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Daily Bread, Libertarians

Daily Bread for 8.23.22: A Sketch on Libertarianism

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 6:10 AM and sunset 7:43 PM for 13h 32m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 12.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 4:30 PM.   

 On this day in 1944, Allied forces liberate Marseille.

So, in fulfillment of a promise from yesterday, and in reply to a commenter who asked recently about books and references on libertarianism: a sketch. 

Libertarians are those who believe that liberty is the critical political value: that from personal freedom for all will come a productive, diverse, and fair society. Liberty is not the only political value, but we think it’s decisive of a good society. Rather than the compulsion of the state (through mandates, taxes and tariffs, restrictions on association, and brute force) we seek a world of free and voluntary interactions (in the marketplace and in private life) of moral equals.

Here you are: individual liberty, free markets, limited & open government, and peace (though free trade with friendly nations). 

We are the inheritors and defenders of an old tradition, stretching back so many centuries, long before the term libertarian was coined (it’s a relatively recent invention). 

Voluntary transactions and associations are the natural, and often spontaneous, result of human sociability. Most people are sociable and friendly, and if it were otherwise society would have remained small and primitive. We believe people can organize well and best when they left to their own choices. The foundation of a productive (and so prosperous) society is private activity, not state action. Better still, free, voluntary interactions are fair in a way that state compulsion is not. 

Consent. As we believe in voluntary, mutual  interactions, we believe necessarily in consent in romance and relationships. Forced sexual encounters (including encounters with those who are by law too young to consent) are wrong and should be punished at law. Nonconsensual romance isn’t romance — it’s criminal assault.

Defense of Self and Others. While there are a few pacifist libertarians (there’s a Quaker Libertarian group), almost all libertarians believe in a right to defend themselves, others, and the country.  

We believe this right includes a right to bear arms, but candidly the worship of guns as a part of a new trinity is simply odd and (from the religious vantage) heretical. Have these people never read a Hebrew or Christian Bible? God, Guns, Trump is simply perverse on religious or secular grounds. 

Diversity. We, the advocates of individual liberty, are necessarily the champions of diversity: among adults there should be unfettered speech, association, romance, attire, and peaceful, consensual activities. 

The most productive and dynamic part of a society is civil society. 

That Bleeding-Heart Thing. So, some libertarians are concerned simply with the obvious problem of a bloated and overreaching of government, and their libertarianism is wholly political. For others of us, thinking of society, we are drawn to make our way in the world with an animating concern about individual well-being. Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism is the union of free-market principles and a commitment to social justice. We see and know that free markets uplift from poverty and advance prosperity better than any alternative political or economic arrangement.

And yet, and yet, we have a true concern for all people, including those who are still struggling and we seek the material advancement of all. So Bleeding-Heart Libertarians propound a fusion of free-market economics and social-justice principles. See John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness. 

That’s why we think about poverty, write about poverty, and complain about failure to consider poverty. We see that those in need matter as much as those of us who have done well. (A bleeding-heart libertarian would reject, and hold in contempt, the boosterism or toxic positivity that promotes only the positive while ignoring suffering.) 

 For a free society to remain free, citizens must recognize that all are moral equals: there can be no supposed superiority or inferiority by race, ethnicity, gender, or orientation. A society that does not recognize this fundamental moral equality among its members will not remain free: a falsely supposed superiority of some will lead to the oppression of others, and a herrenvolk state. 

(Consider Charles Murray, who is falsely labeled a libertarian. His recent work, Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America expounds one lie: that Blacks are inferior in significant ways. After attempting to establish as much, Murray then absurdly contends that we should all just move on with our lives. No and no again: Blacks are not inferior, and pretending that one can declare that they are without destroying their liberty is absurd. Those committed to liberty can see Murray for what he is: a soft-spoken, well-mannered, inveterate racist. There is no imagining of Dante too terrible for Murray and his ilk.) 

The LP. There’s libertarianism, and then there’s the Libertarian Party (LP). The LP has long ceased to be a means to expand liberty. Much of it is now dominated by MAGA men who have taken the name of a famous libertarian and styled themselves a caucus within that party (the ‘Von Mises’ caucus).  They’re bigots who think that free speech of any kind is an expression of libertarianism (as though one could somehow  advance the liberty of all while speaking as a racist, etc.). The free speech of the Klansman is speech, and should be free, but it is not speech in advocacy of ordered liberty. 

The LP once tried to find normal candidates, and was successful for a while, but those days are long past. This libertarian blogger has not been a member of the LP for many years, and will never be again.

The serious among us are Never Trump, and part of a grand coalition to preserve liberal democracy. (Liberal democracy — where liberal means preservation of individual rights within a majority-deciding democracy.) 

The Think Tanks. A few quick words — 

CATO: America’s premier, and most traditional, libertarian organization. Professional, buttoned-down, serious. There’s no institution one could find more state-of-the-art-Washington-D.C. than this. You’d want CATO to do your estate planning, and you’d catch him looking down during the consultation to see if your shoes were properly shined. 

The Reason Foundation and Reason magazine: Libertarian, but often undisciplined, too obliging of conservative donors, and its Hit & Run blog is sometimes closer to Hit-or-Miss. You might want a weekend in Manhattan with Reason, as she’d know all the best places and prove a scintillating, if sometimes unbelievable, conversation partner. If you took the mushrooms she offered you, you’d awaken the next morning with no memory of how you found yourself in a SoHo loft with a French bulldog named Jean-Claude. 

FEE (Foundation for Economic Education): Old, and struggling for relevance. Trying to get hip, but hard to be hip when about you the word hip mostly conjures notions of an orthopedic procedure.  

Niskanen Center: They were libertarian, until they weren’t, and they’re so ill-defined now they’re who knows what. 

A Million Conservative Sites: There are perhaps a million, billion, trillion (I’m not sure), conservative sites that talk about liberty (without personal responsibility), rights (without limit), hurt feelings (you can’t say that about me!), or rave about culture war issues (sexual orientation, transgendered people, immigrants).

How is it that all these supposedly big, bad conservative men of pure stock can’t control themselves?  On a trip earlier this year, I saw a wife and her children look on with embarrassment while a husband and father had a fit at an airport gate, about the mask mandate imposed at the time. There he was, having a tantrum, while they looked on, mortified. The mandate was an imposition, unlike the sensible and easy use of vaccines, but a hysterical display at the gate, to the evident shame of his own family, was a self-inflicted loss greater than the imposed mandate. (No woman should have to take a screeching gibbon to bed.)

Men like this aren’t libertarians simply because they once saw the word liberty on an alt-right website. Ordered liberty requires a recognition of others’ well-being. 

Here libertarians find themselves with a challenge similar to the conservative David French’s challenge: to reclaim the first principles of a tradition.  

 Yacht sinks off Italy’s Calabrian coast after crew and passengers rescued: 

Conservative Populism, Culture, Daily Bread, Ethics, Law, Liberal Democracy, Never Trump, Politics, Reading, Religion, Trumpism

Daily Bread for 8.22.22: Of David French, Traditions, and Examples

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:45 PM for 13h 35m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 20.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School Board goes into closed session shortly after 6 PM, and resumes open session at 7 PM.  

 On this day in 1989, Nolan Ryan strikes out Rickey Henderson to become the first Major League Baseball pitcher to record 5,000 strikeouts.

For every person who approaches politics as personal advancement, there are others who begin and continue politics as a practical arrangement of state power guided by philosophical, moral, or ethical principles. For this second group, it’s principle, not personality, that undergirds one’s actions.

The same is true of theology. In this time of national conflict, the choice about politics confronts the religious: personality or principle? 

This brings us to David French, a conservative evangelical lawyer who opposes Trumpism. French is a true believer, so to speak, and as a true believer he’s come to oppose the nativist authoritarianism that Trumpism represents. French opposes both on secular legal grounds and as a matter of Christian ethics. 

A commenter here at FREE WHITEWATER mentioned French’s latest book, and that comment spurred me to write a bit more about David French, theology, and politics. (To the commenter: your observations are gratefully received.) 

First, a few remarks on my own views. I am not an evangelical, as French is, but instead a mainline Protestant, raised Lutheran, with Catholic relatives, who worships in an Episcopal church outside the city. That church is a combination of mainline theology with an Anglo-Catholic (that is, a traditional) liturgy. So in some ways it’s progressive, and in others it would appear very traditional. It is a matter of grace, serendipitous as grace is, that I have found this parish. 

Of theology, however, I was raised at a time when one was expected to read widely and seriously, of one’s own and of others’ teachings. Comparative religion was simply part of a proper education, and reading comprehensively was expected. (As a religious matter, one does not have to be literate to believe one doctrine or another, but if one is literate, it’s beneficial to read thoughtfully. Translations matter and context matters.) I’m writing this as plainly as possible, but of course it’s a field that invites lifelong study.

The MAGA crowd routinely relies on poor translations, cherry-picked Bible verses, and distorted if not heretical views of Christian teaching in their support of Trump. They often don’t know what they don’t know. They’re wrong (if not in moral error) no matter how loudly they speak. They practice a dominance-and-submission ritual that is as far from Christian conduct as one could go. (This ritual isn’t part of any major theological tradition, Christian or otherwise: it’s more like spousal abuse or a non-consensual fetish. To an observant person, dominance-and-submission does not look Christian — instead, it looks ape-like, an imitation of an animal’s behavior.)

See also FREE WHITEWATER’s posts on Formation, Moral and Formation, General.

That brings me to another part of my upbringing (and that of others of my background). We were taught to read deeply, decide carefully, and defend fiercely. These MAGA men assume that others are weak, that we will accept their shouting, that we will back down in the face of their head-shaking, arms-waving, foot-stomping, and threatening behavior. 

They’re wrong. They think too much of themselves and too little of those who are committed to both a liberal democratic order and well-grounded, traditional Christian theology. We’ll not yield to their ilk, now or ever. They’ve distorted enough history, law, and theology for a century of error-correction.

An evergreen reminder on Trumpism: never means never. 

And so, and so, I am not an evangelical as French is. We are now, however, of the same views on two religious fundamentals. French contends that There Is No Remaining Christian Case for Trump (‘Trump discipled the church more than the church discipled Trump’) and Christian Political Ethics Are Upside Down (‘We’re adamant about politics and flexible about virtue’).

Of No Remaining Christian Case for Trump: 

Or, even worse, did the tension between Trump’s actions and your own morality grow so great that you started to redefine morality itself? How many people made the migration from supporting Trump in spite of his character to supporting him because of who he was? I can think of countless folks, in both public and private life. 

That’s what discipling looks like. 

Ted Cruz says his pronouns are “kiss my ass’ not just because he corrupted himself for Trump but because the crowd is corrupt as well. The same analysis goes for Josh Hawley’s refusal to apologize for his fist salute or his election challenge. He is morally corrupt. That cheering crowd is morally corrupt. 

Why? Because they’ve absorbed the lessons Trump taught. Fight the left with profane anger. Never apologize. 

Of Christian Political Ethics Are Upside Down: 

When I encounter the most partisan preachers and public Christian personalities, I’m often gobsmacked at the inverse relationship between their political certainty and their political knowledge. The less they know about an issue, the more confident they’re obviously right. 

(This is a confession, by the way. To take one example—the more I began to understand about the reality and legacy of racism in America, the less certain I became in my conventional, confident conservatism about law, liberty, and economic opportunity. I’m now far more open to contrary views.)

Earlier this month I was in a conversation with friends, and one of them brought up how he’s combatting the pull toward animosity by revisiting the civil rights movement. In face of indescribably greater oppression than any American community faces today (including the American Evangelical community) its leaders and members demonstrated a degree of grace and forbearance that feels unimaginable today.

While French and I agree on Trumpism and Christianity, we’ve arrived at this from different directions. His is the harder path, walking among, not apart.

In David French’s efforts, there is both encouragement and rebuke. As libertarianism, for example, drifts and slips from its fundamentals, what have we libertarians done, however small the effort, to defend first principles within that political tradition? Hard to overstate how much I admire French’s hard work among conservatives. In his achievements, there is an implicit rebuke that one has not done enough within one’s own traditions, and encouragement that, if one tries, more can be done. 

A bit about libertarianism, tomorrow. 

 Jupiter seen by JWST: 

Daily Bread, Education, University, UW Madison, UW System

Daily Bread for 8.21.22: Direct Admission into the UW System Is a Sensible Idea

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 75. Sunrise is 6:08 AM and sunset 7:46 PM for 13h 38m 04s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 27.4% of its visible disk illuminated. 

 On this day in 1680, Pueblo Indians capture Santa Fe from the Spanish during the Pueblo Revolt.

Rich Kremer reports UW System considering automatic admissions for in-state high school graduates:

The University of Wisconsin System is considering automatically admitting high school graduates to its campuses in hopes of stemming enrollment declines and boosting college access. 

The percentage of high school students enrolling at the state’s 13 universities has been falling since 2013, according to UW System data. Historically, 32 percent of high school grads have enrolled at UW schools immediately after graduation. That fell to about 27 percent in 2020. 

During a Thursday meeting of the UW Board of Regents in Green Bay, members heard a presentation about how a policy known as “direct admissions” could temper the trend. 

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Professor of Higher Education Jennifer Delaney has researched the approach and told the board direct admissions works by offering automatic admission to high school seniors who meet certain grade point average or standardized test score thresholds. 

She said direct admissions sidesteps the traditional application process, which places the impetus on students and parents to fill out multiple college applications in hopes of getting a response. With direct admissions, students, parents and high school counselors are proactively notified about an open spot.  

“Right now, we’re having individuals do individual searches for college,” said Delaney. “Those with parents who’ve gone to college have a real advantage.” 

This is a fine idea: there would still be admission standards (grades, test scores), but the admission process would be simpler (ands easier) in time and effort. Students wouldn’t have to hunt around, and hope, for a spot.  

Although the reported motivation for direct admissions is responsive to enrollment declines, a public-university, direct-admissions process should be the standard in all environments. 

Government’s use public funds to establish a large university system should not come with additional time-consuming barriers to entry for qualified students. Having already paid to establish a public system of higher education, students and their families shouldn’t have to waste their time on non-academic procedural steps to gain admission. 

(Private universities should be free to establish their own application procedures. If they should choose to make those procedures lengthy and complicated, they’ll be on their own to do so against public and private competitors.) 

Direct admission is a better admission process for the UW System.  

 How Mountains of Worm Cocoons Are Turned into Expensive Silk in Vietnam:

City, Film

Film: Wednesday, August 24th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Harold and Maude

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Wednesday, August 24th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Harold and Maude @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Comedy/Drama/Romance

Rated PG; 1 hour, 31 minutes (1971)

This dark comedy focuses on the relationship between a 20 year old man, obsessed with dying and death, and how his life is forever changed by meeting a lively, 79-year- old woman very much alive and enjoying life. This film has become a cult classic.

One can find more information about Harold and Maude at the Internet Movie Database.

Daily Bread, Gableman, Gubernatorial Race 2022, Michels, Poll, Tony Evers, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 8.20.22: Trumpist Michels Quickly Starts Whining About Polls

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see afternoon thundershowers with a high of 74. Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:48 PM for 13h 40m 44s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 36.8% of its visible disk illuminated. 

 On this day in 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring. East German participation is limited to a few specialists due to memories of the recent war. Only Albania and Romania refuse to participate.

The latest Marquette Law School Poll shows a gubernatorial close race between Evers and Michels, but Michels isn’t satisfied, and so, as Trump would do, he’s fantasizing. Sophia Voight reports Tim Michels questions the integrity of the Marquette Law School Poll, says he is actually ‘up 5 to 10 points’ over Gov. Evers:

GREEN BAY – After the latest Marquette University Law School Poll showed Republican gubernatorial candidate trailing Gov. Tony Evers by 2 percentage points, Tim Michels claimed without evidence it’s because “there’s a class of people out there that does not talk to pollsters.”

Wednesday’s Marquette poll showed support for Evers at 45%, while Michels was at 43% and Independent Joan Beglinger was at 7%.

During a campaign stop at the Brown County Republican Party office Thursday, Michels said he believed he is actually up in the polls. 

“If the polls say we’re dead even right now, I believe in my heart that we are up at least 5 to 10 (percentage) points,” Michels told a crowd of GOP party members.

Fox News’ latest poll also shows Michels behind Evers, 46% to 49%. 

These aren’t bad results for Michels, but they’re not good results, either. ‘Believing in his heart’ means nothing; respondents to the Marquette Law School Poll did not check Michels’ beats-per-minute before expressing their gubernatorial preferences. 

About Michels as a Trumpist: he received Trump’s endorsement, ran proudly on it, and is campaigning next month with disgraced money-waster Michael Gableman. He’s all in. 

Swiss Army Airlifts Water to Farm Animals Sweltering Under This Summer’s Heat:

Beautiful Whitewater, Beauty, Charity, City, Culture, Daily Bread, Faraway Places, Local Government, New Whitewater, Open Government, Politics, Poverty

Daily Bread for 8.19.22: Residency Matters, Practically and Ethically

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:06 AM and sunset 7:49 PM for 13h 43m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 45.2% of its visible disk illuminated. 

 On this day in 1812, the American frigate USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada earning the nickname “Old Ironsides.” 

Charles R. Hunt writes Dr. Oz should be worried – voters punish ‘carpetbaggers,’ and new research shows why: 

Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race between Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz has garnered a lot of media attention recently, thanks to the Fetterman campaign’s relentless trolling of his opponent, mainly for being a resident of neighboring New Jersey rather than the state he’s running to represent.

Fetterman has run ad after ad using Oz’s own words to highlight his deep Jersey roots. His campaign started a petition to nominate Oz for the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Fetterman even enlisted very-Jersey celebrities like Snooki of “Jersey Shore” to draw attention to his charge that Oz is a carpetbagger in the Pennsylvania race: a candidate with no authentic connection to an area, who moved there for the sole purpose of political ambition.

While Hunt is writing about candidates for federal office, his research shows how residency matters, generally: 

Why do voters respond positively to deeply rooted candidates and negatively to their carpetbagging counterparts?

One explanation is that deep roots offer candidates a number of practical campaign benefits. A deeply rooted candidate tends to have more intimate knowledge of the district, including its electorate, its economy and industries, its unique culture and its political climate. Deeply rooted candidates also enjoy naturally higher name recognition in the community, more extensive social and political networks and greater access to local donors and vendors for their campaigns.

Other work has theorized that local roots help candidates tap into a shared identity with their voters that is less tangible but meaningful. Scholars like Kal Munis have shown that when voters have strong psychological attachments to a particular place, it has major impacts on voting behavior. And in a recent survey I conducted with David Fontana, we found that voters consistently rated homegrown U.S. Senate candidates as more relatable and trustworthy, and cast votes for them at higher rates.

Just as you’d trust a true born-and-raised local to give you advice about where to eat in town over someone who just moved there, so too do voters trust deeply rooted candidates to represent them in Washington.

The key point: while any resident should have an equal voice, non-residents simply lack the same status in the community.

This is true both politically and ethically. 

Politically. It doesn’t matter whether one thinks they have (or should have) the same status; in political matters non-residents most certainly do not. In the end, the large commuter class of officials in the Whitewater area are vulnerable during controversies — their titles are insufficient to protect their positions during a challenge or crisis. As a matter of durability, if you’re not here, you’re at a political disadvantage. 

Ethically. People have a right to work here and then live elsewhere, although I would hope that day workers would decide freely to choose Whitewater. It’s a beautiful city. While it is a pleasure to travel to faraway places and have adventures elsewhere, no matter how enjoyable those trips, every return to our city is for me a happy one. Whitewater is my home. 

Something more, much more: Whitewater is a city of significant needs. People with true concern for others could find no more deserving place to apply their compassionate talents. (One carries on, doing what one can, in one’s own way, all the while Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day.)

What caring person, during the Great Depression, would have left America for the sake of a supposedly more comfortable foreign land? There is no caring person who would have done so. One would have stayed and chosen whatever role one could (and there are thousands of worthy roles) in support of American society. While there are many commendable acts within a community in need, abandonment is not among them. 

In beauty and in need, Whitewater is worthy of a full commitment: to live here, sharing in both the pleasures and pains of the city, acting in whatever way on can toward the community’s betterment. 

 SpaceX CRS-25 Dragon undocking and departure: 

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, August 23rd, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, The Duke

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Tuesday, August 23rd at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of The Duke @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Biography/Drama/Comedy

Rated R (language); 1 hour, 35 minutes (2020).

In 1961, a 60 year old British taxi driver steals a Goya painting from the National Gallery in London. He then sends ransom notes to the government saying he will return the treasure when they invest more heavily in care for the elderly.

A true story, starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren. Nominated for AARP’s Movies for Grownups Best Grownup Love Story.

One can find more information about The Duke at the Internet Movie Database.

Cats, Science/Nature

Friday Catblogging: Using AI Facial Recognition to Conserve Pumas

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Ashleigh Papp, over at Scientific American, reports How AI Facial Recognition Is Helping Conserve Pumas:

INTRO: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Ashleigh Papp.

Papp: Mountain lions are now posing for their close ups. Researchers based in the greater Yellowstone National Park area have figured out a new way to identify these cats by using facial recognition. And this method is proving to be a better way to monitor these highly elusive creatures.

Alexander: Mountain lions are just really, really hard to directly observe. They’re just so cryptic and secretive. And so we’ve had to find these non-invasive methods, they’re often called to, to get information about a mountain lion population.

Papp: That’s Peter Alexander, a research biologist based in Kelly, Wyoming, who led the research project

….

Alexander: Tigers that’s kind of the classic example of using cameras for individual identity. Because those stripes, they’re like a fingerprint. (10:17) And so a cougar, they do not have any of those really conspicuous stripes on their sides. And so yeah, just your typical flank view shot can be pretty nondescript.

Papp: That’s because nearly all pumas around the world, with exceptions of distinguishing things like scars, have light, sandy colored fur down their sides. The scientific name for a mountain lion, Puma concolor, literally translates to “one color.” This lack of unique coloration on the sides of their bodies means that researchers like Alexander can’t usually tell if one puma crosses a camera trap five times, or if five individual animals pass by.

However, it’s a different story when it comes to their facial markings — they’re kind of a show stopper.

Alexander: You get a close up image of a face, they’re stunning. Just those huge eyes, and there’s a lot of detail in whisker patterns and all sorts of stuff. They really are beautiful.

See Link to Podcast Audio File. 

Conspiracy Theories, Courts, Crackpots, Daily Bread, Elections, Gableman, Government Spending, Legislature, Speaker Vos, Wisconsin, WISGOP

Daily Bread for 8.18.22: Gableman Accomplished Nothing

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:51 PM for 13h 46m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.6% of its visible disk illuminated. 

 Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium.

As one might have suspected, a detailed judicial view now confirms: Special Counsel Michael Gableman’s so-called election investigation was a million-dollar farce. Lawrence Andrea reports that Gableman ‘Accomplished nothing’: Judge admonishes Michael Gableman’s 2020 election review, bars lawyers from case:

For many months, former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 presidential election that has not produced any evidence of substantive voter fraud “accomplished nothing,” according to a Dane County judge. 

Gableman didn’t keep weekly progress reports as required by the Wisconsin State Assembly. 

He conducted no witness interviews. 

And he gathered “no measurable data” over at least a four-month span in 2021, the judge found. 

“Instead, it gave its employees code names like ‘coms’ or ‘3,’ apparently for the sole purpose of emailing back and forth about news articles and drafts of speeches,” Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington wrote in an opinion released Wednesday.

“It printed copies of reports that better investigators had already written,” Remington added, “although there is no evidence any person connected with (the Office of the Special Counsel) ever read these reports, let alone critically analyzed their factual and legal bases to draw his or her own principled conclusions.”

….

In the ruling, Remington admonished the Office of Special Counsel’s five out-of-state attorneys, including prominent conservative attorney James Bopp, for their “baseless” claims against him and revoked their ability to represent the Assembly’s office in the case.

“Its lawyers’ arguments are wholly without merit and, together, their disobedience for the rule of law is contemptuous,” Remington wrote of the attorneys.

“If this case were not on appeal,” he added, “I could sanction OSC and each of its seven lawyers for their specious legal arguments.”

A copy of the Supplement to the Court’s July 18, 2022 Decision Denying OSC’s Motion to Recuse appears below. 

  

 Nelson, NZ, Under State of Emergency After Heavy Flooding:

City, Conservative Populism, Culture, Daily Bread, Local Government, Politics, School District, Trumpism

Daily Bread for 8.17.22: The Populists’ Dominance-and-Submission Ritual

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:04 AM and sunset 7:53 PM for 13h 48m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 66% of its visible disk illuminated. 

 Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meet at 5:30 PM. 

 On this day in 2008, American swimmer Michael Phelps becomes the first person to win eight gold medals at one Olympic Games.

Most political movements have not only an ideology but also a style in which that ideology is expressed. Adherents will often speak in a common way, or even dress in a common way, while expressing their views. Some of this is stereotypical (that is, a conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image). 

David Frum, in Trump Is Back on the Ballot, observes a conservative populist style that Trump exemplifies:

DeSantis ran in 2018 as a craven Trump sycophant. He had four years to become his own man. He battled culture wars—even turning against his former backers at Disney—all to prove himself the snarling alpha-male bully that Republican primary voters reward. But since the Mar-a-Lago search, DeSantis has dropped back into the beta-male role, sidekick and cheering section for Trump.

Trump has reasserted dominance. DeSantis has submitted. And if Republican presidential politics in the Trump era has one rule, it’s that there’s no recovery from submission. Roll over once, and you cannot get back on your feet again.

Trump specializes in creating dominance-and-submission rituals. His Republican base is both the audience for them and the instrument of them. But to those outside the subculture excited by these rituals, they look demeaning and ridiculous. Everybody else wants jobs, homes, cheaper prescription drugs, and bridges that do not collapse—not public performances in Trump’s theater of humiliation.

Trump did not create what Frum describes as a dominance-and-submission ritual, but he is an exemplary practitioner. This is almost always a public ritual: an in-person confrontation between someone and those whose submission he seeks (indeed, demands). In this dynamic, others are to submit after a period of apologies, groveling, and abject begging for the practitioner’s supposed mercy.

Note well, how this is different from an ordinary person’s occasional concerns: while an ordinary person expresses his grievances (however forcefully), the dominance-and-submission approach demands others’ self-abasement in reply. This outward aggression masks an inner neediness: a battening on the degradation of others. A well-individuated man or woman does not seek from others a particular emotional display in response to speech. One may have policy objectives, but legitimate policy objectives do not include expecting, let alone receiving, submissive displays from others. 

For people who have never encountered someone like this, it’s often an unsettling experience. A dominance-and-submission approach often works its force on the unaccustomed. 

(Professionals who have performed difficult clinical work in their careers are sure to have met a few clients or patients who attempt this dominance-and-submission ritual. There are few better, early-in-career experiences than learning how to deal with people of this ilk. Some professionals are naturally cold to this ritual, but experience of it further improves both their natural sangfroid and ability to manage professionally in response to it. A confident recommendation: every last professional, having left his or her blue-stocking background, should commit to a period of gritty clinical practice to see both the best and worst of patients or clients.) 

Years of this dominance-and-submission ritual from Trump, and conservative populist imitators, and yet it’s still hard for policymakers nationally, statewide, or in Whitewater to respond sensibly. Sadly, the same people who know better than to play with a hyena have trouble adopting a sensible response to a dominance-and-submission ritual. 

Unfortunate, deeply unfortunate. 

 Gorgeous Earth from space station time-lapses compiled by NASA: 

Conservative Populism, Conspiracy Theories, Daily Bread, Elections, Never Trump, Trumpism

Daily Bread for 8.16.22: How Election Conspiracies Took Over the GOP

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:54 PM for 13h 51m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 75.1% of its visible disk illuminated. 

 The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1930, the first color sound cartoon, Fiddlesticks, is released by Ub Iwerks.

 How Trump’s election denialism took over the GOP: 

Former president Donald Trump’s false claims election claims began in 2016, but did not become a key litmus test for Republican candidates until after the 2020 election. Here’s how it happened.

Trumpism is dangerous to a free society for many reasons: authoritarianism, nativism, bigotry, and cronyism. Underlying all these malevolent characteristics is a willingness to lie without shame. These MAGA men do not apply to themselves rules of evidence or principles of reasoning. They are a populist movement of desire and grievance. An earlier generation of conservatives would have looked at the Trumpists as thin-skinned complainers. (As it has turned out, the immediately preceding generation of conservatives has, in the main, devolved into Trumpists.)

False claims of election fraud are only one example of the fantastical and mendacious perspective that undergirds conservative populism. 

 Fiddlesticks (1930): 

City, Daily Bread, Local Government, Social Media

Daily Bread for 8.15.22: The Errors of Very Online and Hyperlocal

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 73. Sunrise is 6:02 AM and sunset 7:56 PM for 13h 53m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.3% of its visible disk illuminated. 

 Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1965, The Beatles play to nearly 60,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York City, an event later regarded as the birth of stadium rock.

 David French observes this of a ‘Very Online’ culture: 

The core of the Trump movement is Very Online, and like all Very Online movements it jumps on talking points and messages that can seem weird and wrong to normal folks offline. Defunding or dismantling the FBI is not something normal folks will buy.

That’s right: too much time inside a hothouse leads to crafting newer, more controversial positions to maintain attention within that environment. 

The hyperlocal politics of small towns, both before and after social media began, has a similar tendency. There’s too much time spent thinking about what a few other people in town might think, and not enough time focused on the relationship between local issues and broader forces. 

Very Online focuses one’s thinking on ever more extreme positions among a cyber-obsessed group, and hyperlocalism in town politics focuses one’s thinking on too few people even in a small community. 

One of the surest ways to spot failure in local politics is governance by press release, where genuine accomplishments are replaced with grandiose statements about limited achievements. Awesome isn’t a policy. It’s an adjective. 

In online communities, a few attention-seekers adopt views outside widespread acceptability (leading to bizarre positions). In small towns, a few stodgy residents advance views more restrictive than widespread acceptability (leading to stultifying positions). 

 See merging galaxies close-up in stunning Gemini North telescope 4K zoom-in:

Travel 60 million light-years away into the constellation Virgo to catch a glimpse of interacting galaxies NGC 4568 and NGC 4567. The imagery of the galactic mash-up was captured by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

Full Story: https://www.space.com/colliding-galax… Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA