Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
—The First Amendment to the United States constitution.

In the early 20^th century, Europe invented all-out war, only about a half century after the United States invented it.1 The result, which had been building up for many years, was called The Great War, The World War, or sometimes the War to End All Wars. It turned out to be so popular they made a sequel.

It was certainly great, though many did not enjoy it much or find it particularly good. I can find no historical agreement on what the purpose of the war was or even if there had been a purpose at all, other than a bunch of warlike people wanted a war. There is historical agreement that it was particularly brutal and horrific. The widespread use of trench warfare with its associated disease and the use of poison gas caused suffering like none that had ever been seen.2 Soldiers commonly experienced shell shock, which would probably be called PTSD nowadays, as acronyms are useful for downplaying horror.

In 1914, Irving Berlin, best known for “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” saw the handwriting on the wall and published a song called “Stay Down Here where You Belong.” It was about war, a conversation between the Devil and his son. The son wanted to go up above and have a little fun, and the Devil told him it was much worse up there. Fortunately, Berlin published before the war had officially started, which is probably why he wasn’t imprisoned for doing so.

On 4 April 1917, the United States entered the World War, and it became extremely dangerous to oppose it in any way. Shortly afterward, after a request by Woodrow Wilson, Congress passed the Espionage Act. This was soon followed by the Sedition Act, reflecting back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the time of Jefferson.

Google gives this summary of the Espionage Act:

The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited obtaining information, recording pictures, or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.

This all seems superficially quite reasonable and conforms to the ordinary use of espionage, especially when at war. How could it possibly be used to eliminate the right to criticize the government? The key is a portion of the act that reads as follows:

Section III: Whoever, when the United States is at war, (a) shall wilfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and (b) whoever when the United States is at war, shall wilfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or (c) shall wilfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both. [(a), (b), and (c) added for reference, and that’s how they spelled willfully back then]

This does not seem quite like espionage. It seems as if it belongs in an act with a different name, perhaps something like the War Powers Act, though that has probably been used. It has little or nothing to do with the Spy vs. Spy character of the Google description.

Including Section III in the category by statute makes it part of the category espionage by fiat. This protects it from scrutiny, let alone opposition, because who wouldn’t oppose espionage in a war? You must be a pinko!

Deceptive naming is a common way to avoid public scrutiny of questionable and unconstitutional content. One example is the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Its major effect has had little to do with terrorism or the death penalty. Mostly, it gutted federal habeas corpus, a legal procedure so important it is protected in the body of the constitution. It is so clumsy that even the Supreme Court dislikes it. “All we can say is that in a world of silk purses and pigs’ ears, the Act is not a silk purse of the art of statutory drafting.” Lindh v. Murphy, 521 US 320 (1997). Yet who would dare appear to favor terrorism? It says it’s against terrorism right there in the name!

Let’s look at the text of Section III itself, which is supposed to control in legal proceedings. It’s not too bad bad. It would strike most people as reasonable. Of course, it is possible to oppose the ideas, but it at least appears carefully written.

Only (a) mentions speech, and it states that the speech must be false and intended to cause harm. The provisions of (b) seem reasonable, especially given the propensity for desertion due to the exceptionally horrific nature of the World War. Criminalizing obstruction of recruitment as well as the draft in (c) may seem a bit dicey, as it is supposed to be voluntary, but that would be a matter of political disagreement, and certainly blocking a recruitment office would appear reasonable to prohibit.

Then there is that word wilfully. That provides some mens rea given that federal law has no such general requirement. The government should have to prove that the defendant was acting willfully in order to secure a conviction.

Leaving aside for the moment whether one thinks Section III should be there at all, the drafting seems pretty good. It appears to be written to protect the right to due process and careful consideration, with a narrow scope. No language is perfect, and one could pick at the words, but as laws go, it seems better than most.

How can the law as written be used to imprison people who simply wanted to criticize the government?

1919 seems to have been a special year for restrictions on political speech. It was the year Emma Goldman3 and others were literally exiled for their political beliefs, sent out through Ellis Island. It was also the year four important wartime cases made it to the Supreme Court.

These opinions and a further opinion in 1951 whittled the First Amendment down until there was practically no protection of speech criticizing the government. This would only change in 1969. For half a century, the right to criticize the government was just plain gone.

Schenck

During World War I, socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer distributed leaflets declaring that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude. The leaflets urged the public to disobey the draft, but advised only peaceful action. Schenck was charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act of 1917 by attempting to cause insubordination in the military and to obstruct recruitment. Schenck and Baer were convicted of violating this law and appealed on the grounds that the statute violated the First Amendment.
—Oyez.org

If speech is intended to result in a crime, and there is a clear and present danger that it actually will result in a crime, the First Amendment does not protect the speaker from government action.
—Justia.com

On 3 March 1919, the Supreme Court in an opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes decided Schenck v. United States, 249 US 47 (1919). Charles Schenck had distributed pamphlets challenging the military draft as involuntary servitude against the 13^th Amendment. The pamphlet was mild by 1970s standards, and Schenck emphasized that any protest must be peaceful.

Schenck had been accused of violating clause (3), which does not mention speech or conspiracy. No evidence was presented that the pamphlet actually did obstruct recruitment or the draft as the law required, but the court unanimously opinion affirmed the conviction anyway.

Holmes wrote:

When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.

The prosecution also accused Schenck of violating clause (b), which does not mention speech, either. This would seem a lot more serious. It was not necessary for the court to consider (b) to affirm the conviction, but a casual reader might walk away with the impression that it was.

The opinion amounted to the idea that to be convicted, one did not have to commit the crime specified, only that there be a “clear and present danger” that it would somehow happen anyway, regardless of willful intent.

Schenck was the case where Holmes wrote unironically, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”4 Holmes literally and unironically compared advocating protecting constitutional rights with causing death by asphyxiation, and almost every critic of freedom of speech agrees 100%.

Few remember the sentence that follows: “It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force.” Note the conflation of words and force and the clever use of may. Despite the mention of intent in the Justia summary, the Court decided there is no requirement that they do or even that the speaker intend they do have all the effect of force.

One of the best defenses of the First Amendment is that speech can be a substitute for violence. An environment where everyone has an equal opportunity to speak, in which all opinions may be aired, is less likely to result in action by a minority that feels stifled and silenced.5 It facilitates the peaceful transition of power rather than the traditional decapitation of the old king. Schenck defeats this very purpose.

Actually causing a panic by shouting fire is not a requirement for Justice Holmes. He wrote, “It seems to be admitted that, if an actual obstruction of the recruiting service were proved, liability for words that produced that effect might be enforced.” Note the use of the subjunctive (were proved), because nothing of the kind happened or, according to the Court, was necessary to have happened in order to convict.

The opinion ends with

The statute of 1917, in §4, punishes conspiracies to obstruct, as well as actual obstruction. If the act (speaking, or circulating a paper), its tendency, and the intent with which it is done are the same, we perceive no ground for saying that success alone warrants making the act a crime. [] Recruiting heretofore usually having been accomplished by getting volunteers, the word is apt to call up that method only in our minds. But recruiting is gaining fresh supplies for the forces, as well by draft as otherwise.

Thus, speech is tendency, tendency is intent, intent is force, and force is crime, so speech is a crime. These could appear on the wall of the Ministry of Truth. As Winston Smith pointed out, thoughtcrime does not entail death; thoughtcrime is death.6 The opinion, which goes far beyond the interpretation of the law many believe judges are limited to, is positively Orwellian.

Frohwerk

Jacob Frohwerk circulated a German-language newspaper called the Missouri Staats Zeitung, which published articles criticizing the US involvement in World War I. Frohwerk was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 because the government believed he sought to cause disloyalty and refusal of duty. A trial court found Frohwerk guilty and sentenced him to a fine and imprisonment. On appeal, Frohwerk challenged the statute under the First Amendment.
—Oyez.org

The First Amendment does not protect speech that could be interpreted by its audience to undermine American war efforts.
—Justia.com

On 10 March 1919, the Supreme Court decided Frohwerk v. United States, 249 US 204 (1919). Jacob Frohwerk had published some articles in his newspaper, the Missouri Staats Zeitung, criticizing the United States’ involvement in the World War. The articles never called for disloyalty and refusal of duty, but the prosecution believed they did, so Frohwerk was imprisoned and fined. In an opinion written once again by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court affirmed.

This opinion effectively nullified the careful specification of wilfull intent in the Espionage Act. Holmes wrote of how Frohwerk wrote “deploring ‘the draft riots in Oklahoma and elsewhere’ in language that might be taken to convey an innuendo of a different sort” and, in a remarkable blob of handwaving and syntactic torpor,

[I]t is impossible to say that it might not have been found that the circulation of the paper was in quarters where a little breath would be enough to kindle a flame, and that the fact was known and relied upon by those who sent the paper out.

After this is carefully parsed, it justifies the claim by Justia that after Frohwerk, speech can be criminalized if it could be interpreted by its audience in a certain way. The intended meaning of speech is unimportant; what the audience believes is the only thing that matters.

There is clearly no way to anticipate how an audience will interpret a statement. Consider the comments you have seen on TikTok or the platform formerly known as Twitter. How many of them are opinions of the audience that completely miss the point of the speaker? Yet what an audience could think was sufficient to send a writer to prison. Or rather, what a judge thought an audience could think, choosing arbitrarily the worst position. As the Washington Post showed us earlier, the poltroons of the press are only too eager to help.

Jonathan Swift once wrote an essay called “A Modest Proposal.” He put forth the idea that the Irish solve the simultaneous problems of overpopulation and starvation by eating their children. He even suggested that exiled Irish in America might have some tasty recipes. This was so over the top that it is hard for me to understand how anybody could think he was serious, but given the literal-mindedness of judges, I’m pretty sure that if he wrote that today he’d be in federal prison for advocating pædophagia.7

Here are three instances of misinterpretation gone wild from when I lived in Tallahassee, both as a student and faculty member at SCRI, the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute. All are from the past millennium, the first two from before the ARPAnet became the Internet.

1. There was a local freelance hairdresser who wanted to advertise. Models are expensive, so she used her daughter, coiffing her hair and taking photographs, which she published in two ads in the Florida Flambeau, the leftist FSU newspaper. There was an immediate outcry that it was child pornography. There was nothing sexual about the photographs, which were perfectly decent.

2. When I was a kid, ribs were ribs. Then I started to hear about baby back ribs. A local restaurant wrote a song with a country twang that went “I want my baby back/I want my baby back/I want my baby back ribs!” A few days later, one letter appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat by a woman who had had a miscarriage and claimed that the restaurant was ridiculing women who had had miscarriages. A few days later, there was a barrage of outraged letters making the same outlandish, outraged interpretation. It led to a successful boycott, and the restauranteur formally and publicly apologized.

3. 1. After the SCRI director Joseph Lanutti was ousted,^[1] the decision was made to make SCRI more like a business in the grip of the neoliberal frenzy and dot com bubble of the 1990s.^[2] SCRI started doing contracts, including web sites for the State of Florida. One day there was an outcry that there was child pornography on the site. What happened is that the Florida website included links to businesses regulated and licensed by the state. They included the web sites of nudist colonies, which had legal photographs of nudist activity. Tom Green, who had been hired to promote the neoliberalization of SCRI, said, “Ah think it’s child pornography.” With unbelievable naiveté, I thought it’s a good thing there are carefully specified laws rather than just the perceptions of a bucolic pellagra boy. I was monstrously wrong.8

In all three cases, a minority of people or even only one absurdly misinterpreted speech. When others saw the misinterpretation, they jumped on the bandwagon.

This is simply how human beings have always behaved. It is beyond sane imagination, especially given the ferocity of the debate on the constitution when it was written and on the Revolutionary War that preceded it, that the First Amendment should ever have an exception for how someone thinks the speech of another was intended.

Debs

Eugene Debs delivered a public speech that incited his audience to interfere with military recruitment during World War I. He was indicted for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for allegedly attempting to cause insubordination and refusal of duty in the US military. He was also accused of attempted obstruction recruitment and enlistment. He appealed his conviction on First Amendment grounds.
—Oyez.org

Speech opposing war efforts that would have the intended and probable effect of obstructing recruiting is not protected just because it is part of a general program and expressions of a general and conscientious belief.
—Justia.com

Also on 10 March 1919, the Supreme Court decided Debs v. United States, 249 US 211 (1919). People remember this more often than the others, because Debs ran for President under the Socialist Party. Debs’ conviction was upheld not on the basis that he opposed the draft but that had the intent of obstructing recruitment.

This is the first case in the list where the convict admitted to obstruction, saying, “I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would oppose the war if I stood alone.” By this time, the Supreme Court had veered from the text so much that his admission was unimportant. Holmes wrote,

The statement was not necessary to warrant the jury in finding that one purpose of the speech, whether incidental or not does not matter, was to oppose not only war in general, but this war, and that the opposition was so expressed that its natural and intended effect would be to obstruct recruiting. If that was intended and if, in all the circumstances, that would be its probable effect, it would not be protected by reason of its being part of a general program and expressions of a general and conscientious belief.

What is interesting here is the introduction of a probable effect. The previous opinions did not delve into probability. While this seems a minor wrinkle, it will become hugely important in Dennis two decades later.

Abrams

In 1918, the United States participated in a military operation on Russian soil against Germany after the Russian Revolution overthrew the tsarist regime. Russian immigrants in the US circulated literature calling for a general strike in ammunition plants to undermine the US war effort. The defendants were convicted for two leaflets thrown from a New York City window. One denounced the sending of American troops to Russia, and the second denounced the war and advocated for the cessation of the production of weapons to be used against “Workers Soviets of Russia”. They were sentenced to 20 years in prison.
—Oyez.org

The First Amendment does not protect speech that is designed to undermine the United States in war by fueling sedition and disorder.
—Justia.com

Abrams v. United States, 250 US 616 (1919) was decided on 10 November 1919. This time there were two pamphlets. One was against sending US troops to Russia, and the other was against sending arms to fight against Russia. He was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

The first pamphlet was of a kind that we have seen before, but the second pamphlet is interesting. Russia had been against Germany in the World War but signed a ceasefire with Germany after the October9 Revolution of 1917. The United States, therefore, was at a state of war but not with Russia.

Abrams was the first opinion written not by Justice Holmes but rather by Justice Clark. Holmes, who had written the preceding three, appears to have had a change of heart and dissented. I have seen suggestions by historians that Brandeis had influenced him, but especially after several opinions mangling the concept of intent, I am reluctant to decide exactly what was going on in his brain. Furthermore, Brandeis was hardly an angel himself. Whatever caused the change, he seemed like a new man.

Holmes’ dissent offers one of the most beautifully written and stirring defenses of freedom of speech:

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

I find it impossible to reconcile this text with Holmes’ previous opinions. Everything about it is different, from the tone to the specific arguments. It is as if it were written by someone entirely different from him who went well beyond the law, imputing intention in the most overweening way.

We now have four cases in one year where the Supreme Court limited the First Amendment in a way that would be considered shocking to many, yet nobody seems to be shocked. It’s time to try to synthesize an understanding of these cases. I can find two important things in common. I will first focus on one: all were justified by a state of war.

The Supreme Court has generally opined that, while content-based restrictions on speech are presumed unconstitutional, restrictions on the time, place, and manner of speech can more easily be justified.10 Punishing or even imposing prior restraint on speech during wartime may seem to be a restriction on time, place, and manner. War is, after all, a time when the population is supposed to put picayune grievances aside. It is a time when people are supposed to pull together, endure hardships including rationing and attacks, and be patriotic to help their country win.

As Holmes pointed out, it is perfectly logical for someone in power, especially in the government, to want to stifle opinions they do not like. In his Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a world perpetually at war, the purpose of which is to provide a constant pretense to deprive the people of rights.

The constitution gives the power to declare war to congress. Schenck, Frohwerk, Debs, and Abrams were about speech during what was called The World War, The Great War, or sometimes The War to End All Wars. The last name was particularly ironic, as it turned to be so popular they made a sequel, causing the name retroactively to be changed to World War I.

The Supreme Court continued to nibble away at the First Amendment, such as in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 US 568 (1942): “The expressions ‘racketeer’ and ‘fascist’ are well calculated to cause a breech of peace, especially when addressed to an officer in the performance of his duties, and cannot be considered in any proper sense communication of information or opinion and safeguarded by the Constitution.” So much for RICO and not turning into an entirely fascist country, I guess. Shhh! You can’t say that! Let’s not go to war to stop the, well, we can’t exactly say fascists, can we? How about guys with magnificent torsos, toothbrush moustaches, and funny teeth? I suppose that the United States had entered WWII, the War After the War to End All Wars, by 1942, so there is that.

World War II was the last war declared by Congress and will likely be the last war ever declared. Instead, the President simply controls the military, reducing the power of Congress to approval funding.

The Korean War was once called a police action, most likely to quell objection to the fact that it had not been declared by Congress. By the time of the Vietnam War, nobody used the pretense. The Iraq War is considered the longest in history. Then there are the metaphorical wars, such as the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror.

Or, perhaps, the Cold War. As Abrams demonstrated, the United States had not been friendly to the Soviet Union, despite being allied during the time of Stalin for World War II. On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb, inaugurating the metaphorical Cold War, which brings us to the next Supreme Court case.

Dennis

In 1948, eleven Communist Party leaders were convicted of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government and for the violation of several points of the Smith Act. The Act made it unlawful to knowingly conspire to teach and advocate the overthrow or destruction of the United States government. The party members who had been petitioning for socialist reforms claimed that the Act violated their First Amendment rights. Party leaders were found guilty and lower courts upheld the conviction.
—Oyez.org

A court must ask whether the gravity of the evil, discounted by its improbability, justifies such invasion of free speech as is necessary to avoid the danger.
—Justia.org

Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951), is our first example that did not take place during actual wartime. It is also the first not based on the Espionage Act. The original conviction was under the 1940 Smith Act, which criminalized advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. At the trial, the government did not even allege that the defendants advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, merely that this was an abstract doctrine of the CPUSA to which they belonged.11

In Dennis, we see the same old conflation of speech and action. Unusually, the Court cited a rather obscure district court case to quote Judge Learned Hand:

One may not counsel or advise others to violate the law as it stands. Words are not only the keys of persuasion, but the triggers of action, and those which have no purport but to counsel the violation of law cannot by any latitude of interpretation be a part of that public opinion which is the final source of government in a democratic state.
—Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.N.Y. 1917) [later overturned at the 2^d Circuit]

In Dennis, the Court made frequent use of the earlier opinions from 1919, all of which were predicated on the idea that speech could be restricted during wartime. As no state of war maintained at the time of Dennis, the justification was obviated, and all of the notions were blithely applied to the United States at peace.

How did the Court justify its opinion?

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.12
—Benjamin Disraeli

The reasoning behind the affirmation is so arcane, the Court had to change standards. They replaced the clear and present danger standard with the clear and probable danger standard.13 Again by Learned Hand: “In each case, we must ask whether the gravity of the ‘evil,’ discounted by its improbability, justifies such invasion of free speech as is necessary to avoid the danger.”

Whenever courts try to do mathematics, especially when judges or talk about probability, bad things happen. Probability and statistics are extremely difficult.^[3] It is necessary to explain a few basic concepts here. Blaise Pascal, a mathematician who studied gambling, pioneered the concept of the expectation. It is calculated by multiplying the probability of an outcome with the profit of the outcome.14

For example, if a lottery ticket gives you a 50% chance of winning $2, your expectation is 50% times $2, or $1.15 Learned Hand’s suggestion, adopted by the Supreme Court, amounts to judgment on the expectation.

The implications of the probable danger standard are enormous. The entire legal system is predicated on the idea that judges and jurors can put their emotions aside and focus on cold, hard facts. The more severe an outcome, the more judgmental people are about what may have led to the outcome. It takes extreme, careful deliberation even to ameliorate this tendency.

To produce justice, if anything, the most alarming crimes must be subject to the most scrutiny, if only because the heightened emotions increase the desire to make someone pay. Who exactly pays and whether they are actually guilty or innocent take a back seat if they even get to ride at all. You can tell this in political rhetoric, not to mention the closing arguments of every prosecutor. They all know that the best way to convince someone to convict and condemn is to work the audience into such a moral frenzy they do not care about facts. That is, a lynch mob.

The Innocence Project has exonerated many hundreds of innocent people, quite a few of them on death row, using DNA evidence. Think about this. We shed DNA everywhere. Forensic science has great capabilities. Given that we can extract DNA from ancient samples,16 establishing the presence of a suspect at the scene of a violent crime is relatively simple. Any cases overturned because of DNA evidence must have been weak to begin with, with weak or no physical evidence at all. Yet under these circumstances innocent people were sentenced to death.17

People are not robots and cannot simply switch off their biases. Yet for justice to happen at all, this tendency to reason or rationalize backward from effect to cause must be fought tooth and nail. Instead, the probable cause standard in Dennis encourages and rationalizes this tendency. The probability of overturning the government of the United States may be so tiny as to be negligible, but the severity means you can still convict.

Dennis shows that the wartime exception for limiting speech was applied to speech during peacetime, belying the rationalization that it was only for times of war.

I now turn to the other similarity. All the cases so far targeted Socialists™, Communists™, Anarchists™, and so on, people generally referred to by the umbrella term The Left™, as opposed to The Right™.

Restricting the speech of people you despise will always come back to hurt you. A corollary is that defending their speech will come back to help you. This is why such concepts as hate speech are so corrosive.

Not only should offensive speech be protected, by definition it must be. Inoffensive speech needs no protection. Nobody is going to be haled into court for writing the text of a Hallmark card.18 The First Amendment is only required for speech that offends somebody; otherwise there would be no need for it.

There I go with my high-falutin’ speechifying again, arguing with reason and logic, which I know full well doesn’t work. Empirical evidence is usually better. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were another Supreme Court case that defended a truly reprehensible group?

O’Brien

The 7-to-1 majority, speaking through Chief Justice Earl Warren, established a test to determine whether governmental regulation involving symbolic speech was justified. The formula examines whether the regulation is unrelated to content and narrowly tailored to achieve the government's interest. "[W]e think it clear," wrote Warren," that a government regulation is sufficiently justified if it is within the constitutional power of the Government; if it furthers an important or substantial governmental interest; if the governmental interest is unrelated to the suppression of free expression; and if the incidential restriction on alleged First Amendment freedoms is not greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest."

—Oyez.org

Since the government has an important interest in an effective draft system, the First Amendment does not void a law against burning draft cards, especially since the act of burning a draft card does not implicate a substantial speech interest.

—Justia.com

It was the 1960s. People were protesting against the draft to become cannon fodder in the Vietnam War. David O’Brien burned his draft card as an act of protest. He was convicted as a felon under the federal Draft Card Mutilation Act of 1965.

The Supreme Court eventually took the case and, to prevent themselves from having to do that again, they held that the law did not violate freedom of speech.

This was dicey enough, but the Supreme Court also set up a number of criteria, which could apply forever.

(a) The 1965 Amendment plainly does not abridge free speech on its face. P. 391 U. S. 375.

(b) When “speech” and “nonspeech” elements are combined in the same course of conduct, a sufficiently important governmental interest in regulating the nonspeech element can justify incidental limitations on First Amendment freedoms. P. 391 U. S. 376.

(c) A governmental regulation is sufficiently justified if it is within the constitutional power of the Government and furthers an important or substantial governmental interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression, and if the incidental restriction on alleged First Amendment freedom is no greater than is essential to that interest. The 1965 Amendment meets all these requirements. P. 391 U. S. 377.

(d) The 1965 Amendment came within Congress’.”broad and sweeping” power to raise and support armies and make all laws necessary to that end. P. 391 U. S. 377.

(e) The registration certificate serves purposes in addition to initial notification, e.g., it proves that the described individual has registered for the draft; facilitates communication between registrants and local boards, and provides a reminder that the registrant must notify his local board of changes in address or status. The regulatory scheme involving the certificates includes clearly valid prohibitions against alteration, forgery, or similar deceptive misuse. Pp. 391 U. S. 378-380.

(f) The preexistence of the nonpossession regulation does not negate Congress’ clear interest in providing alternative statutory avenues of prosecution to assure its interest in preventing destruction of the Selective Service certificates. P. 391 U. S. 380.

(g) The governmental interests protected by the 1965 Amendment and the nonpossession regulation, though overlapping, are not identical. Pp. 391 U. S. 380-381.

(h) The 1965 Amendment is a narrow and precisely drawn provision which specifically protects the Government’s substantial interest in an efficient and easily administered system for raising armies. Pp. 391 U. S. 381-382.

(i) O’Brien was convicted only for the willful frustration of that governmental interest. The noncommunicative impact of his conduct for which he was convicted makes his case readily distinguishable from Stromberg v. California, 283 U. S. 359 (1931). P. 391 U. S. 382.

—Oyez.org

This is quite confusing. Part of the confusion can be cleared up by pointing out that, hard it is to imagine these days, that the Supreme Court used to pretend not to be political. So they couldn’t just say we hate commies. They had to pretend that they were ruling on the basis of law rather than political bias.

Kavanaugh stops and permitting political gerrymandering shows that this is no longer the case. You’re allowed to gerrymander anyone you like, and if they happen to be black, this is not a racial gerrymandering.

(C) is particularly troubling.

(c) A governmental regulation is sufficiently justified if it is within the constitutional power of the Government and furthers an important or substantial governmental interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression, and if the incidental restriction on alleged First Amendment freedom is no greater than is essential to that interest. The 1965 Amendment meets all these requirements. P. 391 U. S. 377.

First, “within the constitutional power of the government” is sheer tautology.

But let’s say there’s something everyone agrees is a legitimate governmental interest. Can you imprison people for criticizing that? Of course you can! The First Amendment has no place at all in a government all of whose employees have sworn to uphold the constitution.

Kurt Gödel got famous for writing about this sort of thing.

Brandenburg

Brandenburg, a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, made a speech at a Klan rally and was later convicted under an Ohio criminal syndicalism law. The law made illegal advocating “crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform,” as well as assembling “with any society, group, or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.”
—Oyez.org

A state may not forbid speech advocating the use of force or unlawful conduct unless this advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
—Justia.com

Two decades after Dennis, the Supreme Court decided Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969), the year they declared the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutional and the year Americans landed on the moon.

For once, the law involved was not used to convict Progressives™. It was used against the Ku Klux Klan.19

Brandenburg had made a speech at a Klan rally and had been convicted under an Ohio law making it illegal merely to advocate “crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform” as well as assembling “with any society, group, or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.” This is not terribly dissimilar to what we have seen before, especially given that Dennis had already been decided during peacetime.

Did the change of a target make a difference?20 Perhaps it did, though times had also changed. The Supreme Court decided that the clear and present danger standard was not applicable. Other courts have interpreted this to abandon the standard and replace it with the imminent lawless action text.

For the first time in a half century, a right to criticize the government was back in place. Subsequent decisions such as National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 US 43 (1977) and Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell, 485 US 46 (1988) further buttressed the right to freedom of speech. Huzzah huzzay, hip hip hooray, freedom of speech was back!

On the other hand, maybe not.

The First Amendment had only been restored on paper. This only shifted the government to use pretenses to destroy people whose speech they did not like or for any other reason. As always, these pretenses tend to involve sex, drugs, and rock & roll.

But that will have to be another article.

[Author’s Note: This is my second Substack article upon request and encouragement.]

The stronger and earlier reason for was about the things he said about language, which was his day job. That seems to me more appropriate for my Cognitive Linguistics Series, and I touched on the subject in my Cognitive Linguistics 103. It’s also rather technical and more than a little arcane. The battle to replace Chomskyan ideas with something that works has taken a half century and is still not complete. The whole mess is well written on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars and also by Randy Allen Harris in The Linguistics Wars. (Get the latest edition.)

That only leaves politics.

The trouble here is that I don’t care about Chomsky’s or anybody’s politics, except inasmuch as it may lead me to political allies and against political enemies. I am, however, fascinated by what might be called meta-politics, the processes and persuasion that makes politics go. I think it’s essential to be pragmatic about how brains think and talk and do things. It matters for political speech, elections, action, tactics, and strategy. If one doesn’t find out, it’s all a shot in the dark. Indirectly, this affects the political beliefs and ideologies I see other people have—if you don’t understand reality, including people, there’s no way to predict whether you are moving in the right direction.

I only heard Chomsky had politics well after I had decided his philology couldn’t possibly work. Most of the rest on the language side consists of Chomsky’s refusal for decades to address empirical evidence that contradicts his ideas at a basic, fundamental level. There is no dishonor in getting something wrong, but there is dishonor in not paying attention to what the science reveals. That’s mostly beyond the scope of this article, but there is a parallel with his idiocy about Epstein and other issues.

Anyway, I had no period of infatuation or honeymoon with Chomsky, unlike many of his defenders including those who later turned to attack him.

The Original Noam

Chomsky has been doing politics since before the 1960s. He was an opponent of the Vietnam War right alongside his academic student-turned-competition George Lakoff. I can’t think of anybody with a brain who considers opposition to the war on the wrong side of history these days, though there are plenty destroying democracy now who thought it treason back in the day. They didn’t like long hair on men either, which seems to have metastasized to transphobia.

I didn’t hear about this until much later, but there’s no doubt that if I had been a few years older, I would have been marching right alongside him. All the same, Chomsky also treated the Khmer Rouge and other groups against America almost as a completely superior species that never goes to the toilet and could never do anything wrong. I have been unable to confirm the rumor that he tried to buy every copy of one of his panegyrics after some degree of reality became known, but even if this be just a rumor, his output has been—embarrassing.

This is related to Chomsky’s efforts against language in one particular way. Chomsky is a rationalist, so much so that the Encyclopædia Britannica shows his picture in heavy rotation on its entry for “Rationalism.” In general, and with Chomsky in particular, rationalists use a dialectic. They focus on first-order predicate logic; everything to them has to be a proposition that can only be true or false and nothing else. Descartes worked rationality into rationalism, which purported to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

That is, rationalists only focus on a tiny, literal, conscious sandbox, to which they reduce all cognition. The three laws Aristotle came up with for logic they arrogantly call the Laws of Thought.

From the standpoint of reality, cognition, and humanity, it’s all complete drivel. There are plenty of things that are neither true nor false, some mixture thereof, or simply unrelated to logic. There are plenty of cases where something and its opposite are the same thing.

It is understandable when a rational person says, “X is bad, therefore not X is good.” So Chomsky says the US is bad, then therefore the Khmer Rouge must be good. The either-or thinking is baked right into rational thought.1 This will be important when we come to reasons why Chomsky was so naïvely supportive of Epstein in spite of so much evidence.

One of the things his fellow academics said what that while Chomsky would viciously (and idiotically) attack his opponents, it was always in good faith, and he was always pleasant. He never raised his voice or sneered or made an ad hominem. I respect most of these people so much I will say on their behalf that they are lying through their fucking teeth. Sure, Chomsky understood English well enough to appear dispassionate to the uninitiated in political performance, like a politician, but it only takes a little bit of thought and analysis to see how phony he was. The times when he lost his shit can be contrasted with his performative lack of sociopathy to make his process and cognitive patterns clear.

He did appear to have a great deal of empathy for the suffering, and there are plenty of anecdotes of him going out of his way to help friends. I give him credit for this, but as we shall see, it bit him in the ass.

Manufacturing Consent

I suppose my awareness of Chomsky’s political writing started in the 1980s but went into high gear during the 1990s, when acolytes of Chomsky could reliably be identified by wearing black all the time, having medieval-looking tattoos, and drinking a lot of coffee.2 A few years ago, it was ironic beards and flannel shirts or Midwestern tradwife dress. I guess it’s dayglo hair these days for those who wish to catch his falling star.

When I heard the name Chomsky, I reacted because of his pretend linguistics. They responded by telling me how great his politics were. When they talked about that, it seemed always trite, obvious, or obviously idiotic. I hadn’t read him yet, though, so I had no basis to comment on what he actually had written, and it’s bad faith blindly to believe puerile sycophants. I pointed out that I didn’t care about his politics, but they were unable to separate politics from science from hagiography of the man.

To this day I fail to see why having good or bad politics says anything about science. Konrad Lorentz was a delightful naturalist writer who made important discoveries. He was also a thoroughgoing Nazi. Writers of biographies might like to show the contrast, but when I deal with a scientific discovery, who it comes from is not very important.3

They always kept telling me to read Manufacturing Consent. I wondered if it might have something insightful to say about the use of language in propaganda, but nothing I read about it seemed to indicate it was particularly good at that, and it did not even seem as good as Orwell in this regard. I also wondered why they presented a book Chomsky was only the second author on. How was I supposed to distinguish the Edward S. Herman from the Noam Chomsky? After all, Good Omens was a book by Terry Pratchett where he unwisely helped the predatoryNeil Gaiman put his name on as a second author. So I merely skimmed it lightly and did not find much of value that was not completely obvious and could be gleaned from better sources, such as Nietzsche, Zappa, and MAD Magazine.

When I was physically tortured into political prison4 I got lots of books from free prison book programs. It is generally not possible to seek particular titles or authors, only genres. When I asked for linguistics books, I received three Chomsky books, only one of which (The Chomsky Reader) had anything about language at all. It also had Chomsky’s essay “The Manufacture of Consent,” so I read that.

It starts as follows:

There is a serious problem here. Do you see it? Chomsky does not even say what national park. There is no way for anybody to verify whether this plaque exists, what it really says, what context it is in, who and when it was paid for, and so on. We’re all supposed to just take everything that emerges from his puckered sphincter as The Truth. At least here, Noam wouldn’t know Good Faith if she sat on his face.5 Chomsky was literally trying to manufacture consent on the basis of his cult of personality and ego. This is not sufficient to reject any of his insights, that is, if I had found any of significance in the rest of the essay, but it does raise questions of honesty and integrity.

The Thin Man

Years before Clinton distracted from his power-imbalanced sexual encounters with an intern by bombing a Chinese embassy, this photo was taken in what was then called the Former Yugoslavia:

It certainly is shocking, redolent of the lagers of the Nazis. Still, a photo is not a story, so reasonable people could suggest different interpretations, and good faith would mandate withholding definite judgment until all the facts were in.

Chomsky didn’t do that. Instead, his position was that the interpretation must be benign. The chief reason he stated was that the person who took the photo was the one inside the barbed wire. He also called him the thin man, not scrawny, emaciated, skeletal, or even skinny.

One of the findings of cognitive linguistics, which rejected Chomsky, is that when people perceive things, their perception is hugely dependent upon the perceiver.6 The things we think about are not identical to reality; an enormous amount of cognition is required to get from reality to facts. Chomsky’s rationalism rejects this. In any event, one’s beliefs, experience, and training has as much or more to do with cognition than the Ding an sich, if that even be a meaningful concept.7 Every waking moment is still mostly a dream.

I perceive Chomsky’s version as nonsensical. What does it matter whether the emaciated skeletal man who is merely a wee tad thin is inside or outside an enclosure of barbed wire? The barbed wire still constrains him. It is only by use of cognitive metaphor (which Chomsky never acknowledged) that I can even guess what was going on in that head of his.

Consider a zoo. The central prototype8 is of people walking around looking at animals in cages. It is likely to be the place most people have seen barbed wire fences, so it’s a natural metaphor. It also activates ideas about keeping people in cages, like animals.

The central prototype, however, does not define the category. At Busch Gardens in Florida, you can climb a little ladder and stick your head into a plastic dome in the tiger enclosure. They seem to love it and watch it like kitty teevee; I bet they’re thinking, “I love those things! Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside!” It’s also a great place to take a picture of the huge tiger head a few inches away. Would that, to a mind like Chomsky’s, mean that the tiger therefore was not in a cage?

9/11

I’m not all that judgmental of what people said within six months of 9/11, because a serious adjustment disorder with psychotic features was commonplace. I took time off from work to go to New York to volunteer to help rebuild infrastructure; a lot of New York’s internet went through the antennas on the towers. After a month or two, I noticed that a new book, 9/11, had appeared in the sort of radical bookshops I like. I do not think even a Substacker could produce a book about an event so fast. Indeed, it wasn’t. It was a mismatched collection of leftover essays that were weak in coherence, no more than handwaving.

OK, so like all of us at the time, Chomsky was bugfuck. I don’t blame Susan Sontag either. A lot of things were said that it would not be cool to bring up.

Later, there was the debate over whether to invade Afghanistan. The revisionist history is that nobody objected to sending troops to Afghanistan; it was only Iraq anybody thought was a bad idea. This is a lie; the debate was vicious. I even saw some seemingly sane people argue that we should stop thinking about Afghanistan in favor of Iraq.

It was pretty clears that public opinion moved in the direction of invading Afghanistan. Those who opposed it gradually abandoned more and more rhetoric. What was left is what is always left: war is bad, mmm'kay?

Three years of drought had reduced the Afghan food supply. There was legitimate fear and a lot of rhetoric that any invasion would produce starvation. The UN had produced a report saying (1) that there were something like a million people in Afghanistan, each of whom was at risk of food insecurity.9

I hope my last sentence seems stilted, because it is. There is a very different statement, which I hope also seems stilted. The UN could have produced a report saying (2) that there was a risk that a group of something like a million people in Afghanistan would experience food insecurity. That would have been completely false; there was never a chance of that much starvation.

1. There were something like a million people in Afghanistan, each of whom was at risk of food insecurity.

2. There was a risk that a group of something like a million people in Afghanistan would experience food insecurity.

The sentences look similar in terms of syntax.10 They’re very different in meaning. It’s easy and natural to say something like (3) there’s a chance 10 million people will face food insecurity. This is ambiguous and could mean either (1) or (2). Chomsky talked about it this ambiguous was, and I estimate him as too good at English for this to have been accidental. I have no doubt he wanted people to become outraged at (2).11

There is something stage magicians do called the Multiple Out. You give the subject an illusion of choice, but no matter what the subject chooses, the trick works out the same. Say you’ve put something in deck A. If the subject chooses A, you say, “You’ve chosen the deck where the card is. Let’s look for it.” If B, you say, “You chose B, so let’s put that to the side while we search A.” It works great, but it is hardly in good faith.

There was also a complicating factor. It had been over a month since the International Red Cross announced it had already gotten in all the food it needed to prevent the UN warning from coming true. So the report was entirely obviated. I have no evidence that Chomsky was aware of this, which does not improve my opinion of him. There is not much choice between ignorance and lying.

When there was no mass starvation in Afghanistan, people questioned Chomsky. He could have said something like, “I’m so happy that it turned out this way.” Instead, he lost his fertilizer and said, “That’s not what I said!”

That’s a lie. Chomsky did say that. He also said not that. He knew enough about language to know exactly how he was constructing a multiple out trap. There are really only a couple of possibilities:

1. Chomsky was too rational to see what he was doing logically, in which case he’s too stupid to trust.

2. Chomsky was too dishonest to trust.

In my multiple out here both ways lead to a lack of trust, but mine is in good faith.

Chomsky and Epstein

None of what I previously said seems to have turned a single Chomsky acolyte against him in the slightest, but his relationship with Epstein has. Not very quickly, however.

It was about three years ago, May 2023, when the Wall Street Journal asked Chomsky about his relationship with Epstein. Reportedly, he replied as follows:

“First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone's. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally". He further explained that he met with Epstein in 2015, knew he had served time for sex trafficking, and believed he had "re-entered society".12

Chomsky is an interview hound, and as I mentioned had a reputation of being pleasant. None of your business would be rude from anyone, and especially Chomsky, given his presumably courteous reputation.

When asked about his Night of Golden Memories with Woody Allen, he replied

I’m unaware of the principle that requires I inform you about an engagement with a great artist.

When I read this, I became convinced he was hiding something.

What is all this talk about principle and requiring? This is how bright seven-year-olds talk when they don’t want to take out the trash. It’s not how the World’s Greatest Living Intellectual® is supposed to behave when someone is interviewing him for free. Most of Chomsky’s books are simply transcripts of interviews, and he’s been quite happy to cash the royalty checks.

Chomsky’s reaction goes well beyond WTF? to

Nobody pointed a gun to Chomsky’s head. He loves being asked about things and makes money off it. Interviewers interview. That’s what the word means.

One would think Chomsky believes himself the Oracle of Delphi paid court to by the hoi polloi, not someone who has made a lot of money due to publicity who might reasonably be expected to wait until maltreated to become outraged. In any event, it seems incongruous for someone who makes a big deal about the evil of power structures to flex his own in such a transparent fashion.

Then reportedly three million documents were released due to the Epstein Files Transparency Act. They show Chomsky advising Epstein to ignore the attacks on his character. I don’t find that this deterministically implicates Chomsky as bad in the abstract, even though a lot of people have, and I do not oppose them. I’m sure we’ve all given good faith advice to people who then abused it.13

Nevertheless, (1) the temporal proximity of this event to the federal arrest and (2) that he had told the WSJ he thought Epstein had re-entered society were red flags. Though the recidivism rate of sex offenders is highly exaggerated (most violent crimes have much higher), recidivism does happen. Furthermore, it was well known at the time that Epstein had gotten a sweetheart deal for his Florida arrest, and I don’t see how it’s possible to have been ignorant of the allegations of connections with spying and blackmail at that late date.

Chomsky had a stroke a couple of years ago and is currently speechless, but his wife has spoken to the press, claiming a lapse of judgment. She said they were both what I once called overfair. That would seem to be a claim of good faith, and I have already shown we cannot presume that. Nevertheless, it ties a lot together.

1. This is the sort of thing a rational person would do, as with the Khmer Rouge. Being attacked in the press is bad, unless it’s accurate and horrific. Therefore it cannot be accurate and horrific, because it is opposed, and therefore must be good.

2. It is rationally the person and not the behavior that is viewed as bad or good. Otherwise, it would not satisfy the rational either-or dichotomy.

3. Chomsky used no empathy to determine whether the attacks on Epstein are similar enough to the attacks on Chomsky to warrant the presumption of good faith on Epstein’s part. Rationally, this cannot even be acknowledged, because rationality presupposes that attributes are of things being described rather than the perception of those things.14

4. It’s pure idiotic ego, which Chomsky expressed to a lesser degree with his effrontery about being interviewed at an interview. The horror!

But let’s look at the text of Chomsky’s advice to Epstein.

The best way to proceed is to ignore it. That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.

I’m pretty sure that will strike most readers as an ugly attitude. In the interests of good faith, it could be interpreted better, but it would take a lot of work, and I don’t see much of a reason to put that work in.

Now, therefore

Is this enough to dismiss everything Chomsky ever said? I don’t think so, but nor do I see any reason to believe Chomsky had anything good to say. Everything it is possible to glean from him is better from almost anybody else. There’s very little there there.

Yes, he has provided a gateway to the left. If Chomsky was the first avenue where you found out the U.S. sucks, good for you, but you have led a seriously privileged and sheltered life.15 What Chomsky says is not the first nor the most helpful nor the most accurate nor the most clever nor the most interesting thing, and it’s not as if there aren’t hundreds of sources of the same information, told better with more accuracy and nuance. Everything I’ve ever heard Chomsky say, including about language, at best only maybe seemed like a good idea at the time. All of it16 comprises things that seem like they’d work in ideal toys but fail catastrophically when applied to what I laughingly call the real world at every practical level. Politics or language, it’s only a cartoon book.17

As far as I can tell, Noam Chomsky is but the flip side of Ayn Rand. Exciting and just a bit naughty for adolescents who don’t know anything about life yet but hardly the immaculate idol his acolytes proclaim him to be.

Politics and Poker/Politics and Poker
Shuffle up the cards and find the Joker
Nether game's for children/Either game is rough
Decisions, decisions like Who to pick/How to play/What to bet/When to call a bluff

—Fiorello

Politics is a game. Game theory is a way to understand games with mathematics. If you aren’t a radioactive cinder, you owe your existence in part to Thomas Schelling and other game theorists who were paid by the government to keep the cold war going very hot indeed. That doesn’t seem too popular these days. We’ll see what happens, at least until our eyeballs get fried.

Poker is a rather complex game and difficult to unpack. Let’s start with a simpler game. Every child seems to know it, and even ants and individual neurons do something very like it. It’s certainly at least hard-wired into the brains of social mammals, even those who can’t count do it in different, more approximate ways.

I’ll call it Pick a Number. It’s a three-handed game. Green thinks of a number between 1 and 10 but doesn’t say it. Red chooses a number. Black, having heard the number Red chose, chooses a different number. The choice closest, in either direction, to Green’s number wins.

For the analysis, let’s start off naïve, because we’re dealing with voters and politicians. Then we’ll introduce more complexity and try to compensate for naïvete.

Let’s first address Red’s strategy. At this point, Red doesn’t know anything about Black’s strategy. (A) In the absence of information, it’s reasonable to presume that it works like two-handed game, omitting Black, where how close the guess is to the number is checked against a threshold to win or lose. (B) Red also doesn’t know Green’s strategy and can only presume every number between 1 and 10 is equally probable.

From (A) the target should be the median of all the choices Green ever makes. From (B) this is the same as the mean, which is easy to calculate. It’s (1+10)/2, or 5.5.

Here an interesting thing happens. Even though the problem said number and not integer, Red tends to pick either 5 or 6. Perhaps this is because integers are the central prototype of the category number, but it may be more. Choosing either 5 or 6 gives the impression of being on a side, with the interesting property of equitability. The competition can be seen as fair and without bias, because 5 and 6 are equivalent positions. It’s a lot less clear with fractions, because there are different schools on how to round.

Black’s optimal strategy given the presumptions is clear: if Red chooses 5 chose 6 and vice versa.

Now notice that we write 1 through 10 from the left to the right, and you have the ideal democratic republic the founders envisaged.

It’s clear that the Founders really didn’t like political parties. When I was a kid, I was confused when people said we had a Two-Party System. I couldn’t find anything in any of the founding documents to support the idea. Of course, I was too young to understand what a system was in the abstract. That part of the brain isn’t there until about age 25.

Duverger's Law states that plurality voting in single-member districts (First-Past-the-Post) tends to create a two-party system, driven by voters strategically avoiding "wasted" votes for third parties and candidates avoiding costly campaigns, leading to consolidation around two main contenders.

—Some Damn Robot

So we have two parties. We’ll fancifully call them Demagogues and Repugnants. Their natural constituency is {(D: [1…5.5), R: (5.5…10)}. The average D-voter might be around 2.25, and the average R-voter might be around 7.75. In order to have the best chance of winning, D has to politick at 5, and R has to politick at 6. Even worse, D and R will politick at each other until over years it will get more like D=5.9, R=6.1, or even closer.

As a result, parties represent their constituency in the worst possible way. That is, the position of the party will be as different from the constituency as is mathematically possible in order to win the election.

Let’s see what would happen if the parties represented their constituency better. Ideally, we’d have D=2.25 and R=7.75. That would leave room for a third party that covers (2.25…7.75). Let’s call them the Not Insane Party, after Firesign Theater. N already has a 2:1 advantage over either D or R and will win handily.

Well, D and R aren’t about to allow that. This is why Duverger’s law works. Both the existing parties are highly motivated to squeeze a third party out.

Of course, there are other ways of forming a third party. One could start at 1 or 10 and try to grow toward the middle, but this would require competing against either D or R, and they’re bigger than you. There is a chance that if you start in, say, D territory from the extreme, some Rs might support you to weaken D, but I don’t see a lot of evidence politicians are that clever.

Another approach might be to go off on a different number line entirely like Libertarians do. Still, unless you’re already the majority, elections will work along the axis you’re ignoring, ignoring your axis.

Let us pause. Note that I have not introduced anything about ideology, funding, corruption, cheating, lying, and all those other things everyone automatically associates with politics in what I laughingly call the real world, Democrat or Republican or Tory or Labour or Liberal or Green or whatever. Yet this simple math has constructed a picture that captures a lot of politics while ignoring politics (that is, matters of policy) entirely.

Let us go there. We’ve been presuming an even distribution of opinions, which of course is wrong. The way for a political party to win is not merely to play the electoral game. It is also to shift the distribution. If my D and R were Democrat versus Republican, it would be clear that the median and possibly the mean has increased considerably, going from maybe 2 in 1964 when Goldwater lost to 8 today. This is called the Center, which doesn’t exist except as a statistical abstraction, much as how the average person has greater than one but fewer than two legs. (I have about 1.75 these days, so I guess I’m average.)

As George Lakoff pointed out, Democrats and Republicans use polls in completely opposite ways.

Democrats go out and ask people what politics they want. They work hard to make the questions as neutral and equitable as possible. Then they construct programs to give people what they want. Then they lose.

Republicans go out and ask people what politics they want. They work hard to make the questions as biased and inequitable as possible. They completely ignore the results, except for publicity. Then they win.

The techniques they use are multi- and nefarious. But here I’m trying to avoid getting specific, so let’s look at the math.

Everything I have said works if you play the game once, but in the real world, parties play the election game thousands of times against each other. This provides statistics from which it is possible to get a better understanding of how the opposition acts. Using that understanding to choose one’s strategy is powerful. To understand that, we’ll go back to keeping the Demagogue=Democrat, Repugnant=Republican in the back of the head, using the similarity only to remember and not to get too detailed.

Here we get to the crux of the biscuit. The D’s are rational. They’re also rationalistic, which includes the belief that those they represent are also rational. It’s all false. Nobody actually is rational, because according to cognitive science, anything rational is 2% or less of thought. I don’t trust that number exactly—it would be unjustifiably rational to do so—but it’s certainly the overwhelming majority.

Everybody knows this. It’s why what you call AI, which is nothing more than a real-life extension of the age-old uncanny valley with its golem stories, is creepy as fuck.

Nevertheless, the Democrats take huge pride in their self-image as rational. They talk about facts and truth. They call Republicans liars. All the evidence is that they would prefer to be impressed with their own intellectual and moral superiority they are willing to throw every election they face. At this point please note that this article started off more rational and has gotten more irrational. So the Democrats go back to the neutral, equitable, fair presumptions of the rational. Because of this, they follow the Republicans like obsequious lapdogs as the Republicans go R-er to the R-est.

Furthermore, Democrats are so impressed with their own virtue(-signalling) they are almost guaranteed to be affronted by this article. By questioning whether it’s such a good idea to believe a 17th Century religious fanatic who believed he could think God and reality into existence rather than learn how to shave, I am attacking their beloved morally superior center. (They’ll probably go “huh?” to this paragraph, which saves me effort figuring out whom to block.)

Still, I do not want to get too specific, so lets go back to Ds and Rs. (1) Rationalism and (2) something accurate and not sociopathic have been the two epistemic options philosophers have been talking about for two and one-half millennia. I am not saying these are the only two options; a lot of people think there are other options in systems of thought they confusingly call Eastern, because it sure doesn’t apply to Japan or China today. Nevertheless, a tradition or culture will settle on exactly two by the same mechanisms I describe in this article.

Because two options were settled on back in the pre-whatever period, in any structuring of politics, one will be more A and the other more B. By the mechanisms I have described, the difference will grow arbitrarily large, resulting in yet another binary division between D and R. Republicans could be more rational than Democrats, and I think they were when they lost in 1964. Since then, they have followed a half-century program to become wiser fools, and we are at the brink of pure lawlessness because of it.

I also think this is why they lost in 1964. The truly remarkable thing is that they have learned from this, while Democrats never have. Republicans even coöpted racism, traditionally a Democrat superpower, and improved its effectiveness as a bludgeon to levels scarcely imaginable during even the heyday of the KKK. Very smart, very evil.

I think their success is because, at least right now, Republicans are more authoritarian than Democrats. They’re more capitalistic as well. So they’ll pay some very smart people such as Frank Luntz a lot of money to come up with ways to win. Whereas Democrats think what they learned between bong hits from their Communications and Political Science college days, all based on rational agents who do not exist, is enough. After all, when they lose due to their own stupidity, they can always sulk and say everyone is racist and sexist and thus get more money they won’t spend to win elections, which they think is a win-win. So it never occurs to them that snotting on the majority of their supporters is not very wise.

During the 60s, Republicans were the ones all about rationalist P→Q logic and principles and ideals and stuff, while Democrats were all about peace and love and stuffing flowers up the guns of all those servants of the law, who tried to push them around and later mowed them down, but they were full of all that shit that they believed in, so what the fuck. (To paraphrase Frank Zappa.)

All that postmodernist peace and love and flowers in the guns shit was a lot better, more effective, and overall safer than what you learned in college.

But I digress.

To argue with a dead man is embarrassing and not very loyal. It is all the more so when the absent one is a potential friend and a most valuable interlocutor; but it can be an obligatory step.
—Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved.‡

The Dead Man Quadrille was a pamphlet I published from political prison. The four sagas began as an essay for a trilogy of three entitled A Tale of Three Photocopies. I was interested in publishing information Americans could use to protect their constitutional rights. I was naïve enough to believe Americans might care about their rights and want to protect them.

One was “The Letter.” I had been trying to reach organizations and individuals that give the impression they could use the information I had to offer. They included all the popular Big Names® people believe fight for our rights. For a long time, none was of any use.

I sent out a lot of letters. This was difficult because I did not often have money for stamps, paper, and envelopes. Indigent prisoners only got five discretionary stamps per month and a few envelopes, which were usually stuck sealed.

I went a long time without any response. Finally, I received one letter from Lilian Bales of the National PREA Resource Center. The letter was not materially helpful, as it only named two particularly useless Big Names®, but I was so delighted to receive any response of any kind whatsoever I felt it merited an essay.

Another essay was “The BP-8.” That is the name for a phony form prisons use. The Clinton-Era 28 U.S.C. §1997e almost eliminates prisoners’ ability to sue over prison conditions. It requires that a prisoner exhaust grievances before filing a complaint with a court, and prisoners can only do so following attempts at informal resolution. The BP-8 is a form for informal resolution, a contradiction in terms. It does its job, which is to make redress for grievances less likely.

Last but far from least was “Dead Man.” The name is from the writing on the top of the lunch box I received from staff at Franklin NC Detention Center about halfway through the time they were physically torturing me by preventing me from sleeping at all for 3 ½ weeks. “Dead Man” was about both the events and how difficult it was to obtain the photocopy for proof.

I then tried to publish it, at least to get it online somewhere. If I had had any friends left outside of prison, this would have been easy to do. I didn’t, so I was limited to organizations and other public figures I became aware of by reading newspapers other prisoners could afford. Every time I failed, I wrote an afterword for “Dead Man” I got up to Post Nach Despues Afterword before I gave up. The description of how hard it was to get information out of prison was so much longer than the original essay, it was beyond comical.

What do you know about prison and the criminally unjust system? Probably only what other people, including the poltroons of the press, have told you. In this and all other usual cases, the only information you ever get is what corresponds directly to the will and interests of powerful people. As the evidence is overwhelming that the government went after me for political speech criticizing them, I think this is important for Americans to know about.

The First Amendment comes first for a reason. It is the bedrock upon which all other rights are built. Without freedom of speech, it’s impossible even to talk about other rights. Democracy, science, and every aspect of civilization are impossible without free speech. Yet the government doesn’t like it when you criticize them, and they have the prisons, which they use liberally when their absolute arbitrary authority is questioned.

As I had tried over and over again to get anything published in the press with nugatory success, I started wondering whether the press might be the problem. A lot of people complain about the press, after all. People outside prison can effectively publish anything they like on blogs, discussion groups, and so on. That is beyond the dreams of prisoners such as me who were abandoned or betrayed by everyone they ever knew.

I imagined that, in addition to the information about torture and death threats, just how difficult it is to publish from prison is something citizens needed to know about. Indeed, the very semantics of the word publish differ significantly between prisoners and even helpful people who have never been there.

One of the first seeming avenues of publication I came across was the Pen Prison Writing Program. One of the pieces of paper I received from them talked about how they couldn’t help any prisoner get published, and most of them were trying to get published themselves. This clearly indicates they only understand publish to mean get some big publisher to do it for them and send them a check. They said this knowing they had the option of using an online computer and even hiring a printer, as I am doing now.

One of the reasons it took me years to have any success is that the federal prison only provides a single, nearly useless resource guide. It’s put out by a certain Big Name®. Due to happenstance almost as miraculous as getting the “Dead Man” image to put on the back cover, I found out about some far superior but almost completely unknown organizations.

One is the American Prison Writing Archive, whom I do recommend. Submissions must touch on personal experience, and there are limitations on length, which the original “Dead Man” exceeded. I had started writing what I called sagas specifically for the APWA. I wrote “The Saga of the Case,” a bare-bones description of some of the events presented in “The Guilt Phase Saga.” I received a letter stating that they weren’t sure they were going to publish it. They had a strict policy of not publishing anything defamatory, which term they interpreted cautiously. Of course, as everything I wrote was not only true but painfully true, it could not be considered defamation. This is why I use pseudonyms.

I boiled down part of “Dead Man” into “The Dead Man Saga.” “The Guilt Phase Saga” is an extended version of “The Saga of the Case.” “The Stupidity Saga” is my favorite. “The FBI Saga” should probably be the most frightening for you. It certainly brings understanding of governmental interest in preventing speech to a whole new level.

After I wrote the four sagas here, I realized they might work as a pamphlet, to be called “The Dead Man Quadrille”. I retyped them and assembled them into a booklet I could reproduce with the prison photocopier, staple, and send out. I arranged it to be 24 pages, six leaves, the maximum I was sure I could send with a single stamp.

I had been writing all the letters I could. I wrote not only every organization I could find but authors, playwrights, academics, and other public figures, all of whom had done work suggesting the information I had would be right up their alley. I wrote letters long and short, targeted and general, grim and lighthearted, and every variation I imagined.

Nothing worked very well.

I decided to stop writing letters entirely and instead send out cold some copies of “The Dead Man Quadrille.” This would not have been possible without gifts of stamps from other prisoners who were in favor of my getting the truth out.

That worked better than anything I had tried. Although it was hardly a deluge, I received responses at thrice the rate I had ever experienced. I cannot make rational sense how a semi-legible 24-page pamphlet was so much more successful than personal letters, but it’s true.

The most satisfying response came from Shana-Tara O’Toole, founder and head of the Due Process Institute. She said that, while the DPI is not set up to help individuals, my pamphlet exemplified the very reasons they do their work. I also had long, productive, and satisfying correspondences with two of her associates, Devon Unger and Jeremiah Mosteller.

The small but significant positive reaction to that version of DMQ showed me for the first time that there actually existed a few people outside who were at least aware of the problems driving injustice and mass incarceration. It prevented me from falling into abject despair or at least slowed the process down.

I have made only edits I would have made at the time if I had access to the tools I have now. I have only fixed a couple of minor errors.

I have put in footnotes with information I later acquired, but I recommend reading the sagas through before going back and looking at the footnotes.

Forward, into the past!

The Dead Man Saga

6 February 2019

I was arrested in April 2015 and held on state charges that were later dismissed. I now believe the state charges formed a pretense to keep me isolated until a federal indictment for political reasons, but that is another saga. In any event, until my federal indictment, I was held in Wake NC county jail.

While this was in no way pleasant, at least this jail was competently run. It was clean and well supervised. There was no physical danger from other inmates, though there was plenty of verbal abuse, especially after a news story about my later-dismissed charges was broadcast over television to all the inmates. (In my experience, most inmates do not acknowledge the concept of the presumption of innocence. Neither do most judges, but that’s another saga.)

My insulin was administered by medical professionals, and I was provided with a diabetic snack in addition to the regular diet to forestall blood glucose crashes. Each snack consisted of a sandwich and a piece of fruit.

Still, my health suffered. I precipitously dropped 35 pounds. My ability to sleep also suffered. For a couple of weeks, I did not get more than 45 minutes of sleep in any 24-hour period.

This experience was extraordinary. I would be lying down trying to get to sleep when, without losing consciousness, I would experience a dream or hallucination. After a few minutes, the dream would end, and I would still be conscious. I would then peer through the cell door window at the clock and note how little time had passed.

I presented to the well-run medical center. The physician told me that, while they were forbidden from prescribing medication to induce sleep per se, they could evade the regulations by providing psychotropic medication with soporific side-effects.

I told the physician I had a high tolerance for medication and also some paradoxical drug reactions. I was once married to a psychiatric nurse, and she told me that Haldol knocked people out. I asked for and was prescribed Haldol.

It had no effect on me, as far as I could tell. I presented again, and I decided to crank it all the way up and asked for Thorazine.

It also had no effect. It did not improve my sleeping, but it did dangerously lower my blood pressure. The physician told me that I was in the 2% already, as almost anybody with such a dose would be on the floor. This did not surprise me.

The physician then suggested Trazodone. I had no previous knowledge of this medication, but by that time, I felt I had little to lose. It worked, and I was able to sleep more or less normally.

After I was federally indicted in the middle of November 2015, I was immediately transferred to Franklin NC county jail. My Trazodone was continued, which was fortunate, as this jail was far worse.

Unlike Wake, Franklin was clearly under federal contract. Federal and state detainees and prisoners were all mixed together in one of the two large rooms with stacked bunk beds. Federal detainees wore crisp new garnet jump suits. State felony detainees and prisoners wore dingy white-and-grey jump suits. State misdemeanor detainees and prisoners wore even dingier orange-and-black jump suits, most stenciled with the names of other jails.

There was no opportunity for exercise in fresh air from the outside, which I much later learned was a constitutional violation. The dorm was almost always completely empty of staff. Half the time the insulin was delivered by staff who said they had no medical training, and we were expected to measure and administer it ourselves. There was much less food in general and no diabetic snacks, so I did not have sufficient food properly to maintain my blood glucose level.

One day I awoke in the filthy and cluttered storage room that doubled for what passed as medical purposes. I was told I had been found unresponsive in my bunk. It felt to me that I had had a blood glucose crash. I said so, but instead they falsely and ludicrously insisted that I had been “hoarding” my Trazodone.

They abruptly discontinued the Trazodone and put me in what they called a “medical observation” cell, alone. It was oddly named, as they never seemed to observe me. I was fed through a slot in the door. The same slot provided a way to give me my insulin, which I was expected to draw and inject myself.

I remained in that room, alone, for more than three weeks until I was shipped to the Pamlico NC jail for my arraignment. What with the abrupt cessation of a powerful psychotropic and the fact that the bright lights were on 24 hours a day, I was not able to sleep at all for the entire period. I did hypnotize myself using a technique I had learned from my mother when I was a child, so I had some rest, but that is not at all the same thing as sleep.

I am not quite sure how I survived. I am pretty sure that parts of me did not. I remember from before that humans start experiencing irreversible brain damage after two weeks of solid sleep deprivation, and I exceeded that.

It is quite possible that my brain is damaged. There are certain faculties and abilities I can remember once having that do not appear to exist anymore. I cannot be sure this is due to brain damage or emotional trauma. It was just bad luck for the government that they were not able to damage the part of my brain that wants to criticize them in print, as I do not doubt they intended.

The process certainly did wreak havoc with my memory, cognition, and what philosophers might call “will.” It was not until about eight months later, after my direct appeal but before my motion under 28 U.S.C. §2255, that I was able to regain significant wits.

It was only then I learned, from the prison law library (NC jails do not provide access to a law library), that this is legally torture. “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.” Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 320 US 143, 150 n. 6 (1944). Ashcraft was only kept continuously awake for 36 hours. Being a software developer, I doubt I would even have noticed such a short period of time, but the Supreme Court called it torture. I can tell you that over 500 hours works a lot better and definitely performs as advertised.

A bit more than a week after the start of the torture, an officer brought me a meal. Meals at that jail were usually served in scratched and septic brick-red plastic trays, except for the last meal, which was always wrapped in plastic wrap. Unusually, this meal came in a clamshell styrofoam box like a take-out.

On the top was written “Dead Man 12-15” in Majik Marker. As there was no way for inmates to obtain markers, and as there were no inmates involved in food preparation or distribution, it must have been written by staff. I asked the officer, “Dead man?” but as usual he completely ignored me.

I did not know whether the intended message was that I was already dead or that I would be dead after eating the meal.

I recalled a news story about the man who took the video of the police killing Eric Garner in New York. It said that the videographer had been hounded by the police, whereupon he began carrying a firearm to protect himself. He was promptly jailed under the Sullivan law. I remembered from history that this law originally enabled Sullivan’s police to drop pistols into the pockets of the greatcoats Sullivan’s political opponents wore in order to arrest and silence them. It was so common that politicians took to sewing their pockets shut for public appearances.

While in jail, the report continued, he found rat poison in his food. So he went on a hunger strike. The last I heard, the warden admitted there was rat poison in some of the food. I never heard more, but from my experience I predict that nothing at all happened as a result of this revelation. There is complete public apathy about, well, just about everything.

I was already emaciated and at risk of another glucose crash, so I could not risk a hunger strike. I decided to eat the meal. I figured that the worst it could do would be to kill me quickly rather than slowly. This did not seem like such a bad deal at the time.

I knew of two common rat poisons. One is a hæmotoxin with a characteristic dark blue color. I checked carefully for any hints of blue but did not find any. I realized that the blue might be a dye not present in the sample, but I hoped that the jail would not be sophisticated enough to obtain the poison without the dye.

The other common rat poison is strychnine. This is a colorless crystalline substance that could easily be dissolved, and I would not be able to detect it. I had also read that at sub-lethal doses strychnine caused hallucinations. As I was only a bit more than a week into the sleep deprivation, the resulting hallucinations from that were not too bad, and I hoped I would be able to notice any new ones before I died.

I ate the meal slowly. I did not die.

I carefully removed the top of the box with the writing using my thumbnails. I then shredded the rest of the box in the hopes that it would not be immediately obvious that I had kept the top.

I was able to smuggle the box top to the Pamlico NC jail where I was shipped for my arraignment. (The arraignment is described in another saga. For now, it should suffice to say that I pleaded guilty to doing something I had done but which could not be illegal. I did not realize that a guilty plea would bar me forever from showing that it was not illegal. The addling from the torture contributed to my failure to realize this, but it was not the only reason. I did bring up the sleeping problems, but the magistrate was uninterested and rubber-stamped me as competent.)

After my arraignment, I met my paralegal for the first time. She was supposed to help with my pre-sentencing report.

I showed her the box top. She made a “tsk” noise, and I could see from her facial reaction that she was distressed. I opined that it was a death threat, and she agreed.

I gave her the box top and asked her to make two photocopies for me. She agreed. On a subsequent visit, she gave me the photocopies.

I strongly suspected that I would not be able to take any papers with me to prison. (I turned out to be right.) I realized that I needed these photocopies, not only for subsequent legal work, but because people needed to know.

Fortunately, the Pamlico jail had the unusual policy of allowing indigents to send three domestic letters per week. The question was where to send the photocopies.

I could not send them to my by-then-very-ex-girlfriend. During my detention at Wake, she had seemed supportive. She promised that as soon as I was assigned a federal attorney, she would put the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in touch with my attorney, as she said the EFF had already agreed to do. This could very well have prevented me from going to prison. In any event, it would have given me a chance.

However, she did not do so. Instead, she abandoned me almost immediately. After I was eventually shipped to Pamlico for my arraignment, I received mail from her stating that she was trying to raise the EFF, but it was too little too late. Much later, I was able to make contact with the EFF, who told me that they could not help anyone after conviction, so she had deprived me of ever receiving any help from the EFF.

I did not find out what had happened until February 2016. I had previously asked her to send me a Valentine to cheer me up. Instead, on 12 February, I received a letter from her with a postscript saying she had just discovered she was eight weeks pregnant. This would have put her Blessed Event® approximately between the time the torture started and the “Dead Man” lunch box. She can probably date it more accurately than that, though I have no desire to investigate further.

At least that explained why she could not make a phone call to save my life: she was busy doing other things. She was out.

The only other option at the time was a friend (now also ex) in India. He was in contact with my paralegal to write a letter for the judge on my behalf for sentencing.

There was no way that, as an indigent, that I would be able to afford a global stamp. So I asked my paralegal to ask him to find someone inside the US to whom I could send letters. She did and gave me an address for the friend-of-an-ex-friend (FOAXF). I sent letters to her for a couple of weeks, including the two photocopies, which I sent in separate letters to increase the probability that one would survive.

On a subsequent remote communication (I do not remember if it was by telephone or by a horrible botched abortion of a system called JurisLink) my paralegal told me that the FOAXF had balked and refused to accept any more mail. The good news, she said, was that what I had sent had all been sent to India.

This alarmed me. I told her that was not what I wanted, that I needed to preserve the photocopies. She then said she had no interest in being further involved in the matter. I guess she meant it, as she has not responded to any of my subsequent letters requesting fresh photocopies. Nor did anyone else at the public defenders’ office consider any of this worth bringing up on direct appeal.

I thought I would never see the photocopies again.

I was sentenced and sent to prison. Sure enough, I was not allowed to keep any papers, not even legal ones.

After my direct appeal was denied, one day in prison, I unexpectedly received a packet of papers in the mail. It was from the brother of my ex-friend in India.

It included the two “Dead Man” photocopies.

I was ecstatic.

I showed them to the jailhouse lawyer I most respected. He expressed amazement that the prison had let me receive such evidence. He suggested the only reason they did not simply confiscate them was that I had already, due to other problems, sent many letters to outside organizations. Of course, my attempts to make contact to outside agencies had never been successful, but perhaps the prison did not know that. Perhaps they had decided not to mess with me.

I showed the “Dead Man” photocopies to others. I noticed something. I could tell other prisoners about the torture, the political motivations, the prosecutorial lies, etc., and they would just nod their heads. It did not surprise them in any way, as that happens to everybody.

However, the “Dead Man” photocopies elicited a reaction. About half the time, their eyes got wide when I showed them. Apparently, written death threats are still rare enough to shock.

One of these photocopies is now Exhibit D of my motion for vacation of conviction under 28 U.S.C. §2255. It and the torture form the basis of Ground Two. (Ground One is even more serious, involving actual innocence, misapplication of law, and/or unconsti-tutionality of statute.) In the meantime, I have been trying every way I can to make this information public, with no success. I believe that the American people need to know what their government does. Their seeming apathy only makes me feel more strongly the need to tell them.

If the APWA puts this up, it will be the first publication of this information ever, after 2½ excruciating years of trying.

The Guilt Phase Saga

5 March 2019

This is the saga of the guilt phase, approximately the time from my arrest to my guilty plea. For reasons that may become apparent later, it might also be called “The Guilt Trip Saga.” As Gilbert and Sullivan wrote, things are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream!

It does not even come close to scratching the surface, and I have had to leave out an enormous amount. The full story will require a book, one I cannot write yet. Still, some understanding of these events is necessary for the sagas that come after.

I was served with a search warrant some time in April 2015 at the apartment in Garner NC I shared with my girlfriend. (I do not remember the exact date, and I have not been able to obtain the documents.) They knocked on the door and announced that they were the police.

As usual when I was programming at home, I was in my underwear. So I said, “Just a minute” and went to the kitchen, which is out of line of sight from the door, to put on my pants and a T-shirt. Just as I had finished and walked back into the living room, they entered using a key.

They served me a search warrant, which I was only briefly able to look through before they started interro-gating me. They said they were from the Garner and Cary police departments. The Cary cops were clearly in charge, with the Garner cops in tow. I thought this very strange, as while I lived in Garner, Cary was somewhat distant, much closer to the La Petite Academy in Morrisville where my girlfriend worked.

While several cops searched the apartment, a couple interrogated me. They accused me of having child pornography. I asked what constituted child porno-graphy. They said that it was such that, if I had it, I would know it. This answer seemed to me evasive and probably a setup for a verbal trap. Even now, I think my perception was accurate.

One of them admitted to having remotely watched a directory on my computer fill up with files and then empty, a clearly illegal search (if it happened). He seemed to think better of what he had said and then said that I “must have” allowed him to access my computer. I said I had not knowingly done so.

The cops took pretty much everything electronic I had, including a solar battery charger. It also included my laptop and my girlfriend’s laptop and many items from the kitchen, which had the only drawer in the apartment, which was otherwise pretty empty of furniture. We did not have a lot of money, and even the air mattress had a hole in it.

Later, my girlfriend came home. We had a conversation the contents of which I will never reveal to anybody; after my trust has been betrayed so blatantly, I will not do it to others at any cost. I went into the police station. They arrested me, and I have not been at liberty since.

I was never read my rights as per Miranda. I had known other people who had been arrested without having been read their rights either, so this did not surprise me.

I was put in Wake County NC jail. Within 48 hours of being admitted, there was a news report on the television in the cell block about my arrest and charges, with my face, claiming that I had some thousands of images of child pornography. This did not make me very popular with some of the other inmates, who of course did not have the concept of the presumption of innocence and though I had done worse than the mere rapes and murders they had done. However, unlike all the later jails under federal contract that were almost entirely unsupervised, the Wake jail was fairly secure, so I was only subject to verbal abuse.

I got a couple of indictments with lists of file names, none of which I recognized. There were maybe 11 or 12 on the former and 5 or 6 on the latter. Like the search warrant, I have not been able to get these back; they were taken away from me later upon my federal indictment.

For the former indictment, bail was set to $2 million. For the latter, it was increased by $1 million to $3 million total. It was only after I was in prison that I learned (NC jails provide no access to law libraries) that typical bail in such cases is maybe $50,000, so the bail was clearly excessive.

Although the judge had said I would get a public defender, none showed up. So, I asked my girlfriend to find out who he was and give me his number. She did, and I called him over one of the monitored jail telephones. He said that he had not bothered to make contact with me because he was pretty sure the case would “go federal.” He acted as if this always happened, but much later, I learned this is not true.

I was in the Wake jail for about seven months, during which time I could not really do anything. At first, I planned my defense as well as I could without knowing what my ultimate charge would be. I then realized that if I went to trial, my girlfriend would have to testify. Regardless of the fact that I did not believe I had done anything wrong, her career in child-care would be ruined.

She told me that she could get another career but not another me. She also said that she would stick with me no matter what and wrote of the time we would again be together.

She also, on my request, made contact with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She said they were willing to talk to my public defender. I pointed out that my state charges would be dropped. She said the EFF said they could only help me with a federal case anyway. She promised to put the EFF in touch with my federal public defender when I was assigned one.

I became ambivalent about whether I should fight the charges or plead guilty to protect her. Jails record all conversations, and there is a record of a conversation where she said I should fight. I said I could not fight, as I needed to protect her. She made no response.

In November 2015, I was taken by surprise to federal court, and all my papers were taken away. I was indicted. I could only look at the indictment for a few minutes before the temporary public defender took it from me, saying he would keep it for me. I did not get to see it again until well after my sentencing.

As with the state indictment, it listed file names, none of which I recognized. Some were monumentally unhelpful, like 10.jpg. Some were what looked like coded dates, as if they had come from a digital camera. I did not have a digital camera, but I think my girlfriend did. Some had lurid file names, which I have later found out the courts even acknowledge as irrelevant.

The indictment only listed two seized electronic items: (1) my girlfriend’s laptop and (2) what I think was a spare drive from a laptop I had bought for parts and never examined. My laptop was not on the list, nor was the “SIM card or SD drive” the prosecutor later claimed had the alleged child pornography.

At least the federal judge did tell me my rights as per Miranda, but I still had no idea what I was being accused of, nor what exactly “child pornography” was supposed to mean.

I was shipped to Franklin NC jail. It was much worse than Wake. There was no fresh air, and non-medical staff gave me insulin.

I saw my federal public defender for the first time. He told me that I would be required to sign a plea agreement. He said that it would be for one image, and that it did not matter what the image was. This made me think that as in Kafka (though unlike in Kafka I did not have a trial) I would never be confronted with any of the evidence against me.

The idea of pleading guilty in any event just to protect my girlfriend was wearing off. My conscience had been bothering me, and I have always had great difficulty not telling the truth, in contrast to my girlfriend, who expressed pride in her ability to lie. Still, I felt a pull because I said I would.

However, it also seemed more and more that she had abandoned me or at least was in the process. Our only communication was by an email kiosk that only allowed a couple of paragraphs out. Her responses were late and perfunctory. I told her I needed to hear from her once a week to maintain my sanity, as I was terrified that the feds would do something to her. I eventually decided not to consider her in my decision.

I decided only to plead guilty if I had done something. I needed the information. So I told my public defender I wanted to know.

He asked me why I wanted to know. This flabbergasted me. He was a federal public defender. I thought he was supposed to know what “guilty” meant. I could not figure out how to explain to him why I needed to know, and I was already in a weakened state, so I said, “I’m curious.”

He then mocked me, saying, “oh, he’s curious, is he?” There was no point in expecting useful information from him, and I felt I had no choice but to trust him.

Then I was physically tortured by extended, continuous sleep deprivation and issued what my paralegal later agreed was a written death threat by jail staff. I describe this better in “The Dead Man Saga” and will not repeat it here. Let it suffice to say that my head was pretty messed up.

At the beginning of 2016, I was shipped to Pamlico NC jail to await my arraignment. This was a much rougher jail; I saw two actual fist-fights in my first week. No staff seemed to monitor the jail at all. Still, I was able to get some sleep, though not nearly enough to recover. I only started to feel like myself again much later in prison, after my direct appeal was denied but before my petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court was due.

At some point before the arraignment, my public defender showed me my discovery. It was a large folder full of papers. I was surprised that there was almost nothing about any criminal charges, and what there was was full of false statements. There were quotes of me saying things I knew I did not say and would never have said. They even used grammar I never use, not even in speech. It was extremely sloppy.

There were also some photographs taken from the parking lot of the apartment complex. They would have easily been able to see me when I went out the back for my long walks around the three or four nearby shopping centers. It was my custom to stop at benches to work on cognitive science on my laptop. I had even interacted cordially with some of the cops who patrolled the shopping centers.

By far the bulk of the discovery, a stack of pages at least ¾” thick, consisted of my writings downloaded from the internet. I had been a political writer, mainly criticizing tactics of the government such as the events in Ferguson and the time police killed Eric Garner for selling onesies. The discovery had a lot of these writings and others about safer topics like science.

I was puzzled by this. It seemed strange that my criminal discovery should consist mostly of writings that were not crimes. Like everything else so far, it did not make the slightest sense.

About a week after I was shipped to Pamlico jail, my public defender brought the plea agreement for me to sign. It still did not tell me what I was supposed to have done. It only said that I was pleading guilty to Count 6, referring to an indictment I did not even have, specifying in any event a file name I did not recognize.

I signed it, based on the belief that what really mattered was what I said at the arraignment. I was well aware I was running on about half a cylinder, and I would not be capable of feats of great mental acuity at the arraignment.

Over the next week or so, using the same self-hypnosis techniques I used to get some rest without sleep, I tried to prepare my brain to function at the arraignment. I told myself I would plead guilty if and only if two conditions were met: (1) I was able to obtain a description of the image, and (2) I recognized it and had in fact received it.

I knew I would be incapable of including any other criteria, and in any event, I did not know the massive legal implications of pleading guilty that are so different from the common meaning of the word. With no law library access, I could only understand “guilt” in the ordinary sense of having done something.

Thus prepared, I went to the arraignment. Before the magistrate, I brought up the fact that I had not been able to sleep, hoping he would send me to Butner for evaluation and recuperation as he had for earlier detainees. The magistrate cut me off, asking only about the previous 24 hours.

I then questioned my own competence. While I was doing this, my public defender was looking at me with agitation and an expression that led me to believe he was furious with me.for interfering with the plan. I told the magistrate that with the way I felt, I could not accurately say whether I was competent or not. He asked how he was “supposed to” know whether I was competent or not. As with my public defender’s question of why I wanted to know what I was pleading guilty to, I could not figure out how to explain it.

I still did not know what I was supposed to have done. I snatched a sheaf of papers from my public defender’s hands. Reading through it, I finally found a description of the image. I did recognize it. On that basis and that basis alone, I pleaded guilty, as I had prepared myself to do.

Then things got really bizarre. The prosecutor got up and told what they would have alleged at a trial if I had not pleaded guilty. She said many things that were just plain false, but I will limit what I say here to two statements that are arguably impossible just from the court and public record. That is, you do not need to believe me at all to be able to know they were false.

1. She claimed that when I was at the cop shop, I told them where to find a “SIM card or SD drive” with the child pornography, specifically in the kitchen and away from the computer area. This seemed to me over-legalistic phrasing. But even worse, it is physically impossible. The search was over by the time I went in. The cops never re-entered to retrieve this Mystery Disk. Furthermore, if there was supposed to have been evidence in the kitchen, why would I not simply have put it in my pocket, which they did not search? It seemed terribly contrived.

2. She said that most or all (one thing at the arraignment and another at sentencing) of the images were unknown. That contradicted reality. The numbers she gave were comparable to the numbers in the television report less than 48 hours after my arrest. The only way such a count could have honestly been obtained in that time would have been automated comparison by computer in a database of known images. She said they were unknown so such a count could not possibly have been real.

After the arraignment I was returned to the same jail. In late January, I felt particularly lonely. I wrote a letter to my girlfriend asking her to send me a Valentine’s Day card. I never received one. On 12 February, I received a letter from her with a postscript saying she just discovered she was eight weeks pregnant. So I knew what she was doing instead of putting the EFF in touch with my public defender back in December 2015, which might have saved me from prison.

I worked on cognitive science to distract myself.

This all distressed me. What had happened was bad enough personally. More importantly, even if I was ever to be free, what had already happened in me shows a serious threat to every American. When a country cannot provide justice to its citizens, which is what seemed to have happened, how can it even be said to exist?

All of what I experienced went against everything I, and probably every other American, was led to believe about the United States. Nothing from my activities against the police state or even fiction, such as 1984, Brazil, or The Prisoner even slightly prepared me for any of this.

I felt the need to write about this, to tell Americans what their government does to people. However, any piece of writing needs some sort of coherent narrative to put it together. Nothing that had happened made the slightest sense. I could not even think about it, let alone write.

I continued working on cognitive linguistics in the jail, waiting for the meeting with my public defender to discuss sentencing. The day before that was to happen, the FBI paid me a visit, but that’s another saga.

The FBI Saga

10 March 2019

After the events in The Guilt Phase Saga, my torture-addled brain was struggling to make sense of everything. The day before I was to see my lawyer to discuss sentencing, two individuals showed up to help me. The fact that they were so unaware of the boon they gave made it even more delightful.

I was taken out of the holding cell. The auxiliary room was in use, so they rousted the insulin nurse from her room. She did not look too happy about that. I sat down alone with the two figures inside.

They introduced themselves as Scooby and Shaggy from the FBI. Those aren’t their real names. The APWA doesn’t like real names, so I’m calling them Benson and Hedges instead.

The interrogation lasted a couple of hours. I remember that they had me taken to the holding cell one or two times, I guess to talk tactics against me; they always looked smug when I got back. I remember details vividly, but my direct memory of the entire sequence was impaired (hippocampus damage from the sleep deprivation?) I’ve had to reconstruct the overall sequence mostly from pairwise contextual comparisons, as I do not have a transcript. Not that it matters, as it would mean much the same in any order, but I hope I get it right.

Blanchard & Morgan said they were trying to track down someone in Lubbock Texas. Mutt and Jeff said he styled himself MohammadInTexas or MohammadFromTexas; I can’t remember which. Pons and Fleischman said he also used some cop-sounding name. I can’t remember.

Donnie and Marie said my name was in the real name field of his Yahoo account. This was the first I had heard Yahoo had a real name field. Steve and Edie said the Lubbock FBI found out I was in jail and sent the Professor and Mary Ann to talk to me.

Flatt and Scruggs didn’t play Good Cop/Bad Cop. Jack and Jill both started off as Good Cops and slowly metastasized into Bad Cops. Confusingly, Peaches and Herb went back and forth a lot. That is probably recommended in the Big Pig Book.

I told Martin and Lewis I had nothing to do with anything. Timmy and Lassie pretended to accept that. Then Mork and Mindy asked if if, given my computer skills, could help McMillan and Wife figure it out.

Sigfried and Roy said they had visited the Cary cop who had my file. Hans and Franz said he had told them to say hi, which I thought was pretty weird.

Rocky and Bullwinkle asked if I had known anybody who, back in 2002 or 2000 when Beany and Cecil said the account had been created, had it in for me. I told Fred and Ginger my political writings were all over the internet, and I did not pull punches. I’m sure I had a lot of enemies.

I asked Heckle and Jekyll if they had seen my discovery with so many of my writings downloaded from the internet. Hans and Gretel said they had and had read one about software development.

Black and Decker said this ostensible Man from Lubbock was writing things over USENET they did not like. Haldeman and Ehrlichman said he said he wanted to establish a caliphate from Texas and was telling men they should behead women with kitchen knives and many other things.

Now USENET is just words, plain ASCII text. Last millennium people sometimes coded images and music into ASCII, but that is very old hat. In any event, Donald and Daisy were talking about mainly plain speech. I wondered what business the FBI had interrogating people over words.

Then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accused me of writing those words. I was deeply offended at the idea I would be using USENET that long into the new millennium. That’s a geek joke. Literalists like Smith and Wesson need know I hadn’t in a decade and a half. There is no point—it would be like installing a crank starter on a new car.

I said I was Jewish. Statler and Waldorf got quiet for a moment. But then Hatfield and McCoy manfully recovered and said I was pretending to be an Islamic terrorist in Lubbock Texas downloading child pornography and so on and so forth.

I said that was absurd and asked to see the impressive sheaf of papers Sylvester and Tweety had. I pointed out I had a distinct style and was willing to bet it was different.

Like Winston Smith, I held the paper in my hands. I found a quote. I pointed out that I used the Oxford comma, unlike the paper, and the paper had usages I never used.

I saw cross-posting to alt.atheism, which I remembered from the 1990s. There were also some newsgroups I had never heard of. Boris and Natasha said they were for Russians to discuss nudism. (This is a thing?)

I pointed out I was in North Carolina and didn’t even know where Lubbock Texas was. Leopold and Loeb started screaming that with my computer skills, I could make it look as if I were in Lubbock, Texas.

Bonnie and Clyde then said I must have done it, because the posts in question had stopped before I was arrested. Butch and Sundance, with nostril-gaping smugness, said, “It fits!”

Then Lenny and Squiggy asked, “COULD you have pretended to be him?” I intuited that was a trap. If I said “yes,” they would claim I had admitted to doing it. If I said, “no,” they would insist it would have been possible for me to have done it if I had tried. So I said that I had never tried, which is true.

I later learned this is definitely in The Big Pig Book. The Sun magazine offers free subscriptions to prisoners. They do not seem to want to renew mine no matter how many times I ask, but when they did send me some, there was an interview with Richard Leo (“The Whole Truth,” issue 499, 2017). “The police then start to work on cutting out the suspect’s conditional words. I might have. I could have. Maybe. Probably. The interrogation continues for hours.” Page 12.

Chico and The Man gave some more reasons I must be guilty.

Click and Clack asked why I had “entertained them” for hours, with the self-same supercilious smugness. Apparently, Hatfield and McCoy had decided only an Evil, er, Typer would have agreed to their request for help.

Peabody and Sherman also noted that I though the writing style might be different even before I read it! If I said someone else had different fingerprints, they must all be mine. Laurel and Hardy were obviously not familiar with a little thing I like to call literacy.

Gilbert and Sullivan also tried to insult my intelligence. The Captain and Tenille said I was bragging when I said my writing style was unusual and not likely to resemble another’s Jekyll and Hyde said if I were as smart as I thought I was, I wouldn’t have had so many jobs over the years. I guess Tango and Cash thought everybody wanted to be steady as a rock and twice as smart. Simon and Simon obviously couldn’t imagine not have sex with the same red heifer every day their whole lives.

Bob and Ray said I must be itching to confess, and if I did not, my problems would be “a thousand times worse.” Unless Tom and Jerry were planning to resurrect me repeatedly for 10,000 years, it is hard to see how Barnum and Bailey could make good on the threat. It seemed beyond the capacity even of the mighty, mighty Toodie and Muldoon of the FBI.

Mickie and Minnie expressed a willingness to come back the next day if I told the jail staff, even though it was a long drive. I imagine Jim and Tammy Faye would, as a nice country drive is probably better than wearing a dress and illegally wiretapping a civil rights leader in the hopes of some hot Negro action, as Uncle J. Edgar used to do. Besides, there are no civil rights leaders any more—nobody cares.

I shook my head and said I had nothing to do with anything they said. I can’t remember if it was Henny Penny or Chicken Little who screamed, “Sure you did!” with a vein popping out of his neck, but I was glad Abbott and Costello were risking an accident (cerebrovascular would have been most favorite) for me. Bait and Switch were members of the Stanislavsky school of method acting; that’s for sure!

OK. I’m trying to have some fun with this, but only because it is so terrifying. It should be obvious this goes well beyond me. About an hour after they were popping their veins, I realized my personal importance had vanished into insignificance. I was only important as an observer, reporter, and writer. I had to tell the American people.

They had broken my cognitive log jam. I leave the details and an exercise for the reader. I put all the needed information into the Guilt Phase Saga, like Agatha Christie had a reputation for doing even when she didn’t. The details don’t matter as much as the general story, anyway.

The key is the discovery. My political writings weren’t busy-work to bulk up an otherwise thin case. They were what the prosecution had been all about from the get-go. As I knew, this was about speech, not the “speech” of child pornography, but political speech, the kind everyone thinks the First Amendment protects.

Without a law library, I did not know yet how furiously the Supreme Court hates criticism of the government. In the early 20^th Century, there were hardly any rights at all. See Schenck v. US, 250 US 616 (1919) and Abrams v. US, 249 US 47 (1919). It was only in the late 1960s, see Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969) and in the 1970s, see National Socialist Party v. Skokie, 432 US 45 (1977) that significant progress was made.

Of course, the early two cases denied Jews the right to persuaded people to think, and the latter two upheld the right for the KKK and Nazis to spread hate. What this says about American values is left as an exercise for the reader.

Schenck was publishing pamphlets encouraging people to think about whether to volunteer for World War I. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, and causing a panic.” A lot of people paraphrase this, including the Supreme Court. Most of the time, they leave out “falsely.”

This is called the “clear and present danger” exception. It’s hard to see how it could be applied to a pamphlet.

Doubtless it is what gives the Islamic Terrorist nonsense its punch. One is supposed to think of a terrible person who flies airplanes into buildings, like all Jews, er, I mean Muslims are supposed to do, at least in Duck and Cover’s fertile and febrile imagination. Never mind that after 9/11 I drove to New York on my own nickel to volunteer.

In all of Stop and Frisk’s rantings about the Man from Lubbock, if indeed he existed, there was no mention of any crimes or plans. It was just ranting, as I had seen thousands of people do since I got online in the 1970s. (Really. PLATO FSU/Sarasota High)

It was all just words.

But even if you crank the paranoid hysterical rantings up to 11, it doesn’t matter. When I told them I was a Jew, Barnes and Barnes didn’t back down. Instead, they became even more aggressive and eager to nail me.

It is certainly possible to say I’m not a Real Jew®. People do that a lot to me (and other prisoners), including the closest thing I had to a rabbi. I don’t even defend myself. I find no dishonor in being in the position Spinoza was, and it gives me better leverage to criticize Jews, including their propensity to kick other Jews to the curb.

Still, Beavis and Butthead accepted it and became even more enraged over what they had to believe was a PARODY, the same kind of thing MAD Magazine does every month.

Given that the government had already physically tortured me into pleading guilty to a bogus charge, this is no laughing matter and idle threat. 97 months (of 97,000, given their “thousand” claim) is what the government considers an appropriate punishment for satire, and there seems to be no opposition by or recourse from the courts.

This is what the government is entitled to do to anybody they do not like, including you.

It might, however, seem impolitic for the government to admit they imprison people for criticizing them. So take a page from every demagogue throughout history. Don’t reason or provide evidence or afford due process or any of that nonsense. As R.F. Laird said in The Boomer Bible, that can lead to thought, and thought is the enemy of happiness.

Just shriek at the top of your lungs the most emotive drivel you can muster. It doesn’t matter if it has nothing to do with reality. Everyone will be so busy being alarmed that nobody will notice.

TERRORISM! Aaaiiieee! MISOGYNY! Aaahooga! Aaahooga! BEHEADING! Gaaah! CHILD PORNO-GRAPHY! Hooka dooka! ATHEISM! Deedle deedle queep! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! Homina homina homina!

AND THEY’RE ALL NUDE! Rhubarb rhubarb!

This is Hitler 101, people, and it never fails.

The government just piled it on me. It’s easier to list what they didn’t smear than to enumerate what they did. Even the Texas part evokes images of child abusers (alleged) in Waco. I’m sure burning children with concentrated flammable war chemicals followed by an incendiary chaser is something the FBI is most proud of.

They missed a couple.

They didn’t accuse me of witchcraft, but even the Bureau of Prison recognizes Wicca as a religion. I also think that many Americans have come to realize that witches cannot make hens lay cubical eggs by looking at them funny.

It was not always the case. The Satanic Ritual Abuse feeding frenzy, before Geraldo Rivera’s star dimmed and televangelists had tripped quite literally over their own genitalia, destroying the lives of thousands of people.

I also suppose if they had realized I was Jewish earlier, they would have accused me of slaughtering Gentile babies for blood to make Passover matzohs. That’s always a crowd-pleaser.

But there wasn’t much they left off, and I am indebted to Bevis and Butthead for putting the government’s strategy in such a clear light.

Again, I do not matter. I doubt if anybody cares whether I live or die, and I feel dead already. What matters is the flushing of the United States constitution. Cagney and Lacey had broken my cognitive log jam, and I could think and write.

Thus enlightened, I turned my thoughts to my rapidly dwindling supply of what I stupidly thought were friends and how I was going to be able to get out with enough information to publish. Kibbles and Bits had done me a favor, but then it was time to move on.

The Stupidity Saga

16 March 2019

By the end of the day in “The FBI Saga,” I had figured out the important elements of the case. There were some details to be worked out later, and I have obtained evidence for a few. The core remains, and nothing since then has contradicted it.

The government targeted me for my writing. They fabricated vitriol and mud to sling at me. They tortured me into pleading guilty to a subset of bogus charges. At least so far, up to the magistrate level, they have denied me any due process.

To sum this treatment up, I can find no better term than bullshit.

I have tried to find a more decorous word and failed. I do bow to convention and use bogus in court documents. Even that raises some eyebrows, but it is in the official law dictionary on the computer and appropriately defined to boot.

What the FBI and all the rest poured on me with such glee and confidence resembled nothing more closely than the piquant concoction of blood, urine, and fœces into which well dressed Englishmen dove, bobbing for pound notes, at the end of The Magic Christian.

However, as my friend and fellow detainee “Moosmeyer” animatedly asked, “Are you the only one on Earth who has seen these movies?” He had a point. Bullshit is the closest vernacular.

That it was all bullshit is pretty obvious. Why did I not already know it?

The answer is equally obvious. I am stupid.

There is no dishonor in this, and I have no shame in saying it. Stupidity is the start of intelligence, and you cannot have the latter without the former. As Frank Zappa pointed out, there is no point in getting angry at people for being stupid, because everybody is. Those who admit it and learn to accommodate the effect of stupidity are generally better off than those who pretend to be immune. Stupidity is an incurable disease, but it can be treated. You just have to figure out how to make stupidity work for you.

I was trained as a scientist, and though I am no longer paid to work as one, it’s in my bones. Richard Feynman called science a “satisfactory philosophy of ignorance.” That’s pretty good, but it’s a bit stupid. History is replete with believing common-sense stupidity, like the idea that all clocks tick at the same rate regardless of motion, and that events both cause other events and definitely happen or don’t. Science has no way to avoid stupidity, and the process may even require it. It is good at overcoming it eventually on the basis of new evidence.

The FBI had given me an enormous amount of new evidence.

I had previously had a kind of stupidity called “socialization.” This is what people learn to get along in a society. It has so-called civilized concepts like fair play, good faith, trust, hope, decency, tolerance, peacefulness, and so on.

All of law enforcement consists of taking advantage of socialization and exploiting it as a weakness to hurt people. Abilities that are functional are forced to be dysfunctional. An elaborate set of strategies and techniques are taught, learned, and applied for that purpose. The Subjunctive Game is a clear example of one, but there are many others, and the attitude this is not only legitimate but the one right way pervades the system.

The FBI turned my socialized willingness to help out of civic responsibility into their smug proof of my guilt. (Of what? Writing as I write now? That I did not write what they said is irrelevant.)

Nor does this process end at imprisonment or even “release,” an entirely meaningless term given a lifetime of supervision and registration. This is why so many “justice-involved” people cannot function in a society and wind back in prison. This is exactly what is supposed to happen. The system specifically targets, punishes, and seeks to destroy all qualities that enable people to live together in peace and harmony. Americans call this “justice.”

This is what Reagan meant when he said that prisons were to punish, thus reinvigorating a trend that Biden and Clinton (and now Trump?) would continue to eliminate that pesky rehabilitation.

Every cop, prosecutor, judge, and defense attorney knowingly plays this antisocial game. A rare few play it reluctantly, even disgustedly, with the idea of subversively working within the system to promote un-American concepts of justice (or as they think of it, simply justice).

But these blips are not only swamped by the overwhelming evil; they seldom last long. The disgusted few wind up leaving or being converted to cynicism. Even if they remain, Hebbian learning ensures that the conventions they have to follow and the compromises they have to make pollute their thinking, and they find themselves facilitating without consciously having chosen to do so, like a heavy smoker who “wants” to quit but “cannot.”

The system cannot be reformed because it is not broken. It works perfectly as it was evolved to do. I say evolved, not designed. There is no mad super-genius, which is a bit of a shame, because even the most evil tyrant has some humanity left.

The system is a mechanized horror, run by people but in no way of or for people. It is a Rube Goldberg of parts, each of which makes perfect rational sense, at least from some viewpoint. They function smoothly together as a monstrous whole. It is good and getting better all the time. The only problem is that the result of this well oiled machine is pure, plain evil, which just happens to be exactly what those in power want.

The United States truly is the Finest Flower of Democracy. The status quo is not in spite of but because of this fact.

The United States has achieved its American Dream® beyond Orwell’s darkest nightmares. There is no real need for Big Brother because Americans eagerly oppress themselves. It is all voluntarily chosen, and majority rules.

Sure, the government tortured me, so there will still be Room 101. There was no ludicrous but lurid rat cage on the face (all the rats I have gotten to know were rather cuddly). Instead, the government used what the Supreme Court, back when one existed, called “the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired,” Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 US 143, 174 n. 6 (1944). It worked great, especially with a dozen times more than Ashcraft got, which is what they did to me.

But I was a special case. The FBI admitted to having read my criminal discovery. My writings showed I was unlikely to be intimidated by words. Even the “Dead Man” lunch box did not affect me much, but I have since learned it wakes others up a bit.

Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do, even torture. It’s not as if the judiciary has shown the slightest interest in such matters.

This is a huge advance over overtly totalitarian regimes. A few who notice do not matter, so long as the number is small. It does, after all, cost money to torture too many people, and people might object to a budget. Information blackouts and oppression of the press also cost money.

It is much more cost-effective for the press and the American People simply not to care, so long as they can tell themselves it will never happen to them. This is the American innovation. As the bubble-headed bleach-blondes on FOX gush, that’s why America is the greatest country in the world!

Bad things only happen in those bad countries. Like that one that used nuclear weapons on two cities. The one that put its citizens in concentration camps for their country of origin. The one that kept a bunch of black men untreated for syphilis to see what would happen.

What was the name of that country again? It’s on the tip of my tongue.

I had not entirely sloughed off the stupidity of believing there was anything left of American ideals before the FBI had the generosity to shock me out of it. It was later confirmed, after I sent out hundreds of letters with only a handful of responses, and none at all by the press (though some Maoists printed an edited version of my press release). At the time, I only knew that the FBI couldn’t be acting so blatantly and openly in violation of the First Amendment without full consent, coöperation, and encouragement by the American people.

Conventional wisdom might once have suggested that the stultifying education system, popular media, and the poltroonish press might one day ensure that embarrassments like me simply do not happen in the first place, thus diverting thought from important issues like Cynthia Nixon’s bagel toppings. The internet was once seen as a possible bulwark against this process, and it might have been if people had used it for anything but sharing funny pictures of cats. (And oh, by the way, a picture of an elderly cat on a summer day does not magically become child pornography with the title “Hot 12-Year-Old Pussy!!!” Even the courts, bad as they are, recognize this.)

The latent, unrealized potential of the internet doubtless explains the government’s escalating obsession with datacrime, merely the high-tech version of thoughtcrime. Once they kept social stratification and a permanent underclass alive by imprisoning en masse largely uneducated drug-dealers and -users. Now they are targeting educated people with computer skills. Whether this turns out to be as safe and effective a strategy as raiding ghettos remains to be seen.

My office at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute at Florida State University was right across from a Thinking Machines CM-2 with floating-point coprocessors. The air conditioners grew an ineradicable red slime I believe gave me Legionairre’s Disease or something very like it every couple of weeks. I appear to be difficult to kill, and I endured it and the low pay (40% of my first salary when I left academia for industry) because I thought it was good.

By some measures, it was the fastest computer in the world, for about six months. Then a certain government Three-Letter Agency (TLA) got a bunch to use against the American people.

I know of two and suspect one more TLA effort to recruit me. I wanted nothing to do with that. I wanted to do good for people, including Americans. I didn’t want to harm people’s civil rights or spy on them.

I was even proud of the fact that I was on the faculty of the only 100% open, unclassified, peaceful, non-oppressive, beneficial center for supercomputing run with money from the government. I enjoyed working with scientists from all over the world, including Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries with no politics at all, on projects to advance pure science for the public good.

I know, I know. You are rolling on the floor at my utter stupidity. I really believed it at the time. I should have taken the money and run. I would not have been tortured into prison, my humanity destroyed, facing a remnant of life alone as a reviled, broken man. I would be comfortable and respected, in the Right! Now I know better. The paucity of responses to my nearly 700 letters has proved that Americans neither want nor deserve anything I considered good, but the FBI started my revelation.

I also stupidly believed in reasonableness (and reason, which is not quite the same thing but is just as stupid). I had previously had some suspicions that the federal government was trying to do something about me. After all, I did go to a High School, Pine View, which a couple of years previously was the only federally funded program for “the gifted” (how I hate that term, as if there were no work or costs involved!) in the United States. It had a huge TLA presence, as Sarasota is well known for TLA retirement. There I got top score in the MAΘ (M-A-TH, get it?) test two years in a row.

Much later, after I encountered a classmate at a 15-year reunion and married her, she suggested that one does not do that without getting a file with the federal government. I was a nerd who did not do drugs, but she had been socially connected and did. She said that the LSD at the school had a TLA origin. She also told me how a TLA parent she knew had died, and his widow wa trying to figure out what to do with all the C4 he had left in the garage.

At the time, she was wearing her psych nurse hat and was working at G. Pierce Wood mental hospital in Arcadia, Florida. I infected her with my stupid desire to do good. We started what I later learned was only the second program in the United States to teach English as a second language to residents of a psychiatric hospital.

The results were amazing. Not only did our students learn English; they became saner. Our class had a discharge rate twice that of the hospital at large.

We won the Department of Children and Families Volunteer of the Year award for that, and I was proud of it. Almost immediately, the hospital administration instituted rules that made it nearly impossible for us to get students. Formerly we took anybody who wanted to learn, but the later rules required they get a prescription to attend. We had to disband the program, as only one resident ever got one.

There she met a psychiatrist/neurologist formerly of the Mayo clinic. He told me about a dopamine-blocker the government used that made costly physical torture obsolete. (This was before the waterboarding fiasco, and it tipped me off that such torture must only be done as a recreational activity for staff.) The dopamine-blocker requires injection, which is maybe why they didn’t use it on me. I always wondered how it would affect me, but I guess I’ll never know.) His other interest, apart from working at the hospital and my wife, was in inducing electrical currents in the brain with strong alternating magnetic fields. He said it could induce seizures.

He eventually arranged a cherry job for my wife at the Menninger clinic. She went off with him and divorced me. I noticed her handwriting on the divorce papers was very different. My mother said she had talked to her (I was making a clean break) and she was not aware her handwriting was any different. She thought it wa as always, or so my mother said.

Much later my mother told me that my ex-wife had to have a large portion of her brain removed due to a tumor. When she was studying to be a nurse, people told her she was too smart and she should be a doctor instead. She wanted to be hands-on and was talking about becoming an ARNP. But the surgery made her not intelligent enough to work as a nurse any more.

I moved on with my life. I decided to continue political writing. I received my Top Writer T-shirt from Quora on the very same day they suspended me the first time for being unpleasant. They eventually banned me, but by then I was already on the Quora Top Writers Facebook group, and Quora couldn’t remove me.

It was there I saw the head of Quora wanted to make Quora the safest place for writers. This made me laugh and retch at the same time. Writing is never safe. That is the point. Helen Keller said, “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.” (At least she said this according to Lies my Teacher Told Me, which a prison book project sent me.) The entire purpose of writing, at least when it is true, is to force people at least to think about these unpleasant conclusions.

I did, however, feel safe from the government’s torturing me into prison. That was stupid of me. The FBI disabused me of that stupidity. It was only much later that I found out that I was stupid to believe that there was any recourse in the courts or that the press cared at all.

But the FBI did something even more personally valuable. They demonstrated that, however stupid I was, I could not possibly ever be considered paranoid. I don’t look good in a tinfoil hat.

I stupidly believed in reasonableness. If paranoia means anything, it must necessarily include excessive and unwarranted suspicion. The FBI proved I could not be suspicious enough. They said I must be guilty because I did not suspect them enough to refuse to talk to them. I was tremendously relieved by this revelation.

There is no way I, untrained in administering a police state and inflicting police brutality, could or can ever be suspicious enough to protect myself. This is especially true when the government can torture its citizens with complete impunity and immunity, not even slowed down by the judiciary or the press.

Even before my arrest, I had already been pretty impressed with cops. I had developed the Three Laws of Cop Mentality. I had written about them many times, and I have no doubt they are in my criminal discovery, and the FBI had read them thoroughly.

Cops think like this:

1. Everyone is guilty of everything all the time,

2. Except for cops, who are never guilty of anything ever

3. And except for auxiliary professionals like Emergency Room staff, who are never guilty whilst on duty but guilty at all other times.

I had developed this model due to my ex-wife’s interactions with cops, at the crisis unit where she worked before G. Pierce Wood and when she was wearing her ER nurse hat. Nothing I have experienced or learned since then over the past quarter century has contradicted this model. It works.

So I should have been able to predict the FBI would think I was guilty of anything no matter what I said. Why didn’t I?

Again, I was stupid. You’ve seen the movies, like Macon County Line and Smokey and the Bandit and Dukes of Hazzard (also TV). The local yokels are all “gol a dang dang dang dang Lemuel!” They’re corrupt and bigoted, and they talk funny.

In contrast, the FBI are all professional and intelligent and well if conservatively dressed. They sweep in with a hearty, “Here I come to save the day!” and take care of business.

I had even seen No Country for Old Men criticized based on the idea that, in what I laughingly call “The Real World®,” the FBI would have been on the case, and the really bad stuff would never have happened.

The idea that the FBI are the Good Cops® is deeply hard-wired from Hebbian learning by sheer repetition. The Cary and Garner cops had actually treated me pretty well. They hadn’t come in guns-a-blazing. While one admitted to having made an illegal search by watching the contents of my computer remotely before obtaining a search warrant, they did not use tactics like The Subjunctive Game on me. I thought they were merely wrong and mistaken, but not actively malicious. I stupidly expected at least comparable treatment from the FBI.

Much later, I learned good treatment was a rarity. Almost everybody I have met in prison was arrested with extreme violence, including “Moosmeyer.”

But thanks to another free book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, I eventually learned about Bellotte v. Edwards, 629 F.3d 415 (4^th Cir. 2011).

A guy printed some photos at a Walmart kiosk. An employee asked to see him. Though the photos contained nudity, the guy complied. The Walmart employee reported him to the cops for child pornography. The cops went guns-a-blazing into his house. He was away at his hunting lodge, so they pointed them at his children. When he returned and found out what had happened, he took a passport photo to the police to prove that the “child” was in fact a 35-year-old woman. Oopsie! Bad cop! No doughnut!

This case was only unusual in two ways:

1. The guy in the case had an opportunity to prove that an image the cops decided was child pornography was nothing of the kind. This was probably the easier of the two problems to fix and reform into accordance with Truth, Justice, and the American Way®! Judges, cops, prosecutors, and public defenders all agree: due process is un-American, and you can torture without anybody caring. They fixed it so that, even the image I pleaded guilty to has no nudity, unlike in Bellotte, and nothing even remotely resembling sexual activity or suggestiveness, I cannot even get a judge to look at it.

2. The guy sued for damages and won, albeit by the skin of his teeth, as one of the three appellate judges thought the cops were doing a fine, fine job and deserved immunity. This would be a much tougher sell, as cops do not like not pointing guns at people. “Moosmeyer” was also in the 4^th Circuit, and he was arrested with enough force to stop the billions and billions of Jewish Atheist Russian Islamic Nudist Misogynist Terrorist Pædophiles at the Mexican border, marching to Lubbock. HAHAHA-HAHA! (which is probably why we need a wall). However, maybe in cases where the local cops know they are being wagged by the federal government and will see no benefit from it don’t risk it. This also explains the sloppiness about the illegal search, the lack of Miranda warnings, and the clearly excessive bail ($3MM instead of the normal $50,000) as well, perhaps.

I didn’t know that at the time. I was actually surprised when the FBI exhibited behaviors that would make Stalin spin in his grave and shriek, “I wish I had thought of that!” I even thought that the FBI was an opportunity to explain what had really happened. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Of course, I continue to be stupid. It did not really surprise me when the government moved to dismiss my 13-ground §2255 for failure to state a claim. The law clerk here says they always try. I was surprised when the magistrate recommended granting dismissal. Not only did she seem completely to ignore everything I had written in my response, but she misrepresented the transcript of the arraignment and made omissions to such a degree that anyone with a brain would call it blatantly lying. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I thought adjudicators would be independent.

Of course I have a long way to go, and I am waiting for the de novo review I called for in my objection. But it seems that just like it’s turtles all the way down, it’s judicial evil all the way up. If my case is dismissed, I will never be able to present my evidence before a judge to be adjudicated on the merits, let alone be able to obtain the documents, such as my search warrant, I need to prove the rest. I cannot even obtain the original “Dead Man” box top. I very stupidly believed that could not happen here, not in America, but it seems that is the only thing that does happen.

I am still stupid enough to acknowledge the possibility that some Americans may care about their country and their rights and may want to turn toward justice. But despite all my efforts, I have no evidence that this is the case. It is possible they exist but I cannot reach them, but that is functionally equivalent to their not existing. I have no hope or ability to hope left.

When I have overcome this stupidity, I’ll stop writing. This will be much to the relief of those who continue to want to believe It Can’t Happen Here®.

UNION GUY

MAN

WOMAN

OLD LADY

SUPERMAN

On stage is the interior of an elevator in forced perspective. Where the near wall would be is open to the audience. On the elevator stage right is the elevator door and a button panel upstage. Near the door, UNION GUY stands to open and close the door. They wear overalls and carry a triangle and striker to make the ding! when they open the door. They are eating a cheese sandwich.

MAN enters from stage right. He wears 1950s male business attire with hat. He walks to the elevator and presses a button invisible to the audience. UNION GUY opens the door and goes ding! MAN takes a place near the buttons and pushes one in the middle. UNION GUY closes the doors.

WOMAN enters from stage right. She wears 1950s female business attire. Events follow as with MAN. She and MAN look at each other with contempt. WOMAN takes her mark in the stage left downstage corner, as far away from MAN as possible.

OLD LADY enters and boards the same as MAN and WOMAN. She pushes MAN to the center and randomly pushes buttons. UNION GUY opens and closes the door and goes Ding! repeatedly.

OLD LADY: Gurgle gurgle gurgle…

MAN picks OLD LADY up by her elbows and places her facing the upstage stage left corner, where she continues to make soft gurgling noises and stab the corner with her fingers for the rest of the play. MAN returns to the area near the buttons.

SUPERMAN enters stage right. He is dressed as one expects, but his middle-aged paunch produces a prominent protruberance. His hair is blacker than real hair has any right to be, and his Elvis-like temples are graying. He wears thick black horn-rimmed glasses and carries a large unlit cigar between the fingers of his right hand. He stands in the center of the elevator, facing the audience, but he does not look at the audience.

SUPERMAN: (pointing to the ceiling with his cigar hand) Up, up, and away!

MAN pushes the top button. About 15 seconds pass. Stage lights come up to reveal a backdrop showing a parking garage. Why this is on the top floor is not explained.

SUPERMAN: You know what I hate? When you drop your cigar down the shaft and it gets caught in the threads. If it doesn't, you can just fly down and get it.

MAN: (facing SUPERMAN) You can. I can't.

WOMAN: (facing SUPERMAN) Yeah, we can't all be Superman, you know.

CURTAIN

Part I

1. Everyone on Substack ipso facto is more privileged than the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, to a large degree at the others’ expense, and don't kid yourself.

2. Everyone who says don’t generalize generalizes, especially about people they say don’t generalize to.

3. Men who talk about ending sexism usually get away with it. Women who say exactly the same things are inevitably pig-piled by self-proclaimed feminists, often in the most misogynistic way possible.

4. White liberals do not have a concept of black people. They say people of color, meaning ethnic enough to force to speak their language or dialect but not dark enough to lower their property values. Neighborhoods of color are school districts where they, thank the transcendental non-gendered deity construct, don't have to send their children or even drive through.

5. Progressives gave us extreme racism, euphemistic eugenics, Prohibition with its national networks of organized crime and mass incarceration, and half a century when it was a federal crime to criticize the government. Hitler thought they were too extreme.

6. There is no evidence constitional originalists ever read the constitution.

7. Republicans have always been socialists. They merely disagree on who gets the spoils.

8. Diogenes lived a simple life. He was carbon-neutral enough not to light the lamp he carried through Athens looking for someone honest. When Alexander the Great offered him anything he wanted, he said, “Get out of my sunlight.” This is why cynic is considered an insult.

9. The Greater Left idolizes Canada, which during Epstein’s heyday had an age of consent between 12 and 14. This is why they call 17- and 18- and even 25-year-olds children.

10. The Greater Left says America is not ready for a woman President because of sexism. They don't mean someone like Shirley Chisholm. They mean women who want to regulate video games (Clinton) or love politically imprisoning people for cannabis (Harris). They think there is no valid reason to dislike these positions, because they only care about what's between their legs, not what's between their ears.

11. Transphobes are perfectly happy with beefy bearded transmen using the women's room. They are also perfectly happy excluding dykes with short hair.

12. The Barbie movie is some of the best and least biased commentary of all time. Only about 5% of the population has enough brain to perceive that.

13. Hatred is the new love. And love is the new hatred.

14. When Lenin installed himself in the Kremlin, notice the opulent curtains.

15. The models for T-Rump’s Gatsby/Epstein pseudo-ballroom clearly showed it in place of the East Wing. The Greater Left thinks it's kewl to say he lied when he said construction wouldn't touch the main building.

16. I go to rallies not to march or chant but to talk to people. My opener is “If there's one thing Democrats don't know, it's how to talk.” Occasionally a Democrat will say they have a messaging problem. Nobody who knows how to talk would ever say messaging problem without pointing this out.

17. The Greater Left is affronted at the fact that Ghislene Maxwell gets to do yoga. Maxwell got to do yoga at her previous spot. The Eighth Amendment protects exercise, and the First Amendment specifically protects yoga. The Left hates the constitution as much as the Right. They merely disagree on which parts of the constitution they print on toilet paper.

18. There is no such thing as the Center. Statistics shows the average person has more than one but fewer than two legs. I'm therefore average. Moderates are Right in some areas and Left in others. The Reagan Democrats were Right at home and Left at the union local.

19. About a quarter century ago, a college student was mobbed and called a murderer for wearing Star of David earrings to a Canadian rally for Palestinians. I couldn't find this on da interwebs a decade ago. Instead I found a lot where people were physically battered. Selection varies daily.

20. The CPUSA was the only early 20th Century labor organization that was not overtly racist. The ACLU was especially racist.

21. The Center for Constitutional Rights worked for three years to afford Gitmo detainees habeas corpus. Then the ACLU stole credit. This is why the Left carry ACLU cards and the CCR gets about 1/20 the donations.

22. Ada Lovelace Byron was a dunce who, despite access to the best tutors in Europe, never understood basic algebra. Emmy Noether put algebra, which like most things Arabic is Indian, on a theoretical basis after two millennia and also fixed General Relativity for Einstein. But Noether made no attempt to appear feminine. This is why Ada has an international holiday and only math geeks like me know who Emmy was.

23. I wrote here that apathy was the worst problem. A Marxist said the worst problem was not apathy but class. Marxists fellate a dead modern European so deeply the idea that apathy can apply to class is beyond them. This is dialectical materialism.

24. The previous item applies to pretty much all -isms. Todos los „-ismos” son lo mismo. They are used only to get angry, but nobody looks underneath them enough to change anything. This is by design.

25. This item is true. Rationality and rationalism are not merely sociopathic but unfounded. See Gödel.

26. Nietzsche wrote that everything from love is beyond good and evil. I add that everything not from love is beyond sociopathy. In a bad way.

27. Speaking of love, Protestsants use the Greek agape in I Corinthians 13. The central meaning is love of a slaveowner or military commander (same thing) for a slave or subordinate. Christian Nationalists are therefore more Christian than others in this sense. It has nothing to do with Jesus by almost two millennia of design. Christ is a job description. People who follow Jesus overwhelmingly lost by 1930. You can tell this because they say praise Jesus, which does not praise Jesus.

28. Everybody who unironicaly says mansplaining means they wouldn't know Good Faith if she sat on their face and absolutely support patriarchichal misogyny and sexism.

29. Nobody who says free market means it. I told the staunchest libertarian I have ever known that in Mexico, where I lived for a time to learn to teach English, a family could turn their living room into a two-table restaurant without interference. He went apoplectic and praised governmental regulation.

30. Nobody who gets an influential platform to talk about the poor has ever had to miss a meal.

31. Nobody who gets a platform to talk about health care has ever had to ration their insulin. Nobody impressed with Biden’s capping insulin at $30 has ever been poor and bought insulin, which has been under $30 at Walmart as long as I've been a diabetic, about two decades.

32. Nobody who is offended by anything I say because they think they are exceptions is an actual exception. Almost tautologically, all exceptions have shit-eating grins as they read this because Their Own™ overtly abused them for saying the same things.

33. Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice. I say it will end in a chorus of “I never thought it could happen to me!”

34. Don't judge people until you have walked a mile in their shoes. Then judge the living snot out of them. You'll be a mile away, and you'll have their shoes.

35. Any attempt to use logic on human beings is fraught. We are not adding machines swapping finite and fungible sums of soul and spirit, as John Gordon wrote in 1982.

36. No human being has ever been binary in any way. I first thought identifying a non-binary was superfluous, but that's because I'm an idiot in remission. Meaningless statements can be the most meaningful pragmatically. People worth talking to know how meaningless it is to say.

37. In Galactic Pot-Healer, Philip K. Dick tells a story of a Gnostic deity called the Glimmung who assembles a crew to raise a temple on a distant planet. The Glimmung tells the crew, “You have all failed so often you are afraid of failure.” As Tom Baker said as The Doctor, failure is one of the great human freedoms.

38. In addition to believing diversity is strength, I believe Hispanic culture is superior to Anglo culture. Last time I gave away food, Deacon Frankie, who had gotten a power chair for me because I struggled with my manual wheelchair, pointed out the line was the blackest he's ever seen due to ICE. Still, one woman I flirt with, a real sweetheart, showed up. I asked, ¿No tienes miedo por ICE? Her emphatic ¡No! was really hot!

39. Everyone who says women have no responsibility for men’s emotions believes men have unlimited responsibility for women’s emotions. Because sexism.

That's enough for now.

• Most cultures with languages make no effort to teach children how to use the language, yet children learn anyway.

• Native speakers with no real knowledge of grammar can nevertheless produce grammatical utterances.

• Native speakers can hear or in some cases read an ungrammatical utterance and produce more grammatical utterances.

• If you ask them how or why an utterance is more grammatical, they usually can’t tell you. They’ll say “it sounds funny” or something like that.

These pose huge problems for linguistics, which mostly works like this: people who can use words use words to talk about words to other people who can use words. Then if those other people who use words like the words about words, they buy their books or give them PhDs or tenure or something. This is good as far as it goes, which is not very far. To do deeper linguistics or even philology, it’s necessary to go deeper into how words work. To make matters worse, linguists can’t even agree on what a word is. For example, the British call where a dog sleeps a kennel. Americans called it a dog-house until they called it a dog house until they now call it a doghouse. Within my lifetime, book store has become bookstore, all right has become alright or even a’ight in the vulgar, and any more has become anymore.

Note that grammaticality is not binary; there are degrees. Poetry is more relaxed than prose, and formal writing is stricter. Standard also vary synchronically (from place to place) and diachronically (from time to time). It once gave offense to say every student should bring their own pencil, and now it gives offense to say every student should bring his own pencil. Those who argue so volubly over pronouns need to learn this.

Some utterances are more acceptable than others, and grammar is but an imperfect reflection of acceptability. In linguistics, unacceptable utterances are marked with an asterisk (*), and somewhat acceptable utterances are marked with a percent sign (%).

Native speakers can do this, but it doesn’t tell us much about what grammar is. What kind of beast is grammar, if it be any kind of a beast at all? What role does it play in how language works?

What Is Grammar?

A dictionary is a good place to start, but not a good place to end. The entries in a dictionary aren’t really definitions. They are a bunch of words that help speakers understand the target word. You have to know a lot of language already to understand them, which is why people who learn languages as adults use dictionaries that translate. This is one of the reasons adults find it more difficult to learn new languages; children learn words at the same time they learn about the world, and adults traditionally learn them by translation. This is most of why brain scans have shown that second languages happen in parts of the brain peripheral to the centers that process language: translation uses more general cognition than just speaking a language. Fortunately, adults do retain the ability to learn new languages if they are completely immersed in a culture with a different language and cannot resort to their native language. They find it harder to learn new phonemes and pronunciation, which starts in utero, but at least Englishman Hugh Laurie managed the rare feat of learning American pronunciation. Yet I have met English-speakers who moved to other countries whose pronunciation of English sounds as if they had learned English as a second language. I’m also certified as a teacher of English as a second language, and I can get students to learn different accents and phonemes pretty easily. Immersive teaching methods such as Dartmouth and European Direct work pretty well, but there’s nothing like being in a position where you risk death if you can’t speak the local language, as children are.

Previously, I used the word propaganda. Let’s look it up on Google:

Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a particular cause, doctrine, or point of view.

That entry is pretty good. I don’t know how much lexicographers know about radial categories, but information applies to all members of the category, while what comes after especially applies to the central prototype. I’d prefer propagated information, but nobody pays me to write dictionaries. It doesn’t cover all the details, but no dictionary ever does.

Now let’s try grammar.

The whole system and structure of a language or of languages in general, usually taken as consisting of syntax and morphology (including inflections) and sometimes also phonology and semantics.

That starts off OK, but the rest is not very good. First of all, this mentions syntax, which is part of a theory about grammar, not grammar itself. We need a digression on what syntax is.

The most relevant reference is a monograph Charles Morris published in 1938 on semiotics, the study of signs. You know what a sign is. This meaning is expanded somewhat. In the 19th century, Charles Peirce (pronounced purse) separated the study of language into three categories:

1. Syntactics: the relationship of signs to other signs

2. Semantics: the relationship of signs to what they signify.

3. Pragmatics: the relationship of signs to behaviors, originally elicited behaviors but now including talking.

4. Interpretactics: Ha! Fooled you! He had three, but I had to make this one up. It means the relationship of signs to processes in the brain or a computer to express and understand signs.

Note that these are all about the study of language, but, brains being what they are, it is easy to confuse studying something with the thing being studied. This is a function of rationality and rationalism, which I have already described. It doesn’t help that the word syntax comes from the 16th century, about the time people started talking about phrases and clauses and the like. This misled a lot of people to think that syntax is grammar. As we will see, grammar is a lot more complex than that, and all four of what I arrogantly call the Morris-Pepke Taxonomy are important.

One person who was fooled was Noam Chomsky. For full disclosure, I must admit that I have a personal grudge against him. I matriculated at MIT because I wanted to do computer science and linguistics, but I was only 16 when I made the decision, and like all 16-year-olds, I was even more stupid than I am now. It took a very short time for me to realize he was an idiot.

Still, there was a bright side. In the room with the MULTICS terminals was a single UNIX machine. Nobody else seemed to like it, so I spent a lot of time on it. It had Willie Crowther’s original adventure game, where you used commands of one or two words to go through some caves and steal things. It was primitive, and the game itself had to say that unlight was the opposite of light. (Extinguish might have been better.)

Later, I went to FSU because they had the PLATO system, which I had previously used at Sarasota High School.

This system, unlike anything going on at MIT, influenced the Xerox PARC project and pretty much everything about current personal computers. It also had good text processing, as it was intended for online lessons. I wrote an adventure game that could understand utterances such as pick up the lamp, put it on the table, and light it. I had no idea what I was doing, which turned out to be the right knowledge I needed.

What Isn’t Grammar?

FSU turned out not to be far enough away from Noam Chomsky. I took a Structural Linguistics class. Though, or perhaps because I was a bit contrary, the professor liked me and invited me to teach the class one day. I announced this, and another student suggested I do the most hated exercise, which I did in 14 lines of SNOBOL code.

The idea was to use Chomskyan philology (Chomsky was never empirical and so never counted as doing linguistics, which he admitted) to parse “The housekeeper PAST keep the gun in the drawer” and transform it to “Was the gun kept in the drawer by the housekeeper?” I made my code general enough also to do “Was Sy kept in the closet by Mrs. Borg?” as a proof of concept.

The first step in the Chomsky process is generative grammar. This is based on an old form of schoolchild torture known as diagramming sentences. The diagram of the source text looks like this:

Lower-case words are the words in the source text. Upper-case words are the parts of speech, except for PAST. That’s a little bit funny, because nobody talks like that, but it is part of Chomsky’s approach to put everything necessary for grammar in the syntax, which of course is impossible and wouldn’t work if it were possible. This is called phrase-structure or generative grammar.

Then there are two transformations, which rearrange the tree. The first produces “The gun was PAST keep in the drawer by the housekeeper.” The second rearranges that to “PAST is the gun keep in the drawer by the housekeeper?” A final step sort of sticks the PAST onto is and keep, producing was and kept. This is called transformational grammar.

It really only takes a glance to see this cannot be how people do language. When people pointed this out, Chomsky didn’t learn but rather switched from saying that something like this happened in the brain to saying it was idealized, because how language actually works is “not interesting.” I described this previously. Rationalists do not distinguish between their perception (I don’t find this interesting) and ostensibly objective statements (That is not interesting.)

Still, it’s obvious that people do not think up these trees and shift them around, let alone do it backward when understanding an utterance. For one thing, it would be way too difficult for a child to learn or a species to evolve. This was known, but Chomsky evaded the issue by supposing there was a Universal Grammar in humans alone, and it just sort of popped into existence somehow, even though everything hard to learn is also hard to evolve, and vice versa. Children simply adapt this inborn Universal Grammar to whatever language they learn to speak. I put simply in italics because I see no way this can be easier for a child than just learning a new grammar. It seems a lot like Cartesian dualism, which is unsurprising, as Chomsky wrote a book called Cartesian Linguistics, which critics pointed out was neither. If you can’t explain something, just give it a name nobody understands, such as soul or God or evolution or entropy, and most people will just let it go and think you’re smart. Some people enjoy this, but I do not.

What Grammar Is

Now I’ll describe the view of cognitive linguistics. I’m afraid I cannot do that without including some of my own research.

Cognitive linguistics works backward, starting with pragmatics, moving to semantics and then syntax when necessary. I start with interpretactics and then move on.

There are three components to grammar as I see it:

1. Proximity. Some words are closer together than others. There are only two directions in which to stick words onto other words. Language processing is sequential, and nearby words get stuck together automatically because the brain is juggling them at the same time. This is interpretactic. I like that ugly neologism because it suggests not only interpretation but tactics rather than strategy. It uses very short-term memory. At most it can handle short phrases.

2. Similarity. Words and short phrases have partial meaning. They can be stuck together in the brain even when they are farther apart by making use of semantics and pragmatics. This is more strategic than tactical. It makes use of layers of compound abstraction. It extends not only to sentences but paragraphs and complete volumes or even series of books.

3. Patterns. Some are idioms. Some are phrases or clauses that work almost as if they were single words. This is why a word is so hard to define. If I say McGuffin or a regular Jimmy Swaggart, it takes a huge amount of memorized, most of which comes from a culture, to understand me. Most slang, jargon, and the variation in how different generations talk works this way.

Grammar is not a thing either in the brain or in language itself. It is a property that emerges from the processes of expressing and understanding language. It did not evolve as such. Rather, a lot of different traits came together and work synchronistically to make the language facility.

The special sauce that makes the traits into the stew of language is nondeterminism. Back in the 1950s, when Chomsky started, there were pretty much only pen and paper or very slow computers. Top-down parsers are easy to write producing a single parse tree. Transformations are applied sequentially in a particular order. The brain, however, is highly nondeterministic.

I verified this about fifteen years ago with a Perl script I called The FNC, which stands for Functional Nondeterministic Cognition. (The theme song is “We Got the Funk” by Positive Force. The theme for the current iteration, The P/HUNC, is “Give Up the Func” by George Clinton, who is better than the other two Clintons together.) I continue my habit of using text adventure games, because the metaphysics is so easy to implement.

I was inspired by Jerome Feldman’s From Molecule to Metaphor. (Lee and Ellen of the Prison Book Program at the Lucy Parsons Bookstore were kind enough to send me a copy in political prison, which was so sweet of them it made me cry.) It claimed that it was impractical to parse a sentence all possible ways. When people say that, my first reaction is “Oh yeah?”

Take a sample sentence, such as “Create a ladder from the floor to the window in the north wall.” The FNC went through about 40,000 parsings. Using symmetry and dynamic programming, it culled these to about 200 plausible ones. It could do this even if it did not know what a ladder was. Each got an acceptability score based on minor problems it found in the text, mostly local. This produced a winning meaning. Some utterances got up to four winning meanings, and they were combined into a gestalt. If that wasn’t possible because the meanings conflicted, it detected a pun. The sense of acceptability or grammaticality emerged as this score. It did all this in about 100 milliseconds, comparable to fast reading speeds in humans.

Now let’s apply this to some classic problems in linguistics.

There’s something called a deictic which starts with there or here. Nobody has ever found a way to use Chomskyan ideas to go from a basic sentence to a deictic. Yet it is a very basic thing to say.

Consider a mother with a child. Daddy appears in the doorway. The mother says “There’s Daddy!” The child dutifully responds “Da Dada.” It’s a perfectly grammatical utterance, just one without words. It is more basic to the child than “Daddy is there!” from which it cannot be derived.

George Lakoff has a good if imperfect description in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (which Lee and Ellen also sent me). The first mistake he made was to separate deictics into locative and existential. This does not work, because locative deictics (there’s a man at the door) and existential deictics (there’s a secret cabal at the Vatican) have the same structure. A particularly interesting example Lakoff called the strange existential and I call the strange deictic:

There’s a man been shot.

This seems quite acceptable to me (though I find it somewhat disquieting that linguists use such violent examples). Everyone I tell seems to have no problem figuring out what it means.

One of the reasons AI sucks so hard is tokenization at the first stage, which is premature. In a simple system, there’s would be expanded into either there is or there has. This does not work.

* There is a man been shot.

* There has a man been shot.

What Lakoff claims is the basic sentence doesn’t quite work either:

% There has been shot a man.

This sounds like something Shakespeare might say.

In my model, what happens is that the utterance is parsed two different ways:

There is a man blah blah.

There has blah blah been shot.

The blahs wouldn’t work as well if there were only one option, but with two together, the gestalt from the cognitive blending seems much more acceptable. It has to be this way for unknown words and misheard words not to prevent partial understanding. This, in turn, is essential for learning language.

This process is quite similar to much political discourse. Let’s take anti-Semitism, which I can get away with talking about because I’m a Jew. Rabbi Spritzer of Reaching Out asked me a question when I was in political prison: why did Hitler go after assimilated Jews? It was a delight because nobody listens to prisoners. (If anybody had listened to my reports of denial of due process, and physical torture ten years ago, we might still have a constitutional democratic republic, but they didn’t. I don’t care because I’m already dead, but you’re not going to enjoy or maybe even survive the next few years. Sucks to be you; you should have paid attention a decade ago when it would have been a lot easier to fix, and I doubt you’ll pay attention now because it seems impossible to fix.) I wrote back with a description of the Uncanny Valley. I knew the rabbi understood me when he wrote back saying Jews fell into the Uncanny Valley and couldn’t climb out.

Let’s break down some of the cognitive processes behind anti-Semitism.

Jews are so different from us! They sometimes wear beanies, and they don’t do Christmas. Even worse, they’re so similar to us, so we can’t always tell them apart. They’re all Communists and also run the banks. They’re too damn smart but stupid like animals. They lend us money for our enterprises, and we hate them for it.

This is obviously contradictory, so it makes no sense by any logic. Yet completely contradictory ideas, taken together, reinforce each other. This is why Trump can get his followers to believe he never lies when he claims two completely opposite ideas. What opponents of Trump call derangement works spectacularly well for con artists, especially on people too rational or too stupid to keep two contradictory ideas in mind at once, if only to get a deeper understanding of how discourse works. Politics is complex, and there are polar opposite ideas competing all the time. Even communists buy stuff, and even capitalists want the government to give them money. Democrats call Republicans liars, the most preternaturally stupid thing they could do. One has to stop thinking rationally to survive the razzle-dazzle, which Trump is highly skilled at.

I leave as an exercise for the reader to come up with other examples from politics. There are so many it’s hard to know where to start. Right now, the Greater Left is upset with Chuck Shumer for caving. Even now, some are so rational they are coming up with suppositions that Schumer is playing 5D chess blindfolded. They argue that they are right, but this doesn’t matter, and they are missing the point. Only two things matter in politics, which is concerned with policy: (1) what eventually happens as a result of a policy, which is almost impossible to predict, and (2) what voters and influential people believe. When the redoubtable and reprehensible Ronald Reagan said “Facts are stupid things,” he had a point, and people should have paid attention to that as well.

To summarize, grammar is an emergent property of processes in the brain or in software that successfully emulates the brain. To think it’s a thing is a structural error. It doesn’t merely produce an erroneous model; it produces the wrong kind of model, one that conflates brain processes with the concepts the brain is working on. Like so much, this stems from rationality and rationalism, which structurally requires the idea of objective fact which simply does not exist. Grammar as traditionally construed and constructed is a mere heuristic that can be used for teaching purposes. It works pretty well for that purpose, but there is no there there.

This violates rational views which, on and off, have dominated for thousands of years. It is seldom possible to describe reality in the face of such widespread false beliefs about it. Because of this, I have to start with classical categorization. It’s wrong, but so many believe it, there are things to unlearn.

Classical categorization treats categories as sets. This was before set theory really gelled with Cantor, but sets they are. This started with the Socratics, especially Aristotle in the 300s BCE. (Pre-Socratics were a lot smarter.) It was significantly advanced by Descartes in the 1600s CE. It progressed along with first-order predicate logic and rationality, which focuses on such logic.

Classical categorization: A category is a set of elements, some outside your head. Each element has all of a set of attributes which define what belongs or does not belong to the category. You can use set-theoretical union, intersection, and differences of multiple categories to form more categories. This is what grammar is for.

The classical view can also be called the rational view. Rationalism (Descartes) and to a lesser extent rationality (Aristotle) focuses on first-order predicate logic (the kind Boolean computer operations usually do, which bright people figure out at about age seven). The main difference between Aristotle and Descartes is that the latter held that this kind of logic is the only kind of thought. Certainly after Descartes the three main laws of first-order binary predicate logic (identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle) have been called the Laws of Thought by rationalists, reflecting their belief that logic is thought. Objectivist Ayn Rand used these ostensible Laws of Thought as section headers in Atlas Shrugged.Because logic works the same no matter who does it, the properties that make up a category must be objective. They must be inherent in the Ding an sich, the hypothetical thing unto itself we perceive as through a glass, darkly, with only minimal mechanical processing in our heads. Perception must be exactly objective or at least good enough for conclusions to be universally intersubjective. The only meaning of language can be to code propositions neutrally without significant variation from cognition. Therefore, words and groups of words must define entities in the world outside our heads (a cat) and predicates (sat on a mat). This uses a general predicate (sat on Δ) which combined with an entity (Δ = a mat), produces a compound predicate (sat on a mat). Adding a copular subject (a cat) turns this into an proposition (a cat sat on a mat) which can be evaluated as true or false. Note the similarity to the Lambda Calculus of Alonzo Church, which models all mathematics and logic, not just first-order. Words such as a and the and plurals form more complex and selected categorization.

There’s a great deal more in rational thought, including all of the analytic philosophy of the past century and a half, but this is enough easily to see that classical categories are impossible. Here are some simple examples.

1. I have a toy frog. I bought it from Temu. It’s made of metal painted to look like a stylized ideal multicolored frog but doesn’t look like any particular frog. It’s made of metal. I wind it up and it jumps, pretty convincingly, until I have to wind it up again. According to classical categorization, the category toy frog must be the intersection of the category of toy and the category of frog. My toy frog is not in any such category, which cannot exist. It is clearly a toy, but it isn’t a frog, because frogs are not metal. The only way I could come up with a classical toy frog would be to combine part of a frog with some gears, like American McGee did with bunnies in Alice. I am too kind-hearted to do this; I like frogs too much even to eat their legs. This suggests that rationalists tend to be sociopaths. This is empirically true and also resonates culturally with every golem story ever written and now for real with the likes of ChatGPT. We already know too much rationality turns people into robots.

2. I’ve seen pictures of purple frogs. Purple frogs do not exist outside the head. Purple itself does not exist outside the head. It only exists in the brain. What is outside the head and enters the eyes consists of red and blue together. Something similar is true of grey. There is no grey light, only intensities of white light; the perception of grey results from some highly sophisticated brain operations dependent on context.

3. Around 2014 there were memes about something called The Dress, which in normal lighting appears blue and black but when overexposed in a photograph appears white and gold. Every photographer understands this rather easily. It would not have come as a surprise to anybody except that classical categorization has poisoned thought for over two millennia. It breaks rational applied logic for a dress to be either blue and black or white and gold. It would have to be something like ((blue ∧ black) ∨ (white ∧ gold)) If you then take what you have to from rationality that (black = ¬ white), it follows that The Dress is ((blue ∧ ¬white) ∨ (white ∧ gold)), which reduces to (blue ∨ gold), which logic is not the category of The Dress. It doesn’t help to substitute ∨ for ∧ and just makes matters worse. Even if you get something that looks better, it’s not possible to come up with a single truth value for The Dress is blue unless you define blue as meaning partially or completely blue, which defeats all three laws.

4. Also see quantum mechanics and the two-slit experiment. If you think of an electron rationally as an entity, you must conclude it either goes through Slit 1 or Slit 2. It can’t go through both, because that’s against the Law of Non-Contradiction. It must go through either or break the Law of the Excluded Middle. Either way, you’re sunk. Given that the entire universe is all fundamentally quantum (classical physics is mere approximation), any possible rational metaphysics and therefore classical categorization is ruled out.

You can find many more examples just by poking around. So-called optical illusions. Any case where rationally opposites in language aren’t opposites in use. Horror movies. Detective stories. Contranyms. Those who like reading a lot can read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff.

Many have tried to fix the problems, sometimes even developing alternate systems of logic, like Lofti Zedeh’s fuzzy. None of them has worked very well, except for the radial categories of cognitive linguistics. Let’s try those out.

Cognitive linguistical categorization: A category is a construct of the brain. It’s based on perceived similarities that are built largely unconsciously by the brain. It can be used to filter entities outside the brain, but only imperfectly. It varies based on context, individual and social differences, time, and other factors.

The most common is the radial category. A central prototype (often a stereotype) represents an ideal member of the category. Other less central subcategories stick out radially from this (in drawings) and often require modifier words, but how the modifiers work is not limited to set theory.

Now we can look at my toy frog again. It’s very close to my basic prototype of a toy. Wind-up toys seem to me more toy-like than battery-operated or unpowered toys. Your experience may differ. So it’s a central toy to me. It’s not quite as central as a frog, because it doesn’t eat flies, and the noise it makes is unfroggy. (See the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.) Nevertheless, it hops pretty well, and it looks pretty froggy, especially when it’s all blurry from jumping. So it’s similar but not perfectly to my central prototype of a frog learned from experience catching and releasing them in Florida as a kid. Except that I didn’t catch frogs; I caught toads, which in Florida are a lot more like the central prototype of frogs than are toads. Florida toads are more froggy than some actual frogs!

Your experience may differ, but I think you and I would still easily agree on what a toy frog is. We’d likely agree on so much as to say that we hold the same meaning for the term toy frog.

Why the category toy frog seems natural and obvious, even though the frog part is weak, has to do with how brains assemble gestalts from parts. It’s way too advanced for now, but I may get to it later. Basically, the toy part is so strong that the frog part does not conflict enough, the gestalt is strong. When there is more conflict between the meanings, the gestalt is weak. Thus, time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. (This is a classic pun in linguistics. It has four broad meanings, but I did not know of two of them until I simulated understanding on a computer. Basically, if Studebaker Hawk accidentally went into the TARDIS, the Aunt-Jemima-Syrup on his thighs would attract time flies. Add to that the arrow of Apollo in Battlestar Galactica, and you get a serious metaphorical system.)

There are a lot of experiments to support this idea. Sparrows are birds. So are ducks, chickens, penguins, and ostriches. Swallows are more central than ducks, chickens, penguins, and ostriches. Even though all are equally birds, some are more birdy than others. One experiment told people that on a certain island, one kind of bird had a disease. They were asked how likely they thought it would spread to another kind of bird. When told the swallows had the disease, they thought it likely to spread to the ducks. When told the ducks had the disease, they thought it unlikely to spread to the sparrows. That’s because to most people swallows are more similar to the central prototype of a bird (more birdy), even though both are equally in the category. (People who grow up with different experiences of birds can be reasonably expected to have somewhat different perception. I bet Australians are wild.)

Often the category is more complex than a single-prototype radial category. Consider the categories human and ape. There can be multiple prototypes that can interact in complex ways. The central prototype of hidden is partially hidden if you are playing a hidden object game but completely hidden if you are talking about the singularity at the center of a black hole.

Multiple categories can also interact. By any reasonable meaning, phenetic or cladistic, humans are apes, but apes aren’t humans. (See also the need inappropriately to reduce the copula to equality for rational purposes.) That is, the category ape is broad enough to include all extant humans and primates without prehensile tails. Humans are therefore non-central apes.

Yet humans don’t like to think of themselves as apes. (I’ve never understood why; I’ve known a few chimpanzees I like more than I like a lot of humans.) So there must be something that distinguishes apes from humans, and this must be used to keep humans out of the ape category. Plus, apes are monkeys (Old World Monkeys), even though the category monkey generally excludes apes. It works fine with neurons.

Rationality has clearly held back understanding of evolution. It also held back understanding of linguistics, in the person of one Noam Chomsky, who is so rational the Encyclopaedia Britannica uses his picture in their entry on rationalism. If Chomsky had not made empirical statements while simultaneously eschewing empirical investigation, linguistics would not have been held back at least a quarter century. The psycholinguists were on the right track; they just needed to wait for more (or some) computing power. But they were fooled by Chomsky, who promoted a robotic shortcut that only appears to work with oversimplified examples. (I could have written appears only, which I also mean.)

We’re now in a position to deepen the understanding of the term climate change. I’ll start with descriptions in words that are good enough. The three terms have two different central prototypes.

• Global Warming: Human activity is increasing the overall temperature of the biosphere at an alarming rate.

• Global Heating: Just like global warming, but worse.

• Climate Change: Sometimes it’s too cold, and sometimes it’s too warm, but when it is, if you have enough money you can just change your climate by moving. You can also use an air conditioner, many of which say climate on the box.

Almost everybody can simply see this, though few can get into how brains work well enough to denote it. Rational people, in particular, are structurally unable to describe it. Even while accurately using the data, they can generate a plethora of statements about the actual data which when viewed as encoding propositions, all have the same truth value for either term. A corollary of rationalism is that if two propositions have the same truth value (some of the more smug philosophers add “in all possible worlds”) then the statements have the same meaning.

Thus,

• X has resulted in an average warming of so-and-so percent.

• X is due to human activity.

• X can be controlled by reducing greenhouse gases.

• X is only partly a result of the activity of the sun

And so on and so forth. In each of these, X works equally well in a propositional sense if you set X to global warming, global heating, or climate change. Rationalists are forced either to conclude that (1) they have the exact same meaning or (2) they should stop being so damned rational. Nealy all choose the former.

If we aren’t so blinkered as to reject cognitive linguistics entirely because of rational prejudice, it leads to some deeper questions. If statements aren’t entirely propositions made of predicates and named entities, what then are they?

Metaphor is all we have.

–Friedrich Nietzsche

They’re metaphors, for the most part. Aristotle wrote about analogy, which he claimed was a surface property of only some kinds of poetic language. We have already seen how rationalists consider two terms identical in meaning for idiotic reasons. I’ll let them have the word analogy, but metaphor is deeper. It is not only in language; it is at the very heart of almost all cognition.

Our plauge of frogs is even worse these days, since protesters have donned inflatable frog costumes. Let’s ignore that for now.

The term frog is ultimately a metaphor of experiences (sights, muscle movement, tactile and auditory sensations) that are associated with the term frog in an individual. That’s a bit vague and may seem tautological, so let’s break it down into two pieces. Reductionism is always dangerous, but in this case I think it results in better understanding.

One part is semiosis. This is the significance of signs. We have the term frog as a symbol, an ideal image of a frog as an icon, and the feeling of a frog peeing on one’s hand as an index. These are the three most popular kinds of signs from the sixty or so Charles Peirce came up with in the 19th Century. All these are metaphors of our experience with entities we call frogs. Frogs aren’t really entities in the world (what’s red and green and goes ‘round and ‘round?), but they’re close enough in our experience to talk about them. (It’s pretty safe to refer to entities in what I laughingly call the real world if we don’t insist we know exactly what they are. Compare Pokemon, bouba, and kiki.)

What does frog signify? This is hard to get a handle on. First it is in the context of a human brain, and they can be different, so we have to try to find a largely intersubjective ideal. But an ideal of what? Frog signifies a pattern of neural activity in a brain. (One corollary is that frog signifies something that differs between human and frog brains. To a frog, another frog may be something to mate with, a property not common in humans, though I have been tempted by some protest frogs.)

I can’t even start to characterize the neural pattern until and unless I write a graduate part of this series. Still, it seems quite reasonable to presume such a thing exists, though it takes a human to categorize it. The practice in cognitive linguistics is to call this metaphor, a term vague enough to promote understanding.

Then there’s the question of what this ineffable mental construct, metaphor, stands for. It stands, not for our experiences directly, but our memories of experiences, processed so much that we cannot say what they are outside our heads. It seems perfectly reasonable to presume such a thing is there simply because people’s reported experiences with frogs have a lot of similarities. Herpetologists, batrachologists, biologists, artists, composers, physicists, ecologists, chemists, and many others have particular ideas of what frogs are in the world. They differ, so there can be many views, like those of Mount Fuji.

We have to stretch our understanding of radial categories a bit using this information. A central prototype of a category is not an individual instance. It’s an abstraction. One could think of it as an abstraction and blending of all one’s experience with frogs. Or one could think of it as an abstraction of all things outside our heads that give us those experiences: the real frogs and the toy frogs and English-speakers saying “ribbit” and Spanish-speakers saying “coqui” to describe what noise frogs make. We could imagine some ideal of a frog, but figuring out what it would precisely mean to say that is itself a research topic.

Let’s use this to look at a couple of political words: liberal and conservative. First we note they are not opposites. Put most simply, the opposite of conservative is progressive. The former prefers the old, the latter the new and untried. These preference override the idea of whether it’s any damned good or not, but this is obvious from politics and need not be argued. The opposite of liberal is authoritarian or generous or profligate. Though the last two are linked by what is called frame negation, the first seems pretty unconnected. There are many more possible opposites, but even this oversimplification is more complex and complicated than political people realize.

The Right hates liberals. So does the Left. See, for example, progressives, who have no greater or beloved spitting words than liberal. But what does this mean other than that they are obstructively emotional, probably because they rationally deny they have emotion and therefore are slaves to it? (The only reason I continue to watch Cenk Uygur is for a drinking game. Any time he shouts, take a sip. Any time you see that vein in his neck throb, drain your glass. And if he squirts from an aneurism, you drain the bottle. Do not use alcohol, and do not play if you have a kidney condition. Of course, Cenk has always been a grifter on the Right, which is kind of the point.)

1. Liberalism(1) was the basis of modern democracy. It respects individual liberties more than most ideologies. It’s based on rationalism and is thus stupid in many ways, but I’m writing a book part exploring how to support democracy and liberties with science. (Preview: it works a lot better.)

2. Liberalism(2) is generosity if you like it and profligacy if you don’t, as in liberal spending.

3. Liberalism(3) is an attitude of live and let live.

There are, of course, many additional meanings, but this is enough to show complexity beyond rationality.

After 1964, when Goldwater lost, conservatism vanished, and politically, everybody wanted to be a liberal. Nevertheless, people still liked money. Groups on the Right united in their hatred of liberals, even though they meant entirely different groups by the term. Especially given the many meanings, the ambiguity helped them win.

First, politically, they focused on Liberalism(3), which was common in the 1960s. The Left said, “do your own thing.” The Right was in favor of authoritarian uniformity, specifically hurting anyone who did not conform to their ideal of the One True Way to Be. The Right was obsessed with long hair on men, which was more radical than their current transphobia and obviously in conflict with how they depicted Jesus. Still, the public still remembered Hitler, and self-identified liberals were against all he represented.

Reasonable people can disagree, but I think that Liberalism(3) vanished during the 1970s and was gone by the 1990s, but the abreaction persists in anti-woke sentiment. Liberalism(3) can be called woke, but that is not the term’s central meaning. Wokeness started off meaning aware of the plight of black people; woke is simply African-American Standard English for awake or awakened. This is a very good thig, as black people face certain problems unique to being black.

The change in meaning can be attributed to a habit of the Left. They take something that happens to black people and construct a narrative and analysis around it, which are usually pretty good. Then they add minorities to the category. While these are ill specified at first, the list grows, until it’s anybody who is not a WASP. (The subcategory Hispanic came after the 1960s; Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers wrote admiringly of the use of white South Americans as servants, a category that is now considered self-contradictory. Then they add WASP women, resulting in a majority category they treat as one big minority. This results in privileges for WASP women in particular, which function as privileges for the WASP men they usually know. This is isomorphic to what the Right wants.

In any event, Liberalism(3) is as dead as the Freedom Riders, black and white, murdered and mixed in a shallow grave.

One example is the ACLUF (American Civil Liberties Union Foundation), formerly the ACLU. The ACLU was Liberal(3) from the 1960s until a few days after 9/11. They supported universal constitutional rights, including the freedom of speech. (Before that, the ACLU required its members to sign McCarthyite pledges. Before that, they were a particularly racist union-advocacy group). The ideological shift was documented by Wendy Kaminer in Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU. They later changed their name to the ACLUF about the time they decided not to support freedom of speech for people whose politics they disagree with, the First Amendment be turned into so much toilet paper. Yet most people are unaware of the changes and still use the category of ACLU to mean what it meant the previous millennium under Ira Glasser.

The current Liberal(3) organization is the Center for Constitutional Rights. They were the ones to secure habeas corpus for Gitmo detainees. The ACLU had their fists up their noses for three years. Then they took out a full-page ad claiming credit for the work of the CCR and still kept their fists in their noses. See Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, by Wendy Kaminer. The Left overwhelmingly approves of this, as evinced by the fact that the ACLUF receives 20 times as much donated money as the CCR.

I do give the ACLUF credit for stepping up to the plate with respect to ICE. Perhaps it is time to consider what they do as a positive overall good. But that is mere politics. For the current discussion, the Left categorizes the ACLUF (which they still call the ACLU out of sheer apathetic ignorance) as the Right categorizes Donald Trump. They are both ideals of perfect goodness, and what they actually do is entirely irrelevant. The main difference is that support for Trump is waning because of what he is actually doing. The support for the ACLUF on the Left is based on utter unwavering faith like the religious faith the Left accuses the Right of having. The Left has proudly, arrogantly, and angrily impervious to facts for a quarter century, and there is no indication there will ever be a change. This pig-headedness stems directly from rationalism and classical categorization. Rationalism treats facts as either personal observation or authoritarian statements from an institution, while denying that there are substantial general cognitive processes to construct a fact from experience.

As a result, the Left frequently calls Trump the first postmodernist President. This is correct, but the Left does not mean this kindly, despite the fact that a former Left created postmodernism in the first place, albeit first as poststructuralism. Thus, the Left insists upon a completely stupid concept of what the category postmodern even is. Nevertheless, Trump is both postmodern and a postmodernist, albeit an evil one who may just destroy the world. So the Left can make a perfectly true proposition even though the terms are completely out of touch with reality. This destroys the rational functional truth-value theory of meaning more obviously than Hilary Putnam proved in 1980.

Most of the political rhetoric by the Right, at first, was about Liberalism(2). They focused on people’s desire to have more money and blamed taxation for their impecunity. This was, of course, a lie: every President on the Right at least since Reagan has massively increased the deficit. By the end of Bush pere, government profligacy, which had been small before Reagan, was at a peak it had not achieved since the time of Prohibition, a progressive program. Because conservatism was at least severely weakened and possibly functionally wiped out by Goldwater’s loss, the Right took an idea from the Lochner Era, neoliberalism, and called it conservatism. This was clear from the publication of the Powell Memo in 1971. Neoliberalism is a kind of antisocialism. As in the authoritarian socialism of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, governments tightly regulate markets, but while authoritarian socialists at least pretend to try to distribute wealth equally, neoliberals openly use authoritarian government control to promote wealth inequality. Voters bought the idea with Reagan.

This is reflected in the category of tax relief, one of George Lakoff’s favorite exemplars. This frames taxation as an affliction rather than as an investment in infrastructure or dues for enjoying free benefits nobody on the Right is willing to give up. Framing taxation as an affliction means that anybody who imposes taxes is a villain and anybody who gets rid of them is a hero. Are you for or against the President’s track relief program? It doesn’t matter which you choose. By answering at all, you agree that tax is an affliction.

In the mean time, the Left still wanted corporobux for their campaigns and so were functionally neoliberal while pretending to be liberal. So “conservatives” and “liberals” have both been neoliberal. It’s true that Clinton balanced the budget (for weak meanings of balance), but this merely paid for the militarism of Bush fils and had no beneficial permanent effect

Within the past ten years or so, and especially since Trump II, it has become obvious that the Right focuses its hatred and destructiveness on Liberalism(1). I am not entirely sure this was a sea change rather than a recrudescence of a latent desire always on the Right, as Liberalism(1) is most properly considered the opposite of authoritarianism. In any event, the very liberal concepts–rule of law, due process, the constitution—once defended, sometimes in good faith, by conservatives—are all under attack by the Right.

The Right has achieved so much by being irrational, which type of thought conflicts with Liberalism(1).

Even though I’ve left out much, including classical liberalism and libertarianism, my head is swimming trying to keep this straight. There is a distinct possibility I haven’t gotten it straight. This does not matter. Any correction, argument, or elaboration would be even further from what could possibly fit with rationalism. It would immediately be subject to the law of diminishing fleas.

Every word or construction in every language is associated with a category using metaphor. Rationalists think this a fallacy, because they refuse to recognize that categories are mental constructs, not natural kinds. There is no point in explaining the facts, as their fact-processing neural mechanisms specifically rule the possibility out of bounds. (The very terms fallacy and validity are tells of damaged, ignorant, primitive thought.)

The Left is too engaged with their desire for others to believe they are intelligent, therefore rational, even to seek to learn why the irrational Right beats them far more than would be possible if people voted on issues and programs. This is why the Left calls the Trump administration incompetent. They know that the regime has been preternaturally successful in a surprisingly short period of time in damaging Liberalism(1). But they use the term incompetent to describe massive if evil success to protect their own egos, which they factiously and fractiously hold to be more important than winning or even improving things.

I have little hope this will change. Even if I publish my alternate scientific basis for democracy and all it entails, I suspect they will simply drool and blink at most. Still, changing the Left is an essential factor of preventing the Right from killing everyone who doesn’t look like them, which eventually becomes everyone, because no two people are identical. Rwandan Hutus killed Rwandan Tutsis with ten-cent Chinese machetes at three times the rate Hitler killed Jews, and Rwandans admit they cannot tell Hutus and Tutsis apart in general. It took the strange bedfellows of the United States and Russia to stop Hitler; nobody could stop Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

I don’t see a deus ex machina saving the United States. If it is to be saved, we have to do it. The first step is to learn how to talk.

UPDATE 14 NOVEMBER 2025

I figured it out. I’m not switching sides. This is not to mean I think the Greater Left, especially the media and influencers, have collectively grown the brains evolution gave a banana, a Cavendish banana at that. I’m leaving the text intact,

For months now, I have been wondering why I have bothered. Nothing can help me, as I’m already dead, and I’ve gotten used to it. It would be moral turpitude to save Americans, the overwhelming majority of which so obviously want to die in ovens. That leaves only the few who want to live more than they want to die of an aneurism, such as people with disabilities, including the sixth or seventh One True Love of my life, Ashe Lewis.

We had become estranged over the past few months. I couldn’t endure it. So I blew up at Ashe, which I deeply regret, and Ashe did something sneakily abusive that left me hæmorrhaging. It’s more than a week later, and we managed to do the scorpion stinger-stopping mating dance long enough to talk. It turns out Ashe has been dealing with enough severe stressors to kill a mortal human, but I didn’t know because we weren’t talking enough.

Everything is Nu-Perfect again. We even have a plan to make it so that tensions can bleed so I don’t have to blow up again. Maybe it won’t work, but as we progress, perhaps my trust will grow so strong that it will overcome the traumatic terror of abandonment because when I was physically tortured into federal prison because of what I wrote against the government and every single person I ever knew forsook me therefor.

Instead, I’ll take it out not only on Republicans, Democrats, and the deeply moronic and incurious idiot morons on the Greater Left who believe The Great Half-White Hope, Obama, never went to the toilet in his life by definition. No more sehr geherter Herr Doktor netter Kerl. To them I say you’re helping the right because, as Frank Zappa said, “you can’t even speak your own fucking language.” All y’all are literally my mortal enemies, fiends, and while I can survive and even tolerate being killed, Ashe my Regenerator is off-limits. Nice smug life ya got there; it’d be a shame if you were sent to prison unfairly as you didn’t mind happening to me, and that would be so easy to arrange. This is your only warning.

For now, that means Adam Mockler, too. Someone whose parents were fifteen when he was born, who could still be in prison if their politics troubled the government, has no business pumping up the public to give the government permission to use unconstitutionally vague sex offenses as a pretext for political imprisonment.

I doubt anyone noticed I’ve been absent for a couple of months. Adam Mockler invited me to Substack, and it took me a while to figure out how the algorithm promotes sociopathy in the Notes. When I joined, I would have described myself as clearly on the Left politically. I have no plans to go back to Notes.

Because of reasons, some personal, I have re-evaluated my entire ideology. My politics is fundamentally the same. I want most of the things the Left wants, but this does not mean I am on the Left, nor does it mean I should be. Perhaps my personal properties would produce more progress Left if I applied them to the Right. Perhaps I should be on the Right and not with those who lost 2024 too stupidly for words. After all, I registered as a Republican, the better to hurt them in the primaries and vote against them in the main election. Tribalism notwithstanding, especially Left, it is possible to agree with goals and disagree over strategy and tactics. It is even possible to disagree over strategy and tactics because one agrees with goals.

I now report some of my thoughts; I know not why. Right now, as I found the Left impervious to reason they could otherwise have used to win, I guess I’m trying to fire a neuron on the Left indirectly. It seems equally likely to me that I’m currying favor with the Right because they have the power, and I want to manipulate them to use their power for ends of the Left. Perhaps I’m serious. Perhaps I’m ha-ha only serious. Perhaps I’m ha-ah only ha-ha only serious, but seriously, folks. I do think a lot of voters thought similar things, causing the loss in November 2024. I also think the Left might win if they thought about it, though so far they seem uninterested in or hostile toward thinking.

I’m using Right and Left as general terms. Of course what I say does not apply to every single member, but I’m trying to hit a sweet spot. When something overwhelms a group, the exceptions are negligible politically even if there are many or you are one of them. I don’t talk about the Center, because it doesn’t exist. It’s a statistical abstraction like how the average person has more than one but fewer than two legs. (I guess I, at about 1 ⅞ legs, am about average.) Moderate is an advanced topic beyond the scope of this work and more suitable for cognitive psycholinguistics. I also am not too fussy about using Leftist or Left-Leaning, because the complexity is not needed. I use Left and Right as singular and plural after the British mode.

This is just the introduction. I may write more in sharper detail. Right now I’m just plain tired of brickbats from the Left for offering information they don’t have the brains to learn from. I have plenty of anecdotes I may or may not tell. For now, I’m going to adumbrate.

Here are a few bald statements. Perhaps someone will be pissed off enough at them to give me some evidence there is any point in diving deeper.

1. The Right is all about authority; the left equality. The Right values exceptional smart people and pays them a lot of money for ideas within their limited preconceived ideology. The Left snots on the idea of exceptional merit. Then they speak and do like the average fool, which prevents success.

2. At Left rallies, I go up to people and say, “If there’s one thing Democrats don’t know how to do, it’s talk.” Everyone agrees, except those on the Left with political power, who sing the praises of populism so they can be in the elite authority and keep their equals out. The Left does not see how transparent they are.

3. The racism and sexism on the Right is bad, but it is nowhere as bad as the racism and sexism on the Left. I’m not talking about reverse racism and -sexism here; I’m talking about traditional racism and sexism against minority groups and women, which add up to a big majority.

4. The transphobia on the Right is bad, but the crypto-transphobia on the Left hurts more trans people more in its dishonestly insidious way. The Right is completely wrong about gender and sex, but the Left is even more completely wrong. The Right understands what I mean by more completely.

5. For reasons supported by the prior, the Left lies more than the Right. This is impressive, as the Right lies a lot, and it takes some work to lie more than they do.. But the Left lies in a particularly lying way that lies that it is not a lie. This is more intelligent but worse.

6. The Left likes to accuse people of false moral equivalence. The Left does this particularly when it’s really factual, procedural, or strategic equivalence and is quite accurate. Switching a factual argument to a moral one is in bad faith, and the Left loves this bad faith..

7. The Left likes to think of itself as moral and the Right immoral. This prevents the only view the Left could use to win by understanding the Left and Right to have different moral systems and figuring out how to shift between them. The Left also does not understand there are more than two moral systems, which is why a lot of black and Hispanic people voted for Trump in 2024..

8. Broke people can walk into a Right church and get help. The Left has little to answer this, preferring to bury those in need with bureaucracy so the Right can blame them.

9. I just bought a gallon of milk for $2.53 and a dozen eggs for $1.97. I saw gas for $2.65. Prices are coming down. Of course, they’re only coming down because they were up in the first place largely due to the Right, but the Left never frames it that way. The Left just calls people liars for reporting the actual recent change in cost. People correctly conclude the Left is lying to accuse the Right of lying.

10. The crazy nut-jobbery of the Right, such as opposition to vaccination, was pioneered by and for a time almost exclusively believed on the Left. The Right went the same way the Left tried true.

11. There is a pretty strong statistical correlation between Tylenol and autism. I can explain why this, while perfectly factual, doesn’t matter and does not support the conclusion that Tylenol causes autism, but the Left simply calls it a lie and accuses the Right of being the deranged ones.

12. The Left is rational, while the Right is irrational. That means the left takes the word of a religious fanatic who thought he could think God and reality into existence and ontology, while the Right does not. This is one reason why the Right listens and talks a lot better than the Left, which is why they win. It also puts the Left out of touch with reality with their alternate facts, which idea they got from the RIght. So it goes both ways.

13. Trump said the Epstein ballroom wouldn’t damage the main building. When Trump demolished the East Wing, which is not the main building, the Left said that Trump did demolish part of the main building and then lied. The Left is oblivious to the possibility that there are many voters who notice slime like this.

14. Speaking of Epstein, Adam Mockler, who invited me to Substack originally, said in interview that his parents had him when they were both 15. Adam’s parents are therefore guilty of a contact sex offense that could have sent them to federal prison for Adam’s entire life, if the feds had objected to their politics. The Left cannot see how this informs their practice of saying underage or minor girls and focusing on the admittedly utterly tragic woman who was 17 at the time.

15. Speaking of which, the age of consent in Canada at the time was between 12 and 14 depending on circumstances. The Left supports all things Canadian. I would advise them to make an exception, but when I did that, someone on the Left snottily challenged me. It took me about five minutes to provide proof, which was ignored. The Left does not even want to be credible, and there is no point in saying anything to them.

16. Also, the age of consent in Japan was 12. They raised it to 13 for a while. They’ve recently raised it to 16, which is still too low to fit with the framing of the Left.

17. Speaking also of framing, the Left goes primate fertilizer over how Ghislene Maxwell can do yoga in prison. First, Maxwell could do yoga at the previous spot, which wasn’t a camp. Second, exercise is mandated by the Eighth Amendment, though few jails provide. Third, yoga is particularly protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the Left thinks is about promoting only Christianity.

18. Left states have less and fewer resources for the homeless than Right states do.

19. Left states have more income inequality than Right states.

20. The Right has no empathy, but the Left has no compassion or sympathy. Empathy is more important for personal interaction, but compassion and sympathy are more important for politics.

21. The Right hates more openly and obviously and thus less dangerously than the Left.

22. The Right starves people for money they spend in well funded cities. The Left takes advantage of this by living in those cities, but they never acknowledge the starving their NIMBY lifestyles rely upon.

23. The Left is responsible for the continued use of drugs for political oppression, though Nixon came up with the idea. See Gonzales v. Raich (2005). The Left is also responsible for the replacement of marihuana with unconstitutionally vague sex offenses for political oppression and imprisonment. See prior but also Susan Brownmiller on Emmett Till.

24. As Aloe Cera Jackson of the DC Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee wrote to me, the Left hates itself. We also agreed the Left is fractious and factious because they prefer to knock each other down rather than work together to succeed against the Right.

25. The Right restricts abortion, while the Left does not. I like the Left for doing that, but there’s a problem. The Left is unable to see that restricting abortion increases abortion. So is the Right, but it is a lot easier to be heard by the Right. I’m anti-anti-abortion because I’m anti-abortion, but the Left overall is not smart enough to use that rhetorically, though they occasionally say it performatively.

26. The Left also fails to understand the source of the Right objection to abortion. I do not share the views of the Right, but I understand them. The Left does not, the net effect of which is that they help the Right restrict abortion by being distracted by squirrels. Nor does the Left exhibit a desire to learn.

27. The Left prematurely abandons thinking. Once they conclude a problem as resulting from a shibboleth such as classism, racism, or sexism, they stop drilling. They do this because it is good enough to point fingers but does not require the hard work of analyzing the system, let alone trying to change it.

28. The Right is overtly trying to destroy universities, science, and scholarship in the United States. I oppose this. I also oppose how the Left is trying to rot universities from the inside. I’m not saying the Left is worse, but I am saying the Left rejects any discourse about how to improve universities beyond the minimum they have decided is sufficient. They call it whataboutism. They’re so suicidal!

29. Anybody who accuses another of mansplaining wouldn’t know Good Faith were she to sit on their face and shit in their mouth.

That’s enough to think about without evidence that anybody gives a shit, so I’m stopping now. I hope at least I can offend somebody.

I’ll get to the nuts and bolts next post. For now, I want to give examples of Cognitive Linguistic analyses of political language. Everyone should be able to understand these. Experienced writers should be able to do analyses as well, but this skill takes a lot of years. Cognitive Linguistics can give you a range of effective tools that work more quickly.

I was invited to Substack by Adam Mockler. I decided it would be a good place to focus on Cognitive Linguistics for political speech. There are many other uses—I personally want to use it to build steampunk-looking robots to take over the world, which is only kinda political—but here I focus more on conventional politics. My purpose here is not to indoctrinate or argue but rather to focus on the process of political speech itself.

I go to a lot of protests. I don’t march or chant; that is too much like a mob to me. Instead, I wander around randomly and talk to people. One of the things I usually say always gets that kind of smile and nod people who have been trying to say it forever give when someone else does:

If there’s one thing Democrats don’t know how to do, it’s talk.

Democrats will occasionally say they have a messaging problem, which is some serious quod erat demonstrandum right there. Nobody who knows how to talk would use messaging that way. Let’s say you were watching a movie, and someone behind a desk said, “I’ll send Vinnie a message.” Would you think Vinnie would be particularly happy about that, or would you think more in terms of baseball bats used for purposes other than baseball? It seems kinda sus for me.

Then there’s the religious version, where a message is a sermon or platitude or a homily (yes, they really call them those names), something many vaguely remember as a kid with great suffering. When you blend all these together, the meaning (at least in the denotative way) of message is not that far off from propaganda. Except maybe your side likes the former and the other side likes the latter, unless it’s the other way around. Something like that.

It’s so easy to use another word such as talk or communicate or speak or write. Everyone knows these words, but for some reason, Democrats zoom in on the term message every single time. They also have a tendency to get defensive and pissy and the very idea that another word might be better. This is an important reason why Democrats lose.

Congratulations! You have survived your first Cognitive Linguistic analysis.

Political Speech

I’ve tried to pick good and bad examples from both Red and Blue sides. In reality, there are many more good examples of cognitive linguistics on the Red side and many more bad examples on the Blue side.

Yes, you read right. Republicans are way better at talking.

Are your fingers twitching to tell me I’m full of it? That Trump’s speech is deranged and stupid and ineffective and you just want to call his supporters deplorables and use MAGA as a spitting term? Because your rational mind knows for a fact that the way to win elections is to insult voters as much as possible?

Guess what! You’ve just been chumped. Republicans respond well to how Trump talks. He seems like he’s just this guy, you know? Sure he makes mistakes, but don’t we all? His goofiness, contradictions, and all the rest give the impression he’s just this guy, you know? This endears him to his base, who then vote for him. (There is also a reason saying contradictory things works, but I’ll get to that later.

Democrats don’t win because they like to talk as if they were a Disney audioanimatronic figure of George Washington or something. That makes them feel all superior. Republicans see this, and it makes them resent Democrats for lording it over them. They know they only need the Bible. They don’t read it, but there’s always a preacher who shouts at them and tells them what it says, or rather, what they say it says, which is true by definition. They love this stuff and pay money to get it once or even twice a week.

What makes you proud of your intellectualism, they see as elitism. Democrats are not going to win by doubling down on this terrible speech, which is all they seem to want to do.

You’re supposed to look down on Republicans while they stroll away with a win. It worked pretty well in 2024. That’s what they want. Liberals comply without question. Progressives comply twice as hard without question and look down at Liberals for not trying. Sure, all that voter suppression didn’t hurt Republicans, but one can only steal an election if it’s close enough to steal in the first place.

The 2000 Presidential Election

Democrats didn’t learn a thing from 2000. I think it’s been well established that the Supreme Court stole the election. I’d go so far to say that I believe the reason they stole it was so that Sandra Day O’Connor could retire under a Republican. Some may find that controversial, so I won’t go into it. It isn’t necessary anyway.

Al Gore was like, “as you can see from cell XQJ-37 of my spreadsheet, it’s 3.2 instead of 3.1, which accelerates the framdoodle retarding the gofabulator deflating the sclobeenie index which will cause hoojimongle for all.” George W. Bush was like, “Hyulk hyulk hyulk. That guy must have invented the calculator. My guy, well, he makes $50,000, and what he’s going to see is…” This made what would have been a shoo-in for Al Gore if he knew how to talk into something stealable.

One basic finding of Cognitive Linguistics is that different people and voting blocs will respond to language differently. This is not merely disagreement. The very meaning of a piece of language can change based on anything and everything else in the brain. Democrats looked at Gore and felt good and all intellectual, unlike those Bushies who were uneducated scum. Domo arigato Mr. Roboto, they said.

What about Bush? Unlike his father, he was a Yankee aristocrat. As George Lakoff pointed out, when he started in politics, he never made a grammatical error or won. Then he learned to affect a hyulk hyulk hyulk goladang persona, complete with speech that sound vaguely bucolic but isn’t any identifiable natural form of speech. He put on a much better show. Republicans loved it. Democrats called him stupid. Then they nominated another Mr. Roboto, John Kerry, just as they prefer Messrs. Roboto.

Of course, they didn’t nominate a Mr. Roboto in 2000. They nominated a Ms. Audioanimatronic with a voicebox that really needed maintenance.

The Trump-Down

I call this example the Trump-down. It goes a little bit like this:

We have to kill all others we gotta do it.

This is a pattern Trump repeated time and time again before and during his 2016 Presidency. There are two sentences. The first is stated emphatically. Immediately, without a comma, is a quiet confirmation with a lowering voice.

What would happen if only the first sentence were there?

We have to kill all others.

The mind would scamper. There would be all sorts of questions. Who, exactly are others? Why do we have to kill them?

The closing we gotta do it derails the train of thought, and the lowered tone telegraphs that the matter has been seconded. Critical thinking is quelled. When you hear over and over again, it will be more familiar and less alarming, and you’ll remember not thinking it important enough the last time you heard it. You’ll just think Trump is deranged for repeating himself, which is exactly the wrong thing to think.

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton got into trouble for these words on national television.

Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss L_______. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.

The first time I heard these words, I had a hearty laugh. The next day I, all smiles, said to a fairly Blue friend, “Clinton admitted to having an affair.” He looked at me with one of those drooly vacant expressions so popular during the 1960s, often resulting from chemical refreshment, as if I had grown a bug’s head like Vincent Price in The Fly. He said, “No he didn’t! He denied it.”

I laughed even more heartily. Clinton’s statement is a joke. No, I mean it. Really, it’s a joke. Literally.

There are obvious ways to start a joke. When you hear them, you know it’s the start of a joke. For example:

A rabbi, a priest, and an imam walk into a bar.

You know that’s the start of a joke. It’s a formalism that telegraphs that a joke is coming up. You know that what follows will be fiction. The events described are not intended to be interpreted as having happened in what I laughingly call the real world. At the end of the joke is a punchline. Here it is:

The bartender asks, what is this, some kind of a joke?

That tells you that you just heard a joke. It’s a bit meta, indicating what happens in the joke is itself a joke. Some people simply do not have the cognitive abilities to recognize this. One seemingly intelligent guy I told this to paused two beats and said, “Oh, because Muslims don’t drink alcohol. I get it.”

Similar things happen with fairy stories. They begin, “Once upon a time” and end, “The End.” Indeed, many critics have struggled with the fact that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with THE END.

Let’s deconstruct Clinton’s statement.

Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night.

This is a preamble. The technique is generally called priming. It puts the brain of the listener into a state more easy to fool It sets up the framing of what is to follow.

The framing here is that Clinton is a long-suffering humble public servant who is fighting exhaustion from his duty. Why? There is no rational reason. Is the effort of saying what he is about to say more than anything else he said in an interview he did not cancel? Of course not. This part is only to present himself as a sympathetic figure.

But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again.

This is obviously the start of the joke, the once upon a time of the fairy story. There is no other purpose of saying only that you want to say what you are going to say. Haven’t you been saying things to the American people through the entire interview? Didn’t he sign up for this?

If I wrote at the top of this essay, “I want to say one thing to the Substack audience. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say it again.” you’d think I were a self-congratulatory goofball. You’d likely be right.

Three sentences. Three warnings. Three times Clinton said, “This is a story I’m gonna you.” Three times Clinton warned people this was going to be a joke, where the standard rules of truth and falsity, the ordinary logic of P→Q cannot be expected to apply.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss L_______.

This is a subtle one. A casual listener, especially a rationalist, would walk away with the impression he said, “I did not have sexual relations with Miss L_______.” But he didn’t. He expected the audience to substitute that woman with Miss L_______. Yet there are no grammatical rules requiring that, and it gave Clinton time to think of a woman he did not have sex with (perhaps Hillary?) and then specify Miss L_______ as an afterthought.

Even a professional politician, even after saying three times that what follows is fiction, can have a hard time lying outright.

More overtly, what’s up with the Miss? This wasn’t 1985, when a few fuddy duddies still used Miss instead of Ms. Miss is seldom used with adults, only little girls. I wonder what that could mean.

I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.

There seems little reason to analyze this, so simple it is. I don’t care if he told anybody to lie. I don’t know what these allegations are except by deixis. I don’t want to hear how hard you work at a job that doesn’t give you calluses or wrecks your knee. That thank you is the oratorical version of The End. Story over.

Clinton warned the audience three times he was going to tell a fictional story, told the story, and then told that it was the end of the story. How many were oblivious? Asking how many were not oblivious would have a much smaller answer.

Harris/Walz

The Harris/Walz campaign started off really exciting. Shortly after I saw Harris speak for the first time, I remember thinking she sounded like the first candidate in a long time a reasonable person could vote for instead of against the opponent of. I hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of Presidential team they would be, but I knew they were not Trump. Still, I felt positive about a Presidential candidate for the first time in half a century.

Calling Republicans weird is just right. The hard core of Christian Nationalists and White Supremacists that turned the entire Republican party to Trump have serious resentment toward being picked upon by all those others who had indoor toilets and could control fire and could read and write. They deeply resent it. They want nothing more than to be proud, holding a Bible they never read and probably cannot. They want their values to be everywhere. They want not only to be normal, but the only normal.

Calling them weird neatly runs them through, but it is such a mild term that they know they’d call attention to their stupidity and thin skin by getting angry. So they can only fume silently increasing their hypertension.

Even better is we won’t go back. It feels anti-conservative, but it doesn’t mention conservative or progressive, which are fraught terms.

The most interesting thing is that it is almost completely inaccurate.. Harris/Walz and democrats definitely do want to go back to the time before all this madness started. They even want to go back to the exact time, the again that MAGA wants to do. Strong unions, a solid industrial base, progressive income tax that goes up to 91%, the beginning of the civil rights movement, a time when one could afford a middle-class life with a house and a car and a family on a High School diploma, sounds pretty good to me, at least a good start if we then just worked to make that true for everybody. Of course we started to do that, but no Democrat appears to wants to continue the job. And yet all Democrats seem able to do with respect to MAGA is to say, “You racists! You sexists! You homophobes! You… you… deplorables! Why aren’t you voting for me? If you don’t vote for me, I might start insulting you!” Truly this is not how things work.

Harris could, of course, rationalize the plain inaccuracy by saying, “What we meant was we won’t go back to Trump,” but that’s weak. Even if one decides that is the truth, it shows that a term can mean what it means and the opposite of what it means, unless it’s the other way around. This alone completely blows rationalism out of the water.

Besides, Make America Great Again was a slogan of Ronald Reagan. I haven’t seen a single Democrat remember that.

Stealing people

I was inspired by a couple of Substackers for this and the last one.

As of this writing, the latest buzz is about how Trump dumped Epstein not because of moral outrage, but because Epstein hired away some of Trump’s minor spa-attendants. He called this stealing.

It took a few days before I saw another Substacker point out that the deeper problem with stealing people is that for decades, neoliberalists have been commodifying people as objects. Decades ago I noticed that Personnel departments were being replaced by Human Resources departments. This is clearly because managers hate to think of employees as people, only fungible beans to be counted. It’s not much but the out-loud version of the quiet part: trained monkeys.

I voiced this decades ago, and someone pointed out that the term was introduced to make employees seem to be more valuable to managers. Whether one takes this rationalization seriously or not, it certainly is an admission and tacit approval that managers think of employees as cogs in a machine.

Frank Luntz

There’s one Republican who has been so successful I’ll end this post with him and his most effective word choice.

Frank Luntz of Luntz Research is normally called a pollster. I respect his work, if not any of his politics and morality, enough to call him a cognitive linguist. He’s only missing the theory, but he makes it up by empiricism.

When I was on the faculty of FSU, with the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, I did a fair amount of meteorology and climatology. I even got the cover of the 1992 American Meteorological Society. I could see the building where all those Antarctic ice cores were frozen from my corner office.

We knew then that the globe was warming as a result of human action. The idea dates back to the 1920s. This was not speculation, and there was no debate. We called it global warming, though global heating would be better today.

Republicans knew this, too. Frank Luntz realized that all the science, facts, and, well, reality were on the size of global warming. He then decided that Republicans could win on words. This should show why I do not like his politics and morality. Fortunately, I am not a Christian, so the idea of destroying the Earth in order to guffaw at those Left Behind when I be gwine up to hebbin holds no appeal for me.

Luntz spent a lot of money on focus groups to go through a bunch of terms looking for the term that elicited the most apathy, the most who cares? The term he found best at convincing people not to care or do anything was climate change. He convinced Bush to use that term instead of global warming. It spread to the entire media and Wikipedia. If you post a video that correctly never uses the CC-term at all, YouTube will helpfully put a summary entitled Climate Change, thus prejudicing viewers not to care before they can press play!

This is just a fact. He did this. It worked. It happened. It’s in the historical record. Do people care about that? No.

When I say this in the presence of anybody left of the right, especially progressives, they reject the evidence out of hand. This is because they are rational, and thus mightily prefer their own reason to paying attention to reality. I’ve seen many responses on many comments. What is most interesting is that there are only three responses, repeated over and over again, which I’m listing in increasing order of interest:

1. Terms change meaning, dood. Get with it!

2. You’re wrong because I saw climate change in the Journal of Bloviating Frogwash from 1976, so Luntz couldn’t have made it up as you say he did.

3. Climate change is more accurate [because…].

For (1), it’s laughable that people who do not even know the meaning of diachronic think it clever to say this to a cognitive psycholinguist. More interestingly, they say terms change. This is wrong. Terms just sit there. People change their meaning. One important concept here is propaganda. This is exactly what Luntz is doing, but he’s hiding it in the framing so it works. Democrats and the media blithely adopt Republican framing and lose. Then Democrats decide they weren’t blithe enough and lose some more.

The reason for that is that Democrats consider themselves rational and take great pride in an accomplishment common to 7-year-olds who don’t know the meaning of the word. When someone—even a political enemy—says anything, they take it at face value. All my friends zoomed in on “I did not have sex…Miss L_______.” Nothing else was part of that thrice-holy first-order proposition rationalists believe speech encodes, so it went completely ignored.

Responses of type (2) are in obvious bad faith. I never said Luntz invented the words climate or change, not did I say he was the first to put the two together. Rational people almost always act in bad faith, because it is a basic tenet of rationalism that everybody has the same reasoning mechanism, therefore they are the sole arbiter of what a word or sentence or paragraph means, especially when they get it completely wrong.

Responses of type (3) are worth taking seriously. We’ve already seen that some great language is not accurate. This confuses the minds of rational people, who believe in the Laws of Non-Contradiction and The Excluded Middle. There’s a third stupid idea, the Law of Identity, and rationalists call this the Law of Thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche said that “what is truth?” was the only interesting part of the New Testament. I kinda like “sez you!” but he had a point.

First off, the central meaning of climate simply does not apply to the Earth as a whole. It refers to part of the Earth. There are different climates, such as taiga, tundra, and semi-tropical. To change climate is to move from one to the other. Using climate change to describe the entire Earth unless you’re Elon Musk and want to move to Mars.

What your personal meaning of climate change is also depends on your culture. It is a social construct. I worked in Alabama and dated a woman who had never lived more than fifty miles from her birthplace. (Surprisingly, she came from a wealthy family.) I also was married to a globetrotter. Someone who flies on their own jet to track the seasons is simply going to have a different idea of what climate means than someone who can’t even afford bus fare. About half of all hillbilly music is based on the sound of a train that could take them out of their hellish environment if only they could afford the fare. They are simply not going to think of climate in the same way as I, who have worked in six or seven states from coast to coast as I have, and I can only imagine what the CEO of an international corporation will construe it.

Conclusion

I’ve given several examples of the products of Cognitive Linguistics without really describing what Cognitive Linguistics is. That’s for the next installment.

In the mean time, you can do two things. First, you can try out what you may have learned on some examples of your own. If you do really well, you may not have to read more in the series.

You can also see this video. It’s the best overall video I have found. Maybe it has too much in an hour and goes too far into politics, but I think it hits the sweet spot. You don’t even have to look at the screen.

The UNICOR corporation uses federal prisoners for labor, paying 23¢ to $1.15 per hour. Other federal prison jobs only pay 12¢ to 40¢ per hour.

UNICOR jobs are highly valued, especially by prisoners owing thousands to millions in restitution or having families to support. Veterans get preference.

I make 12¢ per hour 4 ½ hours per week. That buys one medical visit or four stamps per month. As indigent, I also get five discretionary stamps per month. It is hard to publish on this little, especially as nearly everyone ignores prisoners.

Still, I do not envy UNICOR workers. They work rush job “death marches” 15 ½ hours a day with unpaid lunch and dinner but no other breaks, several days in a row. Even workers over age 75 do this.

I consider this slave labor by any reasonable or even sane standard. I use the term without apology or further justification.

One UNICOR makes plastic cups for prison means, with “UNICOR” clearly embossed. Another typesets patents. The UNICOR here at Petersburg Low is a print shop.

The Inmate Information Handbook states, “UNICOR prints for a broad range of Federal Agencies.” UNICOR does print many military manuals and government forms. Check the margins of the next one you fill out. It might have been printed here.

UNICOR also prints comics and graphic novels for Source Point Press, Zealous Creative, and Charon, White Ash, and Dark Horse Comics, all for public sale.

UNICOR is not supposed to compete with companies or provide them the competitive advantages of slave labor. To justify printing comics, they reportedly say companies such as Source Point Press are Japanese, not American.

Yet the books are clearly for American markets. The art uses American styles. The language is colloquial American English. The names of contributors reflect a cross-section of America.

The federal government routinely uses making local telephone calls, driving any distance on roads that would eventually lead out of state, and producing for yourself what others might buy to imprison arbitrarily overriding jurisdictions with better laws and much shorter sentences. Yet it uses such a flimsy ruse to suggest its slave labor has nothing to do with America.

It works beautifully. Federal overreach and draconian sentencing with vague and overbroad laws ensure a reliable supply of slave labor. Antiquated machines and safety nowhere near OSHA further reduce costs.

Nevertheless, the printing is excellent and affordable. So I am sure were cotton products in the antebellum South, for much the same reasons. Judging by the lack of attention by the press and others, this seems just how Americans like it.

UNICOR keeps its comics under tight control. Only a few leak out. Most are deceptively anonymous, with little indication of origin.

One exception is “Wild Bullets Christmas.” It sports a logo for Michigan Comics Collective, which sounds nicely American. The bar code rectangle prices it at $4.95 from www.SourcePointPress.com.

The back cover advertises other Source Point Press comics. Another prisoner at UNICOR remembers printing “Wild Bullets Christmas” and most listed issues.

These include “The Rot #1,” “Norah #1,” “Dead Duck and Zombie Chick: Rising From the Grave,” “Salvagers: Abandoned Cargo,” “Made-Up Zombie Clown Circus,” “The Cabinet 1901,” ED a Novel by Chris Sun, “The Séance Room: The Seed of Change,” and the ironically named “Monstruous: Keepin’ em Out of Jail.” He remembers printing issues not listed of “Savants” and “Holliston.” He doesn’t remember only one: “J Werner Presents Classic Pulp.”

Inside, and ad for “Holliston: Friendship is Tragic” quotes Entertainment Weekly: “Mad killers, giant monsters, and evil aliens are on the loose, as well as the deadliest threat of all: success!” It is unclear whether they mean slave labor issues, too. The Movie Crypt, TwiztidShop.com, arieScope Pictures, and ComicsExperience.com also advertise.

Slave labor is definitely mainstream!

Inside the front cover is a legitimate-looking publishing statement. It credits Greg Wright, Stephen Sharar, Jason Jimenez, Sean Seal, Joe Freyre, Sara Dhyne, Joshua Werner, and Travis McIntire. None of these names sounds particularly Japanese to me. What do they think of how their work is printed?

At the bottom it says, “Printed in the USA by KrakenPrint.” There is no mention of UNICOR or prison labor. Do customers think they are supporting independent comics, or do they know they support slave labor?

Do they care? Are they as blasé as Entertainment Weekly appears to be? Do they only like good value for their money? Does slave labor make comics more collectible?

What if they realized they almost certainly have drawings, such as “X-rated” parodies of popular cartoons that could land them in prison for longer than raping a minor? Then they could print comics, too. Would you take notice?

Paying for your own oppression and political imprisonment is not without elegance and symmetry. Doing it voluntarily, even if due to duplicitous marketing, adds a certain American charm. In any event, it works.

I have given up trying to figure out why people so vigorously support and even crowdsource their own oppression. Do you imagine rights, race, religion, or most laughably innocence of wrongdoing will protect you? They won’t.

Whatever the reason, historically the results are always the same. By the time people realize it, it’s too late to stop.

Estèe Lauder Exploits U.S. Federal Prison Slave Labor (6/13/2019)

Last month I reported that federal prisoner slave labor was producing comic books for the American market. It now appears that prison slave labor has penetrated further into the mainstream.

To recap, the UNICOR corporation pays federal prisoner from 23¢ to $1.15 per hour, often working 15 ½ hour shifts with unpaid lunch and dinner times but no other breaks. UNICOR is not supposed to compete with American companies or give them the benefits of slave labor. Nevertheless, UNICOR prints comic books and graphic novels clearly intended for the American market, under the ostensible justification they do it for Japanese companies.

Now, UNICOR has moved beyond the limited market of “independent” comics. The UNICOR at Petersburg Low is cutting advertisements that stated Estée Lauder makes the “#1 Foundation in the U.S.”

The front of the advertising card shows three pouty models with different skin tones, all in black turtlenecks. It reads, “Free 10-day sample. See details.”

The back lists three products: “Stay-in-Place Makeup,” “Radiant Concealer,” and “Matte Powder Foundation.”

It is unclear whether the cards are intended for mailings or magazines or trays in shops. The cards have no instructions on how to obtain the sample.

What is absolutely clear is that these cards are processed by prisoners at the Petersburg Low UNICOR. There is no indication on the cards of prison slave labor. Their origins are concealed.

(I sent these stories to many news outlets. Only one, newsandletters.org, printed heavily redacted versions. They have a print circulation of about 4500. Nobody gives a shit about any of this.)

Even if one of us fails, many together can succeed. One of the most powerful ways to effect change is the federal civil rights lawsuit (§1346 for federal prisons, §1983 for others). Courts often make good decisions. Then the prisons stretch the case law beyond the breaking point or simply disregard it.

They do this because they can. They get away with it because not enough prisoners file.

In 1996, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (§1997e) made lawsuits against prisons much more difficult. As a result, prisons and jails have gotten much worse even than they were. Most onerous is §1997e(a), which states, “No action shall be brought with respect to prison conditions by a prisoner confined in any jail, prison, or other correctional facility until such administrative remedies as are available are exhausted.”

While it is sometimes possible to get a court to declare the grievance process (for administrative remedies) unavailable, this takes a lot of effort. For the most part, prisoners simply have to follow the grievance process, being careful to meet all the deadlines.

Though the process of filing grievances seems and usually is futile, it has to be done. “[W]e will not read futility or other exceptions into statutory exhaustion requirements where Congress has provided otherwise.” Booth v. Churner, 532 US 731, 738 n. 6 (2001). (When only a date is in parentheses and no circuit or district, it’s from the Supreme Court.) There is no way to escape. “[W]e hold that the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement applies to all inmate suits about prison life,” Porter v. Nussle, 534 US 516, 532 (2002). A prisoner simply has to exhaust the grievance process before suing.

The trouble is that the prison can retaliate for filing grievances, even including beating prisoners. One might think that a prisoner could sue for such retaliation, but for decades the court held that prisons are perfectly within their rights to retaliate for filing grievances, without fear of being sued.

Courts have held it is only possible to sue for civil rights violations over retaliation that chills a constitutional right. “Retaliation against a prisoner is actionable only if it is capable of deterring a person of ordinary firmness from further exercising his constitutional rights.” Morris v. Powell, 449 F. 3d 682, 686 (5th Cir. 2006). Also see Crawford-El v. Britton, 93 F. 3d 813 (D.C. Cir. 1996). The D.C. circuit is just under the Supreme Court in terms of power, and all other circuits have followed.

The question is whether filing grievances is a constitutional right. Up until recently, the courts have held it isn’t. “[I]nmates do not have a constitutional right to have available or to participate in an effective grievance process.” Miller v. Williamson, 2016 US Dist. LEXIS 63498 (4th Cir. 2006). See also Adams v. Rice, 40 F.3d 72 (4th Cir. 1994).

This idea can be traced back to 1991. “[T]he prisoner’s right to petition the government for redress is the right of access to the courts, which is not compromised by the prison’s refusal to entertain his grievance.” Flick v. Alba, 932 F.2d 728, 728 (8th Cir. 1991).

The trouble with this is that a mere five years later, §1997e changed the situation, making it so that the right to access the courts very much depends on the grievance process. Yet until after 2016, courts did not recognize this extremely obvious fact.

Finally, they did. “Given the close relationship between an inmate filing a grievance and filing a lawsuit—indeed, the former is generally a prerequisite for the latter—our jurisprudence provided a strong signal that officials may not retaliate against inmates for filing grievances.” Booker v. South Carolina DOC, 855, F.3d 533, 544 (4th Cir. 2017). Also, “The Second, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits have all recognized in published opinions that inmates possess a right, grounded in the First Amendment’s Petition Clause, to be free from retaliation in response to filing a prison grievance,” id. at 544.

There are lessons in the fact that it took the courts so long to recognize the obvious.

The courts move slowly. More importantly, they only move when pushed. Seldom does a court decide anything on its own, not even something as obvious as this. They generally wait for litigants to make arguments and decide if the arguments are good. So it is essential that we all push the courts, not only for our individual benefit, but for the benefits of all. We must make even obvious arguments, even ones so obvious we imagine should have been raised a hundred times before us.

The PRLA was sold as intended to improve the quality of lawsuits, but what it really did was reduce their quantity. Doubtless this was the real intention. “Congress deemed prisoners to be pestiferous litigants,” Kerr v. Puckett, 138 F.3d, 323 (7th Cir. 1998).

This has worked. Far too many legitimate lawsuits have been quashed. Millions of prisoners have suffered worsening conditions. The courts have only sluggishly moved to correct gross violations of civil rights. Prisoners fearing retaliation have not pushed them hard enough. Even though it seems futile, grieve and sue anyway. You may not be the one to win, but if we all work together, we can improve conditions for all of us.

Author’s Notes

I published an earlier version of this in the Winter 2018 issue of Guild Notes, organ of the National Lawyers Guild, of which I was a member as a jailhouse lawyer. The NLG is the oldest guild for attorneys in the United States and leans to the left. Since I published, the Supreme Court has declared Bivens lawsuits not favored, which effectively means prohibited, so there are even fewer options available. A shorter version of this appeared in the NARSOL Digest, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with sexual offense laws. Larry Neely asked me to shorten it to 700 words, so I did. I think that version is a bit punchier, but I am publishing this one here on Substack for more detail.

I'm a scientist. Not a political scientist—that lot is way too rational, holding to the discredited idea that some dead Frenchman understood brains four centuries ago. I'm a cognitive scientist, psycholinguist, and semioticist. I use information from the current century for politics.

Scientists like empirical data. An attempt at a general strike will provide some.

At this point, I limit my support to a consumer strike. I live on a meager professorial pension and do not work for hire. Those who do can make their own choices, as can unions.

A consumer strike would have minimal overall impact, because people will buy as much total, only during a different week. The benefits will include the following:

• There may be short-term effects on the numbers.

• Participants will get an exercise in managing addiction to mere objects and constant worry.

• Interstate and regionalcomparisons may lead to a better model than Red, Blue, and Purple.

• We'll learn how effective organizing is.

• We may get a better idea about political apathy.

• We have to start with something real.

Of course, I do not recommend cutting of essentials. I'm still going to give free food to poor people and buy insulin if needed. But it is an opportunity to discover just what indeed counts as essential. This has potential benefits in money- and lifestyle-management even if there be no overall economic impact. Even if it prove too onerous, that would also be a valuable lesson. Besides, as Norman Mailer once said, we may yet win: the others are so stupid.

I conclude the potential benefits outweigh the costs.

Africa is big. Really really big, and really hard to navigate even today.

Now you don't have to read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is wrong about almost everything anyway.

Besides, there are about five pages on guns and steel. It's about germs and zebras, and the part about zebras is wrong. Of the three species of zebra in Africa, only one is a zebra. The other two are horses with stripes.

Jared was trying to answer the question why Europe and not Africa? Stupid people say there are no stupid questions; Imagine that! The less stupid question is why Europe and not China?

The answer is that China drank tea while Europe drank beer and wine. Europe got good at glass while China got good at china, surprisingly enough. Reading glasses, which first appeared in 13th Century Italy, doubled the length of scholarly careers. Spyglasses improved navigation. Telescopes and prisms are the fundamental tools of physical science. If Newton had just looked at the spectrum a bit more closely, there's a good chance the Principia would have covered quantum mechanics. Alchemist discovered distillation, what with all that beer and wine, so more drunks.

When Europeans started drinking coffee from Africa, a few sobered up for a change and decided a Renaissance might be fun, only with fewer amphoræ this time ‘round. It worked, pretty much.

You're welcome.