Nice Polite Republicans

You can buy this at here, if you want to for some reason

NPR, like a lot of self-consciously "mainstream" media (*cough* New York Times *cough*) is by self-construction a centrist  organization. By that I mean they've decided that "objectivity" doesn't mean a rigorous and fearless pursuit of facts so much as always being in between the poles (i.e. the center) of political debate, reporting uncritically and at least pretending to take seriously the opinions and arguments of both sides, regardless of how transparently bullshit they are. This strategy might frustrate Zoroastrians and other honesty enthusiasts, but it appears to have worked somewhat; NPR is more trusted among conservatives than CNN, MSNBC, or the New York Times, even thought its trust among liberals is solidly middle-of the pack, and its overall trust. Opinions on NPR are the least divided of any of the news sources polled there and NPR is considered by most Americans (though crucially not Republicans) to be unbiased.

What's going on here? How is it that NPR can despite their best efforts, become as much a symbol of effete liberalism as yoga and lattes? Simple. NPR acquired a reputation in the fever-swamps of the right-wing imagination for being part of a biased "liberal media" because they have some kind of journalistic commitment to reporting  facts in a manner that isn't pure propaganda. With American conservatives it always seems to be Cooper Union one way or the other:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

But NPR does not understand this. Or, perhaps they do understand this, but can't act on this understanding without losing the o-so-precious hard-won "trust" of that endangered species, the moderate Republican. I suppose I could be more fair, and say that what the really prize is being in middle, and that broad perception of being unbiased.

But regardless their strategy of center-ism frustrates certain lefty corners of the internet, who joke that NPR stands for "Nice Polite Republicans". I don't think that's true, per se, but I think that it gets at an important point.

Partly its because they can sit down they sit down and have easy, breezy conversations with Republicans like David Brooks, who is is either profoundly stupid or totally full of shit (either he didn't understand the intellectual enterprise in which he was engaged his entire adult life, or he did understand and is lying about it now). And part of it is, I think, aesthetic; that smooth, unflappable "NPR voice" seems out of place in these very flapped times, calmly reporting today's horror, outrage, or scandal. But the last thing is that NPR seems to project an out-of-touchness, a lack of alarm that implies they just don't get post-2016 politics.

Which brings me to this fascinating 2018 interview of Kathleen Belew by Teri Gross. Teri is interviewing Kathleen about her book, Bring the War Home, a scholarly history of post-Vietnam white supremacist movement(s) in America. Listen to the whole thing, its great. But what jumped out to me was starting around the 25:30 mark, Teri asks Kathleen about the 14 words and Kathleen won't say them, and Teri just does not get why Kathleen won't utter a white supremacist slogan.

And not getting that, in these flapped-up times, seems somehow egregious.

There is No Such Thing as Safety

There is no such thing as safety; only degrees of risk.

This can be a very hard thing to wrap your head around. People want to engage in dichotomous, black-and-white thinking, and while this is easy and useful and isn't always wrong, it often is.

Save vs. unsafe is one of those false dichotomies. Because the truth is that right now, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you are doing other than reading this, and whenever you are reading this, you are not safe. A previously undetected asteroid could be hurtling towards earth at this very moment, about to kill all life on earth, an undetected brain hemorrhage could kill you in the next minute, a gamma ray burst could be hurtling toward us the speed of light, about to microwave the Earth on "high" before we even have time to panic.

The thing about all of those things is that they are incredibly, vanishingly, unlikely. So we feel "safe" from those things even though they could, technically, in theory, happen. Thinking probabilistically is basically an unnatural contortion of normal human thought patterns, and people almost never really do it, because frankly they don't usually have to. So they round up to 100% or down to 0%, and maybe if they are feeling particularly uncertain they settle on 50%. Then they live their lives as if those numbers where, y'know, correct.

The heuristic reasoning part - cognitive corner-cutting often enable human flourishing and is unavoidable anyway. I know people make trade-offs against risk and reward in all sorts of ways, and have heterogeneous preferences, but this "feeling of safety" thing is just weird to me. The most dangerous thing most Americans do is drive. They drive to work and worship, to pick the kids up from school and to get groceries and visit Grandma, and when people do all of these things most of them are confident they're good drivers and feel pretty safe behind the wheel.  The most dangerous jobs in America involve working with heavy machinery and being far from medical attention,  heavy machinery like a car.

And people shrug their shoulders and just get on with their lives! Meanwhile they panic about crime, which has been basically falling my entire life, or fight tooth-and-nail against nuclear energy, which kills fewer people than any kind of fossil-fuel power. People's intuitive senses of danger and risk seem to be finely honed for avoiding tigers and poorly suited for managing the "invisible" risks of modernity.

All of this bothers me immensely. Not the heuristics or the rounding but the sheer inconsistency of it all. Because what I want to be able to to is say "okay, so your said this is what you have to get in time, money, or something in order to be willing run these risks" but it changes completely depending on the threat, as if it matters even though dead is dead. We'll ban shuriken but let any jackass with pulse buy a fucking gun. We'll ban weed but build whole social lives around alcohol. People are willing to make the trade-offs inherent with using cars, but lose their damned shit over scooters.

Instead its all "feeling safe" and "feeling unsafe" - and they expect politicians to fix this! How? When people's feelings are so inconsistent? Building invisible bridges over invisible rivers, I suppose. But what do I do, no, what do we do when the politicians are fear-mongering and quaking in their boots at that invisible river? You can't magic people better.

Look, my dream job is social planner, but how am supposed to fucking do that if y'all can't even give my a straight answer on the risks you're okay with running.

Constitutional Totalitarianism (draft, comments welcome)

It should really not be possible to set up a totalitarian dictatorship without violating the letter of the Constitution at some point. But I’m pretty sure you can – given control of the White House and Congress.

Note that it is entirely possible under current law to control the Congress and Presidency with mere pluralities of the vote. Assuming no faithless electors, for instance, its possible to become President with only of ~25% of the electorate.

So, the Party has managed to win control of Congress and the Presidency by the narrowest margins – and immediately sets about engineering permanent 1-party rule.

• The opposition might try to stop you using filibusters, etc. Just eliminate any procedures that may create problems for you and protect the minority – you’re not going to need them.

• Pack the Supreme Court – nothing unconstitutional about that, and this prevents anyone from making inconvenient “violating the spirit of the constitution” appeals.
• Remember the point of this exercise is to do this without actually breaking any laws. Or at least without violating the Constitution – after all, Congress can change the laws.
• Use the “Kansas Plan” to pack the House and Senate.
• Hell, you could stop here, since an aggressive Kansification could allow me to simply amend the constitution however I’d like.

• Use the income tax to seize all income and then use tax code to manage the whole economy
• This is a kludgy workaround compared to GosPlan but it’ll have to do.

• Create some universal, unavoidable felony, and selectively enforce the laws to purge whoever you like
• Like the federal judiciary, legislators, etc.
• E.g. make breathing a felony
• Note that while you can’t directly suppress speech here, you can, by an amazing coincidence, just happen to arrest anyone who criticizes the government too loudly.
• Prosecutorial discretion is actually a tremendous tool of tyranny in the wrong hands. In the Party’s hands, of course, it will only be used for good.

• Since the Constitution doesn’t explicitly guarantee a right to vote, simply make it so that only members of the Party are permitted to vote.