The mid-term election results are encouraging, but as much as I am happy to see this very clear course correction for Congress, I am equally troubled by these increasingly violent swings from election cycle to election cycle. 

American politics just keeps getting more and more polarized. This is no way to govern a country – society needs stability, consistency and long-term continuity. 

If the US government had been a medical patient, the EKG would have indicated a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. I wish the words to describe it would be "steady progression" and "evolution", instead of "reactive see-saw", or "perpetual tug-of-war". As it is, one can only hope that it's really about taking two steps forward for each step back, instead of the inverse. 

Seeing how far down the gutter Trump has managed to drag us, I'm not sure. The bad keeps getting exponentially worse, but is the good really keeping pace...? Clinton to Obama to Biden is really not indicative of anything except consistency, but if the conservative swing from Bush Sr to Bush Jr to Trump points to a trend, I'm scared to think where the next swing will take us. 

The French 19th century diplomat and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults".

It's a good quote, but it fails to address the smash-and-repair cycle that American government has been stuck in for decades. 

Reagan racked up the debt, Clinton brought us back to solvency. Bush Jr crashed the economy, Obama rescued and rebuilt it. Trump brought chaos and economic strife with his disastrous response to COVID, and then Biden brought back stability, only to have Trump come in with the wrecking ball again. 

It seriously cannot continue like this. 

Don't we ever learn?

American conservatism has slowly slid into the politics of sheer selfishness. Politics where empathy, and concern for the wellbeing of your fellow man are seen as a weakness. Much of the rest of the world seems to be following suit, with a wave of backwards conservatism sweeping the globe, nation by nation. You can clearly see the selfishness in how the roots of modern conservatism have very little to do with "fiscal conservatism" or "law and order" (as used to be the case) – modern conservatism is ultimately just a slightly less radical version of libertarianism, where the concepts of a civilized society and productive, cooperative co-existence between people are replaced with a core self-interest as the operating principle. Where people seek to isolate themselves from other people, erasing solidarity from the ideological map, as if it is somehow something bad.

Here's why that ideology of selfishness ultimately doesn't work:

We all want a nice, safe, comfortable life. We want nice things. Maybe a nice house, a nice garage with a nice car, a nice kitchen with nice appliances, a nice bedroom with a nice bed, a nice living room with a nice, big flatscreen TV. Summers spent on a nice beach somewhere, and winters spent skiing down a nice, snowy slope.

Ultimately, we should want nice things not just for ourselves, but for society as a whole. Because you cannot have one without the other.

That nice, safe, comfortable life is impossible if we don't have laws and law enforcement to stave off crime. Life won't be very nice if you can't afford to treat illnesses, or if you don't have access to healthcare. That nice house doesn't get built if we don't have the means to transport building materials to the construction site. You can't live safely in that nice house if it's not built based on sound construction principles. It might burn down if we don't have firefighters to stop fires. We will not be able to drive the nice car anywhere if we don't have well maintained roads, or a way to transport fuel to gas stations. That nice kitchen won't be usable if we don't have an energy infrastructure to power it. We won't have a nice bedroom if the bed can't get delivered to our house, or if we're not allowed to go home to sleep after we've finished our workday. We won't have anything to show on our nice TV if we don't have ways to transmit a signal to it, or a functioning media ecosystem that produces content for it. We can't get to our nice summer vacation or our nice winter resort if we don't have laws that allow us to take time off from work, or laws that regulate so travel can happen without frequent accidents, or education that enables pilots and navigators to take us safely where we need to go.

All of these nice things require collective investment in a society where nice things are made possible, not just through selfish profit motives, but through the idea that a society is built upon certain collective principles that make those profits possible in the first place. 

Profits don't just emerge out of nowhere: they require a stable society where a willing workforce is able to move freely to where the jobs can be found, where workers are able to get to and from work, live in relative health, and contribute productively to society. That workforce wants a nice life, not just spending their days as wage slaves in order to deliver profits for someone else.

Profits are impossible where crime is rampant. Profits are impossible where infrastructure is failing. Profits are impossible where public investments aren't made to build a secure energy grid, or distribute potable water, or provide sewage treatment, or offer access to things like telephony, or the Internet, or even regular mail, regardless of where we live. Profits are impossible where workers aren't able or willing to take part in wage-driven labor. Etc etc.

It's called a society. We all benefit from investing in it. And we invest in it by paying taxes. People paying taxes, and corporations paying taxes. It is our duty, as citizens, in the name of solidarity.

The selfishness of conservatism says we shouldn't have to pay taxes, that taxes are bad, that taxes are socialism, and we should just get to keep all of our money for ourselves. 

But... who is then going to pay for all that which allows us to have nice things...?

I wish Neil Gorsuch could explain how there can even be something like "textualism" or "originalism" if individual Supreme Court justices believe themselves empowered to apply their own interpretations of the Constitution. If there is indeed only ONE "textualist" meaning of any paragraph in the Constitution, shouldn't Supreme Court justices then be aligned on it? Isn't that what they're arguing: that there is only one irrefutable interpretation, clearly and indisputably expressed somewhere in the text? Instead, they keep arguing that previous Supreme Court justices have interpreted the Constitution wrong. Apparently one justice's "textualism" is different from another's, and the meaning of the Constitution varies from one iteration of the court to the next. Hence, the court appears free to reject previous precedents at will, which seems to defy the very meaning of the word "textualism". The text stays the same after all –  only the judges' rulings change. Maybe it should really be called "Gorsuch-ism", "Alito-ism". "Thomas-ism", "Coney Barret-ism". "Kavanaugh-ism", or "Roberts-ism". 

In an interview, Sam Harris recently stated that he thinks humanity won't always care – and makes the case for why we shouldn't care – if certain ground-breaking solutions are devised by artificial intelligence.

The suggestion that we won't care if a solution comes from A.I., as long as solutions are correct and solve critical problems currently beyond human capabilities, is based on a series of very problematic assumptions.

1. First of all, WHO should be allowed to decide which solutions we, as a species, are fine with having A.I. create for us? Right now, all of this development is driven not by a concern for what is good for humanity, but what disrupts established business practices, and lets a few very wealthy and powerful people reap the benefits thereof. These are existential issues for humanity. Why are we letting predatory capitalism make all the decisions, as if the only thing at stake is money?

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2. Who's going to evaluate and validate the solutions that A.I. produces? If A.I. comes up with solutions that are beyond the ability or the comprehension of humans, who is going to fact-check it? Another A.I.? Where does this end? How will we ever know that we are truly being served by the right conclusions and the right solutions? Are we really willing to accept that humans will not ever again be able to gain independent certainty? I fear that this lack of empirical certainty will send us spiralling into another Dark Age. We've already seen the objective truth be murdered in plain daylight by the new American emperor and his minions.

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3. We really cannot isolate this to the realm of extraordinarily complex problems. If we let A.I. solve complex problems for us, there is no reason to expect that less complex problems won't also be solved by A.I. How does that not leave humanity as a mere passenger in the determination of its own fate?

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4. If we accept that A.I. can produce results that humans are (currently) incapable of, we offload the entire potential for brain evolution to robots, and we WILL inevitably see a degradation and erosion in human thought processes. This was recently proven in a Carnegie-Mellon research study. The erosion of human thought processes was therein called "cognitive offloading", and it happens very quickly when people start applying A.I. to solve problems for them. Humans have evolved because we HAD to; our survival depended on it. If we no longer have to, it stands to reason we will cease to evolve.

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5. If we outsource critical research to A.I., humans will inevitably be reduced to studying A.I.s, to understand how they arrived at a solution, instead of studying the thing itself. This is HIGHLY problematic. Can we really, truly argue that actual human understanding of the problems we face as a species is unimportant? And can we really confidently say that we are comfortable playing catch-up with A.I. for however long we are able to? Isn't it more likely that we will eventually be unable to understand A.I. at all?

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6. At the point where we no longer understand A.I. or the solutions themselves, we have ceased ceded the ownership of humanistic morals and ethics pertaining to solutions, and have in effect made ourselves unable to impose them. Some may perhaps feel comfortable projecting that A.I. can come up with better solutions faster than humans, but do we REALLY feel comfortable suggesting A.I. will also be able to take over the application of humanistic moral and ethical judgment? This in itself is essentially the oxymoron of oxymorons – if humans are classified as inferior to A.I., why would A.I. ultimately accept human morals and ethics? And, by that same token, why would A.I. respect the value of human life? If these principles are articulated by humans, and A.I.'s adherence to them is dictated by humans, we are foolish to think that A.I. won't be able to circumvent any such restrictions.

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7. The entire approach to this dilemma is profoundly nihilistic. It suggests that we ultimately don't care about whether humans drive critical thinking processes, and we thereby KNOWINGLY pull the rug from under evolution itself, as if there are no moral or ethical problems with this. No other species has EVER done this knowingly – i.e., placed themselves below some other species or entity on the evolutionary ladder. To me, this sounds like suicide. If a solution means the certain pointlessness and obsolescence of your species, why on Earth would you ever want it?

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Sam Harris interview: 

• https://youtu.be/-DCLT3pIut0?si=pKCHt6TqNoYDpi2U

In this interview, Sam Harris isn't simply saying humanity won't care about certain things being solved by A.I. – he is using his own lack of knowledge about music to illustrate it, and suggests if HE doesn't care where music comes from, as an example, then perhaps noone else should either. 

But WHO should really be empowered to invalidate everything that makes us human? Art, poetry, music, theatre, dance, film, literature, comedy – should we just give these things up by "virtue" of mob rule? If MAGA doesn't want live theatre with real actors, should we cede that to A.I.? If Silicon Valley thinks it can do art better, should we let them extinguish a form of human expression that has powered our curiosity for millennia? If Rupert Murdoch doesn't like human-created comedy, should we hand it over to machines...?

I've illustrated this blog post with a quote by german artist Gerhard Richter. This quote perfectly summarizes why A.I. is the ultimate nihilism: it means the extinguishing of hope.

One of the biggest weaknesses of the U.S. Constitution is that it requires interpretation. 

You would think that if the law is to apply equally to everyone, then there should not be room for interpretation, since people will have differences in interpretation, and that opens up for unfortunate and potentially unfair fluctuations in how the law is applied. 

Enter the Supreme Court, whose word on what the Constitution actually means is supposedly final. Sadly, not even the Supreme Court justices seem to be able to agree on what the Constitution actually means, or even how to go about interpreting it. Hence the court consisting of a plurality of justices, so individual interpretations supposedly are "evened out". 

Problem is, these justices are politically appointed, and very clearly let their political and ideological biases color their interpretations. For this reason, we have precedents, where one SC supposedly sets a "final ruling" on the meaning of the Constitution in specific cases. 

But what do we say about a Supreme Court whose justices arrogantly feel that it is their right to dismiss the rulings of previous courts, relitigate cases, and in effect re-interpret the law? Is the law not supposed to be consistent? Why do we allow it to change based on political appointments and biases...? Especially when our political system, which ultimately controls SC appointments, permits money to affect political decisions. 

It seems to me, this utlimately means that not only can politicians and political decisions be bought, but so can the interpretation of the law.