AIs and Zombies (Oh My!)

An amusing video, clearly inspired by Fallout but with a sense of humor Range 15 fans might appreciate. 

Licklog Gap

Tulsi Gabbard: Remarks at '26 Independent Women's Forum

Thanks to D29, who forwarded these remarks by Hall favorite Tulsi Gabbard to me. At one point in the remarks she tells a story about a debate early in her political career in which she asserts that she "smashed" her opponent. It was a local race to Hawaii so I didn't see it, but without looking it up I believe her. We all saw what she did to Kamala Harris the one time she got to debate Harris before Kamala decided to withdraw from consideration.

I don't know if it's significant that the only members of the administration that have earned the title "Hall favorite" are Tulsi Gabbard and Harmeet Dhillon, both ladies rather than gentlemen. That may be coincidence, because I believe the reasons are substantive and unrelated: Gabbard's aggressive pursuit of IC politicization and corruption, Dhillon's increasingly robust defense of the 2nd Amendment. Still, given that these were remarks at an explicitly 'women's' forum, for whatever it's worth, they're the ones I appreciate.

D29 notes that there's a lot of Aquinas in her remarks, as indeed there is. 

The Lawfulness of Revolution

A link I saw today mirrors a discussion Tom and I were having in a couple of the posts below. We were talking about piracy; this is about revolution. The question is whether either can be in some sense "lawful," or if indeed having a State whose law approves of the action in any way improves or alters the morality of the action.

The distinction between piracy and revolution is potentially less than it seems. Pirates were often breakaway sailors who had turned against their own government, for example -- indeed, during the period that occasioned the discussion, supporters of the Stewarts often found themselves fighting against the English Civil War government that executed their king Charles I, and then for the new government that followed the restoration of Charles II, and then against the government that rejected James II in favor of William of Orange. Such men could go from being defined as 'privateers' to 'pirates' and back again. 

Likewise, men like Stede Bonnet, an English gentleman who was briefly part of the Republic of Pirates -- the one in Nassau, not the one on Old Providence isle, which is now a part of Colombia (the one with two 'o's, for those following AVI's blog also) before being pardoned and made an English privateer, after which he returned to pirating his own nation's ships as well. Those activities gave information and inspiration to the Revolutionary war American privateers, who were of course considered pirates -- and traitors, as they considered all 'revolutionaries' -- by the English. 

Some of the American revolutionary leaders gave serious attention to the question of whether or not what they were doing could be called lawful, rather than merely just or virtuous or proper. Per the article, they fell on exactly the distinction I mentioned in the comments to Tom:

If you want to impose a religious context on top of the social one, one might not have violated the natural law or the divine law but acted in an upright way as a husband or father defending his family; the murderer clearly has sinned through wrath or lust or whatever brought him to the murder. However, since the religious context introduces a sort-of legislation, it might muddy the point to add it.

Since the article is specifically about 'lawfulness,' in their version of the discussion this is immediately relevant rather than water-muddying. The Natural Law does seem to endorse revolutions -- as the Declaration of Independence frames it, sometimes as a right and sometimes as a duty. 

"The Inquisition Invented Peer Review"

That tracks. 

She's an interesting historian our of the University of Chicago, with books on Viking mythology including a series on Ragnarok. She makes a pretty good case that academic feminism improved our understanding of Viking metaphysics. 

COWEN: What is it that women scholars understand better about Viking metaphysics?

PALMER: [laughs] It’s not mainly that women scholars understand it, but it was the entry of women scholars into the field that helped us understand it. For a long time in Viking studies, nobody wanted to touch metaphysics with a 10-foot pole. This was because during World War II, Hitler’s minister of culture was somebody who had done his dissertation on Viking metaphysics, and you couldn’t work on Viking metaphysics without citing him. So, it made it sort of a poisoned field for a while.

However, when, in the late ’60s and ’70s, the advances of feminism meant that more women were entering academia, but still often being sidelined within academia and pushed into corners of research that others didn’t want to touch, a number of them started looking at topics that people hadn’t looked at in a long time, including that one, especially because Viking metaphysics revolves around weaving.

Now, weaving is a feminine-coded, feminine-gendered subject, both in the Viking period and in the period when history took its formation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Lots of weaving-related equipment had been found in tombs and excavated here and there and then set aside, as this is women’s work and not of interest except to women.

Women started looking at it and were like, wait a minute, this isn’t a weaving shuttle; this is a staff of sorcery, as described in the sagas that very clearly described these staffs of sorcery that look like weaving shuttles because Viking metaphysics is dominated by ideas of threads of fate, the Norns spinning fate, weaving fate, etc. And it was women who were first willing to look at that stuff in detail.

Sir Isaac Newton, Undercover

In conversation with AVI's thoughts on misinterpretations in the history of heredity where he brings up the natural philosopher, astrologer and pirate* Sir Kenelm Digby, I thought it would be interesting to review another 17th century natural philosopher who was an alchemist and undercover investigator for the English mint, Sir Isaac Newton.

As Wikipedia recounts:

"As Warden, and afterwards as Master, of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20 per cent of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felon being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting even the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult, but Newton proved equal to the task.

"Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties. A draft letter regarding the matter is included in Newton's personal first edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which he must have been amending at the time. Then he conducted more than 100 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699. He successfully prosecuted 28 coiners, including the serial counterfeiter William Chaloner, who was hanged."

He also has an interesting coat of arms.

###

* Wikipedia says he was a privateer, but everyone seems dedicated to thinking of him as a pirate, which is admittedly more sexy.

Jesus Wasn’t The Way, Truth, Life “Exclusively”

Someone admitted this woman to the clergy. Not sure whose. She’s very earnest; she has an argument, even. 

New Possibilities

I admit that it took me a while to get into this article because of some of the rhetoric, which reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's declaration that he wrote English 'as a musical instrument.' That can be fun to read, but is hard to take seriously. 

However, there are serious points made. Several of them dovetail with some of our longstanding discussions. 

He opens with some points that are not new. One is a point that Eric Blair used to make here regularly even a decade ago -- that there's actually more good art and music than ever now, and you can find it if you look outside of mass culture. Then he makes a point about expertise that was the heart of the Blog Era of ~2002-2012 (before Social Media began to capture this into corporate-controlled spaces): that real experts of practical experience can now contest credentialed 'experts' and demonstrate the superiority of genuine expertise. 

Then he acknowledges a dangerous downside, one that the post about the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance also shows is not brand new:

The limits of this positive picture must also be acknowledged, as there is a darker underside of increasing State control to this story, as described in these pages previously. But we are only at the start of this new age and there may be ways to address the risks to individual freedoms even while the world continues down the path of individual “sovereignty”.

What follows rhymes nicely -- to borrow the music metaphor for a moment -- with our 'anarchist as far as possible' discussions, the last of which ended with an exploration in the comments of various science fiction accounts of how technology might allow for more human freedom than has ever been possible before. He goes on to note that some kind of vast change is inevitable anyway: the old systems simply cannot survive the present challenge.

He concludes: 

Completely new thinking is required. Radical thinking that goes beyond ideas about “simply” rearranging or reforming the state, including its constitutional arrangements – hard as even that may be. But yet even more boldness is required to match the vast and profound challenges – societal as well as human challenges – that are actually facing us, and that we are still, collectively, in broad ignorance of. 

The best place to start, perhaps, is with the individual and his “sovereign” transformation that is already de facto underway. Political and philosophical work is required to understand how – or indeed whether – this process can shape wider changes in how we govern ourselves and the new rules and rights we might want to put in place in order to deal with what is coming in technology as well as societally. Truly novel thinking on first principles is hard and rare, but the present generation must rise to the task. 

That, indeed, is quite aligned with the project of the Hall. Yet I will say again what I have often said about attempts at genuine novelty: you can't do it from inside the system you're trying to criticize. You have to find a way to get outside of it in order to get enough perspective; and you have to have some alternatives to what you know in order to spark imagination. One way to do this is to study history: the past really was different, and seeing which things surprise you in understanding those differences will go along way to giving you ideas about what could be different in a future world. Science fiction, already mentioned, is another way: but then think about how many famous Sci-Fi or Fantasy efforts have relied upon incorporating elements of ancient or Medieval history into the future. 

The study of the history of philosophy in a sense combines these approaches. I think it is often the case that in the transition to the Modern world, we lost some insights of the ancient and Medieval that were valuable and even true. Even when they were false or wrong ideas, however, they were different approaches: being able to contrast how Aristotle thought about something versus how Kant thought about the same thing, how Plato did versus how Hegel or Marx did, these kinds of abilities to understand different systematic philosophies gives you a capacity to think about what else might be different. It's another road to thinking through truly novel ideas. 

Action on 2A from DOJ

A genuine step forward to try to overturn unconstitutional state laws -- even ones that have been allowed to persist for decades. 

The Justice Department is suing Denver through the Second Amendment Section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, according to Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon.

“I have directed the Civil Rights Division, through our new Second Amendment Section, to defend law-abiding Americans from restrictions such as those we are challenging in these cases,” Dhillon said. “Law-abiding Americans, regardless of what city or state they reside in, should not have to live under threat of criminal sanction just for exercising their Second Amendment right to possess arms which are owned by tens of millions of their fellow citizens.”

Denver’s ban, which has been in place for 37 years, bans so-called assault rifles and magazines that hold more than 15 rounds.

“The Constitution is not a suggestion and the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said. “Denver’s ban on commonly owned semi-automatic rifles directly violates the right to bear arms.

It's rare for me to wish the Federal government luck in its attempts to meddle internally with the states; in general I have supported Jefferson's vision of a Federal government that 'looks out,' and deals with external threats or clashes between states only. However, as noted even in 2014:

We've added one more constitutional role to Jefferson's ideal, which is making sure that even within states government does not violate basic rights. Generally the Federal government has done this badly, but at times they've been the only one to do it at all. 

I was thinking of course of Jim Crow style oppression by state and local governments when I wrote that, but it applies here also. 

UPDATE: Hall favorite Harmeet Dhillon predicts SCOTUS will declare the AR-15 legal and constitutionally protected across the nation. It certainly ought.

Old Story, New Telling

The MIT Press Reader has a story today about how we learned that the NSA had begun spying on Americans in the wake of the Patriot Act. Most of you know the story; there are details here, however, you probably didn't know. 

Cyberpunk 2026

Clever.

It reminds me of what the cyberpunk novels called 'skillsofts,' except you don't have to jack anything into your head; the thing is wholly external. I love the idea of being able to play a guitar, which I've never managed to learn even slightly in spite of several attempts; but now I could just put these on and play like Waylon Jennings, or the bass like Lemmy, or whomever else I wanted.

Killing the Petroyuan

“Yuan” isn’t actually the name of the Chinese currency; it is called the Renminbi (人民币), or “People’s Currency.” “Yuan” is what is called a ’counting word’ in Chinese: things that can come in various quantities have different words to specify what unit is under discussion  instead of “give me a beer,” you must ask for a glass of beer or a bottle of beer  “Yuan” is a quantity of Renminbi; but it’s so commonly used that yuan functions as if it were the name of the money.

Anyway, the Treasury Secretary has a plan.

A swap line is not a loan and it is not a bailout. It is a contractually-bounded currency exchange in which a foreign central bank delivers a deposit of its own currency to Treasury or the Federal Reserve and receives an equivalent dollar deposit, with both parties committing to reverse the trade at a specified future date and at the same exchange rate. The foreign central bank pays interest on the dollar borrowing. The US holds the foreign currency as collateral for the duration. Counterparty risk sits at the central-bank level, not the commercial-bank level. 

The structure is so conservative that the Federal Reserve's swap operations, including peak utilization of roughly $585 billion during the 2008 crisis and $450 billion during the 2020 crisis, have generated no documented losses to US taxpayers across the major episodes examined in the academic finance literature. As Bessent told Congress in defending the Argentina arrangement, "in most bailouts you don't make money. The US government made money." What Bessent is now doing is taking that demonstrated playbook and scaling it into the central instrument of 21st-century American economic statecraft. The strategic logic, which Bessent has stated plainly, runs as follows. Additional swap lines, in his words, "can benefit our nation by reinforcing dollar usage and liquidity internationally, maintaining smooth functioning in dollar funding markets, promoting trade and investment with the United States, and, in hypothetical stress scenarios, preventing disorderly sales of US assets." He went further and named the actual game: "Dollar dominance and reserve currency status are strengthened by constant long-term initiatives, including countering the growth of problematic, alternative payment systems." Translation for those who do not speak Treasury, this is about killing the petroyuan in its cradle.

A Pirate Philosopher

In the comments to a post at AVI's that began with an interesting character, I noted that pirates were pretty common among the English gentry of the era: "The English Civil War and its echoes also turned many adventurers into outlaws on Britain's wide frontier."

That turns out to be exactly what happened in this case. A Roman Catholic who converted to Anglicanism for political reasons under Charles I, he returned to Catholicism during his grief over the death of his wife. A successful privateer defending England's interests before the Civil War, he ended up in exile during the war; fought and won a duel against a French nobleman; became an emissary to the Pope for Oliver Cromwell; and after the Restoration, a popular figure at Charles II's court. He also developed a better wine-bottle than had existed before his time, stronger and tinted to protect the wine from the effects of sunlight.

One of his most famous philosophical/medical attempts was the powder of sympathy. As noted in the post I wrote about "Empathy vs. Sympathy," this was the original use of the term sympathy in English: sympathetic magic, we would call it today.

Up the Militia

Megan McArdle proposes what she clearly intends as 'a modest proposal' on firearms; but she's quite right.

Maybe we’re looking at the problem wrong. Maybe instead of putting so much energy into efforts to keep people from buying guns, we should be trying to change which guns the buy. Instead of trying to make gun purchases more onerous, we should try something more radical: help people buy long guns instead of handguns.

No, I haven’t gone crazy. I’ve just been reading a provocative new paper from economists Bradley Shapiro, Sara Drango and Sarah Moshary.

They start from a few simple and correct premises. First, handguns are associated with more harm than long guns — they are involved in 90 percent of firearm violence and a huge number of suicides. People own significantly more handguns because they are just easier to carry around and easier to conceal.

Second, most people who buy guns say they want them for personal or household safety. That’s a use for long guns as well. Displacing handgun purchases with purchases of less convenient long guns could reduce the likelihood of tragedy when the owner becomes angry or despondent.

So, what if the government gave first-time gun buyers a subsidy to choose a long gun instead?

The numbers on handguns vs. long-guns are well known to readers of the Hall. America is a safe country, a fact that is obscured by a few neighborhoods in a few cities in a few counties creating a vast bias in our statistics. The media likes to report on 'assault weapon' mass shootings, but those are a tiny percentage of the gun violence problem: long guns of all kinds, 'assault' or otherwise, account for a couple percent of the murders. If we then are only interested in mass shootings we reduce that percentage to statistical noise; they just get a lot of coverage in the press because the stories are exciting and drive clicks and viewers. In fact, almost no American guns as a percentage are ever involved in violent crime: once you appreciate that we have more guns than people, the math becomes overwhelming. 

That said, the money to be made in reducing gun homicides is clearly with illegally-possessed handguns: not new laws, since these things are already illegal (e.g. stolen) or illegally possessed (e.g. by felons), and readily done by increased policing in those few neighborhoods in those few cities in those few counties. Nobody ever raises that solution because it doesn't address the real issue that the politicians want to address, which is greater government control over the citizenry -- not the criminal class, but the law-abiding ones.

It would be perfectly Constitutional, however, for the government to require that all non-felon adult citizens arm themselves with a rifle suitable for militia service. Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 gives Congress the authority to "arm" the militia, which would embrace the idea of subsidies for suitable firearms. The AR-15 is the obvious choice: it's the one that operates most similarly to and shares many parts with our service rifles, and shares ammunition with what we have in large military stocks. 

McArdle is only floating this as an idea to broaden the discussion, not as a serious proposal. Still, it has some points in its favor.

Mossadegh

A new report argues that our popular understanding of Iran’s mid-20th century history is almost completely wrong. 

Chamber of Commerce

A curious decision by the local Jackson County Chamber of Commerce as to what they wanted to highlight about their community, but who am I to judge? They seemed enthusiastic.