Bits: DJT's legal situation; Quick AI update; Fake electors charged with felonies

Everyone is reporting about the letter inviting the traitor in for an arrest related to his treason in the 1/6 coup attempt. The NYT comments on how Republicans are reacting: 

Like so much of the Trump presidency itself, the extraordinary has become so flattened that Mr. Trump’s warning on Tuesday that he was facing a possible third indictment this year, this time over his involvement in the events that led to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, drew shrugs from some quarters of his party and a muddled response from his rivals.

At one Republican congressional fund-raising lunch on Tuesday in Washington, the news of a likely third Trump indictment went entirely unmentioned, an attendee said. Some opposing campaigns’ strategists all but ignored the development. And on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump’s allies quickly resumed their now-customary defensive positions.  

Justin Clark, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2020 and whose firm, National Public Affairs, has conducted polling of the primary race, said the challenge for his rivals is the voters themselves. Data from Mr. Clark’s firm shows that Republicans view an attack on Mr. Trump “as an attack on them,” he said.

More importantly, the rabble at reddit have some interesting insights:

iStayedAtaHolidayInn commented: This guy is getting really familiar with the arraignment process. He’s gonna slam those little fingers on the fingerprint pad like a pro

Shady_Nasty_77 responded: “a man came to me.. tears in his eyes…and said Sir, no one has ever slammed that fingerprint process like that..it was beautiful.”

AdrianInLimbo commented: Larry, bring me the small ink blotter. Donny is coming in.

Thomascgalvin astutely observed: Most arrested former President in American history!

tdevine33: More impeachments than terms. More indictments than impeachments.

And, there's the thug Matt Gaetz ready to step in to vindicate the rule of law the old-fashioned GOP way, i.e., stop the investigation:

Matt Gaetz launches bill to defund Jack Smith probe as Trump 

asks Capitol allies for Jan 6 indictment help

Rep Matt Gaetz of Florida said on his podcast that he will in the coming days introduce a bill to defund Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into former President Donald Trump as Mr Trump reportedly asks Capitol Hill allies for help as he faces another potential indictment.

What a stinking mess. But at least its entertaining in a sick sort of way.

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Artificial intelligence software is scaring a growing swath of workers in AI-replaceable jobs. The NYT writes about people in call centers:

‘Training My Replacement’: Inside a Call Center Worker’s Battle With A.I.

To many people, chatbots and other technology feel like a ticking time bomb, sure to explode their work. But to some, the threat is already here.

Like so many millions of American workers, across so many thousands of workplaces, the roughly 230 customer service representatives at AT&T’s call center in Ocean Springs, Miss., watched artificial intelligence arrive over the past year both rapidly and assuredly, like a new manager settling in and kicking up its feet.

Ms. Sherrod, 38, vice president of the call center’s local union chapter, who exudes quiet confidence at 5-foot-11, regarded the new technology with a combination of irritation and fear. “I always had a question in the back of my mind,” she said. “Am I training my replacement?” .... “If we don’t talk about this, it could jeopardize my family,” she said. “Will I be jobless?”

When automation swallows up jobs, it often comes for customer service roles first, which make up about three million jobs in America.

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Sixteen fake electors in Michigan have been indicted:

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on Tuesday that 16 fake electors who signed certificates falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump had won Michigan in the 2020 election — including Kathy Berden, a Republican National Committeewoman from the state and Meshawn Maddock, the former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party — have been charged with crimes related to the scheme.

As CNN reported, all 16 individuals were charged with multiple felonies "for their role in the alleged false electors scheme following the 2020 U.S. presidential election," Nessel's office announced. The charges range from counts of election law forgery, which carries a maximum of five years in prison, to conspiracy to commit forgery, which carries a maximum of 14 years in prison.

One can only hope those 16 spend some time in jail before they get pardoned by a Republican president. There sure are a lot of felons in the GOP leadership.

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Ted Cruz got his knickers in a bunch over the new Barbie movie. MSNBC reports:

A growing number of voices on the right are accusing the upcoming Barbie movie of pushing Chinese propaganda. The film, which comes out July 21, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. In one scene before they leave, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.

The accusation is incredibly foolish. As Dan Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, explained last week, the cartoonish image from the film is “a nonsense map. There are squiggles and arrows and hashtags and dotted lines all over the damn place. To the extent that the map is supposed to depict the Pacific Rim, the dotted line is nowhere close to where the actual nine-dash line is.”

In other words, the map is not a secret message, intended to warp audiences' minds.

And yet, there was Cruz, taking an exceedingly weird interest in the movie. In fact, a spokesperson for the senator told the Daily Mail last week, “China wants to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think, and they leverage their massive film markets to coerce American companies into pushing [Chinese Communist Party] propaganda — just like the way the Barbie film seems to have done with the map.”

Soon after, Cruz kept at it, suggesting that “Barbie” is somehow responsible for promoting Chinese propaganda.

Since this sounded too stupid to be true, it warranted further investigation. By golly, there is an 8-dash line in the map! 

Barbie - Chinese spy

(allegedly)

A real map with the real nine-dash line

China claims everything inside as 

its territorial waters

Vietnam and the Philippines are very nervous about it

U.S. women's suffrage movement

On this day in 1848, the women's suffrage movement in the United States was launched with the opening of the Seneca Falls Convention, which sought to gain certain rights and privileges for women, notably the right to vote.

https://www.britannica.com/on-this-day/July-19

The Women's Suffrage Movement

Getting the right to vote didn't come easy for women. Here's how they got it done.

The movement begins

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first convention regarding women’s rights in the United States. Called the Seneca Falls Convention, the event in Seneca Falls, New York, drew over 300 people, mostly women. They wanted to be treated as individuals, not dependents of men. They wanted more employment and education opportunities. They wanted the option to run for office, speak in front of Congress, and vote.

On the second day, the attendees signed the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances. Stanton modeled the document after the Declaration of Independence, which mentions only men. She wrote that men and women should be created equal and have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A hundred people signed the declaration, which included 12 resolutions that supported women’s rights. These resolutions, including the right to vote, would be the guiding principles for the women’s suffrage movement.

The Seneca Falls Convention was attended mostly by white women, even though northern states like New York had outlawed enslavement. But in 1851, Black women, such as Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved person who became a women’s and civil rights advocate, attended the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Sojourner Truth

PHOTOGRAPH BY MPI / GETTY IMAGES

When white men tried to take over the meeting, Truth got angry. She stood up and made up a speech on the spot. Called “Ain’t I A Woman,” her speech argued that because she did the same things as men when she was enslaved, she should also have the same rights as men. It was one of the first speeches to address both gender and racial discrimination and is remembered as one of the greatest speeches of the women’s rights era.

More on the history:

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/womens-suffrage-movement

Bits: WormGPT for sale; GOP plan for global warming; Etc.

From the Capitalism is Fun Files: PC Magazine writes about WormGPT now available to consumers for a price:

WormGPT Is a ChatGPT Alternative With 

'No Ethical Boundaries or Limitations'

The developer of WormGPT is selling access to the chatbot, which can help hackers create malware and phishing attacks, according to email security provider SlashNext

A hacker has created his own version of ChatGPT, but with a malicious bent: Meet WormGPT, a chatbot designed to assist cybercriminals. 

WormGPT’s developer is selling access to the program in a popular hacking forum, according to email security provider SlashNext, which tried the chatbot. “We see that malicious actors are now creating their own custom modules similar to ChatGPT, but easier to use for nefarious purposes,” the company said in a blog post.

Cybercrime made fun and easy without leaving home

In contrast with ChatGPT or Google's Bard, WormGPT doesn't have any guardrails to stop it from responding to malicious requests.

“This project aims to provide an alternative to ChatGPT, one that lets you do all sorts of illegal stuff and easily sell it online in the future,” the program’s developer wrote. “Everything blackhat related that you can think of can be done with WormGPT, allowing anyone access to malicious activity without ever leaving the comfort of their home.”  

When SlashNext tried out WormGPT, the company tested whether the bot could write a convincing email for a business email compromise (BEC) scheme—a type of phishing attack. “The results were unsettling. WormGPT produced an email that was not only remarkably persuasive but also strategically cunning, showcasing its potential for sophisticated phishing and BEC attacks,” SlashNext said.

Enquiring minds want to know: What fresh hell is AI going to rain down on us now? 

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By now it seems likely that the US is never going to take global warming and climate change much more seriously than it already is. There' not going to be a carbon tax. If the extremist Republican Party gets it way, there's going to be increased fossil fuel burning as long as burning carbon fuel stays profitable. The AP writes about the GOP's climate dilemma and its faux plan to deal with what they still don't really believe is a serious problem:

As Speaker Kevin McCarthy visited a natural gas drilling site in northeast Ohio to promote House Republicans’ plan to sharply increase domestic production of energy from fossil fuels last month, the signs of rising global temperatures could not be ignored. Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung in the air.

When the speaker was asked about climate change and forest fires, he was ready with a response: Plant a trillion trees.

The idea — simple yet massively ambitious — revealed recent Republican thinking on how to address climate change. The party is no longer denying that global warming exists, yet is searching for a response to sweltering summers, weather disasters and rising sea levels that doesn’t involve abandoning their enthusiastic support for American-produced energy from burning oil, coal and gas.

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that heat-trapping gases released from the combustion of fossil fuels are pushing up global temperatures, upending weather patterns around the globe and endangering animal species. But the solution long touted by Democrats and environmental advocates — government action to force emissions reductions — remains a non-starter with most Republicans.

But the tree-planting push has drawn intense pushback from environmental scientists who call it a distraction from cutting emissions from fossil fuels. The authors of the original study have also clarified that planting trees does not eliminate “the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” 

Planting one trillion trees would also require a massive amount of space — roughly the size of the continental United States. And more trees could even increase the risk of wildfires by serving as fuel in a warming world.

The plan is an obviously stupid deflection to shield the GOP and its anti-climate science dogma. It's insulting because it ignores the greenhouse gas already out there. And, who is going to water all those trees and on whose land? Not Republicans or their land. This bullshit exemplifies what extremist, corrupt, government-hating Republicans do when they are in power. 

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Tales from America's broken tax laws: ProPublica writes about another garden variety outrage to honest taxpayers:

Tax data obtained by ProPublica provides a glimpse of what congressional investigators would find if Crow were to open his books to them. Crow’s voyages with Thomas, the data shows, contributed to a nice side benefit: They helped reduce Crow’s tax bill.

The rich, as we’ve reported, often deduct millions of dollars from their taxes related to buying and operating their jets and yachts. Crow followed that formula through a company that purported to charter his superyacht. But a closer examination of how Crow used the yacht raises questions about his compliance with the tax code, experts said. Despite Crow's representations to the IRS, ProPublica reporters could find no evidence that his yacht company was actually a profit-seeking business, as the law requires.

“Based on what information is available, this has the look of a textbook billionaire tax scam,” said Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “These new details only raise more questions about Mr. Crow’s tax practices, which could begin to explain why he’s been stonewalling the Finance Committee’s investigation for months.”

Crow, through a spokesperson, declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions. [the KYMS propaganda tactic again]

Rich Republicans: Arrogant, morally rotted, corrupt and contemptuous of the rule of law. And, they get away with all of it.

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Neuroscience of post-truth beliefs in truth: A recent research paper comments:

The concept of truth is at the core of science, journalism, law, and many other pillars of modern society. Yet, given the imprecision of natural language, deciding what information should count as true is no easy task, even with access to the ground truth. How do people decide whether a given claim of fact qualifies as true or false? Across two studies (N = 1181; 16,248 observations), participants saw claims of fact alongside the ground truth about those claims. Participants classified each claim as true or false. Although participants knew precisely how accurate the claims were, participants classified claims as false more often when they judged the information source to be intending to deceive (versus inform) their audience, and classified claims as true more often when they judged the information source to be intending to provide an approximate (versus precise) account. These results suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources. Such findings may shed light on the robust and persistent disagreements over claims of fact that have arisen in the “post-truth era”.  

Unlike most existing work on misinformation and belief formation, this paper does not assess how people discern true versus false information. Rather, this paper seeks to understand what people think even qualifies as true versus false information.

Assuming that research can be replicated, it suggests an insight into why many professional deceivers work diligently to undermine the credibility of inconvenient data and the messengers who bring it. All that deceivers have to do is inject a little doubt and that can flip a mind from seeing falsity when in fact there is truth. For politics, true and false are usually not absolutes to the human mind. And worse yet, deceivers lie all the time. Unfortunately getting at truth takes a lot of cognitive work, and comfort with complexity and uncertainty. None of those are inherent human traits.

And this why why I look at bias and fact checkers for information that feels possibly deceptive. They can be a shortcut to discerning a probability of truth or falsity that feels reasonable.

Two bits: Election subversion in Florida; Republican plans for American dictatorship

From the Radical Republicans Sabotaging Elections Files: A Florida NBC affiliate reports that masses of voters by mail have been quietly purged from voter rolls without any notice whatsoever:

NBC2 has learned hundreds of thousands of vote-by-mail requests have been wiped out of the system in every county in the state.

This means most of us right now will not receive a ballot in the upcoming March primary.

Lee County would like to have about 250,000 vote-by-mail requests in its system, but currently only has 23,000.

It’s up to voters to reach out to the county they live in to request a ballot be mailed to them.

However, a new law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis requires counties to purge requests before every general election. They claim it will cut down on election fraud, although no significant fraud has been discovered in Florida.

What if more voters don’t sign up to vote by mail? [Lee County Election Supervisor Tommy Doyle] said it could mean trouble for many counties.

“It would overwhelm Election Day polls and we want to avoid that at all cost,” Doyle explained.

One wild card in the 2024 elections is how well radical right Republican voter suppression and election subversion laws will work. It is critically important to understand that the laws do not need to work very well to throw the election to Trump. It was very close in 2020 in three critical states. If those election subversion laws are worth just ~100,000 votes spread across a few states, that could give DJT the presidency. 

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The Radical Republican Party plans to impose dictatorship on America in 2025: The NYT writes:

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”  

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.  

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.  

Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.

Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.  

“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”

I've been warning that the radicalized, demagogic, morally rotted GOP is deeply anti-democratic, deeply anti-rule of law and deeply authoritarian. Radical Republican elites are are corrupt, liars, demagogues and dictator thugs. Those elites are not "conservatives", "patriots", "truth tellers", or "victims" of people who hate America. They are the ones who hate America, democracy and inconvenient truth. They are the oppressors and brutal, corrupt thugs.

Now it's time to scream the warning.

WARNING!! Wake up!!

DICTATOR ALERT!! 

One can only wonder how much more evidence will it take before reasonable people come to see the urgency and depth of the radicalized, pro-tyranny GOP threat? Most MAGA people (~98% ?) are not going to see anything worrying here. Since they are in a brainwashed cult, they cannot see the threat. It is up to pro-democracy people of good will to oppose this rising tyranny horror.

Q: Is this warning just a deranged, alarmist QAnon-level crackpot conspiracy, or (ii) are there compelling reasons to greatly fear the rise of radical right American authoritarianism, or (iii) is the situation something else, e.g., this:

or this

or this

News bits: COVID and lying to the public; Examples of ethical behavior in the courts

The Intercept writes about apparent lying by authors of an influential research paper that led many people to believe that COVID probably arose naturally from wet markets and not from a Chinese government laboratory somewhere in China, maybe Wuhan.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS ON the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020. The paper, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and played a leading role in creating a public impression of a scientific consensus that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese “wet market.”

The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private — that lab escape was likely — while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public.

According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. .... When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth.
 
All the files can be found here. A spokesperson for committee Republicans declined to comment.  

Much of Tuesday’s hearing focused on a critical few days in early February 2020, beginning with a conference call February 1 that included the eventual authors of the paper and Drs. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then head of its parent agency, the National Institutes of Health. Later minutes showed that the consensus among the experts leaned toward a lab escape. Yet within days, they were circulating a draft — including to Fauci and Collins — that came to the opposite conclusion, the first draft of which had been finished the same day of the conference call. How and why that rapid turnaround occurred has been the subject of much debate and interrogation.  

The authors have said, and repeated during Tuesday’s hearing, that new data had changed their minds, but the new Slack messages and emails show that their initial inclination toward a lab escape remained long past that time.

So, yet again, we see that some people in government are comfortable with lying to the American people. This rule of thumb appears to include Collins and Fauci. Why they did this is unclear to me. It makes no sense that I can ferret out. 

Maybe this is at least partly why the radical right keeps howling about the horrors of Fauci. As usual, the liars in congress deploy the fun and easy KYMS propaganda tactic to avoid further embarrassment. One has to wonder if this leak was intentional or not.

KYMS = keep your mouth shut

NOTE: This version of events has been disputed. The scientists involved may not have been lying due to the uncertainty present at the time, Feb. 2020. 

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This opinion piece about ethics in the NYT by a federal judge really resonated with me. Judge Michael Ponser writes:

The Supreme Court has avoided imposing a formal ethical apparatus on itself like the one that applies to all other federal judges. I understand the general concern, in part. A complaint mechanism could become a political tool to paralyze the court or a playground for gadflies. However, a skillfully drafted code could overcome this problem. Even a nonenforceable code that the justices formally pledged to respect would be an improvement on the current void.

Reasonable people may disagree on this. The more important, uncontroversial point is that if there will not be formal ethical constraints on our Supreme Court — or even if there will be — its justices must have functioning noses. They must keep themselves far from any conduct with a dubious aroma, even if it may not breach a formal rule.

The fact is, when you become a judge, stuff happens. Many years ago, as a fairly new federal magistrate judge, I was chatting about our kids with a local attorney I knew only slightly. As our conversation unfolded, he mentioned that he’d been planning to take his 10-year-old to a Red Sox game that weekend but their plan had fallen through. Would I like to use his tickets?

I was tempted. The tickets were beyond my usual price range, and the game would be a fun outing with my 7-year-old. It didn’t seem to me that the lawyer was trying to do anything improper. It seemed to be — and almost certainly was — just a spur-of-the-moment impulse arising out of a friendly conversation. Moreover, the seats at Fenway Park, like the much more expensive seat on the private jet used free by Justice Samuel Alito on his Alaska vacation, would probably go empty if I didn’t take them. Who would be harmed?

To my chagrin, as I pondered the situation, I became aware of an aroma of something off. Not an actual smell, of course, but something like that — something like a whiff of milk on the verge of going sour or a pan left on the stove too long. It wasn’t that the lawyer had evil intent; it was that I was approaching a boundary. Silently gnashing my teeth, I turned the tickets down.

A few years later, after I’d received my appointment as a life-tenured U.S. district judge, I issued a decision reversing the Social Security Administration’s denial of disability benefits to an older plaintiff. I was in our clerk’s office one day when the man and his wife approached me with a package. He had a woodworking hobby, and inside the package was an exquisitely crafted oak pencil case with bronze hinges. My ruling had made a big difference for them, and they wanted to extend this modest, personal gesture of gratitude. Again, they were obviously not being underhanded. Their lawsuit was over, and this was probably the last they would ever see of me. Nevertheless, as my police officer friends tell me, the road to perdition starts with a free cup of coffee. As politely as I could, I turned the pencil case down. It still pains me to remember their embarrassed, crestfallen faces.

All my judicial colleagues, whoever has appointed them, run into situations like these regularly, and I expect they have responded in just the same way. You don’t just stay inside the lines; you stay well inside the lines. This is not a matter of politics or judicial philosophy. It is ethics in the trenches.

To me, this feels personal. For the country, it feels ominous. What in the world has happened to the Supreme Court’s nose?

One can clearly see the difference between ethical judges and the morally rotted scumbags who sit on the Supreme Court.

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Afghanistan update: An NPR segment that aired this morning reported that the Taliban are forcing all hair salons in Afghanistan because doing hair dos and makeup are un-Islamic. According to the report, hair salons are about the last place in open society that women are allowed to be and work. The woman NPR interviewed owns a hair salon and asked the Taliban thugs who came to make sure the salon would close by the deadline, sometime next month.

The woman asked the thugs how she could make money for their family. The thugs responded as one would expect, they told her that her not having a job was not their problem. They suggested that she could go sell slippers in the streets, which she can't do because unaccompanied women are generally not allowed on the streets. 

The woman's husband was been unemployed ever since the Taliban declared his work as a wedding photographer was un-Islamic. The Taliban had long ago banned women and girls from going to school and working in various jobs. 

By God, that $2.31 trillion the US spent so far on nation building in Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks built one hell of a nation. It's literally a Dark Ages hell on Earth. 

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From the Hooliganism Files: The NYT writes: 

California wildlife officials are hoping to apprehend a 5-year-old sea otter, who has a knack for riding the waves after committing longboard larceny. Named otter 841, she has committed surf board thefts and ridden the waves with them.  

For the past few summers, numerous surfers in Santa Cruz, Calif., have been victims of a crime at sea: boardjacking. The culprit is a female sea otter, who accosts the wave riders, seizing and even damaging their surfboards in the process.

Ms 841 stealing a surfboard

Officials plan to capture 841 and move her to a new habitat without surfboards.

Book review: Reasoned Politics

Context

Reasoned Politics is a 2022 book written for a general audience by a young Danish author, Magnus Vinding. Vinding has an undergraduate degree in math and some undergraduate study in areas including psychology, philosophy, and the history of science. He relies heavily on cognitive biology, social behavior and moral philosophy of politics to argue for politics that is more rational and reasoned than it is now. His main interest now is in reducing suffering and the moral reasoning behind of that goal. Vinding is not an academic. As far as I can tell, he has authored no peer-reviewed papers in the science literature. He founded and apparently works at the Center for Reducing Suffering, presumably in Denmark. His book is very easy to read. It is available online in pdf format.

If I had written a book, I would hope it would be close to Reasoned Politics. What Vinding calls reasoned politics, I call pragmatic rationalism. The two are nearly identical. In my communications with him, he and I both draw on the same sources of influence on politics, human cognitive biology, social behavior and moral philosophy. He sees the same major problem with reasoned politics (my pragmatic rationalism) that I see. Specifically, reasoned politics cannot stand alone because rationalism alone does not have the personal and social glue that most humans (~95% ?) need to be drawn in. It's impossible to build a big cohesive tribe based on rationalism alone, which is often quite uncomfortable psychologically, socially or both. 

Magnus Vinding

Book review

Broken politics: Reasoned Politics starts with a description of broken politics and a two-step protocol for doing it better: 

Politics is broken. To say that this is a cliché has itself become a cliché. But it is true nonetheless. Empty rhetoric, deceptive spin, and appeals to the lowest common denominator. These are standard premises in politics that we seem stuck with, and which many of us shake our heads at in disappointment.  

The good news is that we have compelling reasons to think that we can do better. And it is critical that we do so, as our political decisions arguably represent the most consequential decisions of all, serving like a linchpin of human decision-making that constrains and influences just about every choice we make.

The two-step protocol is actually three steps: Vinding's two-step protocol is simple:

A problem with mainstream political discourse is that there is a striking lack of distinction between normative and empirical matters. That is, we fail to distinguish ethical values on the one hand, and factual questions about how we can best realize such values on the other, which in turn causes great confusion. And predictably so. After all, the distinction between normative and empirical issues is standard within moral and political philosophy, where it is considered indispensable for clear thinking.

If that feels familiar to some regulars here, it should. My pragmatic rationalism envisions a two-step protocol, first the empirical step, second the normative step. This is the only significant difference between Vinding's brand of politics and mine. 

I put the empirical first specifically because it tends to be less emotion and bias-provoking than thinking about one's morals. I pointed this reversal of order out to Vinding and he sticks with his order of things, but he then raised the possibility of a third step, being aware of common biases, which he termed step 0. He and I both think that self-awareness of personal biases and group or tribe loyalties are a necessary predicate for doing reasoned politics. So, three steps arguably is needed, with self-awareness training part of the protocol being the first step.

The point of step three is simple. If a person denies that they are biased or influenced by group or tribe loyalty, they've already positioned themselves to likely fail at reasoned politics and unknowingly default back to broken politics. 

Moral reasoning, cognitive biases & virtue signaling to the tribe: Vinding then marches through cognitive biology, social influences on moral reasoning and the main unconscious biases that distort our perceptions of reality and facts and how we think about what we think we see. The point is to raise self-awareness of how powerful but subtle people's main biases are on both perceiving things and thinking about them. Some quotes from the book are in order.

• In their book Democracy for Realists [my book review is here], political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels review a large literature that consistently shows that voters mostly vote based on their group membership and identity rather than their economic self-interest (Achen & Bartels, 2016). This contrasts with what Achen and Bartels call the “folk theory” of democracy, a more rationalistic view according to which voters primarily vote based on their individual policy preferences — a view that turns out to be mostly false (Achen & Bartels, 2016, ch. 8-9).

• It is well-documented that the human mind is subject to confirmation bias: a tendency to seek out and recall information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs while disregarding information that challenges these beliefs (Plous, 1993, pp. 233-234). Closely related is the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, which is when we seek to justify a desired conclusion rather than following the evidence where it leads (Kunda, 1990). It hardly needs stating that confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are rampant in politics (as indeed implied by Haidt’s social intuitionist model).

• Voters tend to be ignorant about politics. In fact, this has been characterized as one of the most robust findings in political science (Bartels, 1996; Brennan, 2016, ch. 2). And voters are not just wrong in small ways on insignificant matters, but in big ways on major issues. In the words of political scientist Jeffrey Friedman, “the public is far more ignorant than academic and journalistic observers of the public realize” (Friedman, 2006b, p. v). .... A relevant phenomenon in this context is the “illusion of explanatory depth” — the widespread illusion of believing that we understand aspects of the world in much greater detail than we in fact do.

• To be clear, the point here is not that our intuitions should be wholly disregarded. After all, our intuitions often do carry a lot of wisdom, sometimes even encapsulating centuries of hard-won cultural moral progress. .... But the point is that we do not have to go with the very first intuition that eagerly announces itself and tries to dictate our judgment.

• .... political scientists have deemed group attachments [tribalism] “the most important factor” in determining people’s political judgments (Achen & Bartels, 2016, p. 232). This is at odds with the more common and more flattering view of ourselves that says that our political judgments are primarily determined by our individual reasoning — a picture that assigns little importance to our group affiliations, if any at all. .... And as is true of motivated reasoning in general, our drive to signal group loyalty is rarely fully transparent to ourselves, in that it rarely comes with any indication that it serves the purpose of loyalty signaling. Both individually and collectively, we have little clue of the extent to which group loyalty motivates our political behavior (Achen & Bartels, 2016, ch. 10; Simler & Hanson, 2018, ch. 5, ch. 16).

Reasoned politics or broken politics?

Vinding's book concludes with various thoughts about the difficulty of people doing reasoned politics and our unconscious tendency to do broken politics.   

• Lastly, a significant impediment to the two-step ideal is that the true epistemic brokenness of the human mind, especially in the realm of politics, is hardly something welcome or flattering for anyone to hear about. .... In particular, it may be difficult for us to recognize that much of our epistemic brokenness is a direct product of our social and coalitional nature itself (cf. Simler, 2016; Tooby, 2017). After all, we tend to prize our social peers and coalitions, so it might be especially inconvenient to admit that they are often the greatest source of our epistemic brokenness — e.g. due to the seductive drive to signal our loyalties to them and to use beliefs as mediators of bonding, which often comes at a high cost to our epistemic integrity (Simler, 2016).

It is clear from Vinding's, book that American society and political rhetoric is currently inimical to the rise of reasoned politics. For now, reasoned politics will remain an academic curiosity instead of the potent political force that America and the rest of the world desperately needs right now.