Heather Cox Richardson, June 30, 2022

This is so depressing…

In the one term Trump’s three justices have been on the court, they have decimated the legal landscape under which we have lived for generations…

Me, feeling a little chuffed: “I got the Sam-e you wanted for $32 for a month’s supply!”

Wife: “Oh I can get a 90 day supply for that much on Amazon.”

Me, incredulous: “Then why aren’t you?”

Wife: “I don’t know…”

20 + years of marriage and she still surprises me.

In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, there has, predictably, been a lot of expressive reaction on social media, especially by women. One woman proclaimed it was the “boomers” fault. Another woman suggested that if men got angry as women do about this issue, this would never have happened.

The first accusation is barely worth dealing with because it is absurd. Let’s just say that my wife and I are boomers, have been pro choice the whole way, have voted in every election, local and national, have done our share of joining protests on women’s issues and were not outliers in our generation.

The second is a common complaint that women have about the men in their lives, who don’t get how important reproductive rights are to them, and men in general, who enjoy the privileges of being male and never have to suffer the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.

My wife replied to this woman’s post. She said she tried to explain it to me but I didn’t get it even though I am one of the “good ones.”

Subsequently my wife tried to engage me about whether men had “skin in the game” and why men were not as supportive of women as they should be on this issue. I told her I wasn’t ready to engage with her about this because, truthfully, I was parsing why I wasn’t angry and hadn’t come to a place where I was confident in my answer. This post is an attempt to understand myself on this question.

Let me begin by copping to my own anger baggage. Anger is hard for me. It is hard for me to express it. It is especially hard for me to experience it. I grew up in constant fear of the explosive, dominating and unforgiving anger of my father. Though he was never physically abusive, he certainly was emotionally abusive. I lived my whole life in fear of that anger whenever I was around him. It only ended when he died last summer. As a result, other people’s anger makes me very uncomfortable.

My first marriage was to a woman who used anger the way my father did. She became irrational and was willing to escalate any argument to whatever place it took to shut me up and shut me down. The reverberations with my father were extraordinary in retrospect.

So yes, anger is not my favorite emotion.

I was married to my first wife for about 11 years. Towards the end of our marriage we got pregnant and we chose to abort the pregnancy. It was a sad time in my life. I was glad that the option to abort was there, but sad that our relationship was in such a miserable state that the idea of introducing a child into the midst of it was inconceivable. It was the only time in my life that I fathered a child. Every now and again I wonder about the child that might have been. Yet I know we made the only choice that made sense.

So yes, I’ve had skin in the game.

My reaction to loosing the constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion is complicated by my belief that abortion is morally problematic. I don’t believe in any God. Still, I believe there is right and wrong (as well as many shades of grey between). Violence is almost never right. Certainly it’s not right when it is a choice one is not forced to make. But things get complicated when, regardless of the choice made, violence will be done.

A good friend once said to me, “I’m pretty sure abortion is violence.” My personal experience with abortion confirms that. Abortion is violence to the fetus, violence to the woman and, sometimes, violence to the man. I believe that abortion should be available as a family planning option, but I am most in tune with President Clinton’s formulation, it should be available, safe and rare.

Moving on to jurisprudence, I have read a lot of articles in the past year about the Roe v. Wade decision. I have landed on the side that it was not well founded jurisprudence. Ruth Bader Ginsberg made that point, repeatedly. She also felt it got decided too soon and in a way that cut off the national conversation that might have evolved into a more workable compromise. The abortion landscape in those days could be horrific, especially for women who lacked resources. I don’t fault the women who pushed it forward to a decision in the only way that seemed possible. But, it was a decision vulnerable to overturning because of flaws in its jurisprudence. The coming decades will be sad and unfortunate for many women in the position of wanting or needing an abortion. My hope is that we will pick up the conversation we didn’t finish having before and come out the other side with better jurisprudence all around. The current jurisprudence, founded on selective originalism as it appears to be, and issued by a court stacked with conservatives who are out of touch with what the majority of the country wants, is no less vulnerable to a future, less conservative, court.

My wife is angry with the conservative justices who maintained at their confirmation hearings that they believed in stare decisis and have turned out to be, in her opinion, liars. Committing to stare decisis as a general principle, which is what I believe they did, is not the same as committing to Roe V. Wade as law that should be viewed as settled. I was not at all surprised they overturned Roe V. Wade. I expected them to.

During the run up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a good friend confided to me that they despised Donald Trump, but didn’t know if they could bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton either. I looked him straight in the eye and said the only issue that should matter is the Supreme Court. The next president was likely going to replace more than one justice (who knew it would be three?). Not showing up, or making some kind of protest vote, failed to recognize the peril of the moment. To me, in that election, that was the issue worth thinking about. That was the issue that one had to vote on. It was, of course, bigger than Roe V. Wade. A conservative court could make all kinds of rulings that would undo the more liberal interpretations of the constitution that make room for the multicultural society I believe in. And that was the point of installing originalist judges on the court. I saw it then and I see it now. I tell everyone who cares to listen that the issue of gravest concern now is democracy itself. We must show up in the next two election cycles. We must vote for democracy. If we don’t, we will loose it.

So, what makes me angry to the extent I do get angry? I am angry with all the moderates and independents who failed to see that the Supreme Court was the central issue and either didn’t show up or made a protest vote in 2016. I am angry with people who allowed themselves to be deluded into voting for Donald Trump and the news outlets that deluded them or pandered to their ratings with false equivalency programming that suggested that 45 wouldn’t be so bad. I am angry with the mostly white Christian Patriarchy’s desire to push their minority viewpoint on the rest of the country. I am angry with Ruth Bader Ginsberg who wouldn’t step down during the Obama administration so that she could be replaced with a judge that would carry on her liberal jurisprudence.

And, in this moment, I am in despair, because I see the same thing lining up to happen again, only this time, democracy is at stake. The mostly white Christian Patriarchy and the wealthy white would-be-oligarchs are not interested in Democracy and are on the verge of successfully taking it down. That is what we are facing in the next two election cycles.

If anger over abortion rights is the issue that brings you to the table to fight for democracy, so be it. But please understand. It is not the central issue. The erosion of democracy is. We are in a determinative moment in history as we struggle to hold on to democracy, and with it, the multicultural rights so many fought so hard to acquire.

William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled

As an artist, he was resolutely his own standard, his own guiding sun… Blake was determined to make what he wanted to make and to make it on his own terms — in a world unready for the art and unfriendly to the terms.

I’m not so sure free speech is a right, but it is certainly a societal or cultural attainment, something we, as a community, can use to enliven, embolden and liberate the soul of our world, provided we are fortunate enough to live in a society that allows such a thing.

Nick Cave

Heather Cox Richardson, June 21, 2022

The theme of the day was our election systems, and how Trump’s attack on them continues to threaten our democracy.

In the US, there is only one issue come November, no matter what your tribe.

The walls of all three of our institutions of democracy were scaled and breached on that appalling day. And almost two years thence, one of America’s two political parties cannot even agree whether that day was good or bad, right or wrong.

Judge M. Luttig

Read Full Statement

On the Knife’s Edge of Democracy

We Americans no longer agree on what is right or wrong, what is to be valued and what is not, what is acceptable behavior and not, and what is and is not tolerable discourse in civilized society.

Judge M. Luttig, prepared statement, 1/6 committee.

Heather Cox Richardson, June 16, 2022

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD):

“New evidence is breaking every single day now. Suddenly, a lot of people want to tell the truth.”

Not that there is any reason to listen to me about such things.

“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” ¹

Loren Eiseley

Something about this sentiment, so common, yet… we are, as best I can figure, the embodiers of miracles. We define what they are and we define them in relation to ourselves. Except to the extent the universe may be pan-sentient, and I don’t completely count that possibility out, we are the beginning and end of what is miraculous.

A miracle is an event that seems inexplicable by natural or scientific laws and accordingly gets attributed to some supernatural or praeternatural cause. ²

My personal attitude is that the miraculous is synonymous with the extremely rare.

Informally, English-speakers often use the word miracle to characterise any beneficial event that is statistically unlikely but not contrary to the laws of nature, such as surviving a natural disaster, or simply a “wonderful” occurrence, regardless of likelihood (e.g. “the miracle of childbirth”). ³

Identifying something as a miracle is a religious posture. A positive view on the universe and humanity’s place in it. It is a reverent attitude that makes room for things to be sacred. I believe in the concept of sacred, but only in a secular sense. I believe that when we view something as sacred, we offer it respect and agree not to violate it. It only has meaning through common agreement.

A true miracle would, by definition, be a non-natural phenomenon, leading many writers to dismiss miracles as physically impossible (that is, requiring violation of established laws of physics within their domain of validity) or impossible to confirm by their nature (because all possible physical mechanisms can never be ruled out). The former position is expressed (for instance) by Thomas Jefferson, and the latter by David Hume. Theologians typically say that, with divine providence, God regularly works through nature yet, as a creator, may work without, above, or against it as well. ⁴

I don’t believe anything happens in the universe that isn’t inherently possible, including god, should s/he exist. I do believe in the extremely rare.

Personally, I believe theologians are out on a limb.

We may give the tendrils of our creative longing different names — poetry or physics, music or mathematics, astronomy or art — but they all give us one thing: an antidote to forgetting, so that we may live, even for a little while, wonder-smitten by reality.

Maria Popova

Does Google’s LaMDA Artificial Intelligence Program Have a Soul?

“a lot of us are going to treat AI as sentient well before it is, if indeed it ever is."

George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen

A more measured article on LaMDA. Belief in AI sentience is an important point.

Will the Jan. 6 Hearings Change Anyone’s Mind?

Learning that Trump’s advisers were divided between Team Crazy and Team Normal, and that Team Crazy clearly had the upper hand, might disturb a fair number of voters. I’ve seen congressional hearings change minds, including my own.

In the Films of Dore O., Feelings Create Their Own Reality

Dore O.’s beautiful, haunting work explores the juxtaposition between the mundanity of the real world and the extraordinariness of our inner lives.

To paraphrase Kelly Anne Conway and the articles I have been reading on the subject this morning:

Whether a chatbot is sentient or not matters less than the belief that it is.

Going against common wisdom that insists computers are a long way from having feelings, Max Tegmark, an MIT professor of physics with a focus on machine learning, does not write off Lemoine as a crackpot.

MIT prof says Alexa could become ‘sentient’ like Google chatbot

Who cares if chatbots are sentient or not—more important is whether they are so fluent, so seductive, and so inspiring of empathy that we can’t help but start to care for them.

Google’s ‘Sentient’ Chatbot Is Our Self-Deceiving Future - The Atlantic

Another Military Recruitment Video Disguised as a Movie

Is it any use pointing out that the first Top Gun was a ludicrous piece of shit? That it was a functioning part of the Ronald Reagan administration’s insane military buildup and aggressive pro-war policies of the 1980s?

Using Spatial Reconstruction to Investigate Russia’s War Crimes

Spatial recognition technology is being used to investigate Russian war crimes and has been able to identify the exact site of the 1941 Babyn Yar mass executions.

Smithsonian Acquires Taxidermy of First Successfully Cloned Mouse

On May 5, 2000, the world’s first successfully cloned mouse (Cumulina) died in her sleep of natural causes. She had reached the ripe old age of two years and seven months, about 95 in human years.

Did Trump Know He Was Lying? Who Cares?

Asking whether Trump knew the election was free and fair is like asking whether a komodo dragon prefers smooth jazz or hip hop. It’s a category error.

Every person in a democratic republic has a duty to ascertain the truth as best they can and that means questioning the pap that they are fed nightly. It means letting the light of skepticism peek under the blanket of certainty every now and then.

I only wish stating the obvious and pointing out individual responsibility for assessing truth and accuracy would make better citizens of the many who are not. But it’s not about being good citizens for so many of us. It’s about being on sides and wanting your side to win whatever the cost.

How is it possible for a three year old iMac to take half an hour to boot up?

Justice, good, evil, right and wrong are human constructs, not universal principles. The only way to apply these concepts usefully is with thoughtful discussion and debate from varied points of view. In this way we achieve consensus and the greatest good for the greatest number.

June 13, 2022

The committee… established that the Trump campaign sent millions of fundraising emails based on the promise to fight to challenge the election results, ultimately raising $250 million from small donors.

But the… so-called Election Defense Fund was never real.

How to Save Women’s Lives After Roe

… Anna… went into labor at 19 weeks, far too early for her child to survive outside the womb… a condition known as PPROM¹… in many cases the medically recommended treatment is abortion.

Anna lived in Texas, where… S.B. 8, has effectively outlawed abortion after six weeks. As a result, the hospital—and consequently, her doctors—concluded that they could not treat her.