Unhelpful Paywalls

It happens quite often—sometimes many times a day—that someone gives me a link to information somewhere that they think I should read. Many of those those links don't actually take me where the person referring me meant for me to go. There's an intermediate stop at a paywall, a chance to subscribe to someone's information source.

Another time I'll talk about what's wrong with news pricing, but for today I hope we can agree that some news subscriptions are too expensive for mere mortals, and even free subscriptions aren't really free—they take time to sign up for, and they promise cascades of unwanted email. So when people reach one of these paywalls, there are various reasons why they often either can't or don't go beyond it. If not out-and-out barriers, paywalls are major impediments to obtaining timely information.

They are also more likely to be actual barriers to someone who is poor than someone who is rich, so they create a stratification of information availability by class in our society, dividing us along familiar lines into “haves” and “have nots,” informationally speaking.

Sometimes the downstream effects of that information imbalance just seem very unjust.

Insisting on a “Paywall Exception”

While I'd like to propose a wholesale rethinking of how we fund our news industry, for now I'll propose something simpler—a “Paywall Exception” for some topics: that are just so important that it isn't in the public interest for them to enjoy intellectual property protection. I just don't want to see paywalls keeping the public from knowing about and sharing important categories of information:

• For impending storms, lives are on the line. Advance notice could make the difference between life and death. If there is information about where those storms are going or how to prepare, that information should be freely available to all. Anyone who wants to profit on such information is guilty of sufficiently immoral behavior that we need a strong legal way to say “don't do that.”

• For pandemics, a lack of information is a danger not just to each citizen's own personal health, but to the health of those impacted by people making poor decisions that might lead to transmission. It is a moral imperative that everyone in society have access to best possible information.

• For existential threat to humanity that is Climate Change, society is mired in deep denial. We still have not admitted how very serious this problem is. Those peddling misinformation are most assuredely going to make their propaganda as free as possible. Truth can barely keep up. We don't need further impediments like paywalls on top of that, or else, soon enough, there won't be any of us left to matter.

I get that news outfits need to make money, but when I see critical information about an upcoming storm, or a possible pandemic, or assaults on democracy or climate change, I get more than average frustrated by seeing that such information is stuck behind a paywall.

They should make their money another way.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

It's beyond the scope of this essay, and would have complicated things too much to mention it in the main body, but there is also the issue of how to implement this exception. It could be voluntary, but I doubt that would work. Or people using the information could assert fair use, but that's risky given the economic stakes in copyright violations. Three strategies occur to me that perhaps I'll elaborate on elsewhere. (1) We could expressly weaken copyright law in some areas related to news, so that it exempted certain topics, or shortened their duration to a very small amount measured in hours or days, depending on the urgency of the situation; (2) we could clarify or extend the present four criteria for fair use; or (3) we could (probably to the horror of some of my lawyer friends) extend intellectual property law to have the analog of what real estate law calls an easement, a right of non-property holders against property holders to make certain uses. I kind of like this latter mechanism, which leaves copyright per se alone and yet could be better structured and more reliable to use than fair use. But that's topic for another day.

The graphic was generated at Abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and variously either Dall-E or Flux.1. There are many reasons I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with so-called “AI”—or Large Language Models (“LLMs”)—but for now I am using graphics generation to experiment with the technology since, like it or not, we don't seem to be able to hold the tech at bay. The prompts used were, respectively:

1. (Flux.1) «Design a 500x500 image of a fancy signpost, with text on a brown background and white gold trim, that bears the words "Entry Restricted" with a horizontal line below that text and above additional text that says "Critical Info Beyond Only For The Rich".»

2. (Dall-E) «Design a color image of photocopier under glass with a sign attached that says "In case of societal threat, break glass." A small hammer is affixed, attached by a chain, to help in the case that the glass needs to be broken.» (But then the hammer was not correctly placed in the picture. It was detached from in the chain and in a strange place, so I had to fix that in Gimp.)

3. (Flux.1) «Draw a 1000x500 image of an elegant sign, with a brown background and white gold borders and lettering, in copperplate font, that has three messages, each on a separate line which are "No Secret Storms", "No Secret Pandemics", and "No Secret Existential Threats", but make these messages share a single use of the word "NO" in the left hand column, tall enough that the rest of the phrases can appear stacked and to the right of the larger word "NO".»

A to-do list for repairing US democracy

 

If we're lucky enough  not to spiral down into dictatorship during this fall's Presidential election in the US, we need to have a ready-made to-do list for repairing democracy.

To start off a conversation on that, here's my current thinking…

Draft Proposed “Freedom Amendment” to the US Constitution

(Rationales, in green, are informational, not part of the amendment.)

In order to solidify and preserve democratic rule within these United States, these changes are hereby ordered to all United States policies and procedures:

1. Voting

1. No Electoral College. The Electoral College is hereby dissolved. Presidential elections shall henceforth be determined directly by majority vote of all United States citizens who are eligible to vote.

2. No commercial interference in elections. No for-profit corporation or company, nor any non-profit corporation or company that as their primary business offers products or services for commercial sale, may contribute to campaigns or other activities that could reasonably be seen as trying to affect election. (The ruling in Citizens United v. FEC is vacated.)

3. Restore the Voting Rights Act. The ruling in Shelby County v. Holder that voided section 4 is hereby reversed, restoring this Act to its full form and asserting full Constitutional backing to the Act. Preclearance is hereby required for all 50 states equally.

4. No “gerrymandering.” The practice of gerrymandering while drawing district boundaries at the federal and state levels is hereby disallowed.

5. Ranked-choice voting. All federal elections shall be handled via a ranked-choice voting process.

2. Ethics & Oversight

1. Supreme Court Ethics Code. The Supreme Court shall henceforth be governed by the same ethics code that binds all federal courts.

2. Congress and the Supreme Court shall be subject to term limits.

   1. Senators may be elected to no more than 3 terms.
   2. Representatives may be elected to no more than 5 terms.
   3. Supreme Court Justices may serve no more than 18 years.

3. No one is above the law. Elected members of all three branches of government are subject to all laws, just like any other person, even though prosecution of such a person for crimes must wait until that person leaves office. In cases where immediate prosecution might be important, impeachment is an option.

4. Senate impeachment votes are not optional. If the House impeaches someone, the Senate must immediately perform all business necessary to assure a timely vote on that impeachment; this process is not optional and may not be postponed. Once an actionable concern has been raised that a public official might have committed a crime, the public has an interest in swift resolution.

5. House and Senate impeachment votes are temporarily private. Impeachment votes by both House and Senate will be recorded and tallied privately, preferably electronically, with only the aggregate result reported immediately. Individual votes will be held securely in private for a period of ten years, at which time all such votes will be made a public part of the historical record.

6. Public office is not a refuge to wait out the clock on prosecution. Any clock for the Statute of Limitations does not run while prosecution is not an option. This applies for all elected persons for whom indictment or prosecution is locked out due to participation in public office, but in particular for POTUS. It may be necessary to the doing of orderly public business not to prosecute a President while in office, however public office is not a refuge in which someone may hide out until the clock runs out on otherwise-possible prosecutions, whether that clock began before or during time in office.

7. Pardon power is subject to conflict-of-interest (COI) restrictions. It is necessary to the credibility of all public officials in a free society that there be some reasonable belief that rules of law do not create options for corrupt officials to abuse the system. Presidents and other state and federal officials embued with the pardon power may never apply such power to themselves, their families, or any other individuals with whom there is even an appearance of conflict of interest. No such person may solicit any action by anyone on promise of a pardon. Any single such action, attempted action, or promise of action where there is a conflict of interest that is known or reaasonably should have been know to the party exercising pardon power is an impeachable offense and a felony abuse of power subject to a penalty of ten years in prison.

8. Independence of Department of Justice. The head of the Department of Justice shall be henceforth selected by a supermajority (2/3) vote of the House of Representatives, without any special input from or deference to the Executive.

   Rationale: Assure DOJ operates independently of the Executive, its mission being to fairly and impartially uphold Law, not to be a tool of partisan or rogue Presidential power.

9. Independence of the Supreme Court. Justices of the DOJ shall be henceforth selected by a supermajority (2/3) vote of the House of Representatives.

   Rationale:

   1. When SCOTUS must rule on the validity of Presidential action, a conflict of interest is created if those Justices might be appointed by that same President or even a majority party.

   2. Since the Constitution requires a supermajority to change its intent, an equivalent degree of protection is essential for choosing those will will interpret that intent. Recent history has suggested that it was easier to change the Court than to change the Constitution, with catastrophic effect decidedly unfair to the majority of citizens.

   3. A President is more than Appointer of Justices, yet that singular capability is so powerful and lasting that it often dominates election campaigns. Citizens need to be free to hire Presidents for other reasons more unique to the moment, such as good judgment; logistical, management, or negotiating skill; expertise in technical or scientific matters; or even just empathy with public issues.

3. Rights of People

1. Corporations are not people. Corporations are legal constructions, nothing more.

   Rationale: To say that they are independent people, is to give some actual people (those who own or control them) unequal, magnified, elitist, or otherwise distorted power over others. There is no place for this in a democracy that purports to speak of all people being created as equals.

   1. No Implicit Rights of Corporations. Any powers and duties of corporations must be explicitly granted to them, as coporations, whether by the Constitution or by legal statute, and henceforth must never be derived from any implication of imagined personhood.

   2. Explicitly Enumerated Rights of Corporations. Long-standing legal powers and duties of corporations such as the right to sign contracts, the right to own property, the responsibility to pay taxes, and any legal responsibility under tort law are hereby acknowledged by express enumeration in support of demonstrated corporate need and are no longer intended to be inferred as part of any preposterous fiction that corporations are just another kind of person.

   3. Non-Rights of Corporations. Alleged rights such as, but not limited to, rights of free speech and religious rights for corporations are hereby clarified to be nullified and without basis. A corporation has no automatic rights of people extending from any metaphor of being person-like. Politics is the province of individual persons, not corporations. Corporations exist for sales, subject to the rules of laws made by individuals, not vice versa.

2. Bodily autonomy right. All mentally competent people have a right to autonomy over choices of medical procedures affecting their own body.

   1. No Forced Pregnancies. From the time of conception to the time of birth, no government nor any other person may have a superseding say over a pregnant person as to any matter relating to a fetus.

      Rationale: This should already follow from the Religious Freedom Clarification, but it is too important to leave to chance. To say that any other person could make such choices would be to allow their religious freedom to infringe the religious freedoms of the pregnant person.

      Also, the term “pregnant person” is used here intentionally to include that adulthood is not a requirement of bodily autonomy. In general, any person who has not been legally ruled mentally incompetent is entitled to self-determination on matters like this. Not even a parent should have superseding control, since a parent will not have to live a lifetime with the consequences.

   2. Fetal Disposition is a Private Matter. Whether a pregnant person wishes to refer to a fetus as simply a fetus, a potential life, an unborn child, or an actual child is a personal religious choice to be made by that pregnant person. No law shall impose a policy on this.

      Rationale: To say otherwise would be to deny the obvous fact that people simply differ on this matter. To assume there were some single right way that everyone must adhere to would be to give dominance to some religious philosophies over others.

      It's a compromise, but the only one that it allows each person the best guarantee of at least some autonomy in a society where not everyone agrees and we are not likely to change that fact by fiat.

      Also, and importantly, some pregnancies are not successful and even in a society where we permit abortion for those who weren't wanting to be pregnant, it would be callous and undignified not to acknowledge the legitimate loss to others who sincerely wanted to carry a pregnancy to term but were unable. It is possible to be respectful in both situations, by feeling the grief of someone who wanted a child and not manufacturing grief for someone else who did not.

3. Right to Choose a Marital Partner. Among consenting adults, the choice to choose who to marry must not be restricted due to race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

   Rationale: This has been accepted already and it is not appropriate to roll that back. It was a good idea anyway, though, because happy families add an extra level of safety net protection to society. Family members try to take care of one another during sickness and other hard times, and this hopefully reduces some amount of stress on public safety nets.

4. Religious Freedom Clarification. The right to religious self-determination is a basic human right.

   1. Religious Choice. All people have the right to explore religous choice on their own timeline and terms. No one is required to pick any particular philosophy, or any philosophy at all, or even to make a choice.

   2. Religious Equality. Religious protections span all religious choices (and non-choices), and hence are accorded equally to all people. No person may be accorded second-class legal status on the basis of their religious philosophy—or lack thereof.

      Rationale: So atheists, agnostics, etc. are still due religious freedom protection. Answers to “Is there a God?” are still due religious protection if the answer is “no” or “I don't know” or “I haven't decided” or “I don't know what that means” or “This is not a binary question.”

   3. No State Religion. The so-called “establishment clause” of the First Amendment is hereby clarified to mean that the United States takes no position that might give the appearance of preferring one religon over another.

      Rationale: We are not, for example, a Christian nation. Nor a Jewish nation. And so on. And yet the US is a nation that intends to treat each religion and non-religion in the same supportive and respectful way, and expects each of these religions to be respectful of others. This is how balance is maintained in pluralistic society.

   4. Religion is not a Popularity Contest. The fact that one religious philosophy might at any given point be more common than another does afford that philosophy a greater or lesser status.

   5. No Bullying in the name of Religion. The freedom of religious choice is not a right to bully or coerce, nor to violate law. Each person's right of religious choice extends only to the point where it might infringe on the equivalent rights of others.

Yes, this could be done by separate amendments. But it would be a lot of them, and the discussion would be much more complex. I say do it all at once because every one of these things is absolutely needed.

If anything, there might be a few things I left out.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post was catalyzed by a single tweet by me on ex-Twitter, but it has been hugely elaborated since, after all, this venue does not have a 280 character limit.

The odd graphic of the scales of justice under repair was created by Abacus.AI's ChatLLM facility, using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Dall-E and the prompt:

Draw a picture of a grayscale statue of a woman holding the scales of justice in one raised hand and a small wrench and a pair of needle-nose pliers in the other hand, lower, at her side. part of the statue should include a toolbox next to her feet that is open and presumably where she's taken the wrench from. the woman should be wearing a flowing gown, as is traditional for this kind of statue, but she should have a pair of goggles on her head, as one would use in a metal shop to protect one's eyes. The woman should have a pair of protective goggles, like one would use for metal working, over her eyes.

And, yes, I'm aware I did not get the needle-nose pliers got left out. And on this iteration I didn't ask for her to be seated, though I had been thinking of requesting she be seated at a work bench to resolve some unwanted aspects of previous attempts, so I went with this as the best of several tries.

American Dictatorship

In a “commentary” piece in Salon titled A candidate, not a president: Jack Smith crafts a simple solution to Supreme Court Jan. 6 roadblock, Norman Eisen and Joyce Vance wrote:

«The Supreme Court’s late-term decision recognizing a dangerously expansive immunity from criminal prosecution for former presidents effectively cut off any chance of the original indictment in the January 6 case against former President Donald J. Trump going forward.»

The article goes on to talk about what Jack Smith has done to salvage the case. Good for him. It shouldn't be necessary to work under the preposterous constraints recently imposed by the Supreme Court, but I'm glad he's up to the challenge. And that's the immediate concern, so it makes sense that Eisen and Vance would focus commentary on something so topical.

But I want to draw back and reshape this same set of observations to highlight a few other things that have been bugging me as the rest of this immediate drama runs its course.

Biden Explains the problem

After the immunity ruling, Biden made a bold statement:

“This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. Each — each of us is equal before the law. No one — no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States.

With today’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed. For all — for all practical purposes, today’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do.

This is a fundamentally new principle, and it’s a dangerous precedent because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States. The only limits will be self-imposed by the president alone.”

Wrapping our heads around the problem

Sometimes when there are big statements made (like that a President has “no limits” or is “above the law”), it's hard to see the practical reality that is lost inside. I notice this when trying to excite people about the urgency of Climate Change, as well. Sometimes, instead of saying the world might end, one needs to say that there will be no more Christmas vacations, orchids, poetry, or reruns of Groundhog Day. Something more personal. Because the vast scope of “anything” or “everything” is just too hard for the brain to wrap itself around.

I'll tie this all together in a moment, but first one more quote.

The aforementioned commentary by Norm Eisen and Joyce Vance also mentioned this:

«As a result, Trump’s attempts to weaponize the Department of Justice to his own private ends are no longer part of the case. Gone is the allegation that he pressured the Department to release a letter falsely claiming that the election was marred by outcome-determinative fraud. Gone is the allegation that he sought to use the Department to press state officials to certify his electors, rather than those of President Joe Biden. And gone is the allegation that he attempted to install his now-excised co-conspirator, Jeffery Clark, as the Acting Attorney General to implement his scheme when other officials resisted.»

So, yes, as Biden noted, Presidents will be above the law. But as the reduced indictment implies, included in the President's broad immunity, which SCOTUS has made up out of nowhere, are the following truths:

• It isn't a crime, just a routine day at work, when the President perpetrates a fraud on citizens of the US, or solicits those who work for him (including DOJ) to do so.
• It isn't a crime, just a routine day at work, when the President meddles in state or national elections.
• It isn't a crime, just a routine day at work, for the President to solicit state officials to do his bidding in ways that would be illegal for others.
• It isn't a crime, just a routine day at work, when the President organizes conspiracies against the United States government, in violation of his oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

Smith is doing what he must do in order to get this past a corrupt Supreme Court. But what they are asking him to accept as a premise is just utterly preposterous. The above examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Forget the fact that we're talking about crimes that probably happened. Forget that it's Trump. Just ask yourself: If you were designing a nation, would these be intended consequences of your design? Can you even imagine our founders intended this? Keep in mind that these are the people that brought us the Declaration of Independence, which said, among other things:

“… The history of the present King … is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. …
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. …
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone …
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation…”

Independent of the prosecution of Donald Trump, independent of the sweeping nature of presidential immunity, these specific truths that we already know from the mere fact that Jack Smith felt it necessary to remove them from the indictment, and which are only the tip of a very ugly iceberg, are not suggesting a positive direction for our nation's future. I would like to live in a country where Jack Smith did not have to fear prosecuting such things would be cruelly laughed out of Court.

We must drive stakes in the ground to keep the Overton window from moving.

Dictatorship vs democracy

Democracies have a lot of problems. The back and forth of democratic decision-making can be messy, processes run slowly, and outcomes are not always pretty. Democracies are said to offer the best of worst case outcomes, not the best of the best. For example, they are supposed to resist capture by a single individual. They are supposed to have checks against becoming dictatorships.

And, let's be honest, a benevolent dictatorship might sound better. Someone who knows good things need to be done and can do them efficiently. But the problem is that there is no such realizable system as a reliably benevolent dictatorship. Even if it started out that way, it would risk in every moment becoming malevolent. And if that happened, and it would, there would be no protection.

So, as Churchill is often quoted as saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

But at the same time, Jefferson wasn't wrong in saying, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

We've been too trusting in the US for too long and have allowed, little by little, for various changes that have weakened our democracy's safeguards. We have seen them burrowing in at democracy's weakest points, and instead of responding aggressively by filling observed gaps, we have let them drive a wedge.

So, at this point we find ourselves preparing for an election that many have described as having placed democracy itself on the ballot, because Donald Trump has promised that if elected, he will be a dictator. Just for a day, he says, but not everyone is Joe Biden. The history of power is that people do not step back from it easily. If Trump achieves any approximation of dictatorship, expect him to decide he likes it and wants to keep it that way. And the Supreme Court seems poised to back that.

After all, he seems to think he can be a dictator on day one if he wants. But the Supreme Court has not said anything that distinguishes any day from any other. If he has the power to be a dictator by his own choice on day 1, he has the power to be dictator by his own choice on any day. The Supreme Court seems to have made that pretty clear. That he's hinting only about a single day has no predictive value. His promises are worth nothing. He changes like the wind. The only consistency he has is his narcissism.

Meta-dictatorship

But, wait a minute, why does the Supreme Court get to decide these things?

Well, that's just their role and always has been. They are charged with making decisions that are true to the Constitution, but who polices that? They do. Or they don't. But, either way, no one else can tell them they're wrong.

Pardon the use of technically precise language here, but they just say shit, and it becomes true, stink and all.

They don't exactly make law, but they tell lawmakers what laws are OK to make. They don't exactly enforce law, but they tell enforcers which laws may be enforced. That's a lot of power. Too much.

They are, effectively, a team of meta-dictators. That's kind of always been there, just waiting to rear its ugly head.

A President is suddenly a king. How? That wasn't previously true. The Supreme Court says so. So we believe it. They claim the power to say that someone is a dictator, above the law and immune to question. How do you do that if you're not already a dictator yourself?

So why are we talking about a future world that only might have a dictator after the election. The problem is real, and here, and now. We have a team of dictators already—a weirdly constituted team that has a minority voice that's like an ignored conscience, unable to have an effect but still able to speak out, alerting us to danger. In spite of that, collectively, they are dictators.

Nothing has recently changed about the power of the Supreme Court other than its composition. It has been a potential dictatorial mob for a while, just awaiting two things to align:

• the right composition, to take advantage of the power that was there.
• the death of shame, so they won't be embarrassed doing it.

Now that those conditions are met, the Supreme Court's danger, a danger that has been there all along, is starkly visible.

In a sense, the story of the US Supreme Court is the story of a dictatorship that started out benevolent and decayed before our eyes, just as I was saying one should expect from any such attempt. As soon as we get the chance, we need to correct its structure so that it has much stronger protections. In the past, our various Congresses and Presidents have seen the Supreme Court's design as something sacred, that works well, not realizing they were simply relying on luck. Democracy must be built upon firmer stuff. It needs solid checks against corruption. Nothing less will suffice.

Leave it to the United States of Capitalism to bring on dictatorship fashioned in its own image, as a board of directors, not quite dictating directly, but freely controlling who is allowed to be the country's CEO and under what parameters they are permitted to operate. It's a bad look. But it's what money has bought.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

For the flag logo, I tried to generate an image at Abacus.ai using various models and Dall-E or Flux.1, but all of them made a complete mess of simple instructions, so finally I asked just "make a simple black and white logo in the style of a clenched fist. make sure the fist has 4 fingers and a thumb" (because many times it gives too few fingers), and I had to edit it onto the flag myself, using a public domain image of a flag downloaded from publicdomainpictures.net.

Edit: The penultimate paragraph in the main article above, beginning “In a sense, the story of the US Supreme Court…” had been intended originally but ended up lost due to editing. It was added back the day after initial publication when its absence was noted.