Doug Muder

Escalating bad faith

January 2, 2015

This is part of a pattern in which all sides are acting in bad faith, and have been for decades. (And it’s not the only example, as I’ll discuss next week. Signing statements are another.) It creates a vicious cycle in which each escalation challenges the other side to either accept a defeat that seems illegitimate or to escalate further. There seems to be no obvious place for this to stop.

~ Doug Muder from, http://weeklysift.com/2012/01/09/escalating-bad-faith-part-i-recess-appointments/

slip:4uweea2.

ɕ

Religious liberty and marriage equality

December 30, 2014

In my view, one basic principle is: No one should be forced to participate in a religious ritual. That’s why I don’t want teachers leading prayers in public school classrooms, especially when the children are too young to make a meaningful choice about opting out. For the same reason, it would be wrong to sue a priest who refused to perform a Catholic marriage ritual for a marriage his church did not sanction.

~ Doug Muder from, http://weeklysift.com/2014/03/03/religious-liberty-and-marriage-equality/

slip:4uwere2.

ɕ

Trick question: when did slavery end?

December 27, 2014

The reason slavery was able to last so long is that the 13th Amendment has a loophole. (Did you notice it? It went right past me.) The loophole is “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. So if you can rig the local laws and get the cooperation of the local law enforcement and court system, you can convict people of “crimes” pretty much whenever you want.

~ Doug Muder from, http://weeklysift.com/2014/03/31/slavery-lasted-until-pearl-harbor/

slip:4uwesa1.

ɕ

Democracy by coincidence

December 24, 2014

Forget for a moment the specific arguments for or against gun control: Does that resemble any process you studied in civics class? Do you think that’s what Lincoln had in mind when he talked about “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”?

There are plenty of other examples where the public has a definite opinion, but has been unable to get the result it wants: getting the NSA to stop tracking our phone calls, sending some bankers to jail after the known crimes of the housing bubble, or even things I disagree with, like prayer in public schools. One current issue is raising the minimum wage: It’s popular, but so far that hasn’t made much difference.

~ Doug Muder from, http://weeklysift.com/2014/04/21/democracy-by-coincidence/

slip:4uwede1.

ɕ

Restoring the Constitution is now a liberal issue

December 21, 2014

Other than photo ID, these are all things the Founders could have written into the Constitution, but they didn’t. And that should tell you something: Levin’s book isn’t about restoring anybody’s “original vision”; it’s about radically reshaping the American government into something it never was and was never intended to be.

Contrast this with the proposals in retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ new book Six Amendments. Only one of Stevens’ amendments — adding a phrase to the Eighth Amendment to define the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment — would change what Stevens’ argues was the Founders’ original intent. (Hanging and the firing squad were common in the founding era.) He composed the other five to reverse the drift of wrong-headed judicial interpretation.

~ Doug Muder from, http://weeklysift.com/2014/05/05/restoring-the-constitution-is-now-a-liberal-issue/

slip:4uwere3.

ɕ

The continuum of aggression

December 18, 2014

Men look at Elliot Rodger and say, “I would never do something like that.” Women look at his victims and say, “That could totally happen to me.”

~ Doug Muder from, http://weeklysift.com/2014/06/02/yesallwomen-and-the-continuum-of-aggression/

slip:4uweye1.

The realization that men and women fundamentally think about, and understand, aggression differently, is probably the single most “wait wat?” moment that I had in 2014.

Seriously.

My brain — and that of every guy I’ve asked — has different categories of violence; Murder is a “no way, no how, would I murder a woman” category. But every woman I’ve asked has “aggression” organized into one big continuum. Rhetorical: Does that strike you as a huge difference in the way men and women view the world? Does is perhaps suggest something about how the male half of the species treats the female half?

ɕ

Infrastructure, suburbs, and the long descent to ferguson

December 12, 2014

The short version is that as the climate degrades and fossil fuels become simultaneously more expensive and less useable, each generation inherits from its more prosperous ancestors an infrastructure that it can’t afford to maintain. Society muddles through from year to year — sometimes even seeming to advance — until some part of that poorly maintained infrastructure snaps and causes major destruction. The destroyed area may get rebuilt, but not to its previous level. The resulting community has less infrastructure to maintain, but is also less prosperous, and so the cycle continues into the next generation.

~ Doug Muder from, http://weeklysift.com/2014/09/15/infrastructure-suburbs-and-the-long-descent-to-ferguson/

slip:4uweia1.

He draws heavily from John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent.

ɕ