Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Saturday, July 29, 2023
·
35 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Another near miss.
This time the TCAS advised one plane to climb and the other to descend (exactly as it’s designed to do). Unfortunately a flight attendant was hurt during the maneuver.
Justice
LimbaughAlito to the WSJ: “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”Meanwhile, the Constitution, Article III, Section 2, Clause 2:
Is committed originalist (pfft lol) and constitutional textualist Alito deliberately spreading misinformation, or does he just not know what he’s talking about when it comes to the Constitution’s text? Similar to when Alito falsely claimed in Dobbs that pre-viability abortion had no historic tradition in the US? (In fact, legal abortion before fetal movement has a longer history in American common law than does antiabortion law.)
Yes, the Constitution provides the US Congress explicit and implicit regularity authority over the Supreme Court. And among its jurisdictional regulatory power, congress can change the number of seats on the court, fund or defund the court, impeach its Justices, and more.
Alito continues to reveal himself as an angry, thin-skinned, imperious sore winner, and a papist ideologue who wrongly believes he is not answerable to the country’s ultimate authority: the American people. His dishonest jurisprudence and lack of discretion are a disgrace — and a gift to would-be court reformers.
@DK: I saw that headline yesterday when I was heading out to dinner and *immediately* thought, “wait a minute, I remember discussing this in my con law class.” Notably, I am not a lawyer, did not go to law school, AND that class was 32 years ago.
So, Alito is either a liar or should really step down from the bench, because he’s forgotten some pretty fundamental sh!t.
@Jen:
Both?
You’re a “textualist” sir. This is literally your whole career. This is the text of your Constitution: “…the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
So what the heck is Alito banging on about?
Beneath all his unseemly and embarrassing whining, crying and playing the victim, Alito really is so self-righteous and self-pitying he cannot see it’s his own tantrums fueling the opprobrium that rankles him. Alito himself is the problem.
Alito is mad smart people can see now he lacks common sense (which wise people already knew about anyone naïve enough to fall for the “originalism” scam, barely a step up from jurisprudence by Oujia board), and that he’s an imposter who sucks at his job. The Judge Has No Robes.
@DK: @Jen: Beat me to it, so I’ll just add “a government of [certain] people, by [certain] people and for [certain] people.” Still, not very surprising given that the founders established a government that would police itself and (probably) never imagined that we would be using it with only relatively cosmetic changes even now. It’s had a good run.
China’s graduates unconvinced by calls to toil in countryside
Wow, who could resist?
Apparently, everybody.
Fad diets, midday sun and … coffee on the sofa: 12 doctors on the everyday dangers they avoid
Heh. Long story short, there may be one or 2 kernels of wisdom here, but these doctors seem to have come to the collective solution of, “Lock your doors, close your windows don’t ever do anything that might turn bad, don’t eat anything because you might choke on it, don’t drink the water and especially not the milk….”
I’m exaggerating of course, but if you put each of these doctors fears (because they’ve seen what can happen) into a single package it would not be far off from what I said above. They all would have had heart attacks if they saw how I raised the boys.
@DK:
@Jen:
This may be a case where understanding Scalito’s language is essential. What does he mean by “textualist”? He seems to mean “finding the text says or means what we need it or want it to mean.”
So, in this case it’s simple to parse the relevant clause to mean “exceptions and regulations concerning the applicability of appellate jurisdiction.”
I wonder, though. If Congress were to pass ethical or other regulations on the Court, how would the justices avoid them? Can they sue the government? In what court would such a suit be heard? If the SCOTUS or a justice is involved in a lawsuit, can the SCOTUS remain the ultimate appellate authority, even if it is party and judge, which is contrary to all legal precedent?
I’m sure Scalito can come up with a rationalized textualist interpretation.
@DK:
@Jen:
He is a liar and a gaslighter. Lying and gaslighting are always integral to Fascism which is what his movement amounts to. He knows quite well he is lying.
(IIRC, Michael Tomasky had a piece recently in TNR re: the GOP’s relationship to truth and Fascism. As just one example, the “Biden Crime Family” crap the GOP is pushing, EAIAC).
This is just horrific: ‘Serious failings’ contributed to baby’s death in 12-hour lone prison birth
This was in the UK so it’s not our prison industrial complex to blame.
Sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
@charontwo:
Actually Tomasky newsletter, not TNR, excerpts:
snip
snip
Meanwhile, DeSantis has been signalling on the down low to the groypers and other Nazi-adjacent sorts he welcomes their support. So one of his guys recently made the mistake of being too obvious by putting out a video featuring the sonnenrad (a less obvious swaztika surrogate) with marching “brownshirts” plus DeSantis’ face.
Oopsie. (Google Nate Hochman).
@charontwo:
The image:
https://images.newrepublic.com/eabdc87a1e5212a878185efed990a9fc13433087.jpeg?w=999
@DK:
Ultimate authority: the American people? Alito and the Federalist Society are part of the Kochtopus effort to govern with a minority of the people. Or failing that, prevent anyone else from governing. “Originalism” was designed as a tool to overturn precedent and as much as possible return governance to the hands of an oligarchic few, as was the case at the time of original Founding.
I see Houston has found a way to get around the controversies about school library books. The new, state appointed, superintendent is firing all the library staff and turning the libraries into “discipline centers”.
@gVOR10:
Thanks for that clarification, that explains how that can happen in a big blue city.
I’ve been playing around with generative AIs, like GPT4 and Bard. Not deeply, and not very seriously. But I think I can see right now they’ll work, if they do, more as part of programs and apps than as stand-alone tools.
For one thing, figuring out what to say as a prompt to get what one wants, is neither simple nor intuitive. They’re rather unpredictable, too. And let’s not even get into their tendency for fabulism (aka “hallucinations”), like citing non-existent cases in legal documents.
In other words, they’ll end up as Clippy was intended to work. Maybe this time they’ll get things right.
@gVOR10:
Proof that the brownshirt wing of the GQP sees schools as child internment centers.
Ozark- My 7 year old grandson just left after a few days stay. During that time we built stuff with power tools, he loved the power miter saw, taught him to build stuff with dowels and glue instead of nails and screws, used the jigsaw, circular saw, sander and every drill. Then we went outside to practice with the slingshot and he burned weeds with my propane mini-flamethrower. What boy doesnt like fire? He kept saying dont tell my mom and I kept telling him I had her do this stuff too. Then we made homemade pasta with a meat sauce, heavy on the meat, for dinner but I made him learn to sharpen knives first. Dessert was strawberries we showed him how to macerate and homemade whipped cream because it’s so much better than the canned stuff. I think a lot of these yuppie parents are way too protective. Besides, they need useful skills. The downside is I am exhausted.
Steve
@Kathy:
Alphabet has a video out that demonstrates a robotic arm that has been infused with AI, rather than needing to program the robot to perform a function, it is given instructions and it decides what to do. In the clip I saw the robot was given several toys to choose one to pick up. The instructions were to pick up the one that represented an extinct animal, it picked up the dinosaur model.
@steve: My sons were traveling with me to TAG and dropping 250′ pits, helping me explore and map virgin caves, and floating our many rivers all summer long. I took them to AZ, AR, OK, WY, Mexico, and Spain. I never got tired of doing it but their teen years had them looking elsewhere for things to do. Nowadays they like to reminisce about those days and we still go floating from time to time but neither of them cave anymore. My eldest is into rock climbing and my youngest is down in NOLA. He recently acquired a canoe for excursions into the bayous.
Heh, a memory: I think they were 10 and 12 or so and I took them down to a wilderness camp along the Current river where the wild horses liked to hang out from time to time. On the way down we drove thru some torrential rains but when we got to the camp the sky was filled with a million stars and the fields were filled with 2 million fireflies. A truly extravagant display I had never seen before and never seen the likes of since. They are now 35 & 37 now and they still talk about that show.
After the campfire had died down and I had put the boys to bed in the back of truck, I climbed in to sleep as well. During the night I was awakened by more downpours 2 or 3 times. When I awoke for the last time around 5 a real frog choker was coming down and waterfalls of water were flowing off my tarp. I looked at the rain coming down, I looked at the still mostly dry streambed draining the holler we were camped next to. I looked at the rain again and made a decision:
“BOYS! GET UP! GET INTO THE TRUCK!” and I grabbed everything and threw it into the back of the truck, tore down the tarp and it went into the back as well (I had a camper top).
Jumped in and started that f*cker up. I was throwing rooster tails of mud and water every where way as the truck slid this way and that. I had about half a mile to go to get to the streambed coming out of the next holler and then I could get out of the valley bottom. When I got to it, it was running bank full. I looked at it, calculated the probable depth of the water, wondering if I could make it when a 2-3′ diameter log floated by.
“Nope.”
Spent the rest of the day putting sticks in the ground as the flood waters of the Current river rose higher and higher and the island we were on grew smaller and smaller as more storms cycled thru dropping their requisite deluges. Every now and again you could here a tree along the Current river “explode” as it surrendered to the pressure of all that water pushing against it.
When our little sanctuary had shrunk down to about 30′ x 15′, I looked at my sons and said, “Boys, we may have to swim out of here.”
They just looked up from their books and said, “OK.” and went back to reading their books. I was more than a little taken aback by the nonchalance of their acceptance of our precarious situation.
The water stopped rising soon there after and I was able to drive out the next day as the flood waters had already receded.
@OzarkHillbilly: That sounded an awful lot like the flooding I experienced in Missouri–statewide the floods were bad–but that was back in 1993, which if I’m doing my math correctly is about five years earlier than what you’re talking about.
That ’93 flooding was BAD. I was working in Jefferson County in July/August of that year and the water came up fast. VERY fast.
@Kathy:
You are right, of course, that they will attempt to deflect and parse etc etc. But as a negation of Alito’s curious declaration, this text doesn’t really need to be parsed.
Alito didn’t say, “Nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress authority to regulate Supreme Court ethics.” Alito said thus:
That’s a very strongly worded false statement. Parsing can’t truth it.
@Kathy:
There are now dozens of online courses offering to teach you “prompt engineering”. It will be interesting to see whether they can evolve fast enough to keep up with the changing landscape of GAI performance.
Ozark- You are much more exciting than I am. Fortunately, while my daughter and son in law are apprehensive about his using power tools, knives and fire they love to travel so he has seen neat stuff in parts of the world I will never see. My daughter who was such a PITA when younger and got mad that I made her try to learn to use tools, cook, do house maintenance stuff, go fishing says it made her not so afraid to try new stuff so maybe it benefited her. That said, I did have to call her and tell her she is a total failure as a parent because the grandson puts ketchup on his bacon. What parent lets their kid do that. An abomination!
Steve
@steve:
I used to teach Odyssey of the Mind coaches. My favorite anecdote involved the 11 year old girl who came home one day and greeted her mother with “Hey Mom, guess what — welding is really easy.”
I would show a clip from Master Chef Junior, in which a 9-year-old (and small for her age) girl uses a knife half her size to butcher a tuna fully her size — and does it well. And I’d note that her parents did not prevent her from acquiring life skills…
@DK:
And next you’ll be claiming the founders did not intend power to be unchecked and imbalanced.
I keep thinking back to the Roman republic. They, too, set up checks of sorts. Like splitting power among several magistrates in each post (two consuls and such), veto power, term limits, etc. In the end, the ambitions of powerful men and their refusal to abide by the law and willingness to break norms, turned the republic to an empire.
@Sleeping Dog:
Clever AI didn’t pick up the human, hiding its true intent.
@DrDaveT:
I’ve read about such things. I still think generative AI would work better as part of some other application, kind of like GPT4 works with Bing search.
@DrDaveT:
I’ve read about such things. I still think generative AI would work better as part of some other application, kind of like GPT4 works with Bing search.
BTW, here’s how Bard fails the Turing test:
Kathy: How do you think O’Brien thinks of himself?
Bard: I think O’Brien sees himself as a kind of revolutionary. He believes that the Party is the only way to achieve a truly equal and just society. He is willing to use whatever means necessary to achieve this goal, including torture and violence. He believes that the ends justify the means, and that anything is permissible in the service of the Party.
Or maybe it was just hallucinating.
@DK: Doesn’t need to be truthed. All it needs is to be believed. We have a saying in the Fundy community:
It’s very convenient.
Random music find of the day, “John Brown” by Marc Ribot and Fay Victor. Probably the most fun song about Bleeding Kansas that I’ve heard (it has a horn section! and an upbeat tempo!), and barely referencing “John Brown’s Body” (I do recognize quick snippets of several other songs though)
https://youtu.be/l21V19U419M
Apple Music’s suggestion algorithms are not as good as Spotify’s, but they got me with this one.
@DK:
Perhaps someone could remind Alito that their budget comes from Congress, so Congress can certainly regulate their money. The
@DK:
@Jen:
re: Justice Alito
I remember thinking, way back in 2006 following his\ contentious confirmation hearing, that he, like Clarence Thomas who also had a bitter contentious hearing, was going to spend a good part of his time on The Court ‘getting even’ with Democrats and liberals.
I don’t think I was far off the mark.
@Kathy:
The devil is in the details of what “works with” means. GPT4 and its kin are purely statistical models that imitate how some words tend to follow other words in the online English corpus. That makes them sound fluent, but they are entirely unaware of what they are saying. It’s not even a case of getting things wrong — they aren’t “getting things” at all, right or wrong. There is no model of meaning in GPT4 or any other large language model (LLM).
So, suppose you have another system, be it Bing or a semantic reasoning model like CYC or a giant knowledge graph… Those systems model meanings. But how do you combine the two? You can’t build meaning into the LLM — that would be a fundamentally different kind of model. So it must work the other way around, that the semantic model will somehow use the LLM as a subroutine. But use it to do what? Which subtasks is it both good at and reliable for?
It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.