Speed Kills

A story recently by Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi saying something about the García deportation case that has me particularly furious. I want to take a few moments here to detail the reasons for my ire.

«Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration failed to take “one extra step of paperwork” before it mistakenly deported a Maryland man…»

—article 2025-04-16 by Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill

The Very Critical Nature of Due Process

First, “Due Process” is not a paperwork step. It is process—specific actions”—that is due by the government to the people. That process is meaningful and substantive and necessary to ensure the freedom of everyone, including you and me.

It is a foundational principle of US government. Freedom cannot exist without it. It is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, in the Fifth Amendment, and it is guaranteed to “people,” a broader set than just “citizens.” Per US case law [e.g., Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001)] non-citizens, even including those unlawfully present, are entitled to due process.

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

—The 5th Amendment to the US Constitution

To say that no process is due would be to say that it's fine for this to happen to anyone. You. Me. Anyone. Because it blurs the distinction between “alleged” and “convicted.” They say they are only doing this to criminals, but, in the US, the way we decide who a criminal is—at least up to now—by due process.

What's good for the goose…

But would the President know this? I'm going to go out on a pretty sturdy limb here and guess “yes.” In spite of being actually convicted on 34 counts (which he disputes), in general, he relies heavily on the difference between accusation and conviction to claim a clean reputation in the face of a very large number of uncharged crimes.

What protects him is not “one extra step of paperwork” but due process, the fact that, under the Constitution, we have a process for determing whether someone accused of being a criminal is in fact an actual.

That important bit of process due to him—and to García—does not take place in the President's mind. It is not just a routine bit of unilateral business to be done by ICE. It happens in court.

Highest possible stakes

If we think we can skip that step, the part about going to court for a fair hearing with proper evidence and a chance to rebut charges, then anyone can be that mistake.

Again from the article in The Hill:

«“He is not coming back to our country. President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story,” she told reporters at a press conference Wednesday, referring to the Salvadorian leader. “If he wanted to send him back, we would give him a plane ride back. There was no situation ever where he was going to stay in this country. None, none.”»

—article 2025-04-16 by Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill

And the notion we would just summarily re-deport him, again without due process, is saying that the US president does not care about this very critical step that has historically set the United States apart from barbarous countries.

Also, the President's oath of office is not itself a mere matter of paperwork (or lip service). It is something all presidents swear to, and it includes language about protecting the Constitution from enemies. He is not doing that. This is not a small administrative matter.

Legal angles?

Personally, I'd go so far as to argue that once he is not defending the Constitution, none of his acts are official acts, and every single one is subject to question before our court system. That is how I would re-approach SCOTUS and ask for clarification because if they really meant that official acts include the overthrowing or ignoring or otherwise trashing of the Constitution someone had sworn to protect, then they themselves need to be impeached on that basis, because saying that was not upholding their oath office to the Constitution and (in my opinion) makes that ruling invalid.

Also, in criminal law, when dealing with evidence, there is the notion of fruit of the poisonous tree when dealing with evidence improperly obtained. What would help a lot right now is the same for the Executive and SCOTUS itself. Once it has been demonstrated that there is a corrupt actor, not defending the Constitution, all further actions coming from that person really should be seen as invalid. To do otherwise is to say that allowing an enemy actor to have effect is more important than We The People. I see no reason at all that this should be so.

I know that people differ politically on a wide variety of issues, but I hope that we can at least admit that logical consistency and sanity are not partisan matters. Assuming that's so, I just don't see how we can have any kind of functional democracy, at least not one based on the Constitution, if major aspects of it are being eroded in real time. Somehow we have to find a means to stop this cancer in its tracks.

On speed

And while we're on the topic of things going too fast, I want to touch on one other matter as we close: speed itself. Speed is a theme that runs through all of this.

The rate at which things happen is a tangible quality of things that is easily overlooked when describing what's going on, but it really matters quite a lot if things are happening faster than people can keep up with or react to.

Project 2025

There is a shock and awe campaign ongoing as part of the Project 2025 rollout. Wikipedia says this about the deployment strategy it's using:

Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a military strategy based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.

—Wikipedia “shock and awe” entry

Military, though? Yes, I think so. It's a good metaphor because it highlights the strategic and tactical nature of the actions taken and that the goal is a political conquest that changes government by means other than democratic votes. Not all military action uses guns. In Sun Tzu's The Art of War, the use of physical violence is seen almost as a last resort.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

—Sun Tzu in The Art of War

Project 2025 is a very ambitious plan with a very detailed playbook for a quick (six month) rollout.

There is a lot in Project 2025 that people might object to. But part of the plan is to do a lot very quickly, each outrageous act a distraction for each other in a kind of fog of war kicked up by a Gish gallop of indignities and violations.

The site www.project2025.observer helps enumerate its aspects and track the progress of each.

DOGE

Speed is an underlying premise of the recent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Efficiency usually implies either lower cost or higher speed. But efficiency is an elusive term and invites the question, “efficiency of what?” My recent essay Government is not a Business discusses, among other things, how inefficiency is important to the correct function of government, making the point that speeding things up doesn't automatically make things better.

People also assume that efficiency means monetary efficiency or time efficiency, but there are other uses of the term that seem to fit better. I think of the efficiency that DOGE is seeking as more like what I've come to call a “permission efficiency”. This relates to the earlier discussion of the safeguards of democracy. They are essentially trying to create a thugocracy, a place where bullies and thugs rule. Rights are protections against state action, but these autocratic oligarch wannabes don't want to have to ask permission for anything. They find permission-asking unhelpful to their goal of pushing people around and hence “inefficient.” That's more like what DOGE is trying to streamline—any possibility of rights claimed by citizens.

And they want to do it fast. Faster than people can react. Because if they took the time to debate it, the debate would not go in their favor.

Forced Pregnancy

Pregnancy, which many of us think should be a completely private matter, has become a public issue. It is a way for certain men to assert an ugly dominance over women through forced pregnancy. From the moment of a pregnancy's conception, a clock starts ticking counting down to when abortion is no longer politically allowed. Where it is allowed, there has been a focus on tactics to introduce procedural obstacles many, of which have no other purpose than to slow down a woman's ability to respond in time to exercise her rights.

Nature imposes some time limits of its own, but then men impose additional ones. None of it serves personal choice, personal health, or personal justice. In a nation whose Constitution promises to leave religion as a private matter, this debate is everything about the assertion of oppressive government control of very private matters, and wending its way in and out of everything that goes on is a race against time.

Weaponizing speed itself

That's really the problem with all of this. By acting swiftly, they can bypass anyone's chance to fight back. Even acts that have protections, if those protections cannot be practically put into play in the time alloted, are effectively neutralized.

In effect, speed itself is the weapon that is and will continue to kill people, perhaps even you and me.

I'll close with a quote from a case years ago, in the aftermath of World War II, Shaughnessy v. U.S. ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953). It's striking how relevant this passage seems, even 70+ years later. The circumstances are not far off. What's changed are some of the tools of such aspiring tyranny, speed itself now central among the repertoire of weapons they wield because modern technology accommodates greater speeds. We must stop this. Let's just hope we can do it in time.

«No society is free where government makes one person's liberty depend upon the arbitrary will of another. Dictatorships have done this since time immemorial. They do now. Russian laws of 1934 authorized the People's Commissariat to imprison, banish, and exile Russian citizens as well as "foreign subjects who are socially dangerous." * Hitler's secret police were given like powers. German courts were forbidden to make any inquiry whatever as to the information on which the police acted. Our Bill of Rights was written to prevent such oppressive practices. Under it, this Nation has fostered and protected individual freedom. The Founders abhorred arbitrary one-an imprisonments. Their belief was -- our constitutional principles are -- that no person of any faith, rich or poor, high or low, native or foreigner, white or colored, can have his life, liberty or property taken "without due process of law." This means to me that neither the federal police nor federal prosecutors nor any other governmental official, whatever his title, can put or keep people in prison without accountability to courts of justice. It means that individual liberty is too highly prized in this country to allow executive officials to imprison and hold people on the basis of information kept secret from courts. It means that Mezei should not be deprived of his liberty indefinitely except as the result of a fair open court hearing in which evidence is appraised by the court, not by the prosecutor.»

—Shaughnessy v. U.S. ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953)

Author's Notes:

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

This post originated as a rant by me on Mastodon. Substantive content has been aded, re-focusing on the issue of speed.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Law and Ordering

“First They Came” | ”Als sie kamen”
by Martin Niemöller

There's been a lot of erosion of US democracy lately. The latest is the case of Kilmar Abrego García's deportation. It should matter to everyone because of the specific precedent it sets.

But it's part of a general trend for how many precedents are being set. The order in which things are happening is not accidental.

In many ways, what I'm going to say here is just a restatement of the famous Niemöller poem. Great poetry often captures an idea crisply, and certainly that poem does. But some things are important enough to say a lot of different ways, and this is certainly one.

So, at the risk of redundancy, let me just say that there's a very specific ordering in which laws and norms are being stretched and broken. It goes from “most acceptable” to “least acceptable” in our society for whose rights we'll tolerate violating. We as a society have grown used to some of our members being abused. They know this ugly truth, and they're exploiting it.

As I explained in my essay Political Terraforming last fall, the goal is plainly just to eliminate all rights. But they can't do it all at once. There's a clear order in which this has to be done.

In effect, there is an aspect of this which is its incremental and creeping nature. We see that as a kind of icky feeling as we wake each morning to look at the Internet, but it's not just that. It's tactical. The Overton window can only stretch at a certain rate. It's apparently fast, but not infinitely fast.

The US right now is a herd of animals where the weakest are at the outside, being picked off one by one by his wolves. We've arranged ourselves with the weakest, least overall-acceptable people at the outside, and too many of us comfort ourselves that we're safe because we're not on the outside (yet).

There's some part of this that's shock and awe, trying to go as fast as possible before anyone can react at all. But there's a slowness component to it, too.

With the system—and our own sensibilities—overwhelmed, citizens are forced to prioritize which indignity to be responding to at any given time. This Gish gallop of disgusting acts is so vast that one cannot respond to everything. So the Project 2025 goal is to lay a foundation of precedents, breaking prior norms, moving the Overton window while most people aren't yet noticing or caring because they're busy with other indignities.

So, amid the flurry of things that every day assault us citizens, they're going slowly enough that the part involving precedent setting passes unnoticed. In this way, by the time it matters for mainstream America, the aspiring dictator will be poised to say “This is just how it's done. You've lost your chance.”

We must not let these things pass unnoticed. It matters to catch them and object to them before legal precedents are set. And, for those of us who think we are not immediately threatened, it matters to see that really we are. It's coming for all of us, and soon. The damage will be done by the time it gets to many of us. So none of us can afford to postpone our outrage and involvement.

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

We The People must not let them divide us. We must stand as one.

 

---

Author's Notes:

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

This post began as a comment on reddit. It's been tidied up and expanded, and the formatting has been adjusted to be suitable for a web venue. The reddit post is best seen as a first draft.

The graphic was downloaded downloaded from Wikimedia (which says it is in the public domain), and then cropped and scaled using Gimp.

Government is not a Business

Be wary of the statement “Government needs to be run like a business.” It should not. It's meant to sound unobjectionable, but is a radical shift away from anything familiar.

Centralized Control

The Constitution is designed around the notion of decentralizing control. It's inefficient, as people often notice, but that's by design. Inefficiency is protection from tyrants. It makes things happen slowly, allowing time for deliberation. Every time you make something efficient, you enable change to happen faster than government can respond, as is happening now with DOGE.

Tyrants want central control. Be wary of the statement “The President is the CEO of the US.” They want you to think a President is a King, a central voice to tell us everything. That neglects the checks & balances of three co-equal branches of government, intended to distribute control, to have the various branches fighting with one another, to make sure there's lots of consensus before anything happens.

Checks on Power

When a Congressperson salutes POTUS and says “yes, sir, you're in charge,” they breach their oath of office. The whole point of distributed power is distributed thought, which isn't happening.

It's pointless and dangerous, to have all the thought be centralized in one person and then to have everyone just say “yes” because then you just have a zillion photocopies of one person's thought. If that person is even thinking. Democracy at all levels intends many people thinking in different ways and making sure many paths of thought lead to convergent policy. That's how consensus is built.

In Service of All

But even beyond that, government differs from business in another very important way. Business is founded centrally on the notion of profit made by determining who not to serve. It's rarely profitable to serve everyone, so the assumption is that it's fine to leave some unserved. Maybe someone else will serve them. Maybe not.

Business figures out its profitable customer base and just focuses on them. That's not what democratic government promises. Democracy, even beyond all the voting stuff, is about believing each person matters just because they exist, that dignity arises not from wealth but from being alive, that we are all equals. Government must serve each of us in a way that does not prioritize rich over poor.

Oh, You Poor Unheard Rich People!

Money already speaks. It needs no representation in government. There are people, usually rich people, who sometimes say that Big Business needs special attention in government. It does not. Business is not going to be forgotten, no matter what government does, so stop feeling sorry for it. Big Business has the shameless means to be regularly petulant, but in spite of its many pity parties, it is not suffering.

Undo the Citizens United ruling. Corporations are not people. Profit-making entities don't need to be voting. Their stakeholders can already vote in public elections. Businesses need no additional, redundant, amplified freedom of speech, no megaphone.

Business isn't going to suddenly stop happening if we change laws in some way that is unfavorable to particular rich folk. If the people who are in business now don't like it, they can drop out. Others will happily take their place.

Fairly Represented

What needs representation in government are regular people. Government sets the rules that all businesses must follow.

Adam Smith, called the father of economics and/or capitalism, expressed concern about morality in business. He very clearly understood that the optimization engine that is the marketplace will not find morality on its own, that business will tend toward tyranny if not forced to do otherwise. He suggested that if you want morality in business, it must be encoded in law.

It's government's job to make good rules that hold tyranny at bay. Some people and businesses will tell you they'd profit better if there were no rules. In my view, where there are no rules, bullies rule. That's no world to be seeking.

What Privatization Dodges

Nor should government be privatized. An important thing that government offers is accountability and auditability by the public, and redress of injustice. Many pushes for privatization are attempts to get around such scrutiny and accountability.

Business is a dictatorship in structure, where the US government distributes control to avoid dictatorial control. We're lulled by business success to thinking such dictatorships nonthreatening, but you can go home from them at the end of the day, they cannot keep you from leaving, and they can't threaten your family or property, as government dictatorships might.

Employees have a duty to business leaders, who have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, whereas our elected representatives have a duty to the public, those who elected them. Elected leaders must be working for The People, not vice versa.

DOGE Debunked

Business profits by efficiency, where democracy finds strength in inefficiency because it distributes power. Too-concentrated power is historically understood to be a great danger. A DOGE-like effort to focus on efficiency might be defensible in some businesses, where efficiency is the central concern, In government, however, DOGE undermines both the safeguards underlying and the stated goals of the US government.

Government must not be run like a business. Elimination of inefficiency is not an automatic positive. Privatization loses control of and accountability for things that affect citizens' lives. Such suggestions are active dangers to democracy to be discussed with great wariness.

 

---

Other Posts by Kent Pitman on related topics:

• Speed Kills
• Retirement Savings
• Political Terraforming
• Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics

Author's Notes:

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

This post was cobbled together from other writings of mine, so if you feel like you've read some or all of this before, you're probably right. But I wanted to put it all in one place.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Election 2024 FAQ

Q. Who should I vote for?

A. Kamala Harris.

Q. But what about Trump?

A. The guy with 34 felony convictions and several court cases pending?

The guy who says he'll be a dictator on day one? He says only day one. Give some thought to how much you trust his impulse control.

I could go on, but just read some of these other questions and answers. They should make it plain why Harris is the only safe, sane, and moral choice.

Q. OK, so he's pretty evil. But I'm willing to put on my blinders because he's quite a business man, am I right? He'll make our economy successful, right?

A. Rachel Maddow spent a segment calling his bluff on all of this. This shouldn't be a great surprise. Trump was convicted in of fraud in New York civil court, and ordered to pay $355 million dollars. It is not a stretch to think he might commit fraud in other situations. Trump's niece, Mary Trump, has a lot to say about his lying.

Q. But hasn't Biden just weaponized the Justice Department? Those aren't real charges are they? Surely they're partisan fictions.

A. No. Biden hasn't done any such thing. In fact, it's the other way around. We're finding more and more evidence that weaponizing the Department of Justice (DOJ) is something Trump sought to do as President. He was held back by others in the government who told him he couldn't. Such restraint is unlikely to happen again because he'll pick yes men to advise him this time around.

Also, Trump is promising to prosecute his political rivals. That isn't how we've traditionally done politics in the US. The whole point of “free speech” is the free exchange of ideas. He wants to end that. He doesn't like dissent. It could get very ugly.

Q. Trump says he'll protect American business by adding big tariffs other countries have to pay. Isn't that good?

A. In a word? No. Trump can't make other countries pay anything. He can make you pay to receive things from other countries. Economists estimate this will cost the average household an extra $4000 a year. Harris is calling it a Trump “sales tax,” which is what it will feel like.

Also, it's been widely reported that businesses are readying to raise prices in anticipation of Trump's tariffs.

Q. But isn't Trump a business guy? He says he'll hire “only the best people”.

A. Many of those same people warn strongly against electing him.

Q. This is upsetting. If that's true, what about his January 6 “lovefest”? Surely you're not saying that was a fiction.

A. Several people lost their lives at Trump's so-called “lovefest” that day. Pence barely made it to safety as crowds chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. The House investigated and confirmed the seriousness of these actions, calling Republican witnesses, many of them Trump staffers, to build their case.

Q. Trump says he'll be a protector of women—

A. Oh, just stop. I know you didn't even get all the way through your question, but, please, just stop. No. He will not. Neither will Vance.

The Washington Post counted his false and misleading statements over a four-year period. They tallied 30,573. You can't trust his promises. He knows they are not legally binding.

But he also appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and bragged about it. During the 2016 campaign period, MSNBC's Chris Matthews got Trump to say “there has to be some form of punishment” for a woman getting an abortion.

And if you haven't read Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, might I suggest you do? It just might turn out to be a useful reference.

Q. My husband tells me I should vote like he does. Is that true?

A. No. We vote privately in the US. At least we do now, under democracy. Who knows what will happen if Trump gains control. He'll probably appoint still more Supreme Court justices. The ones he already appointed have suggested they may want to roll back women's right to vote.

Q. I hate all of this. What if I just “send a message” by staying home?

A. Sitting it out does not send the message “I want another choice.” It sends the message “I'm equally happy with either of these choices.” Read the rest of this FAQ and then get yourself to the polls. You'll be glad you did.

Q. I'm mad about Harris's Climate policies. Can I “send a message” by voting for Jill Stein?

A. Only Trump or Harris will be elected. Stein doesn't have any hope at all of being elected. So the message you send will be at a steep price because Harris has by far a more Climate-friendly record and platform than Trump. Trump does not think that “science knows” if Climate Change is real. (Spoiler Warning: Science knows.)

Voting for Stein does not send the message “I want another choice,” but instead sends the message “I'm equally happy with either of these choices.” There are better times and ways to protest Climate policy.

The world will be very different under these two candidates.
If you care about those differences, you need to vote.

There is good reason to think that protest votes for Jill Stein may have tipped the 2016 election to Trump. If you care about Climate and would be otherwise voting for Harris, there are other ways to protest than to throw the election to Trump.

Q. But what about the Gaza genocide? Biden and Harris are still sending munitions.

A. This is a real concern, but boycotting the election is the wrong way to solve it. Whatever you think of Biden and Harris on Gaza policy, Trump is much worse. He wants to be best friends with Netanyahu, in part because both of them see it important to stay in power to avoid prison.

My advice? Find another way to protest. But believe me, you want to be protesting under Harris, who thinks that's a normal thing to do. Trump wanted to shoot at protesters. He does not like dissent, and especially when it's by or about people of color.

Q. But, but—the border. And all those migrants.

A. The border issue is a real issue, but very complicated. In collaboration with the Biden/Harris administration, Republican conservatives drafted a somewhat harsh policy that nevertheless had bipartisan support and by all accounts would have passed. But Trump asked Republicans to kill it because it doesn't matter to him to have that problem solved. He just wanted something to whine about, and to blame on Biden. Republicans did kill it, and Trump's the one that deserves the blame, not Biden.

Q. But shouldn't I worry that Trump often says Harris is “low IQ”?

A. I'm going to bite my tongue and not ask if you seriously think Trump is “high IQ.” Let's instead just jump straight to the heart of the matter: Calling someone “low IQ” is just a pattern behavior he has for how to talk about people who are black or female. He obviously hopes that, through force of repetition, you'll eventually associate certain attributes with certain people or certain demographics. Of course, he offers no evidence. And anyway, polls suggest she unambiguously beat him at the debate.

Q. It's only for four years, though, right?

A. That's how it used to be. But staying in office keeps him out of prison.. Liz Cheney has credibly suggested that if Trump is given power again, he will not yield it voluntarily.

Q. Maybe Vance will take over. That will fix things, right? He seems more sane.

A. Vance seems comfortable with the US following Rome's pattern, turning from a Republic to an Empire (in effect, giving up our democracy for a dictatorship). He appears to see Project 2025 as the implementation mechanism.

Q. Is there a place I can learn more about Project 2025? Are you sure it's associated with Trump?

A. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 because he knows it's a source of concern. However, many connections between Trump, Vance and Project 2025 have been documented.

There are several places you might want to consider to find out about Project 2025:

• Democracy Forward has created a user-friendly way to browse its serious dangers: The People's Guide to Project 2025.

• A band of graphic artists—some named, some anonymous—has brilliantly put the issue into graphic novel (comic book) form. This is a “must see.”

• The Center for American Progress (CAP) offers a useful explainer piece, The Dangers of Project 2025: Global Lessons in Authoritarianism, that puts Project 2025 into perpective by showing how it will “threaten American democracy by mirroring authoritarian tactics seen in Hungary, Turkey, and beyond.”
• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has an article, Project 2025, Explained, that summarizes what they see as key dangers in Project 2025, and what Trump's connection is to it.

• Project 2025 has its own web page. It's very detailed. 900+ pages. It's highly specific about the speed and scope of what it plans. The goals it sets are scary enough, but the highly undemocratic ways in which it proposes achieving those goals is scary in its own right.

Q. This FAQ by Kent Pitman was kind of fun. Is there more stuff by Kent that I can read?

A. So glad you enjoyed it. Yes, here are some election-related writings by Kent:

• Common Ground on Reproductive Health (on Liz Cheney's fresh outlook)
• Emperor's Wardrobe Day (about those who've been silent)
• The Fraud Who Stole Freedom (an epic poem, with audio)
• Vance Notice (about the danger Vance poses)
• Political Terraforming (why they're limiting rights)
• A to-do list for repairing US democracy (some helpful suggestions)
• American Dictatorship (thoughts on a possible loss of democracy)
• The Pace of Political Evil (what we come to see is normal)
• Conspiring to Contest Key Elections (it won't just be about votes)
• Stayers and Steppers (my advice to Biden to step back, let Harris run)
• Supreme Challenge (urging Biden to use power SCOTUS gave him)

Don't forget to check for other posts that may follow the post you're reading.

The Fraud Who Stole Freedom

Version 2 by Kent M Pitman

Once player loads, click “Play” to hear
this poem read by the author.
It's about 10.5 minutes long.

Most voters in Freedom liked voting a lot,
  but the Fraud_{(dumb, dumb, dumb)}—who was fearful of voters—did not.

The Fraud hated Freedom, the whole Freedom spirit.
  Though if there’s a reason, we’re waiting to hear it.

It could be, perhaps, that his life was too soft.
  It could be his woodpecker wasn’t aloft.

Still, I think that the most likely cause, on the whole,
  may have been that his ego was out of control.

Whatever the reason--no frays or no lays,
  he logged on FraudSocial just needing some praise.

Staring down at his keys, the Fraud muttered aloud,
  at an enemy rally that had drawn quite a crowd.

“They’re making it up,” came his frustrated wail
  “They’re using A.I., but I’ll see they all fail.”

Soon the Fraud’s tiny fingers were whipping a potion.
  “I must find a way to set chaos in motion.”

“Not long ’til the time when the voters will go
  to the polls to elect me as king of the show.”

“But what if they don’t?” he thought with a scowl
  “I’ll have to derail them by calling a foul.”

“They’ll only be honest, if voting for me.
  All else is injustice, I’ll make them all see.”

“I’ll make women like me, as stars get to do.
  If they try to reject me, I’ll hasten to sue.”

“All men will revere me. I’ve bragged of much wealth,
  They’ll want to be near me, a stud in such health.”

And yet as he sat there, it stuck in his craw,
  Past vote counters failed him, they’d followed the law!

The more the Fraud sat there, the more he went bullshit.
  To make sure he won, he’d be needing to pull shit.

“I’ll mount a campaign, I’ll rally the masses.
  I’ll help them to see only I’ll save their asses”

“They’ll think it’s well-meant, say my threats are just kidding.
  But I’ll not relent ’til the world does my bidding.”

“At first I’ll just fraud about doubts that I’ve had.
  If that doesn’t work, I’ll allege ‘migrant chad.’ ”

“Whatever I say, my base will refraud me.
  At the end of the day, they’re just waiting to laud me.”

“I’ll fuss about taxes, I’ll make it sound bad.
  That it’s just about me they won’t see if they’re mad.”

“I’ll make some pronouncements that seem quite attractive
  But each of them will be, of course, quite extractive.”

“I’ll wheel and I’ll deal, they’ll be totally smitten,
  They’ll feel it for real by the time they get bitten.

He had a quick thought, which was all he could muster.
  He wasn't coherent, so padded with bluster.

But with bitterness honed on a long ago day,
  ’twasn’t long ’til he moaned, “I must make them all pay!”

So the Fraud thought his thought, and approved his own trick.
  A quick, slick, sick pick that was sure to off-tick.

He’d post infinite frauds, for his base, so expecting.
  They’d be riddled with lies, far too dense for rejecting.

And yet, like a train, in his Fraudulent brain
  came a painful refrain he could hardly restrain.

“What if my posts get some judge’s attention?
  They’re nudgy with me, I might get detention.”

The voice rambled on and he started to curse.
  Like most of his thoughts, it was more than one verse.

This thought made the Fraudster both itchy and twitchy.
  He needed some safety if things got too glitchy.

So again the Fraud brain did what only it could
  It began thinking fraudulence only it would.

Soon the Fraud made another plan, quick as could be.
  “I’ll sue any district not promised to me!”

“I’ll question their methods and forms of ID
  I’ll cry if they fix it, ‘It’s unfair to me!’”

Pennsylvania and Georgia, said the Fraud analytical...
  And if they sue back, I’ll say it’s political.

“To seal the deal fully, it’s time they all learn
  I can call on some bullies, and tables will turn.”

“But still it could fail,” thought the Fraud with no thrill,
  “Even that,” he then brightened, “is grist for my mill.”

“To cover a failure I must have a fallback.
  I’ll file more lawsuits and ask for a callback.”

“‘Elections can’t have a replay,’ they’ll say.
  They’ll throw it to Congress, where my guys hold sway.”

With his plan seeming ripe, the Fraud started to type
  And he typed and he typed ... and he typed hype-type type.

But then as he typed, he stopped with a hissing.
  “Even though perfect, some detail was missing.”

“I’m in need of a scandal.”
    The Fraud looked around.
  Though their scandals were scarce, …
    maybe … some … could be ‘found.’

He reached out to helpers, phoned ‘fellas’ he knew.
  “Saying just a few ... thousand ... will easily do,”

“We can’t conjure votes,” they said with a shock.
  They never imagined they’d have such a talk.

The fraud seemed impatient, and primped his thin ‘hair.’
  “Not votes, I need scandals, then all will be fair!”

Real billionaires joined, and they funded each fake,
  they knew at the end there were jackpots at stake.

In search of more dirt, the Fraud urgently browsed.
  Just kidding. His mob did. As he mostly drowsed.

Soon tidbits were offered that he could enfraud,
  And they sent him their bills, which he’d hastily wad.

He frauded out why, and he frauded out wherefore.
  He pressed REFRAUD for all, shrugging, “that’s what it’s there for.”

He posted it all. He posted it twice.
  Then he posted some more. And he posted that thrice.

“I’ll show the whole world there’s conspiracy brewing,
  They’ll stick to their stories but I’ll see their doing.”

The Fraud posted and pasted, he pasted and posted,
  Whatever they answered, he always out-mosted.

He pasted and wasted and always lambasted,
  The Fraud was dead set to see victory tasted.

He made some big lies, from whole cloth. They spread.
  And deep-faked some horns on his enemy’s head.

He frauded as Guests, sometimes Red, sometimes Blue,
  and told all who’d listen the rumors were true.

A batallion of bots was unleashed ’round the world,
  They amplified stories and insults were hurled.

He spammed, and he slammed, and he made people stammer.
  “Put the Fraud in a slammer,” a few dared to yammer.

Charges were leveled with harrowing proof,
  But the Fraud called on lawyers who kept him aloof.

Some laws were invoked that had long lacked a use,
  But he argued that singling him out was abuse.

And the public agreed with a sort of a groan
  “A law isn’t fair once a need has been shown.”

A piece at a time, all shame was erased.
  Morality fell and was crudely replaced.

Then pretense was made for the High Court to enter.
  They’d bided their time ’til they came front and center.

They made up some lies about founders’ intent,
  They’d never admit just how much they’d been bent.

Not trusting the Congress, they called it themselves
  An outcome so gifty, ’twas worthy of elves.

They said they avoided a violent coup.
  Too bad they relinquished democracy, too.

Day One saw the Fraud in his dictator best,
  But soon Twenty-Five was put to the test.

They tossed him from office that very same day,
  And courts set to work at lifting each stay.

Back at the White House there'd be quite a scramble,
  The public was shocked they'd received no preamble.

The Snake who stepped up, no one’d looked at too seriously
  It was quite a surprise when he acted imperiously.

Most thought at this point, things would go back to norm.
  But really this only began the real storm.

He’d planned a big Project and started with zeal
  What only his patrons had thought would be real.

This wasn’t a Seuss tale, so ended up ugly.
  It’s hard to imagine a world quite so thugly.

For the rest of the tale, read Atwood’s banned book
  It shows the dark path society took.

The Fraud and the Snake hadn’t stopped crime at all.
  They’d only made Freedom first tumble, then fall.

It turned out the things that the Fraud had foretold,
  Were lies propagated so merchandise sold.

People learned a hard lesson, and cried boo hoo hoo.
  But nothing they tried could build Freedom anew.

And still to this day, those poor souls, so impacted,
  wonder what would be different if only they’d acted.

---

Copyright © 2024 Kent M Pitman. All Rights Reserved.

---

License of Use. A license of use is granted, free of charge, subject to conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-ND 4.0).

About Donations. Although there is no fee for such licensed use, voluntary donations in any amount, by those interested and comfortably able to do so, are gratefully accepted in support of my various writings and web sites at the the HyperMeta.com donation page.

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 threats to democracy or humanity, we cannot afford to close our eyes. The stakes are far too high. Democracy is under active assault world-wide, but especially in the United States right now. Climate is similarly urgent, and aggravated by how societally mired we are in deep denial, unwilling to even admit how very serious and rapidly evolving the problem is. Disinformation campaigns are a big part of both situations. Those peddling misleading information are most assuredely going to make their propaganda as freely available 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.

There must be no secret storms, no secret pandemics, and no secret existential threats to democracy or humanity.

They should make their money another way.

 

---

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. (One might even sue for such an easement where it didn't occur naturally.) 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".»