Destroying democracy by saying they protect citizens

Daily Kos community member LaFeminista has a few thoughts about the promises of AI. From an article in Le Monde:

“It will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.” S. Altman

Sam Altman has been the CEO of OpenAI since 2019, according to Wikipedia. LaFeminista wrote:

The amount of resources being thrown at basic AI is truly frightening, but worry not, AI will solve all the environmental damage done, it’ll solve most everything. Why stop at basic AI? Where is the gain in that mere bagatelle? The amassing of these colossal fortunes demands more, ever more. The race for Artificial Superintelligence and Artificial General Intelligence is on, the Prize for being first? Everything, it is the ultimate win. Ignore the damage! Perhaps not, methinks, but what do I know next to these titans of AI?

Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about an ongoing event, a major piece happened last Tuesday and I’m glad I missed it. This major piece is the nasty guy reading from the Bible while in the Oval Office. Noting like smearing the separation of church and state.

He’s not going to read it silently as a humble expression of faith, of course. That would be silly. This latest incursion into the separation of church and state comes courtesy of this grifty little America Reads the Bible production, where the world’s most ostentatiously Christian of Christian nationalist types in and out of government are reading you parts of the Bible over the course of a full week.

The other participants will be at the Museum of the Bible. And I’ll be happy to miss those too. I’m sure they will find the passages about war and ignore the ones where Jesus said love your enemy and feed the poor. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, discussed the latest book by Ibram X. Kendi. His book Stamped From the Beginning has been on my to-read shelf for at least a couple years. His bestselling book is How to Be an Antiracist, which became “a cultural touchstone” and a handbook for Americans “confronted with the depth and persistence of the nation’s history of antiblackness.” His newest book is Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, discussing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and its significance in the rise of fascism. Wrote Kaplan:

Kendi defines the Great Replacement Theory as the belief that global elites are enabling people of color to displace the lives, livelihoods and electoral power of white people.

Kendi is a professor, a scholar of racism, and a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient. He’s also attracted the fury of the MAGA movement, always a good recommendation. When attacked he responds as a scholar – doing research and writing a book. GRT has been around in various forms for a long time. This version...

was coined by French novelist Renaud Camus in 2010, when he became convinced that Muslim immigrants from former colonies were overtaking the white population of France and its traditions. GRT warns that Muslims and people of color, whether immigrants or citizens, are literally replacing white Christians and traditional European culture, and must be stopped.

GRT isn’t just racism. It claims that social justice movements are acts of “white genocide.” It’s a zero-sum view of the world. It declares Democracy and multiculturalism are threats to whiteness and cannot be tolerated. It should sound absurd. But it is promoted by Elon Musk, Viktor Orbán of Hungary (now out of power), far-right parties in France, and the nasty guy. GRT makes a distinction between a “good” immigrant who came in the past and a “bad” immigrant who came recently. The “good” came legally and assimilated. The “bad” came illegally and they’re destroying the nation. Black Americans, many who have been here for more generations than many white people are also declared to be “bad” based on comments by people like Thomas Jefferson who believed slaves should be freed, but could not live among white people and should be sent back to Africa. GRT and its zero-sum thinking also infects other populations. Black people believe they are being replaced by Latinos. Black Christians believe they are being replaced by Muslims. Black people may be below white, but they can be higher than black immigrants who fear being nabbed by ICE. GRT is insidious because it “causes people to consent to dictatorial states.” Some people choose the protection of privilege over democracy. That’s why authoritarians push it. They can justify destroying democratic infrastructure by saying they are protecting the citizens. GRT is a problem for black people because they’ve fought for democracy for hundreds of years. Kendi says that’s why they need to understand GRT.

There is nonetheless a hopeful cast to Kendi’s latest work, centered on his belief that “human groups are natural allies against inequities,” and that coming together is more instinctual than sowing division.

A week ago Jessica Huseman, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, reported that Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, also Republican candidate for governor, seized the ballots from a recent election. His reason is to do his own recount and open a criminal investigation into the election. The California Supreme Court ordered a halt to his investigation. There isn’t any more reason for this Republican to seize ballots than for any other Republican to dispute any election in a decade.

Elections in the U.S. are run locally. So is law enforcement. That overlap creates a real vulnerability. The same county responsible for storing and counting ballots is also overseen by a sheriff who can get a warrant, enter election facilities, and take materials as part of a criminal investigation. In contrast, federal authorities seeking to obtain election materials have to establish jurisdiction and work through multiple layers of oversight. A local sheriff can act much more quickly, often before state officials or courts have time to respond.

Thankfully, in California the state attorney general has some authority over local law enforcement and was able to tell Bianco to halt his investigation. This may have been before the Supreme Court could act.

Lots of things make Riverside a special case. Chiefly, Bianco’s candidacy for governor raises an obvious question of self-interest — he may be using the powers of his office to elevate a political issue that he thinks will benefit him as a candidate. He is also stepping into the administration of the same election system he wants to compete in — a personal conflict many have long complained about in relation to secretaries of state who run for office during their tenures.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing Virginia’s vote to approve gerrymandering the state to give Democrats a bigger advantage.

What Virginia Democrats did by redrawing the congressional maps was antidemocratic, and it should be illegal. But, for those who care about ensuring the future of democracy, it was the least bad option of those available. As the political scientist Seth Masket wrote last year, Democrats couldn’t force the Republican Party to “feel more reverent toward institutions and norms”; they could only “raise the costs of irreverence. In the long run, that’s the most effective tool available.”

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times asked Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism, how consequential the nasty guy’s time in the Oval Office has been. The choice of “consequential” isn’t about how much the guy benefited the country, but how long his actions will endure. Edsall wrote of Kettl:

On this measure he placed Trump in the Top 5 of American presidents, alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, noting, however, that “Trump’s consequences have been aggressive efforts to unravel the ideas of the other four presidents.”

I’d rather have an “emotional” woman at the nuclear button

My Sunday movie was Claydream, a documentary about Will Vinton who built a video studio based on claymation, the stop-motion technique using clay scenes and figures. He didn’t invent claymation, but certainly raised the level of quality of the art. If you’re a few decades old you probably remember the singing and dancing California Raisins of the 1990s. That was Vinton’s creation. Vinton attended the University of Berkeley in the 1960s, which contributed to his unconventional view of the world. He and a partner created the film Closed Mondays about a man who visits a museum while it is closed and all kinds of strange things happen. That won an Oscar for a short subject in 1974. After that he got four more nominations. He created feature films, one of them The Adventures of Mark Twain. It took three years to make and was released in 1985. Alas, it had at least PG-13 content (I don’t know if this rating was used then) yet was marketed to kids. It didn’t do well. I found it online and may watch it soon. For a while his studio was quite prosperous. But it didn’t last. He was a great creative guy, but not a good CEO. He went to the wrong people to be investors. A lot of what he did was replaced with computer animation. And he didn’t own the California Raisin characters (the California Raisin Board did), so didn’t earn anything off the merchandising of what his team created. One of his last gigs was to help market M&Ms. He was the one who came up with the idea that each color of M&M should have its own personality, such as the green one wearing high-heeled shoes. I enjoyed the movie and was fascinated by some of the characters he brought to life. Natalie Kon-yu, Michael Burke, and Tom Clark of Victoria University with Emily Booth of the University of Technology Sydney, all in Australia, wrote an editorial that appeared in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. Alas, the article is behind a paywall. They didn’t explain why Australians were writing about American politics. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost to the nasty guy in part because people said a woman is too emotional to be allowed near the nuclear button. Have you seen the guy who is near that button? The authors say that everything about the MAGA movement is steeped in emotion. The nasty guy bases is actions on his latest grievances (an emotion). The attack against Iran was title Epic Fury (and emotion). MAGA men are all about how their manhood has been slighted (and emotion) or who they are jealous of (an emotion). The nasty guy and many of his top officials yell at their staffs when displeased (an emotional response). His campaign was based on retribution (an emotion). I’d rather have an “emotional” woman in charge than these people. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported that yesterday Virginian voters narrowly passed a constitutional amendment to temporarily suspend what the citizens redistricting commission did and allow Democrats in the General Assembly substitute a map that would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in their delegation to the US House. This would replace a 6-5 map and give Democrats a national 10-9 advantage in the redistricting battle the nasty guy started with Texas. I found a map of the new districts put out by The Cook Political Report. It accomplishes its goal in the usual way gerrymandering is done – several new districts take a chunk of the huge Democratic population in the DC suburbs, then snake out into Republican territory. The AP article concludes:

A Tazewell County judge ruled that the redistricting push was illegal for several reasons. Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. said lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session. He ruled that their initial vote failed to occur before the public began casting ballots in last year’s general election and thus didn’t count toward the two-step process. And he ruled that the state failed to publish the amendment three months before that election, as required by law. If the state Supreme Court agrees with the lower court, the referendum results could be rendered moot.

Florida has yet to try redistricting and some of the Republican legislators see the likely blue wave and think the effort will leave too many districts with margins too small. Some of the other Republican redistricting attempts are still in court. Beyond Florida states are too far into the primary process and the election cycle to attempt a change. On Sunday – before Virginia’s vote – Andrew Mangan of Kos discussed why Virginia should approve their referendum.

Put simply, Virginia will go from having a very fair map to a very biased one. So how is that good for democracy? Because Republicans have rigged maps across the country for decades, skewing the House’s overall partisan makeup, and Virginia’s proposed map would be merely a minor corrective. In general, congressional delegations tend to be biased in Republicans’ favor. Among states with at least five House seats, there are five where Republicans regularly receive less than 50% of the statewide vote but hold a majority of that state’s House delegation: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There is not one state where the same is true for Democrats.

And this mid-decade redistricting skews states even more.

The big difference is that only one party—the Democratic Party—is pushing to eliminate partisan gerrymandering altogether.

So far they haven’t been successful. And some of their attempts have been blocked by Democrats. A voice I heard today while driving suggests that this redistricting battle will show Republicans the battle cannot be won and they approve a deal. I won’t hold my breath. Mangan included a 2025 poll by YouGov (about the time this redistricting arms race began) that shows 69% of US adult citizens say gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9% say it should be legal. Even among Republican citizens 57% say it should be illegal and only 14% say it should be legal. In today's pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a quote of an article on NPR that was posted late last week:

The more seats you try to flip with redistricting, the harder it is to win approval from the court and the public — and the harder it is for your party to hold the seats it has. In Virginia, some Democrats wanted to settle for a new map that could pick up three House seats. But Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas, one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, wanted to go for four seats. It could take the state’s U.S. House delegation from a near-even six Democrats and five Republicans to possibly 10-1 for Democrats.

Acyn, senior digital editor of Meidas Touch tweeted a clip of a speech by Pete Buttigieg talking to fellow Democrats. Alas, I don’t think he’s running for anything.

And my word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was. That’s not what we’re here to do. We’re not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say, “Here you go, I give you the world as it looked in 2023.” That’s not going to work. It’s not what we need. So much has changed, and the truth is they are destroying things right and left. They’re destroying a lot of good, important things. They’re destroying some useless things too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.

We’re not ready to live in space yet

I finished the book A City on Mars; Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith a husband and wife team. With Elon Musk wearing an “Occupy Mars” shirt this is a timely look at how feasible putting humans on the moon, in a space habitat, or on Mars really is. From the title one could easily guess that the authors don’t agree with Musk. They tackle all the reasons why people say we should put people in habitats. Here’s some of their responses: The belief is that giving humanity a home off earth will allow the species to continue in case we destroy our current home. But earth at its global warming worst is still a zillion times better than life on the moon or Mars. Also, we’re not ready for life in space so let’s keep working to save earth. Putting industry in orbit to protect earth’s environment is too expensive. Consider cement – yeah, there is enough material in space for all the cement we use, but space is too cold for making it and getting all that mass back to earth is expensive. Space resources won’t make us all rich because mining what little there is would be too costly. Sending humans to space won’t end or reduce war and property disputes in space may get fought on earth. When astronauts come back to earth they frequently talk of the new feeling of how fragile earth is and we’re all in this together. But that hasn’t gone much past the wonderful sounding slogans. The authors talk about the things we don’t yet know about living off earth. Does a fetus need gravity to develop properly? Do children need gravity to grow properly? Is moon or Mars gravity enough? What does a livable biome require? No research has been done on the first few questions, not nearly enough on the last. The moon is not a great place to live and would require living underground. Do we really want that? There aren’t enough resources in the regolith to support trade with earth. Mars is not better, partly because there is a poisonous chemical in the soil. Space habitats are better but would take such a huge effort they aren’t feasible, especially at the scale needed for a viable population. The authors spend a quarter of the book discussing current space law and why it matters. The space treaty that exists was created in the 1960s when there were two space-faring nations. Now there are six plus a couple corporations. Things have been fine so far, but what if one of those corporations sets up a mining operation somewhere that is illegal under the current treaty? The authors explain what a company town is and why they have such a bad reputation. What if the company town is on Mars where the employee can’t simply leave and the boss can coerce the worker by reducing the amount of oxygen? We’re not ready to live in space yet. The benefits aren’t as great as is claimed. The size of a viable population is much bigger than most theorist suggests. But if we still want to go to space, there are important things to research. The biggest is in addition to creating a rocket that can go to Mars, Musk should also be putting billions into biome research and space pregnancy. And that space treaty needs a serious update. I enjoyed the book, though my interest flagged towards the end of the discussion on why space law matters. The authors explain their positions well to the non-science reader, using slang and humor. Author Zach is a cartoonist and has lots of drawings to illustrate the points. I recommend the book to science fiction fans and space nerds. I would enjoy reading science fiction stories based on the ideas in this book. I get emails from March for Our Lives, the group founded by survivors of the school shooting in Parkland Florida. Yeah, they include requests for money. They also explain what they’re doing, both the gains and losses. The email I got a few days ago essentially says discussing the emotional and psychological damage of gun violence hasn’t made any difference in lawmaker actions. Instead, this email talks about the economic cost, Lawmakers want to talk about economic things a lot.

Gun violence costs the United States an estimated $557 billion every year, equating to roughly 2.6% of the entire U.S. economy, or more than $1,600 per person annually. To put that into perspective, these costs exceed what the federal government spends on education each year. And yet this burden is rarely part of the national conversation about guns.

The costs show up in medical costs and higher insurance premiums. Survivors face chronic pain and disabilities affecting their ability to work. Their family’s finances become more unstable through the loss of an income and future earnings. The losses hit the communities already facing economic hardship. In this way gun violence is a hidden tax on the country. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote:

President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission had its final meeting on Monday, and you’ll be hyped to find out that everything you ever learned about the Founding Fathers and religion is incorrect, you fools. Trump’s handpicked selection of zealots on the commission want you to know that the separation of church and state is a lie and has been all along.

Needham then quoted a few of those founding fathers to contradict that commission (whose name actually means Religious Liberty for me which includes permission to oppress you). First is Roger Williams, who founded Providence in what became Rhode Island: civic life must be separate from spiritual life with a “high wall” between them. Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote to Baptists:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

James Madison noted that if a government can establish Christianity over other religions it can also establish one Christian sect over others. Needham also noted that of the 12 members of the Commission all are members of Judeo-Christian religions. We know “exactly what church Trump doesn’t want separated from the state.” So the nasty guy having a spat with Pope Leo is rather curious. A lot of nasty guys supporters delight in claims and images that show him as a Christ figure. One of those images made the rounds recently. If not a Christ figure, the nasty guy is at least God’s Chosen President, as is preached to many Evangelical congregations. StanleyYelnats dotcom of the Kos community noted that some supporters have switched from calling him the Christ, to calling him the anti-Christ.

According to biblical prophecy and tradition, the Antichrist is a future, charismatic, and deceptive world leader who opposes Jesus Christ, sets himself up as God, and brings about a, “man of lawlessness” persona characterized by immense power, blasphemy, and the persecution of believers. He is empowered by Satan to perform fake wonders and establish a totalitarian global system.

Some characteristics of the anti-Christ are: He appears peaceful but is cunning. He opposes all things related to God (well, the nasty guy seems to bask in being compared to Jesus). He will control the world’s economic system. He will persecute followers of God (depends on whether one thinks Evangelicals actually follow God). He is focused on power. I will make no claim that the nasty guy is (or isn’t) the anti-Christ. Part of that requires the belief that the End Times are about to start and some Christians have been expecting the End Times for two thousand years. Instead, I will note some of the nasty guy’s Christian followers are turning on him and seeing him for who he is and as the opposite of what they had wanted. Oliver Willis, in his series of Explaining the Right column for Kos wonders, “Why conservatives think they own religion.” I can’t say he gets any closer to the answer than usual, which is not close. He does document Evangelicals think that. Willis goes all the way back to the rise of the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell, who rose to national attention when Ronald Reagan was president. Much of that political energy was put to use in opposition to abortion that came along with the rise of feminism and women asserting bodily autonomy. But all that loud noise convinced the media and too many Democrats that only the right is the true religion. Willis then gives several examples of the left using religion to make its point. The prime example is Martin Luther King and his work in the Civil Rights movement. Currently, James Talarico is using religion in his campaign to be the Democratic senator from Texas.

But conservatives continue to suffer the mass delusion that only their brand of faith is legitimate, falsely arguing that the more inclusive liberal tradition—where other religions and nonbelievers are on equal footing with Christians—is somehow hostile. It wasn’t Biden, Obama, Clinton, or any other Democrats who picked a childish fight with the pope—or who sold personally branded Bibles to their supporters. And Democrats certainly haven’t openly blasphemed against Christianity by posting images depicting themselves as Jesus Christ. That has been the domain of the so-called “religious” right. But they don’t own religion—not at all.

In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Mike Brock of the Notes From the Circus Substack.

You do not need intelligence services or insider access or political analysis to figure out what is going on in Donald Trump’s mind at any given moment. He is thinking zero steps ahead. As the philosopher Vlad Vexler has observed, Trump is floating through dispositional states inside very malignant pathologies. There is no strategy to decode. There is no chess game to map. There is a man moving from one psychological state to the next, driven by the same neurological machinery as any other organism in the grip of a compulsive disorder — seeking the next hit, escalating when the last one wore off, displaying dominance when the hierarchy feels threatened. That is all that is happening. That is all that has ever been happening. […] The commentariat keeps attributing chess to someone playing slot machines. I want to give credit to George Conway, and to the other clinicians and public intellectuals who have spent years trying to bring the public’s attention to this fact. Conway has been consistent and precise and largely ignored by the very establishment press that prefers the “distraction strategy” frame because that frame preserves the comforting fiction that someone competent is in control. The Duty to Warn coalition. The sixty thousand signatories. The people who were called alarmist and hysterical and politically motivated for saying, in clinical terms, what is plainly visible to anyone willing to look.

Daily Kos has upgraded to a new platform. Because of something between the new comment system and the browser I’m using, which is Vivaldi, I don’t have access to comments. And that means no access to the cartoons usually posted there. In Friday’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Christopher Hale:

Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical with no theological training, says Pope Leo XIV doesn’t understand Catholic just war doctrine. Pope Leo XIV’s patron, St. Augustine, invented the Catholic just war doctrine.

Tennis player Martina Navratilova added:

Pretty soon Mike will start telling me how to hit a serve or something….

James Patterson of Providence Magazine

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism. How is that possible? How did this happen? The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

A tweet by Mike Levin

It should be a much bigger story that JD Vance flew to Hungary, stood on a campaign stage, and told voters to return a head of government widely documented for human rights abuses and democratic backsliding. Then, after his candidate lost, Vance said what had happened during the Hungarian campaign was “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.” Was he describing himself? The Hungarian people rejected it all. Democracy held, despite America’s intervention, not because of American leadership. The United States has long argued that elections should be free from outside influence. That standard should apply to everyone, including us.

In the roundup from Saturday a week ago Dworkin quoted Lauren Egan of The Bulwark:

However understandable the downward trend in campus protests might be, the dynamic has become a point of frustration for some parts of the Democratic coalition who feel that anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists are tougher on Democratic officials than on Republicans. They note that even though Harris is out of office, she still gets interrupted at public events by pro-Palestinian protesters. “Every single speech that Kamala Harris gave in those 107 days, they found a way to protest her and call her a proponent of genocide. But they never did that throughout the campaign for Donald Trump, and then they never did it in 2025 when he was giving Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check to annihilate Gaza,” said a former Harris campaign official. “Now, when Donald Trump is threatening to do the thing that they accused Kamala Harris and Joe Biden of being complicit of, they’re silent.”