Month: May 2022

Space – the final frontier.

Because apparently we keep coming back to it.

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Its premature mission – to journey to strange new worlds

To seek out new actors with new forehead makeup

To boldly go where we’ve already gone before.

Well, an Internet friend of mine pointed out that YouTube was given the rights to show the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, so I didn’t have to pay for Paramount Plus to watch it. And from what I’ve seen, it lives up to the hype.

It starts with Captain Christopher Pike still trying to process the mental fallout from Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, which has put a touch of grey into Anson Mount’s All-American Hero persona. When Admiral Robert April shows up at Pike’s ranch and orders him to get back on the Enterprise to rescue his Number One (Rebecca Romijn) from a first contact mission gone awry, Pike is reluctant to go. He’s going through what might be described as pre-traumatic stress syndrome, in which he keeps reliving the vision of the future where he sees his own death, “or as good as.” Spock (Ethan Peck), the only other crewman he can discuss those events with, quickly deduces what’s going on. Spock and a new crewman (Christina Chong) give Pike new and unique perspectives on living with the knowledge of death, and he reaches a kind of Zen approach to accepting his fate.

The problem that I (and a bunch of other people) had with Discovery (aka, DISCO, STD) is that it wanted to be all “progressive” and different even as it insisted on being set in the Star Trek history before Kirk. The much-maligned Enterprise series at least tried to appear as though it were part of the setting’s pre-Original Series past, but Discovery never bothered, creating all kinds of setting anachronisms that could only be resolved by chucking the entire cast and ship into the next millennium.

Strange New Worlds really isn’t that much like the Original Series. Unlike the James Cawley and Vic Mignogna fan projects, they don’t try to make the sets look just like the ’60s Enterprise, and the established characters don’t look or act like the original actors, even to the extent that the JJ Abrams cast did. But I think they’re getting the right tone. The cast has the kind of camaraderie and heroism that I remember from the original show, including Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who looks nothing like Nichelle Nichols but is immensely charming, especially in the pilot episode’s last scene.

But even if this cishet, conventional Star Trek goes in the opposite direction of Discovery, it confirms that old-school Trek was always more liberal and less conservative than some people want to believe. Because in the pilot episode, Strange New Worlds went there. When Pike rescues his Away Team they tell him that the natives of the planet in question reverse-engineered antimatter tech when their astronomers observed the Discovery’s warp jump into the future. And rather than use it to develop space travel, they’re using it to make strategic weapons. So Pike just says “screw General Order One” and appears at the peace talks between the squabbling factions. And he shows them footage from Earth’s history immediately after the 20^th Century, including real footage of people marching on Washington with signs like “AUDIT THE VOTE.” The writers have retconned Trek’s Eugenics Wars to be just one stage of a larger conflict that included a second American Civil War and culminated in a nuclear exchange that led to the extinction of hundreds of animal and plant species and 30 percent of the human population. And Pike tells the diplomats that that’s where they’re headed.

I mean it seems like crazy science fiction, but when the main sponsor of fascism around the world just started a genocidal war, and threatens to launch nukes if the international community doesn’t let him win, cause apparently he’s deathly ill and doesn’t have anything to lose, and meanwhile his main protege in the United States makes his master look like Bertrand Russell, and he’s STILL got at least even odds of getting re-elected president, well, who knows what could happen?

With Strange New Worlds, what we’ve got so far is good enough that I want to see where it goes next. I’m still not sure I want to pay for another streaming service when I can’t make the time to watch what I have. If you have Amazon Prime, you can watch the show but you still have to get an add-on subscription to Paramount. However they do have a 7-day free trial offer. After a few weeks I may check that out to see some more episodes. I may also binge Discovery Season 4 and Star Trek: Picard Season 2, if only to see if they’re AS bad as everyone says they are.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

…We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

-Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government

Well, in actual news this week, somebody decided to leak Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on Thomas E. Dobbs et al v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which political observers predicted was going to be the case where the conservative majority finally got rid of the Roe v. Wade right to abortion one way or another. The text indicates that this is not merely a technical restriction of abortion rights but an active assertion that no such rights exist.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Alito passes over certain legal justifications for an abortion right, such as the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Which among other things would flip the argument: Not, why is there a right to abortion but why is there a state interest in preserving a pregnancy prior to fetal viability? But he says that the Ninth Amendment was not the basis of pro-choice arguments and points to the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause regarding its Section 1. He then asserts that such pro-choice rulings did not establish that a right to abortion was confirmed by the Fourteenth, even as he goes over how it applies in other cases.

Alito points out that while there had been no asserted right to abortion in national law prior to Roe, 30 states still prohibited abortion at all stages. As though the Roe case were not about addressing that fact, going on from Section V, and whether such laws should be valid or whether the Court should assert a different standard. In Section B of his opinion, Alito pronounces “Until the latter part of the 20^th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.” As if emotional emphasis were necessary, he follows by saying, “Zero. None.” Apparently the fact that a right did not exist prior to being asserted by the government, as if that were not the reason cases are taken to court, means that such a right cannot exist. After all prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, what support was there in American law for the belief that a Negro had more than three-fifths the value of a human being?

The gist, highlighted in the Politico article, is on page 4: “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely – the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Truly, the implications of such a ruling are staggering and encompassing. So encompassing, in fact, that I am not sure the author himself is aware of them.

Here are several other words that are mentioned nowhere in the main Constitution or the Bill of Rights: Homosexual. Heterosexual. Machine gun. Semi-automatic. Internet.

By Alito’s Solomonic approach to “strict constructionism”, some liberal justice could at some point assert that the Constitution does not protect a citizen’s right to semi-automatic weaponry or certain types of ammunition, because the Constitution doesn’t specifically protect them, and smirkingly cite Alito’s opinion in their reasoning, just as Alito smirkingly refers to Ginsburg and Blackmun in his reasoning.

Basically, the premise of this decision only works if the Right assumes that the Left won’t end up commandeering the legal system in the blatant and partisan manner that they have. Which is a laugh given that most of the reason for “conservative” bad-faith arguments against the Left is the manic fear that liberals will take over government and do to conservatives what they’ve been doing to the rest of the country all along.

It should be telling that conservatives’ main reaction was neither opposition nor support of the decision so much as shock and indignance that the decision was leaked and “decorum” was violated. After all, that’s more important than human rights. You would think that if abortion is so terrible and the need to protect life is so sacrosanct that they would be rushing to release the news as soon as they could, or perhaps they did and suddenly found out that other people didn’t like it.

It’s almost as if Republicans think that the purpose of government is to act explicitly against the will of the public.

Some commentators thought this leak was some “last-ditch effort by the Left to stir up yet another culture war in the hopes it can save them from utter obliteration in November.” (In which case, Mission Accomplished.) Some thought this was more a conservative attempt to shore up a wobbly conservative justice who might possibly back off of Alito’s opinion. I don’t think so. You already have Justice Thomas who if anything is more reactionary than Alito, and then you have the three Justices that Viceroy Trump appointed, implicitly and explicitly to take out Roe v. Wade. They would not have a draft listed as a Court opinion if there was not a solid majority behind it. It’s been pointed out that after Chief Justice Roberts, Clarence Thomas actually has seniority among the conservative justices and therefore he would have had first right to pen the decision. The fact that Alito took it up meant that an internal deliberation was already made. And the fact that his language directs to strike down Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (when the Dobbs v. Jackson case in question does not specifically require it) seems to indicate that Alito doesn’t particularly care what anyone thinks of the opinion or has any fear of defections. As he says, “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.” I’m sure King George III would agree.

Perhaps the leak was some clerk or Court insider who might actually be pro-life in broad terms and against widespread legal abortion but who is also conservative in the practical sense and realizes that pushing the issue too hard in one direction will lead to a radical backlash and a liberal effort to undermine the entire conservative project in the same way that the radical Right sought to undermine the previous legal tradition immediately after Roe v. Wade. And given the changing demographics of this country it is hard to say that such an effort would not succeed.

And then ask yourself who such an insider might be.

Perhaps this was said moderate conservative’s attempt to say: Are you SURE you want to do that?

Are you SURE you want to do that?

Samuel… Samuel… Are YOU SURE you want to do that?

I am not a huge fan of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, because it leads to taking absurd hypotheticals to impractical levels, but if one is determined to assert an absurd hypothetical, it is still a good rule for determining the consequences of treating your desire as a universal law. At one point Alito said “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.” This is of course an attempt to pretend to objectivity and to wash one’s hands of consequences for a decision that are likely if not inevitable. One could argue, as many scholars over the years have, that Roe v. Wade was ambiguous in its reasoning and difficult to defend. One could argue, as Rehnquist did in his dissent with the original decision, and as Alito does now, that federally the decision ought to be state by state. And federally, it should be the Congress’ power to determine the protections of the federal government, rather than having the Supreme Court making the decision for them and “legislating from the bench”, as conservatives put it in 1973.

There are of course reasons why that did not happen and why Roe lasted as long as it did. The Politico article quotes: “In the main opinion in the 1992 Casey decision, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and Davis Souter warned that the court would pay a “terrible price” for overruling Roe, despite criticism of the decision from some in the public and the legal community.

“While it has engendered disapproval, it has not been unworkable,” the three justices wrote then. “An entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe‘s concept of liberty in defining the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions; no erosion of principle going to liberty or personal autonomy has left Roe‘s central holding a doctrinal remnant.”

Whatever philosophical matters concern the status of unborn life, when the state gets involved in the matter the practical result is to assert that the rights of a woman to her own body are trumped (so to speak) by the existence of a pregnancy.

(Alito, incidentally, had previously said that the government’s pandemic policy led to “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” While he was busy citing all the cases in which abortion was not guaranteed and a state’s right to prohibit abortion was a precedent, he could have looked up all the restrictions on individual liberty that government imposed over the Spanish Flu.)

On Facebook, writer Thomas Clay posted: “All women in the United States are now second class citizens who do not get to enjoy the bodily autonomy we grant a corpse because we still respect the right of a corpse to keep its organs.” You basically have a situation akin to the build up to the Civil War in which some states were “slave” and some were free, but the divider in this case is genitalia and childbearing age rather than racial origin. Although some would argue it’s not much of a difference. While in the abstract it might be better to leave the matter to the states, “conservatives” like Alito and Thomas elide the point that their decisions do not have an impact only in the abstract. It is a good question whether the state of Missisippi would have proffered its case, or whether Alito would have written this opinion, if a majority of state governments were pro-choice or if there was a US Congress motivated to federalize the provisions of Roe.

And one of the reasons that old-time general conservatives, like O’Connor and Kennedy and to some extent Roberts, were loath to mess with precedent even when it goes against moral conservatism is to preserve what one might call the mystique of their institution. Jack Shafer: “The court has long feared that if the nation knew how its decisions come together — if its members dared to wear human faces, if it appeared as anything but a sacred tribunal — its decisions would carry less weight. It’s that easy to lose the mystique built up for centuries. The POLITICO piece reveals a court-decision-in-process as a purely political document that aligns five conservatives against the court’s liberals and, presumably, the chief justice. That accurate portrayal might take decades for the court’s myth-makers to erase.”

We take the Court as Supreme not just because there needs to be a final authority but because that authority is supposed to be outside politics and a balance on the legislature and executive. The decisions of the Court are assumed to have an almost supernatural authority, as if they were written by God on stone with fire. And instead the bias displayed here reveals that any given Court decision has no real need for precedent or constitutional grounding, all you need is a grudge and four other justices to go along with you. And now that Democrats know this, they’re going to do everything they can to just shove through their agenda and shift the balance again, decorum and precedent be damned. And they need a bigger majority in Congress to pull that off. And since Republicans know that, they’re going to do everything they can to make sure they never lose elections anywhere they can help it.

Fortunately for them they have the courts on their side.

To cement that, Republicans would need to build up even bigger judicial majorities in the states during this year’s election to change the election laws for the next national election. And at that point Trump and McConnell’s court majority will be able to do for the 2024 Republican nominee what they did not do for Trump in 2020, perhaps because at the time they thought they wouldn’t be able to force the issue. But apparently now they think they can.

There’s only one thing that could stop that.

The next two elections are Americans’ last chance to determine their own future.

ACT LIKE IT.

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

But nobody can handle that other trip – the possibility than any freak with $1.98 can walk over into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The big super-important story in the news last week was that Elon Musk, after over a week of playing games with the board at Twitter, finally decided to buy the social media outlet outright. And if I seem blase’ about how important this actually is, well, yeah. I seem to notice that the people who are most upset (or elated) about how important this change actually is are the same people who are most invested in spending time on that indulgence.

Of course a lot of the implicit and explicit fear (and elation) is the idea that once Elon Musk comes in to restore “free speech” to a site that actually started taking its own user rules and policies seriously after January 6, he’s going to let Donald Trump, the once and future Viceroy of Russian North America, back on. But in reaction to the news, the Sovereign of Subnormal told everybody that he wouldn’t go back on Twitter even then, cause he’s got this brand new site called… Truf Censhal. Yeah, that’s it.

My take, which I have gone over at least once, is that Twitter’s format is deliberately intended to blast unconsidered opinions and emotional hot takes, that this is the very nature of the format which Musk’s liberal critics are patronizing and posting on and using as a professional community, and if they have a problem with that potential, then they have a problem with the site itself, because that “abuse” of the medium is the very nature of the medium. People like Donald Trump were the ones using the Twitter format in the manner that it best works. And if liberals have a problem with someone buying out the site so that it can be used in such a way, their problem is with the site itself, and if you want a private actor to buy it out, or want the government to regulate it, you might as well have a private actor or the government shut it down altogether, because that is the only way to solve the problem.

But the fact that I don’t loathe Musk doesn’t mean that I’m a huge fan either. I liked the one take I saw recently where somebody called him “Tony Stark without the redemption arc.” One of the other whines about this whole deal is that (supposedly) Musk had pledged to the World Food Programme that he would pledge almost $6 billion dollars to end world hunger if they presented a plan to do it, and he didn’t follow through. I don’t think this is so much because he cares less about world hunger than about letting Trump and Nazis back on Twitter, it’s just that he seems to have the priorities of a fruit fly. At least to judge from his last few tweets where he said he would next buy out McDonald’s to fix the shake machines, buy out Doritos to make sure the chip bags are actually full, and buy out Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in the cola, all three of which are goals I would support more than buying out Twitter.

And yet while liberals were panicking about the unaccountable decisions of a super-billionaire and “conservatives” assume that said unaccountable rich person is defending free speech, there’s another big story which shows how quickly the script changes when you switch the sides.

Over the last few months, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron “Mini-Trump” DeSantis has been trying to one up his former mentor in his appeals to the MAGA cult in what might be a serious effort to get the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. It’s doubtful Trump will just roll over and let him take it, after all, he needs the potential of being president again to stay out of jail. But it’s not like DeSantis can sit around and wait for Trump to die, either. My guess is Trump will die of natural causes in three years then spend the rest of the century as a lich while he’s in litigation with God.

For instance, DeSantis’ administration decided to ban a set of math textbooks that supposedly included questionable ideas. Not that they gave any details. Apparently Arabic numerals are part of a Muslim conspiracy against Christianity.

But the most controversial and consequential act of mini-MAGA was where DeSantis signed what liberals call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prevents public schools from holding discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity, stating that lessons “may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards”. This law also allows parents to sue school districts on those grounds. If you’re wondering how the Right is defending free speech here, well so am I.

The Disney corporation, which just happens to own a massive chunk of real estate in Florida, had at first tried to remain out of the debate, but the leadership ended up siding with “progressives” due to massive public pressure. Well, of course the modern Republican Party is focused on making sure that government is never subject to public pressure again, so DeSantis decided to declare war on Disney. On April 19, DeSantis extended what was already a special session so that Republican legislators could sponsor a bill removing the Reedy Creek Improvement District which the state had outright given the Disney company in 1967 to build Walt Disney World, so as to take away its special privileges and tax status. On April 22, DeSantis signed the bill into law, and admitted that this would cause Disney to pay more taxes as a result.

Let us stand back and commemorate the moment in which a Republican politician actually said that raising taxes on a corporation was a GOOD thing. Y’know, as if this were a principle that “conservatives” would actually hold to even if it inconvenienced their patrons, as opposed to a needledick bugfucker move to punish any deviation from right-wing political correctness.

But as it turns out, the special district arrangement meant that Disney was paying all the infrastructure costs for Reedy Creek and removing their authority would mean that the state or the county take over those costs. Now you know why they agreed to that deal in the first place. Which probably doesn’t concern DeSantis because in his epic quest to impregnate a molecule, the neighboring counties are Democrat-majority. However, “The resort complex’s governing board says that when Florida created the Reedy Creek Improvement District decades ago, the state pledged to protect the district’s debt holders — and not to alter its status unless all debts are paid off.”

In another post, I’d also said that it would not be a good thing if Elon Musk could just buy the 1-15 roadway and start charging tolls for himself, “But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.” Well, as it turns out, something like that was already happening in Florida.

Both libertarians and liberals think (in theory, anyway) that we shouldn’t be giving businesses too many breaks, and on that level it seems like a good idea to take away a corporation’s legal authority over a territory. If liberals and libertarians agree on anything, it is that government has a monopoly on force. That is the defining feature of government. It cannot have final authority otherwise. In a way the idea of whether one man should have all that power over Twitter is the same issue as one company having so much control of a public infrastructure.

Do we seriously want the Disney corporation to have more power in Florida than the Florida state government? In a way, the question is moot: the controversy arose because, in fact, Disney DOES have more power in the special district than the state of Florida, and the state of Florida finally decided to object.
Nobody in the state even questioned whether it was a good idea for Disney to be in charge of the Reedy District, because (in contradiction to normal cheapass corporate policy) they actually spend money to get the best work, because they know that the work reflects on them. The only reason anything changed is because the state government decided to punish what counts as heresy this week. And that ought to be a lesson to any liberal who is hoping the Federal government will look at Twitter and save them from capitalism and freedom of choice.

Why, it’s almost as if all the people wailing about “the rule of law” just meant it as “the way we’re accustomed to doing things”. And almost as if liberals mean “free speech” in exactly the way conservatives do: It only means the stuff they like.

It all comes down to the fact that libertarianism is limited and yet everything still comes back to libertarianism. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy which does not hold that government exists a priori – because existentially, nothing else does. As I say: A collective without its individual components is an empty set. A government cannot exist without individuals. Individuals CAN exist without a government. Yes, they would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, but they would exist. The Constitution was not handed down by Jesus or Moses (no matter what some professional Christians think), it was a product of its time, and while it’s still superior to a lot of the alternatives presented, we are seeing that it has problems because not every decision the Founders made could be perfect, and every decision has consequences. This means, among other things, that government doesn’t HAVE to do everything we can imagine, and a lot of the duties we ask of it were only applied recently because we only recently thought they were government’s purview. It doesn’t have to grant a huge corporation its own real estate to privately manage, nor does it have to take that territory back. Nor does it have to regulate a “free speech” site that has been unregulated by government precisely because we had not had a precedent in social media to do so.

People keep calling Twitter the modern equivalent of a “town square.” Would you be allowed to go to the town square in your community and scream the things in person that people do every day on Twitter? Christ, this is a site that is too rude and profane for ME. Such restrictions that it has on free speech were put in place mainly by user demand. Half of the reason Viceroy Trump was cut off from twitting is that the Twitter staff might have revolted if he wasn’t. It remains to be seen how well the staff will put up with Musk. And then there’s the point that the site never has been profitable, which is why Musk had to put up so much of his own stock to finance the deal. Given that the site is both too big to buy and not turning a profit, certain bankers surmised that when Twitter resisted Musk’s initial offers to enter into partnership, they put out feelers to every other potential buyer and got turned down because it wasn’t worth the deal. Which might be why that Tesla stock took a double-digit plunge in the week after the sale announcement.

As a financial investment, Twitter isn’t worth it. It doesn’t charge for subscriptions. Its advertiser base might not cover expenses. It only matters because of its base of users. Fact is, the social media mavens and other liberals who made Twitter what it is made it huge, and became dependent on it in the process, because they wanted the same freedom that Trumpniks did: The freedom to spout catty, mean-girl opinions to other people without getting punched out like they would for mouthing off to the same people face to face.

Look, as galaxy-shattering catastrophes go, Elon Musk buying out Twitter is less of a problem than Republicans buying out state government, because liberals can give up on Twitter, even if apparently they don’t want to. They can’t give up on government, even if apparently they have.