Ranting and Raving

 I was born in a liberal democracy. The fact that the government - federal or state - could not impose religious stricture on its citizens was a key part of being an American. 

In the eighties the assault began. A two pronged attack by the religious right on the safety of every American who did not believe precisely as they did: first to impose their particular religious beliefs about "when life begins" on the entire nation regardless of what other faiths believed. Second, to institute "school vouchers" so that taxpayers would be forced to support their desire to instruct their children in the precepts that have given the world such blessings as the Crusades, the Thirty Years' war, and, yes, the Holocaust. 

This week, after 40 years of well funded political malfeasance and a full frontal assault on the meaning of "advice and consent" a Supreme Court engineered by Mitch McConnell handed these people victory. Our democracy is irreversibly harmed both by the idea that one religion's attitudes toward abortion can be codified as law, and that my tax dollars can be used to teach the nation's children that I killed Christ. 

I was born in a liberal democracy. With the rulings handed down this week by the McConnell Court, I find I do not live in one today. 

It’s been forever since I’ve posted, mostly because because I haven’t had a lot to say in a public sphere. Passover was nice. Morgan and I had a seder for ourselves the first nigh and hosted one over Zoom the second. Then I spent chol hamoed completing a shelving project and installing some lighting and tile in the basement bathroom. So, a very nice staycation. Coronavirus has meant that I am once again working from home. I generally seem more productive when I am because there are fewer distractions than in the office. It is nice having a house with a somewhat pleasant basement; it has been my third place through all this. Any news from others?

 I want my Liberalism back.  It would be easy to say that at some point recently I stopped being a liberal. But it would miss the mark. A more accurate statement would be that at some point, liberalism pivoted away from being the enlightenment driven political philosophy that it was, that sought to repair the Dickensian economic disparities that marked the dawn of the industrial age, and became something else.

I was in the academy during the germination of the new liberalism, and what I saw disturbed me.  From mantras like "racism is prejudice plus power" to efforts to transform language into something incapable of giving offense, it seemed to me that my liberalism, with its fine moral subtleties was being thrown over for a new fundamentalism in which power was the only sin, powerlessness the sole virtue, and winning the ultimate crime.

What passes for liberalism now is a philosophical approach that seeks to identify and correct "systems of oppression." The liberal position that powerlessness confers virtue is as facile as the conservative notion that powerlessness is the product of sin and possession of power is virtue's reward. In order to stand as a political philosophy, liberalism needs to articulate something more than oppositional defiance to conservatism.

Liberals are going to need to do more than merely identify the oppressed in any power dynamic and then root for the underdog. They are going to need look at the moral systems of both the oppressor and the oppressed, and decide which it is better to have in power. Do contemporary American feminists really want to give power to people whose moral framework requires women to serve as baby mills, neither seen nor heard?  Do those of us who fought so hard to reverse the Defense of Marriage Act really want to empower societies that still treat homosexuality as a capital offense?

Liberals like to use the term "Apartheid" to describe the situation in Israel. The moment that Nelson Mandela was freed was a watershed moment for justice in South Africa brought about with lots of suffering, hard campaigning, and Tropicana orange juice undrunk. But the analogy is a weak one, because Hamas is not the African National Congress. The ANC did not call for the extermination of whites, whereas Hamas' charter calls for the extirpation of all Jews from the Holy Land. Moreover, the ANC did not seek to replace a democratic government with an oppressive theocracy, which would be Hamas' plan precisely.

If racism is prejudice plus power, you might do well to examine your underdogs' prejudices before fighting for their power to reify them.

Over the past few days, as the Las Vegas Tragedy unfolded and was explored, the usual noises have been getting made about guns.  So,

Background Checks:
Paddock's only prior was a  traffic violation.  No red flag there.

Sound Mental Health:
Really? Should  I not be able  to buy a gun because I spent 6 years talking to a variety of MSW's and PhD's about my mother?  Do we really want to create a disincentive to the seeking of care for mental illness by suggesting that obtaining a diagnosis will culminate in forfeiture of  rights?

I've heard some other bizarre proposals including liability insurance, sin taxes.

But here is the cold hard fact.  Paddock was a rich, white man who had led an officially blameless life.  Between wealth and white privilege, were guns completely illegal in the US, he would have had the means to obtain them, transport them, and would have likely remained undeterred.

So that's why this event should be regarded as essentially useless to the gun debate.


Phase 2: National  Unity.

We need to think reasonably about guns, and we need to place the conversation in context.  Guns are lethal force, and their use is highly context sensitive.

City dwellers see guns most commonly in association with crime.  This  is  because really there's not much one can do with a gun in city life except use it to kill another person or leverage the threat of killing another person to effect  a  property crime.  Gun hobbyists, former military folk, and law enforcement might take  guns to shooting ranges, and skeet (clay) shooting is enjoying some popularity as a  sport.  Urban gun owners might go into  the woods every  fall  to hunt deer, and stock their freezer with some  meat they can boast about having gotten on their own.  But the fact is no one in a  city really NEEDS a gun.  The most frequent reason cited for handgun ownership is "self defense," which tends to  be  a code for wanting level footing with a hypothetical armed assailant.  This being said, gun ownership in cities should be viewed as a  luxury.  A luxury tax on guns and ammo  should not  prove an undue burden on people who  are essentially buying guns in pursuit of enjoyment.

Rural dwellers  are another matter  entirely.  Here the lethal force factor is far less likely to be getting leveraged against people, and target shooting is the honing of an important life skill, rather than a hobby.  Lethal force is likely to be leveraged against predators coming after livestock.  The shape of poverty is also  very  different.  Urban poor may use panhandling or dumpster diving to supplement their diet.  But rural poor are likely to have a rifle and unlikely to have dumpsters.  So, they shoot "critters" by which I mean small game or  vermin that can  be used to add protein to the diet.  Guns in the country are a way of protecting  and obtaining food.

So here is my proposal: tax the hell out of urban gun sales and use the money thus obtained to make guns and ammo WIC eligible and  tax free in rural areas to rural residents.  We don't tax food, and we don't tax seed for food plants.  Let's not tax the tools of food protection/acquisition either.

The Guardian reported on Friday that a Judge has delayed the planned 11 executions in Arkansas because of a suit brought by McKesson that one of the drugs used for the lethal injection had been acquired by fraud. They called this "Unprecedented, " but I wondered if that was indeed true. It seemed to me that I remembered a case with some similarities from the late 1800's.

A young man with some very big ideas about power generation and transmission, and electric light went to work for Thomas Alva Edison at Menlo park. Edison's "my way or the highway" management style rendered him not very receptive to this young man's ideas. As for the young man himself, he did not wish to remain in a place where his ideas could not be explored, and there was a row between him and Edison. So it came to pass that Nikola Tesla brought the Prophase electric motor and Generator to George Westinghouse, under whose aegis he also developed the fluorescent light bulb.

Edison had developed a thriving business selling Direct Current (DC) generators and small power distribution systems to New York's wealthy. Each installation required its own generation station because DC cannot be transmitted very far - at the voltage levels that it is useful for things like domestic lighting, it can't travel very far along copper wire.

Tesla's prophase generators, however, did not have this issue. They output three sine waves, each 120 degrees out of phase with the next corresponding to the each three windings on the armatures. Using transformers, this Alternating Current (AC) could be boosted to very high voltages at low current, which would not encounter the same amount of resistance as DC, and then stepped back down to useful voltages at the point of usage.

This gave Westinghouse a tremendous competitive advantage over Edison, especially as regarded the development of Electricity as a utility. Edison acquired a prophase generator, and the services of a sadistic electrician and set about giving demos wherein dogs were electrocuted to death to show the dangers of Alternating Current. He would describe these dogs to his audience as having been "Westinghoused."

In the meantime Tesla was also giving demos, showing the safety of Alternating Current by allowing it to be passed through his body at very high voltages and very low amperages in order to light fluorescent lamps that he held in his hand.

I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusion about the moral character of each.

While all this was going on a crazy person axe-murdered his family, gave a confession, and was sentenced to death.

Edison proposed to construct a new means of execution, called the Electric Chair. And he intended to use Alternating Current as the killing agent. Westinghouse hired an attorney to represent the condemned man and argue that since this was an untried mode of execution, it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The case was argued before the New York Supreme Court, which allowed itself to be persuaded that death by electrocution would be painless. The US Supreme court refused to hear Westinghouse's appeal, trusting the lower courts ruling.

Even with a ruling in his favor, Edison still needed a prophase generator sufficient to the task, and Westinghouse refused to sell it to him. So Edison turned to the used market to acquire one, without disclosing to the seller what it was for.

I wonder if the Justices felt a bit hornswoggled then, when the execution had the condemned man flailing in pain for for minutes before Edison increased the power, killing him in another two. Edison went on to describe the murderer as having been "Westinghoused."

Ultimately, Alternating Current won the day, because it would be Westinghouse that would win the bid to build the hydro-electric generation station at Niagara Falls.

McKesson's case against Alabama is dissimilar from Westinghouse's case insofar as they are using a different legal theory, and accusing Alabama of Fraud. They do not sell the drug in question for use in lethal injections, so agents of the Corrections Department represented themselves as having other needs for it - on-label needs. Because the would not have sold to the DoC had they known the intended use, they were lied to, and this is fraud.

So is their action unprecedented? Insofar as legal action by a company has attempted to prevent a proprietary technology from being used to carry out an execution, probably not. And though the legal precedent set by Westinghouse's case came out in favor of the executioner, I cannot imagine that a modern court would fail to note that it relied on Edison's testimony which was proven false by subsequent events. Insofar as McKesson is not acting on behalf of the condemned, but rather bringing its own claim of fraud in its own behalf, this does differ.

There is a case that is also in the courts brought on behalf of the condemned, arguing that this sequence of execution, driven as it is by the expediency of performing the execution before the system's stock of a second necessary drug expires, is cruel and unusual.

I hope McKesson wins. My own feelings about the death penalty is that their are many crimes for which it is a just punishment, but that given the limitations of human sense and feeling, it is too easy to apply it unjustly.

An account of the Edison/Tesla rivalry may be viewed here.

Moved to Dreamwidth.
Same Username.
I've already found some of you there.
Feel free to find me there as well.

It was just last week that Morgan and I walked into a  Caribou Coffee  in St. Paul.  The trivia question was "Where is Paisley Park?"  I was able to correctly answer Chanhassen.  He had just given a concert the night before and one of the Baristas had been there.

So today's  news of his death took  me by surprise.

I don't have much to say about him really.  His music was part of the environment I grew up in, but I never quite fancied  it.

The juxtaposition of that trivia question and the news of his death is sort of a memento mori, I guess.  It strikes close to home when you share a metro area with someone that high profile.

The Israeli Palestinian Conflict: Not a Civil Rights Issue.

I want to get a few thoughts down here. American liberals tend to view the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a Civil Rights issue. It's a narrative we are comfortable with, that we understand well, and that we know how to pick sides in. The basic assumption is that the Palestinians are fighting for a right to self determination that is a threat to Israeli hegemony, and if Israel would only give them this freedom, there would be peace. If this were true, the Oslo accords would have resolved the conflict. But there are larger goals in play here.

It is important to understanding the current condition of the conflict to read Hamas' charter. It is a thick read, written in lovely regal language. But its thesis is clear. I will distill a few things here that I think are pertinent.

1. What does Hamas mean by liberation and resisatance? We liberals love these words. We hear them and our sympathies are immediately awakened to poor, hungry masses yearning to be free. But it is not people that Hamas is looking to liberate. It is land. (Article 6 and Article 15). The land is "every inch of Palestine." And that would be Palestine as it looked at the time of the British Mandate. Liberation of the land entails bringing the land under Islamic rule, as Hamas understands it (ibid).

2. Where does Hamas fit among Islamic movements? Hamas is a unit of the Muslim Brotherhood, specializing in the Liberatioan of Palestine (article 2). What this means is that the goals of Hamas are in service to the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood.

3. What about the two state solution? Article 13 of the charter should be read in its entirety to understand why this will not work so long as Hamas holds poltical power, but here is a brief quote."There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are a waste of time and a farce."

So, what we should be noticing here is that what Hamas wants for the land it calls Palestine (which is to say the 1947 borders) is the same Islamic rule that, over the past few years was selected and rejected in Egypt, the Egyptians ultimately preferring the political oppression of a military government to the religious oppression of rule by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The next question is what do the Palestinians want? I can't answer that. The Palestinians, if offered an election, will find themselves in the unenviable position of choosing between Hamas and Fatah. I am convinced that the election of Hamas a decade or so ago was less about alignment with Hamas' goals than it was about throwing the Fatah bums out. I think that during a period of calm, throwing the Hamas bums out would be a real possibility, but that during a time of live fire, there is a tendency to cleave to the more belligerent party which would work in Hamas' favor.

Eliminating Hamas is essential to being able to give the Palestinians the freedom to explore their desires. Achieving this would mean reoccupying Gaza without settling it, and subjecting it to the political oppression now found in Egypt, while working assiduously to improve prosperity. When there is a strong, moderate Gazan majority, it should fight, and win, a war for indepedence that would culminate in its having its current borders with, depending on Egypt's goodwill some additional land in the Sinai. The West Bank could be part and parcel with this or not depending how West Bank and Gaza Arabs feel about each other.

Current liberal attempts to influence the peace process or to coerce Israel into yielding too much too soon do not ultimately support core liberal values like equality or self-determination, because they enable Hamas, for which these values are best relegated to the dustbin.