CSotD: Monday Miscellany
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A good day to clean out the files, since the No Kings rallies are over and we’re just sweeping up the rest of our crises. Mondays are always a little quiet, since most political cartoonists seem to take Sunday off, but Ramirez had this puzzler to offer.
He seems to think, near as I can tell, that race plays an unfair role in the Voting Rights Act. I was under the impression that race was the reason we had to have a Voting Rights Act, given that race was the criterion under which voting rights were being denied.
We seem, however, to be sliding into an interpretation of small-d democracy under which what we once called “tyranny of the majority” has become a measure, rather, of fairness: That if most people are white, if most people are Christian, if most people seem to think the world is fair, then sail on, ship of state, and it’s not fair for minorities to expect to be heard.
Or, at best, they’ll be heard and their words dismissed.
I’ve seen comparisons between John Roberts and Roger Taney, the latter being the Supreme Court Justice who presided over the Dred Scott Decision, in which he declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Roberts specifically denounced that decision in his confirmation hearings, but, then, it seems that what is said in confirmation hearings stays in confirmation hearings, given how many potential justices claimed to respect stare decisis in Roe v Wade and how they treated it once it was actually brought before the Court.
As noted here before, the key to Mauldin’s classic cartoon about the Civil Rights Act was that the eagle had decided to reclaim his proper seat. Jim Crow couldn’t possibly have stood up to him in a real challenge, but there hadn’t been one.
And now we’re sliding back into the notion that majority rule should be absolute. People like Lester Maddox and Bull Connor and others who stood up against civil rights became folk heroes within what seemed a festering crowd of malcontents, but, as a few outspoken types liked to point out, not only did the “segregation forever” crowd have a following in the Deep South, but their opinions were also pretty popular in South Boston.
Still, when it was time to choose in 1968, George Wallace only won five states, with conservative America lining up, instead, behind the more moderate Richard Nixon. There are any number of reasons that election went as it did, particularly since Humphrey was seen as an extension of LBJ’s Vietnam policies and the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had disrupted liberal politics.
But the bottom line is that extremism in the form of Goldwater had been rejected and America was no more ready for it when Wallace came along.
Today, however, there seems to be a sense that laws catering to minority rights are no longer appropriate.
Now, to be fair to Ramirez, who seems to waver between right and centrist, Pam Bondi hasn’t been having such a swell time lately and appears to have overstepped a line or two. Perhaps there are limits to what is acceptable, given that the MAGA crowd is more loud than they are numerous.
Not that she’s in any danger of being fired, but she may need to cool her jets for a bit and let other cabinet members carry forth the battle.
Meanwhile, look who has stepped back into the limelight! Commuting the sentence of fraudster and public joke George Santos is a jaw-dropper, given that he hadn’t been in the news and there seemed no reason to draw attention to him at all, much less to set him free.
One of the fundamental questions in both law and politics is “cui bono?” or who does it benefit? If this move benefited anyone besides George Santos, it’s not obvious, and the commutation even frees him from having to repay the people he defrauded.
The best that can be said of the move is that it’s not as ludicrous as the recently floated proposal to build a tunnel from Russia to Alaska, which is part of a plan to take advantage of climate change by mining the northern reaches of both nations and apparently Elon Musk is part of the plan.
I wouldn’t know whether to bring in Lewis Carroll or Jonathan Swift to explain all this, but I’m sure not up to it myself.
People who stand back with their mouths agape are beginning to wonder about the precipitous growth of artificial intelligence, which certainly has some benefits in creating spreadsheets and computer codes but doesn’t seem to be blending with other creative endeavors as well, and seems to be less marketed than it is shoved down the public throat.
Not that it isn’t being embraced. Facebook is suddenly full of videos of unlikely animals doing unlikely things and bogus announcements of what NFL team owners are boycotting the Super Bowl over the halftime show. We already know that people are gullible, but AI is, to use Steve Bannon’s term, “flooding the zone with sh*t” so that it’s becoming hard even for discerning people to tell truth from nonsense.
Pope suggests that a bursting of this bubble would make the housing bubble seem insignificant, and given both the money being invested and the breadth of AI’s reach into daily life, he could be right.
Though it might be worse if there were no crash. A study at MIT suggests that people who use AI in their writing don’t understand what they have produced and may be losing their ability to process real words entirely.
If it’s true that old generals are always planning to fight the last war, it’s also true that we’re woefully unprepared for the next one. It may not even involve guns, much less bombs.
Keyboards will do.
Molina has a unique perspective, having fled one dictatorship already, and he suggests that the problem facing our democracy is not tyranny of the majority after all, because polls show that most people want some very basic, reasonable things.
But Big Brother isn’t listening and doesn’t care.
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