Where are the Augurs?

Originally, the Romans were seven hilltop villages under Etruscan domination. The nominally Roman deities Minerva, Mercury, and Vulcan were Etruscan. The Romans eventually ascended, absorbing their Tuscan, Latin, Samnite, and Greek neighbors.

The words in red come from Latin. This is based on a poster
in a classroom at Lincoln High School in Cleveland where
Nida Glick taught Latin for many years before my time.
(During WWII, she was a cryptologist. See her biography at
 https://www.military.com/coast-guard/lt-cmdr-nida-glick-uscgr.html )

The Roman Senate was only the topmost assembly. While the Roman Senate was culturally conservative, it also could be fickle when making and repealing laws. As the republic matured over decades, lifetimes, and centuries, young men ascended through increasingly responsible (and therefore powerful) appointments in public service. Being the moneyer for two years let you get your name out there for people to see, typically by honoring the public service of an ancestor.

 

Jean-Antoine Houdon's George Washington (left)
and Horatio Greensnborough's George Washington (right).
Washington was called "The Father of His Country" by
people who had been educated to read Latin.

When political conservatives insist that we are a republic and not a democracy, they are glossing over some contextual facts. It is true that in the Athenian assembly citizens voted directly—and they could change their collective minds. If a law remained in force, it was transcribed from painted words on wood to being carved in stone. It is also true, though, that the assembly voted to install officials in charge of the harbor, the mint, etc. On the other hand, Rome had a different tradition. 

 

Imperial Rome continued the fiction of being a republic and not a kingdom. The emperor (imperator: military commander-in-chief) was the “first citizen” and one of two consuls, and often granted the title “father of his country. ” Around the head on the obverses of many denarius coins of the empire the abbreviation PP stands for Pater Patriae: father of his country. But it refers to a deeper tradition of privilege (privis + legis = private law), when the senior elder of a family held life-and-death ownership over everyone on the farm. 

The coins of Roman emperors also give their years of consulship: COS III, for example, meaning that the Senate had re-elected them to their third term of office. Silver coins generally came from the private holdings of the imperator. The Senate issued the official copper coins of the government. The abbreviation SC meant Senatus Consulto. 

Copper sestertius of Marcus Aurelius.
Minerva with Owl and S C.

Some political conservatives claim to be Constitution originalists who insist that today we should return the intentions of 1789. At that time, political parties were private associations, not public institutions. Even when parties first erupted, conservative Anglophile Federalists versus liberal Francophile Republicans, the Vice President and President were elected separately and could be from different parties. 

This one-ounce silver commemorative issued by the
U.S. Mint would have spoken well to ancient Romans
with both the personification Libertas and the eagle of Jupiter  
carrying olive branches and its mottoes and legends: 
Liberty, United States,
E Pluribus Unum.
The numerals would be foreign to them
but they could sound out the letters.

Today, the VP is still the President of the Senate but seldom sits there, giving over the daily work to a president pro tempore, chosen by the Senate. You have to wonder what life would be like with President Donald Trump and President of the Senate Kamala Harris. President Harris (her proper title under the original Constitution) would vote as a senator in case of tie balloting. 

 

Previously on Necessary Facts

Etruscans and Americans 

The Cure for a Failing Empire 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

The Mercury Dime 

You Have No Right ...

Following the logic of the U.S. Supreme Court in its recent “abortion” decision (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), although you do have an explicit right to bear and keep arms, you have no implied right to a bulletproof vest. You have a First Amendment guarantee to publish whatever you want, but no implied right to read whatever you want. Because nothing in the Sixth or Seventh Amendments defines how many people are empaneled on a jury one person can be a jury. The list goes on.

 

These are among the many specious arguments put forward by the Court: 

The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, but several constitutional provisions have been offered as potential homes for an implicit constitutional right. Roe held that the abortion right is part of a right to privacy that springs from the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. See 410 U. S., at 152–153. The Casey Court grounded its decision solely on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Others have suggested that support can be found in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, but that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the heightened scrutiny that applies to such classifications.

[...]

The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition. The underlying theory on which Casey rested—that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for “liberty”—has long been controversial.

The Court’s decisions have held that the Due Process Clause protects two categories of substantive rights—those rights guaranteed by the first eight Amendments to the Constitution and those rights deemed fundamental that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.

[...]

Finally, the Court considers whether a right to obtain an abortion is part of a broader entrenched right that is supported by other precedents. The Court concludes the right to obtain an abortion cannot be justified as a component of such a right. Attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Casey, 505 U. S., at 851. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.

Syllabus, DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, No. 19–1392. Argued December 1, 2021—Decided June 24, 2022.

In the logic of the court, because extra-marital and non-marital relationships have no historic support in US law, they can be outlawed today (or tomorrow). By the last sentence above, the fact that a substance is ruled "illegal" by legislation closes your right to challenge that law. The justices of the Supreme Court may know prostitution when they see it. I am not sure how it is different from "dinner and a movie" -- or marriage. 

 

You have no right to leave the United States or to travel within them. 

 

Just as medical devices are regulated and their ownership, possession, and use are controlled by law, so, too can any instrument or tool be circumscribed: electrophoresis, polymerase chain reactions, spectroscopes, microscopes, telescopes, radios, televisions, … In fact, radios have almost 100 years of regulation around them and nothing in the Constitution or US history establishes your right to a radio (television, computer). 

Whether a computer is a “press” would be an argument before a Court that seems well disposed to limiting any claims not supported by explicit text in the original documents of 1789 or 1868. 

Can a state require the licensing of a musical instrument?  

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

 

AMENDMENT XIV

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14th Amendment notwithstanding, states had laws against marriages across racial lines.  (Personally, I find no scientific evidence for the existence of "race" as a characteristic of human beings. Most of the rest of the world seems to disagree with me.)

“The first ever anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage. In a speech in Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people". By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes. By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states. While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his relationship with a white woman, actress Kim Novak. In 1958, Davis briefly married a black woman, actress and dancer Loray White, to protect himself from mob violence. 

“In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Richard and Mildred Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"— or vice versa—each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years. In 1967 the law was ruled unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

In a statement of sheer ignorance, Vice President Kamala Harris told NPR: “This [Dobbs v. Jackson] is the first time in the history of our country that the United States Supreme Court has taken a constitutional right that was recognized …” (Interview with Asma Khalid 28 June 2022 here.) It absolutely was not. To be generous, let us allow that Vice President Harris misspoke.

 

It was the law of the land that no Asian could become a US citizen. That fact was cited by “the great dissenter” Justice John Marshall Harlan in his reply to the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling affirming racial segregation. Harlan noted that by law, an Asian, who could not become a citizen would be allowed to ride in a railway carriage with White people, though a Colored person, born here, an Army veteran, perhaps, could not. 

World War I US Army veteran Bhagat Thind Singh was denied his citizenship. The Court affirmed that racially, as an Aryan, Singh was “White” but that to the common man of America, he was an Asian and therefore ineligible for citizenship. 

 

In 1935, Jehovah’s Witness Christians in Minersville, Pennsylvania, refused to salute the flag in a pledge of allegiance ceremony. They were expelled from school. In 1940, the Supreme Court upheld the decision: Minersville School District v. Gobitis. Freedom of religion is not absolute, the Court said, but is subsidiary to the need for national unity and therefore national defense. That decision was overturned in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). 

The fact remains - contrary to the opinion of the Vice President - that SCOTUS has taken away rights from people.

While the First Amendment promises freedom of religion, there is no explicit right to freedom from religion. While the Federal government is barred from establishing a national religion, states can and have (Massachusetts and Virginia) had their own government-supported churches. 

 

About 30 years ago, it occurred to me that if abortion takes a human life and is therefore murder, then a miscarriage must be manslaughter. I am pretty sure that I offered it as an argument to libertarians and progressives at social gatherings and was met with blank stares. It seems to have sunk in. (NPR here: Losing a pregnancy could land you in jail in post-Roe America.) You would have to prove that you were not negligent, that you obtained pre-natal care and followed the regimen prescribed for you. Absent that, you are negligent. 

I do not understand why "a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification" except, perhaps, because men are also prohibited from terminating their pregnancies, just as the rich and poor alike are forbidden to sleep under bridges. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The GOP as Pushy Beggars 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

Ayn Rand versus Conservatives 

The Science of Liberty

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing Bogus Arguments 

 

A Socratic Mob

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. -- The Federalist No. 55

Another general remark to be made is, that the ratio between the representatives and the people ought not to be the same where the latter are very numerous as where they are very few. Were the representatives in Virginia to be regulated by the standard in Rhode Island, they would, at this time, amount to between four and five hundred; and twenty or thirty years hence, to a thousand. On the other hand, the ratio of Pennsylvania, if applied to the State of Delaware, would reduce the representative assembly of the latter to seven or eight members. Nothing can be more fallacious than to found our political calculations on arithmetical principles. Sixty or seventy men may be more properly trusted with a given degree of power than six or seven. But it does not follow that six or seven hundred would be proportionably a better depositary. And if we carry on the supposition to six or seven thousand, the whole reasoning ought to be reversed. The truth is, that in all cases a certain number at least seems to be necessary to secure the benefits of free consultation and discussion, and to guard against too easy a combination for improper purposes; as, on the other hand, the number ought at most to be kept within a certain limit, in order to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a multitude. In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

FEDERALIST No. 55

"The Total Number of the House of Representatives"

From the New York Packet. 

Friday, February 15, 1788. 

Alexander Hamilton or James Madison

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Why Democracy is Difficult 

Politics and the Inverse Square Law

I Quit Meetup

Michael Shermer's Moral Arc

The Science of Liberty

Toxic Leadership

“You’re fired!” Pres. Donald Trump not only cannot get along with the people he hires, he denies them afterward. He called Gen. Jim Mattis “over-rated.” If we did not know Donald Trump from his own publicity about his success in real estate (The Art of the Deal, Random House, 1987), then his rise as a media personality should have warned us that he is not someone to take responsibility for his actions. 

March 13, 2020. Remarks and Press Conference on the Coronovirus outbreak

Q    Thank you so much, Mr. President.  Dr. Fauci said earlier this week that the lag in testing was, in fact, “a failing.”  Do you take responsibility for that?

And when can you guarantee that every single American who needs a test will be able to have a test?  What’s the date of that?

THE PRESIDENT:  Yeah, no, I don’t take responsibility at all, because we were given a — a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations, and specifications from a different time.  It wasn’t meant for this kind of an event with the kind of numbers that we’re talking about.  And what we’ve done is redesigned it very quickly with the help of the people behind me.  And we’re now in very, very strong shape.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-conference-3/

This is President Trump during an online meeting with state governors. Perhaps he had something else going on in his mind that made him feel defensive, but when I caught this image, he was listening to Gov. Larry Hogan, Republican, of Maryland, who was thanking him. 

GOVERNOR HOGAN:  Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, this is Larry Hogan, Chairman of the NGA.  First of all, I just want to thank you so much for this call today and I want to thank you for the great communication that you've had with all of the governors over the past few weeks.  It's been tremendous.

Mr. President, thank you for signing the second stimulus last night and for your ongoing efforts to mitigate the economic impact that we're all facing.  And thank you so much for appointing Vice President Pence, a former governor, to lead this crisis.  He has been terrific in working with all of us and reaching out to us.

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, Larry.

GOVERNOR HOGAN:  Yesterday, yesterday, we had a meeting of all of the governors at NGA, prior to this call.  And, you know, we were getting a lot--you're getting a lot of input--  you're being bombarded by 50 different people with different questions.  We try to consolidate it down to, kind of, a group of concerns that all of the governors agreed on were, sort of, our priorities.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-video-teleconference-governors-covid-19/

In the Middle Ages, military authority and civil authority were identical. As Europe reawakened, the military was subordinated to civilian control. Ever less often did dukes, kings, and emperors lead their troops into battle.The capture of Napoleon III at Sedan in 1871 was the dunce’s after school lesson. And military dictatorships are notoriously unsuccessful. So, the modern army carries out the orders it is given. The Second Gulf War was not just winnable: it was won. The fifth largest army in the world melted and evaporated. We then met them again in a new fog of war, a war that could not be won. Sometimes, being brilliantly intelligent is just not enough. (The Fourth Star previously on NecessaryFacts reviewed here.) 

But Pres. Donald Trump is not brilliant. People like him who become leaders need strong teams. Donald Trump never learned how to build a team. He just appoints people to jobs and fires them when they disagree with him. We are living through the consequences of that.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Leader's Bookshelf 

Leadership 

Extreme Ownership: How the Navy SEALs Lead and Win 

Make Your Bed 

Team of Teams 

New Plate and Stickers

Having retired from the Texas State Guard, the time came to change the messages on my car.

The State of Texas grants a long list of specialty plates for those who have served. Federal military veterans from all branches can display their highest honors with Bronze Star and Purple Heart among many others. Disabled veterans have their own serial numbers (DV-) as well as the message.

I designed and paid for the central bumper sticker:
ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE
LIVING THE DREAM
SERVING TEXAS
I had a hundred run off and then distributed some to my buddies in the TXSG, donating the bulk of the inventory to our "Country Store" retail operation run by the T-4 (Logistics) shop.

The Barlett for President sticker came from a West Wing fan site, of course. I wish that I lived in that universe. We were enthralled by the characters who were working the most important jobs of their lives. Even most of the Republicans were admirable.




My goal here is to change the messages periodically. In the waiting file, I have "Who is John Galt" and " I (heart) Capitalism" among others.

The new license plate is a chemical formula for urea. It can be NH2-CO-NH2 or CO(NH2)2 or other representations. In 1828, urea was the first organic compound made in a laboratory entirely from inorganic components. (See Wikipedia here.) Among other achievements, its synthesis supposedly disproved the theory of vitalism. Vitalism posits that "life" is an ineffable and irreducible quality. I am not sure that I accept that, but I am sure that organic compounds can be found in stellar nebulae. I do not know how strings of hydrocarbons become living organisms. The empirical evidence is nonetheless unarguable.

To the right of Question Authority is "What do you geek?" It was a campaign from the City of Austin Public Library last year to promote a wide range of interesting and curious passions from a diverse array of representational patrons. (They were real people. I am just not sure that they were truly library patrons rather than professional models.) It now eclipses the little square which read "Bring them Back Alive" (a promotion of the American Automobile Association) though in Hungarian. The AAA gave them out in many languages.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Centralization and the Inverse Square Law
Politics and the Inverse Square Law
Gregory M. Browne's Necessary Factual Truths
The Problem of Induction: Karl Popper and His Enemies

I am not Voting in State Elections

I am proud of my voting record. I show up for primaries. I never cast a vote without an opinion: if I do not know anything about the candidates, then I do not choose among them. I always vote for the candidate, never for the party. (I also contribute money to campaigns, but that is another topic.) This time around, I am not voting in state elections. The reason why is that I am currently serving in the Texas State Guard. Although I have been in for four years, I never considered the arguments before. Now I believe that those who serve in the government should not vote. We in the Texas State Guard are permanent, part-time employees of the State of Texas. Therefore, I will not vote on state office candidates or state ballot proposals. 

As is typical for me, several lines of reasoning came together to form a truth. We have over 300 proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. The Binomial Theorem builds Pascal’s Triangle. The circumference of a circle, the area of a circle, the surface area of a sphere, and the volume of a sphere were known as synthetic truths for two thousand years before they could be derived analytically by algebra and calculus. A is A. Contradictions do not exist because contradictions cannot exist.

The first line of reasoning came from the cinematic version of Starship Troopers. There, the writers moved a scene from the closing episodes to the opening. In the book (reviewed here), Juan Rico is in officer candidate school when he is presented with a Socratic inquiry on the subject. In the movie, he gets quizzed in high school. In the film, it is short and direct: We require military service as a pre-condition for full citizenship because when you vote, you call upon the full power of the state to do your bidding; and no one should do that who does not understand the consequences. 

The corollary is not stated: as long as you are serving, you have not completed your term of service. And if war is declared, you serve for the duration without voting.

 

Generals Grant, Marshall, Patton, and Eisenhower
did not vote while serving.

In the real world of planet Earth, among the soldiers who did not vote while in uniform were Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Lt. Gen. George Patton, Gen. George Marshall, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gen. David Petraeus, and Gen. Martin Dempsey. That array came to me from a New York Times op-ed piece by an Army major: “I Fight for Your Right to Vote. But I Won’t do it Myself.” by M. I. Cavanaugh, New York Times, Op-Ed, October 19, 2016, available online here.  

In Good Company Among Non-Voters

 The broad argument there is that politics divides people. “One 2010 study found that over a quarter of military officers reported that another officer tried to influence their vote.”

Statistical surveys of the military show that in the enlisted ranks, Democrats, liberals, Republicans, conservatives, independents, and the uninvolved tend to reflect the American public: we are evenly split and separated by a healthy margin of non-conformists. Within the officer corps, the list to starboard is clear, but even so, about 20% of West Point cadets and about 20% of lieutenants self-identify as liberal or Democrat. The higher you go, the fewer of those you find. 

Whether it is from wisdom or differential selection is not clear. What is clear is that Republicans and conservatives tend to be more vocal in the workplace, though, ironically, less materially committed in real political life. Even so, especially now, both parties put up a military front whenever they can by using people in uniform as symbols for their platforms. Everyone in the military wants more government money spent on the military. Not everyone in uniform wants a border wall or open borders. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Do You Know Your Military?

Politics and the Inverse Square Law 

Why Democracy is Difficult 

A Critic Meets the Military 

Michael Shermer's Moral Arc

The 475 pages are a quick read because it is so easy to agree with the many assertions of fact and moral claims. Also, the typography - extra leading between lines - makes reading this into a downhill jog. The author founded Skeptic magazine and contributes to Scientific American. And he is a political liberal, carrying on the program of the Enlightenment. Moreover, the entire presentation is wholly compatible with the intentions of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

That may well seem paradoxical to both conservatives and progressives for whom reason, reality, ethics, politics, and economics are unrelated. Religious fundamentalists and academic postmodernists both deny the validity of science. While both camps claim the vocabulary of political freedom for their headlines and rubrics, their narratives quickly devolve into further controls and harsher punishments for their respective enemies. Both are racists; they just favor different groups. Both would quickly constrain and ultimately abolish the open global market. 

The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason
Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom
by Michael Shermer (Henry Holt and Company, 2015).

“As I documented in The Mind of the Market, trade breaks down the natural animosity between strangers while simultaneously elevating trust between them, and as the economist Paul Zak has demonstrated, trust is among the most powerful factors affecting economic growth.” (page 126)

“The effects of trade have been documented in the real world as well as in the lab. In a 2010 study published in Science titled “Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” the psychologist Joseph Henrich and his colleagues engaged more than two thousand people in fifteen small communities around the world in two-player exchange games in which one player is given a sum of money equivalent to a day’s pay and is allowed to keep or share some of it, or all of it, with another person.  You might think that most people would just keep all the money, but in fact, the scientists discovered that people in hunter-gather communities shared about 25 percent, while people in societies who regularly engage in trade gave away about 45 percent.  Although religion was a modest factor in making people more generous, the strongest predictor was “market integration” defined as “the percentage of a household’s total calories that were purchased from the market, as opposed to homegrown, hunted, or fished.”  (page 127) (See "Success of the WEIRD People" on this blog for a review of the wider study.)

That is especially telling as both preppers and greens advocate for economic and ecological self-sufficiency, living from the land and close to the Earth. 

Left: one person, one day;
slow changes over 100,000 years.
Right: Very many people,
very many per day. Rapid changes
over 20 years and still evolving.

Shermer goes into some statistical detail demonstrating that trade leads to democracy, and democratic government lessens the likelihood and damages of war.  He does the same for domestic war, that is, for crime, showing a decrease in violent crime and a concomitant decline in capital punishment.

  

The economics of capitalism are inseparable from the politics of equality, which in turn rest on the epistemology of reason.  Instead, the conservatives of the 20^th century ignored or fought against every opportunity for progress. They still do so today, echoing the protests of Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck, that change is not natural.

On the other hand, Ayn Rand insisted that politics rests on morality which depends on epistemology. For her, the significant struggles were about the theory of knowledge.  Shermer devotes a chapter to the problem of free will, “10: Moral Freedom and Responsibility.”  I believe that ultimately, he does not answer the question.  But he does encase it in four replies: the modular mind; free won’t; degrees of moral freedom; choice as part of the causal net. The facts that he marshals are interesting, though no one is compelling. That, perhaps, is his strongest implicit argument. He never says it, but his approach defeats the attempts at reduction. You cannot have free will, the argument goes, because each action has a cause, and so on…  Shermer cites physiological studies of brain activity to show that your mind is more complicated than that, working deeply in parallel networks, not sequential steps.  And at several junctions, the “you” that is “you” has the ability to say “no” to redirect your own thoughts.  Usually.  He does examine several severe cases of psychopathic behavior and shows them to be materially caused by cephalic defect.  That only raises more questions.  But to me the important feature was recognizing that the essence of material progress is good thinking.

“Again, I am not arguing that reason alone will get us there; we need legislation and laws to enforce civil rights, and a strong police and military to back up the state’s claim to hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force to back up those laws. But those forces are themselves premised on being grounded in reason, and the legislation is backed by rational arguments.” (page 257)

 

In Chapter 12, Shermer outlines his “Protopia” not the impossible Utopia, but the world of the actual present in which things are getting better.  Discussing income inequality, for instance, he demonstrates via IRS statistics that in America we still have social mobility. Some of the poorest rise and some of the richest fall, even as most of us remain in the middle three quintiles for most of our lives. “… 60 percent of those in the top 1 percent in the beginning year of each person had dropped to a lower centile by the 10^th year.  Less than one-fourth of the individuals in the 1/100^th percent in 1996 remained in that in 2005.” (Citing a report from the National Tax Journal.)

Shermer became a scientist late his academic career. His doctoral dissertation (Clarmont Graduate University) was a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace.  However, Shermer was at first a fundamentalist Christian. Not raised that way, he chose it as a teenager. Only the strict requirements Pepperdine for studies in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic kept him from pursuing a D. Th. He was interested in psychology, but although a behaviorist, he was not interested in lab rats. He eventually settled on studying the history of science.  He later produced and hosted Exploring the Unknown for Fox TV.

That lays some foundation for Chapter 4: Why Religion is not the Source of Moral Progress.  He joins Christopher Hitchens (cited twice in that chapter) in a complete refutation of any claim to material or moral value in religion.  Shermer presents two pages of graphs correlating religiosity positively with divorce, homicide, abortion, and suicide.  The narrative only underscores the fact that religion has not led  us to our material comfort or self-satisfied happiness.

The essential arguments in this book that are so easily accepted by the right wing libertarians of the 21^st century condemn the traditionalist conservatives of the 20^th century.  Ending racial prejudice – even the very idea of “race” – recognizing social equality independent of sex (or gender), and abandoning the irrationality of superstition (especially from self-identified “fundamentalists”) should have been the agenda of the Republican Party. But the GOP never understood individualism; and the Democrats never perceived individuals apart from their special interest groups.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Four Books about Bad Science

Science versus Common Sense

World Peace Through Massive Retaliation

god is not Great

Reflections on the Sokal Affair

Absolutes and Objectives

The Rational Optimist and the Grand Complication

Book Review: Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny"

This is a thoughtful, thought-provoking set of aphorisms and reflections.  As much as I enjoyed it – and believe that I benefited from reading it three times – I have to ask if the author would have written it had Hillary Clinton been elected president.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
by Timothy Snyder,
Tim Duggin Books (Penguin Random House LLC),
2017; 126 pages, $7.95.

“History does not repeat but it does instruct.” (page 9). 

“History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To  understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible not for everything, but for something.” (125)

Snyder’s thesis is that Donald Trump represents a new fascism. Snyder includes  aspects of communism and Nazism, as well, acknowledging that all three are variants of the same collectivism of the early 20^th century.  A couple of warnings do apply to Democrat Party politicians; and at least one nice nod went to the unnamed George H. W. Bush for his “thousand points of light.” But Snyder’s target is Donald Trump.  And I have to agree, if only because Trump is the President, and, whatever her foibles, Clinton is not.

None of the quotations or citations are referenced; the book has no footnotes or end notes.  However, the writing is unassailable with nice segues across the chapters.  Snyder counsels us to be our own investigative reporters, to check stories, rather than just accepting what we want to view and believe.  Snyder also warns us to be wary of sound-bites out of context. He then commits both errors near the end of the book.

Explaining why Donald Trump is a nationalist, but not a patriot (which I accept), Snyder writes that Trump wants to return to the economic chaos of the 1930s:

The president himself has described a regime change in the style of the 1930s as the solution to the problems of the present: “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster.” What we need, he thinks, are “riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.” (page 123)

So, I googled the statement, and found that it was made on February 10, 2014 about 6:36 AM on "Fox & Friends."  Then, I found a plausible interpretation from Snopes.  I checked four other claims Snyder made, and all of them were true. In any case, the quote above was unreferenced and taken out of context.

Chapter 6: Be wary of paramilitaries

He does not identify the Occupy movement of the left as a paramilitary, but neither does he dwell on the many “citizen militias” of the right. Snyder’s concern is with the crowd control at the Trump campaign rallies in 2016.  I found that less salient. Hecklers are there to disrupt, not to engage in dialog. In effect, they are thieves who violate property rights, denying access to the venue that was paid for by the candidate and the supporters.  However, Snyder is cogent when he points out: “The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.” (44)

That warning underscores the opening Chapter 1 and is reinforced by other examples as the book progresses.  

“Do not obey in advance.”  Many of the horrors of totalitarian regimes were not contemplated by the rulers at the top, but were invented by followers far below who anticipated orders they never actually received. Snyder cites the Nazis, but it applies to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.  And it explains the violence of self-defined “patriots” who attack American Sikhs, thinking them to be Muslims, in effect carrying out what they imagine to be their leader’s command to rid the nation of undesirable foreigners.

Chapter 9: Be kind to our language

“Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.” (59)

Snyder warns against the domination of the screen with allusions to Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.  Those are the best known, of course, but Brave New World (1932) had its “feelies” movie theaters wherein by holding a device you could feel what the actors touch.

“The choice to be in public depends on the ability to maintain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.” (86)  (That closes the chapter and segues to …)

“So try for your self to write a proper article, involving work in the real world: traveling, interviewing, maintaining relationships with sources, researching in written records, verifying everything, writing and revising drafts, all on a tight and unforgiving schedule. If you find you like doing this, keep a blog. In the mean time, give credit to those who do all of that for a living.” (76)

 “We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but we want our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgment on the basis of zero investment?  We get what we pay for.” (77)

Chapter 14. Establish a private life.

“Have personal exchanges in person.” (87)

About the liberals and the politics of inevitability:

“Yet they portray the present simply as a step toward a future that we already know, one of expanding globalization, deepening reason, and growing prosperity. This is what is called teleology: a narration of time that leads toward a certain, usually desirable, goal. Communism also offered a teleology, promising an inevitable socialist utopia. When that story was shattered a quarter century ago, we drew the wrong conclusion: Rather than rejecting teleologies, we imagined that our own story was true.” (119)

About the conservatives and the politics of eternity:

“It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concern with facts.

Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.” (121)

I could go on at extreme length, quoting Snyder and recording my reflections.  This is a book to carry around and read when you have a moment. More to the point, it is a book to discuss with your friends.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Libraries of the Founders

The Science of Liberty

The Economic Value in a Liberal Education

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

I Quit Meetup

I sent this to CivicAction@Meetup.com and to the Austin #Resist when I received a Meetup request from them.  I also sent it to the organizers of the groups that I belonged to, most of them for computer users.

I am cutting my access to all of my Meetup groups and to Meetup.com as of February 28, 2017, in response to a corporate decision by Meetup to support the Resist political action collectives. 

“We decided that we wanted to do more to support these efforts so we created a network of 1,000 #Resist Meetup groups with a few special characteristics.” --
https://www.meetup.com/help/article/2736376/

 While I am sympathetic to many of the social justice causes pursued by Resist, I must object to Meetup’s delivering a special value to them. My comrades on the right wing also have advanced the cause of freedom. Their methods and their successes do not grab headlines.  It is a matter of culture.

What are the politics of pasta?

As collectivists, my progressive comrades form strong groups, and groups are easy to see. They grab headlines when they grab other people’s property. But that property had to be created first. The exceptionally great wealth of America was the work of millions of individuals who mostly minded their own business, making their own lives as best they knew how by the standards they chose according to their personal values. That does not make the home pages of news media – unless it is to “doodle” in celebrating the historical birthday of a dead writer, musician, inventor, or scientist.

Meetup.com is a tool for those conservatives, libertarians, and Objectivists who advance the ethics and politics of individualism.  By creating new, no-cost platforms for one political group, Meetup.com of necessity excludes those of other political beliefs – and those groups with no political agenda. It is also a platform for millions of individuals who share personal – sometimes peculiar – interests of their own, far removed from politics. And that speaks to a fundamental problem with progressive causes.

It is critical that this be understood. Dr. Martin Luther King looked forward to a future in which each person is judged by the content of their character.  But character is an attribute of a person, not of a group. 

The Pursuit of Happiness is selfish.

Choosing not to do business with someone because they are not from your ethnic, social, gender, class, or religious group is irrational.  But freedom of association is a fundamental political right. While my collectivist comrades try to eliminate discrimination by engaging the power of the state, my friends on the right go to the root of the problem: lack of character.

If the owners of Meetup.com want to end social injustice, they should empower their customers who meet to build character. But that would mean creating a 1000 special groups for some religions or some philosophies in preference to others.  And there is no way to parse that, because, after all, even karate builds character.

Therefore, I will delete my Meetup account and switch to some other service or set of services, such as Google Groups, which, in fact, evolved from the age-old Usenet maillists.  Ultimately, no one needs Meetup.com. That is something to keep in mind.

Michael E. Marotta

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The Science of Liberty
Liberty's Kids
Money as Press and Speech
Libraries of the Founders