[FRIAM] labels

[Marcus Daniels]

Sure, I don’t know why I’d want that kind of law.   So long as there is this governmental mechanism, I want a liberal court, and for the left to play as dirty as the right does in order to get it.   It is an ongoing battle over how we want to live.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2020 10:24 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] labels

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.



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