A Reply to Professor Lipson on Facebook

Professor Lipson posted the, linking to a Spectator article, 

"Trump's never-ending 'stolen election' story damages America."

Yes, there were problems with last November’s election, but they have been litigated and audited for months. To continue questioning those reviews and challenging the outcome does lasting damage to our country. It’s long past time to stop.

Trump’s attack on our constitutional procedures does not stand alone. The Democrats have waged their own damaging assault on several fronts. They floated the idea of adding two new states to the Union and more Justices to the Supreme Court. Both are efforts to fundamentally change the legislative and judicial branches by packing them with supporters. 

Politicians wage attacks like these for tactical advantage. Alas, what is tactical advantage for them inflicts real structure damage on our democracy.

My reply follows.

On this one you are simply wrong. The reality may be simply too terrible to accept. The often paranoid theories of the worst and least credible people have finally proven true. Yes they may have cried wolf a thousand times but that makes it possible that the genuine criminals took advantage of that as a cover, recognizing that many had been conditioned not to react to the real theft. The very magnitude of the crime drives those complicit to go to extraordinary lengths to defend it. As Hillary said, "If we don't win we all hang." That then leads the innocent such as yourself, who are invested in maintaining the forms of civil society and constitutional government even as the substance has been eaten out, to bandwagon and give them cover.

The crucial moment may have been when the Democrats endorsed Occupy Wall Street and the Republicans did not challenge that. Occupy was not Free Speech but a dry run for ANTIFA. The point of no return was the refusal of Stacey Abrams to concede in Georgia. The Democrats were allowed to create a shadow government and then under the cover of COVID allowed Abrams to sponsor the mechanism for the theft of the 2020 election. The GOP should have used every tool available to force the Democrats to break with Seditionists and repudiate what was clearly a coup in progress months before the election. Unfortunately the antipathy to Trump among establishment leaders of the GOP enabled the Democrats to maneuver them into passivity.

The maintenance of the forms of institution and ritual are not meaningless. There is reason to cling to them even when barbarians occupy the seats of power. It is through the institutions and the rituals, through the Constitution and Congress and the Presidency and the courts, and schools and religions, that values are transmitted and justice is delivered. That leads to a free and prosperous society. The institutions and rituals are tools, not the goals in themselves, but they are valuable tools and to abandon them is the path of despair and defeat. However as they are but a means and not the end they must be supported by vigorous enforcement. The fact is that the institutions did not, were not permitted to, operate. The supporters of President Trump did not have their day in court. Millions believe as I do that the election was stolen and that becomes more certain over time, not less.

Between the election of the Constituent Assembly of 1918, that met for only 13 hours before the Bolsheviks dismissed, it and 1990 Russia was governed by a dictatorship cloaked in the forms of law. After all the Soviet Constitution of 1936 promulgated by Stalin was "the most democratic on earth." Did that make protests illegitimate? There is no need to go full Godwin and dwell on the forms cultivated by the constitutionally legal and elected, with the possibly unneeded use of fraud and thuggery, government of nazi Germany.

Is it possible to satisfy the concerns of most of the sane, as I hope that I am, people who dispute the legitimacy of the current regime in DC? Yes but it becomes increasingly difficult to do so and the response from those invested in preventing an accounting has already crossed over into violence. The Democrats have proclaimed that any disputing of their claims to power, including peaceful protest and lawful assembly or communications, is Sedition and may be suppressed with force. Demonstrators who entered the Capitol on January 6th, which was probably unwise, but who did so after the police opened the doors and entered peacefully staying between velvet ropes have been treated brutally in a manner that only we thought had existed in the past in dark backwoods corners of America.

What can be done? At a minimum the fact that there is a legitimate concern must be acknowledged. A full formal audit and public accounting of the election must be held. Invalid votes must be exposed and rejected. Where a state's Electors were improperly assigned their votes in the Electoral College must be invalidated. Reassignment of those votes to a competing slate is a separate issue. It may or may not be justified depending on the facts. If either canceling some EC votes or replacing them were to overturn the outcome of the election then the offices of President and Vice President would have to be declared vacant. At that point the XXth Amendment would take effect. My expectation is that would make the Speaker the Acting President until a new election could be held. Here is section 3 of the XXth Amendment:

𝑆𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 3. 𝐼𝑓, 𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑥𝑒𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡-𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑑, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑉𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡-𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡. 𝐼𝑓 𝑎 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑛𝑜𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑛 𝑏𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑥𝑒𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑓 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚, 𝑜𝑟 𝑖𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡-𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑞𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑦, 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑉𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡-𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑐𝑡 𝑎𝑠 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑙 𝑎 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑; 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑦 𝑏𝑦 𝑙𝑎𝑤 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑛 𝑛𝑒𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑎 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡-𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑛𝑜𝑟 𝑎 𝑉𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡-𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑, 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑐𝑡 𝑎𝑠 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡, 𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑟 𝑖𝑛 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑐𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑑, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑐𝑡 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑦 𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑙 𝑎 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑜𝑟 𝑉𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑.

There are real issues arising from the 2020 election regarding Voter ID and Early or Mail in voting, as well as Harvesting, that Congress should address.

Looking back, and at the risk of flogging a horse, I want to add something.
Professor Lipson was my teacher, my mentor, is my I dare say friend, and over 40 years ago I was a spectacular disappointment when he I think took a turn as my advisor in the hope of getting some useful work out of me. His opinions matter. A belief in the benefits and even the necessity of building institutions, political, legal, and academic, and accepting the legitimacy of their procedures, including accepting an undesired result, is a rational and moral position. Good scholarship in the Social Sciences makes one aware of the grim consequences that follow when those institutions collapse and with startling speed societies revert to the Hobbesian war of all against all. 

As the Declaration says "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer" because the alternatives are both unknown and as the evidence of history and theory shows are usually worse. If the consequences of the election a year ago were, unpleasant as it may seem, simply the consequence of Donald Trump's abrasive personality alienating key groups of people combined with some clever or even unethical but still legal maneuvering by his opponents then the answer to his supporters may be, as the Lincoln Project Bush/McCain loyalists seem to say, "Suck it up. There was a lot at stake and you blew it. Now we have to try to put the pieces back together and it is going to be harder than it would have been if Trump had never existed." 

Is that true? The evidence is obscured but that is because there has been a sustained campaign to suppress the evidence. That in itself makes it harder to accept the prematurely proclaimed results. Certainly it is reasonable to believe that the reason that Trump gained the support of the Republican base and probably the majority of the citizenry was that the Establishment in the GOP had become corrupted and demonstrably failed to defend the institutions and see that they functioned as tools to deliver the benefits of law liberty and prosperity I described above. Was there a spontaneous move reacting to traditional political operations or rather a sophisticated conspiracy that resorted to Sedition and even foreign support along with organized criminal activity, from mob violence to illegal election law changes, to coerce an illegitimate result?

To simply propose the second half of the above choice would seem bizarre or even paranoid but the first alternative, given what we all saw, is also incredible. We cannot simply dismiss one and declare that the other must be true. We need a proper accounting, no matter how inconvenient that may be. Efforts to suppress challenges are themselves evidence that the results should be challenged. Every effort to deny that accounting moves the weight of evidence to the side of declaring that that Mr Trump is correct.

Rot in The Groves of Academe

Actions must have Consequences, in Physics Politics or Law.

The Statute of Limitations, which guards against persecution and the introduction of unverifiable or tainted evidence as well as some forms of corruption, is not the same as granting wrongful conduct a veil of oblivion if it is not punished within two news cycles. We need a prominent regularly updated running tally of outrages and most importantly their consequences if any. In the below case from three years ago do we know what happened? Is Thomas still employed at U Miss or at any college or by any government?

Part of the problem may be the relentless pressure on faculty to fill more than one role. Faculty at major universities are expected not only to perform research and mentor graduate students but also to engage with undergraduates and to act as public intellectuals, as personalities and advocates. That may have begun as a patriotic contribution to the government when it needed Experts to assist in crisis such as the Great Depression and then WW-II and The Cold War but it also was recognized as a gold mine in bringing to the schools not only direct federal money but also publicity that payed off when raising funds for the endowment. Famous faculty proved almost as valuable as a good football coach.

The other side of that is the pressure on faculty at small and state colleges to also produce and publish original research. Continued publication by senior faculty, Full or Associate Professor, at state colleges should not be a requirement for job retention, even if tenure rules change as they well may. Publication by junior faculty seeking tenure should be subject to much more critical review, separate from that of the journals they publish in. The current system has become a self licking ice cream cone with a frequently inedible product. Real scholarship may be drowned out by the white noise of those who have nothing to say and who say it aggressively. This has been exposed by the placement of hoax articles.

Teaching faculty at state colleges who wish to participate in the life of scholarship beyond their classroom duties should be afforded opportunities to do so as Affiliates at regional Research Universities. While publishing as an Affiliate might generate some prestige and a small possibility of advancement to a research position at a university the expectation of a financial benefit proportional to the labor involved should be limited. The job of the college teacher should be to teach. This is a step back possibly to the concept of separate college and graduate faculties, although with the colleges largely on separate state school campuses, similar to that of the Hutchins era at the University of Chicago.

Teaching in a non-vocational program at a Community College is probably worse than teaching in a decent high school, and there is no reason to support dubious publishing opportunities in questionable journals and an inflated graduate system to manufacture the doctorates that are not needed for the small number of genuine scholarly positions available. Without a doubt there are good people who can't get into a position at a top tier university. This is a tragedy and sometimes even an injustice. But the cost to society, especially in the opportunity cost of wasted resources, of pretending that those in the non-scholarly positions are producing work that is as valuable as scholarship should stop. Einstein may have done his best work while he was a patent clerk but we don't expect every patent clerk to publish and we don't create redundant journals to handle the produce of tenure hungry patent clerks. We would be better off if those who are not going to prosper as scholars, which in most fields like Anthropology means all but a handful a year, are told to focus on teaching and to drop the SJW theatrics. An Affiliation program would allow the leading faculties of the Research Universities to work with and find those who do belong in a top tier scholarly setting, without duplicating the graduate program at every state college. Of course I am generalizing. That is needed to generate testing.

The problem is that after WW-II with the GI Bill the number of college students expanded dramatically, that created the demand to increase the number of graduate students, which created the demand to increase the number of graduate programs, all with federal funny money, and then the baby boom followed, increasing the demand ad infinitum or at until the students decided that hetero-sex was a bad thing. 60 years ago a small liberal arts school or a state college could boast of one or two serious scholars, often Jewish refugees, who were relieved of the burden their colleagues had at the research universities because at the small schools they did not have to teach graduate students. That reduced some of the perks of Academia but it worked. Now the vast overgrown network of 2nd and 3rd tier schools is flooded with faculty like the character at the original link for this thread and the students, many of whom do not belong in a liberal arts school, are ill served. For those faculty who aspire to something better it must be depressing. How can we get back to what worked?

The state colleges were established under the Land Grant system as Normal Schools (Teacher's colleges) and Veterinary schools. Those are important functions. A few other similar professional programs, such as Accounting and Engineering, may be considered of direct benefit to the states, as determined by th state legislatures.

BTW an Uncle of mine was a great scholar of French literature and became Dean of graduate studies at UMass, Amherst. Under his guidance that school became a great Research University. He was proudly Liberal and hated Eisenhower. When he was a graduate student at Columbia he was on a committee of graduate students, all but my uncle were I think veterans, who went to see Eisenhower, then the President of the university, to ask for a $25 raise. Eisenhower threw them out of his office.

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Privus Sapo

October 17, 2018  · 

Shared with Public

The University of Mississippi has this to deal with:

“Don’t just interrupt a Senator’s meal, y’all,” James Thomas, an assistant professor of sociology, tweeted from his @Insurgent_Prof account on Oct. 6, the day Justice Brett Kavanaugh was sworn into the Supreme Court.

“Put your whole damn fingers in their salads,” he wrote. “Take their apps and distribute them to the other diners. Bring boxes and take their food home with you on the way out. They don’t deserve your civility.”

This untenured Assistant Prof is probably around 38 years old and spent the half of his life since high school working into his current position. If he gets fired, as I hope, his record should be amended to ensure that he does not find employment at a secondary school. He is quite literally unemployable. What can he do? Write Stand Up LGBT comedy reviews? The Village Voice has folded.

The larger issue is the bloat in America's education system. There are tens of thousands of people with graduate degrees that there is no market for except for taxpayer created jobs where they manufacture more students, who spend 4 to 15 years in the same fields and then expect employment. How many graduate programs in Sociology and Anthropology producing how many PhDs does America need? Probably fewer than a dozen, with all but the top 3 producing 1 to 3 new PhDs a year. The best may generate up to 5. How many undergraduate programs in those fields are justifiable? More than the graduate programs but still fewer than now exist. Almost all state university graduate programs in the Social Sciences and Humanities, which grew as an unintended consequence of the post WW-II GI Bill, should be shut down.

All government scholarships should be tied to some period of prior active or concurrent reserve military service.

Fbook Is Down

Fbook is down. Is it a $2 part or bad software inn the spaghetti code or is it deliberate? To be clear I have absolutely zero evidence of this, it is pure speculation for heuristic purposes.

When someone falls into the trap of doing business with a mobster they always start by thinking that they are a free agent still. Then comes the moment when the rug gets pulled out from under them. The CCP is a Mafia. Did they, either directly or through a US government cut-out, make a demand that Zuckerberg finally said "No" to? It would comport with the model for them to pull the plug to ensure future compliance. If that happened then it indicates that we are all already in the box and that Xi and his gang believe that we cannot escape. What powers to stop them remain? The infinitesimally small possibility that the CO and XO on an SSBN would launch against orders? I do not believe that will happen. The only consolation that I can offer is that the totalitarian project, and the parasitic gangster model it is wedded to, are doomed to failure. Eventually but long after we are all gone and civilization has collapsed human communities will revive like green shoots riding from the devastation after a forest fire. Hopefully there will be isolated pockets like monasteries where some memories and learning may be preserved.