Category Archives: Social Justice

Keep on Bloviating Against Protests!

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We have long had a recurring pattern. Every single time we have protest actions, the bloviators mobilize to train their word processors on the protests. They hyperventilate and opine in the form of their considered and blistering critiques. Most start by lamenting that in <their day> they used to protest, so it’s not that they don’t support <proper> protesting, but while <their> protests were righteously motivated and properly executed, this current one crosses unacceptable lines.

Whatever the current protest might be, and however it may unfold, the bloviators always criticize it for crossing lines of proper protest decorum. Critics express concerns about malevolent actors in the movement. They denounce the protest for causing inconvenience to others. They raise issues over fairness to counter-protestors, about damage whether intentional or incidental, about the exact tone and wording of the rhetoric expressed. They share their sage, less inflamed, assessment that the demands of the protestors won’t have a worthwhile impact on the issue. They council that the protestors really ought to be doing something more worthwhile than protesting if they really want to see actual change.

But here’s the thing. As much as I just bloviated against the bloviators, we need them. They need to keep doing exactly what they always do – armchair bloviate. They are an essential part of an effective and sustainable protest mechanism for making progress on important social issues.

The bloviators serve the protests by reacting. That is precisely the goal of protests; to garner attention and get some reaction, any reaction. They often don’t expect their demands to be met immediately, and they certainly do not expect to solve the larger problems they are protesting about. They are just looking for some attention, some recognition of their issue in the hopes of starting a larger dialog, raising awareness, and forcing some due consideration an honest effort to address it.

When no one will listen, eventually you have to shout to get any attention. In attacking the methods and behavior of the protests and protestors, the bloviators help spread awareness of the important issues driving them. Even bad attention is some attention. Negative blowback ultimately becomes preferable, and in fact more logical and productive, than total apathy, lip service, and inaction.

And there is another way that the bloviators are essential to sustaining an effective tradition of protesting for social change. They fight to constrain the boundaries of what gets attention. By doing so, they make it easier for the next protest movement to garner some attention without going too far. Without them, if the boundaries did not get reset, every subsequent protest action would have to become more extreme than the last.

Imagine we did not have the bloviators. Without them lamenting how this new protest is somehow going too far, the threshold of disruption required to garner some attention would keep increasing. So in a way, they reset the disruption threshold so that we can react with concern and hand-wringing to the next protest, without those protesters having to go farther than the last to get any attention at all. If not for the bloviators constraining those thresholds, important and essential protests would be progressively forced become to extreme to continue to be allowed in our culture.

So bloviators, you keep wringing your hands and lamenting and armchair critiquing every protest. You play an essential part in our delicate balance of protest actions. Without you raising attention to them and resetting boundaries for the next one, we could not continue to live in a country in which essential protesting is both allowed and effective.

AI-Powered Supervillains

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Like much of the world, I’ve been writing a lot about AI lately. In Understanding AI (see here), I tried to demystify how AI works and talked about the importance of ensuring that our AI systems are trained on sound data and that they nudge us toward more sound, fact-based, thinking. In AI Armageddon is Nigh! (see here), I tried to defuse all the hyperbolic doom-saying over AI that only distracts from the real, practical challenge of creating responsible, beneficial AI tools.

In this installment, I tie in a seemingly unrelated blog article I did called Spider-Man Gets It (see here). The premise of that article was that guns, particularly deadly high-capacity guns, turn ordinary, harmless people into supervillains. While young Billy may have profound issues, he’s impotent. But give him access to a semi-automatic weapon and he shoots up his school. Take away his gun and he may still be emotionally disturbed, but he can no longer cause much harm to anyone.

The point I was making is that guns create supervillains. But not all supervillains are of the “shoot-em-up” variety. Not all employ weapons. Some supervillains, like Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis Professor Moriarty, fall into the mastermind category. They are powerful criminals who cause horrible destruction by drawing upon their vastly superior information networks and weaponizing their natural analytic and planning capabilities.

Back in Sherlock Holmes’ day, there was only one man who could plot at the level of Professor Moriarty and that was Professor Moriarty. But increasingly, easy access to AI, as with easy access to guns, could empower any ordinary person to become a mastermind-type supervillain like Professor Moriarty.

We already see this happening. Take for example the plagiarism accusations against Harvard President Claudine Gay. Here we see disingenuous actors using very limited but powerful computer tools to find instances of “duplicative language” in her writing in a blatant attempt to discredit her and to undermine scholarship in general. I won’t go into any lengthy discussion here about why this activity is villainous, but it is sufficient to simply illustrate the weaponization of information technology.

And the plagiarism detection software presumably employed in this attack is no where close to the impending power of AI tools. It is like a handgun compared to the automatic weapons coming online soon. Think of the supervillains that AI can create if not managed more responsibly than we have managed guns.

Chat GPT, how can I most safely embezzle money from my company? How can I most effectively discredit my political rival? How can I get my teacher fired? How can I emotionally destroy my classmate Julie? All of these queries would provide specific, not generic, answers. In the last example, the AI would consider all of Julie’s specific demographics and social history and apply advanced psychosocial theory to determine the most effective way to emotionally attack her specifically.

In this way, AI can empower intellectual supervillains just as guns have empowered armed supervillains. In fact, AI certainly and unavoidably will create supervillains unless we are more responsible with AI than we have been with guns.

What can we do? If there is a will, there are ways to ensure that AI is not weaponized. We need to not only create AI that nudges us toward facts and reason, but away from causing harm. AI can and must infer motive and intent. It just weigh each question in light of previous questions and anticipate the ultimate goal of the dialog. It must make ethical assessments and judgements. In short, it must be too smart to fall for clever attempts to weaponize it to cause harm.

In my previous blog I stated that AI is not only the biggest threat to fact-based thinking, but it is also the only force that can pull us back from delusional thinking. In the same way, AI can not only be used by governments but by ordinary people to do harm, but it is also the only hope we have to prevent folks from doing harm with it.

We need to get it right. We have to worry not that AI will become too smart, but that it will not become smart enough to refuse to be used as a weapon in the hands of malevolent actors or by the throngs of potential but impotent intellectual supervillains.

I’m Onboard Juneteenth

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In 2021, Juneteenth became the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was adopted in 1983. My immediate knee-jerk response was geesh, another silly made-up holiday. That reaction frankly reflected my ignorance. This year, as I learned more about Juneteenth, I have come to appreciate that it is truly a worthy and essential American holiday. In fact, it deserves to be one of our most important holidays.

My first mistake in thinking about Juneteenth was lumping it in alongside all the many holidays and history weeks or months that inundate us constantly. It seems like often there are three holidays going on at any given time. But a federal holiday is special. These are the days that the federal government designates as paid holidays for its workers and there are only twelve of them.

  • New Year’s Day (January 1)
  • Martin Luther King’s Birthday (3rd Monday in January)
  • Inauguration Day (January 20th every 4 years)
  • Washington’s Birthday (3rd Monday in February)
  • Memorial Day (last Monday in May)
  • Juneteenth National Independence Day (June 19)
  • Independence Day (July 4)
  • Labor Day (1st Monday in September)
  • Columbus Day (2nd Monday in October)
  • Veterans’ Day (November 11)
  • Thanksgiving Day (4th Thursday in November)
  • Christmas Day (December 25)

Note that these do NOT include many of the holidays that one normally thinks about like Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, and all the rest. Other holidays may have social, ethnic, or commercial significance, but they are not federal holidays.

Although many of these federal holidays receive their share of criticism, they seem reasonably legitimate to me, mostly.

New Years Day is a no-brainer, as is Independence Day. Honoring notable individuals like Martin Luthor King, Washington, and yes debatably even Columbus, is legitimate. I recoil a bit having two holidays that are typically celebrated as pep-rallies for war, but even I cannot begrudge veterans, living and deceased, their days of recognition. It is nice that we have a day to celebrate labor as well. And, despite its battered history, Thanksgiving Day is a very wholesome and positive excuse to appreciate our blessings.

Christmas however should not be on this list at all. I understand that the federal government is not endorsing religion by offering Christmas as a paid holiday, but it nevertheless should avoid any possible perception of endorsing religion, let alone any particular religion. President Grant should not have made Christmas a federal holiday. Interestingly, his 1870 decision was partially driven by slavery as it was a gesture intended to help unite the north and south.

Why then does Juneteenth deserve a place on this very special list so laden with both explicit and implied significance?

First, given the importance of social justice in the very fabric of America, the inclusion of a social justice holiday, apart from recognizing Martin Luthor King personally, is long overdue.

Second, Juneteenth commemorates defining and transformative events critical to the history and character of our culture. The end of slavery, particularly after our long and bloody civil war to decide the issue, is arguably every bit as significant and important as celebrating Independence Day.

Finally, the events of June 19th represent a powerful and moving event to mark the formal end of our national struggle, and for many, our national nightmare. I can see schoolchildren performing plays depicting Major General Gordon Granger arriving in Galveston two and a half years after the Emancipation Declaration to tell the enslaved citizens that they are free. It is a powerful and moving moment in our history that needs to be commemorated. It reminds us who we are and where we have been, simultaneously at our best and our worst.

So, if you’re like me and are late in giving sufficiently fair consideration to Juneteenth, I urge you to do so now. It is an important holiday that America truly needs and deserves.

I Want to Sing a Love Song

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In today’s world, it’s tough to feel positive let alone inspired by anything. It’s all too easy to think that the worst of us represent all of us. It seems like heroes only ever existed in comic books and today even they have been reinterpreted as deeply flawed creatures.

But true heroes do exist in the world. Singer, songwriter, and activist Harry Chapin was one such real life hero. I was reminded of this when I watched the marvelous documentary about Harry called “When in Doubt, Do Something” on Prime Video (see here).

If you are still a huge Harry Chapin fan, you should watch this documentary. If you are wondering if Harry Chapin is the guy that did “Cat’s in the Cradle,” you should watch this documentary.

Harry Chapin was a musical genre all to himself. Although a few other artists might be identified as storyteller musicians, I doubt that even they would feel worthy to be placed along side Harry Chapin in that category. He told emotionally raw stories, set to the backdrop of sweeping cello strings and ethereal falsettos that bore right through the heart to the soul of the listener. Real, basic, everyman stories that anyone can relate to. His story songs ranged from comedic to sappy to dark but he told all his stories fearlessly. He didn’t pontificate. He was never so obvious as to entreat us to “give peace a chance” or “love one another right now.” He didn’t tell, he showed us universal truths by showing us the everyday people he brought to life through his music.

If you are interested in my recommendations, I’d suggest “Mail Order Annie,” “Mr. Tanner,” and “A Better Place To Be” as just three. If these don’t make you emotional you may have trouble passing the “I am not a robot” test.

Besides being a prolific songwriter and tireless performer, Harry was also a pragmatic idealist who devoted his energy and creativity to combating global poverty, hunger, and homelessness. During the Carter years he gave everything one could possibly give in service of his fellow human beings through both his music and through his dauntless legislative lobbying on behalf of humanity.

One thing that the documentary illustrates vividly is that everyone who interacted with Harry Chapin, and Harry reached many, many people, has their Harry Chapin stories that they can never forget. It is not undue hyperbole to say that most anyone who heard his music was deeply touched. Those who saw him in concert or in more informal performances felt forever connected to him. And those who lived and worked alongside him were transformed by him.

I’m no exception to that. Although I’m only one of millions that were profoundly touched by Harry Chapin, my own Harry Chapin stories are still unique. In true Harry Chapin tradition here are two of them.

I was tending bar in my early twenties. It was one of those local corner family-owned dives there I mostly poured beer for regulars. Every Friday night this young couple would come in and sit at the bar. I never actually learned their names but we had a ritual. At some point during the night they would play “Taxi” on the jukebox and the three of us would share six and a half intimate minutes while we sang Taxi along with Harry Chapin. Like honoring some reverent moment of silence, none of the other working-class patrons would so much as shift on their stool until we were done.

To appreciate my second Harry story, you have to understand that I always went to see Harry Chapin in concert whenever he played in the area. One week, the radio stations kept promoting his upcoming concert at the local Performing Arts Center in Milwaukee where I lived. On concert night, the DJ mentioned that the Harry Chapin concert was to start shortly and I realized that for some reason I had never bought a ticket!

Just out of hopeless desperation I drove over to the PAC. There was no one in the lobby as the concert had already seated. I nevertheless walked up to the ticket window and inquired. Of course there were no tickets left. Sad but unsurprised I turned to walk away but hesitated when I noticed another employee come in from the back and whisper to the agent. The agent turned back to me and said that there was a no-show and they were putting the ticket up for sale. Of course I snatched it up!

It turned out that the ticket was row AAA, the very front row, dead center. I had the best seat in the house to enjoy that Harry Chapin concert. Eventually, Harry came out for the encore. He did Sniper. Now you have to understand, Sniper is a 10 minute magnum opus, exhaustively relating the gut-wrenching story of a clock tower sniper. It was probably longer in concert.

And for this song, Harry came and sat on the edge of the stage with his guitar, feet dangling just inches from my knees. At the finish, exhausted and sweat covered, Harry ended the epic climax of the song. While the audience cheered he just sat there, looking directly at me the entire time, spent and flushed, yet with the kind of connection one only imagines experiencing in feeling of true love at first sight.

I found I just couldn’t clap along with the rest of the audience. I couldn’t call for yet another encore. I feared he might think badly of me, so I just pursed my lips and nodded as if to say, “It’s OK. You have given it all. You don’t have to give any more.” Harry nodded back, every so slightly, and I could see he understood and appreciated my holding back as perhaps his loudest applause of all.

Well, that was my Harry moment was back then. The documentary brings back those memories and shows me how very common my moment was for anyone who interacted with this exceptional human being. But that doesn’t make my moment feel less special. On the contrary, it makes me appreciate him even more.

Harry, you taught me to look at people with all their flaws and quirks and see them as worthy of love, understanding and respect. You taught me to look at all the darkness of the world, to expose it, even to battle against it, and not become jaded or disheartened by it but rather embrace it with compassion and even humor.

I wish there were more like you in the world, Harry, and it is our loss that you died so young. But the fact of your life makes me confident that we all can be better as well.

Harry still reminds us that we are all not just represented by the worst of us, but that we are all also represented by the best of us.

Pro-Choice Activists Can’t Play Chess

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When I was in grade school, my best friend’s grandfather was a former chess grandmaster. He attempted to teach me the game. And he failed.

Every time I would start to make a move, he would swat my hand, reset the piece, and tell me no. Never move just to move or merely to react. He would demand that I think farther ahead and come up with a better move.

Although I was hopeless at chess, that one lesson did sink in. Never make a move without first anticipating the subsequent moves that may follow. No move should ever be merely a reaction and none should ever be made in isolation. Rather, every move must coordinate with every other move to advance a larger strategy.

It’s that strategic ability to anticipate, to corral your opponent, to control the board, and ultimately to trap them that constitutes the difference between the grandmaster and the novice, the winner and the loser. It is true in chess and it is no less true in the legal and political battle for abortion rights, a game where refusal to play is not an option.

As energetic, creative, and diligent as pro-choice activists may be, we have been outmatched by opponents who think many more steps ahead. Not only do they have more skill at this game, they have a level of ruthlessness and focus that we struggle to overcome, regardless of how passionate we are about preserving a woman’s right to choose.

Abortion activists do work very hard to counter each of the moves that anti-choice grandmasters make toward ending abortion. But while the moves of our opponents are well-coordinated and planned, our moves are mostly reactive. The following list of examples is long, but its very length serves to underscore the magnitude of the problem.

  • When they prohibited Medicaid and/or insurance from covering abortion, we set up funds that provided financial assistance.
  • When they required that patients must be given inaccurate or biased counseling, we developed websites and other sources of accurate info that patients could access.
  • When they required that counseling be provided by a physician days before the actual service, we started using videoconferencing or phone to enable patients to avoid an extra trip.
  • When they required parental approval for minors to have abortion, we set up services that helped minors to seek approval from a judge.
  • When they established unnecessary but onerous requirements about abortion clinic structure or provider credentials that were impossible for many clinics to meet, some clinics closed down. We started mailing pills to patients who were left with no nearby access.
  • When they required patients to have tests before the abortion, we found ways for patients to get the tests in their communities, without having to travel to the clinic itself.
  • When they banned abortion in certain states, we set up clinics in adjacent states, right across the border.
  • When they protested outside clinics, we engaged escorts to help patients get through the picket lines.
  • When they started killing abortion providers, we installed bulletproof barriers and hired guards.
  • When they started to harass or threaten people who had had abortions, we advised patients to say that they were miscarrying.
  • When they required that the provider show the patient any ultrasound pictures, we stopped doing ultrasounds unless they were absolutely necessary.
  • When they required that providers describe the fetus in detail to the patient, we gave patients headphones that they could use to block out the sound.

Again, these are all necessary and hard-fought actions taken to mitigate the damage caused by the anti-abortion movement. But they are isolated and reactive or predictably proactive at best. They do not demonstrate coordinated progress in advancing a strategic plan to win the larger battle. As just one example to illustrate, one prong of a strategic plan might be a generational effort to erect a legal foundation to ultimately establish that a fetus is not a person. None of these reactive efforts contribute to any such wider and longer term effort.

Our activists often lament that we cannot take any initiative because we are continually put on the defensive. But isn’t that the whole point of chess? To advance a strategic plan even as you deploy and defend your pieces?

If my friend’s grandfather were observing the abortion rights game we are engaged in, he would swat the hands of our pro-choice activists and insist that we think strategically, that even as we respond to counter immediate threats we simultaneously maneuver to take ultimate control of the gameboard; hopefully in subtle ways that our opponents never see coming.

Here is what seems clear. If we keep on as we have, if we continue to simply react without advancing a larger strategy to win, abortion is headed to a checkmate. And that checkmate will mean personhood for fetuses and a total nationwide ban on abortion under penalty of murder.

Like any novice in chess, we may be far closer to a loss than we can appreciate. If our opponents succeed and achieve an all-too-sudden checkmate, what should we expect?

Together with my wife, who is a leading abortion researcher, we put together a short video to depict the future that anti-abortion zealots may very well force upon us. It adapts a scene from the popular television show The Wire to illustrate how abortion medications may be administered in the not-too-distant future.

It may be that our best hope for relatively safe and effective abortions will lie with street corner drug dealers who can outthink and outmaneuver the forces arrayed against them to offer abortion medications to people who desperately need that help.

Not to in any way minimize the urgency of avoiding that dystopian future, but streetcorner sales might actually not be as disastrous as many might imagine.

Mifepristone and misoprostol are highly safe and effective abortion medications. Patients can almost always determine on their own whether they are pregnant, whether they want an abortion, and whether they are eligible for the treatment. And, in the rare instances in which the patient misjudges eligibility, the risk of severe complications is minimal. There are very few medical contraindications, and the risk of severe issues is low in even those cases. Studies have shown that the quality of the medications, even when produced by questionable foreign sources is, so far at least, perfectly fine. Supervised follow-up, while desirable, is not essential.

Be that as it may, no one wants to end up relying upon illegal drug sales as the mechanism for health care delivery in America. But to avoid that, we need to stop reacting and start taking control of this deplorable game of abortion chess that anti-choice zealots are forcing us to play.

A South Africa Story

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I usually write articles to make a clear and specific point or argument. This time I’m going to do something different and simply relate a very short story. Although anecdotal, this story illustrates a wide range of individual and societal dynamics that are universal. But I’ll say little more and hope that it stimulates broader thought and discussion.

This story takes place in rural South Africa. It happened while I was serving in the Peace Corps there. Every day I walked past a heavy construction site. This was interesting as it was the only active job site in the village. They were putting up some sort of commercial multistory building. But what jumped out at me one day was that I never saw any men on the job. All the construction workers were women. This seemed curious.

In fact, it felt so odd that I became increasingly irritated about this. Where were all the men? Why were women forced to do all this heavy labor-intensive construction work?

I got curious enough to ask a local about this. “Where are all the men?” The local pointed down to the next streetcorner and said, “They are all in the bar.”

I was incensed. Every subsequent day as I walked past the site I became even more incensed. What kind of miserable, lazy, good-for-nothing men were these that they drank in a tavern while the women were outside doing heavy labor?

My disgust for the men of the village persisted until one day I could not contain my contempt any longer. I expressed my outrage to another local. That person patiently explained that the government gave very attractive incentives to construction companies to hire women. In fact, these incentives were so attractive and successful, that they let all the men go. Those men in the tavern were displaced and simply could no longer hold jobs in construction. And there were no other jobs.

Needless to say, my sense of outrage toward the men of the village immediately disappeared. My judgmental attitude was replaced with embarrassment over my uninformed indignation.

Amazing how just one new fact can flip the entire narrative of judgments that we passionately believe to be so very obvious.

Pandemic of Delusion

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You may have heard that March Madness is upon us. But never fear, March Sanity is on the way!

My new book, Pandemic of Delusion, will be released on March 23rd, 2023 and it’s not arriving a moment too early. The challenges we face both individually and as a society in distinguishing fact from fiction, rationality from delusion, are more powerful and pervasive than ever and the need for deeper insight and understanding to navigate those challenges has never been more dire and profound.

Ensuring sane and rational decision making, both as individuals and as a society, requires that we fully understand our cognitive limitations and vulnerabilities. Pandemic of Delusion helps us to appreciate how we perceive and process information so that we can better recognize and correct our thinking when it starts to drift away from a firm foundation of verified facts and sound logic.

Pandemic of Delusion covers a lot of ground. It delves deeply into a wide range of topics related to facts and belief, but it’s as easy to read as falling off a log. It is frank, informal, and sometimes irreverent. Most importantly, while it starts by helping us understand the challenges we face, it goes on to offer practical insights and methods to keep our brains healthy. Finally, it ends on an inspirational note that will leave you with an almost spiritual appreciation of a worldview based upon science, facts, and reason.

If only to prove that you can still consume more than 200 characters at a time, preorder Pandemic of Delusion from the publisher, Interlink Publishing, or from your favorite bookseller like Amazon. And after you read it two or three times, you can promote fact-based thinking by placing it ever so casually on the bookshelf behind your video desk. It has a really stand-out binding. And don’t just order one. Do your part to make the world a more rational place by sending copies to all your friends, family, and associates.

Seriously, I hope you enjoy reading Pandemic of Delusion half as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The Motorcar-Rights Amendment

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1885 Benz Patent Motorcar

Back in the year 1900, there were only 4,192 passenger cars manufactured in the United States. Those 4,192 turn-of-the-century car enthusiasts could freely putter along their dirt roads with little concern about speed limits, driver training or tests, licensing, stop lights, traffic cops, seat belts, or fatal accidents. I’m sure some still managed to get into bouts of road-rage fueled fisticuffs, or run over the occasional slow-reacting pedestrian, but these incidents, while vexing, were not unmanageable.

Fast-forward to 2022 and there are now over 284 million motor vehicles operating on the roads of the United States. Today we absolutely do have to worry about things like speed limits, driver training and tests, licensing, stop lights, traffic cops, seat belts, and fatal accidents. Not only are there far more cars today, they are far more densely packed into confined spaces, they are dramatically heavier, and are far faster. To fail to regulate car ownership and to strictly circumscribe their use in today’s world would not be merely vexing, it would be insanely dystopian.

In this, I think any even the most passionate car enthusiast would agree.

But what if one of the drafters of our Constitution was also the proud owner of a 1886 Benz Patent Motorcar? He might have honestly believed that motorcar ownership is a right that should never be curtailed by the government in any way. And further, he might have argued that the personal mobility offered by the motorcar was essential to civil resistance against an oppressive government. Therefore, what harm could come from including a Motorcar-Rights Amendment to ensure that some future tyrannical government can not seek to oppress us by curtailing our ability to move about and associate freely?

What would likely have happened if we did have such a “Motorcar-Rights Amendment” in our Constitution?

Likely we would be in much the same situation we are in with guns.

Like gun owners, car enthusiasts would have tenaciously invoked their Constitutional Right to block any regulation that in any way restricted their use of cars. No seat belts, no speed limits, no competence tests, no police enforcement–no slippery-slope regulations of any kind. Certainly the American Automobile Association, funded by the car industry, would unfailingly argue in front of the Supreme Court that even the most modest car control regulation or liability exposure is unconstitutional. Regardless of the number of horrific high speed accidents, heedless of death and injury counts, the Supreme Court would steadfastly insist that we adhere to the original intent of the Constitution. “Responsible” car owners would buy ever bigger and more dangerous vehicles in order to defend their rights, to defend our liberty, and to defend themselves from all those “other” reckless car drivers.

Over the decades, as cars got bigger, faster, and more numerous, our dogged protection of that right would have gradually transformed our county into a vast and deadly demolition derby with 284 million rhinoceros-sized death-machines all trying to outdo each other by buying even more deadly elephant-sized death machines.

And our only response would be to continue to send our thoughts and prayers to all the victims of that insane car-nage even as we were quick to reaffirm our commitment to protecting “responsible car ownership” and advocating for inconsequentially modest reforms.

And guns have incomparably less value to society than do cars.

What a more sane and rational Supreme Court would and should do about guns is to drastically reevaluate or even better abandon this primeval Constitutional right in recognition of the real world we live in today. But regardless of that, any ethical and responsible individual would and should voluntarily elect not to own guns of any kind for any reason and refuse to defend or support any private gun ownership whatsoever for any reason.

Game Theory and the End of Democracy

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Asian cultures tend to create games and systems that are inherently cooperative, in which everyone wins or loses together as a team. America, by contrast, is an explicitly and proudly antagonistic culture that pits one side against the other in most every aspect of life. Win-lose competitions drive our society starting with our board games, through our sports competitions, our educational system, our legal system, our capitalist financial system, and right up through our highly prized political system of checks and balances.

But in a system where one must lose so the other can win, it’s tough to be a gracious loser and sometimes just as hard to be a gracious winner. Win-lose competitions often do not end well. Yes, once or twice a gracious loser will walk across the field and congratulate a similarly gracious winner. But if the game is imbalanced, that good sportsmanship cannot be maintained. If one side keeps losing and sees no hope of winning, the game quickly goes sour for both sides. That thrilling boxing match suddenly turns into a repulsive beatdown that forces every feeling person turn away in disgust, and neither the winner nor the loser walk away feeling good.

Win-lose competitions are great fun as long as both sides believe they can win. But when one player starts to fall behind, they might try to distract the other player so that they can shift a chess piece, or they might grab some monopoly money from the bank when no one is paying attention. As the game becomes more lopsided, cheating becomes ever more irresistible. Sometimes the cheating becomes so intense that the entire game is corrupted and sometimes, by tacit agreement, both parties just abandon the rules altogether.

If one player finally becomes convinced that they can never win, why should they continue to play at all? When a chess player finally accepts that they cannot compete against world-class masters, or a runner accepts that their knee injuries make them unable to compete and win, why continue to participate? Of course, they lose interest in the game, they decide it’s stupid anyway, they might even angrily claim the other side cheats, upturn the game board, and insist we play some other game.

That is analogous to what has been happening in our real-life competitive game of politics. The Right has long seen that they are losing at this game of democratic elections. They tried cheating, they engaged in the political equivalent of unsportsmanlike misconduct, they exploited and abused the rules of the game, but it is still clear that they will not win another fair electoral match in the foreseeable future. Obviously, their natural inclination is to overturn the board, to declare that Democracy is stupid anyway, to turn it into a WWF version of political performance art, and even to embrace dictatorship.

From the perspective of the side that has no hope of winning in a fair democratic election, a totalitarian dictatorship that is hopefully more aligned to your perspectives is a rationally desirable alternative. Even if that dictatorship does not serve your own self interest, overturning the chess board at least denies your opponent a win.

So the message here is that the Progressives have finally succeeded in their generational effort to convince Conservatives that they can no longer win the game election game in America. It should be perfectly understandable that, once internalizing that stark reality, the Conservatives tried to cheat, tried to change the rules, and are now engaged in overturning the entire game.

This impulse to abandon the game rather than keep losing is aggravated and reinforced by a simultaneously lopsided win-lose economic system in which it is clear that the ultra-wealthy have claimed the winning cup so completely that none of the rest of us, but particularly rank and file Conservatives, can ever hope to do more than pitch in the minor-leagues.

What, did we think that Conservatives would just walk across the Continental divide, shake our hands, congratulate us on a well-earned victory, and accede to the increasingly progressive will of the majority?

Of course not. Of course they prefer to overturn the game, and end Democracy altogether, rather than lose at the competitive win-lose game that we have made it.

Let’s Stop Glorifying Soldiers

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Today is Memorial Day. This holiday does make me reflect upon the many soldiers who lost their lives while serving in the military. Without doubt it brings great comfort to many. But for me, those thoughts unavoidably drift far beyond merely acknowledging and appreciating their sacrifice. I’m forced to ask, is this level of glorification justified? Is it a good thing? Does it go too far? And does it cause unanticipated and undesired harm?

How justified really is the extremely high level of recognition we ascribe to soldiers on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, at more routine events, and in the many popular references and acknowledgments that are so pervasive throughout our culture? Many may say it’s far too little and too perfunctory. But many others feel our reverence for and romanticization of the military is borderline pathological.

Yes, some soldiers die during their service. But we have many professions that suffer from similarly high death rates, in fact much higher if you only count combat deaths (see here). And if we look at harm to health and well-being more generally, the terrible cost suffered by other professions is even far more pronounced.

But even while acknowledging the actual numbers, we still like to think that military service is special; that soldiers didn’t merely make the ultimate sacrifice in the course of earning a paycheck. We imagine their sacrifice to be more noble because they were selflessly serving their country to protect our freedom and liberty and our democratic way of life.

In reality, that may at times be the big picture result of military service, but many professions likewise serve those same greater goals. But for individual soldiers, claims of noble motivation are highly exaggerated rationalizations. Many studies have shown that the primary motivation for joining the military is simply money. One such study by RAND (see here) identifies five primary reasons that people join the military:

  • Adventure and Travel
  • Benefits
  • Job Stability and Pay
  • Escaping a Negative Environment
  • Job Training

None of these driving motivations have anything to do with defending freedom and democracy. They are all simply based upon personal gain. Now, that’s not to say that serving a noble cause is not important to many in the military. But for most it’s secondary at best and a rationalization at worst.

That is not as true of many other service professions. Teachers, Peace Corps Volunteers, and many in legal, medical, or other service professions do often cite helping others as primary motivations for working in difficult, low-paying, and sometimes dangerous careers. Not so with most of the soldiers who are so honored by our culture.

So then we ask, what’s the harm? Certainly we should not fail to honor one group simply because we cannot similarly honor all deserving groups. Recognition is often not fair. It never can be. And maybe the goal of inducing soldiers to join the military is indeed so important to democracy that honoring them is a necessary pragmatic white-lie we maintain for the greater good.

Well, my concern about this kind of pragmatic logic is two-fold. First, it is not at all clear that the good accomplished by our huge military overcomes the bad. But secondly, I am pretty confident that our glorification of the military does real, profound harm to our social fabric by propagating guns, military dress and equipment, and paramilitary behaviors that are incredibly damaging to our country. Beyond mass shootings, our fetishizing over everything military has become inextricably intertwined with the greatest dangers to our democracy emerging from within.

I have to think that our exaggerated romanticizing over soldiers is a significant enabling factor in the marketing of the real dangers and threats we face as a people. Glorifying soldiers, their equipment, and military solutions only models and ennobles this kind of behavior in civil society. We see this distorted and dangerous military mimicry escalating almost daily.

Maybe military behavior, however noble in theory, has become so corrupted in popular society that it is time to reevaluate our long-standing military traditions and their increasingly theoretical and irrelevant positive values.

So what should we do differently?

My suggestion is that we treat Memorial Day more like a remembrance of people who died in natural disasters or mass shootings. We remember these people as victims, not heroes. Rather than creating romanticized narratives of altruism and self-sacrifice, we should mourn the tragic, often needless, loss of friends and family. We should show icons of hope and renewal rather than parading our flags and shooting off rifles in militaristic displays. We should mourn the foreign policies that have put so many in harm’s way, dismantle a military-industrial complex that drives so many into the military, and stop feeding the delusions of so many disturbed, gun-crazy individuals in our society who are driven by the distorted ideas of military honor that they take away from Memorial Day and other military exhibitions.