The Pace of Political Evil

US politics has lost its civility. Civility kept progress on the Conservative agenda slow, and it created time and opportunity for opposition response. In recent years, this pressure has intensified in speed and scope, making it hard to respond effectively in any civil way.

Trump is not the only player in this. Others, working patiently over decades, laid a foundation that was ripe for the arrival of someone like him. The system has been weakened over time. Gerrymandering, the Citizens United ruling, and the stacking of the Supreme Court are examples.

But Trump has been a definite innovator in the sociopathic governance space. His two primary innovations, either one of which would be sufficient to explain the reverence of the rich and power-hungry, have been:

1. 

   The outright shredding of shame, and the important social safeguard that shame had previously provided. Prior to this, there were a great many things no politician would dare try because of fear of being found out; Trump showed that fear to be a waste of time. Far too many voters are willing to turn a blind eye to shameful behavior that comes from a politician that otherwise serves them, which has allowed the GOP to very rapidly morph into the Party of Machiavelli.

2. The observation that massive numbers of voters don't check truth or consistency. Prior to this, politicians feared injuring their own supporters, which led to a natural reserve in how nasty a policy could be; Trump has shown that it's a productive strategy to create policies actively hurtful to one's own base, who will notice the pain but not bother to find out where it comes from, preferring to just be blindly angry, without direction, and to just wait to be told by tribal leaders who they should be angry at.

The consequences of these shifts are legion, far too numerous to discuss here in detail, but they include corrupt behavior to acquire and keep office, and the open incitement of and condoning of political violence, even to include outright insurrection. These also include ever more blatant acts of judicial activism by a questionably seated and plainly corrupt majority of the Supreme Court. Openly scornful of any suggestion that they be bound by an ethics code, they are apparently bent on taking a buzz saw to long-standing readings of the Constitution in favor of uglier ends—probably to include the present trend of the Republican party toward White Christian Nationalism.

The basic problem is that the founders did not anticipate this speed and scope. The safeguards they built in were few, and the presumption was that the system would be self-correcting, patching small holes on a one-off basis as they came up. The Supreme Court was designed for perhaps a challenge or two per Presidential term. Even if it was still functioning in a properly ethical way, it would not be up to the present onslaught of challenges—as I had warned about in a tweet on ex-Twitter a month before the 2016 election:

"Trump…involved in a startling 3,500 legal actions".

Visualize 3,500 Constitutional challenges by a #bully #President flexing his muscles. https://t.co/6HffNXKA7y

— Kent Pitman 🌎 (@KentPitman) October 13, 2016

 

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The graphics were created at abacus.ai via its ChatLLM facility.

The prompt for the paperwork graphic, created by FLUX.1 was "create a black and white graphic that shows someone with a xerox machine that is rapidly spewing out legal documents in the direction of a model of the supreme court". I'm not sure what I expected as a result of that. A smaller court building, for one. But I guess this was sort of responsive.

The prompt for the shame graphic, created by DALL-E, was "create a simple black and white graphic sketched graphic of a man whose face is vaguely like donald trump, but feeling shame with one hand over his face and the other hand extended into the foreground, palm up and out, in a stop gesture intended to hold nearby people at bay." You can see it ignored parts of my request.

Kamala uninterviewed?

This will be a gripe of short-lived relevance, but I still wanted to say it out loud because there are other themes implicated that have more enduring nature.

About the Harris candidacy, I keep seeing:

“Harris has yet to give an interview…”

As if that's some kind of gotcha that shows weakness, fear, or lack of validity.

She's not exactly hiding. Barely more than a month ago, she was advocating for Biden. All of a sudden, she is thrust into a situation that was not anticipated. She has done extraordinarily, being at once a Vice President and a candidate, charged with assembling a team, approving preliminary messages, selecting her own Vice President after numerous interviews, syncing up on messaging with Walz, preparing presentations for the convention, and surely meeting with a zillion people who have competing theories of how she should spend her very limited time.

I don't know about you, but that's more than I get done in a month.

Not to mention the fact that her job up until now has not been to make policy but to support Biden's policy. It will probably take her a little while to work out how to articulate a strategy of her own, and how to present it in a way that is respectful of the fact that she's still Biden's VP.

All to say it doesn't look to me like ducking anything. It looks like walking straight into a firehose. While it will be interesting to hear an interview, I write off any delay as saying there are only so many waking hours in a day. Few people have assembled a campaign at all in that time, much less one with this amount of momentum. I think she's doing great.

But it's equally reasonable to note that an interview is really not going to shed any more light. It's a form of outreach to be sure, but there aren't secrets that are likely to be uncovered in that way. The people who are against her are hoping there will be a gotcha moment, but I think her policies to the extent that she has them formed yet, are on display. At this point we are trusting values, because that is what this election is about.

I am not a Democrat, but an Independent. By that I mean that I don't vote on anything or anyone just because I'm part of some tribe, I think things through. And I would be writing this same essay if it was Liz Cheney running and she had not sat down for an interview. I know enough about her and her values from what she stood up for in the Jan 6 hearings to know Democracy would be safe under her. I would be unwaveringly saying the same thing as I'm saying about Harris right now: democracy is on the line, and that matters more than anything.

So if you know anything about me, and there's no reason you should—I'm just a random guy with an opinion, you know that climate is in fact my top priority. And that I disagree with Kamala on some really material things about climate, mostly urgency. And she used to be against fracking and seems to have moderated. That's not great. But it doesn't change my unconditional support for her one iota.

Because if Trump is elected, there will be…

• no discussion of science,
• no chance for climate at all,
• no civil rights,
• no protective government agencies,
• no part of government, nor property entrusted to it, that is not for sale,
• no safety for anyone gay,
• no safety for women,
• no safety for people of color,
• no freedom of religion,
• no dignity for the elderly,
• no respect for injured or fallen heroes,
• no respect for people with disabilities,
• no real safety for anyone who is not straight, white, male, young, and rich,
• no safeguards for the environment,
• no workplace safety,
• no employment safety and fairness standards,
• no sane public health policy,
• no chance for fair elections in future elections.

Whatever I might think about Harris—or even Cheney in my hypothetical—and her policies, seems small compared to worrying that democracy is secure. And, believe me, I would disagree with Cheney way more than Harris. But my point is that small partisan matters are not the issue right now, and even large partisan matters are dwarfed by the threat to democracy. Partisan reasons are not the reason to cast a ballot one way or another. Not this year.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. There should be no higher priority than making sure he does not become US president.

We'll be lucky if the cancer that Trump has planted does not cause a bunch of people to challenge election results without basis and then have the morally compromised Supreme Court that he has stacked approve such antics, completing a procedural coup.

Serious damage has been done to our democracy, and it is limping along as it is. A strong showing for Harris and a Democratic Congress is a chance to have enough time to mend some things.

Otherwise, it's probably game over for US democracy, and a short road from there to game over for the world against climate change as petro-state dictators gain an edge at a terribly bad time.

Any attempt to suggest that Harris needs to sit down and discuss something in more detail completely misses the point and makes no sense to me.

• Democracy, not autocracy.
• Hope, not fear.
• Joy, not anger.
• Acceptance, not division.
• Lawfulness, not lawlessness.
• Constitution, not bullies.

Those are the things Harris stands for, and you aren't going to learn anything materially different from that in an interview. It'll be quite interesting to hear what she says in an interview, but she is not derelict for not having sat down for an interview. We have enough information for now, so let's cut her some slack. She should be getting credit for managing priorities well enough to give us the important things first. That bodes well for the future.

 

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This essay originated as a post on Mastodon. It has been edited to fit the richer format of this venue, and somewhat edited to include additional content not in the original post, so you could think of that post as an initial draft.

The image was created by so-called “generative AI” via Abacus.AI and its interface to the FLUX.1 facility via a chat interface. I'm not sure how happy I am about the idea of these tools, but find myself needing to learn how they work, so I figured I'd use this as an experiment to see how they work. The prompt I used to get this graphic was:

“Make a graphic in black and white that shows, in silhouette form, two people sitting in comfortable chairs, facing each other. One of the people, the person to the right as we're looking on, is Kamala Harris in a pantsuit, and the other, to the left as we look on, is a generic news person doing the interview. There should be a coffee table between them, with a coffee cup on each side so that each would have something to drink if they needed it. Assume that the two are being recorded for television, so it is not necessary for there to be a visible microphone or any note-taking material.

And yes, if you're paying attention, it didn't take all of my instructions. The result was not a silhouette, for example. It just confirms that these tools are not as good as people often say. They make mistakes. Sometimes really conspicuous ones. But this was the best I got after several attempts, and was good enough for this very flexible case. I still am not a big fan of these tools, both for their environmental footprint and because they confabulate freely. They don't really understand, just mimic. That it drew anything at all suggests there were probably other things humans had done that were close enough that it could crib from them. But I'll gripe in more detail about all this on another day.

The Sudden Importance of Truth

Out of Context and Out of Line

It is disingenuous and preposterous to nitpick Tim Walz over remarks that weren't even about him but about gun availability. It's doubtful he intentionally lied, hoping to mislead folks unchecked—he's a teacher. He knows that would never stand. But we all say things that don't come out exactly right, and if it's not our focus, we press on.

He did, after all, carry weapons. And there was a war going on. And his remarks here are not trying to suggest he's a war hero, they're trying to say he has sufficient experience and perspective to understand the difference between military need for assault rifles and civilian needs.

It's legitimate to debate the correct interpretation of the Constitution. Some people think that the Second Amendment is a right of the people to have sufficient firepower that they can take down an out-of-control government. I don't happen to agree with that. Taken seriously, it would amount to a right of private citizens to have nuclear weaponry, so I think the idea that citizens can keep parity with the government, if that's what it ever meant, was lost long ago. But it's a legitimate policy debate we could have. Debate Walz on that, if you want to, because that's what he was speaking to. This was not a discussion about his military record. It merely mentioned it in passing, in shorthand, to give context.

Likewise on the issue of when he retired, plenty of people retire at 20 years. It was his right to retire. He received an honorable discharge. That's really all that needs to be said.

No one's decision to retire after 24 years needs to be questioned. Full credit to Walz for answering graciously pointing this out.

Rules of Engagement

And, just to be clear on the debate rules here, what is the standard for misstatements? How many times does a candidate have to repeat a single ill-shaped, questionably worded, or not-quite-true statement, much less a Big Lie, in order that their honor is put in doubt or their campaign be disqualified?

Asking for a few friends (the US).

Because if there's a sudden renewed interest in the truth here, that is the real story. I was starting to think truth had atrophied from disuse.

Due Diligence

You know where I'm going. The Washington Post estimated 30,573 false or misleading statements by Trump while in office. Is that disqualifying? Is anything like that alleged of Walz?

Are we just talking military issues, JV? Should we talk bone spurs?

Exceptional Vision

Perhaps we should revisit Trump's later remarks about 9/11, as described in an ABC News article (bold mine for emphasis):

Trump Tower is located on 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, a little more than four miles away from ground zero.
…
“I have a window in my apartment that specifically was aimed at the World Trade Center, because of the beauty of the whole downtown Manhattan. And I watched as people jumped, and I watched the second plane come in,” he said then. “Many people jumped, and I witnessed that. I watched that.”

And from that same article (again, bold mine):

At the time, he noted “many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders,” and then claimed, “and I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

And from an article linked by that one (bold mine):

Trump's claim that he saw television reports of people in New Jersey celebrating the attacks has been discredited. He stood by that claim on the campaign trail last year.

There is probably more I could say if The Washington Post’s “30,573” number is even remotely right. (Will we be holding them to the same precision as you want to hold Walz to, or the relaxed precision you reserve for your boss?)

But maybe we could pause here for a response.

 

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This essay originated as a thread on the ex-bird site. It has been edited to fit the richer format of this venue, and expanded to include additional content not in the original thread.

Conspiring to Contest Key Elections

US citizens and concerned others should pay attention to a segment from last night's Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC (6 minutes):

The story tries to make sense of the fact that Trump has repeatedly remarked in an ominous way that he's not too concerned about whether people vote, as if the plan is to win the election not on votes but court challenges.

She's drawing on excellent reporting from Rolling Stone. From that article:

“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, says Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”

I don't even know why anyone at MSNBC is surprised. I've been worried for now a couple of years that this was going to happen and it was because of reporting MSNBC and others did even back then, saying that the groundwork for this was being laid. That we have taken this long to recognize the threat is distressing.

If Biden does not have a task force in place to counter this threat, he needs to make one.

As I noted in my July 5 blog post Supreme Challenge, before Biden passed the baton to Harris, Biden now has considerable power he's opting not to use but must reconsider using to assure fair elections.

He could, for example, order DOJ to charge every one of these people who are conspiring in advance and without foundation to challenge an election with seditious conspiracy. Such powers, SCOTUS tells us, are absolute and not subject to legal review. Probably there are other actions he could take, too.

My more general point is that we don't have to sit idle and watch misdeeds play out as if there is nothing to be done. Certainly if Trump is elected, HE will use those same powers in exactly the same way but without foundation, hesitation, or remorse, and without the health of our democracy as his goal.

As noted by Marc Elias in the quote above, these guys are not kidding around, they are playing for keeps. The Dems better treat this as the serious threat it is. I'd say the GOP should likewise care, but they're in a hypnotic trance, operating in mindless lockstep, so it's up to those not under the spell to act.

Maybe, too, Kamala can see what Joe might not and use her newfound clout to get him to take the gloves off.

 

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This is effectively a mirror of an essay I wrote on Mastodon earlier today, July 30, 2024. This post is effectively a mirror for easier access, though the original venue has some comments not replicated here, and obviously I've done some reformatting and light editing to accommodate better typography options available here.

About the Kamala Candidacy

I have some thoughts on the sudden shift Sunday from a Biden/Harris ticket to a Harris ticket. I'm just going to bundle them all together here.

An Unusual Transition

I think it's going to be difficult for Kamala to develop a different position from Biden on issues where she disagrees. Her position as VP has required that she echo Joe's position, not make her own policy, but as the Democrats' primary candidate, she must feel free to differ.

It's important that Joe give her express permission to disagree publicly on matters. He can still be the decider for the present administration, but they need to understand that she might differ, so they must be explicit about this.

In some cases, he may want to shift positions. In others, they might need a transition plan. In others still, they should give people a heads up that there will be a difference. This is how democracies work. It's odd, but we should be proud, not embarrassed or ashamed, that there is some complexity to it. That we can do it in a civil way is exactly the kind of thing we want to preserve, and to keep the Republicans from destroying.

Residual Biden Baggage

Biden was not just laggging in the polls because he was old. He had taken other actions that alienated voters that Kamala can get back if she is careful.

One example is the Gaza genocide. Many felt Biden was complicit in this by continuing to send weapons and not pushing harder on Israel to stop. Frequent references were made by Netanyahu to the idea that it must defend itself, but no rational person thinks you have to kill an entire society, every last man, woman, and child in order to defend yourself. Many have defensibly called this a genocide, even though a formal ruling on the matter will take longer than most of these people have to live. In February, however, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel must take steps to prevent any acts of genocide in Gaza, and many took this as a clear hint that what they were doing was in range to be considered a genocide.

It is important that Kamala not follow in Biden's footsteps in appearing to be complicit in this, and in fact work with President Biden to make sure the US has taken a hard stance on that even now. Not only is this important for a purely humanitarian reasons, but she's running on law & order, and it's a bad look to be aiding and abetting someone who may later be charged with war crimes.

Moreover, within the US, there have been peaceful protests of the treatment of people in Gaza that have been summarily labeled as antisemitic. Police forces have had a far too strong hand. There is a Constitutional right to peaceful assembly that some say has been intentionally violated. There is a block of voters who are outraged and have been blaming Biden for that. This is a chance for a reset.

Democracy Now produced an excellent video on this matter, interviewing Annelise Orleck, former chair of the women's and gender studies department and the Jewish studies department at Dartmouth College, who suffered a violent arrest and said in the interview "People have to be able to talk about Palestine without being attacked by police." Kamala needs to adopt a more discussion-friendly position, again because this kind of hard line approach is more appropriate to the GOP.

Certainly I have had discussions with people about why it's important to vote Democrat in this election, to avoid a monster getting into office. Rightly or wrongly, there are voters who in good faith have concluded that the policies so far under Biden are those of a monster as well. Trying to discuss degrees of monsterness is not likely to be Kamala's path to success in such discussions.

Democrats need to stand for the idea that political problems are resolved by discussion, which may sometimes involve peaceful protest as protected by the Constitution.

To navigate this, I think Kamala establish some clear guidelines to clarify Democratic policy on this. I suggest at least these rules of thumb, which seem to me to be fair to both sides in this debate:

• Israel has a right to defend itself.
• Genocide goes well beyond mere “defense” of Israel.
• One can challenge Israeli policy without being antisemitic. (A US State Department web page explicitly clarifies “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”)
• Engaging Palestinians in a civil way does not imply one is pro-Hamas or antisemitic.
• Peaceful protest is Constitutionally protected.

Picking a Vice President

Not because he is Jewish, but specifically because (as discussed above), he's taken hard line stances against protesters, Shapiro would not be a good choice of of Vice President. Picking him would not be healing. It would open questions of Constitutional violations and police brutality that would distract from a clean campaign.

I have been swayed by the large amount of support I've seen from others, and the observations that he's an excellent speaker and debater, that Pete Buttigieg is the right choice for Kamala's VP.

I'm not 100% sure that Pete is being considered, though I definitely feel he should be. Among those that the media seems to think are being considered, I see Mark Kelly as my second choice. Mark doesn't seem like a bad guy, but he's not as dynamic and engaging as Pete, who I really think could bring a lot more real energy to the campaign.

Skeletons in Kamala's closet?

At this point I really don't care if there are skeletons in Kamala's closet. She checks enough boxes right now that I'm ready to back her in spite of bumpiness that might come up.

I've seen various claims in news articles and on social media that Kamala's past record will soon be seen by the public as its own kind of baggage, that the Democrats are in a euphoria, not paying attention to her past record, and about to be surprised. I'm not especially worried about most of that, even where I might disagree.

Of course, I reserve the right to complain and to suggest she modify policies I don't like. But that's consistent with my real concern, which is that she stand for civility and especially peaceful resolution of disputes through civil discussion, and for the Constitution as we have traditionally known it before the GOP recently started to challenge and dismantle it.

Democracy is under attack. Honestly, if Liz Cheney had registered Democrat and was Biden's VP with the necessary popular support, I'd probably vote for her. Not because I want her policies. I disagree with most of what I've seen of her taste in social policy. But because right now at this point in history, our biggest concern is to stabilize our democracy, and I know she would reliably do that. Fortunately, I know that Kamala will keep the Constitution safe and will have better policies—even if I might still disagree with a few. Once we're safe from Project 2025, and better safeguards are put in place, we can get back to ordinary partisan bickering.

My biggest concern is Climate Change, but even that has no chance without a functioning democracy. So we have to fix democracy first. Science cannot function without an open exchange of ideas, free of censorship or the injection of propaganda. Project 2025 is putting the unfettered exchange of ideas in severe jeopardy, so we have to definitively stop that.

I do hope we hurry, though, because the Climate Change is not waiting.

 

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The photo of Kamala is a size-reduced version of the public domain Official portrait of Vice President Kamala Harris at Wikipedia.

Social Computing, before the Internet

Author's Note: Recently, on Mastodon, Jason Self posted a nice little blurb in celebration of the 57th anniversary of the Incompatible Time Sharing (ITS) operating system (OS), enumerating some of its cool features. His list was good, but there's a feature of ITS that I've always felt isn't given its due, so I responded at length with my thoughts about that. Lars Brinkhoff suggested that I should put those thoughts in a more easily-referenced place, so that's what I'm doing here. I've done some light editing to make this read better of context. No attempt was made to make this a precise mirror. Let's call the original a rough draft and this cleaned up version the official version.

Oh, and in my personal experience, this operating system is pronounced as three separate letters (“I-T-S”), not like the possessive pronoun (though see notes at end for some exceptions). Glad we got that cleared up. Now let's dive in.

The big, underappreciated thing about the ITS operating system, too easily seen as a weakness, was the nearly complete lack of security. Seriously.

Today, of course, security is absolutely essential. But the luxury of working without it back then resulted in a huge productivity gain, enabling us to do early experimentation with ideas that otherwise were destined to seem impossible for another few decades.

What do I mean by a lack of security? Well, ITS existed on the net (ARPANET, not yet Internet) for years with

• no file security,
• no protection against any user (even a not-logged-in user) shutting down timesharing,
• tools that let any user spy on any other, and
• commands to read interactive messages or email that took a command line argument of whose messages to read.

Yet the level of abuse of these gaping security holes was negligible/tolerable for a long time. You heard me right. Years.

It was partly an artifact of the time. Maybe some combination of

1. most folks not thinking to make mischief in the first place,
2. most users knowing how precious it was and being asked to behave like adults and respect it,
3. using those same tools to see what others were doing and mutually policing,
4. using spy tools to make sure people weren't floundering and frustrated but helped to succeed,
5. treating even guests (tourists) with respect,
6. "security through obscurity" still worked back then.

I didn't understand how critical this was until I started using a Digital Equpment Corporation (DEC) commercial TOPS-20 OS on basically the same (PDP-10) hardware. I felt suddenly way less productive and was at a loss for why. I went back to an ITS host and enumerated all the programs in the system directories (SYS, SYS1, SYS2, and SYS3) to see what was missing.

One realization was that most of that software just supported other ITS software. It wasn't what was missing.

The other realization, something I then had no name for but with benefit of history I now do, was that ITS was an early form of social media. I think that's a better, less nutty way to make sense of its spying capabilities, such as the DDT (shell) command called “os” (for “Output Spy”) to say whose console to spy on.

What passed for display back then was more primitive than you may be thinking. In most cases, and I'm not going to go into exceptions here, it wasn't even bitmapped, just 7-bit ASCII characters assumed to be in a fixed font determined by the console display device. If you saw that device, you might imagine it to be a personal computer, but it was just a display. All computation was on a centralized mainframe operating system the size of a room, and running the ITS operating system, a timesharing system that let multiple users be connected at once.

Note that this was not camera spying. There were no cameras on these machines. No real provision for that kind of thing. This was just a view into the stream of character text and display codes that were rapidly flying by on the way to the user's console. The “modern” (or, perhaps better, “surviving”) analog would be the ANSI escape codes you can use on things like a Linux terminal window to get simple display effects without presuming much about the specific font size or family.

Like in Star Trek TNG episode “I, Borg”, TOPS-20 made me feel like Hugh did: There were “no other voices in my mind”, voices of other users that I might “hear” on ITS. (Metaphorically “hear”. We had no audio back then.) The difference between ITS and TOPS-20? I was lonely, just as Hugh was. I could send messages on TOPS-20, but only private ones. Socializing information, knowing what others were doing, sharing work? All very hard on TOPS-20. The silence was deafening.

Similarly, you might ask: Why would anyone be allowed to see somebody else's screen? Why would that ever not be creepy? Why would someone want you to read their messages to/from others?

Well, isn't that what we do on Facebook in the modern era? Or on tools like Slack at work? Somebody starts a conversation and others arrive to see it, see what's been said so far, and add to it. That's how ITS felt. The metaphor used by these other systems is not “spying” but in practice it's very similar. You'd login, notice friends were online, read their recent messages to find out what was going on, and then (once caught up in conversations), join in. Details were different, but in the social media paradigm it's easier to see why it felt not so much creepy as fabulously useful, especially compared to the isolation of other OSes of the time—and even some now, though that's finally changing, catching up with ideas we explored decades ago. In the context of the era, it made us enormously more efficient than you might have expected by creating synergies not available on commercial systems that had to try to be secure.

And the ability to watch somebody else's screen? Well, we do that in zoom today by screen sharing, though we now elect when we do it and when we can't. Still, it's powerful. In fact, ITS had mechanisms to let someone else not only watch but intervene in and type to your console as they watched. That was more powerful than you can do with simple screen sharing now, though more elaborate tools do exist. It's all a matter of trust, and back then we afforded ourselves more trust than one might today imagine.

Social trust, more often called “freedom” is a tricky thing. It accepts a certain risk along with almost a prayer that people will use it wisely. Once it's abused, it's quickly a tragedy of the commons. Preserving such trust, such freedom, is more important than people realize. It wasn't enforced by programs, but by social conventions, by who we revered and who we did not. There is an analogy to be made to real world society and politics today, but for brevity I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

My point, though, is that people too easily imagine it was uniformly more primitive back then. There were technical limitations, certainly. But it was different too. Not easy to compare. No camera, just screen, and no ability to opt out of sharing it. And it wasn't really the screen you were sharing, just the codes that had been sent to draw on it, obtained starting from an arbitrary point in the output buffer (a sort of low-level, ephemeral event queue). Often it looked crappy on a slow terminal trying to watch a fast one because of data loss trying to keep up, or trying to watch a screen with sophisticated display capability from a screen (or even “paper terminal”) lacking such capability. And it could be hilarious or frustrating if you spied on someone who was spying on you, with those characters just going back and forth in an endless loop. Even so, most of the time, it worked pretty well. You could usually tell what someone else was doing.

It was also an early interactive, collaborative development environment. Programmers worked with each other and users (who they could watch using those programs to learn directly how well they worked). We had no lack of ideas and a very specific sense of what was working and what wasn't in the things we had. A lot of today's “new inventions” may be things we knew we wanted. We were limited by what tools were implemented, so progress started slow. And processors were slower than today, so that didn't help. But people were clever, and much more careful with time/space efficiency than today.

As just one example, I recall Emacs starting in about 3 seconds on ITS, on a PDP-10 with 10-15 users. I'm sure it took longer with 20 or 30 users logged in at the same time. Today, on much faster personal hardware, Emacs starts fast but still not instantly. Of course, more happens now under the covers. And more flexibility— and sloppiness—are allowed. But Emacs (then implemented in TECO, not yet Emacs Lisp) was a real wonder in both size and space efficiency.

Back then if something didn't work, you sent a bug report. Bug reports were something everyone learned to write as part of their civic duty to make sure stuff got better over time. Another social detail. You could report a bug on anything by mailing to BUG-whatever. Host names were optional, defaulting to the local host. It was a small community. If there was no actual whatever corresponding to the bug address sent to, the mail was delivered to BUG-RANDOM-PROGRAM to make sure nothing got lost. Someone seeing the report, who might be a maintainer or even just someone casually peeking in on that maintainer's mail, might say “show me”. So you'd reproduce the bug on your console and assume they were able to watch along as you did. Again like Zoom (the screen sharing part, not the video).

Most stuff lacked formal documentation. If there was a "Help" option in most programs, it usually just told you that documentation would get there eventually. A major exception was Emacs, because TECO libraries forced you to document each function, and most people did. But most other programs had no help at all. I remember being surprised, years later on a commercial system, that someone was able to figure out a program. “I looked at the documentation,” they said. “Oh, I replied, people are actually doing that now?”

But lack of formal documentation did not mean ITS users went without help. Many just typed queries to the DDT (shell) command line, vaguely like you might do with Copilot in a modern system. The user would probably see a syntax error if they typed such a question that way, but often someone would be spying on them, especially if the user was new, to make sure they were doing OK. So they might volunteer an answer based on what they saw the user doing, syntax errors and all, maybe before the user asked. ☺

It was primitive tech, but we pushed it to its limit. And the lack of security helped a lot by not wasting programmer time, program memory, and execution time doing things we had no need of.

We built many sketches of our imagined futures. ITS was all about that in a way other OSes of the time were not.

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Author's Notes:

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The two PDP-10 photos were taken by me.

Sources for a meticulously reconstructed approximation to the ITS environment are available at GitHub. It is intended to run on an emulation of PDP-10 hardware (the KLH-10 or the SIMH emulator). Although you might want to join the ITS-Hackers discussion forum and find an existing emulation. It's a social system, after all, and you'll have more fun and learn more if you find a place where there are others to commune with.

I'm told by Lars Brinkhoff, subsequent to publishing this article, that some people did pronounce “ITS” like the single syllable “its”! He cites Barbara Liskov and some “Zork people” as having confirmed this. There were four ITS machines (AI, ML, MC, and DM). DM (“dynamic modeling”) was where Zork arose, and always seemed to me a community slightly more insular from the other three. Perhaps this was a result of that same cultural separation. I'm just speculating, though.

Some follow-up discussion about this essay occurred on a Google groups thread.

Stayers and Steppers

I have issues with all the discussion over Biden. People seem to be talking at crossed purposes. I think some are not listening to what others are saying. That's super disrespectful, but also hugely unproductive because there's no point arguing against something no one is saying.

For example, some are seeing this as pro-Biden vs anti-Biden. That's a huge misunderstanding. The ones asking Biden to step aside are almost exclusively people who like and respect Biden. They're NOT “against” him. They're interested in seeing Dems win, and they don't think Biden can.

I'm going to refer instead to Stayers and Steppers. Stayers are those who think Biden should stay, and Steppers are those who think Biden should step aside. I conjured these words so they don't have pre-attached senses of Good vs Bad. They're just people divided by their preferred tactic for winning the election.

It comes up in Biden v. Trump discussions that folks say to vote Biden because he's not an autocrat. I also hear some Stayers saying that Steppers should stop talking about forcing a candidate on voters that they didn't vote for, that that's autocratic. It's not autocratic. The process is messy, but it's not autocratic.

Many of us have used terms like fascist and autocrat loosely for our whole lives because we never needed the terms to refer to our reality. We now risk seeing these played out in horrifying reality, so let's be more careful with words.

I do think who takes over and why is important, though. Kamala's whole job is to be the backup for Biden. So she's the obvious choice. I agree opening the convention to a fight among other candidates will create both chaos and resentment. Skipping a well-qualified woman of color will be conspicuous. Let's not do that. But, either way, it's not autocratic.

There are people who don't like Biden in this, and might even be described as anti-Biden, but that group is not the Steppers. I'll call the third group the Disillusioned.

Some Disillusioned are just shrugging quietly, some are actively bitter. This group either won't vote or will vote third party. The Disillusioned are not Steppers. They don't care any more what Biden does, because they've washed their hands of it.

The fact that there exists a Disillusioned group is the primary reason, I think, that Biden's numbers are suffering. He was suffering even before the debate. But the debate gave us a reason to talk about Biden's poll numbers. The Steppers are worried about how many Disillusioned there are. In many cases, they've talked to the Disillusioned to try to get them to come back, to explain how important it is to back the Dems. That discussion usually goes nowhere and is painful. For the Stayers not to acknowledge that the Steppers have made such good faith arguments to the Disillusioned that the Stayers have pointlessly made to the Steppers (because the Steppers are not the ones walking away, they are just remarking on the fact of others doing it) is super-annoying and incredibly disrespectful and unproductive.

People have become disillusioned for may reasons, but Gaza is a big one. No amount of saying the war should finally end is going to get them back. They're mad about the genocide, and they're hearing “it's time to end this” as “our genocide has killed as many as is productive.” That doesn't appease them. They need an admission that a very bad thing is already done and still ongoing and we've supported that. They think someone must take blame. It's hard to see the Disillusioned-by-Gaza coming back at all, but if they do they'll want Biden, who made us complicit, gone. For that reason alone, Biden cannot heal this by staying.

Some Disillusioned are also worried about age. Some may have seen someone among family or friends go downhill. They know how quickly it can happen. They know it doesn't happen all at once, but at first it's "now and then". No amount of showing a good day will convince them there aren't bad days. That's going to still haunt them. To them, Biden's reassurances sound like a promise of a brave face that may hide a hidden truth.

Plus, defense of Biden's gaffes gives cover to Trump's.

Some Disillusioned just don't want a choice of two old white guys. That's only fixed by Biden stepping aside.

Biden and the Stayers keep showing us people who like him, but no Stepper doubts there are such people so that helps not at all.

The Stayers point to good days, but no amount of good days rebut the possibility of bad days.

The Stayers point to past accomplishments, but no past accomplishment is proof of a future one.

A lot of pointless, wasted talk at crossed purposes.

The Steppers aren't the ones walking away. They're just observing that OTHERS are.

Tonight's [July 11, 2024] press conference did not speak to those others.

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Author's Notes:

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This essay by me was originally published on Mastodon on July 12, 2024. Click through to see some discussion that followed.

Only very light editing was done to create this almost-mirror copy, to make a references to “tonight” clearer and to make better use of bold and italic, which are not available on Mastodon.

Note from the original essay:

I wanted to refer to logical proof rules for universal and existential quantifications, but I went for less nerdy English instead, hoping to be more accessible to all.