REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 1:33 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 24, 2025 8:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Supreme Court’s new religion case could devastate American workers

Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin risks giving employers a sweeping new power to ignore laws protecting their workers.

By Ian Millhiser | Mar 24, 2025, 5:30 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/scotus/404678/supreme-court-catholic-charities-wis
consin-religious-liberty-workers

If you know the name of a case the Supreme Court will hear on March 31, Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, you can probably guess who will prevail.

The Court’s Republican majority almost always rules in favor of Christian litigants who seek an exemption from a federal or state law, which is what Catholic Charities is looking for in this case. (Notably, the Court’s Republicans have not always shown the same sympathy for Muslims with religious liberty claims.)

But, while the outcome in Catholic Charities seems unlikely to be a surprise, the stakes in the case are still quite high. Catholic Charities seeks an exemption from Wisconsin’s law requiring nearly all employers to pay taxes that fund unemployment benefits. If the Court grants this exemption, the justices could give many employers a broad new power to evade laws governing the workplace.

Like every state, Wisconsin taxes employers to fund benefits for workers who lose their jobs. Like most states, Wisconsin’s unemployment benefits law also contains an exemption for church-run nonprofits that are “operated primarily for religious purposes.”

The state’s supreme court recently clarified that this exemption only applies to nonprofit employers that primarily engage in religious activities such as holding worship services or providing religious education. It does not apply to employers like Catholic Charities, which provide secular services like feeding the poor or helping disabled people find jobs — even if the employer is motivated by religious faith to provide these secular services.

Catholic Charities, however, claims that it has a First Amendment right to an exemption, arguing, among other things, that Wisconsin’s limited exemption for some religious nonprofits and not others discriminates against Catholics.

None of its arguments are persuasive, at least under the Supreme Court’s existing decisions. But precedent plays hardly any role in how this Court decides religion cases. The Republican justices routinely vote to overrule, or simply to ignore, religion cases that they disagree with. The Court’s very first major decision after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment gave Republicans a supermajority on the Court effectively overruled a decision governing worship services during the Covid-19 pandemic that was only a few months old.

Realistically, in other words, the Court will likely decide Catholic Charities based on the justices’ personal preferences, rather than by following the doctrine of stare decisis, which says that courts should typically follow their own precedents.

That said, it remains to be seen how far this Court might go in its ruling. It could choose to distinguish Catholic Charities — which is a legitimate charity that does genuinely admirable work — from employers who claim religious exemptions only to hurt their own employees. But if it chooses to be expansive, it could overrule a line of precedents that protect workers from exploitative employers who claim a religious justification for that exploitation.

“Religious liberty” doesn’t mean religious organizations get civil society’s benefits and none of its costs

In order to understand the Catholic Charities case, it’s helpful to first understand the legal concept of a “corporation.” Corporations are entities that are typically easy to form under any state’s law, and which are considered to be entirely separate from their owners or creators. Forming a corporation brings several benefits, but the most important is limited liability. If a corporation is sued, it can potentially be liable for all of its assets, but the owners or controllers of that corporation are not on the hook for anything else.

Corporations can also create their own corporations, thus protecting some of their assets from lawsuits.

Think of it this way: Imagine that José owns two businesses, one of which sells auto parts, and another that fixes cars. If these businesses are incorporated, that means that José’s personal assets (such as his house) are protected if one of his businesses are sued. Moreover, if both businesses are incorporated as two separate entities, a lawsuit against one business cannot touch the other one. So if, say, the auto parts company sells a defective part, that company could potentially be put out of business by a lawsuit. But the car repair company will remain untouched.

Catholic Charities is a corporation that is controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. According to its lawyers, the president of Catholic Charities in Superior, Wisconsin, is a Catholic bishop, who also appoints its board of directors. The Catholic Church gains significant benefits from this arrangement, because it means that a lawsuit against Catholic Charities cannot touch the church’s broader assets.

Under Wisconsin law, however, the church’s decision to separately incorporate Catholic Charities also has a cost. Wisconsin exempts employers that engage in religious activity such as worship services from its unemployment regime, but it does not give this exemption to charitable corporations that only engage in secular activity. Because Catholic Charities is a separate legal entity from the church itself, and because it does not engage in any of the religious activity that would exempt it from paying unemployment taxes, it does not get an exemption.

Presumably, the church was aware of all of these consequences when it chose to separately incorporate Catholic Charities. The Catholic Church has very good legal counsel, and its lawyers would have advised it of both the benefits of separate incorporation (limited liability) and the price of that benefit (no unemployment exemption). Notably, Catholic Charities has paid unemployment taxes since 1972.

But Catholic Charities now claims that this decades-old arrangement is unfair and unconstitutional. According to its brief, “the Diocese of Superior operates Petitioners as separately incorporated ministries that carry out Christ’s command to help the needy,” but “if Catholic Charities were not separately incorporated, it would be exempt.” That very well may be true, but if Catholic Charities were not separately incorporated, it also would not benefit from limited liability.

That brief alleges three separate constitutional violations — it claims that Wisconsin discriminates “against religious groups with more complex polities” (that is, with more complex corporate structures), and it also raises two claims that both boil down to an allegation that Wisconsin is too involved with the church’s internal affairs because its law treats Catholic Charities differently if that entity were not separately incorporated.

The discrimination claim is weak, because the Constitution does not prohibit discrimination against entities with complex corporate structures, it prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. Wisconsin law treats Catholics no differently than anyone else. If a Muslim, Hindu, Protestant, Jewish, or nonreligious charity also provides exclusively secular services, it also does not receive an exemption from the state’s unemployment law.

Similarly, Wisconsin law does not entangle the state in the church’s internal affairs, or otherwise dictate how the church must structure itself and its subordinate entities. It merely offers the church a bargain that it is free to turn down — the church may have limited liability, but only if it accepts the consequences of separate incorporation.

A decision for Catholic Charities could have disastrous consequences for workers

Realistically, the immediate consequences of a decision for Catholic Charities would be virtually nonexistent. The church maintains its own internal program that pays unemployment benefits to laid off workers, and it claims that this benefit program “provides the same maximum weekly benefit rate as the State’s system.” So it appears that, no matter who prevails before the Supreme Court, unemployed former employees of Catholic Charities will still receive similar benefits.

But other religious employers may not offer benefits to their unemployed workers. If Catholic Charities prevail in this case, that victory would likely extend to all organizations which, like Catholic Charities, engage in secular charitable work motivated by religious belief. So workers in other organizations could be left with nothing.

Historically, the Supreme Court was reluctant to allow religious employers to seek exemptions from laws that protect their workers, and for a very good reason — abandoning this reluctance risks creating the situation the Court tried to ward off in Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985).

Tony Alamo was often described in news reports as a cult leader. He was convicted of sexual abuse against girls he considered to be his wives. One of his victims may have been as young as nine. Witnesses at his trial, according to the New York Times, testified that “Alamo had made all decisions for his followers: who got married; what children were taught in school; who got clothes; and who was allowed to eat.”

The Alamo Foundation case involved an organization which was nominally a religious nonprofit. But, as the Supreme Court explained, it operated “a number of commercial businesses, which include service stations, retail clothing and grocery outlets, hog farms, roofing and electrical construction companies, a recordkeeping company, a motel, and companies engaged in the production and distribution of candy.” Tony was the president of this foundation, and its workers received no cash salaries or wages — although they were given food, clothing, and shelter.

The federal government sued the foundation, alleging violations of federal minimum wage, overtime, and record keeping laws. And the Supreme Court rejected the foundation’s claim that it was entitled to a religious exemption from these laws. Had the Court ruled otherwise, it could have allowed people like Tony Alamo to exploit their workers with little recourse to federal or state law.

The Alamo Foundation opinion warned, moreover, that permitting the foundation to pay “substandard wages would undoubtedly give [it] and similar organizations an advantage over their competitors.” Cult leaders with vulnerable followers would potentially push responsible employers out of the market, because employers who remained bound by law would no longer be able to compete.

Indeed, the Supreme Court used to be so concerned about religious companies gaining an unfair competitive advantage that, in United States v. Lee (1982), it announced a blanket rule that “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.” Religious entities were sometimes entitled to legal exemptions under Lee, but they had to follow the same workplace and business regulations as anyone else.

It’s important to be clear that the Catholic Church bears little resemblance to the Alamo cult, and Catholic Charities certainly does not exploit its workers in the same way that the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation was accused of doing.

But the Court paints with a broad brush when it hands down constitutional decisions, and the Constitution does not permit discrimination among religious faiths. So, if the Catholic Church is allowed to exempt itself from workplace regulations, the same rule will also extend to other religious employers who may be far more exploitative. Should Catholic Charities prevail, religious workers can only pray that the Court writes a cautious opinion that doesn’t abandon the concerns which drove its decision in Alamo Foundation.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, March 24, 2025 11:59 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


very little remaining of Traditional Democrats

the mob of NeoDemocrats have taken over

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Thursday, March 27, 2025 8:15 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump's war on science

By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 27, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science

. . . in the course of life, scientists would occasionally discover various health hazards that were inconvenient to the interests of private industry. It turns out, for example, that nicotine is addictive and that inhaling smoke causes cancer and lung disease. It turns out that while fossil fuels are incredibly useful, they cause greenhouse gas emissions, and coal generates incredible amounts of particulate pollution that seems to have wide-ranging negative consequences for human health. It used to be the case that industrial activity was releasing tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, causing acid to rain down on major American cities. In a well-functioning market economy, we study these kind of externalities and try to come up with cost-effective ways to address them.

But Newt Gingrich (who deliberately dismantled Congress’ scientific expertise) and George W. Bush made it clear that any finding of fact that could justify regulatory intervention was per se unwelcome.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/it-is-time-to-restore-the-us-office
-of-technology-assessment/

Republicans could have responded to neutral presentation of scientific facts by saying something like, “It’s true that stricter tobacco regulation would save lives, but I’m opposed to it on philosophical grounds of freedom.” Instead, we had Mike Pence running around telling people that smoking doesn’t kill.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/mike-pence-defend
ed-his-smoking-doesnt-kill-op-ed-in-a-2000

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, March 28, 2025 5:23 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Chief Justice Roberts Hands Trump the Keys to Power

By Keith Raffel | March 26, 2025

https://www.creators.com/read/raffel-ticket/03/25/chief-justice-robert
s-hands-trump-the-keys-to-power

First, there's the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee. In that case, Roberts cast the deciding vote to reverse a century of precedent by authorizing corporations, other outside groups and wealthy donors to spend unlimited sums on elections. Just days after the decision, President Barack Obama warned the decision "will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections." Unlimited contributions have indeed tilted the American electoral process toward the interests of corporations and the rich. Today, the largest contributor to Trump's 2024 campaign, Elon Musk, is playing an unprecedented role in the current administration.

Second, in 2013, Roberts assigned himself to write the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which threw out a key section of the Voting Rights Act. A 2024 article in the Journal of Political Economy found evidence that the Shelby County holding decreased turnout of minority voters due to "voter suppression tactics that have occurred in the absence of federal oversight." As two professors wrote in an American Economic Association paper: "Our findings suggest that perhaps Chief Justice Roberts should be slightly less optimistic about the state of democratic equality in the South."

Third, in 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should be taken off the state's ballot because of the 14th Amendment's bar on candidates who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States or "given aid or comfort to its enemies." Upon review, Roberts and four associate justices held that a statute must be passed by Congress for such a disqualification to take effect.

Fourth, Roberts again assigned himself to write for the majority in last summer's United States v. Trump. In his opinion, the chief justice conjured up a right to immunity for the president "from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority." In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor says Roberts "invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law."

Trump agrees wholeheartedly with Sotomayor's analysis. He has said, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president" and "He who saves his country does not violate any law." He appears to know, too, that he owes Roberts a debt of gratitude. On March 4, cameras caught Trump patting Roberts on the arm and saying, "Thank you again. I won't forget."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 7:09 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


How to collapse America from the inside out

By Thom Hartmann | March 31, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/how-to-collapse-america-f
rom-the-inside-out/

If Putin wanted to kill America, how would he best do it? Exactly like this:

— Install a puppet or ally inside the government; as Lincoln foresaw, a tyrant doesn’t need to invade. He just needs to rise from within. Trump has repeatedly echoed Kremlin talking points, undermined NATO, attacked Ukraine, praised autocrats, and created chaos at home. If Putin picked a candidate, it would be Trump — and the intelligence community has confirmed Russian efforts to help him win in both 2016 and 2020.

— Dismantle American institutions from the inside; Putin’s best move would be to encourage the erosion of U.S. government capacity: devalue science, underfund law enforcement, defund agencies, destroy trust in elections, and sabotage public health. All are happening as you read these words.

— Stoke internal division; a divided America is a weak America. Putin’s cyber and propaganda ops have long stoked racial hatred, anti-government sentiment, anti-vax ideology, and far-right extremism. Trump accelerates all of it. Musk’s X (Twitter) has become a vector for disinformation, propaganda, and fascist apologia.

— Weaken U.S. alliances around the world; Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO, praised Putin’s invasions, and undermined Western alliances. Now he is threatening our allies with the possibility of invasion. This is textbook Kremlin strategy — divide the West, and conquer its influence.

Whether Trump and Musk are taking direct instructions from Putin or simply operating in ideological lockstep is a question of degree, not direction. The destruction they are today inflicting on America is strategic, not accidental; coordinated, not chaotic; and oligarchic, not populist.

And whether Trump and Musk are doing it on Putin’s instructions, acting out the Dark Enlightenment vision of a CEO America, or simply trying to wipe out any institutions that might challenge their exercise of raw power, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The outcome is the same: the deliberate disempowerment of the American people and the dismantling of a liberal democratic order that has stood for 240 years.

These two men and their enablers in the Trump regime are quite literally taking apart our American government while, at the same time, doing away with our protections against wealthy predators and destroying our international alliances.

The Founders had this noble idea that, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy, they’d largely borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy and other northeastern tribes: people can govern themselves when power-hungry psychopaths are kept in check.

It animated George Washington when he wrote:

“As mankind become more liberal, they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community, are equally entitled to the protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality.”

And Abraham Lincoln, who rescued our nation from the fascist Confederate oligarchs who’d taken over the South and then dared try to bring down our democracy through warfare:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

And here we are. So far, Trump and Musk have or are in the process of:

— Gutting the IRS so badly that the country will lose an estimated $500 billion to morbidly rich tax cheats
— Killing off the EPA, so polluters can run free and profit from giving us cancer
— Disbanded the Public Integrity Section that once prosecuted corrupt politicians
— Shut down the DOJ unit that was prosecuting violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
— Moved the ATF under Kash Patel’s overview with the goal of neutering it
— Crippling the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) that stops big banks and insurance companies from ripping off average people
— Taking a hatchet to NASA, presumably to hand more power and money to SpaceX
— Dismantling the Department of Education to create more demand for private for-profit schools
— Paralyzing the Department of Health and Human Services that protects us from disease and pandemics
— Mutilating the National Labor Relations Board that protects workers’ rights
— Proclaiming their intention to end FEMA, so Americans are on their own when climate-change-driven disasters strike
— Tearing apart the Social Security Administration so seniors will have to rely on big banks for retirement options
— Demolishing the National Institutes of Health that develops new drugs and cures for disease
— Seizing control of the FCC so they can end net neutrality and dictate content of radio and TV programming
— Stripping NOAA of its workers so we’ll have to rely on for-profit companies for our weather reports and storm warnings
— Kneecapping the Department of Transportation to block new public transportation projects and deregulate big trucking companies and self-driving cars
— Ripping up the Department of Energy so it can’t fund any more “green” energy projects
— Wiping out the Department of Housing and Urban Development to prevent any new low-income housing projects
— Attacking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to leave Americans defenseless
— Largely ending the ability of the Office of Civil Rights within the DOE to enforce anti-discrimination laws in education
— Defunded the National Institute of Justice that works against terrorism and far-right extremism
— Eviscerating the Department of Veterans Affairs and other programs that help our veterans (including shutting down the suicide prevention hotlines)
— Defunding the Department of Agriculture to gut food stamps/SNAP, school lunch programs, and supports for small family farms
— Paralyzing the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) that oversees the executive branch to make sure anti-terrorism efforts don’t violate civil rights
— Weakening the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) so it can’t do its job of protecting minority or disabled workers and job applicants
— Firing scientists at the FDA, gutting oversight of drug manufacturers.

And that’s just a partial “so far” list.

Meanwhile, Trump is snatching students off the streets and transporting them to a brutal private for-profit prison in Louisiana with no due process whatsoever in clear defiance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; proposing changes to voting laws that will prevent tens of millions of married women from casting a ballot; and threatening to seize foreign, sovereign lands by force.

There are several factions at work here.

— First, there’s Trump himself, who’s so filled with hate against the government that once threatened to imprison him for his crimes that he’s more than happy to hand a meat axe to anybody who’ll make government workers squeal in pain.

— Next come Musk and the so-called PayPal Mafia of German, South African and homegrown billionaires who think women should not be allowed to vote, capitalism and democracy are incompatible with each other, and appear to have fantasies of ruling over a whites-only ethnonationalist state run like a corporation.

— And finally, there are the old fashioned rightwing billionaires who simply don’t want to pay their fair share in taxes or have their companies regulated; these are the guys who, for over 50 years, have been following the Powell Memo to build the infrastructure — media, legal, lobbying, think tanks, etc. — that has made all this possible today.

Americans are starting to wake up to the damage these men (the ones driving the process are all white men) are doing and this weekend millions of protestors will show up in the streets of every city in America to make their discomfort and anger known.

It’s a beginning. If public opinion becomes too strong to ignore, it’s possible some Republicans will decide that protecting our republic is more important than fearing a primary challenge funded by the richest man in the world; that could stop much of what Trump’s doing dead in its tracks.

On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that such demonstrations could provoke Trump to fulfill his previous threats to follow the examples of Putin, Lukashenko, and Erdogan and declare a state of insurrection, mobilizing the military against the citizens of America.

At that point, all bets are off and the window to save American democracy will have shrunk to a matter of weeks or months.

Whether Putin is running this show — as those who point to his reportedly regular phone conversations with Trump and Musk argue — or it’s a homegrown effort to cripple our nation is almost irrelevant; the reality is that they’re well down the road in a way that may be irreparable, at least within a generation or more.

As my old friend Rob Kall points out over at OpEdNews.com, institutional knowledge is a critical resource for both companies and governments, and these mass firings are ripping it out of our nation’s systems of governance leaving a hole that will take decades to re-fill.

Thus, with Congress neutered and the courts half-paralyzed and moving slowly, it falls to us to stop this anti-American destruction spree. And that will require massive public expressions of outrage, demands for action, and relentless pressure on our politicians.

The key to mobilizing public pressure is to make clear to Americans exactly what Trump and Musk are really up to. To help people understand that this regime’s real agenda — which they are ruthlessly executing right in front of us — is to destroy the United States of America as it was and turn our country into something much more like Hungary or Russia.

And, to the extent that our corporate media is too timid or too bought-off to raise the alarm, that work falls to us, to me and you.

Tag, we’re it. Pass it along.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 10:35 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How to collapse America from the inside out


Unless this is a 4-year breakdown of Joe Biden*'s Presidency, nobody is interested.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 10:35 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
very little remaining of Traditional Democrats

the mob of NeoDemocrats have taken over


And the polling for Democratic Party approval continues to plummet.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, April 19, 2025 9:44 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Solving the Trolley Problem: Towards Moral Abundance

by Kyle Munkittrick | Friday, Apr 18, 2025

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/04/solving-the-trolley-prob
lem-towards-moral-abundance.html

Trolley Problem meets ‘I Want To Go Home’ meme

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, inadvertently exposes a blind spot in our collective moral calculus. In making their case for a better politics, I think they’ve also, as an accidental by-product, solved the infamous Trolley Problem. Free download at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Ezra+Klein+Derek+Thompson

Abundance argues that improving the supply of things like housing and energy is good on its own term and that material abundance can help address collective problems, like homelessness or climate change. The choice between allowing people to sleep on the streets in tents or forcing them into shelters is, as Klein and Thompson point out, a false dilemma caused by poor housing policy. The choice between growth and progress vs climate change is a false dilemma caused by poor energy and construction policy. Klein and Thompson are, justifiably, focused on the political thorniness of these issues, but, in their efforts, also demonstrate something startling: they implicitly demonstrate that material abundance can obviate moral quandaries.

The Trolley Problem is so well known and over-explored it’s easy to forget that it is relatively new. The Trolley Problem is a modern moral dilemma. There are no trolleys in nature. You cannot replace the trolley with a bear or a hurricane or an opposing tribe—those things do not run on tracks, their brakes can’t go out, and there is no simple lever by which you choose their behavior. The Trolley Problem is a problem of technology, yet none of its solutions are allowed to be.

The Trolley Problem is, as it is usually presented, a false dilemma. There is no correct answer to the problem; both options are tragedies, neither better, regardless of permutations. Even being asked to make the choice is morally corrosive (as I’m sure Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson would agree). The Good Place demonstrates this to absurd comedic effect.
Michael from The Good Place pointing at his diagram of how to kill everyone in the Trolley Problem
Another ‘solution’ to the Trolley Problem

It is the ridiculous Sisyphean repetition of The Good Place trolley episode, along with our own decades of obsession over the problem, that resonates most with Abundance. What if instead of trying to figure out if one or five is the better choice with infinite variations and philosophical arguments, we just fix the trolleys? This is the core insight of what I call Moral Abundance—the idea that technological and material progress can eliminate moral dilemmas entirely.

Consider climate change. Abundance not only recommends choosing among existing tech like moving from coal to solar, but also explores near-future examples like cultured (aka lab-grown) meat. This tech does exist, but it’s niche, nascent, and expensive. It’s also unsettling and popular for politicians to oppose it. But Abundance, correctly, holds up cultured meat as a worthy goal because in addition to helping address climate change (agriculture is a major contributor), it would also allow us to effectively end the moral stain that is factory farming.

Yes, we can remove factory farming by just banning it, but that’s a political non-starter. It would mean less food choice (not great), inequity where only millionaires get steak, eggs, and bacon (sad!), potential food shortages (bad) or, worse, famines (very bad). In a Trolley Problem-esque version of the dilemma, the question we’re asked is who should suffer, animals in cages or people in famine?

The answer of Abundance is neither. We can obviate the question with progress. The implicit claim of Abundance is that material abundance not only makes things cheaper, easier, or higher quality, but also makes it easier for people to be better. Abundance, yoked to technological and social progress, can mitigate root causes of moral dilemmas, obviating them.

To formalize this concept: Moral Abundance proposes that material and technological abundance, by removing constraints or scarcity, can mitigate moral issues and render some specific moral questions effectively obsolete. By changing the landscape of debate, abundance makes it easier for everyone, on net, to be better than they would or could otherwise be. Moral Abundance shifts our attention from the moral question in front of us to the opportunity to eliminate it all together. The solution to the trolley problem is not one track or the other, but to invent, build, and deploy safer trolleys.

Moral Abundance is, in part, about recognizing that our environment can be moral, and we can choose to intervene. Noah Smith makes a compelling political argument that anarchy is not welfare, that is, allowing people to be anti-social doesn’t help them or society. We can make the same argument about nature: chaos is not amoral. Nature or the status quo harming people is bad. It is evil, even though there is no actor. We tolerate it because we believe cannot control or change it. Moral Abundance challenges that helplessness by recognizing our capacity to reshape the context of ethical dilemmas, not just navigate within them.

Moral Abundance also recognizes the function of time and progress to create a kind of chronological moral luck. By virtue of living today it is easier to be good, because of massive social and technological progress, than it was a century ago. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, along with The Culture and Star Trek in the pantheon of great post-scarcity fiction, demonstrates this moral luck. Despite deep flaws, the future of Terra Ignota is more moral than our own society on almost every measure because material constraints (of health, of travel, of energy) are all but eliminated. Moral Abundance also results from improved circumstantial moral luck. Abundance reduces the possibility of scarcity forcing individuals into tragic choices—the bad luck of facing that specific unavoidable dilemma. Moral Abundance reminds us that material, social, and technological progress can be powerful inputs to moral progress.

As such, Moral Abundance invites ethicists and philosophers to consider the practical world of technological development. Elements of Moral Abundance are already present throughout philosophy. The capabilities approach developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen offers a particularly useful framework. “Capabilities” here are real freedoms—the actual ability to choose different ways of living. By focusing on what people can actually do rather than abstract rights or resources alone, this approach naturally aligns with Moral Abundance’s emphasis on expanding practical moral options. A surprising example comes from Shulamith Firestone, who explicitly argued in her Dialectic of Sex that technological advances like artificial wombs would be necessary for true gender equality. Firestone has one of the first, clearest examples of identifying a particular technology as a direct solution to a seemingly intractable moral issue.

More recently, bioethicists like Julian Savulescu, Ingmar Persson, and Thomas Douglas have proposed “moral enhancement” technologies to improve human ethical capacities directly. These could make us less selfish, more tolerant, and less neurotic, among other pro-social benefits. And at the bleeding edge of technology, Amanda Askell is working not to merely constrain AI, but to instead actively shape its development toward moral ends. These philosophers are practical experts in the relevant sciences (neuroscience, biochem, machine learning) and have put their reputations on the line advocating for specific paths that technology should take.

So what path should food production take to achieve Moral Abundance? Before factory farming and the green revolution, famines were common due to the chaos of nature. As factory farming, the green revolution, the refrigerated shipping-container, GMOs, and global free-trade improved and matured, famines basically went away. Consider these two graphs below from Our World In Data on Famines.

Deaths per 100,000 people, globally, due to starvation, came down 90% from the 1960s to the 2010s. Absolute deaths are down 98% on the same time horizon. Does this mean we have perfect global food equity? No, but, my goodness, I’ll take a near order of magnitude reduction in absolute and relative deaths due to famine in a 50 year period over nothing.

History is full of examples of Moral Abundance at work. Kerosene and electricity did more to end whaling than any concerted conservation movement. Legal systems of justice obviated dueling and honor culture. Automation and safety measures has made mining, once famous for tolerating carnage, come to see every death or injury as a preventable tragedy. Anesthesia and sanitation made surgery all but pain-free, orders of magnitude safer, and dramatically more effective. Long-acting reversible contraception (IUDs, Nexplanon, etc) has done more to reduce unwanted and teenage pregnancy than centuries of religion, cultural norms, and after school specials. Each dilemma was its own trolley problem (light vs whales, coal vs miners) obviated by progress.

But while famines have faded into history, the horror of factory farming has grown. This is critical to remember: abundance can create more moral good overall even if new moral wrongs emerge. Before the 20th century, famine was a given, there was no alternative. As disorienting as it seems, that we can even ask the question, “Who should suffer, animals in cages or people in famine?” is progress. Moral Abundance pushes us to continue our progress, to look past the initial false-dichotomy, and to ask weird questions about our future, like What if we could get the meat without the animal? One question obviates the other. Abundant, affordable, high-quality cultured meat could keep famine rare, reduce climate impact, and reduce animal suffering.

Cultured meat, you might rightly point out, exists today and we don’t have these benefits. Transitions to new technologies are uneven. Innovations often start out as rare, limited, and expensive luxuries—they are not abundant. Cultured meat will likely become cheaper and more ubiquitous, just like cell phones did and EVs are becoming. Which, in turn, will make it easier to eat factory-farmed meat less, just as EVs make it easier to pollute less. Material abundance is a necessary (but not sufficient!) condition for Moral Abundance.

This also does not mean that any form of abundance, such as cultured meat, only facilitates moral goods. New technologies destabilize things (that can be bad), lead to surprising new problems (e.g. phones are addictive), and during the transition, can be inequitable (e.g. EVs are still often a ‘luxury’ and not an option for many). Moral Abundance doesn’t presume utopia or mindless techno-optimism. Moral Abundance’s pursuit is to give ourselves more options and thereby make it easier to be better. And it does not happen in a vacuum. Klein and Thompson vociferously argue that high state capacity and a flourishing, dynamic private sector combine to facilitate the conditions under which Moral Abundance is possible.

As we build toward Moral Abundance, we might envision a future where our descendants no longer wrestle with the ethical quandaries that consume us today—not because they’re inherently wiser (though, if enhanced, they just might be), but because the technological foundation we lay now helps create a world where factory farming, climate catastrophe, and resource scarcity have become historical footnotes rather than pressing moral emergencies. Moral Abundance challenges us not just to build a better future, but to build a future in which we can be better.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, April 19, 2025 12:34 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 8:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trumptards and Confederates are/were absolutely evil but they feel/felt that their behavior is normal and necessary for their happiness and they won't stop until dead. Lincoln chose killing Confederates rather than endless talking to them in vain about ameliorating their atrocious behavior. Democrats are facing the same choice with Trumptards.

Was the Civil War Inevitable?

Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America. What we feel when we study Lincoln’s life through the war is not so much the force of fixed convictions imposed on others as a sense of his discovery, in real time, of what he believed.

By Adam Gopnik | April 21, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/28/lincolns-peace-michael-v
orenberg-book-review-1861-jay-winik

Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters: terrible but somehow inevitable, beyond anyone’s control. Shaking your fist at the fools who started the First World War and condemned millions to a meaningless death seems jejune; historians teach us to say that the generals did their best under impossible conditions. Mournful fatalism is the requisite emotion, even when mad fury would be more apt. Efforts at de-escalation are cast as weakness or cowardice, while those who lead nations into catastrophe are praised for their “strength of character,” or for stoically accepting what was supposedly unavoidable. We rarely honor those who turn back at the brink. John F. Kennedy’s compromise during the Cuban missile crisis is an exception, though only because prudence and caution—our removal of nuclear missiles from Turkey—were neatly covered up and presented as pugnacity and courage: we had made the Russians “blink.”

The habit of describing war with metaphors drawn from natural disasters is as old as war writing. Homer himself uses natural metaphors to ennoble violent human actors: Achilles is a wildfire sweeping across the Trojan plain. Given what Greek warfare actually entailed—pitched battles of close combat, where victory meant cutting others to death with edged weapons—the figure feels less like a metaphor than a mask.

So it is with us. The Civil War lingers in memory as brutal and heartbreaking, but also as heroic and tragic, accompanied by an Appalachian campfire fiddle. It is the altar of American existence—a sublime sacrifice and a perpetually contested example—so thoroughly sanctified that to ask if it might have been avoided by pragmatic compromise feels almost obscene. No war, no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation, no Gettysburg—neither the battle nor the address—to inspire and instruct us? And yet three-quarters of a million people died, and the enslaved people in whose name the war was fought emerged still trapped in an apartheid terrorist state. Was it worth it?

In “1861: The Lost Peace” (Grand Central), Jay Winik—the author of several fine works about American history—takes up that question of whether the Civil War might have been avoided. The title overpromises a little. Nowhere in the book do we encounter a truly plausible compromise that might have averted the conflict. What Winik offers instead is a portrait of two sides talking past each other, rather than with each other. Still, he traces the efforts of those who genuinely wanted to prevent war and the trauma of secession—and shows how Abraham Lincoln tried at first to listen and then at last refused. Download Jay Winik’s books at https://libgen.rs/search.php?&req=Jay+Winik

The early chapters are given over to what will be, for many, a familiar story. We hear again how an underrated, grotesque-looking backwoods lawyer with scant experience (one term in Congress and two failed Senate runs) managed—by virtue of being a moderate and, usefully, an outsider; a man of the frontier rather than of Boston or New York—to wrest the Republican nomination from the seemingly inevitable William Henry Seward, of New York, and go on to win the national election against the pro-slavery Democrat John Breckinridge.

We’re told about the assassination plots brewing before Lincoln had even taken office, forcing him—in ways widely seen as comical, not to say cowardly—to sneak into Washington under the protection of the newly founded Pinkerton private-detective force. (By rumor, though not in fact, he was dressed in women’s clothes.) Southern states were already passing resolutions of secession one after another, with South Carolina taking the lead. Meanwhile, the Confederate noose was tightening around Fort Sumter, in the waters off Charleston, where the Northern garrison was effectively under blockade.

The reasons for the radical action were plain. Lincoln, despite his efforts to present himself as a moderate, was what we would now call a single-issue candidate. The issue was slavery, and his categorical rejection of it. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong” was his most emphatic aphorism on the subject, along with his famous injunction: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”

Though absolute on the moral question, Lincoln was neither the hard-core political abolitionist we may wish him to have been nor the apologist for slavery some later commentators have made him seem. He was, instead, a democratic politician trying to build a coalition—and he knew that, to keep the border states within it, a firm New England abolitionist line would fail, while a focus on containing slavery, not eradicating it, might succeed.

And so, during that strange American interregnum between election and Inauguration—it was even longer in the nineteenth century, with the ceremony held in March—Lincoln struggled to find common ground with the Southern secessionists. He began a pre-inaugural exchange of letters with Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, a friend from his congressional days who made it clear that, in the Southern mind, everything was secondary to the preservation of slavery. “We at the South do think African slavery, as it exists with us, both morally and politically right,” Stephens wrote. “This opinion is founded upon the inferiority of the black race. You, however, and perhaps a majority of the North, think it wrong. Admit the difference of opinion.”

The enterprise of avoiding war was likely doomed from the start. Nonetheless—and here lies the new emphasis of Winik’s book—there was an attempt at a “Peace Conference” (Winik oddly capitalizes it throughout) during this pre-inaugural period, and it was more substantial than most subsequent histories have acknowledged. If it didn’t resolve the crisis, it at least exposed the depth of the deadlock.

The conference took place in Washington, at the Willard Hotel, where Lincoln had stayed since his arrival, using his suite as his office. The Willard, like the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York, has gone through many incarnations, but in the nineteenth century it seemed more central to Washington life than either the White House or the long-unfinished Capitol. (Its cast-iron dome was still incomplete.) From February 4th to the 27th, the conference drew delegates from twenty-one of the thirty-four states then in the Union. It brought together representatives from the South—most notably from Virginia, the cradle of Presidents, which had not yet committed to secession—with Republicans from the North, many of them, as Winik reveals, operating under the direct or indirect guidance of Seward. Though the delegates were mostly former members of Congress, the gathering wasn’t limited to them; the former President John Tyler, of Virginia, who held no official position but remained influential, was present.

It was, by all indications, a comfortable negotiation. Both sides dined—if a Willard menu from that year is to be trusted—on lamb chops, stewed kidneys, and, precociously, frozen custard, which, like baseball, would not become a national mania until after the war. It is perhaps less surprising, then, given their shared table, class, and manners, that both sides, including almost all the Republicans, were ready to concede the permanence of slavery in the South in exchange for ending the threat of secession. A Thirteenth Amendment was proposed, and could probably have passed, guaranteeing the continued existence of slavery in the states where it already prevailed. Even Lincoln was prepared to accept this.

The unresolvable issue was the extension of slavery into the territories. Here, the arguments were fierce, layered with subtexts and overtones more audible then than now. For all the civility of tone and talk of compromise — Lincoln went so far as to agree that a fugitive slave could be recaptured and returned to bondage — the real conflict was profound and, in the end, unbridgeable. Like the conflict in the Middle East today, it was rooted less in clashing interests than in vast and irreconcilable mutual fears. The underlying meanings were evident to all: any limit placed on slavery, the Southerners believed, was intended to hasten its extinction; any constitutional blessing of slavery, the North understood, was intended to support its extension.

To use an awkward but apt modern analogy, it was as if the right-to-life movement, having won the Presidency, were to concede that reproductive freedom would remain protected in blue states like New York and Massachusetts, but be entirely eliminated in red states, with harsh penalties. Blue-state voters would see that the true goal was to end abortion everywhere, and that agreeing even to a temporary truce meant accepting the long-term influence of hostile neighbors on a vital and defining issue.

Behind the Southern delegates’ suspicion was a kind of post-October 7th trauma: John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, in 1859, had convinced the South that the Black population was poised to rise up in bloody rebellion if given the chance. This, in retrospect, was plainly chimerical—the enslaved had not, in fact, joined Brown’s insurrection, and, when Black enfranchisement did eventually come, however briefly, during Reconstruction, Black Americans, far from turning violently on their former masters, embraced electoral politics with enthusiasm. But the Southern establishment was unshakable in its belief that any concession to abolitionists would end in the massacre of white families. Stephens wrote indignantly to Lincoln of “such exhibitions of madness as the John Brown raid into Virginia, which has received so much sympathy from many, and no open condemnation from any of the leading men of the present dominant party.”

Lincoln nonetheless participated warmly in the Peace Conference debate, insisting that his task was simply to follow the Constitution, which he understood to prohibit secession from the Union as an act of treason. Yet, for all his provisional concessions, he effectively ended the conference by declaring, “In a choice of evils, war may not always be the worst. Still I would do all in my power to avert it, except to neglect a constitutional duty. As to slavery, it must be content with what it has. The voice of the civilized world is against it.”

Those words may now strike us as unduly mild, but behind them lay the doctrine of the “Scorpion’s Sting”—the idea, adopted by antislavery advocates around the world, that if slavery could be encircled and confined, it would destroy itself, as the scorpion is said to sting itself to death when trapped in a ring of fire. The scorpion metaphor, though pungent, was poorly chosen. Just as frogs do not, in fact, remain in water as it boils but leap out when they are scalded, scorpions are actually immune to their own venom, and, when encircled by fire, they die not by stinging themselves but from heat-induced convulsions that only appear to be self-inflicted. That image offers a better metaphor for the war to come. Stoic suicide doesn’t occur in nature. Frenzied, senseless self-destruction does.

Yet Lincoln’s words signalled—clearly, to anyone attuned to their overtones, and everyone at that conference was—that slavery was to be put, or left, in a position where it would have to end itself. Slavery had a cursed past, and a present to be tolerated, but no future. No one quite said this; everyone grasped it. And so the Willard Peace Conference quietly foundered. Its resolutions were rejected in the Senate and never even reached a vote in the House.

Southern paranoia and Northern complacency together may explain what, at first glance, seems to us the oddest feature of the Willard meetings: that no one on the Northern side proposed a rational plan for gradual emancipation and enfranchisement, presumably subsidized by the already wealthy industrialists of the North and carried out over some specified interval. Such plans had been tried before—in Pennsylvania, as early as the seventeen-eighties, and proposed for Virginia, though unsuccessfully, by Thomas Jefferson. Surely a similar scheme, however brutal its delay for the enslaved, might have spared the country the full scale of the war to come. Lincoln himself returned to the idea in 1862, when he proposed a program of compensated, gradual abolition for the border states. Yet even then, at the height of the war, sympathetic border-state representatives refused to act. Slavery had embedded itself too deeply, not only as an economic engine but as a terror-bound cultural institution.

The tragedy was that, while the South could not overcome its paranoia about the violence it would suffer if the slaves were freed, the North could not imagine the scale of the violence it was choosing. The assumption, of course, was that the conflict would last twelve weeks—just long enough to put the erring states back in their place. But only a few months later Julia Ward Howe would be staying at the same Willard Hotel when, in the course of a day, she saw a column of freshly inducted Union soldiers, in blue uniforms, marching and singing lines from a newly adapted spiritual: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.” The words struck her as too direct, and she composed a loftier version in her hotel room, substituting God’s vengeance for that of the abolitionist: “He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword / His truth is marching on.” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was born. It was only November, and already more than forty thousand soldiers had fallen. The eternal language of euphemism—swords and lightning—had begun its work, displacing the reality of bullets breaking bodies.

In the wake of the failed conference, Lincoln skillfully replaced “abolition” with “the Union” as the war’s compelling purpose. The case he made to connect the end of slavery with the preservation of a political arrangement was subtle. Secession, he maintained, was a denial of democratic rule. Slavery had, from the beginning, been a national issue. It could not be fenced off and become a parochial one now. This was the logic, easily lost to us because it’s so familiar, behind the memorable line in the Gettysburg Address, delivered two years later, that the great question of the war was whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated”—that is, to liberty—“can long endure.” Without a strong central authority—not a dictator or a king but a unifying rule of law—a free state would be torn apart by demagogues and dissension.

Yet the argument, though it has come to seem foundational, is in some ways specious. As Southern critics noted at the time, for the wrong reasons but not with the wrong logic, the American Revolution was itself an act of secession—from a functioning and successful union. Many regions have broken apart at the will of their inhabitants. It is easy to imagine horrors today that could make, say, California and Oregon and Washington want to declare themselves a separate polity, and it is hard to invoke a moral principle to tell them that they can’t. From this perspective, the idea of “union” was one of the most disingenuous diversions in American history: the transformation of an abstract constitutional principle into a cause worth dying for.

Why this new argument proved so powerful remains something of a mystery. Edmund Wilson, in his study of Civil War literature, “Patriotic Gore,” saw in it the blunt, power-fixated logic of human history: big states swallow small ones. The North was stronger and bigger, and it swallowed the South. The bleak truth, Wilson suggested, is that people like joining armies of conquest. Presumably, when the Great Canadian campaign begins, there will be no shortage of soldiers to fight it, or of apologists ready to enumerate the horrors of Canadian life that must be erased, poutine aside.

And yet Canada, oddly, offers a clue to the peculiar appeal of Lincoln’s abstract ideal of “union.” Donald Trump’s threats have, almost overnight, caused a famously divided and centrifugal nation to cohere into a single national front. Something like that happened across the North at the outset of the Civil War, when “the Union” became not just a constitutional principle but a moral rallying cry. The South, for its part, responded in kind: secession swiftly forged a fractured region into a reactive unity, bound by fear of emancipation and faith in a mythic agrarian freedom.

In an illuminating study of American Jews during the conflict, “Fear No Pharaoh” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Richard Kreitner notes that even pro-slavery rabbis in New York were converted by Lincoln’s unionist rhetoric. Morris J. Raphall, who led the Greene Street Synagogue and had defended slavery on Biblical grounds, abruptly reversed himself when Lincoln invoked the vision of a united America. American Jews, Raphall insisted, knew the “difference between elsewhere and here.” His son enlisted in the Union Army and lost an arm at Gettysburg. As in the post-mass-immigration moment of the First World War, a crisis proved necessary to forge a common identity. “Elsewhere” and “here” always make for more compelling rallying cries than “right” and “wrong.”

This bleaker view is reinforced by the historian Michael Vorenberg’s new book, “Lincoln’s Peace” (Knopf), which picks up the story at the other end of the conflict, as the war was drawing to a close after unfathomable death and suffering. Vorenberg’s account, despite the intervening carnage, returns us to a situation eerily similar to the one that preceded the war: the white South, though militarily defeated, had no intention of accepting anything resembling racial equality. And, while Robert E. Lee might have declined to resort to guerrilla warfare, many of his lieutenants carried on a program of suppression by terror. In that sense, Vorenberg argues, the Civil War never truly ended.

Lincoln’s assassination was, in this light, a last-ditch terrorist assault on the national government—one that very nearly succeeded. Seward and Vice-President Andrew Johnson survived the conspiracy only by chance. The pattern of compromise persisted, with the politics of the border states still exerting undue influence. Indeed, one of the most fateful disasters in American history—Johnson’s embattled Presidency—was a by-product of those very compromises: Johnson, a Tennessean, was chosen to replace Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, on the 1864 ticket in a bid to appease the border states, with predictable results.

In “American Civil Wars” (Norton), Alan Taylor broadens the frame to include parallel struggles over national identity and democratic renewal in the eighteen-sixties—not only in the United States but in Canada and Mexico as well. One could broaden it further and argue that the period from 1848 to 1871—bracketed by the liberal revolutions and the end of the Franco-Prussian War—was marked by a series of violent shocks across the Western world, culminating in the establishment of a liberal political compact that, in some form, endured into our own time. Lincoln’s “passion” became so sanctified, in this reading, because it was the most extreme instance of a common struggle. In this view, the American experience was not exceptional but emblematic—a subset of the painful emergence of something resembling genuinely popular democracy.

What’s striking about the new literature on Lincoln and the war is that, though one may expect him to be in some sense debunked or “deconstructed,” he remains a largely idealized figure. Winik is admiring of his firmness of purpose at the war’s outset; Vorenberg mourns its absence at the war’s end. Matthew Stewart, in his recent study of the influence of idealist philosophy on abolitionism, “An Emancipation of the Mind,” goes further. Drawing on quotations from Karl Marx, a Lincoln enthusiast, Stewart argues that Lincoln was essentially the first Marxist President: embracing a view of labor not far from Marx’s own, and opposing the peonage of working people in all its forms.

This is obviously tendentious—nor does Stewart mean it entirely seriously—but, then, Lincoln, like Jesus, is easily made to conform to whatever ideological need the historian brings to him. If a left-wing, quasi-Marxist Lincoln is a plausible invention, so is a far-right, conservative one of the sort evoked by Harry V. Jaffa, the godfather of the Claremont Institute. Jaffa saw Lincoln’s choice of war in 1861 as wholly heroic—an almost Christlike epiphany that united revelation and reason in a moral crusade. He cast Lincoln as the embodiment of a set of absolute values: Biblical revelation and Greek reason joined in opposition to the relativism of modern liberal humanism, with its taste for irony and its acceptance of a plurality of forms of existence. Jaffa was, in effect, allying Jerusalem and Athens against New York. He wanted the American home built on rock, not shifting sand, and believed Lincoln was its carpenter.

In truth, we have no difficulty building our abodes on sand—that’s why the most expensive homes in Los Angeles and Long Island are called “beach houses.” There is no bedrock to build on, in the world or in morality. The political ground beneath our feet shifts, grows squishy, and is meant to. What we feel when we study Lincoln’s life through the war is not so much the force of fixed convictions imposed on others as the gradual emancipation of his own mind—a sense of his discovery, in real time, of what he believed. A powerful intuition that slavery was absolutely wrong evolved into a tragic fatalism, haunted by a sense of Providence, and finally opened into a horizon of hope, shaped by the scale of suffering Lincoln had helped to unleash. This much death had to make for a better land.

Yet believing that the war was inescapable is not quite the same as believing that it was right. Was the Civil War “worth the sacrifice”? Suppose that someone had had the force and the imagination to craft a plan for gradual emancipation. Full enfranchisement might have been delayed for several years, but the enslaved would have been free at last. And what of the human cost? If eight hundred thousand people had been deliberately murdered over the next four years—in some expanded version of the Trail of Tears or the Bataan Death March—would we see that as an unfortunate necessity of history or as an unforgivable crime?

Of course, some eight hundred thousand did die—many in horrific ways—while the formerly enslaved were left to fend for themselves in a postwar state where apartheid was enforced by terror. Why, exactly, is that outcome morally preferable—or more readily excused? These were not slaves but soldiers, who, in some collective sense, chose to fight. But was that choice entirely their own? Or was it made for them, by circumstance, by duty, by the illusions of glory, not to mention the blunt force of conscription? We are far too ready to depict the suffering of others as the price of the history that seemingly rewards us now.

The truth is that we accept mass dying with enormous aplomb. More than a million perished in the COVID-19 pandemic, but those who complacently predicted that it would be no more than a season’s pain appear to represent the new common sense: lockdowns were excessive, the health establishment overreacted. Mass dying barely fazes us—until, that is, it becomes personal and particular. Leo Tolstoy revered Lincoln, calling him “a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity, whose name will live for thousands of years.” Yet in “War and Peace” he captures the raw vulnerability of a young soldier—brave, devoted, almost absurdly loyal to the cause and its flawed leaders—wounded in battle. As blood seeps away and he imagines death nearing, the soldier slips into a state of wonder at existence. These passages, among literature’s most poignant and strangely affirming, bridge the gap between the vastness of war and the intimacy of a single death. A youth, swept into combat by patriotic fervor, faces bullets and, fallen, gazes at the sky, not with moral clarity or anger but with innocent bewilderment: Existence is so good—why am I dying for this? Major Sullivan Ballou, writing to his wife, Sarah, before the First Battle of Bull Run, mused, “I know I have but few claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, nor that, when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.” Early in the fight, a cannonball tore off his leg. He lingered in agony for a week, very likely in no condition to whisper anything, least of all her name.

Lincoln’s elegiac words about the dead soldiers at Gettysburg remain true: from their sacrifice, we still can take renewed commitment to their cause, that of liberty against tyranny. But we should also remember that the purpose of the struggle of liberty against tyranny is not to carry on the fight but not to have to. We can’t forget these soldiers’ lives, but neither should we forget the manner of their dying. Even if we return to the original proposition—that the Civil War was unavoidable, or that of all the bad choices war was not the worst—it doesn’t alter what happened at Bull Run or Antietam. Remaining alive to other people’s pain, in the face of heroic rhetoric, retrospective rationalization, and two-sided tribal terror, is perhaps the hardest moral task we face—and one at which we almost always fail. Sometimes the only people who can see the sky are the soldiers who die beneath it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 1:32 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trumptards and Confederates are/were absolutely evil but they feel/felt that their behavior is normal and necessary for their happiness and they won't stop until dead. Lincoln chose killing Confederates rather than endless talking to them in vain about ameliorating their atrocious behavior. Democrats are facing the same choice with Trumptards.


Do it tough guy. You keep talking about it every day, but you're a dirty little pussy and you have no stones.

Stop being a whiny little faggot and go start your Civil War.

Give me one good reason to put you into the fucking ground for good.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025 2:51 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025 4:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T


OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!


We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 10:32 AM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T


OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!


We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.




I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times. Yet you still cannot grasp the concept of someone being their own person. Not just another follower. You are MAGA. This means you are a follower. And, influenced by stories created by others who avoid the truth.

The trillions lost in the stock market crash is just the beginning. It is MAGA that’s dying. It is destroying itself. Which is why the whole world is laughing at Trumps’ intellect, well, lack thereof.

And Gilligan, there is something else that I am. I am a truth teller. As you post bullshit, conspiracy theories and lies because you hate, I post the truth.

OH yeah, as for me posting in threads I’ve created, don’t you? I've been to a few of your threads over the years. I'm pretty sure I've seen you posting there. You're a funny guy Gilligan.

T

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 2:12 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T


OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!


We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.




I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times.


And it's been a lie every time you've made that claim.

You don't have any thoughts of your own. You speak in headlines and political cartoons.

You are 100% Democrat through and through and you are the stupidest person I have ever known.

And your bit about being a "truth teller" is beyond hilarious. Everything you ever posted here turns out not to be true in retrospect. You should stop cataloging all of your failures to figure out when you're being lied to in all these threads.

Your dead party is all the evidence anyone needs to see this.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:30 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T


OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!


We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.




I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times. Yet you still cannot grasp the concept of someone being their own person. Not just another follower. You are MAGA. This means you are a follower. And, influenced by stories created by others who avoid the truth.

The trillions lost in the stock market crash is just the beginning. It is MAGA that’s dying. It is destroying itself. Which is why the whole world is laughing at Trumps’ intellect, well, lack thereof.

And Gilligan, there is something else that I am. I am a truth teller. As you post bullshit, conspiracy theories and lies because you hate, I post the truth.

OH yeah, as for me posting in threads I’ve created, don’t you? I've been to a few of your threads over the years. I'm pretty sure I've seen you posting there. You're a funny guy Gilligan.
T




And it's been a lie every time you've made that claim.

You don't have any thoughts of your own. You speak in headlines and political cartoons.

You are 100% Democrat through and through and you are the stupidest person I have ever known.

And your bit about being a "truth teller" is beyond hilarious. Everything you ever posted here turns out not to be true in retrospect. You should stop cataloging all of your failures to figure out when you're being lied to in all these threads.

Your dead party is all the evidence anyone needs to see this.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon



Nothing else to say

T

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


So shut the fuck up for once then.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You still didn't tell us what you were doing when you went into hiding for 3 weeks after the election, Ted.

You weren't cutting yourself, were you?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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