[FRIAM] labels

Sun Oct 11 13:23:58 EDT 2020

Right Now, the major dimension of U.S. politics is (appears to be?)
"liberal" vs "conservative" (both in their weird modern connotations). And
so, it seems like if we want a "balanced" Supreme Court, we must ensure a
balance between the number of "liberal" vs. "conservative" justices. That's
fine. In doing so, we are allowing for any and all amount of
imbalance along the other dimensions, but Right Now, that's fine. Maybe
later we will care about the balance in other dimensions, and justices will
at that point have their record scrutinized in other ways.

However, such natural shifts are harder if we pass a law stating that the
"liberal" vs "conservitive" dimension MUST be balanced (5 of each, for
example). It would now take an act of legislation for us to start trying to
balance along a different dimension, and the old-guard might be able to put
that off (to their benefit) long after the political concerns of the
population have shifted.

Plus, what do we make of judges who are centrist along the dimension we
have declared primary? Are they ineligable for the top seats unless they
"pick a side" so they can enter properly into the state-mandated accounting
of who fits where?

And that's not to mention the problem of the meanings of those terms
shifting over time. Recall that, out of our terrible modern political
vocabulary, the term "libertarian" is the closest to the 17th and 18th
century use of the term "liberal" (as in "classical liberal economics").
Regan-era conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s were pro-gun control,
Eisenhower conservatives were pro-preservation of federal land, and pro
enourmous infrastructure investments. Etc., etc.

Incidentally, I think that last part is key to the distinction Barrett was
trying to make (whether she was disingenuous or not is another issue). Over
the long term, it we might hope (for the sake of language) that
"conservative" legal attitudes correspond with "conservative" political
attitudes, but, at the least, the speed of focus is quite different. There
are many justices that have held their ground in a point on the various
continuum while the political ground shifted underneath them. The current
(and recent) judges that we associate most closely with a particular
political ideology all still have a healthy handful of cases in which their
decisions didn't play well with the associated political parties or
political base.

<echarles at american.edu>

On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 12:57 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:

> What reification into law?    As culture changes, the investments of
> organizations can be threatened.    But other opportunities arise for
> organizations that are quick on their feet.
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Eric Charles
> *Sent:* Sunday, October 11, 2020 9:45 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] labels
>
>
>
> But.... <General Social Scientist Hat On> It is a "first principal
> component" in our particular culture at this particular point in history.
> To reify it's status as the first principle component into law would make
> it very hard for a different dimension to come to account for a larger
> percentage of the variance at some point in the future. The existing power
> structure benefits from convincing us that it will never be the case that a
> different dimension could ever become so important that it deserved
> that level of attention, because that would legitimize parties identified
> primarily upon that other dimension... and such hegemonic processes should
> generally be viewed with suspicion (and derision).
>
>
>
> <Libertarian Hat on> Tying to some of the other discussions, we should be
> suspicious of attempts by the bureaucracy to use law and regulation to
> mandate that social distinctions currently-important to the bureaucracy
> remain important into the indefinite future. Would we be better off if, for
> example, what if, people in the 1790's made a compromise where, by law,
> half of SCOTUS justices had to be "for a weak central executive" while the
> other half had to be justices had to be "for a strong central government".
> Or if people in the 1830s had come up with a compromise where, by law, half
> he SCOTUS justices had to be "for state rights" while the other half had to
> be "against slavery." My intuition is that such efforts would not have
> benefited society. We should *not *be in favor of the government engaging
> in such efforts, and we should scrutinize every regulatory effort to try to
> minimize such effects (to the extent that is practical).
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 1:23 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
>
> It is the first principal component..
>
>
>
> On Oct 9, 2020, at 8:40 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> 
>
> I agree that the illusion of there being only the single axis of
> Left/Right is a travesty.
>
> I also intuit that my own preferences for ranked-choice-voting to *allow
> in* more dimensions may be naive in some way I don't fully apprehend.
>
> I'd love for you (and others) here to explore the paradoxes and
> inconsistencies implied in all of this.
>
> On 10/9/20 9:18 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>
> --- reconfigure (expand) it from 9 to 15 but
> *balance* the Left/Right ideology (I think he proposed 5/5) and then
> ---------
>
>
>
> Note that one thing both parties agree on is that we should conceive
> politics as utterly and completely a choice between the two of them. God
> forbid that we conceive of judges using any other dimensions. In fact,
> let's enshrine it in law that we must forever focus on exactly whether we
> have a "balance" of "left" and "right". Ugh!
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2020 at 4:48 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Ha!  I refer to the last bit as "ok fine, TWIST my drinking arm!" when
> someone offers to buy me one...   the only one to twists my drinking arm
> this last six months has been Mary... and Maybe Stephen and his circle
> on "ZoomGrappaNight".
>
> I don't like the language around "packing the court".   I don't think
> "reconfiguring the court" is the same as "packing the court".   Clearly,
> the (not so) loyal opposition to the Dems *would* pack the court...  add
> 6 more justices and make sure they are ALL conservative leaners.   Pete
> Buttegeig was the first to speak of this in my earshot, and HIS version
> sounded pretty reasonable...   reconfigure (expand) it from 9 to 15 but
> *balance* the Left/Right ideology (I think he proposed 5/5) and then
> leave it to the Justices themselves to fill the remaining 5 (through
> some arcane process?).    What the Republicans have been building up to
> for decades is "packing the courts".
>
> Checks and balances are tricky, as is depending on social norms and
> standards, but I think it might be "as good as it gets", at least for
> the time being.
>
> - Steve
>
>
> On 10/8/20 1:36 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> > Ha! That was the essence of one of the 538 panel member's phrasing
> suggestion for Kamala Harris in response to Pence's question about packing
> SCOTUS. The elaborated version was: "Because confirming Barrett, NOW, is
> such a horribly wrong thing to do, we have no choice BUT to pack the
> court." ... I.e. now look what you made me do. That was my dad's favorite
> phrase to justify whatever abuse he chose to mete out that day. He once ran
> over my bicycle with his truck. I *made* him run over my bike because I
> left it laying in the driveway. It's a running joke with my fellow drinkers
> who *regularly* FORCE me to drink more than I should. There is no free
> will. I live to serve.
> >
> > On 10/8/20 11:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >> Look what you made me do,
>
>
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