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[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

But the question being put is fundamentally about what concrete objects could provide the touchstone ... the analog, the real measurement device ... for any such "ideal" government. If textualism is too open to interpretation (whether "originalist" or "living document"), what other concrete objects can we use to avoid that interpretive wiggle room?

Those "narrow" questions decided by some technicality or other, like abortion rights being a privacy issue, only exist because our Constitution is too interpretable ... like priests argueing jargonal, hermeneutic minutia. The only reason I reject your accusations of Scientism is because, in proper science, we have (relatively) concrete analogs against which to test our hypothetical constructs. For a Constitutional government, we don't really have a persistent thing to lay our thoughts on top of to see if they fit ... like the old platinum-iridium meter bar.

What we need is a miniature government machine like an Orrery or something ... but not an oracle like His Dark Materials' alethometer ... a *structural* and behavioral analogy to the way we design the government to work. Screw the pocket Constitution! We need a Computer Constitution ... we could put one in your car to tell you which traffic laws are violations *and* one in every Justice's pocket to tell them which legislation grinds the machine's gears and which legislation makes it purr.


On 10/14/20 1:48 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Put the left brain aside.
> 
> Make a half-dozen or so Ayahuasca sessions mandatory for anyone aspiring to, elected to, or appointed to any level of government position (including local DMV clerks) and sit back and observe the "ideal" form of government emerge. An argument could be made that the Athenian government arose, in significant part, from just such a process.
> 
> Jon will back me up on this as soon as he finishes Muraresku's book.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2020, at 9:21 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>> So, along with the comments made about Roberts' memos and recognition 
>> that the court is just as political as the other 3 branches (and the 
>> implicit 4th), and hearkening back to the apparent capitalist 
>> *requirement* of a permanent, but materially open, under class, what 
>> concrete form could a Platonic Constitutional Representative Democracy 
>> take? If not "text", then what? What expression(s) do we have to 
>> enshrine in order to enshrine the abstract concepts being expressed?
>>
>> Maybe *multiple* expressions would approximate it better, a text, a 
>> diagram/animation, and a mechanistic computation. (My principle is 3 
>> are required, 2 is inadequate, 1 is ridicule-worthy.) So if the 
>> concept(s) to be enshrined are separation of powers into, say, 4 
>> branches of government, then from that conceptual constitution, we 
>> write a text, draw a diagram, and build a simulation. Then those 3 
>> "documents" are held up as "the Constitution" ... "the law of the land".
>>
>> To my mind, that question *precedes* the causal inferencing (well-) 
>> shone by Whitehouse. The extraction of an ephemeris from noise requires 
>> some sort of prior model. We have to decide kindasorta what we're 
>> looking for before we start willy-nilly inferring. (While relatively 
>> agnostic inference algorithms like empirical mode decomposition are 
>> always attractive, TANSTAAFL.)
>>
>> On 10/13/20 12:09 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> I don’t really know which thread to attach to, or where best to attach to it.
>>>
>>> But in a room I was in, Sheldon Whitehouse’s statement in the confirmation hearing was playing:
>>> https://www.facebook.com/derek.friday/videos/10102085065399760/
>>> This seems to me where the conversation should be, (or at least this part of it).  I would like the evening news better if they would include content of this kind. For cynics about politicians who want to cop-out and say “Ah, they’re all rats”, I would like to put this forward as an argument that there are plenty there to work with.
>>>
>>> Narrow questions that can be answered legalistically, but that refuse to address the big mechanisms of causation, seem to me to be pure distractions, and it irritates me that they get more than proportional time.  Any meaning the narrow moves get is coming from these big causal contexts, and it is worth seeing a bit of the machinery by which they are organized.

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