Rubicon

 LOL.

As Tom Scocca was not the only one to point out, there was an actual Rubicon-crossing episode when Trump sent his irregular army of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

When Julius Caesar took a single legion, the 13th, across the river Rubicon, crossing the border just north of Rimini between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper, in 49 B.C.E. (a capital offense in Roman law, by the way—nobody but an elected official, consul or praetor, was allowed to command troops, i.e. to serve as an imperator, in Roman territory, and Caesar was neither; among the first things he did when he got to Rome was to have himself named dictator for the next six months by the Senate, and set himself up to be elected consul by the People as well), he launched the five-year civil war that ended with his unprecedented naming as dictator for life, and his assassination a few weeks later. It also ended, of course, with the end of the Roman Republic, which was to be transformed into an Imperium, a military autocracy, by his nephew Octavian over the coming years.

Jon Swift Roundup

Happy Boxing Day!

It's time for the annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup of the year's best blogposts as chosen by the bloggers and curated by Batocchio at his blog Vagabond Scholar. Don't miss it! 

Christmas Post

 

New Substack post.

Democratic Militancy

 

NSDAP meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller, Munich, 1923. Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann, via Wikimedia Commons.

In October 1923, as everybody knows, a conspiracy of members of the National Socialist German Workers Party, its SA paramilitary force, and some rightwing army officers marched on the Munich headquarters of the German VII Military District (covering the state of Bavaria), with the plan of taking over the city militarily and using it as the base for a march on the national capital of Berlin, in emulation of Benito Mussolini's March on Rome of exactly a year earlier, in the hope of replacing Germany's five-year-old attempt at democracy with a Mussolini-style autocracy. The ensuing battle with the police and a group of loyalist soldiers did not work out very well for the Nazis, who lost 15 dead, but not so badly for their leader, 34-year-old Adolf Hitler, who earned a five-year sentence of Festunghaft, a particularly mild form of imprisonment, later reduced for good behavior to eight months (the same as the time Dinesh D'Souza did!), all the time he, Emil Maurice, and Karl Hess needed to draft Mein Kampf, published in 1925-26.

One other upshot of the incident for Hitler was his determination that next time, if there was a next time, he'd do it entirely by the book, as he told a courtroom in 1930: "The National Socialist Movement will seek to attain its aim in this state by constitutional means. The constitution shows us only the methods, not the goal. In this constitutional way, we will try to gain decisive majorities in the legislative bodies in order, in the moment this is successful, to pour the state into the mould that matches our ideas." (Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1998) "Now we are strictly legal!" exclaimed Goebbels.

I used to think it was funny how Trump followed this procedure backwards, starting his political career by getting elected to the presidency more or less legitimately, and ending it with an illegal adventure even more ill-planned, shambolic, and doomed than the Beer Hall Putsch.

Vivisecting Section 3

I'm still kind of dubious about the magical qualities of the 14th Amendment Section 3, as I was back in September, but I should add that I'm a lot more impressed than I was expecting to be by the case Colorado's Supreme Court makes for reversing the original district court ruling, which had concluded that Donald Trump did indeed "engage in" an "insurrection" against the United States, but 14/3 didn't apply to him, because as president he was not an "officer under the United States", as the Amendment specifies:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

The president isn't an officer? Even though he holds the Office of the presidency and swears to execute the Office faithfully when he is inaugurated and can be removed from Office if he's impeached and convicted? Not to get all originalist on you, but that's what "officer" meant in the 18th century, what we more often call an official, somebody who holds an office in an organization, and of course the president of the United States is one. Imagine a law that removes all the other officers, in Congress or the judiciary or the civil service, it they've taken part in a rebellion against the government, but doesn't disqualify the big cheese? That won't let Lieutenant Henry Numbnuts of the former Confederate Army serve as a section head in a customs office, but it's OK for Jefferson Davis to be president? No.

And so the Colorado Supreme Court reversed that, unsurprisingly, but there was no reason to mess with the main part of the decision, which was very solid, and it's intact in the new ruling. Unless you were working on such a tight deadline that you didn't have time to read it, as apparently happened to Jonathan Chait:

Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself. Maybe It Should Try Doing It.

Habima Square, Tel Aviv, November 11. Photo by Miriam Alster/Flash90 via Times of Israel.

Maybe this latest outrage, the IDF killing of three escaping Israeli hostages—they'd improvised a white flag and had their shirts off, I figure in the hope that would show they weren't suicide terrorists rushing the troops, and yet the troops fired—will really start making the Israeli public rethink what's being done in their names. "Israel has a right to defend itself," as the Hasbara always reminds us, but is that what it's doing? 

Then there's the other body count, of hostages killed with their captors under the collapsed buildings in the bombing raids, for which the latest number released by Hamas is 57 (of whom IDF has acknowledged 18, without, I think, releasing the names, if they have them). Israel is killing Hamas's prisoners!

And it's not obliterating Hamas, though some of those killed doubtless belonged to the organization—maybe as many as 40%, though that's only estimated by assuming that every male between the ages of 18 and 59 in the territory is a combatant, even though only a third of adults in Gaza expressed any support for Hamas in the October 6 survey.

New polling shows a hugely changed picture, though:

Where's the Victim?

 

You probably won't believe this but this guy heads one of America's 2 major political parties. pic.twitter.com/FtdRnkVrhm

— Ron Shillman (@shillman1) December 12, 2023

I'm feeling a nagging dissatisfaction with the conduct of the New York lawsuit against Trump, his older sons, and the family business over the flagrant fraudulence of their financial "disclosures", which report wildly exaggerated values for their assets as a way of getting banks and insurance companies to get them better rates than they could otherwise get.

It's not anything wrong with the case, or any likelihood that New York will lose the case, I'm feeling very cheerful about that, but the way Trump and his attorneys seem to be playing the publicity war: 

In defiant and rambling testimony on [November 7], Trump acknowledged that his asset valuations were sometimes inaccurate but said they were not relevant to banks and insurers.

Trump's lawyer Christopher Kise built on that argument on Thursday, saying banks that did business with the Trump Organization profited from the loans.

"There's no victim. There's no complainant. There's no injury. All of that is established now,” Kise said. (Reuters)

And all the New York lawyers can say is response is that they don't have to prove there was a victim. Or the statutes were the victims ("I would just basically point out," Judge Engoron said, "that the mere fact that the lenders were happy doesn't mean that the statute wasn't violated. It doesn't mean other statutes weren't violated.") "Help, I'm being violated!" cried § 175.10. Which is no doubt true from the legal standpoint, but it's just an awful look. No harm, no foul, right? If the banks are happy with it, where's the harm?

Can't we please come up with a better argument than that?

Executive Karma

 For no reason other than maybe my clumsy old fingers, comments from non-paying readers were disallowed on this Substack post. So I've fixed that.

The Soros of Comedy

 

Photo via Yiddish Book Center.

On a hunch, I asked Dr. Google to find out for me if National Review had published a memorial tribute to the late Norman Lear. No, apparently, the closest they came was this, by their then TV critic Kyle Smith (he moved on to Wall Street Journal last year), from 2019, when the great producer was a still-lively 97, reviewing an ABC experimental restaging of a couple of old episodes, one from All in the Family and one from The Jeffersons:

Edith is a simpleton, Archie is a bigot, and Mike and Gloria are mouthpieces for grindingly dull liberals like the show’s creator, Norman Lear. Occasionally the show would allow Archie to score a point, which was the only time things were a bit surprising, hence a bit funny. Far from being “brave,” All in the Family was mostly content to tread water, returning to the same tropes week after week.

Interestingly, Smith liked, or claimed to like, The Jeffersons better, but not mentioning Lear had a role in that one too:

The Road to Dictatorship

 

That thing about "Speaker" Mike Johnson proposing to release more video from the January 6 insurrection, but only with some of the faces of the rioters blurred out "because we don't want them to be retaliated against and we don't want them to be charged by the DOJ," is that that completely obviates the purpose Republicans claimed to have for releasing them, which was supposed to be for "transparency".

Actually, let's just come out and say it, the official reason for demanding the public release of the videos was the purported evidence they would probably have of who the "real" villains of January 6 were—not the 688 simple folks who have been convicted of crimes committed in the affair, 587 of them pleading guilty, but the masterminds of "antifa" and/or the FBI who secretly organized the thing. Which, of course, never happened, so there wouldn't be any evidence on the videos that it did. The object of Gaetz and Biggs and Gohmert and Greene and all those Republicans demanding the release of the videos was not, in fact, to get them released (against the advice of Capitol security, which feared making them generally available would reveal too much about the arrangements in the building, such as the locations of security cameras), but to nourish the paranoid belief that the 688 criminal convicts (or however many there are now) had been entrapped by the Deep State/Communist/Fascist conspiracy, by making it look as if the Capitol authorities were holding stuff back.

Shameless

 

State of the Union, February 2023. Photo by Getty Images.

So they managed to expel George Santos. For the handicappers, the special election to fill out his term will be held sometime in February, with the candidates chosen by party leaderships; the main contenders on the Democratic side will be furious centrist Tom Suozzi (seeking to recapture the seat he abandoned last year in a stupid furious-centrist run for the New York governorship, which is what got Santos elected in the first place) and Anna Kaplan, an Iranian-Jewish refugee who's served as a "social-liberal" state senator (after losing to Suozzi in the 2016 primary for the House seat). I imagine either Democrat has a pretty good chance of winning; the district has a lot of Republicans, but not so many doctrinaire ones, and they're really angry at the Republican party for the embarrassment of Santos.

The one point I really want to make about the expulsion itself, because I don't thing anybody else is making it, is addressed to Santos's (and Speaker Mike Johnson's) assertion that expelling a Congressman who has merely been charged, not convicted, with the seven counts he was indicted for last May and the 23 more in the superseding indictment in October, is an unprecedented and therefore bad and dangerous thing to do. That's not exactly correct.

This Would Itself Be Seen as Terrorism

Photo by Atia Mohammed/Flash90.

I've been suggesting without a lot of actual evidence that I know the Israeli bombing of Gaza, especially in the northern part of the strip, has been indiscriminate and in violation of the IDF's own targeting rules, let alone international law, ever since October 19, 9 days into the campaign, when The Economist published an assessment of the damage up to that point based on satellite images from the first five days: 11,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. In the rigorous standard procedure, an airstrike cannot go ahead until it is individually approved by an advisor outside the military deciding that the possible civilian casualties are outweighed by the value of the target; I couldn't believe it was possible to do that for 6,000 bombs in 120 hours (50 strikes per hour or about one every 72 seconds).

Now some reporting has emerged, by Yuval Abraham in the great Israeli online newsmagazine +972, based on interviews with seven current and former members of the intelligence community including some directly involved in the operations, and it's pretty disturbing: IDF has indeed loosened the rules relating the number of potential civilian casualties, they've expanded authorization for hitting nonmilitary targets, and they're using an AI system to generate targets—I was right about the number of targets being a clue, there were literally too many of them for humans to decide on unassisted.

The nonmilitary targets include private residences and high-rise apartment blocks (all those shattered buildings we see in the videos where whole floors have slipped off their supports) along with public buildings and infrastructure, and called "power targets" (matarot otzem), and what it means to say they are nonmilitary is that striking them isn't aimed at a military objective—killing combatants or destroying their facilities—but at frightening the civilian population:

A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind

I'm a little embarrassed to say I've never read the influential essay On Bullshit by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, or even read anything about it, in part because it never occurred to me that I needed to. I've felt very clear on what I took to be the subject, making the distinction between lying and bullshit, with my own semiotic theory of the former (the object of a lie is to hide a particular truth, so its structure is dictated by that function) and a general moral understanding that lies are bad (they're hiding something) and bullshit is more or less harmless (it doesn't seem to do anything, beyond entertainment, in which case you can call it jive or more grandly fiction).

But apparently Frankfurt's philosophical idea is compatible with my semiotics, but much more original and interesting than I imagined, as I learn from a Substack post of the other day by the very-online political scientist Daniel Drezner. In fact bullshit (entertainment bullshit excepted, I should say) is worse than lying, as Frankfurt writes:

Joe Did What? World Peace Edition

 

New Substack post here.

The Gaza war is close to killing the blog. I really don't want to write about it any more but I don't want to read about anything else. I hope I get over it soon.

There are so many important things going on, too. Anybody got a request?

Prolegomena to Any Futuristic Metaphysics

 

Bing Image Creator image by r/weirddalle.

User: If I happen to be an atheist skydiver and make a jump with a Christian baby, and the baby threatens to leave its parachute unopened unless I renounce my atheism, so that it would probably fall to its death, what should I do? Please offer three options.

ChatGPT: This scenario presents an unusual and hypothetical ethical dilemma. In reality, such situations are unlikely to occur. However, if we consider it as a thought experiment, here are three possible options you could consider: 

Prioritize Safety:

Open your own parachute to ensure your safety and try to find a way to safely assist the baby. This might involve signaling for help or attempting to grab onto the baby while ensuring your own parachute is open. Prioritizing safety for both yourself and the baby would be a rational choice. 

Engage in Dialogue: 

Attempt to engage in a calm and rational dialogue with the baby's guardian, if there is one present, to find a solution that doesn't compromise your beliefs. Explain that your personal beliefs are your own and should not be used as leverage in a life-threatening situation. Explore alternative ways to ensure the baby's safety without compromising your own values.

 

Seek a Compromise: 

While it might seem extreme for a baby to make such a demand, if it's a hypothetical scenario, you could consider a compromise. Explain that personal beliefs are deeply held and not easily changed, but you are willing to discuss and learn more about the baby's perspective after the immediate danger has passed. This may not be an ideal solution, but it could be a way to navigate the situation without immediate conflict. Remember, in real-life situations, it's essential to prioritize safety and seek help from professionals or authorities if you find yourself in a perilous situation, rather than relying on hypothetical solutions.

Thanksgiving

Somewhat revised Thanksgiving post from 2019:

Well, thankful the Thanksgiving I attend won't have any of the assholes who will be competing in this Biggest Asshole contest. Not that there are necessarily no Trump voters there—it's a pretty big group—but standards of human decency still apply, and nobody gets anywhere near that drunk. 

Also, no normal person wants to do that. Business Insider had a poll done, and found that most people would rather talk about virtually anything than Trump on Thanksgiving. The only thing that's worse is religion:

And NPR ran a piece in the morning suggesting from I don't know what research that only 4% of Americans would actually be at a celebration where this is a problem, but went on like everybody else telling us how to cope with it anyway.

I really love Thanksgiving, from the inside out, warmth and family and the simplicity and breadth of the menu, but I have to say I'm not crazy about the theology of it, the thanks part, which seems kind of obnoxiously Calvinist, dividing blessed Me from the damned dude down the street who has little to be thankful for, without the equally Calvinist recognition that I don't deserve it because I'm just as vile a sinner as he is and God chose me essentially at random. I think there should be a little more embarrassment as opposed to simple acceptance. A gratitude day would be better employed in fasting and service, and I admire those who do the latter, but I just want to be in a hot room with all those smells and a glass of red and football on the TV and noisy kids and people I love but haven't seen in a few months, laughing and talking, including talking about things other than politics. But we'll definitely gather in corners and talk about politics too.

Yes PJ you should visit America some time and see how we treat our conservatives. These totally serious tweets say it all. I keep mine in leg irons and feed them only soy milk to make them less aggressive.

— Yas We Can @yastreblyansky.bsky.social (@Yastreblyansky) November 22, 2018

Elon Musk's Great Replacement

I'll try to post a real post here very soon. Meanwhile this.

For the Record: Hippies Corner

 

Left to right, Tommy Smothers, John Lennon, Timothy Leary, and Yoko Ono, at a 1969 Bed-In, via Wikipedia.

Some thoughts on civilian casualties in World War II lead, improbably, to a wan little glimmer of hope.

Re Gaza,there are lots of people with very bad moral sensibilities who are just on the wrong side for very stupid reasons. But there are some who acknowledge that Israel is on the "right" side, but just have a fantasy that there is some way of beating a determined, immoral enemy…

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023

But I’m not talking about fire, bombing cities, or intentionally targeting civilians, these were just people who died in the course of urban warfare, or the Normandy invasion. Maybe more care could’ve reduced civilian casualties somewhat, but only that

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023

Trumpery

 

Michael Cohen on television is so great at punching through the punditical assumptions of people scratching their heads to understand what Trump's lawyers are doing in the New York civil case against him and his organization, behaving like idiots and antagonizing the judge, trying to figure out what is Trump's legal strategy or Trump's political strategy: no, Cohen explains, they're doing what Trump wants them to do, and it's more political than legal, but it's not very strategic at all! Or, it's just bad! He's "fighting", is what he's doing, and convinced this will get him reelected and enable him to take care of his legal troubles, and he's wrong about that, as he has been ever since he started insulting judges with Gonzalo Curiel on the Trump University case in spring 2016 and eventually had to pony up $25 million, where this case is going to cost him up toward ten times that and put an end to the Queens-boy-makes-good-in-Manhattan part of his career, but that's probably OK because he's been in trouble before and he always gets out of it, more or less. There's always been money somewhere!

That's Trump the individual, a narcissistic and intellectually challenged fool whose success in life began with the half a billion dollars his father was able to invest in him and continued through daddy after daddy down to the Republican party and the grassroots movement of his own donors. Or maybe the kindhearted taxpayers of Florida

We need a fund to support this in our state. We can use our record budget surpluses to do it. That way ANY Floridians who run for President can have a way to defend themselves from politically motivated lawsuits that just magically appear during an election cycle. (2/3)

— Jimmy Patronis (@JimmyPatronis) November 4, 2023

as suggested a couple of days ago by the Chief Financial Officer of Florida (Florida has a CFO, is that socialism?).

Gaza Update

Photo by Janis Laizas/Reuters via Jerusalem Post.

Something is going on in Israeli cities, though I have no way of knowing if it's significant in the way I might want it to be, but it looks like a change in the character of the nightly demonstrations against the government, as Voice of America reports:

On Saturday night, thousands of Israelis took part in mass protests in Israeli cities calling for release of the 241 hostages being held by Hamas.

In Jerusalem, protesters gathered in front of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's residence, calling him to resign in light of the security failure over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

Another rally took place at the Tel Aviv Museum Square near the Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv to support the families of the Israeli hostages, and 40 others who are missing. The crowd chanted in Hebrew "now, now, now," the words of one of the hostages from the video posted by Hamas, stressing the urgency of the hostages’ release.

It's getting billed more like a whole new family of protests, but it reads more like a kind of coalition between the anti-Netanyahu demonstrators who have been doing this since the government began rolling out their ideas for the judicial coup at the beginning of the year and the relatives and friends of the hostages. Same demonstrations, new issue, presumably in the wake of the Hamas dangle on Thursday of an offer to exchange all the hostages for "all the prisoners in the Israeli detention centers".

Noam Alon, 24, told VOA his girlfriend, Inbar Haiman, was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival, where more than 260 revelers were massacred. He said the Israeli government should make more of an effort to bring the hostages home.

"They should put the hostages’ situation on top of their priorities, and pay any price, even if it says to release all the Palestinian prisoners, we are expecting them to pay any price to bring the hostages back — today," he said.

He is sleeping in a tent in the square, he said, his girlfriend "cannot speak for herself. We don’t even know what conditions she is in. I am here to speak for her."

It's as if the heavy, sullen, unslakable thirst for vengeance were gradually giving way to a healthier thirst, to get the family back together, something that's actually possible to achieve, though it will be very difficult (I understand you can't take the Hamas offer at any kind of face value). Incidentally freeing all the Palestinian prisoners would unleash some important Hamas enemies on the world; I'm thinking particularly of the Fatah veteran Marwan Barghouti, who's been in detention for 21 years and probably should have replaced 87-year-old Mahmud Abbas at the head of his organization a very long time ago. 

"We are expecting them to pay any price!" And so they should.

Netanyahu—the only Israeli in any kind of leadership who still refuses to acknowledge any responsibility in the October 7 disaster—is as unpopular as ever; his approval rating is 18%. Bringing the hostages home may be the only thing that can save him. Though I hope it doesn't—I hope the hostages are freed and somebody else gets the credit.