Lying

If you lie once, you have to keep lying to protect that first lie. Eventually, the lies will pile up.

- Please Excuse My Younger Brothers (Ep. 9).

Quote Of The Day

I'll pray that every time that landlord goes out somewhere, he accidentally steps in dog poop. 

- Victoria of Many Faces, Episode 1 (after "that landlord" refused to rent a place to her because she recently adopted a child).

Blame

Part of the reason we use the law to assign blame is to free those to whom blame is not assigned of guilt.

In The Resistance We Drive Minivans

The left is resilient. We have strong communities. We care for our neighbors. We are the grown ups in the room and we prove it with our actions. Trump and the Republicans are doing immense damage to our nation, but at the grass roots, we are doing what we can to mitigate the harm.

In the resistance we drive minivans, we take ’em low and slow down Nicollet Avenue, our trunks stuffed with hockey skates and scuffed Frisbees and cardboard Costco flats. We drive Odysseys and Siennas, we drive Voyagers and Pacificas, we like it when the back end goes ka-thunk over speed bumps, shaking loose the Goldfish dust. One of our kids wrote “wash me” on the van’s exterior, etched it into the gray scurf of frozen Minneapolis slush. Our floor mats smell like mildew from the snowmelt.

In the resistance we play Idles loud, we prefer British punk, turn the volume up, “Danny Nedelko,” please and thank you — we cast that song like a protective spell across our minivans: Let us be bulletproof, let us be invisible. . . .

Everyone is doing his part here, each to his ability. This is easier to accomplish, it seems, when joy and love are the engines. Outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where detainees, some of them American citizens and legal residents, are being held without beds or real blankets, the grannies of the Twin Cities are serving hot chocolate to college kids in active confrontation with ICE. I know of an off-grid network of doctors offering care to immigrants, a sub rosa collective of restaurateurs organizing miniature food banks in their basements. A friend of mine is a pastor who went with around 100 local clergy members to the airport in protest. Another friend is an immigration lawyer who spends his days endlessly filing habeas petitions, has gotten 30 people released from detention over the last few weeks. He recently offered a training session on how to file habeas petitions and 300 lawyers showed up, eager to do the work pro bono. . . .

Here’s what you need to remember: There is no reward that comes later. No righteous justice will be dispensed, not soon and not ever. Renee Good and Alex Pretti don’t come back to life. The lives of their loved ones are not made whole again. Thousands of people will remain disappeared, relatives scattered, families broken. This story does not have a happy ending, and I can assure you the villains do not get punished in the end. If that is your motivation, try again, start over.

But you also need to understand — and this is equally important — that we’ve already won. The reward is right now, this minute, this moment. The reward is watching your city — whether it’s Chicago or Los Angeles or Charlotte or the cities still to come — organize in hyperlocal networks of compassion, in acephalous fashion, not because someone told you to, but because tens of thousands of people across a metro region simultaneously and instinctively felt the urge to help their neighbors get by." . . .

you slow down to the speed limit, you turn Idles a little louder, you play “Danny Nedelko” again. That song comes from an album called “Joy as an Act of Resistance.”

Today I’m driving a girl who never speaks other than to say thank you. She’s out of the car now and trying to clamber ungracefully over a dirty ice bank that walls off the roadway from her house. There is no entry point — she’d have to walk down to the corner to gain access — and I’m cursing myself for where I’ve dropped her off. The skies are an unsympathetic oatmeal. It is very cold, the dark dead of winter.

Out on the stoop of her building, the girl’s mom and little sister are waiting. The mother looks on nervously, wishing to minimize this vulnerable transition point between car and home. The little sister is probably 3 years old. She is in pigtails and wearing footie pajamas and she is radiant, leaping up and down, clapping, ecstatic to see her big sister come home. The quiet girl is stone-faced and stumbling, and eventually she makes it across the wall of gray ice to her stoop, where her little sister grabs her by the leg. 

I’ll admit: This was the only time I cried, throughout this whole disgusting affair, as I sat in my car watching the girl in the footie pajamas clapping for big sister’s safe return[.]

An excerpt from this New York Times Op-Ed essay.

The Complicated Story Of MAGA Politics

The modern Democratic party operates to a great extent like politics is supposed to work in Civics 101, and follow on political theory says that it is supposed to. It has found policies, that its leaders believe are good ones for the nation, that can unite a diverse big tent coalition. Democrats believe that government can be a force for good and want to use it the implement policies that make the world a better place. They go to great lengths to demonstrate with evidence that their policies do indeed do so. They aren't saints, but they also view stupidity, bad character, and malice in their leaders negatively and are generally happy to cast out leaders who demonstrate those traits.

The Republican party, in living history, was a pretty similar organization and movement that assembled a different bundle of policies to unite a different, smaller tent coalition.

But, that Republican party is almost gone and rapidly dissolving, even though most of its top leaders got their political start in that party.

The MAGA Republican party and movement, in contrast, is something else entirely. It absolutely still has its roots in the pre-FDR solid south Democratic party, in the Dixiecrats, and in the post-Southern strategy anti-civil rights Republican party. But unlike the Republican party that preceded it, it doesn't fit the Civics 101 model.

MAGA Republicans don't accept a lot of the bipartisan consensus about many aspects of policy making and governing that preceded it. It is isolationist. It is anti-trade, anti-immigration, anti-NATO, and unconcerned about alliances with foreign dictators. It has no respect for expertise. It doesn't think that government does anything good (and is oblivious to the benefits that its members receive from government), so it isn't troubled by having the government run by incompetent fools. It has strong authoritarian leanings, no commitment to democratic ideals, and little concern for the rule of law. It sees power as a tool to utilize to fight culture wars and its political opponents, rather than as a means to advance the greater good

Republican political leaders know perfectly well that most of President Trump's executive branch appointees, like RFK, Jr., are incompetent idiots whose only redeeming quality is their momentary personal loyalty to Trump. Most of them are also well aware that many of the policies that Trump is pushing for are objectively bad ones.

Then why do these Republican leaders back Trump anyway?

They can read the room. They know that they face mafia style backlash from Trump if they cross him. They also know that their not terribly bright constituents in the MAGA base firmly support Trump (or at least have until very recently within Trump's second term when they've discovered personally, the hard way, how bad his policies really are) seeing any deviation from Trump's agenda as a betray of Trump's MAGA base including them. The MAGA base also sincerely believe in a lot of the misguided elements of Trump's agenda because unlike most Republican leaders, they don't know any better.

Billionaires and the political representatives of many big businesses also know personally well that Trump is a horrible person who supports mostly bad policies who is basically trying to destroy the federal government from the inside. But, for them, the immense tax cuts that Trump has delivered to them, and the dismantling of federal laws and regulations that cost them money have seemed worth it to them so far.

The conservative leaning members of the college educated upper middle class, who used to work in think tanks formulating conservative policies that they thought furthered the national interest on a basis similar to that of their liberal peers, who served as senior civil servants, and served as professionals in roles that either supported conservative economic and religious interests, or were at least apolitical, meanwhile, have abandoned the Grand Old Party in droves, some to be unaffiliated politically, some to be libertarians, and some to become "moderate" and "neo-liberal" Democrats. Fools loyal to MAGA and Trump's cult of personality, and powerful hypocrites, have rushed in to fill the vacuum that they upper middle class conservatives left behind.

The agenda of Trump and his MAGA cult of personality isn't sustainable. But it wasn't really meant to be. The objective of MAGA is to burn it all down, and to entrench far right cultural dominance and political power now, knowing that in the long run, the democratic process and respect for the rule of law and settled political norms, run fairly, will undermine those objectives.

Destruction can be accomplished more quickly than building something that works. So, it doesn't have to last long. And, if the MAGA base comes to realize that the face eating leopard they supported ate their faces once the damage done is irrevocable, that's their tough luck in the eyes of the billionaires and far-right cranks who actually benefit from its agenda. By then, if the MAGA agenda is successful, they will have dug the United States (and even the larger world) into a hole that will be very hard to get out of again.

The system struggles to stop them. Trump has installed enough people loyal to him that share his far from the mainstream agenda in key institutions like the U.S. Supreme Court, the military, and senior government offices that he wasn't supposed to be able to oust and oust, and key policies that he wasn't supposed to have the legal right to control, that the systems and people designed to stop him aren't doing their jobs. The system wasn't designed to to stop a President who had no respect for his oath of office, no commitment to the good of the nation, no respect for the rule of law, and immense political power arising from a base brainwashed by decades of lies from clergy, Republican political leaders, and cynically manipulative conservative mass media outlets that jettisoned their journalist ethics long ago.

Of course, the willingness of the MAGA base to be manipulated and accept these lies didn't come from nowhere. It isn't that information that reveals that these are lies isn't available. It isn't that members of the MAGA base unanimously agree that Trump has good character.

They are motivated to accept a false worldview because the last half century of American progress has left them behind and greatly diminished their socio-economic status in relative terms. They are willing to take the gamble of destroying the system because of they feel that it has done nothing for them, and that they have no prospects of improving their lot within it.

Most of them made a bad bet. Trump's agenda will leave them worse off and reveal to them that they actually did have something to lose in the system that they are trying to destroy. The policies that they thought were the problem aren't the source of their dismay. Their future prospects within the system that they support destroying were better than they believed them to be. But, now that they've made that bet, a psychological unwillingness to admit that they've been duped and made a mistake, and the fact that much of the damage to both the system and the political process has already been done, makes remedying their mistake difficult.

The situation could still be turned around: If enough of the MAGA base is disillusioned fast enough. If enough old guard Republicans and conservative judges who are hypocrites wake up to the fact that the end game isn't a good one before it is too late. If Trump dies or implodes (which is a bet the left is trying to make by pushing the Epstein files issue) and no successor to Trump as the leader of the MAGA movement arises. 

But if it is turned around, the most likely failure mode for MAGA will be a dramatic collapse of the entire political movement. It will look like an economic bubble popping. It will look like the sudden death of the Whig party in favor of the new Republican party shortly before the Civil War. It will look like the collapse of Naziism at the end of World War II, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will look like the post-Herbert Hoover Republican Party of the 1930s. It might even look like the French Revolution with guillotines and all.

There isn't much room for a middle ground business as usual alternation of power at the margins at this point.

My Facebook Profile Mottos

Defend Witches!

Democracy is worth fighting for

Fiat justitia ruat caelum cadet

개는 수프입니다

I'll leave the translation of the last two, from Latin and Korean respectively, to the reader.

Midweek Rants And Observations

* It was 101º F today in Denver. Fortunately, we have a brand new swamp cooler, so this is survivable. I'm honestly a little surprised that our power stayed on. We've had two power outs for more than an hour each on hot afternoons in the last few weeks.

* My office suite is having a potluck next week. There was a sign up sheet for names and what you are bringing. A majority of people who signed up said they were bringing "TBD". Suck it up my office neighbors. Commit to something.

* Why does it take the City of Denver weeks for a deed that is recorded and digitally processed by the Clerk & Recorder's office weeks to be reflected in the Assessor's Office records?

* A recent new report stated:

Church stands by call to execute gay people: “I will not apologize for preaching the Word of God.”: A men's night sermon said gay people should "blow yourself in the back of the head."

Just what I would expect a Baptist church in Indiana to say. The most vile people in America are Christians.

"Not all Christians are this bad" you say? Then why aren't they picketing outside the steps of this church for heresy and blasphemy? It isn't my place to do that. Not my monkeys, not my circus. But it is hard to take any Christians seriously when this isn't the instant and vigorous response of Christians who say they're wrong.

* There is a tornado warning in Washington D.C. right now. WTF?

* There are too many crazy people in this country, and not just in the White House.

A group that calls itself an anti-government militia told News 9 it’s “absolutely” targeting Oklahoma weather radars, claiming they control the weather. The warning comes just days after a vandal knocked out News 9’s live radar.

* I don't doubt for a minute that the allegations of this complaint, which was later dismissed (not on the merits), were true:

* The people who leave anti-immigration comments on social media posts and news story (and there are lots of them) are among the most vile people you'll see on the Internet. These people would have been pro-Holocaust, pro-segregation, pro-slavery, and pro-witch burning.

It is a reminder that the evil that is Donald Trump runs deep. There are there millions, if not tens of millions of these monsters in the United States.

Stupid hurts people. But this level of vile goes far beyond that. They are as bad as the most culpable violent criminals in our prisons. Where do these people come from? What can we do about them?

* It just doesn't stop.

* Anti-aging, life extension drugs are a real possibility, if not in my lifetime, in the lives of my children.

A simple monthly injection allows mice to live 25% longer and free from diseases: The strategy — the injection of a simple antibody — has already begun to be tested in humans in an attempt to cure age-related illnesses.

* The Texas floods have are already the fourth most deadly floods in Texas history. There are still 161 people missing, so they could easily rise to #2, and floods in San Antonio are ongoing.

 

Most of these deaths were preventable. The part of Texas hit has consistently had the highest concentration of flood deaths in the United States since the 1930s. State and local officials rejected a proposal in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, to install flood detection devices and warning sirens but weren't willing to spend the money to do so. Trump's cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service impaired the warning that people at risk in the flood received. Trump gutted FEMA which only started to take action to help 72 hours after the floods when it was already too late (the U.S. Coast Guard, in fairness, stepped in anyway and saved about 165 lives at the insistence of a brave rookie over the indifference and waffling of his supervisors). The Texas Governor and its top emergency response official have urged Trump to cut or eliminate FEMA.

* Gun homicides are down, but gun suicides have reached a record high.

The CDC reports 27,300 gun suicides in 2023, constituting 58% of all gun deaths, a record high. Wyoming led the nation with about 19.9 gun suicide deaths per 100,000 residents — nearly 10 times the rate of Massachusetts, which had the lowest at about 2.1 per 100,000.

Gun homicides fell for the second year in a row, dropping from 20,958 in 2021 to 19,651 in 2022 and 17,927 in 2023. Despite the decline, the 2023 total ranks as the fifth highest on record for gun homicides.

Why Is David Brooks Wrong About Why People Admire Donald Trump?

Brooks On Why People Admire Trump

David Brooks, a pundit who also writes for the New York Times, who is a former conservative who later in his career transitioned to being a moderate, has a new article today in the Atlantic magazine, entitled "Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?" that is also an engagement with the life work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who recently passed in May at the age of 94.

MacIntyre argued that from at least the time of the classical period, communities ("a dense network of faily, tribe, city, and nation") created duties and expectations about how to live your life and act morally according to your social role ("soldier, farmers, merchants" and mothers), which people generally accepted and made it their life's work to live up to as well as you could. Judaism, Christianity and Islam tweaked these duties and expectations to give greater weight to compassion and humility, but through the Middle Ages maintained the same social structure in which morality and your duties in life were societally imposed. The wars of religion at the end of the Middle Ages convinced people that maybe religion was not the best thing to organize societies upon and in reaction to that came the Enlightenment period of the 18th century centered upon reason and science, and relegated morality to a matter of individual choice.

MacIntyre argued that this produced a decline in shared morality, although Brooks himself would put this moment in the mid-1960s. The narrative continues with Nietzsche famously saying that "God is dead" because we'd killed him and made ourselves our own gods. In this narrative, Hilter, Lenin, and Mao fill that moral vacuum with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism, "and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease."

At this point it becomes less clear whether it is MacIntyre or Brooks talking. But the two solutions to a moral vacuum that Brooks presents are coercion or manipulation. Either coerce others to believe what you believe, e.g., with corporate DEI, or manipulate people with the kind of lies and sleaze that Trump and Fox News are known for utilizing. The battle of these methods in the 1980s and 1990s "looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared to today", Brooks argues, because in the last thirty years people have sought righteousness instead through their political identities and politics permeates everything.

Without a firm universal ground in "the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness", "People are rendered anxious and fragile" and without a moral foundation, they "fall apart when setbacks come."

He sees Trump as a man "who doesn't even try to speak the language of morality", doesn't care about weakening "our shared moral norms" with his example, speaks a language of preference "I want" and a language of power "I have the leverage", and a language of self, of gains of acquisition, of benefitting himself, instead.

Brooks argues, within the framework of MacIntyre's philosophy that Trump is "just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create." He also argues (inaccurately, in my view) that if Trump was on their team, most Democrats would like him too, and that you're lying to yourself if you deny it.

Brooks argues that pluralism is the answer to to resolving the tension created by incommensurate values, but that we need to recalibrate it to make people "more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community" and to provide rigorous moral education to the next generation (which sounds a lot like the coercion he condemned earlier in his argument).

Why Is Brooks Wrong?

I don't think this rings true, and find better answers in psychology and economics than in philosophy, which I've always considered something of a dead end and historical curiosity that recalls long since superseded proto-science, than something of real value today as anything more than intellectual history.

In my view, Trump, a psychopath rich in "dark triad" traits, is an archetypical figure familiar to observers of politics and public affairs and history since classical times, if not earlier, who is a constant threat to every organization from families to empires. There is nothing novel or surprising about him, himself. 

Demagogues were something that the Founders of the United States, at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, worried about. Democracy and the Bill of Rights were their answer to the narcissistic mad kings and equally dark leaders of established religions with whom they were very familiar, both from the 18th century world and from the history that they knew from the classical era through the Middle Ages. The Founders were familiar with Roman Emperor Nero. Machiavelli in "The Prince" wrote about how dark triad tactics might be advisable to a leader seeking to gain power for his people. They were intimately familiar with the tyrants of British history, right up through King George. The believed that people whose rights were guarded by law would not vote for such scoundrels. Lest we forget, George R. R. Martin, in his Game of Thrones series, a fantasy series that draws heavily on the War of the Roses, history that was much more fresh in the minds of the Founders, reminds us of what that was like and why it is best avoided.

It wasn't a bad plan. 

The Constitution adopted in 1789 lasted without an insurmountable constitutional crisis for 72 years, when Civil War broke out. After the crisis over slavery that manifested in the Civil War was overcome in 4 years of brutal deadly fighting (that still leave the nation deeply divided) was over, followed a 12 year Reconstruction period, and in turn followed by 77 years or so of de jure segregation but a fragile peace. We then went on to have another 70 years or so of the constitution working more or less as intended. 

We are in the midst of another constitutional crisis now, which their plan may or may not be good enough to overcome. 

The United States of America, including its 13 years before the current constitution was adopted, is 249 years old, making it the oldest fully non-hereditary democratic governmental regimes still in existence on the scale of a large nation. But the Founders, as one of the first countries to have a full fledged democratic Republic at a large national scale, lacked the historical experience or foresight to plan for every potential eventuality and their plan is now clearly not the optimal design, although it may be that our Republic's woes are such that no formal constitution would have been sufficient to prevent them.

The times and places in history where tyrants arose also doesn't match up. MacIntyre's framework suggests that we should have seen a breakdown in a sense of duty and morality in the Enlightenment. But we didn't see this happen across the board. Yes, the moral divide in the U.S. may be traceable to the moral fight over slavery that emerged in the Enlightenment. But, this was not a general, individualized loss of community norms, it was a divide that arose between two coherent and vital cultures, that of the slaveholding South on one side, and of the abolitionist North on the other, sustained, as much as anything, by the perceived economic needs of each region, with clergy serving of cheerleaders of each side and framing these economic imperatives with moral justifications.

Why did we get Hitler in Weimar Germany, and Lenin in Russia, while France, England, and the United States were not similarly afflicted?

Hitler is the clearest example. Germany's defeat in World War I, the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and economic collapse, radicalized many Germans, making them crave an authoritarian strong man to save them, and causing them to abandon the luxuries of caring for their fellow man whom they saw as their competitors, or as a drag on their society's ability to overcome the malaise that they faced.

Similar economic forces drive American politics today. After a couple of decades of remarkable shared prosperity, economic growth, which make the liberalism and the care for their fellow man of the Civil Rights movement possible, ceased to be shared starting sometime around the early 1970s. Since then, mostly educated, urban elites have captured almost all of the economy's economic growth for a half century, while less educated folk in rural areas and small towns have seen their economic prospects stagnate. The Civil Rights movement improved the economic lot of non-whites and women. New immigration laws welcomed foreigners. Free trade allowed manufacturing to be offshored to markets with lower wages, fewer labor protections, and weaker environmental laws. The U.S. de-industrialized and the Rust Belt came into being. Free trade rules, environmental rules, protections for unions, automation, birth control and abortion have, in their view, destroyed an economy fueled by domestic manufacturing and fossil fuels, in which men received good pay that made them heads of their families.

Half a century later, counties that vote blue have more than double the per capita GDP of those that vote red. Red America has captured almost none of the economic growth of the last half century, while Blue America is more prosperous than almost any other place on Earth. Prosperous Blue America extended its inclusive shared affluence mindset to allow the LGBT community to live publicly and in dignity, and to make it safe to be openly secular. 

Straight white Christian men in Red America without much education have seen every other demographic but them improve their lot in the last fifty years, while they have seen almost no improvement in their real wages, increased unemployment, and an inability to maintain stable and solid marriages and families. In relative terms, they seem themselves, and the rural and small town communities that they live in, as the losers, and see the economy as a zero sum game in which non-whites, foreigners, and women have taken what was theirs, and in which atheists and gays have ripped apart the moral framework that held their parents and grandparents families together. They want to throw out everything that they see as having driven their half century of eroded status with no end in sight, and return to the days when their relative status was vastly greater, no matter how unfair that may seem to everyone else. 

They are so frustrated over this sustained defeat that they are willing to turn to an indiscriminate authoritarian who breaks the rules that they see as having held them back, and are even willing to resort to violence, to get it. Their concerns about good character and process values and fair play have dissolved in the face of falling life expectancies, deaths of despair, regular unemployment, disability from the manual work that they are qualified to do with the economy doesn't need anymore to same extent, and their inability to hold onto wives and children that really arises not from an immoral society but from their own failures of economic providers. Faced with their conditions, they want to burn the system down and start over from new foundations that elevate their relative socio-economic standing.

Not everyone who votes for Trump has experienced this, and not everyone in red counties and red states has supported him. Some have supported Republicans simply out of thoughtless, long ingrained habit, or because they think that they are among the rich who will benefit from tax cuts. But peer pressure from enough people who matter in their little small town and rural communities, and in the working class underworld of Blue America, have made their political views (stripped of any reasoning behind them) normative in their communities, won over their wives, and caused religious congregation to which these men have been drawn because they are saying what these men want to hear to thrive and reinforce these men's views.

What we see today is more a product of capitalism, appropriately regulated but with only modest redistribution, doing what it does naturally: increasing GDP as fast as it can, while leaving the productive better off than the less productive who are worse off. But capitalism has done its thing to an extent greater than the political system is willing to bear, bringing us to a breaking point. 

It's worse in the U.S. because we have done less to cushion the blow for those who are less productive either by finding them places in the new economy or redistributing wealth and creating a stronger social safety net (in part, because racism has left the U.S. with a weaker sense of solidarity). But the same pressures are present in Europe, with somewhat different targets to fit local changes over the last half century, and are strongest in the places that are economically struggling.

Democrats Are Predominantly More Correct Than Republicans

The main sin that the Democrats have committed is not taking seriously enough the grievances of the working class, especially working class white Christian men, who have not shared in the improvement in relative or absolute prosperity that much of the rest of the nation has enjoyed, and who are lashing out at people they see as competitors or as people undermining morality, when neither of these things is the real problem. 

Despite adopting many policies that substantively benefit Red America more than their own base, they didn't go quite far enough, and left this constituency economically struggling, and equally importantly, feeling like they didn't matter and were neglected.

Progressives gets this and have tried to secure radical economic reforms to address this problem, so they don't have to resort to the injustices towards innocents that Trump has inflamed his supporters to think they want. But progressives do not make up a majority of the American public, and the bigger tent necessary to secure the majorities needed to reach a position of power where change can be enacted, and a constitutional framework and political system that tends to create gridlock and too strongly defends the status quo, has thwarted their efforts to secure more than incremental change, which has not been enough. Sometimes the frustration of progressives over their insufficient clout and numbers to achieve the full measure of their goals in a system that already makes it too hard to do so, when they rightfully believe that their proposals are urgently needed to keep far right tendencies at bay and secure economic justice, even boil over into claims that Democrats are no different than Republicans, since both are controlled by big business, despite the fact that this just undermines their own cause.

Contrary to Brooks' assertion, Democrats wouldn't fall for a Trump. They aren't desperate in the way that the MAGA Republican base is, and so they are happy to purge people like him from their ranks when they are caught. The Democratic Party isn't full of criminals, and is much less corrupt than the Republican Party which has had vastly more criminals and is now openly corrupt. 

Democrats and progressives are right that a manufacturing based fossil fuel economy isn't coming back, and that even if manufacturing did come back that 21st century manufacturing is so automated and skill intensive for most jobs, and so unproductive and low paying for others, that it wouldn't restore the economy and related societal consequences that flowed from it anyway.

Democrats are right that the rich aren't taxed enough, although they are mistaken that unions are a leading cause of the shared prosperity benefits that came from a tight labor market, rather than a symptom of that tight labor market that more efficiently utilized economic power that workers already had.

The Democratic effort to create working class clean economy jobs was the right idea, but was too little, too late.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that putting the Ten Commandments in schools, embracing religion, restricting abortion and birth control, making it legally harder to divorce, and squashing gay rights and transgender rights will restore morality and strengthen working class families.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that economics is a zero sum game, in which gains for non-whites, women, educated people, and immigrants, and imports leave white native born men without higher education, their communities, and the U.S. economy, generally, worse off.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that taxes and government spending are bad for the economy or bad for them. They are particularly wrong in thinking that reducing social safety net spending which disproportionately benefits them, will leave them better off, or that tax cuts for the wealthy, big businesses, and people with high incomes weaken the economy or leave them worse off. They have also forgotten (or never knew) that the era they seek to return to "when America was great" was characterized by high taxes and lots of government spending (as well as a very militant union movement).

Republicans are wrong in thinking that they don't benefit from the world order that foreign aid spending and our historical military alliances supported, and are a waste of money, and in thinking about military strength purely in terms of U.S. military might standing alone when wars are almost always won by the side with the most allies and "soft power."

But It Takes More Than Facts And Logic To Change Minds

Of course, as we've learned very painfully, mere facts and logic are enough enough to change political views, and in particular, are not enough to change the political views of a base that holds those views precisely because it has not prospered in an economy based upon knowledge and intellectual ability, and has had wealthy, amoral elites manipulate the information that has been imparted to them.

People's political identities are fundamentally social and are deeply shaped by economics and the information, however untrue it may be, that they have chosen to listen to when forming their world views (something that is itself influenced by their economic circumstances, as well as their ancestral culture).

You have to quash fountains of disinformation and fact resistance that have been gradually taking hold for decades. You have to either get people to admit that they have been conned, or find a way for people to change their political views that allows them to deny that this has happened. You have to make their views uncomfortable for them to hold in their own personal lives, but must do so in circumstances where converting from them is less painful than retreating into their denial with likeminded victims of the con. You have to be able to show them in terms that they understand and believe that your proposals are better than MAGA's and to back that up with an ability to produce tangible results for them. You have to address their needs and hardships, and not merely show that the other side is worse.

Those are tall orders, and it isn't clear that Democrats are up to the challenge. 

Democrats best hope is really that the Republicans, at a time when they are undeniably in complete control, are making the lives of the MAGA base tangibly worse, or convince the MAGA base that this is imminently about to happen, and to undermine any hope that they have that burning everything down will lead to a future that leaves them better off in relative terms, if not in absolute terms. Trump and his allies, as they attempt to govern in a purely ideological manner, are their own worst enemies here.

The GOP's hold on Congress is tenuous. In 2026, flipping 4 seats out of a 53 GOP seats would flip the Senate, and flipping 3 seats out of 220 GOP seats in the House (and reclaiming three currently vacant democratic seats in vacancy elections) would flip the House. Trump is the least popular President since Trump, and many of his particular policies, including his recently passed budget, are wildly unpopular with voters. The public is no fan of Congress and a lot of Republicans in Congress have voted for measures that are unpopular with the people who elected them (even though the final budget bill retreated from many of Trump's demands) and will actively hurt the people who elected them. Some of the gerrymandering that influenced the results of the 2024 election will also be remedied in 2026. Elon Musk's proposal to create a new "American Party", even if it wasn't terribly successful, would split the conservative vote in a way that could benefit Democrats immensely. The U.S. Supreme Court has also never had less popular support in the history of modern polling, and conservative voters no longer need to support Trump and the GOP to keep in that way (or to have their tax cuts for corporations and the rich made permanent).

It is unlikely that Republicans will hold both Houses of Congress in the 2026 election. They will probably lose control of the House and at least lose ground in the Senate, barring a major escalation in the steps that Trump has tried to take to erode democracy in the last sixteen months, with lukewarm but significant support from the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority which has significantly impaired the ability of other federal courts to restrain Trump.

Time will tell how it turns out in the midst of the constant political chaos and societal unrest that Trump have actively stoked.

Left leaning forces don't have to keep MAGA's dictatorial power grab at bay forever. The MAGA base is in demographic decline. The Democratic base is growing. If the left can endure this crisis and thwart full on totalitarianism until Trump is dead and his MAGA agenda has been discredited by its own failures severely enough, for enough years, the crisis will be overcome and the Republic can be saved. It may be bruised, battered, and irrevocably harmed in many ways, but it would not be beyond all saving. 

But history is also not without precedents, like Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea, where progress is dramatically reversed when totalitarians succeed, and this backward state continues for forty years or more with minimal progress. And, unlike the case of people subject to the Axis regimes in World War II, no other country or alliance will be coming to rescue us, because we are too big and too militarily mighty. Another civil war might save us if that happens, but that would be a horrible price to pay.

Ghibli v. Disney Villains

In a nutshell, this video makes the case that Disney villains are inherently evil and must be defeated and punished, while Ghibli villains are redeemable and have understandable motives but have suffered and are misunderstood. To a lesser extent DC Comics follows the Disney model and Marvel Comics follows the Ghibli model. The video argues that Ghibli villains are more realistic and creatively interesting, but acknowledges that Disney villains are cathartic, efficient, and satisfying. The video attributes the difference to a Judeo-Christian American culture compared to Japanese values rooted in Shinto religious roots (although much of that is really Confucian).

Honestly, I disagree that Ghibli villains are "more realistic".  Ghibli style villains may be more common, but Disney style villains are out there too. We call them "psychopaths" and some key distinctions in criminal law, like the distinction between 1st degree murder and 2nd degree murder, are attempts to distinguish irredeemable psychopaths from misguided or impulsive or environmentally pressured individuals who are capable of being reformed.

An Imaginary Passover 2025

This weekend is the Jewish holiday of Passover, which is based upon an event described in Chapters 11 and 12 of the book of Exodus in the Torah in which God kills all first born males, human and animal, in Egypt on an appointed night, except in homes where the lintel is marked with a lamb's blood as the members of the Jewish community were instructed by their leaders to do.

Benchmarking the date of this event in the Biblical story in a manner consistent with the appearance of the Philistines in the Levant (which historically happened around 1200 BCE at the time of the Bronze Age collapse), this story would be taking place something like 3200 to 3300 years ago.

Imagine the impossible scenario that another miracle is called for now, in the United States, to smite the wicked and protect those who are less wicked. Suppose that this time around, on Passover evening starting after sundown on April 12, all 77.3 million people who voted for Trump, who are still living, died, a bit more than 20% of the population of the United States, so an event of similar magnitude.

Image how that would change the world. Almost all of the Republican elected officials and judges would die. Children would be almost completely spared. Some states, like West Virginia, Wyoming, and Utah would take particularly hard hits, as would most rural areas and small towns outside New England and Hawaii and college towns. Very few people would be left in predominantly white Evangelical Christian churches and Mormon temples the next morning. Predominantly white Protestant churches and Catholic parishes would likewise take strong hits. Jews celebrating Passover and predominantly black churches would barely notice a difference. The old, men, and people without college educations would be disproportionately hit, as would blue collar small business owners and farmers. The impact in big cities would be quite modest. The U.S. military office corps would be very hard hit, and the enlisted ranks would experience a milder impact. The LGBTQ community would be almost all spared. Schools, colleges, and universities would have only modest impacts. Non-religious people and non-Christians generally would see a quite modest toll. Many billionaires would be no more.

There would still be a crunch. Prompt arrangements would have to be made for many children left without parents. Figuring out how to keep farms running would be particularly challenging. But it would probably set the country back only a few years as the people who were passed over returned to the path of decency and responsibility and competence.

The hostile stance of the U.S. towards the rest of the world would promptly fade away. Those remaining wouldn't have a single set of political views, but the crazy and mean spirited elements would be gone.

The victims wouldn't all be horrible, horrible people, but they would be much more personally culpable than the victims of the Biblical Passover, who just had the bad luck to be non-Jewish subjects to the Pharaoh, and were often innocent children or animals. 

Who Cares Most About Helping People In Need?

The more secular you are, the more care about the well-being of the poor. The more religious you are, the less you care about the well-being of the poor.

Atheists care more about helping people in need than people with any other category of religious beliefs.

Enforcing Noblesse Oblige

La noblesse oblige literally "nobility obliges") is a French expression that means that nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities; the term retains the same meaning in English. For example, a primary obligation of a nobleman could include generosity towards those around him. As those who lived on the nobles' land had obligations to the nobility, the nobility had obligations to their people, including protection at the least.

- Wikipedia, Noblesse Oblige.

The American system of representative democracy is profoundly anti-elitist. In its ideal form, which it somewhat approximates, all adults can vote for candidates who are not meaningfully screened for qualifications to do the jobs for which they are elected.

Most other parts of our society don't work that way. 

Typically, when a business or government needs an employee, or an individual or firm or government wants to hire a contractor to do something, the business or person seeking a contractor tries to do so on a meritocratic basis consistent with what they can afford. For many kinds of tasks, a government license awarded on the basis of a meritocratic examination process that can be revoked for various kinds of professional or personal misconduct is required to even be considered for doing that task.

Most of the time, competence and qualifications are considered to some extent in the process of electing representatives to oversee the government on behalf of the voting public by the voters who are given the authority to elect them. But that isn't hard wired into the system (although some more specialized state and local elected offices like sheriffs and surveyors and judges and prosecutors sometimes do have some minimal professional qualifications that are required of candidates).

Unlike elected officials, civil service employees of governments are appointed on a formally meritocratic basis with only minimal political input by supervising officers for the prospective employees who are well-informed about the candidates' qualifications and are generally highly trained and qualified themselves.

Why do we have a system that allows ill-informed voters, no matter how uneducated they may be, choose people to run the system from among a group of minimally screened candidates with no obligation, even an unenforceable and theoretical one, to choose from among those candidates on a meritocratic basis?

The political theory behind a system with minimal screening of candidates and a very broad franchise is that the desire to win elections gives politicians an incentive to care about the best interests of the people who are entitled to vote, rather than caring only about their own personal interests and desires.

The ill-treatment that American society affords to people who can't vote at some or all levels of our political system, like children, non-citizens, prison inmates, institutionalized mentally ill people, people in places like the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and people who live outside the territory of the governmental body whose voters select those elected officials, supports the conclusion that including someone in the franchise tends to produce political outcomes that benefit people who can vote. 

Likewise, policies that meet the interests and desires of people who vote more consistently, like older people, educated people, and Evangelical Christians, are more frequently translated into government policy than the interests and desires of people who vote less often, like younger people and less educated people, even when they have a right to vote.

The American political system has made a calculated choice that having politicians who care about the needs and desires of as many people as can legitimately be permitted to vote is so important that it is worth the risk that in the cases where these voters will make bad choices, especially when they are ill-informed and are not very good decision makers about anything.

The political theory, in other words, is that a franchise that is as broad as possible with minimally screened candidates will enforce noblesse oblige upon the class of politicians who are elected in this system, and that having politicians who are incentivized to display noblesse oblige in their decision making is worth the price that society pays in choosing less qualified leaders because a greater share of the decision makers are ill-informed and bad at making decisions than they would be if the franchise was narrower. The political system of American representative democracy enshrines equality in order to create no incentives to make as few people as possible strangers of the law.

It is a political theory that leans heavily on formal political institutions to cause this to happen rather than alternative means.

Not every political system in history as relied upon this strategy.

Confucianism, in contrast, focuses on securing noblesse oblige by instilling a political culture infused in it.

In Confucianism, almost every important interact in life in characterized as being unequal and hierarchical. Subordinates have a duty to obey and defer to their superiors. Superiors have a duty to look out for the bests interests of their subordinates in a spirit of reciprocity and fiduciary-like duty. Confucianism calls for people to be promoted to higher positions of authority on the basis of merit, which is viewed as a balanced mix of competence and good character in the sense of upholding confucian values.

Modern cultures with strong Confucian values display pros and cons. They tend to be well ordered, to be law abiding, to have people who are good at self-organization and cooperation in times of need, and to have relatively few people who are just cast away and neglected. But these are prone to abuse of authority and bullying by people higher up in the hierarchy, tend to ignore positive or urgent input from people low in the hierarchy, tend to force subordinates to sacrifice their own well-being and desires for the demands of their superiors, and are reliant on the people at the top to be innovative because those at the bottom are not permitted to innovate. Confucianism, focused as it is on a system rooted in good men, rather than good laws, also tends to be vulnerable to corruption and not very focused on the consistent rule of law.

Of course, different modern Confucian influenced societies address the "natural" shortcomings of Confucianism in different ways. 

Japan has done a relatively good job at curbing the selfishness of people like senior executives in positions of power, and has begun to temper Confucian values with respect for personal self-actualization as it has become a more affluent society with the luxury of doing so. 

South Korea has been less successful at curbing excesses and abuses by superiors, and has likewise been somewhat less successful at fulfilling the obligation to look out for subordinates. But it has also been better, on balance, at allowing self-actualization in lieu of subordination of one's own desires to the will of those superior in the hierarchy.

China has done a poor job indeed of curbing kleptocracy by those in power, but has done a good job at having the older generation cede power to the younger generation, in a manner that has fostered a class of relatively young, powerful, innovative change makers that have kept its society from becoming too static and tradition bound. But China has done a particularly poor job of respecting individual self-actualization, or listening to the voices of subordinates with valuable input that could be offered in decision-making. China has also suffered mightily from corruption and is deeply immersed in a social and intellectual climate of dishonesty and censorship of the truth.

Feudalism, the political culture that produced the concept of noblesse oblige in the West was similar, but unlike Confucianism, awarded positions of authority based primarily on the hereditary principal, rather than based upon meritocratic selection. Also, feudalism tied the sense that superiors should look out for the well-being of their subordinates to the pride, ego, and greed associated with ownership. In a feudal context, you basically owned your subordinates, and your sense of noblesse oblige was related to your desire to have your property be the best that it can be for your own person benefit since this would make you rich in the process.

Saudi Arabian style monarchies, while hardly meritocratic or democratic, have at least tamed the hereditary principle, by having large, polygamous royal families in which the current ruler can choose the most qualified person within this large royal family to be their successor. This mitigates the risk that a hereditary successor will be profoundly incompetent or immoral, and creates an incentive for its many princes to distinguish themselves in competence and loyalty in connection with the competition to be a successor to the reigning monarch or at least a member of the reigning monarch's inner circle.

Saudi Arabian monarchies do show outstanding noblesse oblige in terms of using their wealth to benefit the actual citizens of their kingdoms, but like most absolute monarchies, are also highly repressive and authoritarian, and treat people who are not their permanent subjects and property as disposable and care for their well-being only to the extent that it is transactionally necessary.

Returning to the question of the American political system, the question is really how we can secure noblesse oblige on a broad based basis, without sacrificing competence, rule of law, and freedom from corruption motivated by partisanship, to the extent that the MAGA movement does today. 

While there is a place to recognize political motives rooted in a desire to satisfy a broad grass roots of society rather than only its elites, not all choices which we have vested politicians with making are equally valid. There may not be one right choice, but there are many choices which are objectively worse across the value systems that are intersubjectively shared by broad swaths of our society. And, a system that makes objectively bad choices because swaths ignorant people in the grass roots don't understand that these are bad choices is broken.

Furthermore, the American political system has slipped away from securing noblesse oblige on a broad based basis from its political leaders, because its electoral and legislative processes and procedures have created incentives to further the well-being and desires of minimal winning coalitions while neglecting or actively harming those outside the winning coalition. 

Also, deep rooted flaws in the design of the American political system that arose because the Founders who designed it didn't have the benefit of the lessons of two and a half centuries of global democratic government's successes and failures, prevent the American political system from accurately translating the needs and desires of its people as a whole into appropriate action. It is a political system that is too gridlocked to promptly change to reflect new knowledge and needs, and is too biased towards rural white Christian interests and the interests of the ultra-rich, and against urban, non-Christian and non-white people's interests, and people who are not ultra-rich.

The inability of our gridlocked political system to address urgent needs and desires, especially those of the working class has been toxic for the American political culture. It has undermined faith in the belief that politicians can be in good faith about wanting change. It has washed away concern about the good character or competence of its political leaders. It has fueled the search for scapegoats to lash out against like immigration and free trade and non-Christians and LGBT people and women's rights and racial minorities. It has encouraged thoughtless and radical anti-government attitudes, conspiracy theories, anti-science ideologies, and distrust of intellectual elites.

Working class needs and desires have been neglected, in part, because they don't vote as consistently as more educated and affluent people do, and, in part, because the economy is changing but political gridlock has preventing timely and competent responses to these changes. This is led to the conventional wisdom that political changes have not occurred because bipartisan political elites are conspiring against them, even though this is more untrue than not and the primary reason that the current political system has not addressed their needs is that  the current system makes it too hard for well-intentioned political elites to secure effective change.

Returning to the question of the American economic system, there, the question is mostly, how we can cause the people at the top of economic hierarchies to display more noblesse oblige to their subordinates and to the larger society at a time when they have gone too far in milking the system for their own personal benefit at the expense of the rest of society. American economic elites generally are very competent, and are certainly much less corrupt the American political elites. But they also have far too weak incentives to refrain from causing externalities or exploiting subordinates and third-parties for their own personal benefit. The American political system's job is, in substantial part, to reign in the excesses of American economic elites, and the American political system has done a fairly shoddy job of doing so, in part, because the system in designed in such a way that this kind of regulation of American economic elites is too difficult to secure in a system that takes an unreasonably wide consensus to act.

Quote Of The Day

 

From "A Terrified Teacher At Ghoul School" (Episode 9).

Does Realignment Just Reflect Underlying Clusters Of Norms?

Color me skeptical. I don't believe that polarization at the grass roots was nearly as polarized forty years ago as it is today.

We develop a new method to endogenously partition society into groups based on homophily in values. The between-group differentiation that results from this partition provides a novel measure of latent polarization in society. For the last forty years, the degree of latent polarization of the U.S. public has been high and relatively stable. In contrast, the degree of partisan polarization between voters of the two main political parties steadily increased since the 1990s, and is now converging toward that of underlying values-based clusters. Growing partisan polarization in the U.S. is a reflection of partisan views becoming increasingly aligned with the main values-based clusters in society.

Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuno-Ortin, Romain Wacziarg, "Latent Polarization" (May 2024).

Conservatives Make Poor Elites

Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have so much corruption that it would head towards collapse. This is why conservatives cannot build scientific institutions, and only a very small number of credible journalistic outlets. Right-wingers are discriminated against in academia and the media, but they mostly aren’t in these professions because they select out of them, since they lack intellectual curiosity and a concern for truth. If it doesn’t make them money or flatter their ego in a very simplistic way — in contrast to the more complicated and morally substantive ways in which liberals improve their own self-esteem — conservatives are not interested.

Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump. As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, EHC is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist. A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.

From here via Marginal Revolution.

Twelve Judgments About People Based Upon Their Actions And Beliefs

If you don't tip your server in a sit down restaurant in the U.S., when the server didn't try to kill you or gratuitously insult you in a severe way, you are a bad person.

If you think it is O.K. to deny a child a school lunch because that child doesn't have money with them to pay for it, you are a bad person.

If you try to ban a book at a public library or school library, you are a bad person.

If you report someone, who is otherwise law abiding, to immigration officials for being an undocumented immigrant, you are a bad person.

If you support Trump over Biden for the U.S. Presidency, there is at least an 80% chance that you are a bad person.

If you believe that God commanded you to condemn gay people, and you try to follow that command, you are a bad person.

If you carry a gun in the grocery store and this isn't part of your job, you are a bad person.

If you aren't in the military or a SWAT team, and you aren't a museum curator, and you buy or build an assault rifle, you are a bad person.

If your truck "rolls coal" you are a bad person.

If you throw trash out of the window of your vehicle onto the ground you are a bad person.

If you believe that a young woman or girl who can't marry without parental consent or the consent of a court should need parental or court permission to get an abortion, you are a bad person.

If you do not provide medical care to treat your children for an injury, illness, or preventative medicine, because it conflicts with your religious beliefs, you are a bad person.

Modern Conservatism Is Morally Bankrupt

Glenn C. Loury’s new book, “Late Admissions,” is unlike any economist’s memoir I have ever read. Most don’t mention picking up streetwalkers. Or smoking crack in a faculty office at Harvard’s Kennedy School — or in an airplane at 30,000 feet. Or stealing a car. Or having sex on a beach in Israel with a mistress and attracting the attention of the Israel Defense Forces. Or later being arrested and charged with assaulting her. Or cuckolding a best friend.

From the New York Times.

A libertarian leaning academic economist nonetheless observes that "even given all this, Loury has a good career as an economist and as an public intellectual."

I remember a time when part of conservatism involved a commitment to the rule of law, and a strict traditional moral code. It was also an ideology that believed strongly that if you couldn't conform to the moral code, or just messed up, that you shouldn't brag about it, and instead should keep it a closely guarded secret to protect your reputation. But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore, and black conservative academics are no exception to this trend.

The Road Christianity Could Have Taken

 

Christianity has steadily become a morally evil force in the United States. This was not an inevitable result, although, perhaps it was a likely one.

Mainline Protestants and Catholics could have tried to nip in the bud the current trend in the bud, denouncing the prosperity gospel, the resort to Old Testament thinking, and the general atmosphere of hate in Christianity. There were seeds of that. In Catholicism there was liberation theology and the social gospel, and as a global faith with a leader in Italy, it has always been a bit more cosmopolitan than American Protestantism, even if it has had no qualms about blending church and state. These trends also made real progress in elite seminary training for mainline Protestants, but the living faith of the people in the pews didn't transform in the same way.

These movements within American Christianity didn't bear fruit. Promising steps in the 1960s and 1970s in that direction fizzled out without fanfare. The path suggested by the Chicago Folk Service faded away, while the path imitating secular arena rock thrived.

One of the big barriers to this path is that Christianity is fundamentally at odds with the metaphysical naturalism that is the correct description of our world. In a scientific worldview, there is no room for miracles, for divine intervention, for prayers that make a difference, for faith healing, for demonic temptation and corruption.

The people who have left Christianity are not a random sampling of Christians. They are disproportionately people who share that scientific worldview, and it so happens that a scientific worldview and more humane moral instincts tend to coincide. This is why a more moral Christianity was always going to be a less likely outcome.

Of course, in the United States, where there is great freedom of religion, it is also the case that heresy can't have legal force. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means that there is no such thing as a heretical sect in the United States. It is an open marketplace of ideas, and the sects that appeal to the darker sides of human nature thrived in that competition.

The Ethics Of War and Killing

There was a time, in junior high school, when I was a hard core pacifist, at all levels of the personal to the international level. I no longer hold that view.

War And The Use Of Force Is Sometimes The Answer

At the international level and in the context of civil wars, at least one party in any military conflict usually has no choice in the matter. Someone rebelled against them and attacked them. A pacifist stance that one should just give in to violence and threats of violence, while opposing them with non-violent resistance, simply isn't a workable real world approach.

Similarly, defense of self and defense of others defense to assault and homicide offenses isn't at all problematic. 

Indeed, legally justified war is to a great extent a recognition of this principle in a context where military force is necessary because the state using military force is not strong enough to deal with the threat through the more cumbersome and resource intensive due process and methods of its criminal justice system.

And, there is an aspect to those defenses which is non-obvious, but should be noted. Defending yourself or another against serious crimes, unlike a defense of property justification, requires reasonable necessity, but it does not require proportionality.

Killing thirty hostage takers in order to free one person who has been kidnapped is still legally and morally justified.

What Is Right The Gaza Conflict?

In connection with this idea, one of the factors that weighs heavily against Hamas in Gaza, and against Israel, is that Hamas still has about a hundred Israel hostages taken in the October 7 attack that it launched on Israel (which 57% of adult Gazans surveyed still think was the right decision to conduct, after the fact).

The Israeli-Gaza conflict is complex and multi-factored from a moral and ethical perspective. Israel has a long history of mistreating the Palestinians, and it retaliatory military actions in Gaza have inflicted immense suffering, loss, and hardship that is ongoing on lots of people in Gaza who aren't particularly blameworthy. But the Palestinians insistence on hard line positions that Israel shouldn't exist, that they should get their pre-1948 lands back, that they are justified in killing Israelis more or less at random today, and that several generations later that they are still refugees is extremely dubious. Basically, they lost control of their land to conquest and the time has long since passed for them to suck it up, accept it as a fait accompli, and find a way to move on from that defeat. And, Israel excesses, even if they are not fully justified, are at least understandable, when large majorities of the Palestinian adult population wants them dead and sees no moral problem with killing them at random. I don't think that Israel is responding to the October 7 attack in most ethically justifiable manner. 

But the fact that Hamas deliberately provoked this attack knowing that there would be overwhelming retaliation for it, that fact that the people who elected Hamas still feel that the attack was justified even after knowing the consequences, the fact that Hamas has not released the remaining 100 or so Israeli hostages it holds, the fact that Hamas has an official policy with has wide Palestinian support of favoring the annihilation of Israel, and the fact that Hamas is to some extent best understood as an Iranian proxy force, all greatly mitigate Israeli culpability for retaliating for the October 7 attack and changing the way that Gaza will operate going forward, in a way that has inflicted too much collateral damage on less culpable Gazans.

Israel certainly has no obligation to limit the number of people it kills in its responsive military action in Gaza to be somehow proportional to the 1400 or so people that Hamas killed on October 7-8 or so. At a minimum, it is justified in killing every single member of the Hamas military and those civilians somehow connected to ratifying or implementing the attack on it, to destroying everything that facilitates Hamas's military capabilities, to kill everyone it needs to in order to free those 100 hostages, and to inflict whatever collateral damages on Hamas controlled Gaza is necessary to achieve those ends. The only real ethical question is whether there has been far more collateral damage to Hamas controlled Gaza than is necessary, and on that point, there is a fair argument that there has been and that there is a great risk that the unnecessary part of that collateral damage will be great going forward.

I personally wouldn't find it morally offensive for Israel to deport the entire population of Gaza to someplace new, if a place could be found that would receive them. But Egypt doesn't want the Gazans, and neither does anyone else. 

But, for example, given that Hamas, the government that the Gazans chose in reasonably fair elections to rule them, was armed, provided with intelligence by, and incited to bring the October 7 attack by Iran, Iran has a moral duty to accept a relocation of all of the people of Gaza to its territory and it probably wouldn't be wrong for Israel to involuntarily deport them there and turn Gaza into additional territory for Israelis. Similarly, if predominantly Muslim countries really want to advocate for the well-being of Gazans, they should put their words into action and accept Gazans into their territories as new citizens of their countries.

The Death Penalty

I am also not ethically opposed to the death penalty, per se. There are definitely crimes for which the death penalty is not an excessive or disproportionate punishment. Likewise, an execution or corporal punishment that is excruciatingly painful isn't excessive for a crime that was itself heinous, although it may be undesirable for the government to cater to those who take delight in inflicting pain on others.

In theory, the death penalty could be cost effective relative to the cost of incarcerating someone in a maximum security prison for the rest of their life.

My problem with the death penalty is that, as applied, our criminal justice system is rarely accurate enough to justify the executions of wrongfully or immorally convicted innocent people which frequently occurs, and that our death penalty system as it is currently designed does not save money relative to life imprisonment.

Furthermore, many countries that have not abolished the death penalty, including China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser extent, death penalty states in the U.S.), routinely use the death penalty for offenses for which it is not justified in circumstances in which the accuracy of their systems in imposing it upon people who are executed is doubtful.