Ranting and Raving

And who shall I say is calling?

2025-03-14T00:34:40Z

So, they came in the night and arrested Mahmoud Khalil. I am a Jew and a Zionist. My Zionism, according to some, puts me "to the right of Attila the Hun." I won't contest it. Mahmoud Khalil is someone whom I regard with enmity. He is someone who, I suspect, wants me dead. Or if not me personally, then the 8 million or so of my coreligionists who reside in Israel.

None of this is salient. What is salient that they came in the night and arrested Mahmoud Khalil. The person going about his daily life was "disappeared" by the United States Government. The Destroyer has been loosed in our nation, and just because it destroys your enemy does not make it your friend. With the Destroyer loosed, no one is safe. It does not discern. Its power is arbitrary.

The salient thing is that they came in the night and arrested Mahmoud Khalil for his dissent. I do not agree with his particular dissent, but I too am a dissenter. As unsafe as protests like the ones he led made me feel, I feel far more unsafe because they came in the night and arrested Mahmoud Khalil. For his dissent.

And for whom else might they come, and for what matters of dissent?

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The court which is not a court.

2022-06-28T23:13:36Z

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.

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A conversation from years ago.

2022-05-08T22:53:00Z

Professor William Spanos was a professor of literary criticism at Binghamton University in the '90s. He taught subjects like Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism, and was very likely to assign readings from folks like Foucault and Derrida. His mien and bodily demeanor were often compared to "Lear in the storm" by those seeking to describe him, and he was solidly liberal in his political leanings. I took a class with him on Postmodernism, in which I took an incomplete that I satisfied years later with a paper discussing emerging network technologies and the panoptic gaze. He gave me a B+ with the comment "I don't see what this has to do with postmodernism, but it is fascinating nonetheless." His garrulousness won him the awe of his students.

So it came to pass that while I was there, DJ'ing and serving as News director for the campus radio station, that the Fairness Doctrine fell. A right wing talk show would joining our dinner hour lineup, and I was quite distressed. Lo and behold, there was William Spanos crossing the campus like a thunderstorm that was late for Office Hours. I accosted him, explained what was happening, and asked for his assistance in preparing a rebuttal. His response comprised two main points:

You can't argue with Crazy and
This will pass, reason will prevail.

Well, it hasn't passed, and these two points have been the reason that Democrats have largely sat by for 40 years while the tools of critical thinking were systematically undermined by the rise of right wing radio and TV, and Republican assaults on Public Education. The groundwork was laid then, with the siloing of traditional media that the destruction of the fairness doctrine made possible, for the political landscape we have today. It is no accident that Donald John Trump awarded his Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh and not to, say, Mark Zuckerberg. And while we wring our hands about the role of social media in the spread of mis/disinformation, we do not stop to ask what fruit the fields of Facebook and Twitter might have brought forth had the broadcast spreader of public discourse not come to them preloaded with the rants of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly.

Democrats have stood idly by while everything that ever made America something other than a "shithole country" has been dismantled. The fact that January 22nd 2021 came and went without Donald Trump clapped in irons means that not even a Confederate flag being marched through the Capital is sufficient to prod them to action. They ask me for my money and I ask myself whether that money belongs in their election coffers or my get the hell out of Dodge coffers, and the latter is winning.

C.S. Lewis notes in Perelandra that

You cannot reason with Evil and
If you do not destroy it, it will prevail.

The 30 years since that conversation with Professor Spanos have proven Lewis right and him wrong. And we are left on the precipice of a fall not unlike that which Germany took in 1938.

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Heh

2022-05-08T02:06:03Z

So. I read an article the other day that talked about social media and the ways in which people are often chilled in what they are willing to say because of the degree to which trolls, thought police, and other bad actors can leave one feeling like saying anything real or strong is just not worth the BS.

It rang true.

My reticence about posting here has been, in the main, about some issues I had on LiveJournal with users that engaged in that sort of behavior. It was not the fault of the platform, but of those individuals.

But I have come to realize that ceding that space served no one. It just left it to be filled by all kinds of broken voices that are tearing the world apart, while anything I might have said that anyone else might have thought worth amplifying has languished instead in my own mind. I don't flatter myself that my words can change the world, but I have come to understand that being silent is tantamount to standing idly over my neighbor's blood.

I have also realized that letting these things languish in my own head has not been good for me. Writing is a necessary kind of catharsis, though, if I'm honest, it's really more of a necessary mental emesis. In the event of swallowing too many toxic ideas, induce vomiting

One final note. JK Rowling has become a hero to me. Her writings, from Harry Potter to her Richard Galbraith books to the Fantastic Beasts screenplays betray an understanding of the nature of evil and the dangers it currently poses that has convinced me that she is one of the few remaining people in public life with her head on straight. I do not say that for any other reason than to let the reader know that if they are not comfortable with her, they can expect not to be comfortable with me.

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WW84 One line review

2020-12-26T20:19:28Z

Making wishes on a crystalline phallic symbol is all fun and games until someone goes part Maine-Coon.

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richardf8 @ 2020-04-23T20:39:00

2020-04-24T01:53:44Z

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?

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Greetings.

2019-04-02T04:23:58Z

My cat was very alarmed to learn that former Vice President Joseph Biden was accused of rubbing noses with a woman in 2009. She demands that he apologize for the cultural appropriation of this ancient, sacred feline greeting, and feels that some sensitivity training might be in order. I, on the other, simply breathe a sigh of relief that it was feline, and not canine, culture that was appropriated.

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What happened to my liberalism?

2018-06-18T03:36:17Z

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.

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Political Stuff

2017-12-11T23:58:38Z

Last week was eventful. One day, the Senate passed an execrable tax bill designed to further consolidate wealth among the extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else and increasing the deficit. It is a tax bill that is designed to bring back the gilded age, which is to say, the eve of the panic of 1893. Trump Department of the Interior also opened large swaths of Bears Ears national monument to logging and drilling. To prevent this sort of thing is the reason I voted for Hillary Clinton.

Then Trump announced that he's moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. The fact that that would NEVER have happened on Hillary's watch is the reason that I had to hold my nose while voting for Hillary. I want everyone to think about just what this means . . .

That in a few years US Diplomats and Israeli Government officials won't have to sit on Highway 1 for an hour when they need to meet face to face. Yup. That's it.

So for everyone who thinks this is the dawning of the age of the Third Temple, or the Second Coming of Jesus, or the Disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people, get over it. Trump has merely shown a long overdue courtesy to another sovereign nation.

The fact that the Palestinians think this means it's a great excuse to initiate ~~pogroms~~ a day of rage surprises no one. It is equally unsurprising that Israel, and perhaps the US, will be alone in refusing to allow the Palestinians to hold policy hostage with the threat of violence.

So now, to the third point. Al Franken was basically compelled to resign on the basis of spurious, uninvestigated allegations of sexual impropriety. The lack of due process is disturbing, and it seems to me that the primary reason for the Democratic Caucus' demand that he step down was so that they could engage in virtue signalling, saying that if they made Franken step down for so much less than Roy Moore is accused of, Republicans should not abide Roy Moore as a Senator. African American Senator John Conyers was similarly ousted a few days earlier.

The Trump presidency should, in and of itself, be sufficient proof that virtue signalling is a failed political strategy.

As it stands, I feel quite betrayed by the Senate Democrat Caucus. It seems to me that, for all their talk of "deplorables" during the campaign, it is they who have managed to lynch a black man and crucify a Jew in a single week. I expect that when I need to vote for Franken's replacement on 2018, I will be writing Franken's name in.

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Not. About. Guns.

2017-10-05T03:30:07Z

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.

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Going Political

2017-08-16T00:21:43Z

I'm neither left nor right, I'm just sitting here tonight,
Staring at that hopeless little screen.
--Leonard Cohen, "Democracy."

I feel that the time has come to do some political posts. I am going to begin by laying out my personal political platform. It's not complicated, and it's not simple, and it's not something I ever get to vote for, because, for reasons I don't understand, many of my causes have been taken up by one party or the other, but not both. Here goes:

I am Pro-Gun and Pro-Choice,
Pro-Labor and Pro Israel,
I believe that the government has the responsibility to collect taxes and provide services.
I believe that people should be generally free to do as they wish, but that the government has an obligation to set rules where the exercise of one person's freedom poses danger to another person.

That about sums it up.

I generally vote for Democrats, because I find that they do (ever so slightly) more to advance my agenda than impede it.

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Unprecedented?

2017-04-17T03:53:04Z

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.

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Yetziat LJ.

2017-04-14T03:48:34Z

I have left LJ. Honestly, I haven't looked at the new ToS, it is enough that all the people I had been following over there left for here. I have begun the import; I expect it to finish sometime in the fairly distant future.

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