On Grave-Dancing

Once again, a famous person who held distasteful political beliefs has passed away, and the grave-dancing has commenced. This time it was Kirstie Alley, an actress famous mostly for her long-standing role on Cheers. She was also an avowed conservative (although she withdrew her support for TFG in 2020 and announced she wouldn't vote for either candidate), and a Scientologist. Accordingly, some seem to think it's OK to celebrate her death because she's an "enemy."

Really?

My own criteria for acceptable grave-dancing (YMMV) upon the death of someone whose politics we deplore require considering the following factors:

1. Was the person currently causing a significant amount of social discord, suffering, or other trouble such that their demise will make a noticeable difference in people's lives? Or were they old adversaries who were no longer involved in any kind of public life; or people whose impact was merely annoying, but insignificant?

2. Did they have family, friends and/or associates who genuinely loved them, or were they so disagreeable or toxic that they won't be missed by anyone?

3. Did they ever do anything good or useful, irrespective of their politics; i.e., did they support good causes, donate generously to charities, or provide entertainment through their art, music, acting, etc.? Were they kind to children and animals? Or were they consistently greedy, uncharitable, mean, disinclined to help people or do anything to make their lives easier?

4. Did they contribute negatively or positively to public discourse; that is to say, did they express their opinions, however wrong-headed they might have seemed, courteously and rationally, or as insulting, hateful trolls?

Applying these criteria, I can't think of any reason to dance on Kirstie Alley's grave. She was just an actress with political opinions contrary to mine. I also didn't dance on the graves of John McCain, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, or Bob Dole. I didn't agree with them but I didn't hate them. In fact, the only graves I can anticipate dancing on, and might even do so with pleasure, would be Trump's and Putin's. They meet all of my negative criteria. As to other "enemies," I offer the wise words of Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, written following the Civil War.

I feel pretty much the same way.

After TFG was defeated in 2020 I thought, Finally we'll be rid of that toxic lunatic and things will get back to normal again. But then there was all that election fraud nonsense and crazy Rudy saying mad things in the parking lot of a landscape company and 60+ lawsuits and 1/6, and pretty soon it looked like TFG was going to be the political equivalent of long covid - you survived and sort of recovered but the unpleasant after-effects just won't go away and you don't know when they will, if ever.

So we hope for the best but expect the worst, and the outcome probably will be something in-between and in varying degrees of awful, depending on where you live. We'll have to carry on but we won't know for awhile what the final picture will be - probably not Nazi Germany but maybe some kind of "soft" fascism or something like The Troubles of Northern Ireland, or maybe just protracted struggles in the courts. The best case scenario is that Biden vetos everything coming out of a GOP-dominated Congress, but even that is just a stalemate. And what might happen in 2024 is anybody's guess. It's the uncertainty and the sense that something really bad could happen that makes me feel like the character in the Li'l Abner cartoon with the storm cloud over his head. I'm old but given my ancestors' tendency toward longevity I could be around for another 20 years or so, and right now I'm just hoping those last years don't suck too much.

Oh. My. God. This opinion should be required reading in every civil procedure class

in every law school in the country. I believe one of TFG's Lawyer Barbies, Alina Habba, was responsible for the dog's breakfast of a complaint, and she was righteously whacked upside the head. Even TFG's other incompetent lawyers think Habba is incompetent. https://www.thedailybeast.com/alina-habba-the-trump-lawyer-the-rest-of-trumps-legal-team-loathes

A few gems from the opinion:

The media don't have to report it; this is something people see themselves, every day.

I have always been a pretty committed institutionalist, but

after watching the 1/6 hearings so far and reading the recent opinions of a no-longer-legitimate Supreme Court, as off this evening I'm kind of like, "FUCK IT! BURN IT ALL DOWN!" We don't have the country we thought we had, or even could have had, because too goddamn many people in power suck and too many other people like it that the people in power suck, and the system just does not fucking work. Maybe this country is just too big and complicated for the original system to work, or maybe it never really did but for 200 ears wheezed along just well enough for us to think we were the Shining Fucking City On The Shining Fucking Hill and didn't notice the rot in the basement. Or chose not to notice it.

So the gaping holes in the system allowed TFG to crash through the guard rails that were really only made of toilet paper straight from Mitch McConnell's bathroom, and 2/3 of the Supreme Court just stood there and said, Hell, yeah, as the car rolled down the embankment.

The founders knew it was all an experiment anyhow, and I guess the lab just blew up.

But the obvious question is, *why* do they want to own guns?

More specifically, why do people want to own the sorts of guns that are useful and intended only for killing many people in a short period of time? People want guns for hunting. My dad owned guns - a few rifles and shotguns for hunting, like everybody else's dads. It was no big deal. Every fall he'd go pheasant hunting and we'd have pheasant for Thanksgiving instead of turkey. But you can't hunt pheasants with an AR-15, at least not if you want anything left of them to make a meal with. Some people have a gun at home for protection, but you don't need an assault-type weapon, just one you can access quickly and don't need to aim accurately, like a shotgun. You don't need to turn a home invader into hamburger.

So who are the people who want multiple military-style guns, and why do they want them? I think the whole gun issue has to be analyzed from the demand side as well as the supply side. What is it about guns, especially those kinds of guns, that makes some people fetishize them? And that's what it is - a fetish. Some people have assigned meaning to guns far beyond their use as a common tool for hunting or self-defense. To some, guns are such a powerful symbol of manly American patriotism that any attempt to restrict their ownership or use is tantamount to treason. Where did this bizarre fixation come from? A lot of different places, probably, starting with the individualistic cowboy fantasy, the myth of American exceptionalism and the rise of toxic masculinity. All this as been amplified by the NRA, which once was just a sportsman's organization but in the '70s became a tool of the gun manufacturers, and which turned gun ownership into a non-negotiable right-wing idee fixe. And many people - mostly white men who are convinced that the commies are going to sap their precious bodily fluids if they don't keep an arsenal of weapons to ward off an oppressive government, as well as insecure, disturbed boys whose revenge fantasies are fed by online violence porn - are now convinced that they need guns like they need air and food.

I don't know how to change this.

What is meant by "legitimate"?

The pertinent dictionary definition is "accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements." So in that sense, the court is legitimate. It exists and operates in accordance with the Constitution and federal statutes. What it has become, however, is a legally established and therefore "legitimate" body that has lost the confidence of a large sector of the population. It exists in the first place as a branch of government intended to provide an ostensibly neutral arbiter of the law and thus a check against the political tendencies of the other two branches. Some of its decisions since its creation have been politically-motivated and some have been downright bad, but overall it has at least seemed neutral and fair enough that the other branches and the people have been willing to accept its decisions as reasonable applications of the law that they were willing to accept even if they didn't agree.

It started to slide, I think, with Bush v. Gore, which was such a bad, dumb, poorly-reasoned and disingenuous opinion that its goal - to achieve a particular political outcome by twisting the law and the facts of the case - was screamingly obvious. It's gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket during TFG's maladministration with the addition of overtly biased and arguably unqualified justices, and now the draft opinion in Dobbs shows beyond doubt that the court is just another political body, and as such will have lost the confidence of a whole lot of us that our cases can have a chance at a fair hearing. That's the whole reason for a court to exist - to give all cases before them a fair hearing - and if a court can't be trusted to ensure impartial justice, its technical "legitimacy" is meaningless.

I'm not sure natural selection will weed out this particular brand of idiocy.

I wonder whether the trait of ignoring science for political or ideological or tribal reasons is inheritable. If it is, the trait will persist just because so many of the anti-vaxxers have already reproduced. However, I question whether the type of stupid that causes some people to prefer rumors and conspiracy theories that reinforce their existing suppositions about the socialist government forcing them to do things they don't want to do is genetic. There is research suggesting that conservatives are more fearful than liberals, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201612/fear-and-anxiety-drive-conservatives-political-attitudes - although this theory has been questioned, https://www.livescience.com/conservatives-not-more-fearful-than-liberals.html - because it appears that conservatives aren't necessarily more fearful than liberals, only that they are afraid of different things. And, the author suggests, it might be that people adopt a political identity first and then fear certain specific things as a result.

Fearfulness in general is probably an inheritable trait. But people who won't get vaccinated don't fear covid, or at least not enough, even though they should (like the caveman fighting off a lion with a stick), but they fear the vaccine. Why? It's not because they are fearful in general, but perhaps it's because their political identity has motivated them to fear the vaccine more than the disease. Arguably this is just plain stupid, but is it low-IQ stupid? Probably not. I'd posit that it's a learned stupidity (and here I define "stupid" not as developmentally disabled in some way, but as willfully ignorant) arising from rigid political identity. It's a social disease, not a genetic one.

But even so, if the 'rona kills off enough of these morons to keep the GOP from winning elections I will be satisfied that their karma has run over their dogma.

Actually it isn't. It's an argument that the president was acting

within the scope of his presidency when he said what he said, not that it was OK to say it. If he was acting in that capacity the government is obligated to raise a defense on his behalf and substitute itself as the defendant. The catch, of course, is that the government can't be sued for defamation, so the government would be off the hook for damages. in Clinton v. Jones, the Supreme Court case held that a sitting president of the United States is not immune from litigation for acts done before taking office and unrelated to the office, but this is a case involving an act done while the president was in office. So they have to rely on Nixon v. Fitzgerald, which held that a president is absolutely immune from litigation for discretionary acts done while in office. The decision is very broad, and although it doesn't define exactly which activities Fitzgerald covers, the case is generally interpreted to mean that as long the action is within the broadest understanding of the president's function as president, he's immune. The reason the appeal is being taken by the current DoJ is not to protect Trump but to determine, by an appellate court, where that line is. The notion that a president can make allegedly libelous statements regarding a situation not related to his function as president is a huge stretch and it will probably fail, as it should. But it is in no regard inappropriate for the DoJ to want to get an answer to the question for the sake of future administrations.

No. Trump's "craziness" consists of some fairly extreme personality disorders

but he's not psychotic in a way that would support an insanity defense (which rarely works anyhow). Gigante feigned mental incompetence as if he was developmentally disabled rather than psychotic; he shuffled around in a bathrobe, mumbling to himself, and acting as if he didn't understand what was going on around him; his lawyers claimed he had been mentally disabled since the late 1960's, with a below-normal I.Q. of 69 to 72. He was willing to publicly humiliate himself in a way that Trump would never, ever do. Trump, however, is a malignant narcissist who apparently has managed to convince himself that he won the election because his disorder won't permit him to acknowledge he lost. But he would never allow his lawyers to raise an insanity defense, and he isn't legally insane (unable to understand the nature and consequence of his actions) even though he is certainly not normal.

A somewhat similar case is that of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who, in 2011, killed eight people by detonating a bomb in Oslo, then killing 69 young people at a summer camp. Initially he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, but a second psychiatric evaluation determined he had narcissistic personality disorder but was legally sane. Breivik was outraged at the initial diagnosis that he was mentally ill, even though it would have kept him out of prison. He "expressed hope at being declared sane in a letter sent to several Norwegian newspapers shortly before his trial, he wrote about the prospect of being sent to a psychiatric ward: "I must admit this is the worst thing that could have happened to me as it is the ultimate humiliation. To send a political activist to a mental hospital is more sadistic and evil than to kill him! It is a fate worse than death." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik I think Trump would be equally outraged at the idea of raising an insanity defense.