Society, Culture, and Economics

New U.S. Constitution? A Proposal

/ Thomas Harper / Leave a comment

I am born and raised in the United States, and so this post is going to take a U.S.-centric view, but the same ideas could be applied in other countries as well, especially if those countries are facing similar issues. The issues I speak of are the growing sense of political divisions and loss of trust in the government, leading to a loss of trust in the very ideas of democracy, liberalism, enlightenment values, free market economics, and civil liberties. Popular responses to this discontent takes one of two forms: the position that we need to overhaul the entire system (e.g., with a revolution), or the position that we ought to double down on what we are already doing. In this post, I would like to propose perhaps a sort of middle ground.

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Section 230: Should We Get Rid of it?

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Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, known as the Communications Decency Act, contains the famous Section 230(c)(1), which consists of the 26 words that created the internet:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

You can see the full text of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 here (Section 230(c)(1) is on page 101). Why this is in the news lately is that a case before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) may be deciding whether Section 230(c)(1) ought to be upheld or disposed (namely, in the cases Gonzalez v. Google, LLC and Taamneh v. Twitter, Inc.).

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Ukrainian War One Year Hence

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It’s been about a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine commenced. I wrote an article about the mounting tensions literally the day before Russian forces crossed the border (or, at least, the border as it was at the beginning of 2022). I made some predictions in that post, and a lot of digital ink has been spilled as people balkanized into pro-war and anti-war positions in the world outside Ukraine. Here is a bit of a retrospective on this unfortunate conflict.

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Is Value Neutrality Possible?

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Objectivity, also known as value neutrality or impartiality, is one of the highest ideals of science. The principle behind it is that science studies mind-independent reality, i.e., that which continues to exist even if no consciousness is there to perceive or think about it. This mind-independent reality is devoid of all values – there is no such thing as “good and bad” or “useful” or “beautiful” when it comes to, say, galaxy formation or evolution by natural selection. A major criticism of science levied by critical theory is that value neutrality is impossible, even if we are to take the assumption that mind-independent reality exists and that mind-independent reality is value neutral. As such, instead of blinding ourselves to the values and biases that are inextricable from science, we ought to import the “correct” values into science (e.g., feminist science).

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Should We Trust the Mainstream Media?

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Can’t find original source, but I got this comic from here.

A recent Munk Debates in Toronto on November 30 examined the topic of whether or not the mainstream news media is trustworthy (the debate is titled “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media”). Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi took the position that the mainstream media is not to be trusted while Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg took the opposing position. You can read a transcript of the debate here. As debates usually go, nothing was really resolved, though an overwhelming majority of the audience seemed to favor the Murray-Taibbi position after the debate. As such, the question remains: should people trust the mainstream news media?

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Is Capitalism Evil?

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capitalism and extremism
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Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, famously said that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Yet capitalism is also the bogeyman for a lot of people, especially on the left, though if you go far enough to the right there is a loss of faith in capitalism as well. Just like the libertarian capitalist acolytes can find any way to make all of society’s ills out to be the fault of the government, everyone else have come up with no shortage of ways to lay all our problems at the feet of capitalism. Such intoxicating clarity has aided in simplifying the world for a great many people. But is capitalism as evil as they say?

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How Well Was COVID19 Handled? What Should We Have Done Differently?

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The COVID19 pandemic saturated the news for a good eighteen months or better. Lately we don’t hear much about it anymore. If topics jawed about by the usual talking heads are to be gauged, everyone is over the whole pandemic thing. Few places still require masks and few people still voluntarily wear them. This, of course, ignores the fact that, with some six-and-a-half million people dead as a result of COVID infection, and ten times that many who got it and lived, there are a good deal of people who had their lives changed dramatically and permanently as a result of the pandemic. But now that the virus is endemic in a seemingly less pathogenic variant, it is a topic that has taken leave of the rapidly shifting zeitgeist of our modern times. Now is the time for postmortems by commentators and historians. That’s what I’m about to do here (as a commentator, not a historian).

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Who is the Bigger Threat: the Right or the Left?

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Here in the United States, the so-called “Red Wave” that was supposed to have crashed over our legislature and state offices on November 8, 2022 failed to transpire. Prior to the midterm election, grim warnings of rising fascism abounded. “Democracy itself”, we were repeatedly admonished, was going to be strangled by rightwing fanatics before it could die its natural death. Pair this with the dour tidings of Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and Kanye West spouting more of his increasingly deranged brand of asinine attention seeking, and the rhetoric from the left almost painted a picture of the U.S. teetering on the brink of madness, like Germany of 1933.

On the other side of the ledger, prognostications warning of the gathering whirlwind of Woke-ism and Marxism grew ever more vociferous. Schools and universities, we are warned, have been mutated and twisted into Marxist reeducation camps where children are corrupted and groomed by depraved deviants and insidious ideologues, all while leftwing censorious indignation furiously proliferates in every corner of the internet. The “Red Wave” was supposed to be a last-ditch bulwark against the rising red tide of Neo-Marxist totalitarianism. If these dire omens were to be believed, then one might be convinced that the U.S. is in the same precarious position as China in 1966.

But which of these grim narratives is true?

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American Democracy

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election time running out
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In the United States, we have our midterm elections coming up on November 8, 2022. Both “sides” of the election (the conservative and right-leaning Republicans and the progressive and left-leaning Democrats) have an alarming number of people frothing at the mouth with vitriol toward their opposing side. The other side, both argue, are an existential threat to democracy. They’re not just wrong or misguided, but nefarious and cunning. They want to harm [insert group here, e.g., children or minorities]. This is the kind of political divisiveness that heralds an inevitable plunge into authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Here is the problem, though: both sides are not exactly wrong about their opponents.

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What is Authenticity?

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Authenticity is a somewhat ambiguous term, and yet many believe it to be very important. People strive for their own authenticity while admiring it in others. In modern times, authenticity tends to mean something like “being who you actually are on the inside” in a way that clears away the corrosion of social expectations to reveal the perfect gem of our authentic selves. But is it really that simple? What does it even mean to find some hidden inner authentic self? Is this even a helpful way of conceptualizing authenticity?

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Transhumanism and Ideology

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The nineteenth century is famous for a lot of things – the Napoleonic Wars, the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the Atlantic slave trade (it’s continuance and then its termination), the American Civil War, the industrial revolution, colonialism, and much else. But many of these things could probably be put broadly under one title: the rise of ideologies. Socialism/communism, liberalism, capitalism, republicanism, and nationalism are among the most well-known of such ideologies. The seeds sown in the nineteenth century resulted in the poisoned fruit of the twentieth century: the rise of Fascism/Nazism and Communism, the two World Wars, and the Cold War. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man attempted to declare that liberal politics and capitalist economics had triumphed over all other ideologies; the book is both lauded and derided by people on all sides of the political spectrum. But we have merely come up with new ideologies – or, at least, mutated and adapted old ideologies to fit our times.

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Consuming Content: Good or Bad?

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The word content is used as a catch-all for the various types of online media people consume. Youtube, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitch, and plenty of others contain videos, podcasts, streams, and many other things that fall under the category of content. Shows and movies on streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, et al. are also considered content. I suppose even blogs like this one could be considered content, too. And boy is there a lot of content out there. But what does it all mean?

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Religious Violence vs. Secular Violence

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Image of the aftermath of a 2021 suicide bombing in Baghdad, Iraq that killed 32 people (source)

Less than a week ago (as of writing this), we had the twenty-first anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks that collapsed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and sent four planes worth of people to their deaths, in addition to those killed in the buildings (2,996 people killed in total). Just over a year ago, the U.S. finally abandoned its occupation and nation-building project in Afghanistan, a misguided enterprise that resulted from the 9/11 attacks two decades earlier. As the image above shows, violence has not yet ended in Iraq, either – a country that had no ties to al-Qaeda, nor possessed any “weapons of mass destruction”, even though those were the casus belli for the U.S. invasion. The violence perpetrated by the 9/11 terrorists is said by some to be religiously motivated, a sort of clash of civilizations, while others say it’s political (as a result of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, it’s support for Israel, and it’s cozy relationship with the Saudi government). The violence perpetrated by the U.S. in 76 different countries (as of 2018) is said by some to be anywhere between a necessary evil and noble. Others argue that it’s imperialist, racist, Islamophobic, and/or no different than what the 9/11 terrorists did. How can we parse these different views?

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Sam Harris and Trump Derangement Syndrome

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Sam Harris Trump Biden laptop
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I’ve said before that I don’t usually like to talk about the news-of-the-day stuff here. I like to make posts that, even if someone stumbles upon it a few years from now, they’ll still find it relevant, or at least interesting. Here I’m going to talk about the recent controversy about Sam Harris and his alleged Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. The reason is that, like it or not, Donald Trump’s ascendancy to leadership (even messianic) status among conservatives, Republicans, and right-wingers is going to have a long-reaching effect within the United States. And, since the U.S. has such a large place on the world stage, this is also something that will have far-reaching effects throughout the rest of the world as well.

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What is Equality (and Equity)?

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In recent years the difference between equality and equity have been discussed more and more. Equality is taken to be the idea that people have equal opportunity while equity is the idea that people (ought to) have equal outcomes. In the former, it means there should be no legal or political impediment to someone entering the market, whether that’s the buying and selling of goods and services or of one’s labor. The latter, equity, says that things like racial, sex/gender, and economic disparities need to be corrected through legal and political policies. But are these the only notions of equality?

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