An analogy

Imagine this:

Ted

A few years ago, Ted became a vocal “anti-feminist”.

He is intense about it. He talks about it a lot. He put “anti-feminist” in his social media bio.

He is not a passionately misogynistic MRA. He is culturally & politically on the left, less misogynistic than most men, genuinely concerned with social justice. He was radicalized by seeing feminists who advocate persecution of trans women in the UK.

He shares a lot of misogynistic “anti-feminist” talking points, some of them originating from transparently hateful bigots.

Most “anti-feminist” critiques he shares address real persecution of trans women in the UK. Often the things he shares point to TERFs at their worst … but even when they do not connect to feminism or feminists at all, he shares them as “anti-feminist”.

Many criticisms of feminism he shares offer real facts in a wildly misleading frame. He loves talking about how W.I.T.C.H. claimed to speak for all women, evoked a lineage from a false history of witchcraft, and embraced “terrorism” in the name of their organization. He has a long catalogue of real wrongs feminists have committed, which he insists demonstrate what feminism Really Is.

Most of the criticisms he shares are almost comically wrongheaded about how feminism works. He claims feminism is a religious cult, pointing to suffragettes’ entanglement with the temperance movement, pointing to alliances with the Christian right over porn, sex work, and transphobia. He claims feminism is inherently violent, drawing a continuity from “terrorism” by First Wave suffragettes through attacks on trans women today. He claims that feminists admit to their bigotry and thirst for violent genocide by pointing to figures like Lierre Keith, Valarie Solanis, and Janice Raymond … and sharing misleading out-of-context quotes from figures like Margaret Sanger and Andrea Dworkin. He claims that feminism is not an authentic social justice movement because it stands for “cis female supremacy”, because it depends on a strange & novel conception of “women”, because it only began in the late 19^th century.

He is only interested in transphobia by feminists. He recognizes transphobia by other groups, but dismisses those as distractions from confronting the central problem of feminism.

Ted is smugly confident that he understands feminism deeply. He insists feminism is transphobic by definition, repeating slogans like “feminism is bigotry” and “feminism is genocide”.

He takes accounts of feminism that differ from his as just deceitful apologetics for feminist transphobia either created by lying propagandists or repeated by dangerously, irresponsibly self-deluding feminists.

Jane

Jane is a cis woman who cares deeply about trans liberation. She knows Ted shares her basic values, but his confusion about feminism troubles her.

She counts herself neither as a feminist nor as an expert on feminism, but she knows more than most. Since she respects many feminists she knows, she tries to clarify Ted’s confusions.

Neither her alliance with his commitment to trans liberation nor her lack of an alliance with feminism gives her credibility in his eyes.

When she tries to explain to him how he misunderstands feminism, he insists that “repeating deceitful feminist propaganda” makes her a defender of transphobic genocide.

When she assures him that she respects criticisms which understand feminism — women of color objecting to racism in the movement, the “abolish gender” school of queer theory, et cetera — he insists that this is chaff obscuring her defense of feminist transphobia.

When she tells him that the history of feminism, trans liberation, and the relation between them is far more complicated than the version he tells, he objects that referring to “complexity” is a rationalization of transphobia, since transphobes constantly fault slogans like “trans women are women” as simplistic lies.

When she tries to explain to him how his commentaries land with women, feminist and otherwise — especially when he calls feminists “morally equivalent to rapists” — he insists that protecting trans people is far more important than their feelings.

When she points to trans women who are feminists, and points to feminists who have fought hard for trans liberation, he dismisses them as cherry-picked weirdos in denial about the truth of feminism.

When she points to the things feminism has accomplished, and to the women who are feminists for those reasons, he objects that women should have found another way, that they easily could have … but he cannot name what that alternative would have been. He insists that all feminists ultimately support cruelty to trans people. He rejects the significance of the wrongs feminism addresses because feminism recruits those to “demand a pass” for cruelty.

When she tells him that she understands that he is not a misogynistic bigot but she is worried about him making moves which enable misogyny, he objects that he does not have a misogynistic bone in his body, that many women are anti-feminists, that feminism deliberately encourages more misogyny to justify itself. When she walks through particular things he says, he says that she is making a dishonest feminist move, weaponizing accusations of misogyny to deflect criticism.

When she tells him that he could stand for trans liberation directly, without framing it as “anti-feminism”, he says he is following the lead of trans women who name feminists as the primary agents of their oppression.

When she tells him that he needs to tread carefully because misogynistic bigots, theocratic reactionaries, and fascists often style themselves as “anti-feminists”, he insists that he has never seen that.

Ted is just one among many “anti-feminists” like him Jane encounters. Every time she engages with trans liberation or feminism at all — and often when she just talks about women in any way — guys like Ted come out of the woodwork to insist that she supports the genocide of trans people.

She remains committed to trans liberation, but these constant slaps in the face make it hard for her engage with the movement as vigorously as she wants.

The point

# israel-palestine

This post is about ‘anti-Zionism’.

The analogy is imperfect in many ways. Zionism is the core ideology of a nation-state; feminism has nothing like that institutional power. There are forms of anti-Zionism which make a much stronger case than any form of anti-feminism. Trans liberation presents no threat to anyone; Palestinian liberation advocacy ranges from profoundly egalitarian to dangerously violent. I have a lot more sympathy for confused anti-Zionists than I would have for Ted, since Israel-Palestine is genuinely confusing. Et cetera.

And:

Most “anti-Zionists” I encounter do not understand what Zionism is and offer commentaries on it paralleling Ted’s absurd misunderstandings. They are dismissive of critique, even from people who share their commitment to Palestinian liberation. Most of these people are obviously not motivated by antisemitic bigotry but their “anti-Zionism” does antisemitism.

Bad on the merits. Bad for the cause.

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

A “Jewish state”?

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

In this long moment of crisis, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza, I am not invested in defending Zionism. But I do see a need to counter how many people misunderstand every wrong committed in the name of Zionism as an inevitable consequence of aims baked into Zionism at its core. That misunderstanding often rests on over-reading what Zionists mean by a “Jewish state” to cast Zionism as an inherently racist, unjust, and therefore illegitimate form of nationalism.

To pursue Palestinian liberation effectively, without slipping into implicit antisemitism, we must understand what Zionism is and is not.

• A state?
• Theocracy?
• Genocide?
• Apartheid?
• Minimum viable Zionism
• Ordinary Westphalian nationalism
• The point

Defining Zionism

There are many strains of Zionism. Individual Zionists vary in their thinking about what Zionism should entail. To define Zionism, we must name what all Zionists agree that Zionism means.

After the founding of Israel in 1947, Zionism means support for the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state in some form.

Thus much rests on what Zionists intend as a “Jewish state”; I like to refer to the vision shared among all Zionists as “minimum viable Zionism”.

Before describing that, let us first dispell important misconceptions.

A state?

Many assume that Zionism has always pursued a Westphalian nation-state: a soveriegn, geographically-bounded polity among the 200+ nation-states which we have divided the world into.

An understandable confusion. We have come to take the Westphalian order as normal. Zionists did found the state of Israel. Zionists now support Israel’s continued existence.

But it is an astonishing turn of historical contingency that Zionism eventually produced the state of Israel. At the founding of modern Zionism in response to the emerging Westphalian order the 1897 First Zionist Congress released the Basel Program manifesto, which offers a different definition:

Zionism seeks to establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law

At that time, Palestine was not a state, nor was it a country in the pre-Westphalian sense; “Palestine” named a region within the Ottoman Empire. The Empire was a very different entity from a Westphalian nation-state.

The “home” pursued by the Basel Program was not a euphemism for a nation-state. An oppressed ethnic minority carving out a soveriegn nation-state independent the Empire was wildly implausible. Many early Zionists saw a nation-state as not just unachievable but undesirable.

Early Zionists thus imagined an creating an ethnic enclave within the Empire, roughly analagous to the Pennsylvania Dutch, as we can see with the rest of the Basel Program (emphasis mine):

To achieve this goal, the Congress envisages the following means:

1. The expedient promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine.
2. The organization and bringing together of all Jews through local and general events, according to the laws of the various countries.
3. The strengthening of Jewish feeling and national consciousness.
4. Preparatory steps for obtaining the governmental approval which is necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose.

This early history does not matter much in understanding contemporary Zionism; the existence of the state of Israel reframed Zionism to mean supporting the state’s existence. But it matters a great deal in countering the misunderstanding that Zionism has contemporary Israel as its foundational vision.

Theocracy?

Many assume that Zionism means theocracy. An understandable confusion: Judaism is a religion.

But Jews can also be understood as an ethnic people, like Turks or Arabs or Aleuts or Kurds or countless other peoples. Many Jews do not practice the religion but do understand themselves as members of the Jewish ethnic community; I am one among them.

While Zionists often embrace Jewish religious poetics, Zionism has always very explicitly framed itself as a secular movement which addresses all Jews as a single ethnic people. Israel neither obeys nor exerts religious authority. Israeli society includes many with vigorous religious practice, including a few who do want a turn toward a theocratic Israel, but there are far more Israeli Jews who are not very observant, even not observant at all.

Zionism opposes theocracy.

Genocide?

Many assume that Zionism aspires to a society of only Jews, requiring a genocidal purge of gentiles.

Another understandable confusion. As I write this, Israel is deep into a genocidal effort to annex Gaza which has already killed over 80,000 people. Before the founding of Israel, Zionist militias killed and displaced many Arab Palestinians, which escalated in the 1948 Nakba to killing over 10,000 Palestinians and driving 80% of the Arab population of the newly-formed state of Israel from their homes. The West Bank is still subject to de facto occupation, seizing increasing amounts of territory for Jewish settlers. There have always been hardliner Zionists who do want a nation composed only of Jews through what is euphemistically called “ethnic cleansing”.

It does not excuse these horrors to say they do not define Zionism.

When Israel was founded, the Arab Palestinians who remained became citizens of the new state. Today, one in four citizens of Israel is a gentile, most of them Arab Palestinians. There have always been many Zionists who have vigorously opposed the murder and disenfranchisement of Palestinians. Israel has not only expanded the occupation of Gaza & the West Bank; at times they have rolled back settlements and other claims.

We must recognize how Zionists have done genocide. But Zionism does not mean genocide.

Apartheid?

Many assume that Zionism requires an apartheid state in which gentiles are denied equal legal rights & protections.

This is the most defensible confusion. Israel is now and always has been an apartheid state. Israel hardliners deny this by pointing to the big population of gentiles holding Israeli citizenship, but that is disingenous; gentiles have always been second-class citizens in countless ways, both in explicit legal inequities and in many more rights which are only equal on paper. Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank are not Israeli citizens and have been even more disenfranchised under the shadow of Israeli guns.

It does not excuse these and other real horrors to say that apartheid does not define Zionism. In the time of Zionist enclaves within the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, apartheid was not even conceivable. Since the founding of Israel, liberal Zionists have always fought hard for equality for gentiles; hardliners have always held the upper hand, but they do not deny that the liberals are Zionists.

We must recognize that Zionists have done apartheid. But Zionism does not mean apartheid.

Minimum viable Zionism (MVZ)

If a “Jewish state” of Israel does not require theocracy, genocide, or apartheid, what does define it?

The core vision which all Zionists agree on includes:

The continued existence of the Westphalian nation-state of Israel …

1. governed as a secular liberal democracy
2. where Jewish culture is ordinary (rather than exceptional as it is everywhere else)
3. inviting Jews from all backgrounds to become new citizens

Point 1 merits skepticism. Actual Israel — and all too many Actual Zionists — betray it. One cannot claim to have a “liberal democracy” while maintaining a de facto apartheid society. Too many Zionists square that circle by denying the injustices of Israel’s history & present, and by pursuing ugly measures to ensure a perpetual Jewish demographic majority in Israel.

But those disingenous Zionists would not work so hard at the lie that Israel is a true liberal democracy if Zionism were not defined by the ideal that Israel should be a liberal democracy. (They parallel bigots in the US denying how we fall short of our own creed of equality.) Hardliners consider liberal Zionists wrong and dangerously naïve, but do not deny that they are Zionists because Zionism does not refuse equality for gentiles.

Point 2 articulates what Zionism means by a “Jewish state”. All states have some shared culture without any authoritarian imposition by the government. Shinto shrines abound in Japan. Spain all but shuts down during seista time. Sugared avocado smoothies are readily available in Brazil. Such cultural norms are not authoritarian impositions on people who do not share those inclinations.

Readily available kosher food and workplaces closed for Yom Kippur do not constitute unjust inequalities.

Point 3 reflects the purpose inscribed in the Zionist project, a Jewish state as a haven for Jews around the world fleeing oppression and worse. All states choose whom they allow to easily claim citizenship. Many states make it much easier to become a citizen if one has ancestors from that country. Such rules can be a bit weird: Liechtenstein has a path to citizenship through winning a public municipal vote, and many countries open the door to people with particular skills.

That invitation is compatible with the obligation many people (including me) see to also offer citizenship to the descendents of Arab Palestinians displaced in the Nakba.

Israel’s invitation is no more peculiar or unjust than any nation’s immigration policy.

Yes, Israel as it exists now exercises what we might call “Jewish supremacism”, and there are strains of Zionism which want even worse. But that is not inherent in Zionism, as many Zionists stand against it.

The modest ethnic preferences of MVZ are compatible with respecting a truly sovereign Gaza & West Bank, with a gentile majority in Israel, with return & reparations for Palestinians displaced by the Nakba, with true equality for everyone in Israel. MVZ is compatible with a more egalitarian society than any realworld nation today.

An ordinary Westphalian nationalism

Anti-Zionists often fault Zionism as distinct from most other founding national principles in seeking an “ethnostate”, evoking an image of something comparable to a Klansman’s dreams of white nationalism. But MVZ is nothing like that.

Ideas like “the Spanish people” were invented to justify the Westphalian order, claiming that countries have sovereignty over their citizens and territory because the citizenry constitue A People with that territory as their homeland. Casting “Spain” as the nation-state of the “Spanish people” — asserting a primacy of that over Catalans and a distinction from “the Portuguese people” — asserts a relationship between ethnicity and nation. There is no bright line between those kinds of national foundations and minimum viable Zionism.

Early Zionists were fearful of the implications of the Westphalian world animated by these logics which was emerging in the late 19^th century. As a diaspora ethnic minority with a long history of suffering genocidal pogroms, they predicted that if Jews did not find a chair before the music stopped — a homeland — we would end up disenfranchised forever … at best. The events of the early 20^th century proved that Westphalian myths of unified national peoples were a terrible threat to diaspora ethnic minorities. Not only did that Westphalian sensibility animate the Nazi genocide of Jews (and another diaspora ethnic group, the Roma, as well as many others) that sensibility led other countries to close their doors to refugees from that genocide. Zionists rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered together with half the world’s Jewish population while other movements failed to save Jewish lives.

In that context, I cannot fault Zionism as a hopelessly poisoned nationalist project. The vision of a Jewish state I call “minimum viable Zionism” is no less legitimate than that of any other state … or of any other ethnic nationalist project like, say, Catalan independence.

The point

I do not count myself a Zionist. The past does not preclude the potential for a more just alternative to Israel. But the history which produced Zionism and then the state of Israel helps animate the respect I have for many Zionists. I respect Israelis whose Zionism consists simply of loving the only home they have ever known. I respect Zionists who defend the Zionist project as having rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews from genocide in Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and other countries while all other movements failed. I deeply respect liberal Zionists who have fought hard for a truly egalitarian Israel.

Nor do I count myself an anti-Zionist. The past does not preclude the potential for a truly just Israel. But the history of Israel — the horrors of the Nakba, the occupation of Gaza & the West Bank, the oppression of Arab citizens of Israel, the current genocide in Gaza — helps animate the respect I have for many anti-Zionists. I respect those whose anti-Zionism is just an extension of their opposition to the entire Westphalian order. (If they have a compelling alternative to offer, I am interested.) I respect Palestinians who use “anti-Zionism” to mean nothing more than resistence to the injustices they have suffered under the flag of the state of Israel; I wish they would frame their position as “Palestinian liberation” instead, but it is best to honor how they describe themselves.

I wrote this post because I do not respect anti-Zionism which misrepresents the Zionist project of a “Jewish state” as a distinctly illegitimate form of nationalism. There are many reasonable objections one may make to Zionism as an ideology and a movement, but misrepresenting what a “Jewish state” means to cast Zionism as an inherently unjust foundation for a nation is ultimately antisemitic.

Opting out

Henry Fudge’s essay Degeneracy Is A Symptom is bleak and clarifying.

Consider what it means to be a young adult in a developed economy, and consider it across the same three stages.

In the hedge stage of being alive (call it 1955 to roughly 1975 in the Anglosphere), a median wage covers the median life. You leave school, you get a job, you find a partner, you buy a house at three or four times your annual income, you have children, you save into a pension that your employer co-funds, and at the end you retire on something approaching your final salary. Cash flows cover principal. The future is, in the literal financial sense, affordable. The system is hedge-financed at the household level.

In the speculative stage (call it 1980 to roughly 2008), wages cover the running costs of a life but not the accumulation of the assets a life requires. You can pay your rent but you cannot accumulate a deposit at the rate house prices are rising. You can service your student loans but you cannot retire them. You take on more debt to bridge the gap. You roll your overdraft. You buy your house with a 95% mortgage at six times income because there is no other way to buy it. The system is functional so long as credit remains available and asset prices keep rising. You are speculatively financed. You are, in Minsky’s terms, depending on the music continuing.

In the Ponzi stage (call it now), wages do not cover even the running costs of the life that previous generations defined as normal. The deposit is unreachable; the family is unaffordable; the retirement is fictional; the career path that was supposed to deliver these things has been replaced by a sequence of contracts. The only way to access the reference standard of living is to acquire assets that rise faster than wages, which means either inheriting them, marrying them, or speculating into them. Productive labour, in the Ponzi stage, is a losing strategy by construction. You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.

What does a rational agent do in the Ponzi stage?

She does not work harder at the losing strategy. That would be irrational. She pivots to strategies with the property that their upside actually reaches the reference threshold, even if their expected value is poor. She buys lottery tickets, metaphorical and literal. She speculates on crypto. She gambles on football. She starts an OnlyFans. She day-trades. She marries for money. She sells her eggs. She joins a multi-level marketing scheme. She bets her redundancy on a single hand at the roulette wheel of life because the steady strategy has a known terminal value below the threshold she needs to clear.

Found by way of Silverman On Security, who says:

This is a great analysis of an interesting article. What goes unsaid, and I expect it is only because Paul doesn’t work in the discipline, is that what is being described has been known as Differential Social Organization, which is the beginnings of Social Learning Theory.

It grew out of the response of Sutherland, the father of modern criminology, to his colleagues at Chicago doing the neighborhood studies for the Cook County Courts. Those studies were an attempt to apply sociology & demography to questions of juvenile delinquency and other criminal activity.

As the lore goes, when Sutherland looked at his colleagues’ results he told them what they were really looking at was not normatively versus deviantly organized communities in different neighborhoods & areas (zones) of the city.

Rather, the neighborhoods & areas with the highest levels of delinquency, deviancy, and crime weren’t maladapted, they were differentially socially organized.

What he meant was that in order to be able to survive, function, and live under the socio-economic & socio-political conditions those Chicagoans were living in, it made perfect sense for men, teens, and boys to engage in criminal activity as there were few decent paying jobs. Since their was almost no reward to engaging in the licit economy, the risks of engaging in the illicit one were lower because it was pretty much that or nothing. Similar for women who chose to engage in sex work.

When I read the excerpts that Paul include, clicked through to the piece he’s responding to, and then his take on it my impression was this is a description of Differential Social Organization with two other, and related to each other, empirical sociological / criminological explanations.

Institutional Anomie, which is the macro- to meso-level modern variant of Weber’s classic anomie theory and General Strain Theory, which is the more micro- to meso- version of Weber’s classic. Specifically the alienation from each of the societies socio-economic, socio-political, and social realities.

Differential Social Organization is very apt and useful to look at what happens to states & societies and the groups & people within them under different socio-political, socio-economic, socio-religious, and societal conditions. I’ve used it in my work on Iraq & Afghanistan for the Army.

The information environment

I shoulda assembled a linkpile of resources long ago. For now, just one key one:

Nothing moves the needle

A reflection on how mainstream news media have been compromised … and why even when they do report what is happening it does not shape our poltics as it once did. Its reflection on Russian disinformation is particularly good, neither under- nor over-stating its relevance:

⋯ Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a troll farm in St. Petersburg— didn’t invent a new method. It merely industrialized Surkov’s domestic playbook and aimed it at a country with no immune system for it—the United States. The clearest illustration isn’t abstract: the IRA organized both a pro-Trump rally and a counter-protest, at the same place and time, in Houston in May 2016 — manufacturing both sides of a street confrontation among real Americans who had no idea the same operation was staging them against each other. That is Surkov’s method, exported and automated.

None of this is speculative. The Mueller Report and Volume 5 of Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2020 findings — written under Marco Rubio as the committee’s acting chairman — documented real coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. That’s not a theory. That’s the official record. What’s happened since is the payoff: a Republican Party that has largely stopped treating Kremlin-aligned talking points as disqualifying, and a pipeline — tracked in detail by researchers like Renee DiResta at Stanford — that launders Russian-state narratives into American conservative media until nobody can quite trace where a given talking point originated. It doesn’t matter anymore whether it started in Moscow. It’s ours now. There’s an old Soviet intelligence term for what Surkov practiced: reflexive control — shaping what an adversary believes to be true so thoroughly that the adversary defeats itself, freely, without ever feeling coerced.

The ascent of social media made Surkov’s method exponentially more effective. It led to the creation of thousands of siloed news platforms governed by algorithms which grew increasingly impenetrable. Before long, Russia and its American assets—knowingly or otherwise— began promoting so many conflicting and contradictory narratives that it was impossible for a single shared narrative to dominate the whole culture.

So that’s what I mean when I say freedom of the press doesn’t work anymore—at least, not the way we always assumed it did. It isn’t that the First Amendment stopped protecting reporters, or that fewer scoops are landing. It’s that Surkov’s method, and its automated heirs, did the one thing capable of neutralizing the whole system: they got to the audience before factual reality did.

Democratic socialism (n.)

I keep needing a short explainer.

What democratic socialism means

As Hobbes teaches, government emerges from the need for an explicit agent maintaining the social order. Public institutions ensure people’s security through military defense and criminal justice, resolve conflicts through law and courts, and adjudicate standards like weights & measures, among other things.

Democracy asserts that public institutions must serve everyone in society, for both moral and instrumental reasons. Elections, transparency to journalism, juries chosen by sortition, and other instruments create public accountability. Democracy contrasts with authoritarianism, in which the exercise of institutional power lacks accountability to the people it affects.

Socialism and capitalism contrast in how they approach capital: the factories, organizations, and other means by which we produce the goods & services which provide the material supports for people’s survival, dignity, and joy. Socialism includes capital in the sphere of public institutional responsibility & authority which government addresses; that can mean a range of things from state control of capital or institutions outside the state like worker-owned firms. Under capitalism, public institutions enforce private individuals’ ownership of capital, empowering them to direct society’s resources, inviting them to extract as much wealth for themselves as possible, making the overwhelming majority of people dependent on capital owners to pay them wages.

Thus democratic socialism — “demsoc” — means capital controlled by public institutions accountable to the people.

The absence of democratic socialist examples

We can point to societies combining democracy & capitalism, authoritarianism & capitalism, and authoritarianism & socialism, but we lack clear lasting examples of democracy & socialism. At the risk of evoking the BS of the “political compass”:

This unpopulated quadrant should give us pause, but we must not conclude that democratic socialism must be impossible.

Historical contingency does much to account for the gap. Modern democracy, industrialization, and capitalism all developed together in the 19^th century. That does not make the three tightly linked: there are cases of industrialization producing democratic capitalism or authoritarian capitalism or authoritarian socialism.

Democracy emerges slowly. Once established, it has never fallen to authoritarian socialism, but has been overthrown many times by authoritarian capitalism. Authoritarian socialism has only defeated a democratic socialist movement in the initial scramble after revolution against an authoritarian predecessor.

Leftists commonly argue that democratic capitalism has never developed into democratic socialism because democracies defuse socialist movements with social insurance concessions — pensions, education, healthcare, unemployment benefits, et cetera. This makes democratic socialist challenges to democratic capitalism a good bet even when they fail.

The dynamics of socialist failures

What do the failings of 20^th century authoritarian socialism teach us about the nature of socialism? Dare we hope that 21^st century democratic socialism will not produce the same horrors as 20^th century authoritarian socialism?

Much of the worst has unmistakable parallels in 20^th century authoritarian capitalism, demonstrating that the authoritarianism was the culprit. The rest of the worst appeared in the transition from pre-industrial conditions to industrialization, and has unmistakable parallels in cases where that transition led to capitalism, demonstrating that industrialization was the culprit.

Lesser — but still significant — problems emerge from the distributed sensing & computation challenges of a national-scale industrial economy.

Partly this too reflects authoritarianism rather than socialism, in creating strong incentives to deliver comforting lies to higher-ups. Inability to see what the economy actually does bedevils authoritarian capitalist societies no less than their authoritarian socialist counterparts.

And 20^th century socialists made a huge mistake in overestimating what central planning could accomplish. The early Soviet Union actually performed better than capitalist economies by many measures, coördinating efforts and eliminating redundancies in a way capitalist economies could not. But after picking the low-hanging fruit, it turned out that you can never have enough guys with pencils and green eyeshades in Moscow to optimize the zillion little coördination and quality control problems of a complex industrial economy as well as the highly motivated local experts at firms under capitalism could. While the Soviets clung to central planning, the capitalist West had far better and far more abundant consumer goods. Score one point for Hayek.

But socialist public authority does not necessarily mean central control. (Plus central planning seems to have a bright future: Walmart, Amazon, and other massive privately-held markets demonstrate that computing tech gives central planning an edge over constellations of small actors in the 21^st century.)

Democratic capitalism’s burden of proof

Democratically-accountable institutions enforcing private control of capital inherently compromises the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Capital owners’ wealth is …

• inequality in and of itself
• an instrument of authoritarian control over employees who depend on them for wages
• authoritarian control over people’s material conditions across society
• insulation from experiencing those material conditions
• disproportionate influence over the democratic process setting policy in other domains

Ascendent democratic capitalism animates our national & global condition during this moment, the greatest social / political crisis since the Second World War. In this crisis …

• fascism has returned from the grave
• the postwar geopolitical order is broken beyond repair
• day-to-day material conditions for most people in the US and the industrialized world at large have long followed a worsening trajectory, with no end in sight
• the material sustainability of human civilization is in jeopardy

We should not accept the democratic capitalist status quo by default because we have uncertainty about the potential for democratic socialism. Democratic captialism must make a positive case for itself, addressing both its real strengths and its demonstrated problems.

Democratic socialism does not require revolution

A democratic capitalist order can evolve toward democratic socialism through a series of policy experiments, like …

• Adding democratically-accountable members to corporate boards
• National sovereign wealth funds taking shares in private firms
• Democratically-accountable public banks as an alternative to private investors
• Public provision of goods & services entering markets without displacing private solutions: public housing, postal banking, familiar & novel utilities, key consumer goods, …

Constitutional daydreams

As one among many seeing a need (and opportunity) for big ideas to enable American reconstruction after this long, terrible moment, I have been daydreaming about what a new Constitutional order could look like. I don’t have any real expertise in comparative government, so I offer this as a playful-but-not-frivolous provocation.

If you do not like these ideas, I keep an index of thinking about Reconstruction which includes other comparable proposals.

A unicameral Congress

This proposal rests on an idea I have for replacing our first-past-the-post system with a novel system in which voters cast ranked ballots, producing a set of elected representatives each of whom holds different voting power in Congress, proportional to their voter support.

There are three distinct types of Congressional representatives.

County councilors

Each county elects five councilors. Though different counties have different populations, representation is equal because the counselors hold voting strength in Congress proportionate to the population who voted for them.

With 3000+ counties in the US, that would mean over 15,000 councilors. Best to have them cast votes electronically from their home county rather than send them to DC, making them available to their constituents.

Choose senators nationally

It is weird that the US has two geographically-determined sets of national representatives, so I propose choosing senators in a national election: everyone in the country votes, and the top ten candidates become senators.

These ten senators become the biggest movers in politics, as a group small enough to have an unstructured discussion in a room together. Each would present a policy package tentpole, creating a greater range of loci of power than just two (or a few) parties.

Having these Congressmembers elected nationally with proporational representation empowers significant but thinly-distributed minorities; if just 10% of the population shares interests but lack a majority in any particular area, they can still elect a senator.

Assemblors chosen by sortition

Have 50 Congressmembers chosen randomly from the citizenry, like a jury. Each would vote in Congress with the strength of ⅟50^th of the eligable voting population. Fifty is a big enough group to smooth out the bumps of weird individuals, but a enough that they could convene in a room together and build real relationships.

All three types of reps vote together

Rather than having the weird two-stage process of current American bicameralism, in this system all three types of reps would vote in Congress at the same time and have their proportionally-weighted votes tallied together. The numerous councilors would not overwhelm the few senators & assemblors because assemblors & senators vote with a strength of millions while each councilor has only the strength thousands of voters.

A measure supported by a strong majority of senators could pass if it was a bit short of a majorities of councilors & assemblors, et cetera.

A new type of supermajority

Parliamentary systems require various kinds of supermajority for particularly strong measures. F’rinstance, it currently takes a 2/3 majority in the Senate to ratify a treaty.

In this system, strong measures could require a majority among each of the three types of congressional representatives, harder to achieve than the normal single combined vote, but democratically powerful as it demonstrates majorities achieved through three structurally distinct representations of the polity.

Distinct powers for different classes of Congresspeople?

This system creates an implicit gauge of public support for assemblors. If assemblors do their job well, fewer people might bother to vote for senators & councilors, granting the assemblors more power in Congress. If assemblors do badly, citizens could respond with higher election turnout, outweighing assemblors’ power.

Some key particular functions may be assigned to one type of Congressional reps or another. I think it is probably wise if only senators can introduce new legislation. Judicial appointments might be approved by assemblors alone, since they most directly represent the citizenry.

Separating the classes Congresspeople for certain functions helps provide some intra-Congressional checks-and-balances. Perhaps senators do not vote on impeachment proceedings against other senators, with that determined by a supermajority of the body of councilors & assemblors, and so forth.

A parliamentary executive

Presidential systems have a host of problems. The US got lucky for a long time, but it seems our luck has run out.

Congress chooses a PM who serves as chief executive, much as the president serves now. Omit veto power over legislation and the pardon power. Give the PM a bit greater authority over foreign policy by doing stuff like lowering the threshold for Congress to approve treaties. Reduce (or maybe even eliminate) the process of Congressional approval of executive appointments, since the PM answers directly to Congress.

This makes the legislature stronger and the executive weaker; there are good reasons to want that.

I hope that the Congress as designed here would not be vulnerable to the deadlocks which prevent some parliamentary systems from forming a government. There is a lot of prior art in parliamentary systems to draw upon in preëmpting those problems in specific selection process Congress uses.

A ceremonial president

Constitutional monarchies have some advantages from having a ceremonial head-of-state distinct from the democratically-empowered chief executive. In the US the presidency awkwardly combines both functions, and we should not compromise the PM role that way. Given the poetry of the American presidency, it would be nice to also have a president to address this problem.

The president would deliver an annual State Of The Union address, award medals, et cetera. They would have full discretion over a constitutionally-fixed discretionary budget, pegged to maybe 0.1% of the national budget. I imagine a bouquet of ombudsman-like powers. The president would be able to compel Congress to vote on any question. I think the pardon power would present less conflict-of-interest trouble connected to this weaker role. I imagine that the president would continue to use the White House, but get cut off from all the extra business in the basement, which instead would be at the disposal of the PM with an office in the Old Executive Office Building.

I hate Ronald Reagan but he would have been great as this kind of ceremonial head-of-state. Even Donald Trump would have been relatively harmless in the role.

Choose the president with a national popular vote using ranked ballots where voters can list anyone they like, just as they do for senators and councilors. My electoral mechanism is not structured to produce a single victor, but there are a number of ways to determine one from ranked ballots … and with much lower stakes for the office, any method will do.

Unitary government with stronger counties

A council comprised of the councilors a county sends to Congress plus a set of local panelists chosen by sortition governs each county. The councilors vote both in the national Congress and in the local council, while the panelists would only vote on county governance. (This embraces Americans’ common false intuition that members of the House Of Representatives have responsibility for governance within their home districts.)

Rather than have our complex overlapping jurisdictional relationships between municipalties, counties, states, and the federal government, this is a unitary system which only structurally recognizes the national government and the counties. Power resides in the national government, which assigns power & responsibilities to the counties.

Counties may not raise funds; each county receives funding out of the national budget directly proportional to their population, at a rate set by Congress. This corrects stark inequities in the resources available to local government today.

Because councilors vote in Congress, the national government would not starve the counties of funding or authority … but senators & assemblors considering policy at the national scale would balance assemblors’ appetite.

States are grandfathered in as agreements between counties, and municipalities become instruments controlled by the counties, which county governments may alter or abolish. (This is why I refer to national rather than federal government, and the flag at the top of this post retains the basic form of the US flag but omits the stars representing states. We might call the reconstituted nation the “Republic Of America”.)

Judiciary

I have given judicial reform much less thought. This system is compatible with many proposals I have seen.

F’rinstance, the Supreme Court may work much the way it does now, but instead of being populated through our weird system of death and gerentocracy we appoint a new Justice each year and retire the longest-serving justice if that gives the Court more than nine Justices.

The PM might propose judicial appointments subject to approval by Congress, much as the president does in our current system … or perhaps assemblors alone ratify — even select — judges.

Anti-corruption measures

Any such surgery on the Constitution is a good time to get the money out of politics. There are many good, familiar proposals, like public funding of electoral campaigns. I have a radical proposal to add to the mix.

All elected officials — plus appointed officials controlling a budget greater than 10,000x the national median income — become a Public Citizen for life, with tight constraints on their personal finances. They get a pension of twice the national median income … but are forbidden to take any other money from anyone. The national government takes custody of their assets, though they get right of first refusal to rent their house at the market rate.

This would be expensive, and tricky to enforce, but would keep powerful government officials from governing to the benefit of monied interests and then cashing in after they serve. Plus it would encourage ordinary people to take on government service while deterring rich people!

Miscellany

I have a grab bag of other proposals —

Pre-commitment to legislation

Candidates for legislative office may make a binding promise to vote for specific legislation. If that law comes to a vote they don’t get a choice; they must cast the vote they promised. To avoid poison pill shenanigans, this would have to be bound to very specific legislative language.

Re-drawing county lines

With counties so important, it would be valuable to have a process for splitting, merging, and otherwise re-drawing county boundaries, rather than stay stuck with boundaries created under very different conditions. Elected councilors would hesitate to alter their jurisdiction and thereby risk losing their position, so changes need to come from somewhere else. Most unitary states give the national government the power to alter administrative units like counties.

It might also be sensible to let local panelists propose changes which then get put to a plebicite, which would require majority approval by the citizens in each region affected. So if County A wanted to take custody of Region B within County C, it would require a successful vote among voters in County A and Region B and the rump County C.

Pace layers

Assemblors have a lot of responsibility, so give them an eight-year term. In their first two years, an assemblor gets tutored in the operations of the government. In their third year, they participate in the assembly but do not have a vote. Then they serve as full members of the assembly for five years. Each year ten new assemblors join the pipeline and ten retire, giving the body of assemblors continuity.

The ranked-ballot system gives incumbents a significant credibility advantage, but having their voting power proportional to votes they receive means that each rep’s strength will wax and wane with each election. I think it would be wise to have the senate face an election every year, while counties might come up for election at a slower cadence, maybe every five years.

Since the presidency is much less fraught in this system, I don’t think the cadence matters; it might make sense to have Congress call Presidential elections at will, with a requirement to call them at least every eight years. I would not subject the president (or any elected position) to term limits, but I do want the presidency to be a role that honored political leaders would retire to, so past presidents are barred from holding any other government position.

No other elected positions

Voters choose only senators, councilors, and the president. I am skeptical that having a lot of elected positions creates more democratic accountability; fewer elected roles make accountability more clear, easier for inattentive citizens to keep track of.

Insulated accountability bodies

There are a few forms of accountability which should be protected from election pressures, as the judiciary is now in the US. I imagine a set of bodies with specific domains of interest and subpoena power. These would be appointed by the national assemblors, whose limited terms and varied backgrounds present the least temptation to corrode these bodies’ willingness to check irresponsbile exercise of power.

• Rather than have the constitutionality of legislation governed by a reactive Supreme Court, I would have a body committed to this function with a mandate to proactively check laws’ constitutionality. Congress would be able to demand a test of the constitutionality of proposed legislation.
• A body must audit Public Citizens to ensure that they obey the financial restrictions upon them.
• Government secrecy is necessary for certain purposes but invites abuse, so have a body able to inspect government programs and information, checking that secrecy is actually justified.
• Citizens need reporting of factual information about government operations beyond what journalists can do, as current bodies like the Congressional Budget Office do.

Explicitly name core principles

The Declaration of Independence names bedrock principles which should have the force of constitutional law. The preamble should include something like: “The institutions named here — and whatever actions those institutions undertake — derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed and from serving all of the people they govern: protecting their equal rights and dignity, meeting their human needs, enabling them to work toward common purpose.”

Today we must draw a line

This morning, President Trump threatened to commit massive genocide in Iran.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

Today we are all tested.

Congress and others in power

You bear greater responsibility than ordinary citizens. Getting this right was your job.

Anything short of active opposition to Trump and all his works from the beginning places you among the disgraced for the rest of your life: no voice, no power, no responsibility.

Anything short of vigorous effort to impeach President Trump before the sun sets means you belong in the dock at The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Citizens

Today I saw someone on social media say:

The only groups you can effectively blame for this are MAGA voters. The independents stupidly moved for economic reasons they thought this creep would fix. They basically did a Transformers unite and shit this horror on the rest of us.

It simply wouldn’t have happened without them.

A lot of minority voters voted for him, too. And I have seen people wishing harm on groups of people because some people in a group did that.

That is also fucked up. They also didn’t singlehandedly vote this man in.

It took groups of people to create this mess we are in. A lot of factors go into presidential election victories and movements(propaganda, voting restrictions, and deliberate ignorance baked into our citizenry).

So, if someone is like THE LEFT IS THE FAULT they can go to hell.

I concur that moral responsibility rests on Trump voters and people in positions of real power. Even the most prominent American leftists have just not had the power to bear meaningful responsibility. And I have repeatedly and publicly allowed for people who refused to vote:

I can respect saying “I just could not bring myself to vote for the lesser evil on this”. I vigorously disagree, but it is legitimate.

I meant it. But my grudging respect ends today.

And I have repeatedly and publicly extended this grace:

The bargain we offer to Trump voters is that we grant that it was an honest mistake if they admit that it was a mistake.

I meant it. But that ends today, too.

The new covenant

If you have not opposed Trump to even the minimal measure of voting at every opportunity for the only electoral candidates who viably contested him, today is your last chance to avoid permanent disgrace.

“Gosh, I made an honest mistake” no longer cuts it.

You must admit today that you got a vital and easy call catastrophically wrong. You must admit that you have no wisdom to offer on any subject until you have rigorously examined & altered your principles to make this error impossible for you in the future, and then demonstrated to the satisfaction of people who opposed Trump that you have gotten your head straight.

If you positively supported Trump with even just a ballot, you bear a moral debt which you have to work off with active effort to prevent another Trump ever threatening the world again.

Anything less is so morally reprehensible and dangerously stupid that anyone who ever credits anything you ever say or entrusts you with even the smallest measure of power or responsibility joins you in the ranks of the disgraced.

If you want anything more than teeth-gritting support for your fundamental rights as a human being, you must devote the rest of your life to vigorously supporting those of us who got it right in our labors to build a better world.

Murc’s Law

the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics

You’ve Probably Never Heard of “Murc’s Law”, But You’ve Seen It in Action Lots of Times assembles several useful commentaries. (It has a good reference to Romney bitterness.)

See also Campos’ Exception from The paradoxical limits of Murc’s law:

If the government is shut down, that is because the party that is against the government [the Republicans] has succeeded in achieving its reason for existence, which is to not have a government, or at least one that actually works.

Facts have a YIMBY bias

For now this is just a disorganized stub index. I keep needing resources about housing policy, so I’m going to start racking them up here.

Ned Resnikoff

A policy wonk I like.

Dissent | Supply and the Housing Crisis: A Debate

Debunking a lot of silly left-NIMBY arguments.

The Nation | A YIMBY Theory of Power

A response to criticism of the Abundance YIMBYs.

Roosevelt Institute | There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing

The vacant housing canard

Debunking NIMBYism: A Closer Look at Vacant Housing Units

A few key statistics showing that there is not a big resevoir of unoccupied housing which people could move into tomorrow.

Millions of U.S. Homes Are Sitting Vacant, So Why Are Homes Still So Expensive?

Another look at the numbers on vacant housing.

Why vacant homes won’t solve our housing shortage

Another overview of the fundamentals.

Building “luxury” housing

Many NIMBYs say that allowing more housing development will not bring down housing costs because developers will just build “luxury” housing. But even building fancy housing brings down housing costs, because it soaks up housing demand by affluent people who would otherwise bid up the cost of existing housing stock.

The Downmarket Impact of New Multifamily Housing: Evidence from a Honolulu Condo Tower

A case study showing that fancy new housing brings down the cost of all the housing nearby.

Curbing Rising Housing Costs: A Model-Based Policy Comparison

An academic paper with evidence that building new “luxury” housing might actually be the best way to bring down housing prices.

Policy

Beyond Skepticism: Data Confirms Auckland's Zoning Reforms Delivered on Housing Promises

A case study showing that zoning reform brought down housing costs.

California YIMBY | Restoring the California Dream

A comprehensive proposal.

Tax Incentives and the Supply of Low-Income Housing

A study showing that tax credits targeted at the creation of “affordable” housing is ineffective.

Pew | Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents

Increased supply lowers costs.

Politico | The left’s housing civil war is ending

YIMBYism is not neoliberalism.

Housing the unhoused

It turns out that high housing costs cause people to become unhoused, and the most effective policies to address houselessness are to lower housing costs and to just give people on the street stable housing.

Finland’s Zero Homeless Strategy: Lessons from a Success Story

An overview of a policy success.

Two encounters with the grift

I have an unwholesome interest in scams. Not because I romanticize them; because I cannot imagine devoting that level of effort when one could do something useful instead.

A call from a boiler room

One day back in the 20^th century I got a cold call from a young lady working in a boiler room somewhere. She had an Exciting Offer for me. She talked through her script with earnest, clumsy enthusiasm. I let her run for a minute, then gave her a couple of softball questions, which she fielded by awkwardly reading scripted answers. Then I took a guess.

“Is today your first day at this job?”

“Yeah, sorry, I’m still learning.”

“No harm done. You’re doing great. But can you tell me how your employer makes money from this?”

She started to paraphrase the rap from her script, but I interrupted her. “No, that is not how they make money.” Then I explained the scam to her.

She paused a long moment. “Wait. Really?”

“Yeah. Now, I don’t want to tell you what to do. Working this kind of job is a bummer. You wouldn’t have taken it if you didn’t really need the money.”

“I sure do.” She said it with conviction I was glad she could not muster when reading the script.

“So think about this. Your employer is lying to me in order to rip me off. Are you sure that they will keep the promises they made to you?”

“Oh.”

“Hang in there. And have a good day.”

“Thank you.”

I felt like a hero.

Short con on the street

One day I was walking up Powell Street in San Francisco, near Union Square, among the tourists. A man in a nice suit and no necktie approached me. He sheepishly confessed to being in a jam; things had gone sideways for him, his wife & kid were holed up in a hotel room, and he needed a little money to get his car and them back on the road.

He was good, but I made him work for it with some pointed questions. He had great answers, and he really sold the mix of anxiety and embarrassment. I gave him forty bucks, and he handled the blow beautifully — grateful and eager to go sort out his troubles. Worth every penny.

Maybe six or eight years later, I was walking up Powell again, and I saw him scouting the crowd; he was even wearing the same suit. I hoped I might get to see him work someone else. But instead he approached me. I understood him not recognizing me; the last time I had been clean-shaven, with my hair tied back, dressed casually, while this time I was beardy with my hair down and wore a good suit.

It was uncanny having him give me the exact same pitch again. I drew out my wallet, pulled out a couple of twenties, grinned, and said, “You told me the same story right here on Powell Street years ago; I gave you forty because I admired your craft. I’ll give you another forty now if you tell me why you marked me.”

He tried to bluff past it. He didn’t know what I was talking about, he had to get back to his wife and kid, blah blah blah.

“No, I already heard that one. But I really will pay to hear what about me got you to choose me as your mark,” I said cheerfully.

His demeanor changed. He was sorry he had bullshitted me. The reality was that he was in a different jam, but he figured the wife and kid thing would be more convincing. He started to lay out this whole different story.

“That’s not what I asked.” I waved the money. “Satisfy my curiosity, or don’t.”

His demeanor changed even more sharply. He was suddenly in tears. He was desperate because he was in trouble. He trembled. The guy was good. I feigned a sympathetic expression and enjoyed him working it for half a minute. But I pulled my hand with the money closer to me.

“Heartbreaking,” I said. “But not what I asked. It’s easy money. Do you want it? Tell me how you marked me.” I expected a lie, but was ready to enjoy one.

He stopped the shtick, suddenly and completely. He was expressionless, and for a moment he met my gaze with a psychopath’s dead eyes.

Then he just walked away.

Republic Dogs

Rescuing a classic from linkrot:

Republic Dogs

By Nathaniel Daw
Copyright 1994 and all that.

---

---

[Thrasymachus is tied up in a chair. Socrates is brandishing a gun in his face.]

Thrasymachus:
Don’t kill me, man!

Socrates:
Are you finished, fucker?

Thrasymachus:
Look, look, man, you can have my ten yoke of oxen. My virgin daughters? My pomegranite orchard?

Socrates:
You like pomegranites? Shit, motherfucker, I hear they’ve got a fuckin’ all-you-can-eat special going on on pomegranites where you’re headed.

Thrasymachus:
Don’t do it, Socrates. Be fair.

Socrates: [Suddenly contemplative]
Fair?

Thrasymachus:

[Sees an opportunity for survival]
Yeah, fair … think about my wife and children --

Socrates:
Would you say that to be fair is the same thing as to be just?

Thrasymachus:
What?

Socrates:
Well, I’m just a dull, wandering street philosopher, so I don’t understand quite where you’re headed with this particular line of reasoning. Perhaps [motions with gun] you could further elucidate your theory of justice.

Thrasymachus:
My theory? Of justice?

Socrates:
Yes. You do … have a theory of justice, don’t you?

Thrasymachus:
Uh …

Socrates:
Or perhaps you’d like to hear my theory.

Thrasymachus:
Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course, your theory. You have a theory?

Socrates:
Well, yes, I have been thinking a little about justice -- not of course, so deeply as could a wise sage like yourself. But I’ve had a little idea, an insignificant but troubling little idea, and it’s been bothering me a little, and I thought that maybe someone as smart as yourself could help convince me that it was wrong.

Thrasymachus:
Of course, I’ll do anything I can to help.

Socrates:
So you’d like to hear my theory?

Thrasymachus:
I’d be honored.

Socrates:
My humble little idea goes something like this. [He is suddenly extremely loud and violent. Roars:] Justice is only the will of the stronger. What do you think about that, asshole? [Slaps Thrasymachus across the face with his gun]

Thrasymachus:
Uh, uh, uh …

Socrates:
Come on … come on, you wanna try and disprove my theory, you weak little shit? Yeah? Yeah? Shit, I think I feel a proof coming on. [Shoots him.] Why, thank you Thrasymachus, you’ve certainly opened my eyes.

---

Narrator:
Thrasymachus. Alcibiades. Aristotle. Socrates -- are Quentin Tarantino’s Republic Dogs.

[Enter Alcibiades and Aristotle]

Aristotle:
So you’re saying you’d give Helen of Troy a foot massage?

Alcibiades:
Fuck yeah, in a minute.

Aristotle:
You’d touch her feet? She might be the most beautiful bitch since fucking Aphrodite, but trust me, her feet stink. And her armpits stink too. Just cuz she’s beautiful don’t mean she don’t smell like the rest of us. And don’t you go telling no deodorant story, either, cuz you know and I know it wasn’t invented during the Trojan war.

Alcibiades:
What, you wouldn’t do her?

Aristotle:
I didn’t say I wouldn’t do her. I said I wouldn’t give her a foot massage. I don’t dig on feet.

Alcibiades:
Well, what if before you did her you’d have to give her a foot massage to get her in the mood?

Aristotle:
Allow me to inquire, Alcibiades. What if you had to massage her armpits to get her in the mood?

Alcibiades:
Fuck you, Aristotle.

Socrates:
You guys have got it all wrong.

Alcibiades:
What, you don’t like foot massages either?

Socrates:
No, motherfucker, the Iliad, you’ve got the Iliad all wrong. Do you wanna know what the Iliad is about? Well, I’ll tell you what the Iliad is about. It ain’t about no bitches, that’s for fucking sure.

Alcibiades:
Sure it is. You’re saying Helen of Troy ain’t one hot bitch?

Socrates:
I’m not saying Helen of Troy ain’t a hot bitch, I’m saying the Iliad ain’t about her. She ain’t even in it. The Odyssey is about bitches, I’ll grant you that. But I’ll tell you what The Iliad is about. It’s about big boats. Didn’t you ever read the second Canto? Boats boats boats boats boats boats boats. Hence, the Trojan War.

Aristotle:
You’re full of shit.

Alcibiades:
Fuck yeah you are; the Iliad is about Achilles’ struggle with his own homosexuality.

Socrates:
Maybe I should frame my theory a bit more emphatically. [Drawing his gun.] Didn’t you ever hear of the face that launched a thousand … boats?

Alcibiades:
Uh …

Socrates:
WELL?

Alcibiades:
Yeah.

Socrates:
Well, how’d you like me to launch your face?

Alcibiades:
Uh …

Socrates:
Ahh, I guess that example cleared up all your objections then. [Points weapon at Aristotle] You don’t have any problems with that, do you?

Aristotle:
Hey, man, it’s cool. Cool. Boats are cool by me. I was just on a boat recently.

Socrates: [Putting away his gun.]
Well good for fucking you. This makes you special?

Aristotle:
From Mycinea.

Alcibiades:
What’s it like? I hear they do some crazy-ass shit there.

Aristotle:
Man, that place is like Mount-fucking-Olympus. Every night, they gather round the fire in certain legally designated areas, where government-licensed civil servants throw the roots of a domestically cultivated plant in the fire.

Socrates:
So fucking what?

Aristotle:
So the smoke makes them giddy and lighthearted as if they had drunk on wine, only they don’t have a headache in the morning, that’s fucking what.

Socrates:
That’s it, I’m fucking going. It’s the perfect fucking city.

Aristotle:
It ain’t the perfect fucking city.

Socrates:
You know a better city?

Aristotle:
No, I don’t know a better city, motherfucker, but that don’t mean fucking Mycinea is fucking perfect. “Perfect” doesn’t mean that there ain’t nothing better, it means perfect.

Socrates:
Can you explain that lofty idea in terms a base, wandering street philosopher like myself might be able to understand?

Aristotle:
Well, allow me to demonstrate. Let’s say there was an imaginary city, and all the people were divided into three groups. Let’s say I represent the Gold group, I’d be Mr. Gold, you, Socrates would be Mr. Silver, and, you, Alcibiades, Mr. Bronze.

Alcibiades:
Why do I have to be Mr. Bronze?

Aristotle:
Because it’s only a demonstration. So me, Gold, I’d be the philosopher king --

Alcibiades:
But why can’t I be the philosopher king? Look, Socrates, I’ll trade with you.

Aristotle:

[Draws a gun, fires a shot into the air,

and points it at Alcibiades]
Interrupt me again, motherfucker. Interrupt me again. Nobody’s trading with anybody. This is my allegory.

[Alcibiades gestures submission.]

Aristotle: [Putting away gun.]
So as the philosopher king, it would be my duty to keep seditious literature out of the city.

Socrates:
I got it. I understand.

Aristotle:
Shut up, motherfucker, how can you understand my perfect city when I haven’t explained it yet?

Socrates:
No, dickhead, not that, I understand what you were saying before, about perfection. It’s all about forms.

Aristotle:
Forms?

Socrates:
Yeah, motherfucker, forms. Like, something don’t have to physically exist for it to be perfect; it exists as the perfect ideal, the perfect form, beyond mortal comprehension.

Alcibiades:
Socrates, you’re supposed to pour your libations on the ground, not drink them till you’re talking like a crazy Bacchae bitch.

Socrates:
Normally, I’d be pouring libations with your spinal fluid right now, but since I’m feeling at peace with the universe I’ll try to enlighten your sorry ass instead. Imagine there’s this dark, underground cave.

Alcibiades:
Yeah?

Socrates:
And there’s this rapist-motherfucker, and he’s got this gimp, right, tied up in the cave. See that?

Aristotle:
Okay.

Socrates:
And this rapist, he’s a sick motherfucker, so let’s say one day he sends down a coupla pipe-hittin’ negroes to cut the gimp’s ear right off.

Alcibiades:
Cut his ear off?

Socrates:
Yeah, and gouge out his fucking eyes. Now wouldn’t you say that the ear and eye are the proper receptacles of the senses of sight and hearing, respecitively?

Alcibiades:
Clearly so.

Socrates:
So, moreover, would you not agree that this gimp’s senses are imperfect?

Aristotle:
Why, yes, Socrates, I suppose they would be a trifle damaged.

Socrates:
And what do things look like to someone with imperfect senses?

Alcibiades:
Dark?

Socrates:
No, motherfucker, nine letters, begins with “I.”

Aristotle:
Imperfect.

Socrates:
Bingo. So you’d say this gimp, you’d say this gimp motherfucker would be unable to perceive true perfection -- but that don’t mean it don’t exist. Now if you brought him out of the cave, into the light, things would be less dark, and his eyes might heal a little, he might begin to see a glimmer of light, thereby gaining the idea of true perfection --

Aristotle:
What kind of argument is that? Your theory of the forms rests on an arbitrary and vicious act of violence.

Socrates: [Draws his gun.]
Aristotle, you’re Plato’s student, I respect you, but I will put fucking bullets through your heart if you don’t take back what you said about me being violent now!

Aristotle: [Also drawing gun]
You shoot, you’ll be dining with Lord Hades tonight. I repeat. You kill me, your ass is eating pomegranite fucking casserole for the rest of eternity.

Alcibiades:
Shit, man, you’re acting like a bunch of fuckin’ Spartans. Am I the only philosopher around here?

Socrates and Aristotle: [To Alcibiades]
Shut up!

Alcibiades:
Guys, guys, calm down. Look, I’ve got it. Let’s have a symposium -- we can all drink wine and make speeches in praise of love.

Aristotle:
What are you, some kind of pansy?

Socrates:
Shoot that dipshit.

[Socrates and Aristotle turn in unison and shoot Alcibiades, then turn back and again aim at each other.]

Socrates: [To Aristotle]
Don’t think you’re getting off that easy. You ever read Plato?

Aristotle:
Of course.

Socrates:
There’s this little passage I got memorized that I like to recite in situations like this. It is a tale of a brave man, Er, who once died in war. On the twelfth day, as he was already laid out on the funeral pyre, he revived, and told what he had seen yonder. He said that after his soul had left him it travelled with many others until they came to a marvellous place, where there were two openings upward into heaven, and between them sat judges. These, when they had given judgment, ordered the just to go upward through the heavens by the opening on the right. The unjust they ordered to travel downward by the opening on the left. For all the wrongs they had done to any person they paid a tenfold penalty. Savage men, all fiery to look at bound their feet, hands and heads, and threw them down and beat them, tortured them on thorny bushes.

Aristotle:
What the fuck was that all about?

Socrates:
So, motherfucker, prepare to test the hypothesis! See, I’ve got it figured out, I’m the just man, and you’re the unjust man, my gun is the thorny bushes, and Mr. dead pansy here is the judge. Now DIE MOTHERFUC --

Aristotle:
But what if I’m the just man and you’re the unjust man and this dead dipshit is the thorny bushes?

Socrates:
Oh, uh …

Aristotle:
Or what if Alcibiades is the just man, and we’re both unjust men. And the thorny bushes are the judge?

Socrates:
Shit, well I guess that all depends on your definition of justice.

Aristotle:
Exactly my point. That was what I was working up to with my description of the perfect city, before I was so rudely interrupted.

Socrates:
Shit, I’m sorry. I don’t suppose you could explain it to me now?

Aristotle:
Only if you stop pointing that thing at me.

Socrates:
Well … all right.

[Both of them holster their guns.]

Aristotle:
Whew. That was exciting. [Patting him on the back,] Could I interest you in a drink?

Socrates:
One minute. I’ll meet you there.

[Aristotle starts to walk off]

Socrates:

[drawing his gun and pointing it

  at Aristotle’s back]
But first, how’d you like to hear my theory of justice?

[they both freeze. the end.]

One cheer for “‘AI’ art”?

I am generally skeptical of breathless “AI” boosterism. LLMs have given us some astonishing surprises in the last few years, and we can expect more surprises over the next few years at least, but it is preposterous to see artificial superintelligence is on the horizon. LLMs have differently-shaped strengths and limitations from familiar proceedural computing systems, but the contrasts with what we see from human cognition make it obvious that there are a lot of things humans do which they simply cannot.

I am generally disgusted by the disdain both for the arts and for artists in how “AI” boosters imagine replacing artists with robots. Surprising and weirdly impressive as developments in “‘AI’ art” art have been in the last few years, I cannot imagine thinking that “AI” is on a trajectory toward replacing novelists, painters, filmmakers, et cetera. I join those who refer to “‘AI’ art” as “slop” because of its deeply schlocky quality.

But I don’t want to be a one-dimensional “AI” hater, and have been challenging myself to think about ways these tools can be useful. So here are some ideas I am not sure are good, offered as a provocation to my thinking and others’.

Slightly better clip art?

Maybe “AI” illustrations are not a big problem because their distinctive janky quality signals what they are, meta-communicating I am using this as an ephemeral little instrument to communicate a simple intent, rather than as a subtle work.

When generative “AI” image tools were new, I experimented a bit. I made this little meme image quoting a Lou Reed song by asking “AI” to give me a “sneering Statue Of Liberty”. I am satisfied with it delivering a little something I could neither draw nor afford to pay an artist to do.

I think that plays because it is not a subtle work. A picture is worth a thousand words and I wouldn’t ask “‘AI’ art” to do that … but sometimes you just need an illustration worth less than a dozen words. There are plenty of bland corporate filler illustrations which express no profound human intent. I know using “AI” deprives illustrators of jobs making this stuff, but isn’t that the kind of elimination of toil we should embrace as enabling Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism?

Maybe the right regulatory solution to “AI” images is to lean into their janky soullessness. Might we force them into a few house styles so we always recognize that they were not created by an artist?

For the TTRPG table?

There is currently a fight among tabletop roleplaying game creators about the use of “‘AI’ art”. I join with those who advocate against the use of “AI” slop in rulebooks and other materials. But I have been thinking about a possible LLM-driven artbot for creating images on the fly for use during play in games like D&D which has the necessary scale to pay for artists to create big corpus of art used as training data.

They would have a bunch of reference illustrations of what halberds, swords, beholders, dwarves, fireballs, et cetera are supposed to look like plus tagged examples of a handful of “house styles” like Cozy Fantasy, Heavy Metal Album Cover, Heroic Pseudo-Realism, Medieval Woodcut-Ish so that it can render any of the Things in any of the Styles.

Published settings & adventures could include an artbot module of data about creatures, locations, items, NPCs, etc to support relevant illustrations.

Then a gamemaster could instruct the artbot tool to spit out images of what is happening in play: “Liddel The Rogue and Vadania The Druid face the kobolds in the Cave Of Dread” or whatever.

The artbot tool to do this would require real programming, not just prompt “engineering”. It would be important to create images which are consistent, which align with the plans for an adventure, et cetera.

My hope is that this kind of artbot would end up benefitting artists, producing an ecosystem with new jobs to create reference images to train it for an endless succession of adventures and sourcebooks. Software-mediated marketplaces like Etsy have enabled artists a bit, making it easier to sell stuff like commissioned character portraits; I imagine this hypothetical TTRPG artbot enabling new kinds of commissions between players and artists.

Maybe none of that would work! But this is the kind of thought experiment which keeps me from being an absolutist in opposing “AI” illustrations.

As an ingredient in mixed-media art?

Over on the Bluesky thread where I first articulated this idea, someone countered …

“Fully automated luxury gay space communism” should have a higher aspiration than to feed money to the VIC collective to torch miles of rainforest and fresh water to generate an image of partying seniors with 9 fingers per hand for a failing rural elder care program.

Put a tick more precisely I think a use case for LLMs of artists doing drafts and preliminary scaffolding for their sincere work is orders of magnitude more socially beneficial than for making corporate PowerPoint sloptent even more repellent & sloppier.

Indeed. Even my dumb little meme images seem useful to me as an instrument for a small purposeful comment.

The more substantive uses of “AI” I find interesting are artists using these tools as one among many instruments in composing something with intention and meaning, whether it is James Curico weaving “AI” elements into complex mixed-media artworks or Damien Walter using “AI” illustrations just to liven up a videoessay so it’s not just him being a talking head. Curico says:

I’ve had very good results in this direction, personally. Though it’s kind of a lose-lose talking about the process since on the one hand it’s “doesn’t matter if you spent 90 hours on it you still deserve the electric chair” and “what's the point if can’t do it with one prompt?”