[FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

Tue Jul 2 15:46:38 EDT 2024

Yeah.  Worse than that.

If I look at Thomas and Alito, I’m not sure it would even be necessary to bribe them, apart from some coordination services.  They are both characters of grievance.  In that sense, not far removed at all from the MAGAs on the street.  Mostly they want to poke somebody in the eye, and humans are very resourceful in noticing opportunities when that motive is always present.

Roberts is the one I have to work harder to find words for.  Not because it is hard to know what I think of him, but because it is hard to put the right terms together.  It’s a kind of blandly presented disingenuousness, but so over-the-top disingenuous that that is where I run out of words.  Like watching a smash-and-grab burglary and saying “nothing but routine shopping days here”.  Putting up straw-men about things that aren’t happening, while explicitly refusing to acknowledge things that are.  

To Glen’s point about “too conspiratorial”.  My sense of this is utterly ordinary.  I don’t see anything especially clever, or especially strategic, in these 6-scotus rulings.  There is a kind of garden-variety cowardice: not wanting to take crisp positions for which they can be pilloried, but wanting to gum up works, send frivolous things back to appellate courts, issue vague rulings where they know the interpretation will be done by hacks lower-down in the chain, who mostly are too anonymous to be pursued.  But there is a chicken-hawk quality to it too, and I feel like this is coming from a group dynamic that operates over individual styles: yes their rulings have the waffling character of cowardice, but they also _take_ cases that are flatly meritless, so that they get to put a stamp on them in spite of mostly adding mud (but always biased in one direction).  I guess the word I am struggling for is something like “decadence”.  Occupants of an institution so long insulated from the substance of its actions that their priorities have all been drawn off into small and empty vanities.  It seems utterly normal to me, but catastrophic in a country with the institutional size of the U.S., where bad choices can accumulate in vast numbers before there is enough of a selection response to address them.  At which point it becomes very hard to make corrections stably.

Eric

> On Jul 3, 2024, at 2:20 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> I think SCOTUS might be useful idiots too.   Easily bribed like with a motor home and free vacations.   
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 10:11 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?
> 
> Right. MAGA are the useful idiots being exploited by the conservative arm of SCOTUS to push through the Unitary Executive, which, in turn, is the "useful idiot" being exploited by the wealthy to achieve the oligarchy as a stepping stone. And to some extent, this is Thiel's "Straussian Moment" or Yarvin's return to a kindasorta Monarchy. And the Pew data you pointed to demonstrate that, like in France, *we* don't mind that lukewarm authoritarianism ... Thiel's a bit like Plato's Philosopher King ... or maybe a better analogy is Thiel is like our Supreme Leader while Trump is like Ebrahim Raisi.
> 
> On 7/2/24 07:15, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> The MAGAs aren't the wealthy, they are envious of the wealthy.   DJT included.
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>> Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 6:28 AM
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?
>> 
>> I worry this is too conspiratorial. The only way I can see it sustaining is if we take selfishness as a core human trait in the same way we take reason/rationality as a core human trait. Both are false as crisp categories. But there's enough of either (and their inverses - self-sacrificing and embodied cognition, respectively) to wax and wane. Assessing whether or not, say, an oligarchy can maintain in the face of such a diverse and distributed system requires us to define relatively objective measures of selfishness (or "corruption" - but I'd argue defining that well is fraught). And a good measure of selfishness has to include, as you mention with Cannon's family, a measure of the size of the various tribes. My guess is the even if the wealthy recognize that other wealthies are in their tribe to some extent, there'll be more in-fighting amongst those elephants than there will be solidarity. Say what you want about capitalism, it encourages intra-tribal rifts and inter-tribal exchange. And that allows bursts of altruism or "universalist" beliefs. If the successive oligarchies are disrupted often enough, in complex enough ways, we may be able to continue approximating a democracy.
>> 
>> On 7/1/24 14:00, Santafe wrote:
>>> I have an impression that the pattern of this and many other decisions is an acknowledgment — front brain or mid-brain; don’t know — that a second-government that isn’t the institutional one is now fully up and running.
>>> 
>>> Many years ago, when I was working with Shubik, he gave me a paper by one of his colleagues who had been active in trying to support the Aquino government in the Philippines as a realization of the constitutional system set up (whenever that was done).  The paper’s theme was that having laws on the books that nominally seem to “uphold” democratic governance in one place may be worth not-much someplace else, where the whole social culture — all the skills, networks of relation, expectations — are built on generations-long histories of what we would call corruption (but for them, is just how things get done).
>>> 
>>> scotus repeatedly disaggregates and ambiguously states the criteria for something, rather than taking any concrete and intelligible stand, and when there is a law that does take an intelligible stand, they make up some story that it doesn’t really say what it plainly says, and put an ambiguous dictum in its place.  (Weird; like the inverse of “painting over rot”; it is taking sound wood and somehow painting rot over it).
>>> 
>>> Now, if there were not a sophisticated enough system to put compliant apparatchiks in a very broad swath of lower courts, lawmaking houses, etc., that ambiguation would do limited good.  But when money is very concentrated, communication very modern, and markets very very efficient in centralizing power, and there are a few decades to work, that kind of broad installation of corrupt actors can get done.  There is enough machinery in place to micro-manage them if needed (amicus briefs or even individual threat and bribery), but there probably are enough collaborators that a lot of the micro-managing isn’t even needed.  It’s like a system of “alternative laws" (next term for KAC to coin) that mostly don’t need to be enforced if a few occasions serve to keep the precedent live in people’s minds.
>>> 
>>> So in New York or Washington the cases will be weakened by picking around the edges, but in florida cannon can just throw it all out, and know her family will remain safe (and maybe even her personal beliefs will be followed; who knows re. that).
>>> 
>>> Likewise bible teaching in schools, banniing of abortifacients and eventually contraceptives through the mail within their territory, and so on.
>>> 
>>> Because I have to (as the only form of employment I am for the moment holding) unfortunately do a lot of flying back and forth, I am aware what a nuisance it is to have Russian airspace unavailable.  11 time zones.  I wonder when the various red-captured states will start to declare their airspace off limits to alrlines that fly between the coasts.  LIke, flights from NY to CA would have to go through Canada.  Given the great circle already, that wouldn’t be such a big deal.  But maybe flights from Mexico or S. America to non-theocratic states would suffer some added cost.
>>> 
>>> Eric
>>> 
>>> p.s.  I have to note how much my use of terminology has been modified by Arendt’s way of grouping things, and there are emails I sent once that I would not send now (or would have to word differently).  Not that I have the ability to know whether her system is a good one, only that I can follow it and see that it is very different from the offhand one I have used and usually see used.  So for instance, she would not call the Nazis “Fascists”; they were distinct at the time and stay so in her terms.  She also distinguishes mere authoritarians from totalitarians, as part of a larger distinction between “parties” and “movements”.  In her system, “parties” seek to control the state, on behalf of particular interests, in contrasts to “movements” which seek to destroy it.  So the Fascists were fundamentally still a party-type organization; only the Nazis and the Bolsheviks were real movements.  And the Nazis and Bolsheviks saw each other as true peers, and looked with contempt on the mere Fascists.  Much follows from that distinction.  Authoritarians have stable goals, even if not overtly admidded outside those running them; movements need not have any particular goals, save to keep the movement moving, so becoming more fluid and cult-like over time — one reads about the supervention of the SA by the SS and then the conuous invention of new inner layers within the SS, each more detached from specific skills than the ones before — until they collapse because they aren’t really organized around getting anything particular done.  She argues that the parties and the movements co-travel early on, and that the parties fail to recognize the difference in what they are dealing with, until eventually they get eaten up and didn’t see it coming.  When I read or hear Stuart Stevens I have a strong sense of that.  All that reads very comfortably with the situation at the moment.  It’s odd; a bad analogy: I think of disregulated cell populations pre- and post-metastasis.  The authoritarian parties are mere tumors, taking up residence within the normal rules of organ development.  The movements spread to everything, and eventually undermine all rules except their own.  Most of the educated, luxuried, bribed, etc. operators now are still party-men.  scotus, the non-MTG-type elected officials, and such. The movement characters are a different category.  MTG is just the front wave of cannon-fodder for them, and trump is too unfocused (or am I wrong; is he focused-enough on one goal?) to really be a longer-term builder of anything (though not by too much).  I am not yet seeing who has the combination of delusion and focus to fill the Hitler or Stalin role.  But the social structure seems to have laid out the throne, and we try to figure out who occupies it and for how long.
>>> 
>>>> On Jul 1, 2024, at 11:58 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.
>>>> c
>>>> om%2fus-news%2flive%2f2024%2fjul%2f01%2fsupreme-court-trump-immunity
>>>> - 
>>>> claim-decision-updates%23top-of-blog&c=E,1,HjPSPMDt8Wf8_2t6B5NRgPS6e
>>>> Q 
>>>> oM9ERREUVJg7-qQgIoTykx-HMc4-VJ15LWXlArv7k86lDYDmnX0_MAvUEwQTGSEpHEsh
>>>> T
>>>> JjBa28-h5oxQZa8k,&typo=1
>>>> 
>>>> Anyone care to take a stab at explaining why the ruling doesn't simply kick the can down the road a bit? I mean, how could (say) hiding secret documents, riot incitation at a campaign event, etc. be considered official acts of the Office of the President? I suppose I can see some of the evidence being thrown out, like claims about POTUS not getting involved in protecting the Capitol building. But is this ruling really that damaging to the prosecution's case?
>>>> 
> 
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