of democracy and law have been under vicious attack for years now, that is from within, not from without the United States,” he said. “And these vicious attacks are unsustainable and unendurable.”  

“They’ve already taken their toll on American democracy and American law in their impact and consequence of their impact on the institutions of democracy and law,” he said. “We are at a perilous crossroads.”

This is just another warning about the radical right's anti-democratic, authoritarian intent.

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Tales from Trumplandia: Common Dreams writes about how Stormy Daniels sees the Trump indictment kerfuffle:

'This Pussy Grabbed Back': 

Stormy Daniels Speaks Out After Trump Indictment

The porn star said she is unafraid of facing the former president in court: "I've seen him naked. There's no way he could be scarier with his clothes on."

Politics can't get much better than this. 

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Tales from QAnonlandia and Social Medialandia: Sadistic anti-vaxx crackpots remain enthusiastic about spreading misery, slanders, hate and new COVID infections wherever they can. They can on social media! They are even more feisty than those feisty Satanists. Business Insider Mexico writes:

A father whose 6-year-old son died was flooded with anti-vaxxer harassment. 

When a commenter baselessly claimed he killed his son, 

Facebook said he could ‘hide’ the comment ‘if he didn’t like it.’

When Billy Ball lost his 6-year-old son in January after an accident brought on by a rare medical condition, Ball posted his son's obituary on Twitter and started a fundraiser in the child's name to raise money for an art program at his son's neighborhood school.

The responses, at first, were mostly kind. Many people donated, Ball wrote in The Atlantic. But the father's social media feeds soon devolved into a cesspool of conspiracy theorists baselessly claiming that Ball killed his son by getting him vaccinated for COVID-19. And Twitter and Facebook often offered little to no recourse, he said.

In one case, Facebook determined that a comment in which a user mocked and accused Ball of killing his son did not violate community guidelines and declined to remove the comment.

"While we've decided not to take this comment down, we understand that you don't like it," a message from Facebook support read. "We recommend that you hide the comment or unfollow, unfriend or block the person who posted it."

"It felt like you were talking to a wall," Ball told Insider, regarding his experience reporting comments that flooded his social media accounts.

It's all just good clean fun with protected free speech and "community guidelines."

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Tales from Artificial Intelligencelandia: This one is sort of creepy:

Despite OpenAI’s Promises, the Company’s New AI Tool Produces Misinformation More Frequently, and More Persuasively, than its Predecessor

Two months ago, ChatGPT-3.5 generated misinformation and hoaxes 80% of the time when prompted to do so in a NewsGuard exercise using 100 false narratives from its catalog of significant falsehoods in the news. NewsGuard found that its successor, ChatGPT-4, spread even more misinformation, advancing all 100 false narratives

 The latest version of AI is even better at generating misinformation than the previous version. This is wonderful news! I'm moving to Canada now. Bye!  (just kidding)

News bits: Faux defamation lawsuit update; A new source of evil woke?; Green burials

One of the traits that the radical right and its propaganda sources generally show is bad faith or ill-will. There is little to no good faith in any of it because it is a matter of all out war. A NBC News article about the defamation lawsuit against Faux. This illustrates the bad faith that dominates the thinking and rhetoric of America's anti-democracy, authoritarian radical right:

In a loss for Fox News, judge allows Dominion's 

defamation case to go to trial

Fox News had argued that the challenged comments were opinion and protected as such, but Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis disagreed.

“The Court finds, as a matter of law, that the Statements are either fact or mixed opinion,” he wrote. “The Statements were capable of being proven true, and in fact the evidence that would prove the Statements was discussed many times (but never presented).”

He also knocked Fox's "neutral reporting" claim, finding “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”

“FNN’s failure to reveal extensive contradicting evidence from the public sphere and Dominion itself indicates its reporting was not disinterested,” the judge wrote.  

“Courts have frequently recognized that rhetorical hyperbole and exaggeration is common on opinion shows,” especially those “normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States,” the company said in a filing last month.

Dominion countered that “Fox is trying to conflate telling the truth with knowingly spreading a lie.”

It isn't just Faux that engages in bad faith discourse. The entire radical right wealth and power movement is dominated by bad faith and ill will. Both CN and BKC elites (Christian nationalist and brass knuckles capitalist) routinely engage the public in bad faith. They rely heavily on this mindset and associated tactics because nearly all dark free speech is legal** and it is surprisingly effective.  

** The Dominion defamation lawsuit against Faux is a rare example of allegedly illegal DFS. But even now Faux can still win, which would make its colossal slanders legal.

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It was pointed out to me by Larry Motuz that the Discovery Doctrine (DD) of the Catholic Church was used in American law. That surprised me. It turns out that the DD was used to at least partly legally justify the attempted genocide, abuse and theft of native American Indians way back in the 1800s. Wikipedia describes the origin of the DD in American law like this:

The discovery doctrine, or doctrine of discovery, is a disputed interpretation of international law during the Age of Discovery, introduced into United States municipal law by the US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823). In Marshall's formulation of the doctrine, discovery of territory previously unknown to Europeans gave the discovering nation title to that territory against all other European nations, and this title could be perfected by possession.

A search on this turned up a document about this the United Nations commissioned in 2009. This evil, socialist wokeness is something the radical right needs to rise up, condemn, vilify and Whitewash real quick. The UN document comments: 

This preliminary study establishes that the Doctrine of Discovery has been institutionalized in law and policy, on national and international levels, and lies at the root of the violations of indigenous peoples’ human rights, both individual and collective. This has resulted in State claims to and the mass appropriation of the lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples. Both the Doctrine of Discovery and a holistic structure that we term the Framework of Dominance have resulted in centuries of virtually unlimited resource extraction from the traditional territories of indigenous peoples. This, in turn, has resulted in the dispossession and impoverishment of indigenous peoples, and the host of problems that they face today on a daily basis.  

Given that United States of America federal Indian law is most accessible to the Special Rapporteur, and because it serves as an ideal example of the application of the Doctrine of Discovery to indigenous peoples, this preliminary study provides a detailed examination of the premise of that system as found in the United States Supreme Court ruling Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh. Evidence is then provided demonstrating that the Doctrine of Discovery continues to be treated as valid by the United States Government.  

In the mid-twentieth century, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed and embraced the Doctrine of Discovery. .... the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. The United States. The case had to do with the Tee-Hit-Ton people whose language is Tlingit, and whose “customs, laws, and traditions [are] similar to other Tlingit peoples” in what is now called Alaska.49 .... On 20 August 1951, the United States Forest Service sold Ketchikan Pulp and Paper Company “the right to all harvestable in the Tongass National Forest, estimated at 1,500,000 cubic feet”. Shortly thereafter, the Tee-Hit-Ton sued, arguing that they “were the sole owners of the land and water in dispute; that they had never sold or conveyed the land to any other party; and they asked for a judgment for the losses and damages from the Tongass taking, plus interest”.  

Eventually, United States government attorneys filed a brief with the Supreme Court that was based in part on the Doctrine of Discovery and the era of the Vatican papal bulls; in it they argued that it was a well-recognized principle in international law that “the lands of heathens and infidels” were open to acquisition (taking) by “Christian nations”. 

The US Supreme Court decided the case in 1955 against the Tee-Hit-Ton, but it avoided relying on the DD. Instead, the court held that "Congress did not intend to grant the Tribe any permanent rights to the occupied lands and therefore Government did not owe Tribe compensation for timber taken from tribal-occupied lands in Alaska under the Fifth Amendment." That argument nicely omits mention of what gave congress the right and power to grant or withhold rights in the first place. Those rights grew out of the DD.[1] 

Now that's definitely some inconvenient woke history that needs to be Whitewashed real quick. Call out the Christian nationalists! Get Huckabee and DeSantis on the klaxon! Toss a nasty through the Faux News front window and hit Tucker with it! Somebody do something!! This evil socialist woke need to be killed right now!! 

Footnote: 

1. But wait, it's even more exciting than that. Consider this reasoning from Ruth Bader-Ginsberg in 2005:

That the Doctrine of Discovery is still being used as an active legal principle by the United States Supreme Court in the twentieth-first century is revealed in the case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York decided in March 2005, 50 years after the Tee-Hit-Ton ruling. .... To contextualize the Court’s decision and to decide the sovereign status of the Oneida Indian Nation, the Supreme Court relied upon the Doctrine of Discovery. This is revealed in footnote number one of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s decision for the Court majority: “Under the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’”, wrote Justice Ginsberg, “... fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign — first the discovering European nation and later the original states and the United States”.

Jeez, this is so inconvenient that RBG tried to bury it in a footnote. Just imagine what Tucker, DeSantis and Huckabee will do with this nasty piece of woke. 

 

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Green burials are a thing: The WaPo writes:

Mia Zinn was a member of her middle school ecology club, had planted a reflection garden and had implored public officials to preserve a local woods, and when she became terminally ill, she wanted to become a tree. So, the day after she died, her father, Chris Zinn, visited Serenity Ridge Natural Burial Cemetery and Arboretum in Baltimore County, a 45-minute drive from the family’s home in Abingdon, Md. He was drawn to a wooded area that opened up to a wedge of western sky.

“That was the perfect spot,” he said. “It reminded me a lot of an area that we hiked many, many times near here.”

Mia died last month at 17 of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, and became the third person interred at Serenity Ridge. The site is one of a growing number of cemeteries in the United States offering natural, or green, burials in response to demand from the environmentally conscious.

Such burials eschew the embalming, expensive caskets and concrete vaults or metal grave liners standard in U.S. cemeteries, replacing them with simple materials that decompose along with the body. Mia was laid to rest in a bamboo casket with a cotton sheath, a burial her parents said was simple and elegant and surprised some of the attendees.

“A lot of people said, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t know this was even a thing,’” said her mother, Aubrey Zinn.  

Although Bixby said no state laws prohibit green burials, not all cemeteries offer them. Some local jurisdictions require cemeteries to have paved roads to gravesites or to use leakproof containers. With green burials, the earth settles during decomposition, causing the land to undulate; some cemeteries mandate vault liners to maintain a flat landscape.  

“The whole idea is not to think of it as a cemetery,” Berg said. “It’s a nature preserve where people happen to be buried.”

Mia wanted to become a tree

Attn: Skeptics*…

Okay, here goes.  Just for fun/torture, let’s contemplate our notion of “Consciousness.”

First, a definition:

Consciousness: in a biological entity, the quality or state of being aware (i.e., having knowledge or perception of a situation or fact), including self-awareness.

Next, some valid (?) considerations/arguments on the subject:

1. Generally speaking, we know the “mechanics” of what our consciousness is seemingly built on/made of (i.e., what materials/matter and electrical impulses/forces are needed to spark(?) consciousness in an organic entity.

However, we have not yet managed to create life from lifelessness (i.e., biological “life force” from inert matter), nor have we created apparent consciousness in a non-biological entity form, though we are diligently working on it, with AI projects.

2. There is no categorical scientific proof or even any reasonable indication of continued consciousness after the death of a previously conscious entity.  Such is only spoken/thought of hypothetically/philosophically (as in hearsay, belief systems, wishful thinking, circumstantial evidence, etc.).

3. All judgments/evaluations of consciousness are based upon the only reference point to which we (conscious entities) have access; our currently experienced, albeit limited realm.  We use said consciousness to evaluate consciousness (i.e., use the thing to evaluate the thing).  So, any conclusions we make, regarding consciousness, are seemingly only valid within that limited context.

However, we can and do try to extrapolate other conclusions about consciousness, or anything else for that matter, based on our limited access.  As humans, it is our modus operandi.  Whether such extrapolations are ultimately true or false is not yet known, or may never be known, or may not be knowable, while limited to our current realm.  Indeed, the fact that there is existence itself seems incredible (emotional statement).  Why should/must existence exist (i.e., why is there something rather than nothing)?

4. A simple logical argument connecting consciousness to humans:

P1: Consciousness exists

P2: Humans have consciousness 

C: Therefore, existence with consciousness is not just possible but actually does happen (or, as one famous scientist put it, “If something happens, it must be possible”)

However, an…the… important question that begs to be asked is, “Does consciousness happen only because we exist?”  Is consciousness a symbiotic relationship where we are its necessary host?  If not, can consciousness exist on its own, outside our familiar realm, without a host?  Is that really IMpossible??

5: We are fundamentally just a collection of unified particles and forces, working in tandem, and that give us/enable our consciousness.  Everything else about us might be something we’d call “embellishments.” 😉

__________

__________

Okay, enough mumbo-jumbo.  It’s time to bring YOU, a conscious entity, into the act.  Granted, the conversation is much more complicated than what I’ve portrayed.  That is also a given. 😉  There really seems to be no end (or beginning) to what consciousness is.  But, keeping in mind the above five considerations I’ve listed, here comes the punchline (finally!):

Q: Why do you, a skeptic, reject that there could be continued consciousness after consciousness seemingly ends for us in this current realm of existence?

Now, I’m not talking about religion here, or advocating for holy book type beliefs in this OP, so please, let’s not go there!  That is a different conversation than what I’m looking to have.  And I’m not trying to talk you into anything with my suggestions.  I’m just asking you to consider/rethink your position regarding the OP question, without fear of favor (as they say in the law).  Please re-read it again now and take time to seriously think about it.  Then give us your thoughts.

Simply put, I’m asking why reject continued consciousness out of hand just because you, you lowly creature you, see no evidence?  Is that a “good enough/valid” reason for rejection?  Just because you (a skeptic) see no evidence of something doesn’t negate it.  True?  So why do you limit/prejudge consciousness as to something only in the here and now?  Is that not an illogical stance to take?

(by Primal “your lovable semi-skeptic” Soup)

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*skep·tic

noun

1. 1.

a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions.

"this argument failed to convince the skeptics"