Reading, thinking and commenting this week
February 14 - 21, 2021
Things I’ve read, listened to and/or thought about this past week:
Matt Taibbi, Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual (Substack)
Matt Taibbi, A Friendly Debate About Herbert Marcuse, with R.J. Eskow, In which R.J. defends Marcuse, plus some leftover thoughts about the author of "Repressive Tolerance" (Substack)
Matt Taibbi, Rush Limbaugh, Who Should Have Stayed Jeff Christie (Substack)
Matt Taibbi, S--t Public Defenders See: The Great Covid-19 Jury Charade (Substack)
Glenn Greenwald, Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment (Substack)
Glenn Greenwald, The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot (Substack)
John Waters, Ah! Look at all the 'lonely'...Trumpers? (Substack)
John Waters, Save The Last Trance For Me (Substack)
John Waters, Diary of a Dissident (Substack)
Techno Fog, Was Cuomo's COVID Cover-Up a Federal Crime? (Substack)
Jordan Schachtel, How the Gates Foundation seeded America's COVID-19 policy catastrophes (Substack)
Jordan Schachtel, Out: 100 Day Reopening Plan – In: Indefinite COVID Regime (Substack)
Jordan Schachtel, The Biden Administration is already attempting Middle East regime change (Substack)
Jordan Schachtel, Flashback: Fauci describes Ebola quarantines as ‘draconian,’ warns about ‘unintended consequences’ (Substack)
Matt Stoller, Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace (Substack)
Emily Hill, Quit Stalin, Be My Valentine (Substack)
John Michael Greer, A Gathering of Long Lost Friends (Ecosophia)
Andrew Korybko, US Election 2020: From Conspiracy Theory to Conspiracy Fact (Off-Guardian)
David James, How the Big-Tech monopolies are hurting their own value (Off-Guardian)
Joshua Hochschild, Once Upon a Presidency: From populist to dissident (American Mind)
Binoy Kampmark, Facebook Unfriends Australia: The Triumph of Epistemic Chaos (Off-Guardian)
Jeffrey Tucker, Covid Cases, like Political Careers, are Dropping Like Rocks (American Institute for Economic Research)
Ethan Yang, The Abuse of Emergency Powers and Lockdowns (American Institute for Economic Research)
Jonny Peppiatt, Opportunity, Incentive and Rationalisation (Lockdown Skeptics)
Tessa Lena, The Great Reset for Dummies (Substack)
Edward Curtin, The Invincible Green Stick of Happiness (Off-Guardian)
Ben Domenech and Mollie Hemingway, Getting White-pilled with Michael Malice (Federalist, podcast)
Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, Glenn Greenwald returns (Useful Idiots, podcast)
Alex Berenson (Twitter)
Ivor Cummins (Twitter)
Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (hard copy)
Comments Posted
KW comment on Glenn Greenwald, Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment
KW: The free speech cases about the book sellers in Rhode Island have another interesting, current parallel.
If a Covid-lockdown-dissenting business owner in a lockdown state disagrees with mask mandates and occupancy restrictions and wants to allow Covid-lockdown-dissenting customers to freely express their own disagreement with mask mandates and occupancy restrictions by preferentially shopping, dining or drinking at a rebellious business, the state governments in the lockdown states have indicated - through their executive orders - a willingness to attempt to revoke the business license, liquor license or other required licenses and so shut down those rebellious business completely.
Through this mechanism, the population of customers and business owners has been effectively led to believe that compliance with mask mandates and occupancy restrictions is “voluntary,” when in fact it is coerced through threat, by the state government, to use force if compliance is not forthcoming.
The private business owners, in turn, coerce customers, through signs on the door that say “No mask, no service” or similar rules. When all of the businesses in a community have the same signs and enforce the same governmental viewpoints, individuals have no means to express dissent through their independent business transactions. So it’s interesting that there’s already been a case somewhat on point.
Rebellious, dissenting business owners in lockdown states, such as Pennsylvania, could in theory use that case to bring their own suits against the Pennsylvania government. If, that is, they had the extra money lying around for litigation after a year of lockdowns and occupancy restrictions and lost customers and lost income.
Another commenter replied:
the government will probably argue that this particular expression of dissent could endanger the pursuit of life of other citizens.
Further response
KW: And the plaintiffs could argue that suppression of this form of dissent endangers their lives and liberties and those of their patrons. That’s the issue, I think. When your right to swing your arm ends at my nose, that point in space becomes crucial to identify.
Further, such a case would require the government to demonstrate the nexus of endangerment with evidence. Given the counter examples of Sweden, Florida and a few other jurisdictions that used historical pandemic management methods, assessed data and projections early in the Covid crisis and made different crisis management policy choices, with equal or better outcomes by the government’s preferred metrics (cases, hospitalizations, and deaths), I don’t think the governments advocating the lockdown, mask mandates and occupancy restrictions would be able to make a sufficient case to overcome the dissenting plaintiffs and customers rights to free speech, free assembly, free association and related constitutionally protected rights.
At a bare minimum, having courts hear the cases would provide a forum for evidentiary review and public policy reversals on constitutional, proportionality and efficacy grounds, which we don’t currently have.
It’s all been unilateral, by executive order under emergency authority, without legislative review or judicial appeal procedures. At least in Pennsylvania.
And even here, interestingly, the local police acknowledge that the Governor’s executive orders have no enforcement mechanisms; local police cannot issue citations or make arrests for noncompliance. As written, compliance is to be entirely “voluntary “ and so enforcement is completely devolved to business owners, who, afraid of losing business licenses, are rigid.
For what it’s worth, a few pub owners have called the bluff of the Liquor Control Board, refused to comply, took their cases to admin court, and the LCB backed off and dropped the cases. Quietly. At those establishments, mask use is optional and social distancing is moot; patrons enter at their own risk, voluntarily and with informed consent .
The Georgia legislature last summer adopted specific liability-focused laws to protect business owners, clarifying that entering a business entails risks(as does every other human activity), voluntarily assumed upon entering, and recently renewed that measure.
There was a case, last spring and summer, Butler v. Wolf, in which a federal court found Wolf’s executive orders were unconstitutional, and illegitimate, and in the process assessed some of the evidence presented by the government, finding it woefully lacking.
But the court’s ruling made no impact on “enforcement,” likely because the executive orders are written to require “voluntary compliance.”
It’s a very clever bind: making something simultaneously unenforceable, unappealable and unreviewable, because it’s actually not law at all, it’s just “advice.” As with the Rhode Island booksellers. But back then, the court apparently managed to intervene with some effect. Today, not so much.
[KW followup: It’s very similar to Penn State’s gray governance: not private enough to be accountable to shareholders. Not public enough to be accountable to voters and taxpayers. Just quasi enough to be accountable to no one. Centre Region Council of Governments operates in much the same gray way. It’s not accountable to municipal voters as supervisors and council members are, and not accountable to Centre County voters as county commissioners are. COG is directly accountable to no one. I very much admire-hate the cleverness of the gray-zone fraud.]
KW Comment on Matt Taibbi, A Friendly Debate About Herbert Marcuse, with R.J. Eskow, In which R.J. defends Marcuse, plus some leftover thoughts about the author of "Repressive Tolerance"
MT: “[Marcuse] wrote in Repressive Tolerance about the uselessness of submitting information to “the people” in any jumble of “contesting opinions,” because doing so implies that “the people are capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.”
KW: “I think we’re far more at the point of a majority of Americans understanding “the uselessness of submitting information to ‘the Government’ in any jumble of contesting policies, because doing so implies that “the Government is capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.”
I know that’s the conclusion I’ve reached after two decades of local-scale community organizing driven by issue research, public information campaigns, and attempts to inform local government officials about aspects of policy matters they have not considered, and have no interest in ever considering. They no longer deliberate at all, at least in public. By the time they vote, they’re almost always unanimously in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants. So the effort is useless.
