[ed. I do this too when I'm lazy. See also: Rose Zhang: The secrets behind the sweetest swing in golf (GD); and, Michelle Wie West and Annika Sorenstam Finish Their 2023 U.S. Women's Open Rounds at Pebble Beach:
Monday, July 10, 2023
Rose Zhang: Tee Fun
[ed. I do this too when I'm lazy. See also: Rose Zhang: The secrets behind the sweetest swing in golf (GD); and, Michelle Wie West and Annika Sorenstam Finish Their 2023 U.S. Women's Open Rounds at Pebble Beach:
What John Roberts and His Court Have Wrought Over 18 Years
The end of a Supreme Court term always sparks a lively conversation about how to characterize what just happened, and this year was no exception. In refusing to weaken the Voting Rights Act any further, did the court show itself to be a bit less dogmatically conservative than the year before? Did the 6-to-3 rejection of a dangerous theory that would have stripped state courts of the authority to review election laws show that the justices could still build bridges across their ideological divide?
Yes, democracy survived, and that’s a good thing. But to settle on that theme is to miss the point of a term that was in many respects the capstone of the 18-year tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts. To understand today’s Supreme Court, to see it whole, demands a longer timeline. To show why, I offer a thought experiment. Suppose a modern Rip Van Winkle went to sleep in September 2005 and didn’t wake up until last week. Such a person would awaken in a profoundly different constitutional world, a world transformed, term by term and case by case, at the Supreme Court’s hand.
To appreciate that transformation’s full dimension, consider the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice 18 years ago: Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies.
These goals were hardly new, but to conservatives’ bewilderment and frustration, the court under the previous chief justice, the undeniably conservative William Rehnquist, failed to accomplish a single one of them. In fact, to any conservative longing for change, the situation in 2005 must have appeared grim indeed. Not only had the Rehnquist court reaffirmed the right to abortion in the 1992 Casey decision; in 2000 it overturned a state ban on so-called partial-birth abortion, a law aimed at enlisting the court in a graphic anti-abortion narrative.
On gun rights, the court was maintaining a decades-long silence despite Justice Clarence Thomas’s public call in 1997 to revisit the Second Amendment and the George W. Bush administration’s startling advice to the court five years later that the federal government was ready, for the first time, to support the individual-right position on the ownership of firearms when an appropriate case arrived.
The Grutter decision in 2003, upholding affirmative action in admission to the University of Michigan’s law school, appeared to put racially conscious admissions decisions on a solid footing, at least for 25 more years.
On religion, a 1990 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia held that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause ordinarily did not provide a religious opt out from compliance with laws that applied to everyone. And one of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s last major opinions, Locke v. Davey, called for maintaining a cautious “play in the joints” between free exercise and the First Amendment’s other religion clause, the establishment clause. (“In other words,” as the court put it, “there are some state actions permitted by the establishment clause but not required by the free exercise clause.”) The decision rejected the claim that a state offering scholarships for postsecondary education had to cover study for the ministry as well. There is little doubt that the same case would come out differently today.
Finally, actions of the federal agencies that make up the administrative state were largely insulated from judicial review based on the court’s 1984 Chevron decision, requiring courts to defer to an agency’s plausible interpretation of its own authority if Congress had failed to speak precisely to the question at hand.
That was how the world looked on Sept. 29, 2005, when Chief Justice Roberts took the oath of office, less than a month after the death of his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist. And this year? By the time the sun set on June 30, the term’s final day, every goal on the conservative wish list had been achieved. All of it. To miss that remarkable fact is to miss the story of the Roberts court.
It’s worth reviewing how the court accomplished each of the goals. It deployed a variety of tools and strategies. Precedents that stood in the way were either repudiated outright, as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision did last year to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or were simply rendered irrelevant — abandoned, in the odd euphemism the court has taken to using. In its affirmative action decision declaring race-conscious university admissions to be unconstitutional, Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion did not overturn the 2003 Grutter decision explicitly. But Justice Thomas was certainly correct in his concurring opinion when he wrote that it was “clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.”
Likewise, the court has not formally overruled its Chevron decision. Its administrative-law decisions have just stopped citing that 1984 precedent as authority. The justices have simply replaced Chevron’s rule of judicial deference with its polar opposite, a new rule that goes by the name of the major questions doctrine. Under this doctrine, the court will uphold an agency’s regulatory action on a major question only if Congress’s grant of authority to the agency on the particular issue was explicit. Deference, in other words, is now the exception, no longer the rule.
But how to tell a major question from an ordinary one? No surprise there: The court itself will decide. While the ratio of major questions to ordinary questions of administrative law remains to be seen, it’s hard to envision an issue important and contentious enough to make it to the Supreme Court not being regarded as major by justices who flaunt their skepticism of the administrative state.
Justice Neil Gorsuch was candid about this in a concurring opinion last year when the court limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate emissions from power plants. The major questions doctrine, he explained, “applies when an agency claims the power to resolve a matter of great ‘political significance.’” What is a better indicator of political significance than sustained conservative backlash? Last year’s environmental case set the stage for the court’s June 30 decision overturning the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. (...)
My focus here on what these past 18 years have achieved has been on the court itself. But of course, the Supreme Court doesn’t stand alone. Powerful social and political movements swirl around it, carefully cultivating cases and serving them up to justices who themselves were propelled to their positions of great power by those movements. The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize. That may not be apparent on a day-to-day or even a term-by-term basis. But from the perspective of 18 years, that conclusion is as unavoidable as it is frightening.
These goals were hardly new, but to conservatives’ bewilderment and frustration, the court under the previous chief justice, the undeniably conservative William Rehnquist, failed to accomplish a single one of them. In fact, to any conservative longing for change, the situation in 2005 must have appeared grim indeed. Not only had the Rehnquist court reaffirmed the right to abortion in the 1992 Casey decision; in 2000 it overturned a state ban on so-called partial-birth abortion, a law aimed at enlisting the court in a graphic anti-abortion narrative.
On gun rights, the court was maintaining a decades-long silence despite Justice Clarence Thomas’s public call in 1997 to revisit the Second Amendment and the George W. Bush administration’s startling advice to the court five years later that the federal government was ready, for the first time, to support the individual-right position on the ownership of firearms when an appropriate case arrived.
The Grutter decision in 2003, upholding affirmative action in admission to the University of Michigan’s law school, appeared to put racially conscious admissions decisions on a solid footing, at least for 25 more years.
On religion, a 1990 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia held that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause ordinarily did not provide a religious opt out from compliance with laws that applied to everyone. And one of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s last major opinions, Locke v. Davey, called for maintaining a cautious “play in the joints” between free exercise and the First Amendment’s other religion clause, the establishment clause. (“In other words,” as the court put it, “there are some state actions permitted by the establishment clause but not required by the free exercise clause.”) The decision rejected the claim that a state offering scholarships for postsecondary education had to cover study for the ministry as well. There is little doubt that the same case would come out differently today.
Finally, actions of the federal agencies that make up the administrative state were largely insulated from judicial review based on the court’s 1984 Chevron decision, requiring courts to defer to an agency’s plausible interpretation of its own authority if Congress had failed to speak precisely to the question at hand.
That was how the world looked on Sept. 29, 2005, when Chief Justice Roberts took the oath of office, less than a month after the death of his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist. And this year? By the time the sun set on June 30, the term’s final day, every goal on the conservative wish list had been achieved. All of it. To miss that remarkable fact is to miss the story of the Roberts court.
It’s worth reviewing how the court accomplished each of the goals. It deployed a variety of tools and strategies. Precedents that stood in the way were either repudiated outright, as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision did last year to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or were simply rendered irrelevant — abandoned, in the odd euphemism the court has taken to using. In its affirmative action decision declaring race-conscious university admissions to be unconstitutional, Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion did not overturn the 2003 Grutter decision explicitly. But Justice Thomas was certainly correct in his concurring opinion when he wrote that it was “clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.”
Likewise, the court has not formally overruled its Chevron decision. Its administrative-law decisions have just stopped citing that 1984 precedent as authority. The justices have simply replaced Chevron’s rule of judicial deference with its polar opposite, a new rule that goes by the name of the major questions doctrine. Under this doctrine, the court will uphold an agency’s regulatory action on a major question only if Congress’s grant of authority to the agency on the particular issue was explicit. Deference, in other words, is now the exception, no longer the rule.
But how to tell a major question from an ordinary one? No surprise there: The court itself will decide. While the ratio of major questions to ordinary questions of administrative law remains to be seen, it’s hard to envision an issue important and contentious enough to make it to the Supreme Court not being regarded as major by justices who flaunt their skepticism of the administrative state.
Justice Neil Gorsuch was candid about this in a concurring opinion last year when the court limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate emissions from power plants. The major questions doctrine, he explained, “applies when an agency claims the power to resolve a matter of great ‘political significance.’” What is a better indicator of political significance than sustained conservative backlash? Last year’s environmental case set the stage for the court’s June 30 decision overturning the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. (...)
My focus here on what these past 18 years have achieved has been on the court itself. But of course, the Supreme Court doesn’t stand alone. Powerful social and political movements swirl around it, carefully cultivating cases and serving them up to justices who themselves were propelled to their positions of great power by those movements. The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize. That may not be apparent on a day-to-day or even a term-by-term basis. But from the perspective of 18 years, that conclusion is as unavoidable as it is frightening.
by Linda Greenhouse, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matt Rota
[ed. Worth a full read.]
Sunday, July 9, 2023
Saturday, July 8, 2023
The Beast Within Capitalism
The most popular YouTuber in the world is MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, a 24-year-old from North Carolina who specializes in ever-more-costly stunts and giveaways. MrBeast’s videos include:
Extravagantly giving away money has been extremely lucrative for MrBeast: he is now poised to be the first billionaire YouTuber. His line of chocolate bars (Feastables) is now stocked in Walmart, a custom Nerf gun bears his imprimatur, and he has a chain of “ghost franchise” burger restaurants (essentially, local restaurants deliver their own burgers to you in a MrBeast wrapper). His online shop has sold tie-in merchandise “like socks ($18), water bottles ($27) and T-shirts ($28).” (...)
MrBeast insists in interviews that the main goal of all of this is simply to help people and make positive change in the world. In the authorized documentary on his rise to fame, MrBeast says he just loves the feeling that comes from changing lives. When he handed a stranger thousands of dollars, “a lot of them just broke down in tears in front of me.” A pizza delivery guy who received one of MrBeast’s mega-huge tips was profusely thankful, telling him “I just got to spend the rest of the day with my kid because you gave me money and it allowed me to take the day off.”
MrBeast has therefore tried to target many of his giant cash donations to those who actually need them. He has given away a million dollars in food to people in need, given tens of thousands of dollars to people who lost their jobs during the pandemic, bought all of the food in a grocery store to give it to a food bank, filled five buses with school supplies for poor schools, given millions to Ukrainian refugees, built houses for homeless families, rebuilt tornado survivors’ homes, and planted 20 million trees.
The latest MrBeast philanthropy video, “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time,” has attracted some controversy. In it, he pays for thousands of sight-restoring surgeries for vision-impaired people around the world, and documents their reactions as they see the world with clear vision for the first time. (He also gives some of them stacks of cash, and gives one young man a brand new Tesla. One patient peels off the bandages and the first thing he sees is a sign that reads “You Just Won $10,000.”) Some viewers called the video “demonic” and “exploitative.” (...)
But MrBeast has a defense of what he does: Would he be a better person if he didn’t cure the blind and donate to food banks? If he stuck to paying people to cover themselves in snakes, would he be less controversial? The people whose surgeries he paid for seem genuinely overwhelmed with gratitude, and it is clear he has changed their lives. One might argue that if he’s going to pay for surgeries, he shouldn’t do videos about it, because this kind of “inspiration porn” essentially coerces people with disabilities (since who is going to be able to turn down a sight-restoring operation?) into appearing on YouTube and uses them for clicks. MrBeast would likely counter by saying that his video has raised both awareness and money, and that people are going to have their sight restored who would not be able to see if the video hadn’t caused the public to donate the funds. One irate Beast-defender said “Go ahead and cancel him, that’s 1000 people that wouldn’t get a life-changing surgery they can’t afford.”
I think we can better understand the problem with MrBeast, however, if we don’t focus so much on MrBeast himself. In fact, the person who called MrBeast’s video “demonic” said exactly that: Beast himself was merely “fascinating and bizarre”; what was disturbing was a video whose core message was: “a single rich guy paid for life-changing surgery for us, and it’s easy to do this.” Another critic pointed out that the real problem was “the dystopian thought [that] we’re reliant on YouTube videos instead of competent government for assistance,” and we “can never again untangle acts of kindness from brand-building.” As Hasan Piker explained, the problem with the video is less with MrBeast paying for the surgeries than with the fact that a quick, easy surgery isn’t accessible to people in the first place and so they’re getting it through a MrBeast video:
So while I’m tempted to say “the problem isn’t MrBeast himself, it’s the economic system that lets people become so desperate they need MrBeast in order to take a day off and see their kid,” and I do think that’s true, MrBeast himself is also grotesque. In his videos, he relishes the power that unlimited wealth gives him. Sometimes he uses this to change lives, but sometimes he will only give people the money if they first swim with sharks. The competitions mostly seem pretty harmless, if often unpleasant (staying in a small circle for 100 days to win $500,000), but it’s clear that part of the reason people are willing to undergo whatever challenges MrBeast sets is that money has the power to completely change people’s lives. In a world where everybody was doing fine economically, maybe there wouldn’t be anything objectionable about offering people a reward to participate in some televised challenge, but in this world, where nearly half of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency expense, a lot of people are going to be grasping for MrBeast’s largesse because they need it. (...)
I do think, however, that there is something fundamentally tawdry about MrBeast’s money obsession. The videos I like most are the ones where he does a complicated and cool thing like building a giant Lego tower. The videos I like least involve simply going up to people and handing them wodges of cash, not just because it conflicts with my notions of distributional justice, but because it’s lazy, taking advantage of the fact that just having a bunch of money gives you an immense amount of power in our world. Yes, it means you can get people to do things like sit in a big bucket of ramen noodles for hours. But the side of humanity that will eat worms for money is not the side we should be encouraging, because these scenarios are, at worst, exploitative and, at best, extremely stupid.
- Extreme endurance feats and challenges (counting to 100,000, reading the entire dictionary, spending 50 hours in Antarctica, spinning a fidget spinner for an entire day, being buried alive, starving himself for 30 days, completing a marathon in comically oversized shoes, eating a really big slice of pizza)
- A lot of what I would classify as “labor-intensive stupidity” (filling a friend’s house with a million Legos or tons of green slime, dropping a car from a helicopter into a pool of Orbeez, crashing a train into a brick wall, having a hundred people in dinosaur costumes walk into a store)
MrBeast insists in interviews that the main goal of all of this is simply to help people and make positive change in the world. In the authorized documentary on his rise to fame, MrBeast says he just loves the feeling that comes from changing lives. When he handed a stranger thousands of dollars, “a lot of them just broke down in tears in front of me.” A pizza delivery guy who received one of MrBeast’s mega-huge tips was profusely thankful, telling him “I just got to spend the rest of the day with my kid because you gave me money and it allowed me to take the day off.”
MrBeast has therefore tried to target many of his giant cash donations to those who actually need them. He has given away a million dollars in food to people in need, given tens of thousands of dollars to people who lost their jobs during the pandemic, bought all of the food in a grocery store to give it to a food bank, filled five buses with school supplies for poor schools, given millions to Ukrainian refugees, built houses for homeless families, rebuilt tornado survivors’ homes, and planted 20 million trees.
The latest MrBeast philanthropy video, “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time,” has attracted some controversy. In it, he pays for thousands of sight-restoring surgeries for vision-impaired people around the world, and documents their reactions as they see the world with clear vision for the first time. (He also gives some of them stacks of cash, and gives one young man a brand new Tesla. One patient peels off the bandages and the first thing he sees is a sign that reads “You Just Won $10,000.”) Some viewers called the video “demonic” and “exploitative.” (...)
But MrBeast has a defense of what he does: Would he be a better person if he didn’t cure the blind and donate to food banks? If he stuck to paying people to cover themselves in snakes, would he be less controversial? The people whose surgeries he paid for seem genuinely overwhelmed with gratitude, and it is clear he has changed their lives. One might argue that if he’s going to pay for surgeries, he shouldn’t do videos about it, because this kind of “inspiration porn” essentially coerces people with disabilities (since who is going to be able to turn down a sight-restoring operation?) into appearing on YouTube and uses them for clicks. MrBeast would likely counter by saying that his video has raised both awareness and money, and that people are going to have their sight restored who would not be able to see if the video hadn’t caused the public to donate the funds. One irate Beast-defender said “Go ahead and cancel him, that’s 1000 people that wouldn’t get a life-changing surgery they can’t afford.”
I think we can better understand the problem with MrBeast, however, if we don’t focus so much on MrBeast himself. In fact, the person who called MrBeast’s video “demonic” said exactly that: Beast himself was merely “fascinating and bizarre”; what was disturbing was a video whose core message was: “a single rich guy paid for life-changing surgery for us, and it’s easy to do this.” Another critic pointed out that the real problem was “the dystopian thought [that] we’re reliant on YouTube videos instead of competent government for assistance,” and we “can never again untangle acts of kindness from brand-building.” As Hasan Piker explained, the problem with the video is less with MrBeast paying for the surgeries than with the fact that a quick, easy surgery isn’t accessible to people in the first place and so they’re getting it through a MrBeast video:
“You watch this video and go, ‘Aww, how cute and how nice.’ I watch this video and I’m filled with rage that we shut off access to a ten-minute procedure because we paywalled it and decided that like some people just simply can’t get it. It is so insanely frustrating that it’s up to like one YouTube guy to decide to make content out of it, that people who are too poor can’t just fucking see.” (...)
It’s nice that MrBeast plants trees and donates to food banks. Plenty of the super-rich use less of their wealth to fund good works, so targeting him in particular can seem a little harsh. (However, I don’t mean to single him out for criticism; I’ve previously written about lots of other terrible rich people.) But he could do a great deal more good if, when trying to change lives, he gave some indication that he understood the basic concept of justice. As it is right now, it seems like the only thing he knows is that when he hands a giant roll of hundred dollar bills to someone, they become overjoyed, and he likes the feeling he gets when they tell him how wonderful he is and how much he has done for them. MrBeast could actually have done a video on blindness that would have avoided controversy if he had demonstrated some of the anger that Hasan Piker had about how it’s absurd that MrBeast even has to do this. He could have not just advocated that people in the audience give money, but encouraged them to think seriously about the fact that this problem could easily cease to exist with a few tweaks to the healthcare financing system. I realize it may be too much to expect from a 24-year-old YouTube bro who just enjoys playing Willy Wonka, showering golden tickets (blindness cures, bricks of cash, Teslas) on random people. But I am willing to take MrBeast at his word when he says he wants to give away his money and help people, and I believe it’s possible for him to undergo moral and political self-education that will make him a better advocate for the causes he says he cares about.
So while I’m tempted to say “the problem isn’t MrBeast himself, it’s the economic system that lets people become so desperate they need MrBeast in order to take a day off and see their kid,” and I do think that’s true, MrBeast himself is also grotesque. In his videos, he relishes the power that unlimited wealth gives him. Sometimes he uses this to change lives, but sometimes he will only give people the money if they first swim with sharks. The competitions mostly seem pretty harmless, if often unpleasant (staying in a small circle for 100 days to win $500,000), but it’s clear that part of the reason people are willing to undergo whatever challenges MrBeast sets is that money has the power to completely change people’s lives. In a world where everybody was doing fine economically, maybe there wouldn’t be anything objectionable about offering people a reward to participate in some televised challenge, but in this world, where nearly half of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency expense, a lot of people are going to be grasping for MrBeast’s largesse because they need it. (...)
I do think, however, that there is something fundamentally tawdry about MrBeast’s money obsession. The videos I like most are the ones where he does a complicated and cool thing like building a giant Lego tower. The videos I like least involve simply going up to people and handing them wodges of cash, not just because it conflicts with my notions of distributional justice, but because it’s lazy, taking advantage of the fact that just having a bunch of money gives you an immense amount of power in our world. Yes, it means you can get people to do things like sit in a big bucket of ramen noodles for hours. But the side of humanity that will eat worms for money is not the side we should be encouraging, because these scenarios are, at worst, exploitative and, at best, extremely stupid.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: MrBeast/uncredited
[ed. Links galore (if you're into this sort of thing). I've only been peripherally aware of this guy and glad I didn't waste my time finding out more.]
Friday, July 7, 2023
The Rage and Joy of MAGA America
I’ve shared this fact with readers before: I live in Tennessee outside Nashville, a very deep-red part of America. According to a New York Times tool that calculates the political composition of a community, only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats. I’ve been living here in the heart of MAGA country since Donald Trump came down the escalator. This is the world of my friends, my neighbors and many members of my family. That is perhaps why, when I’m asked what things are like now, eight years into the Trump era, I have a ready answer: Everything is normal until, suddenly, it’s not. And unless we can understand what’s normal and what’s not, we can’t truly understand why Trumpism endures.
It’s hard to encapsulate a culture in 22 seconds, but this July 4 video tweet from Representative Andy Ogles accomplishes the nearly impossible. For those who don’t want to click through, the tweet features Ogles, a cheerful freshman Republican from Tennessee, wishing his followers a happy Fourth of July. The text of the greeting is remarkable only if you don’t live in MAGA-land:
It’s not just Ogles. It’s no coincidence that one of the most enduring cultural symbols of Trump’s 2020 campaign was the boat parade. To form battle lines behind Trump, the one man they believe can save America from total destruction, thousands of supporters in several states got in their MasterCrafts and had giant open-air water parties.
Or take the Trump rally, the signature event of this political era. If you follow the rallies via Twitter or mainstream newscasts, you see the anger, but you miss the fun. When I was writing for The Dispatch, one of the best pieces we published was a report by Andrew Egger in 2020 about the “Front Row Joes,” the Trump superfans who follow Trump from rally to rally the way some people used to follow the Grateful Dead. Egger described the Trump rally perfectly: “For enthusiasts, Trump rallies aren’t just a way to see a favorite politician up close. They are major life events: festive opportunities to get together with like-minded folks and just go crazy about America and all the winning the Trump administration’s doing.”
Or go to a Southeastern Conference football game. The “Let’s Go Brandon” (or sometimes, just “[expletive] Joe Biden”) chant that arises from the student section isn’t delivered with clenched fists and furious anger, but rather through smiles and laughs. The frat bros are having a great time. The consistent message from Trumpland of all ages is something like this: “They’re the worst, and we’re awesome. Let’s party, and let’s fight.”
Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.
At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.
Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.
Once you understand both dynamics, however, so much about the present moment makes clearer sense, including the dynamics of the Republican primary. Ron DeSantis, for example, channels all the rage of Trumpism and none of the joy. With relentless, grim determination he fights the left with every tool of government at his disposal. But can he lead stadiums full of people in an awkward dance to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Will he be the subject of countless over-the-top memes and posters celebrating him as some kind of godlike, muscular superhero? (...)
Trump’s fans, by contrast, don’t understand the effects of that fury because they mainly experience the joy. For them, the MAGA community is kind and welcoming. For them, supporting Trump is fun. Moreover, the MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad you are. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.
In fact, they often don’t even know about the excesses of the Trump movement. Many of them will never know that their progressive neighbors have faced threats and intimidation. And even when they do see the movement at its worst, they can’t quite believe it. So Jan. 6 was a false flag. Or it was a “fedsurrection.” It couldn’t have really been a violent attempt to overthrow the elected government, because they know these people, or people like them, and they’re mostly good folks. It had to be a mistake, or an exaggeration, or a trick or a few bad apples. The real crime was the stolen election.
It’s the combination of anger and joy that makes the MAGA enthusiasm so hard to break but also limits its breadth. If you’re part of the movement’s ever-widening circle of enemies, Trump holds no appeal for you. You experience his movement as an attack on your life, your choices, your home and even your identity. If you’re part of the core MAGA community, however, not even the ruthlessly efficient Ron DeSantis can come close to replicating the true Trump experience. Again, the boat parade is a perfect example. It’s one part Battle for the Future of Civilization and one part booze cruise.
The battle and the booze cruise both give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging. They see a country that’s changing around them and they are uncertain about their place in it. But they know they have a place at a Trump rally, surrounded by others — overwhelmingly white, many evangelical — who feel the same way they do.
[ed. Sounds about right. I'm as sick of MAGA idiots (and their enablers) as I am Nazi sympathizers (white supremacists). Probably a lot of overlap.]
It’s hard to encapsulate a culture in 22 seconds, but this July 4 video tweet from Representative Andy Ogles accomplishes the nearly impossible. For those who don’t want to click through, the tweet features Ogles, a cheerful freshman Republican from Tennessee, wishing his followers a happy Fourth of July. The text of the greeting is remarkable only if you don’t live in MAGA-land:
Hey guys, Congressman Andy Ogles here, wishing you a happy and blessed Fourth of July. Hey, remember our Founding Fathers. It’s we the people that are in charge of this country, not a leftist minority. Look, the left is trying to destroy our country and our family, and they’re coming after you. Have a blessed Fourth of July. Be safe. Have fun. God bless America.Can something be cheerful and dark at the same time? Can a holiday message be both normal and so very strange? If so, then Ogles pulled it off. This is a man smiling in a field as a dog sniffs happily behind him. The left may be “coming after you,” as he warns, but the vibe isn’t catastrophic or even worried, rather a kind of friendly, generic patriotism. They’re coming for your family! Have a great day!
Or take the Trump rally, the signature event of this political era. If you follow the rallies via Twitter or mainstream newscasts, you see the anger, but you miss the fun. When I was writing for The Dispatch, one of the best pieces we published was a report by Andrew Egger in 2020 about the “Front Row Joes,” the Trump superfans who follow Trump from rally to rally the way some people used to follow the Grateful Dead. Egger described the Trump rally perfectly: “For enthusiasts, Trump rallies aren’t just a way to see a favorite politician up close. They are major life events: festive opportunities to get together with like-minded folks and just go crazy about America and all the winning the Trump administration’s doing.”
Or go to a Southeastern Conference football game. The “Let’s Go Brandon” (or sometimes, just “[expletive] Joe Biden”) chant that arises from the student section isn’t delivered with clenched fists and furious anger, but rather through smiles and laughs. The frat bros are having a great time. The consistent message from Trumpland of all ages is something like this: “They’re the worst, and we’re awesome. Let’s party, and let’s fight.”
Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.
At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.
Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.
Once you understand both dynamics, however, so much about the present moment makes clearer sense, including the dynamics of the Republican primary. Ron DeSantis, for example, channels all the rage of Trumpism and none of the joy. With relentless, grim determination he fights the left with every tool of government at his disposal. But can he lead stadiums full of people in an awkward dance to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Will he be the subject of countless over-the-top memes and posters celebrating him as some kind of godlike, muscular superhero? (...)
Trump’s fans, by contrast, don’t understand the effects of that fury because they mainly experience the joy. For them, the MAGA community is kind and welcoming. For them, supporting Trump is fun. Moreover, the MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad you are. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.
In fact, they often don’t even know about the excesses of the Trump movement. Many of them will never know that their progressive neighbors have faced threats and intimidation. And even when they do see the movement at its worst, they can’t quite believe it. So Jan. 6 was a false flag. Or it was a “fedsurrection.” It couldn’t have really been a violent attempt to overthrow the elected government, because they know these people, or people like them, and they’re mostly good folks. It had to be a mistake, or an exaggeration, or a trick or a few bad apples. The real crime was the stolen election.
It’s the combination of anger and joy that makes the MAGA enthusiasm so hard to break but also limits its breadth. If you’re part of the movement’s ever-widening circle of enemies, Trump holds no appeal for you. You experience his movement as an attack on your life, your choices, your home and even your identity. If you’re part of the core MAGA community, however, not even the ruthlessly efficient Ron DeSantis can come close to replicating the true Trump experience. Again, the boat parade is a perfect example. It’s one part Battle for the Future of Civilization and one part booze cruise.
The battle and the booze cruise both give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging. They see a country that’s changing around them and they are uncertain about their place in it. But they know they have a place at a Trump rally, surrounded by others — overwhelmingly white, many evangelical — who feel the same way they do.
by David French, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle, via Getty Images[ed. Sounds about right. I'm as sick of MAGA idiots (and their enablers) as I am Nazi sympathizers (white supremacists). Probably a lot of overlap.]
Thursday, July 6, 2023
Heat Records Are Broken Around the Globe as Earth Warms, Fast
Already, the surge has been striking. The planet just experienced its warmest June ever recorded, researchers said, with deadly heat waves scorching Texas, Mexico and India. Off the coasts of Antarctica, sea ice levels this year have plummeted to record lows.
And in the North Atlantic, the ocean has been off-the-charts hot. Surface temperatures in May were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.6 degrees Celsius, warmer than typical for this time of year, breaking previous records by an unusually large margin.
The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.
“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”
by Brad Plumer and Elena Shao, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andy Wong/Associated Press
[ed. Not your grandmother's planet. Especially the ocean temps. See below.]
Human Resources
ITEM: Insects are an ideal source of protein for denizens of a world facing climate change and a growing population.
ITEM: The rise of government-assisted euthanasia produces a new source of organ donations.
ITEM: A new startup that specializes in composting people seeks to raise $5 million in its latest funding round.
But, to paraphrase the film’s central mystery, what is Soylent Green? It is many things: dystopian science fiction, kitsch, excellent meme-fodder, a showcase for Charlton Heston (who is simultaneously a genuine charismatic and one of cinema’s great hams), and more. It came out of that fertile late-1960s and early-1970s period of imaginative fiction, in which the gee-whiz optimism of the early postwar era gave way to increasing pessimism and even nihilism, and cosmic anxieties became metaphors for social ones, and vice versa.
Like most major science-fiction movies, it is based (loosely) on a novel, the mostly forgotten Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. And, like many science-fiction films — including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back to the Future II, and Blade Runner — the action takes place in a future that has now already passed. Soylent Green’s then-distant future of 2022 is one of desperate overpopulation, global warming, and class inequality. The few rich live in fortified compounds and have access to regular food and water, while the many poor must rely on synthetic foodstuff, mass-produced by the powerful Soylent Corporation. A partial solution to the demographic crisis is euthanasia.
The story centers on an NYPD detective, Robert Thorn (played by Heston), who uncovers a conspiracy spanning the government, scientific elites, and of course the Soylent Corporation. Through a series of plot machinations too convoluted to elaborate here, he discovers that the synthetic food Soylent Green is in fact made from the corpses of the recently euthanized, leading to the film’s famous climax, in which he reveals the awful truth.
It is a testament to the film’s resonance that many people who have never sat through an entire viewing of it nonetheless know its famous concluding scene — up there with the ending of Planet of the Apes (another Charlton Heston sci-fi showcase) for producing a cultural legacy that has outgrown that of the movie itself. (...)
Of course, overpopulation fears were hardly limited to the domain of imaginative fiction. Amid exponential population growth worldwide, the postwar era saw widespread expressions of concern, crystalized by Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, which erroneously predicted the deaths of hundreds of millions of people through starvation within a decade.
But the Malthusian nightmare did not come to pass. While the population of the United States (not to say the world) has increased substantially in the intervening years — growing nearly 60 percent since 1973 — apocalyptic fears of overcrowding and mass starvation did not materialize. In fact, throughout most of the world, demographic collapse is the more likely future, as birth rates continue to decline. Meanwhile, our agricultural output has been keeping pace with population growth thanks to the Green Revolution (though its benefits are not yet entirely global). If you lifted an extra out from inside the world of Soylent Green and deposited him in our own present day, one imagines he would be astonished at the world of plenty he now inhabits.
Is Soylent Green then merely a curio — a Seventies relic like The Late Great Planet Earth or pet rocks? Perhaps not. For technological advancement is not a panacea for social ills. And while our own story (so far) has averted the apocalypse, we have not averted some of the more dystopian implications of that era’s speculative fiction. (...)
Of course, one might argue that any prescience on the part of Soylent Green is qualified by its getting the larger Malthusian argument wrong. But beneath this material issue lies a deeper philosophical fear: that faced with external constraints, technocratic modernity will find instrumental uses for people, whether they want that or not. In this sense, the film retains a certain queasy power not in spite but because of its ridiculousness, its willingness to make explicit our otherwise tacit horror of turning human beings into mere matter — in this case, literally.
This is to say that Soylent Green may remain kitsch, but kitsch can sometimes express widespread hopes and fears more clearly than great art. And its particular fears concerning the appropriate size and equality of our population are arguably perennial ones, for every human society must reckon with them in some measure. Beneath these fears lies the question of whether our ever more utilitarian modern society has transformed humanity itself into something merely instrumental.
by David Polansky, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Soylent Green
ITEM: The rise of government-assisted euthanasia produces a new source of organ donations.
ITEM: A new startup that specializes in composting people seeks to raise $5 million in its latest funding round.
Scenes from a 1970s dystopian science fiction film? Nah, just typical headlines from the past year. How apropos, then, that it should be the fiftieth anniversary year of one of that subgenre’s most iconic films, Soylent Green. And, while we’re counting anniversaries, we’ve just passed the year in which that story was set, 2022.
Like most major science-fiction movies, it is based (loosely) on a novel, the mostly forgotten Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. And, like many science-fiction films — including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back to the Future II, and Blade Runner — the action takes place in a future that has now already passed. Soylent Green’s then-distant future of 2022 is one of desperate overpopulation, global warming, and class inequality. The few rich live in fortified compounds and have access to regular food and water, while the many poor must rely on synthetic foodstuff, mass-produced by the powerful Soylent Corporation. A partial solution to the demographic crisis is euthanasia.
The story centers on an NYPD detective, Robert Thorn (played by Heston), who uncovers a conspiracy spanning the government, scientific elites, and of course the Soylent Corporation. Through a series of plot machinations too convoluted to elaborate here, he discovers that the synthetic food Soylent Green is in fact made from the corpses of the recently euthanized, leading to the film’s famous climax, in which he reveals the awful truth.
It is a testament to the film’s resonance that many people who have never sat through an entire viewing of it nonetheless know its famous concluding scene — up there with the ending of Planet of the Apes (another Charlton Heston sci-fi showcase) for producing a cultural legacy that has outgrown that of the movie itself. (...)
Of course, overpopulation fears were hardly limited to the domain of imaginative fiction. Amid exponential population growth worldwide, the postwar era saw widespread expressions of concern, crystalized by Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, which erroneously predicted the deaths of hundreds of millions of people through starvation within a decade.
But the Malthusian nightmare did not come to pass. While the population of the United States (not to say the world) has increased substantially in the intervening years — growing nearly 60 percent since 1973 — apocalyptic fears of overcrowding and mass starvation did not materialize. In fact, throughout most of the world, demographic collapse is the more likely future, as birth rates continue to decline. Meanwhile, our agricultural output has been keeping pace with population growth thanks to the Green Revolution (though its benefits are not yet entirely global). If you lifted an extra out from inside the world of Soylent Green and deposited him in our own present day, one imagines he would be astonished at the world of plenty he now inhabits.
Is Soylent Green then merely a curio — a Seventies relic like The Late Great Planet Earth or pet rocks? Perhaps not. For technological advancement is not a panacea for social ills. And while our own story (so far) has averted the apocalypse, we have not averted some of the more dystopian implications of that era’s speculative fiction. (...)
Of course, one might argue that any prescience on the part of Soylent Green is qualified by its getting the larger Malthusian argument wrong. But beneath this material issue lies a deeper philosophical fear: that faced with external constraints, technocratic modernity will find instrumental uses for people, whether they want that or not. In this sense, the film retains a certain queasy power not in spite but because of its ridiculousness, its willingness to make explicit our otherwise tacit horror of turning human beings into mere matter — in this case, literally.
This is to say that Soylent Green may remain kitsch, but kitsch can sometimes express widespread hopes and fears more clearly than great art. And its particular fears concerning the appropriate size and equality of our population are arguably perennial ones, for every human society must reckon with them in some measure. Beneath these fears lies the question of whether our ever more utilitarian modern society has transformed humanity itself into something merely instrumental.
by David Polansky, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Soylent Green
The Acceleration of the Age of the Idiot
There’s a thought I keep on having, and maybe you’ve had it too. The main question they’ll ask about our age is: how did everything get so stupid, so fast? You can look at our economies and see inflation ripping through them. But there’s another kind of inflation at work too. In human folly, and all its flavors, from ignorance to malice to bad faith and beyond. It’s pulsating through our societies, and the lunatics, it seems, are seizing control of them, faster and faster.
I know you know that. But I also think it’s instructive to really think about it for a moment.
But we weren’t exactly in the insane — to me as an economist, anyways — position of a recession hammered home by central banks raising rates to astronomical levels just as the mega-scale impacts of climate change hit. Which themselves were largely ignored, in favor of an endless parade of celebrities and billionaires.
Does it feel a little bit like…what’s the phrase I’m looking for…The Bonfire of Vanities at the end of a civilization…out there today? Welcome to the Acceleration of the Age of Stupid.
Think back, again, just a decade, and remember how you felt. How do you feel now, in comparison? If indicators are any bet, you feel not just worse, but astonishingly worse. People are so pessimistic that it’s hard to even do it justice in words — 80% of people, and this finding holds true across societies, basically think there’s not going to be a future, for them or their kids. A decade ago? Societies might not all have been shining examples of happiness — but they weren’t exactly biting their nails to keep from screaming in despair, either. And all that’s taken a knock-on effect on social cohesion, meaning trust and ties, which are collapsing at light speed.
When I or you say “stupid,” as in, “Jesus, how can people even be this stupid?” — and we mean everything from climate denial to regressive who want to take rights away to fanatics who want to ban books to lunatics who think storming Congress is wonderful and peaceful — part of what we mean, even if we don’t know it, is all that: pessimism, the loss of social cohesion, trust and ties collapsing — but I’m getting ahead of myself.
"So a weird and startling megatrend is emerging: human consciousness is shrinking — that’s what all these flavors of stupidity really are — at precisely the time it needs to expand. Expand most, given our civilization crossing the threshold into the Age of Extinction.
The growth of conscisouness is the expansion of empathy, grace, truth, beauty, justice, goodness, wisdom, courage, humility. See any of that happening? Or just the explosive growth of every flavor of folly, every crazed admixture of stupidity, history’s ever seen, at light speed?"
I know you know that. But I also think it’s instructive to really think about it for a moment.
Think back to a decade ago. Just a decade ago. 2013. It seems like a…practically a…Golden Age…by comparison. We’d go online, and Twitter and Facebook weren’t…great. But they weren’t the smoking wrecks of disinformation, hate, and moronitude they are today, either — not even close. Our politics was fragmented and a little bit fractured — but nation after nation hadn’t been seduced by fanatics who’d go on to wreck its institutions and norms, like Brexit did to Britain, or Trumpism did to America. Our economies weren’t exactly in stellar shape — stagnation was beginning to bite.
Does it feel a little bit like…what’s the phrase I’m looking for…The Bonfire of Vanities at the end of a civilization…out there today? Welcome to the Acceleration of the Age of Stupid.
Think back, again, just a decade, and remember how you felt. How do you feel now, in comparison? If indicators are any bet, you feel not just worse, but astonishingly worse. People are so pessimistic that it’s hard to even do it justice in words — 80% of people, and this finding holds true across societies, basically think there’s not going to be a future, for them or their kids. A decade ago? Societies might not all have been shining examples of happiness — but they weren’t exactly biting their nails to keep from screaming in despair, either. And all that’s taken a knock-on effect on social cohesion, meaning trust and ties, which are collapsing at light speed.
When I or you say “stupid,” as in, “Jesus, how can people even be this stupid?” — and we mean everything from climate denial to regressive who want to take rights away to fanatics who want to ban books to lunatics who think storming Congress is wonderful and peaceful — part of what we mean, even if we don’t know it, is all that: pessimism, the loss of social cohesion, trust and ties collapsing — but I’m getting ahead of myself.
by Umair Haque, Eudimonia and Co. | Read more:
Image: Peter Dynes"So a weird and startling megatrend is emerging: human consciousness is shrinking — that’s what all these flavors of stupidity really are — at precisely the time it needs to expand. Expand most, given our civilization crossing the threshold into the Age of Extinction.
The growth of conscisouness is the expansion of empathy, grace, truth, beauty, justice, goodness, wisdom, courage, humility. See any of that happening? Or just the explosive growth of every flavor of folly, every crazed admixture of stupidity, history’s ever seen, at light speed?"
Wednesday, July 5, 2023
They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine.
Chris Hedges:They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine. (ScheerPost)
Image: Preying for Peace – by Mr. Fish
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Review – Tom Cruise Does It Better
Already, the keynote stunt has become a legend: the one on the poster, the one he reportedly did – for real – six times in one day before he was satisfied. Tom Cruise’s compact body floats free of the motorbike as it drops to earth from between his diamond-hard thighs, having launched him with a throaty roar off an unfeasibly high cliff-edge; he sails through the sky, pulls the ripcord on a nifty little parachute, and swoops down towards … the speeding Orient Express, fully intent on the traditional carriage-top punch-up. We gasped in the audience. Someone behind me went: “Oh shi-i-i …” Carly Simon should have come in with a new song: Fair Enough, Somebody Does It Better.
This outrageously enjoyable spectacle has compelled my awestruck assent with its sheer stamina, scale and brio: the seventh in the Mission: Impossible action franchise with Cruise starring as Ethan Hunt, the mysterious, superfit leader of a top-secret intelligence/combat unit called the Impossible Mission Force, brought in by a shadowy US government agency when they want deniable stuff doing. Their initials of course are IMF, and in this film they finally get round to doing the gag about them not being the International Monetary Fund, the one we reviewers have been doing for years.
Seven films! Daniel Craig got sick of 007 after just five. But at 61, Cruise looks better than ever and pretty much wedded to the IMF. (...)
In this film, as in so many in the past, evil forces are trying to get hold of a MacGuffiny object which will permit them to control/destroy the world, and Ethan and the gang are the only people to stop them. There is some tremendous stunt work, including a wacky Italian Job-style chase around Rome in a titchy little yellow Fiat, the biggest train scenes since Paddington 2 and some very impressive horsemanship from Tom in the Arabian desert – in his headdress he is the seventh pillar of hunkiness. A very tense opening sequence aboard a Russian sub called the Sebastopol – its associations with Crimea being perhaps a rebuke to Putinist chauvinism – introduces us to a certain bejewelled cruciform key, split into two; this is the oddly low-tech object whose owner, having reunited the halves, can master a new and terrifying form of AI, a self-replicating digital consciousness with the capacity to invade any operating system in the world. Already the genie is emerging from the bottle. (...)
In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.
This outrageously enjoyable spectacle has compelled my awestruck assent with its sheer stamina, scale and brio: the seventh in the Mission: Impossible action franchise with Cruise starring as Ethan Hunt, the mysterious, superfit leader of a top-secret intelligence/combat unit called the Impossible Mission Force, brought in by a shadowy US government agency when they want deniable stuff doing. Their initials of course are IMF, and in this film they finally get round to doing the gag about them not being the International Monetary Fund, the one we reviewers have been doing for years.
Seven films! Daniel Craig got sick of 007 after just five. But at 61, Cruise looks better than ever and pretty much wedded to the IMF. (...)
In this film, as in so many in the past, evil forces are trying to get hold of a MacGuffiny object which will permit them to control/destroy the world, and Ethan and the gang are the only people to stop them. There is some tremendous stunt work, including a wacky Italian Job-style chase around Rome in a titchy little yellow Fiat, the biggest train scenes since Paddington 2 and some very impressive horsemanship from Tom in the Arabian desert – in his headdress he is the seventh pillar of hunkiness. A very tense opening sequence aboard a Russian sub called the Sebastopol – its associations with Crimea being perhaps a rebuke to Putinist chauvinism – introduces us to a certain bejewelled cruciform key, split into two; this is the oddly low-tech object whose owner, having reunited the halves, can master a new and terrifying form of AI, a self-replicating digital consciousness with the capacity to invade any operating system in the world. Already the genie is emerging from the bottle. (...)
In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.
by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. Taking my grandson to see this one. See also: Running, jumping, looking: is the new Mission Impossible the Tom Cruisiest film Tom Cruise has ever made? (Guardian).]
[ed. Taking my grandson to see this one. See also: Running, jumping, looking: is the new Mission Impossible the Tom Cruisiest film Tom Cruise has ever made? (Guardian).]
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
The Abuse of YouTube's Copyright Policy
[ed. Important. We need a massive overhaul of copyright law, especially with AI coming.]
How to Stave Off Constitutional Extinction
Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate independence, but it might be more significant, more pregnant with meaning, to celebrate amendment — the writing, ratifying and especially the amending of constitutions. Except lately there hasn’t been much to celebrate, with amendment having become a lost art. And a constitution that can no longer be amended is dead.
The U.S. Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971. Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification in 1972, but its derailment rendered the Constitution effectively unamendable. It’s not that people stopped trying. Conservatives, especially, tried.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan endorsed a balanced-budget amendment. In the 1990s, Republicans proposed anti-flag-burning amendments, fetal-personhood amendments and defense-of-marriage amendments. Lately, amendments have been coming from the left. “Nationally, Democrats generally wish to amend constitutions and Republicans to preserve them,” The Economist proclaimed last month, on the same day that California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, proposed a federal constitutional amendment that would regulate gun ownership. “I don’t know what the hell else to do,” he said, desperate.
The consequences of a constitution frozen in time in the age of Evel Knievel, “Shaft” and the Pentagon Papers are dire. Consider, for instance, climate change. Members of Congress first began proposing environmental rights amendments in 1970. They got nowhere. Today, according to one researcher, 148 of the world’s 196 national constitutions include environmental protection provisions. But not ours. Or take democratic legitimacy. Over the last decades, and beginning even earlier, as the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky point out in a forthcoming book, “The Tyranny of the Minority,” nearly every other established democracy has eliminated the type of antiquated, antidemocratic provisions that still hobble the United States: the Electoral College, malapportionment in the Senate and lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. None of these problems can be fixed except by amending the Constitution, which, seemingly, can’t be done.
It’s a constitutional Catch-22: To repair Senate malapportionment, for instance, you’d have to get a constitutional amendment through that malapportioned Senate.
While it’s true that Americans can no longer, for all practical purposes, revise the Constitution, they can still change it, as long as they can convince five Supreme Court justices to read it differently. But how well has that worked out? That’s what happened, beginning in the early 1970s, with abortion and guns, the north and south poles of America’s life-or-death politics, in which either abortion is freedom and guns are murder or guns are freedom and abortion is murder. Chances are that if you like the current court, you like this method of constitutional change and if you don’t like the current court, you don’t like this method. But either way, it’s not a great boon to democracy.
Troublingly, our current era of unamendability is also the era of originalism, which also began in 1971. Originalists, who now dominate the Supreme Court, insist that rights and other ideas not discoverable in the debates over the Constitution at its framing do not exist. Perversely, they rely on a wildly impoverished historical record, one that fails even to comprehend the nature of amendment.
A written constitution ratified by the people — and subject to amendment by the people — is an American invention. In the 18th century, people who drafted constitutions and commented on constitutionalism came to agree that if such a strange, new and fragile thing as a written constitution were to endure, it would, as time passed, need to be both repaired and improved, mended and amended. To amend meant, at the time, to correct a fault; to repair an omission; to fix what’s broken; or to improve, in a moral sense: to make something better. The word shares a root, four of its five letters, and almost the entirety of its meaning, with the verb “mend.” You can mend a dress but you can also mend your ways; you can amend your will but, for your errors, you can also make amends. All this was contained within the philosophy of amendment.
“We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth,” Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense,” published in January 1776. The states and the new federal government began writing constitutions that spring. Delegates to the Continental Congress who drafted what became the Declaration of Independence were also working on state constitutions: Thomas Jefferson was drafting the preamble for the Virginia Constitution and John Adams was involved in the drafting of the constitutions of Virginia and New Jersey while avidly following the constitutional goings-on in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Maryland. (...)
Amendment is a constitutional mechanism necessary to avoid insurrection. The U.S. Constitution was itself an act of amendment, written in 1787 because the Articles of Confederation were technically amendable but, for all practical purposes, not. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the Virginia delegate George Mason, pointing out that everyone knew the Constitution that they were drafting was imperfect, argued that “amendments therefore will be necessary, and it will be better to provide for them in an easy, regular and constitutional way than to trust to chance and violence.”
The U.S. Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971. Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification in 1972, but its derailment rendered the Constitution effectively unamendable. It’s not that people stopped trying. Conservatives, especially, tried.
The consequences of a constitution frozen in time in the age of Evel Knievel, “Shaft” and the Pentagon Papers are dire. Consider, for instance, climate change. Members of Congress first began proposing environmental rights amendments in 1970. They got nowhere. Today, according to one researcher, 148 of the world’s 196 national constitutions include environmental protection provisions. But not ours. Or take democratic legitimacy. Over the last decades, and beginning even earlier, as the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky point out in a forthcoming book, “The Tyranny of the Minority,” nearly every other established democracy has eliminated the type of antiquated, antidemocratic provisions that still hobble the United States: the Electoral College, malapportionment in the Senate and lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. None of these problems can be fixed except by amending the Constitution, which, seemingly, can’t be done.
It’s a constitutional Catch-22: To repair Senate malapportionment, for instance, you’d have to get a constitutional amendment through that malapportioned Senate.
While it’s true that Americans can no longer, for all practical purposes, revise the Constitution, they can still change it, as long as they can convince five Supreme Court justices to read it differently. But how well has that worked out? That’s what happened, beginning in the early 1970s, with abortion and guns, the north and south poles of America’s life-or-death politics, in which either abortion is freedom and guns are murder or guns are freedom and abortion is murder. Chances are that if you like the current court, you like this method of constitutional change and if you don’t like the current court, you don’t like this method. But either way, it’s not a great boon to democracy.
Troublingly, our current era of unamendability is also the era of originalism, which also began in 1971. Originalists, who now dominate the Supreme Court, insist that rights and other ideas not discoverable in the debates over the Constitution at its framing do not exist. Perversely, they rely on a wildly impoverished historical record, one that fails even to comprehend the nature of amendment.
A written constitution ratified by the people — and subject to amendment by the people — is an American invention. In the 18th century, people who drafted constitutions and commented on constitutionalism came to agree that if such a strange, new and fragile thing as a written constitution were to endure, it would, as time passed, need to be both repaired and improved, mended and amended. To amend meant, at the time, to correct a fault; to repair an omission; to fix what’s broken; or to improve, in a moral sense: to make something better. The word shares a root, four of its five letters, and almost the entirety of its meaning, with the verb “mend.” You can mend a dress but you can also mend your ways; you can amend your will but, for your errors, you can also make amends. All this was contained within the philosophy of amendment.
“We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth,” Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense,” published in January 1776. The states and the new federal government began writing constitutions that spring. Delegates to the Continental Congress who drafted what became the Declaration of Independence were also working on state constitutions: Thomas Jefferson was drafting the preamble for the Virginia Constitution and John Adams was involved in the drafting of the constitutions of Virginia and New Jersey while avidly following the constitutional goings-on in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Maryland. (...)
Amendment is a constitutional mechanism necessary to avoid insurrection. The U.S. Constitution was itself an act of amendment, written in 1787 because the Articles of Confederation were technically amendable but, for all practical purposes, not. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the Virginia delegate George Mason, pointing out that everyone knew the Constitution that they were drafting was imperfect, argued that “amendments therefore will be necessary, and it will be better to provide for them in an easy, regular and constitutional way than to trust to chance and violence.”
by Jill Lepore, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rozalina Burkova[ed. Happy 4th.]
Nearly Half of US Honeybee Colonies Died Last Year
America’s honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies, an annual bee survey found.
But using costly and Herculean measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday’s University of Maryland and Auburn University survey found that even though 48% of colonies were lost in the year that ended April 1, the number of United States honeybee colonies “remained relatively stable.”
Honeybees are crucial to the food supply, pollinating more than 100 of the crops we eat, including nuts, vegetables, berries, citrus and melons. Scientists said a combination of parasites, pesticides, starvation and climate change keep causing large die-offs.
Last year’s 48% annual loss is up from the previous year’s loss of 39% and the 12-year average of 39.6%, but it’s not as high as 2020-2021’s 50.8% mortality rate, according to the survey funded and administered by the nonprofit research group Bee Informed Partnership. Beekeepers told the surveying scientists that 21% loss over the winter is acceptable and more than three-fifths of beekeepers surveyed said their losses were higher than that.
“This is a very troubling loss number when we barely manage sufficient colonies to meet pollination demands in the U.S.,” said former government bee scientist Jeff Pettis, president of the global beekeeper association Apimondia that wasn’t part of the study. “It also highlights the hard work that beekeepers must do to rebuild their colony numbers each year.”
The overall bee colony population is relatively steady because commercial beekeepers split and restock their hives, finding or buying new queens, or even starter packs for colonies, said University of Maryland bee researcher Nathalie Steinhauer, the survey’s lead author. It’s an expensive and time consuming process.
The prognosis is not as bad as 15 years ago because beekeepers have learned how to rebound from big losses, she said.
“The situation is not really getting worse, but it’s also not really getting better,” Steinhauer said. “It is not a bee apocalypse.”(...)
Some commercial beekeepers who have succeeded in the past lost as much as 80% of their colonies this past year, while other beekeepers did well, it varied so much, Evans said. Pettis, who has 150 colonies on Maryland’s Eastern shore, had less than 18% loss, saying he used organic acids for mite control. (...)
The demand for pollination from commercial bee colonies is growing even as the beekeepers have to work harder to make up for losses, Steinhauer said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says 35% of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants and the honeybee is responsible for 80% of that pollination.
by Seth Borenstein, AP | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Julio Cortez
But using costly and Herculean measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday’s University of Maryland and Auburn University survey found that even though 48% of colonies were lost in the year that ended April 1, the number of United States honeybee colonies “remained relatively stable.”
Honeybees are crucial to the food supply, pollinating more than 100 of the crops we eat, including nuts, vegetables, berries, citrus and melons. Scientists said a combination of parasites, pesticides, starvation and climate change keep causing large die-offs.
“This is a very troubling loss number when we barely manage sufficient colonies to meet pollination demands in the U.S.,” said former government bee scientist Jeff Pettis, president of the global beekeeper association Apimondia that wasn’t part of the study. “It also highlights the hard work that beekeepers must do to rebuild their colony numbers each year.”
The overall bee colony population is relatively steady because commercial beekeepers split and restock their hives, finding or buying new queens, or even starter packs for colonies, said University of Maryland bee researcher Nathalie Steinhauer, the survey’s lead author. It’s an expensive and time consuming process.
The prognosis is not as bad as 15 years ago because beekeepers have learned how to rebound from big losses, she said.
“The situation is not really getting worse, but it’s also not really getting better,” Steinhauer said. “It is not a bee apocalypse.”(...)
Some commercial beekeepers who have succeeded in the past lost as much as 80% of their colonies this past year, while other beekeepers did well, it varied so much, Evans said. Pettis, who has 150 colonies on Maryland’s Eastern shore, had less than 18% loss, saying he used organic acids for mite control. (...)
The demand for pollination from commercial bee colonies is growing even as the beekeepers have to work harder to make up for losses, Steinhauer said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says 35% of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants and the honeybee is responsible for 80% of that pollination.
by Seth Borenstein, AP | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Julio Cortez
Monday, July 3, 2023
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)