Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Trumplandia legal sagas: Attorneys suing attorneys
Monday, September 18, 2023
On the Meaning of the Post-Truth Concept and Its Effects
A 2019 research paper, The Upsurge of Irrationality; Post-truth politics for a polarized world, discusses how researchers see the recent descent of political discourse into the mess it is today for tens of millions of Americans. It nicely describes what concepts such as post-truth mean and how they can influence thinking and political and social policy. The following are some quotes from the paper.
.... the term “truthiness”, coined in 2005 by the comedian Stephen Colbert and defined as “the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” So, truthiness is not necessarily falsehood or propaganda: it can be mere ignorance shaped by emotion, “gut feeling” and overreliance on intuitive thinking. Nevertheless, while truthiness was used primarily for political satire .... post-truth is not a joke any more.
Current social polarization has led to an upsurge of collective irrationality in which formerly underground unwarranted beliefs and radical discourses have become mainstream. .... controverted shared values have been replaced by alternative epistemologies shaped by identity-related empirical misconceptions that are at the core of current cases of “culture war.” This state of affairs has recently been called “post-truth.”
There are several interconnected concepts considered as major forms of collective irrationalism, such as pseudoscience, science denialism, fact resistance, and alternative facts. Post-truth has emerged as a higher-order concept that describes the current sociological state of affairs in which all these forms of irrationality thrive. This recent term is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
The meaning of post-truth goes beyond being a fool or a liar — “in its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd's reaction actually does change the facts about the lie (...) what seem to be new in the post-truth era is a challenge not just to the idea of knowing reality but to the existence of reality itself.” In this regard, although political lies have always existed, “post-truth relationship to facts occurs only when we are seeking to assert something that is more important to us than truth itself. Thus, post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not.” So, while truthiness locates the responsibility for lying, post-truth is more vague and collectivist in this regard, providing no clear way to define who is responsible, when, and to what extent. Hence, post-truth gives rise to “a world in which politicians can challenge the facts and pay no political price whatsoever.”
California files climate change lawsuit against big oil cos.
INTRODUCTION1. In 2023 alone, the State of California has endured both extreme drought and widespread flooding, sprawling wildfires and historic storms, and an unusually cold spring and a record-hot summer. These extremes are devastating the State and destroying people’s lives and livelihoods, and they are accelerating. These extremes are the products of climate change, and climate change is the product of widespread combustion of fossil fuels. Oil and gas company executives have known for decades that reliance on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they suppressed that information from the public and policymakers by actively pushing out disinformation on the topic. Their deception caused a delayed societal response to global warming. And their misconduct has resulted in tremendous costs to people, property, and natural resources, which continue to unfold each day. Californians and their families, communities, and small businesses should not have to bear all the costs of climate change alone; the companies that have polluted our air, choked our skies with smoke, wreaked havoc on our water cycle, and contaminated our lands must be made to mitigate the harms they have brought upon the State. This lawsuit seeks to hold those companies accountable for the lies they have told and the damage they have caused.3. Defendants are large companies in the fossil fuel industry who have misled consumers and the public about climate change for decades. Defendants have known since at least the 1960s that fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution that would warm the planet and change our climate. Defendants’ own scientists knew as early as the 1950s that these climate impacts would be catastrophic, and that there was only a narrow window of time in which communities and governments could take action before the consequences became catastrophic.4. Rather than warn consumers, the public, and governments, however, Defendants mounted a disinformation campaign beginning at least as early as the 1970s to discredit the burgeoning scientific consensus on climate change; deny their own knowledge of climate change- related threats; create doubt in the minds of consumers, the media, teachers, policymakers, and the public about the reality and consequences of the impacts of burning fossil fuels; and delay the necessary transition to a lower-carbon future.
18. American Petroleum Institute
a. Defendant American Petroleum Institute (API) is a nonprofit corporation based in the District of Columbia and registered to do business in California. API was created in 1919 to represent the American oil and gas industry as a whole. With more than 600 members, API is the country’s largest oil trade association. API’s purpose is to advance its members’ collective business interests, which includes increasing consumer consumption of oil and gas for the financial profit of the Fossil Fuel Defendants and other oil and gas companies. Among other functions, API also coordinates members of the petroleum industry, gathers information of interest to the industry, and disseminates that information to its members.
b. Acting on behalf of and under the supervision and control of the Fossil Fuel Defendants, API has, since at least 1988, participated in and led several coalitions, front groups, and organizations that have promoted disinformation about the climate impacts of fossil fuel products to consumers—including, but not limited to, the Global Climate Coalition, Partnership for a Better Energy Future, Coalition for American Jobs, Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth, and Alliance for Climate Strategies. These front groups were formed to promote climate disinformation and advocacy from a purportedly objective source, when in fact these groups were financed and controlled by the Fossil Fuel Defendants and other oil and gas companies. The Fossil Fuel Defendants have benefited from the spread of this disinformation because, among other things, it has ensured a thriving consumer market for oil and gas, resulting in substantial profits for the Fossil Fuel Defendants.
302. As a direct and proximate result of the Fossil Fuel Defendants’ failure to warn, their fossil fuel products caused the State to sustain the injuries and damages set forth in this Complaint, and will cause future injuries and damages to State as set forth in this Complaint, including, without limitation, damage to State property, State infrastructure, and natural resources. The State seeks compensatory damages for these injuries in an amount subject to proof.
Sunday, September 17, 2023
NATO Secretary General states that Russia invaded Ukraine to keep NATO out
The idea that Russia's chief reason for fighting against Ukraine (since 2014, but especially 2022) is to prevent NATO membership for that country has been called a myth, falsehood and Russian propaganda . This is the case despite warnings from policy experts, and diplomats including a stark warning from now-CIA chief, Nicholas Burns. In a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Burns wrote,
"Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Russian President Vladimir Putin). In more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests."
Burns also wrote a classified assessment of the Bush plan to admit Ukraine into NATO called "Nyet means Nyet" available at Wikileaks. I've written about all this before in some detail here. I restate the denials of the importance of the NATO enlargement issue only to set up the following clip of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaking on just this subject earlier this month . It is from his opening remarks to the EU Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Security and Defense given on Sept. 2, 2023 in Brussels. The clip is from UK Declassified, and below it is a partial transcription of his remarks, and a few supplementary documents that he mentions to make his point.
After discussing the continuing enlargement of NATO including Finland and Sweden, Jens Stoltenberg states that:
" The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.
The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.
So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite. He has got more NATO presence in eastern part of the Alliance..."
What happened in 2021 prior to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia? This is part of the background to which Stoltenberg alludes above.
A) In November, US and Ukraine signed a US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership. Some of the passages that the Russians found concerning are quoted below. The Charter can be read in full here.
"Guided by the April 3, 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration of the NATO North Atlantic Council and as reaffirmed in the June 14, 2021 Brussels Summit Communique of the NATO North Atlantic Council, the United States supports Ukraine’s right to decide its own future foreign policy course free from outside interference, including with respect to Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.... The United States and Ukraine endorse the 2021 Strategic Defense Framework as the foundation of enhanced Ukraine-U.S. defense and security cooperation and intend to work to advance shared priorities, including implementing defense and defense industry reforms, deepening cooperation in areas such as Black Sea security, cyber defense, and intelligence sharing, and countering Russia’s aggression...The United States remains committed to assisting Ukraine with ongoing defense and security reforms and to continuing its robust training and exercises. The United States supports Ukraine’s efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability."
The Russians had long sought guarantees that Ukraine and Georgia would not join NATO. The US and NATO ruled out any such concessions. Russian troops Spring and then again Fall of 2021 were amassed ominously around much of Ukraine's borders signalling a possible invasion. It is in this context that the US-Ukraine Partnership was signed, sending a clear message to Moscow-- i.e. troop buildup or no, NATO welcomes Ukraine, and the US will work with Ukraine to arm and advise them to counter Russian aggression.
NATO membership and US-Ukraine military and intel cooperation on Russia's border have always been major drivers of the conflict, whatever US media says. Here is another clip, this one of Zelensky's former advisor (2020-2023), Oleksii Arestovych. He discusses candidly the fact that "[Ukraine's]price for membership in NATO is a big war with Russia"-- a "full scale war" with Russia, he says, in which Ukraine's population, cities, and infrastructure will be "devastated." (See subtitles in vid below). When this interview was filmed in 2019, Arestovych was an intelligence officer, and was aware of just how important it was for Russia to keep Ukraine out of NATO at all costs. He was clear-eyed about the consequence of Ukraine's NATO aspirations being a brutal, full-scale war. As is evident in this clip, he predicted with some prescience the course of future events.
Bits: Inverse vaccine invented; Paxton acquitted; Quiet genocide in China
New Vaccine Can Completely Reverse Autoimmune DiseasesLike Multiple Sclerosis, Type 1 Diabetes, and Crohn’s DiseaseResearchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have developed a novel vaccine that, in laboratory tests, can completely reverse autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and Crohn’s disease — all without shutting down the rest of the immune system.
A typical vaccine teaches the human immune system to recognize a virus or bacteria as an enemy that should be attacked. The new “inverse vaccine” does just the opposite: it removes the immune system’s memory of one molecule. While such immune memory erasure would be unwanted for infectious diseases, it can stop autoimmune reactions like those seen in multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, or Crohn’s disease, in which the immune system attacks a person’s healthy tissues.
The inverse vaccine, described in a recent paper published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. PME researchers coupled an antigen — a molecule being attacked by the immune system— with a molecule resembling a fragment of an aged cell that the liver would recognize as friend, rather than foe. The team showed how the vaccine could successfully stop the autoimmune reaction associated with a multiple-sclerosis-like disease.
The job of the immune system’s T cells is to recognize unwanted cells and molecules — from viruses and bacteria to cancers — as foreign to the body and get rid of them. Once T cells launch an initial attack against an antigen, they retain a memory of the invader to eliminate it more quickly in the future.
T cells can make mistakes, however, and recognize healthy cells as foreign. In people with Crohn’s disease, for instance, the immune system attacks cells of the small intestine; in those with multiple sclerosis, T cells mount an attack against myelin, the protective coating around nerves.
Hubbell and his colleagues knew that the body has a mechanism for ensuring that immune reactions don’t occur in response to every damaged cell in the body— a phenomenon known as peripheral immune tolerance and carried out in the liver. They discovered in recent years that tagging molecules with a sugar known as N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal) could mimic this process, sending the molecules to the liver where tolerance to them develops.
More work is needed to study Hubbell’s pGal compounds in humans, but initial phase I safety trials have already been carried out in people with celiac disease, an autoimmune disease that is associated with eating wheat, barley, and rye, and phase I safety trials are underway in multiple sclerosis.
A University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll released earlier this month found 24 percent of the Republicans who were asked if “Ken Paxton took actions while Attorney General that justify removing him from elected office” said he did, 32 percent said he didn’t, and 43 percent said they “didn’t know” or had “no opinion.”
The One Million Tibetan Children in China’s Boarding SchoolsOne day in late November 2016, back home in Tibet, I received a distressing call from my brother telling me I needed to check on his granddaughters. “Something very strange is happening,” he said.
My young relatives, who were 4 and 5 years old at the time, had just enrolled in a boarding preschool that the Chinese government had established in my hometown, Kanlho, a seminomadic region in the northeast corner of the Tibetan plateau.Though it had only been three months since the girls had started at the school, my brother described how they were already beginning to distance themselves from their Tibetan identity. On weekends, when they could return from school to their family, they rejected the food at home. They became less interested in our Buddhist traditions and spoke Tibetan less frequently. Most alarmingly, they were growing emotionally estranged from our family. “I might lose them if something isn’t done,” my brother worried.
Concerned, I set out to the girls’ school a few days later to pick them up for the weekend. When they walked out of the gates, they waved to me but barely spoke. When we arrived home, the girls didn’t hug their parents. They spoke only Mandarin to each other and remained silent during our family dinner. They had become strangers in their own home.After listening to the girls’ stories, I asked my brother what would happen if he just refused to send them. He teared up. Disobeying the new policy would mean having his name blacklisted from government benefits. Others who have protested the new schools have suffered terrible consequences, he said.
Over the course of my three years of fieldwork and meetings with students, parents and teachers, what I discovered was worse than anything I could have imagined.
I met young Tibetan children who could no longer speak their native tongue. The schools strictly controlled parental visits. In some cases, schoolchildren saw their families only once every six months. Dormitories, playgrounds and teachers’ offices were heavily surveilled.
Friday, September 15, 2023
Are We Prepared for the Militarization of the Trump Movement?
Historian, Adam Jortner wrote the following warning for Current (published 9/7/23)
The endgame of election denial is already underway
Two deaths last month. Craig Robertson of Provo, Utah, was shot by the FBI after making repeated threats against Joe Biden. Robertson was allegedly refusing to comply with a search warrant. Nine days later Laura Ann Carleton of Cedar Glen, California, was shot by a man who objected to her display of an LGBTQ+ flag in her shop. The assailant shouted at her, mocked the flag, and then killed her.
Two very different Americans—both dead because of the militarization of the right. Robertson threatened people through social media and, when asked about it, threatened with a gun. Carleton displayed a political flag and was shot.
Neither should have died. But they remind us that we need to talk about American political violence—and the little-known fact that in modern America 96% of all murders linked to radicalism come from the far right.
We know the source. Since the rise of President Trump, violent rhetoric and calls for armed retribution have become daily occurrences—sometimes from the president himself, sometimes from allies in the conservative media ecosystem, and sometimes from robots at Russian troll farms seeking to egg us on to more and greater violence.
I don’t want to elaborate on this. We all saw the riot on January 6. We know about the Proud Boys.
What I cannot understand is how our political reporters are still missing the connection between Trumpist calls for violence and paths to power in the United States. A recent cover article at Time mentions Trump’s indictments under the euphemism “legal troubles.” Trump does not have legal troubles: he has been indicted in an attempt to overthrow the legitimate election of an American president through violence[1]. As a former president now faces multiple trials for trying to overturn an election, and as that president threatens his opponents with force, most political columnists still wonder how it will all shake out for Trump’s strategy in the election. They remain focused on questions such as whether Trump will appear at the GOP debate, how he will alter his talking points, and what his messaging will be in the wake of accusations.
They continue, in short, to treat this crisis as a scandal. It is far more than that.
Political experts and talking heads still assume in the age of election denial that everyone in America accepts the basic norms: Political power and authority come through a series of laws, determined and enforced by elected officials—the law binds us and gives power its legitimacy.
Trump does not believe that, and he and his close associates have been broadcasting a different version of American legitimacy for years.
In this world, only “real” Americans have a right to rule. What makes a real American? It is left deliberately vague, but outward patriotism and militarism are sure signs. It is not quite race-based—Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the GOP nomination as an Asian-American. But he wants to limit the vote to people over twenty-five. Those Americans who fit the stereotype of a 1950s suburban or farm family: These are the people who count. But support for Trump matters, too. Trump and his retinue have over and overstated that the people who support him are Americans; everyone else is a traitor or potential traitor.
Those who love America are the ones who must rule America. Legitimacy comes from ideology, not law. For Trumpists, the question that defines whether a person can legitimately voice political concern is not, Are you a citizen? It is, Do you love America?
Yes, the question is ill-defined—but then, it is not a question of law but a question of intent. Trump still believes America is legitimate, but the courts, the Biden administration, and any Democrat are not legitimate, because they do not love America.
The media continues to treat this rhetorical shifting of legitimacy as a sideshow—“Hey! That’s funny.” But it’s a feature, not a bug. Indeed, it explains much of Trump’s current movement: The election of 2020 was fraudulent, because the results indicated that Biden won, and Biden did not love America, and the late-counted votes for Biden came from big cities where real Americans do not live. Therefore, they must have cheated.
Biden could not have won, therefore he did not win, therefore the government is no longer legitimate.
And here is where we need to pay better attention: If the government really is illegal, then its decisions are not binding on the populace. This is part and parcel of most theories of political power, and certainly for the American experiment born from “no taxation without representation.”
And so Trump and his allies ignore the law, lambast the judges, and encourage violence against other Americans—because in their minds, the law is no longer binding upon them.
This idea is now filtering down to the streets of Provo and San Bernardino county. Robinson did not have to obey the search warrant the FBI produced, because (as one Facebook fan put it) he refused “to kneel before a godless tyrant.”) A man who apparently had threatened to kill numerous Americans did not have to follow the law, because the law had become godless.
In the world of election denialism, the government has no authority, and therefore “real Americans” have no obligation to it. Indeed, the government itself is illegitimate and un-American, and Americans who are not real—Democrats, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people—have abetted that crime. America is under siege.
Therefore it is no crime to commit violence to liberate it.
As efforts to rein in this violence—and as the process of bringing the perpetrators of the January 6 riot to justice picks up steam—this notion will get louder. And it will become, if it has not already, the paramilitary wing of the Trump movement—not formally aligned but omnipresent, willing to smash, shoot, and intimidate where necessary.
Will all Trump voters do this? No. What about all of his hard-core base? No. What about the people who fly Trump flags, and Blue Lives Matter flags? No. Not even all of them. But some of them will. And then we will have a presidential candidate with an informal army.
Our modern politicos and commentators have no idea what this would look like; they are far more interested in whether Joe Biden likes ice cream than on how paramilitary groups helped destroy democracies in Argentina, Peru, Burma, etc. This has happened before in the U.S., by the way—in the 1870s, southern Democrats adopted the Ku Klux Klan as a paramilitary wing and used intimidation to smother Black votes and establish one-party rule in the South. It has not gone down as a great era.
The media is still waiting for Trump to pivot to the general election and become a “normal” politician. The response to his solid grip on the 2024 GOP nomination is met with a kind of open-mouthed naivete: “What will happen if he wins?” They do not seem to understand that if Trump sounds insane, that is because he is no longer working with the constitutional model of American legitimacy.
The media will never get this, not really. But you can. It behooves all of us to recognize what calls for violence and violent political rhetoric are: a call for an uprising against the American constitution and the rule of law. It is literally un-American.
This theory of where power comes from may not come to pass, but those who laugh it off or tolerate it because they think it will inevitably be defeated are abetting its rise. By failing to take the rejection of the consent of the governed seriously, they inhibit the efforts of this country to resist its coming effort to seize power.
What exactly, will it look like on Election Day 2024?
No one is quite prepared to say. But too many people are taking that lack of preparation as an excuse not to prepare for anything.
[1] This is not quite accurate. Trump was not "indicted in an attempt
to overthrow the legitimate election of an American president through
violence." As the NYT noted in August, "The indictment asserted
that as violence erupted that day, Mr. Trump “exploited the
disruption,” using it to further his goal of stopping the certification
of his loss in the election. But it stopped short of charging him with
actually encouraging or inciting the mob that stormed the building,
chasing lawmakers from their duties." (NYT: 8/323)