Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Erosion of rule of law is one of the critical aspects in failed
states. The folks who stand up for "what is right (tm)" are
extremely important to the overall functioning of society -
investigative journalists, honest cops, whistleblowers and so on.
When trust in the system collapses, and those people tend to stay
home or go missing, the system overall starts to fall apart.

Widespread flouting of the law by the States will accelerate US
decline far, far faster than a principled States Rights agenda will.

https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlords-and-rodeos-why-nothing-wor
ks/
  

    
Via email from Tiffany Lee Brown:

Here we've been discussing the State of the World. Upcoming on
January 20, there will be a State of Democracy Summit available for
free online -- the subjects and panelists look very interesting. 

One panelist is formerly the active, charming, much-missed Well
member <zimby>, journalist Farai Chideya. One of the main sponsors
of the event is Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Craig was active on
The Well for years (another nice person we miss around here!) and is
founder of Craigslist.

<https://www.92y.org/state-of-democracy>
  

    
thanx for posting this. but, sigh...
  

    
Man, I miss Farai. So much of this conversation I'd love to hear her
weigh in on!
  

    
> This is a
> near-comical allegation that they are in danger from me

They/we are in danger from you, just as you are from us. This
includes other people on the plane you take.

This isn't something to be smug about. Even with a booster your
vaccination isn't as reliable as we thought it was last spring.
  

    
>may rely on the Hispanic vote

May rely more on the urban/rural shift, which is trending favorably.
  

    
Vinay, I'm going to harsh parts of your manifesto. :-)

"Turn the big cities into States: Chicago, San Francisco, LA,
Chicago, Seattle and so on. This helps sort out the Electoral
College problems, without annihilating it."

Statehood for Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C. would largely do the
same thing, and seems more plausible. They each have large
constituencies for statehood already, and their governments,
particularly Puerto Rico already do many of the things that state
governments do. Badly, sometimes, but there's structure to build on.

This happened as recently as 1959 (the year my sister was born),
when Hawaii became a state, so there's a legislative structure for
it, while there's none for cities becoming states.

So will the Democrats kill the filibuster to enable this before the
mid-terms? Might Murkowski, Romney, Sasse and enough other
supposedly "good" Republicans  clear a view around the bulky
specters of Trump and sleazy Mitch McConnell to help? History
doesn't write the future, but there's precedent, a template, for
powerful federal voting rights laws and enforcement.

Meanwhile, why would states agree to let major cities secede? The NY
metro area generates the most economic activity of any other place
in both NYS and New Jersey. The San Francisco metro area is
apparently the sixth largest economy in the U.S. The Wikipedia
reports that "in 2016, the nine counties of the Chicago metropolitan
area accounted for 77.3% of the state's total wages, with the
remaining 93 counties at 22.7%."

"Push huge amounts of power over moral wedge issues down to the
States: drugs, guns, abortion, LGBT legal status. This only works
with Federal assistance to move people to a place
they want to live: we can't have people economically trapped in a
jurisdiction which just rolled back their civil rights."

This would be a tragedy. How many Black or brown or impoverished
white people do you think this society would relocate this way? What
kind of traumas would people endure while trying to get out? What
happens when, as does happen fairly regularly, New York or
Massachusetts or Maine or New Jersey elects a Republican governor?

What about American Indians living on or near reservations: so so
many in states that have gone full-on conservative wingnut? Those
are either their traditional territories or what they managed to
claw out for themselves after being forcibly relocated in the 18th
and 19th centuries. It's taken the land disappearing from under
them, due to climate-change driven ice melt and coastal erosion, for
some Alaska Native villages to try and move inland from their
ancestral villages.

The Democrats can't even get all their members to acknowledge that
federal paid family and medical leave would be a clear economic win.
So it's hard to imagine any Congress is going to pay to relocate
millions to different states.  

That only seems to happen when states or feds see the economic logic
of removing homes after flooding disasters – which doesn't seem to
happen often. New York State bought out dozens of coastal homes on
Staten Island in the wake of Sandy – people who got little to help
over the prior decades that their neighborhoods flooded regularly.
FEMA relocated many people living along the Mississippi after the
Great Flood of 1994.

Campaign finance reform could happen, conceivably.

Very few countries are gonna let the U.S. Pentagon run nuclear power
plants on their territory. An enduring American military presence is
termed "occupation" by a lot of these people. Some of use felt
comforted or relieved when the Pentagon typically sided with
American democracy over fascism during the Trump years. I'd argue
this was norm that underlined just how quickly and thoroughly Trump
and his operatives knocked down most norms.

Generally, I don't think we can assume the military is much or any
more competent at making the best choices, or even most humane, when
it comes to managing complicated and expensive projects. 
  

    
So Bruce, I want to come back to the biopolitics: the app you *must*
have installed, and which *must* have its bluetooth on.

I'm thinking here of Apple's airtags - I don't know how you tell
your iPhone not to pass GPS data to Apple when your phone comes
within range of a lost object with an airtag on it.

A pervasive network which reports on us whenever two or more are
gathered together. And I'm wearing an Apple Watch, which streams
who-knows-what to who-knows-where.

That sort of sounds like we're building the capability, over the
next few years, to simultaneously watch the beating hearts hundreds
of millions of people scattered all over the world.

I don't know what that is. It's some kind of bizarre biopolitical
panopticon: we can't see the whole world but we know where the
people are and we know how they feel from their biological
indicators. We have their DNA from all the PCR tests - unless I'm
very much mistaken they're going to sequence all the DNA in those
samples including the human DNA? I might be wrong about that.

Anyway it's just a very weird event: the breaking through of
computers into the biological domain on some epic scale. We got
invaded by a virus, but it brought a new era of digitization in its
wake.

What *is* that? Does it even have a name?
  

    
Emily Gertz: I used to carry a business card that said "I don't get
out of bed for less than one percent mortality."

If I was going back into that business today, my card would say "bad
solutions for insoluble problems."

Once you put civil war on the table as the possible outcome of *not*
letting the Red States have a lot more control of their destinies,
the minor aggravations of relocating a lot of people become a lot
more acceptable.

I don't know that there *will* be a civil war in the US. It's reeked
of civil war / failed states to me since maybe 2007, when I first
started writing about pushing the Wedge Issues down to the State
level and moving people around to handle the civil rights impacts.
But I'm also a noted catastrophist: I worked on a lot of things that
never happened, and a few that did!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/books/review-how-civil-wars-start-barbara-w
alter.html

I don't know of another implementable alternative to the US running
the *risk* of civil war. I think if a concrete plan was put on the
table to give the Wedge Issues back to the States, pretty much all
the fire would go out of the pro civil war faction - they'd be
getting most of what they want without the risk of having AC130
Ghostriders circling over American skies.

As an alternative to war, the logistical and humanitarian issues you
raise seem pretty minor. 

Is moving people around expensive? Sure. Cheaper than war.

Are the Native Americans potentially going to get screwed again?
Sure. Happens over and over again, they've had a terrible ride,
maybe they get screwed again.

But *as an alternative to war* these are trivial prices to pay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ADdToI9Akw&t=570s this is footage
from the Bundy ranch standoff in 2014. It's notable because an armed
group of ranchers force a group of rifle-bearing police back down
the road.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ADdToI9Akw&t=540s there used to be
close up footage of this conversation, where Officer Friendly, a
very paramilitary-looking police officer, is persuaded that it's
time for him and his men to go home.

These guys, the snipers, are on the overpass behind the overpass you
can see the crowd at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhNFqaLioD4
there were several of them, serious looking sniper dudes,
overlooking the entire situation. If a firefight had ensued the
police would have been massacred.

At the time, the rumour was that a couple of police counter snipers
had been politely disarmed and walked out of the situation.

America is *knee deep* in people who are capable of pulling off this
kind of stuff. They've got the guns, they've got military training
(veterans) or they've been trained by people who had military
training, they're extraordinarily numerous - ten million deer
hunters make acceptable infantry in many scenarios.

The potential for a firestorm of violence in America is very real,
and I do not see either democrats or republicans looking for
off-ramps. What I see is people ignoring the warning signs of
potential impending doom - much as they ignore climate change - and
crossing their fingers it all sort of works out.

I'm not saying pushing the Wedge Issues down to the States wouldn't
cause problems. I'm not saying people wouldn't die - 20 million
people driving to new homes, some of them are going to die in car
accidents they would not otherwise have had at the very least - but
in terms of *stopping the risk of widespread political violence in
America* I don't know of a better credible solution right now.

And I'd say the same about nuclear power, if solar wasn't getting
cheaper so incredibly fast. 

Thank god for that.
  

    
No convictions for walking the police off the land at gunpoint
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/08/bundy-family-charges-dropped-n
evada-armed-standoff

And a reasonably insightful piece about militia iconography 
https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/

You can see a militia column working its way through the Jan6 crowd
in the first few seconds of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiMEmgUf9EE

There's a lot more footage of those guys around. If you watch the
crowds carefully in the Jan6 footage, there are a fair number of
anomalous actors - a low key, faces covered, fast moving two man
team who are in and out of the building in minutes, that sort of
thing. There was a *lot* of action on the day.

To briefly to forestall the standard arguments:

1) Lightly armed militias in Iraq and Afghanistan ground the US
military to a standstill. Combined population is 80 million, 25% of
the size of the US. Militias on US soil would be larger, more
heavily armed, better trained, and US personnel would be unlikely to
treat them as a faceless enemy: expect a lot of tipoffs about when
the bombs are going to start falling over Huston.

Also don't assume that the Russians, Chinese etc. wouldn't run
shoulder launched surface to air missiles and assorted other goodies
into the conflict areas, and also provide satellite etc.
reconnaissance. 

2) I'm not saying this *will* happen. I'm saying this *could*
happen. It's a realistic risk: a large scale Civil War 2 is possible
and a lot of people in America (on all sides) are actively planning
and preparing for it, all of which makes it more likely.

Bringing the temperature on that conflict down means giving the
potential insurgents some of what they want politically, *or*
treating their leadership like union organizers in banana republics,
and having the CIA round them up, shoot them, and bury them out in
the desert.

I'd rather negotiate than see this go kinetic, risk millions of
deaths, risk the death of the US democracy if the coasts lose, and
possibly the loss of global democracy (and any hope of international
climate treaties) right behind that.

This is super high stakes. Maybe we need to figure out how to give
these people more of what they want, in areas where a compromise can
be reached, before the craziness escalates and the shooting might
start.
  

    
>the minor aggravations of relocating a lot of people

I glitched on this. There were aggravations in relocating a lot of
people when India and Pakistan became independent. The aggravations
were arguably anything but minor.

And then when you consider the situations of working class young
women and girls seeking reproductive health support RIGHT AWAY, the
aggravation of moving to another state - and then staying there? -
is not in any way minor. 

I get that you're talking big picture, but the amount of suffering
involved in devolving power to the states is beyond the capability
of my pocket calculator.

My first choice would be Lincoln's, all over again.
  

    
When you have to go into debt to sell your house, relocation is a
major, life-changing aggravation.
  

    
>I'm saying this *could*
happen

Well, anything could. But it still seems incalculably remote. I
don't think appeasement is a useful strategy, though.

You can't give them "a little bit of what they want"; wha they want
is a patriarchal white ethostate. Politically and logistically
infeasible.

The various authors dining out on the fashionable ominous warnings
about impending civil war don't even think it would be a war in any
conventional sense, but rather more of a Northern Ireland during the
Troubles model. Tragic, yes, but still a parochial conflict touching
relatively few. Prosecuting such a conflict seems infinitely
preferable to tolerating atrocity in exchange for -- what's that
phrase? -- peace in our time. 
  

    <scribbled by mct67 Tue 11 Jan 22 20:59>
  

    <scribbled by mct67 Tue 11 Jan 22 22:57>
  

    
The analogies that are being offered are, yes, analogies, but at the
bottom of this is the undeniable fact that the separate state are
not actually able to subsist as they are without the help of the
entire federal government.  It's the same in Canada with its "have"
and "have not" provinces. 

If the states are given their head, do they get from the federal
government more than they put in? And if not, which states can
survive?
  

    
Paul Belserene: 

So let's think about what the social compact changes are.

Firstly, remember, pre-1913 no income tax. Federal government had
very limited tax raising powers, around 5% of its current budget.
Most of the tax burden for running society was on States and
municipalities, and was things like property taxes and sales taxes,
not income taxes. The income tax was what turned America into a
"proper country" with a powerful executive capable of prosecuting
foreign wars and making social policy: prior to that, FedGov was
poor.

Secondly, most Americans have been getting poorer in real terms
since the 1970s. A lot poorer: the dollar has lost a ton of its
value, wages have stagnated, wealth has concentrated. An enormous
number of Americans are just plain broke or permanently in debt,
across all social classes. The wealth came from winning WW2, with
the nuke: nobody was going to tell the Americans no, and the people
who did got zapped by the CIA with relative impunity. Plus a huge
and undamaged manufacturing and industrial base. I seem to remember
70% of the world's trucks and highways were in America.

So as the rest of the world catches up America starts to feel poorer
and poorer in comparison. The comparative advantage dissipates, the
rich use their power to change the rules to keep them rich, and the
poor pay the price. US healthcare is the core of this mess, but
education is a close second: people are being treated like cattle.

People are very, very bad at getting poorer gracefully. So from my
perspective this is the macro-story: fifty years of imperial
decline, and only 100 years of Federal government in its current
form: it really only comes into existence with the income tax.

This equilibrium - huge Federal government, and economic decline -
is wha the Right are complaining about above all other things.
They're *dramatically* less interested in race, and *more interested
in money* than people give them credit for: they'd be as happy
enslaving the Irish as the African Americans, if the law would let
them. Poverty makes people monsters, and agriculture is a curse for
those who work the land. This is what we have to work with...

(oop, out of time, more later)
  

    
Interesting news on the Chinese front.  Xi Jinping decided that
computer games were bad for kids; "spiritual opium," made them lazy
and neglecting their analog engineering.  Those gamers are 'lying
flat,' they're 'touching fish,' they're not participating the
'national rejuvenation.'

So, they just stopped licensing games.  You can create games in
China, but you can't register and sell them.  Game studios are going
broke all over China.  Xi doesn't just attack Baudi Alibaba Tencent
Big Tech oligarch,  he's also happy to choke the little guys --  the
"tigers and flies," as they say in Chinese anti-corruption
campaigns.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3161717/china-gaming-crackdown-freeze
-new-video-game-licences-extends-2022


I don't think Xi ever wants the game business to come back.  I
suspect he has games figured as premonitions of the Metaverse, which
is an awful fever-dream that a proper civilization just shouldn't
have.

Xi is by no means a Luddite, mind you: Xi loves Chinese Artificial
Intelligence, Chinese moon colonies, he can't get enough of military
hardware.

Xi Jinping is 68 years old (and so am I).  I wonder how many years
as a baton-swinging autocrat this Emperor can possibly have left in
him.
  

    

*The Kazakh regime has got it together to have a parliamentary
meeting and a formal policy announcement (thoughfully translated
into English for the sake of us offshored voyeurs).

https://www.gov.kz/memleket/entities/mfa-strasbourg/press/news/details/311251?
lang=en

"President Tokayev confirmed that perpetrators of violence took
advantage of public discontent with the increase of liquefied gas
price. Initially, peaceful rallies against the rise of gas price
took place in a number of regions. Then, peaceful protests were
hijacked by bandits, looters, and armed terrorists, including
foreign militants. The perpetrators’ key goal is clear – they aimed
at destruction of government institutions, undermining of the
constitutional order, and, ultimately, the seizure of power in
Kazakhstan.

"Facing an unprecedented armed aggression by terrorists, Kazakhstan
had to request for assistance from its partners at the Collective
Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) and deployment of an
international peacekeeping contingent. By today, the main mission of
the CSTO peacekeeping force has been successfully completed. A
phased withdrawal from Kazakhstan of the entire CSTO peacekeeping
contingent will begin in two days and will take no more than 10 days
in total."

*Are those CSTO peacekeepers really gonna shoulder arms, wrap their
flags and march out of Kazakhstan, "Mission Accomplished"?  Doing
that in an oil-patch is practically unheard-of, but I guess it
worked for Kuwait once.  Sort of.
  

    <scribbled by bruces Wed 12 Jan 22 03:09>
  

    
*Along with the imported sticks from the CSTO, the President is
offering the restive Kazakh  population a rather extensive selection
of carrots.

"The Government will make a special effort to address the issues of
economic inequality in Kazakhstan. It will ensure that incomes of
all groups of population grow at pace with the growth of the
national economy.
Within two months, the Government and the Chamber of Entrepreneurs
will develop a programme to increase the income of the general
public and will prepare concrete proposals to reduce poverty in
Kazakhstan.

"The Government will promptly develop a new Social Code. The
Government must adapt its social policies to the new reality, taking
into account the challenges of the Covid pandemic and all other
problems. The Social Code should become a key element of the new
“social contract” in Kazakhstan...

"A special fund “For the People of Kazakhstan” will be established
to support Kazakh citizens at the time of need. The fund will be
fully transparent and accountable to the public. Its funding will
come from private and public sources."

*Will these promised bribes mellow  out the riotous population?   I
have my doubts, because I don't think the locals believe this will
happen, but, well,  maybe they won't become Syria or Afghanistan. 
Kazakhstan is by no means Shangri-La, but not becoming Syria or
Afghanistan, that would be almost a victory condition in MMXXII.
  

    
I wonder what the Chinese video game ban will do to their birth rate?
  

    
And, can I note just how radical a piece of social engineering a
video game ban is? That's an *extremely* deep reshaping of the
forces shaping the young: it's turning those kids into different
people.

Raising their kids like our billionaires do?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tech-billionaire-parents-limit/
  

    <scribbled by jonl Wed 12 Jan 22 07:02>
  

    
I suspect a video game ban in the USA would result in mass suicide
or worse.