Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Support Josh Harder for Congress

I've been quiet lately in part because I'm sinking back into the pit of despair when I think about politics.  The spinelessness and hypocrisy of the Republican party, the insidious and corrosive effects of corporate "free speech" embodied in soulless monsters like Sinclair and Fox News, and the fact that ultimately all this insanity has its foundation in the will of the people (or at least a significant fraction of them) has me struggling at times to see much light at the end of this tunnel.  The outpouring of grass-roots energy in the Democratic party is encouraging, of course, but we really shouldn't have to work this hard do defend the principle that, if the President is a crook, he should be called out for it.

The Washington Post yesterday ran a story headlined "Could Trump bury Mueller’s findings? Yes — if Republicans help him do it."  You should read it.  It's sobering.  I am as staunch a defender of civil liberties and the presumption of innocence as you are likely to find.  But if Donald Trump is, say, beholden to the Russian government, don't you think the American people ought to know?

It is becoming clear that we cannot count on the Republicans to answer this question affirmatively.  They have repeatedly shown that they will put party over principle.  They will gerrymander, lie, cheat, and even abandon their own principles to stay in power (to what end one has to wonder).  Not that the Democrats are necessarily a whole lot better, but there is one thing that is becoming clear: if we want to know the truth about Donald Trump, the only way we can insure that we will find out is to vote the Democrats into power in the House of Representatives this November.  If we fail to do that, it will be game-over.  Robert Mueller will be fired, his report will be buried, and We the People will never know the truth.

Happily, taking the House seems to be a real possibility, and I want to take this opportunity to do something that I very rarely do here on the Ramblings and endorse a Congressional candidate and ask you, my readers, to support him.  His name is Josh Harder, and he is running in California's 10th Congressional district, which includes the central valley town of Modesto.  That district is currently represented by Republican Jeff Denham, who won the 2016 election by only 3 points.  If there was ever a flippable district in the U.S., this is it.

I met Josh the other day and I was very impressed.  He's working incredibly hard, he knows what he's doing, he has great stage presence, and he has terrific command of facts and issues.  But most importantly, he will bring us one step closer to a Democratic majority in the House, which we will need in order to stop the Republicans from burying Donald Trumps sins in a bureaucratic sarcophagus.  Whatever your stand on policy may be, I ask again: if the President of the United States is beholden to a foreign power (or has otherwise broken the law) don't you think we ought to know?

15 comments:

Luke said...

To your pit of despair thing—what evidence do you have that POTUS has that much power, in comparison to all the other concentrations of power (and perhaps more importantly, momentum) in the country? I should think that the principle way power remains in control is to present a façade to confuse as many people as possible; the real operations are behind the scenes. I'm not trying to go conspiracy theorist; instead I think that Trump making a big deal about the size of the inauguration crowd and the press eating it up is a great example of masterful distraction.

Maybe it's time to come down hard on everyone who thinks the following is a good idea:

     1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
     2. "Never go outside the expertise of your people."
     3. "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy."
     4. "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
     5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
     6. "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
     7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."
     8. "Keep the pressure on."
     9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."
     10. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
     11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside"
     12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
     13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

? If you think any or all of them are good tactics, I would be interested to know.

Ron said...

@Luke:

Trump is not the problem, he's a symptom. The problem is the tens of millions who support him, and are willing to give him a pass on actual crimes he may have committed because he promises to restore white protestant males to their rightful place at the top of the social pecking order.

Luke said...

Ok … but are you under the impression that Democrats are really trying to eliminate the pecking order? Or is it just one pecking order warring against another?

Ron said...

I think what the Democrats advocate (government-guaranteed health care, better social safety nets, reproductive freedom, more open immigration...) is a lot closer to my vision of social justice than what the Republicans do, though I do concede that the bar is very low.

But that's not my argument here. The reason I think it is vital to support Democrats this cycle is not because of policy, but because I believe, to quote Richard Nixon, that the American people have got to know if their president is a crook. The Republicans don't seem to believe that any more (if they ever did), and I am very confident that if the Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress, Mueller will be fired, his report will be buried, and we will never know for sure if Donald Trump -- or any future president -- is a crook or not.

Luke said...

There's a pretty huge presupposition in what you're writing, and that is that people want the truth. Here's some evidence of the contrary:

>> Our basic thesis—that we are strategically blind to key aspects of our motives—has been around in some form or another for millennia. It’s been put forward not only by poets, playwrights, and philosophers, but also by countless wise old souls, at least when you catch them in private and in the right sort of mood. And yet the thesis still seems to us neglected in scholarly writings; you can read a mountain of books and still miss it. (The Elephant in the Brain, ix)

There is also:

>>     Most people are easy prey for propaganda, Ellul says, because of their firm but entirely erroneous conviction that it is composed only of lies and “tall stories” and that, conversely, what is true cannot be propaganda. But modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. It operates instead with many different kinds of truth—half truth, limited truth, truth out of context. Even Goebbels always insisted that Wehrmacht communiqués be as accurate as possible. (Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, v)

For even more, see Eric Schwitzgebel's 2008 essay The Unreliability of Naive Introspection and 2011 book Perplexities of Consciousness.

Ron said...

It's not a presupposition. It's a desperate hope.

Luke said...

Ok. What is your EE&R basis for that hope?

Ron said...

EE&R does not give rise to hope, it gives rise to truth. The reason I hope that people will care about truth is that I think life can get pretty unpleasant when people stop caring about the truth and start giving their leaders free passes to break the law.

Luke said...

I suggest taking into account the time lag / slow build-up of corruption, and then the planning horizons of most citizens in most (all?) democracies. The water is being slowly turned up on all of us frogs. We got used to it being a little less hot than it is now. Why do we care so much about a slight temperature increase? Is it because the new emperor didn't wear the same invisible clothes that the previous emperors clung to?

BTW, my only solution to all this is to empower people and stoke desires (these two things positively reinforce each other). I think the problem is that we've domesticated our citizens and that we're reaping the consequences. However, IIRC you have a very different opinion on this topic—you were relatively happy with democracy being a façade. Perhaps you could consider that maybe such façades don't actually work, long-term?

Ron said...

> you were relatively happy with democracy being a façade

That's news to me. Whatever gave you that impression?

Luke said...

(i) Our discussion at a Dialogos event about democracy being a way to keep people from objecting to how they're being governed; (ii) my inability to see you working to appreciably change that state of affairs; (iii) your apparent unwillingness to use EE&R to learn how to do something remotely like MLK Jr.—I reference his political effectiveness; (iv) your never emailing me back when I asked via email for what you are doing, when you made an oblique comment online; (v) my being completely unable to understand what you are even thinking in terms of making it less of a façade. Maybe I'm just terribly ignorant; it is kind of the story of my life.

Ron said...

(i) - I said that's the way it was. I didn't say I was happy about it.

(ii) - With all due respect, you do not have a lot of visibility into my life. So just because you don't see me doing something doesn't mean I'm not doing it.

(iii) - I'm sorry if you don't approve of how I choose to allocate my time.

(iv) - I have no idea what you're referring to. But see (iii).

(v) - I have no idea how to make it less of a facade. Sorry if that's not the answer you were hoping for, but that's the way it is. (And now I feel the need to point out that I haven't seen a whole lot of constructive suggestions coming from you either.)

Luke said...

> (i) - I said that's the way it was. I didn't say I was happy about it.

I found it odd how nonchalantly you spoke of democracy being a façade; I detected no chagrin from you that this is [currently] the case. One can make certain statistical deductions from those two data points. They can be wrong, but I think the statistics make it worth shifting the probability distribution based on that evidence. Or do you disagree?

> (ii) - With all due respect, you do not have a lot of visibility into my life. So just because you don't see me doing something doesn't mean I'm not doing it.

Hence my "IIRC" and my "Maybe I'm just terribly ignorant; it is kind of the story of my life." Do I need to add more protocol-words next time?

> (iii) - I'm sorry if you don't approve of how I choose to allocate my time.

Curiously enough, I stated a fact and you inferred a judgment from it.

> (iv) - I have no idea what you're referring to. But see (iii).

> Ron[2017-05-20 12:21]: I am actively involved in some currently stealthy efforts to help fix the situation. Contact me off line if you're interested in knowing more and/or participating.

> Luke[email 2017-05-20 12:52]: Do share. :-) I recall you mentioning work on helping Democrats with their IT, but I'm not sure how "stealthy" that is.

Given that, I think the sarcasm on point (iv) was unwarranted.

> (v) - I have no idea how to make it less of a facade.

Why doesn't EE&R deliver, here? I find it oh so hard to believe that EE&R doesn't deliver, here.

> (And now I feel the need to point out that I haven't seen a whole lot of constructive suggestions coming from you either.)

For one example among multiple, please see the email I sent you on 2018-01-07 titled "potential software/culture idea: productive complaining". Here's the bulk of it:

>> People really like to complain, whine, bitch, moan, etc. It seems to me that most of that is mostly a waste. Perhaps there is a way to capture more of it and redirect it toward productive uses. The most basic way I can think of is to challenge people to better describe what they're complaining about so that one can aggregate complaints and see which things are irritating many people … and solvable without extensive social reengineering. Two nights ago I came up with the name "Would it be nice?", which makes the additional step of challenging people to describe a better state of affairs, but in a wishful way where the dream of a better world is kinda dead on arrival. This is beneficial because there are many naysayers and dream-killers who can suck up tons of time and energy. This is the cultural side.
>>
>> The technical side is probably rather difficult; my experience online is that collaborative aggregation of knowledge is *very* hard. The best example I know of is Stack Exchange, and its very strict structure (there is basically no effective way to have anything more than the briefest of conversations) makes it super-good at yes/no matters and basic clarifications (e.g. What is the difference in “Boot with BIOS” and “Boot with UEFI”), and really crappy for most everything else. The process of aggregating complaints will almost necessarily involve progressive refinement and categorization/tagging, probably with multiple contesting points of view for some topics. What exactly this should look like I don't know. People are really lazy and any system to capture complaints and ideas of how things could be better needs to take that into account.

Ron said...

Actually, thinking back on it, I don't recall saying that democracy was a facade. Which is not to say that I didn't say it, but I don't recall saying it, so I don't recall what my demeanor was. I *do* recall saying that the reason I believed in democracy (back when I did believe in democracy) was not that it produced good outcomes, but because it made it less likely that people would resort to violence in response to outcomes they didn't like.

> sarcasm on point (iv)

That wasn't sarcasm. I really had no idea what you were referring to. Now that I do I can report that, sadly, that effort is dead. But it's not because I didn't try.

> Why doesn't EE&R deliver, here?

I have no idea. Maybe humans are too complicated for us to understand right now. Science is still a young endeavor. We've only been at it for 400 years or so, or maybe 4000 depending on how you count. We've been a species for a few hundred thousand years or maybe a few million. That's a lot of evolution to wrap our collective brains around.

> For one example

OK... so why haven't you implemented this?

Luke said...

> Actually, thinking back on it, I don't recall saying that democracy was a facade. Which is not to say that I didn't say it, but I don't recall saying it, so I don't recall what my demeanor was. I *do* recall saying that the reason I believed in democracy (back when I did believe in democracy) was not that it produced good outcomes, but because it made it less likely that people would resort to violence in response to outcomes they didn't like.

(1) If it acts as a thing that it isn't but people don't see through to what it is, then they are seeing a [sufficiently] convincing façade. Right?

(2) I do not ever recall you pushing for something better than the democracy you believed in back when you believed in democracy. (Maybe idea-ism, but how have you developed it since you first blogged about it?) I do believe the country if not the world is starving for good ideas and implementation in this realm.

> That wasn't sarcasm.

"I'm sorry if you don't approve of how I choose to allocate my time." seemed like sarcasm and your response to (iv) said "see (iii)".

> > Why doesn't EE&R deliver, here?

> I have no idea.

Why are you so convinced that EE&R hasn't delivered, here? For example, it seems like this is an important result:

>> When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions. (Descartes' Error, xii)

The book has 26,000 'citations'. Two other important results IMO are Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government and Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. If your fellow atheist friends and acquaintances are in active denial of those (at the explicit or implicit level), perhaps it would do some good to try to convince them out of [so much] error? On the other hand, if you think any of those results are wrong, I would like to be convinced out of error.

> OK... so why haven't you implemented this?

It is a large endeavor for a single person and I'm tired of serving other people all by myself as if I'm their slave. And I have willpower issues. In the meantime, I am working on my fledgling "tools for scientists" program; here's a picture of the TEC setup: https://imgur.com/UuXcy0I . I'm also working on some software for $$$ which I will be able to use as a robust foundation for the project I told you about.

Would you like some more examples to counter your rather acerbic "(And now I feel the need to point out that I haven't seen a whole lot of constructive suggestions coming from you either.)"?