Is Provoking a Backlash the Only Thing That the TSA is Good For?

http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2012/03/so-just-what-is-tsa-good-for.html

By way of Borepath's blog, a nice representation of the rate of return the public has experienced on its investment of insane amounts of time, money, and humiliation into the TSA organization since 9/11.

There was one significant security improvement made after 9/11---in fact it was made on 9/11.
It was that the public changed its expectation regarding the impact of a hijacking from 'we'll take an unscheduled vacation to Cuba and pick up some cigars' to 'some SOB wants to turn us into charcoal by using our plane as a guided missile'.  Changing the expectation is all that it took to make such behavior impractical.  All of the rest is theatre---expensive, humiliating, and time-consuming theatre.  All of the terrorist incidents that have been thwarted recently have been done so by...you guessed it...passengers, or, if you prefer, by the unorganized militia of the US.  Not for nothing did Sun Tzu say, if you put your men on deadly ground (i.e., ground where it is clear that you must fight and/or die, retreat is obviously impossible) they will live (because most of the slaughter in ancients battles came after one side's morale had broken, and those 'on deadly ground' tend to have very strong morale).  Because the public now recognizes a hijacking as 'deadly ground', it is extremely unlikely that we'll see a successful repeat of the tactic.

But the TSA is good for one thing.  It is good for increasing the anger of the population against the system.  Check out the comments on any site with stories about the TSA that allows open comment.  Also check out the up/down votes by other readers on said comments.  It strikes me as not unlikely that the tipping point on the campaign to delegitimize the judiciary will come when someone decks a TSA agent for inappropriate action and the case goes to a jury trial where the jury plays the nullification card.  Every nullification makes the next one easier.  Perhaps the TSA will turn out to have been worth the price all along.

Supreme Court Takes Up Texas Affirmative Action Case: No Lose Battle for Reaction

http://gantdaily.com/2012/02/21/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-university-affirmative-action-case/

If they dismantle more of Affirmative Discrimination, we win.  If they don't, they hand us more of the all important public anger at an advantageous time, perhaps even enough to move more of the population down my judicial delegitimisation scale.
This summer's raft of decisions should be interesting indeed, especially played to the background of $4+ a gallon gasoline prices.

How to: Who...Whom in the Jury Room

I've talked at some length about the use of Who..Whom in Jury Nullification before, which I'd like to expand on more.

Specifically, how does one actually carry this out?
Unlike FIJA, which is a fine organization, I'm not advocating openly attempting to nullify.  Instead, I'm advocating a backhanded and passive aggressive nullification strategy, one that is far harder to fight against, by, say, the judge removing you from the jury.  Conflict requires both in your face and slippery strategies---one enables the other just like rushing sets up passing opportunities in American football.

The first rule is you never breathe a word about jury nullification anywhere near the courtroom and certainly not in the jury deliberations.   You don't even hint at it with things like---oh I don't think it's right to send him to jail for so long for X or I'd rather use the prison space for guys like Y.  No, instead what you do is expand the area of fuzziness that you are given into obscene proportions.  That fuzzy area is 'reasonable doubt'.  What does reasonable doubt mean?  Does it mean being 99% sure?  99.9%?  as sure as a Christian with 4 aces?

The key is it means precisely what you want it to mean.  So take a leaf from Public health guys making 'studies' about gun control.  Start with your desired conclusion and set your parameters to whatever they need to be to 'justify' it.  Remember, if you torture the data enough, it'll confess to whatever you want it to.  Of course you go who...whom, under the same circumstances as the FIJA-style nullifier, you just aren't open about such.

The first phase from your perspective (I'm assuming you're not a grand juror---I've been called for jury duty several times but never for a grand jury) is jury selection.   Both the prosecutor and the defense are looking to shop for the most favorable jury they can get.  What you want to do is betray as little information to them as you can short of obvious perjury.  They're looking for information out of the verbal band as well as what you actually say.  For instance, the more words you say, the better their estimate of how smart you are is going to be.  If they're actually good at their craft (fortunately, an AWFUL lot of them are horrible at it, I can normally infer a person's political positions and cultural alignment within a minute or so of hearing them speak on matters that are not explicitly political, it is a matter of word choice and inflection and a willingness to combine signals that are only in the range of 80% or so accurate into a reasonably accurate prediction, stereotypes are damnably useful things) the more you say the more likely your game is up.  Plus particularly smart people are prone to be more verbose and to want to cover their answer completely and with the desired nuance.  Try not to present that image.  Last time I was in jury selection I knew one of the sides was going to smoke a peremptory challenge on me when the defense attorney asked me what standards of evidence I was familiar with employing, and I answered him with the two that he knew (preponderance of evidence and 'reasonable doubt') and another that he didn't know (clear and convincing, typically an administrative law standard midway between the other two).  But I had negative interest in being on that jury.  So remember, short answers that betray no bias towards defense or prosecution, even though if you're going to go Who...Whom, you are the most biased defense juror imaginable.

Assuming you make it onto the jury, what you need to start doing as the trial progresses is make lots of notes (if they allow you, many don't), or mental notes (if you have to), on anything and everything that is plausibly painted as weak in the prosecution's case.  Imagine what the five star defense attorneys would question.  Question that and remember it for the jury deliberation.  It's actually better if the defense doesn't actually question it, because then the prosecutor would have a chance to defend against that line of argument.  But guess what, neither lawyer gets to go anywhere near the jury room.  You do.  Think 'motivated skeptic'.  Emulate whatever group you consider to be 'immune to reason' that 'uses its high intelligence to deny what is nearly certainly true'.

Here's the bottom line.  Simply by staying the course, you can almost certainly force a mistrial, since the jury won't reach a decision.  But you can play for more than a mere tactical victory.  You've got things on your side, notably that you're likely way more committed (imagine this is, say, a case against some redneck for having a shotgun that is 1/4 of an inch too short) than are the other jurors.  They know this (and you should NOT explicitly remind them of this, that is likely to backfire)---they get to leave only once a mistrial is declared or a decision is made unanimously.  One way to get there is to surrender to your who...whom and return a not guilty verdict.  In addition, by spinning scenarios that are admittedly of low probability, you will make them seem more real to the other jurors, and hence higher probability in their minds. Drip, drip, drip--exploit those cognitive biases.  Try to seem reasonable and extremely 'fair minded'---it helps if you betray a lot of cultural markers of disliking the class/group from which the defendant is drawn, this will make your scenarios wherein the defendant isn't actually guilty seem more credible, as in an admission against interest.  But if you can't swing the other 11, no biggie, a mistrial is usually nearly as good as an acquittal.  Done in reasonable numbers, this procedure would result in making nearly any law without an overwhelming consensus behind it practically unenforceable.  The only defense against it is trying to take away the right of a trial by jury, which, by the way, was one of the big grievances motivating the 1st American revolution.

Schelling, Kuran, Reaction, and the Way Forward

About a week ago, on my post

http://www.chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2012/01/advice-for-conservatives-you-need-to-be.html

a short discussion took place in the comments.  

CLAR said...

my impression is that most reactionary/conservative types are stuck in a mode like wildebeests getting ready to cross a river- milling around, getting frustrated, yet still scared to be the first into the river and have their career ended by the crocodiles enforcing the informal thought crime laws of our government. i definitely count myself in this crowd.

my prediction is that when this shifts, it will be a stampede that might run away with itself. while such radical change will be to our net benefit, it will probably have many negative side effects from being so rapid.

at the time I responded

CLAR,
'Negative Side Effects' is an interesting euphemism. What you're describing is a preference cascade a la Timur Kuran, and yes, I do think such an event is not unlikely.

I've had this on my mental back burner for some time, and recalled a few jigsaw puzzle pieces lying about on my mental map that can probably be usefully pressed into service.

CLAR clearly identifies one major aspect of the problem.  There are tons of wildebeests, and only a few crocodiles, but nobody wants to go first.  This is directly analogous to the metastable circumstances immediately preceding a riot (or more commonly, a riot that doesn't actually happen).  This brought to mind Schelling (for those unfamiliar with his work, specifically, a Schelling Point or 'point of coordination', here's the executive summary.  A Schelling Point is a point around which groups can spontaneously organize based on their estimate of where others of like mind will naturally gravitate.  The classic example is of meeting a person in New York City, where you have no time or place, just a date---the 2 Schelling points being Grand Central Station at noon and the top floor of the Empire State Building).  Fortunately, a lot of mental energy has already gone into analyzing these particular problem.

The publication below provides a hint
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj14n1-13.html

The entrepreneur will throw the first stone when he calculates that the risk that he will be apprehended for doing so has diminished to an acceptable level. The risk of arrest declines as a function of two variables--the size of the crowd relative to the police force available to control it, and the probability that others will follow if somebody leads. This latter point could potentially be tricky, because as we have noted, crowds will generally be inhospitable to the commission of violent acts. But it is possible for a crowd to telegraph its willingness to riot. Buford's account (1991: 81n-dash85) of a soccer hooligan rampage in Turin furnishes an example. Members of the crowd marched themselves around in a spontaneous formation with a stilted, unnatural gait, chanting the name of their team. This unmistakable token of cohesion stopped well short of anything that the Italian police could plausibly charge as solicitation or incitement, but served to assure the members of the crowd that a critical mass had formed.

In essence, what is needed to to provide at least one Schelling point to generate plausibly deniable cohesion.  A group needs to be able to communicate its intent in an easily deniable fashion.  Leftists understand this at least at a gut level, which is why they impose their regime of thought crime enforcement so rigidly.  They perceive the possibility of a preference cascade wiping out much of their work and work hard to maintain massive preference falsification per Kuran.  If you ever want to be REALLY encouraged as a reactionary, leaf through some of the books by the left about the vast right wing conspiracies at your local bookstore.  They will tell you what they fear.  It's funny honestly, to read their perception of the average conservative as being like me, but on Thomas Carlyle class reactionary steroids.

If we look at this through a chemical metaphor, one needs several things.  First, the reaction requires sufficient energy to overcome the barrier of activation energy.  The analog of course is that the population must become sufficiently angry to create a prerevolutionary condition per Lenin.  Second, a catalyst is needed to speed things along.  This is where the plausibly deniable cohesion comes in.  I've suggested several things that fit that category here in the past:

1.  Weaken the power of universalist moral rhetoric in the public sphere through mockery and identification of the real particularist interests that ACTUALLY motivate said rhetoric
2.  Assault the various entities of the Cathedral at every opportunity, and use their mistakes to weaken them and erode their legitimacy.  In particular, the Judiciary is presently ripe for the destruction of its prestige.  Several cases of obvious (but deniable) who..whom Jury Nullification can be used to embolden one's supporters and demoralize our adversaries.  Such will almost certainly provoke a disproportionate response from the Cathedral, which is actually a positive thing from our point of view, because it just raises the temperature of the reaction.

Here's how we can reduce the activation energy to Jury Nullification.  First, simply by talking about it (although inside a courthouse, never breathe a word about it or you'll never be selected as a juror) we make it more likely.  Second, it would be very useful to us to break down some of the social taboo on it by maneuvering other groups into making the first move on it.  The group that is really ripe for this are drug users and the legalization crowd.  Pretty close to half the population is against the War on Drugs, at least insofar as pot is concerned.  If you can get substantial sections of that group to start bringing out the jury nullification hammer, the reluctance of other groups to use it will be greatly reduced.  This is something I've been working on for years now in other guises on various forums on the left.

Working Overtime to Manufacture Anti Semitism in the Supreme Court

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States


Presently the Supreme Court consists of 6 Catholics and 3 Jews.  That's 1/3 of the SC with less than 2% of the population.  Catholics, for their part, are overrepresented by a factor of 2 or 3.
 Kagan, Breyer, and Ginsburg are Jewish, all of the rest of the Supreme Court Justices are Catholic.

The problem for the Jewish brand is that all 3 of the Jewish justices are hostile to White interests.  It is practically a certainty that all will vote against the Arizona law when the case comes up, with the possible exception of Kagan recusing herself due to conflict of interest, since she was the Solicitor General on the case in the first place.  If a 4-4 tie didn't have the same net effect as 5-4 against (since to overturn the previous court requires a majority), I doubt very seriously whether Kagan would recuse herself despite the blatancy of her conflict of interest.   Sotomayer will also almost certainly vote against the law.  In all likelihood, the decision will hinge on the vote of Kennedy.

Now, when things fall apart and the center does not hold, just WHO do you think is going to have absorbed the blame here?  It doesn't matter who writes the majority or prevailing opinion, or who concurs in part.  What matters is the end result and whether it tars the Jewish brand further.  Breyer and Ginsburg have long been hated by many.  Kagan creates the possibility of creating decisions that inspire vitriolic hatred on the back of a majority Jewish vote (3 Jews and 2 Catholics).  Who do you think will be blamed here?  Do you think this will inspire a pogrom against Catholics?  No, they'll be swept under the rug, and the fact that 4 Catholics voted on the side of 'righteousness' will be considered instead.  There are presently several really significant issues on the Supreme Court's docket, issues that I guarantee will create lots more anti semites if they go the wrong way and might even if they go the correct way.  The fact that all 3 votes can be predicted with a great deal of certainty in advance without even so much as a law degree by a layman is also very concerning.

Ginsburg and Breyer are both pretty old (born in 1933 and 1938 respectively).  I'd suggest that when the time comes to replace them, that Jewish folks back a Jewish justice somewhere to the right of Justice Thomas for one seat and a white Protestant for the other.  Holding a block of 3 seats in the SC is an extremely dangerous lightning rod.  It's not in your interest to have the average Joe in the US think of those 3 when he thinks 'Jew'.

The Supreme Court Plays into Our Hands Once More by Granting Cert on the Arizona Immigration Law

Once again the Supreme Court plays directly into our hands, this time by granting cert on the Arizona immigration law case.  They really have two options:
1)  Uphold the law in substantive terms.  If they do this, we win, as it will embolden more states to do likewise or
2) Strike down most of the law.  If they do this they will bleed TREMENDOUS amounts of prestige from their institution, especially if they do it by a narrow vote, like 5-4.   It is a terribly difficult thing to sell to ordinary people that no, YOU can't enforce one of our laws while WE refuse to enforce it ourselves.  That is, we refuse to do our job and we refuse to let you clean up the mess resulting from us failing to do our job as well.  That infuriates people.  Since as reactionaries, we are long both anger AND volatility, this might actually be the preferred outcome---if only we could get something that looked like 2 but effectively was 1.

It is getting easier and easier for me to convince ordinary people---not networked reactionaries---that the judicial and political system is rigged against them and that they are no longer required to play by the 'gentleman's rules of engagement' in said arenas.  This is all to the good, the existing order must collapse before Reaction can proceed, and we can't score all the goals needed ourselves.  The System must score lots of 'own goals', which fortunately it seems to be managing quite nicely.

Heads I win, Tails they Lose: The Supreme Court and Obamacare

The individual mandate and Obamacare is up for consideration by the Supreme Court.  In essence, the Supreme Court is to decide whether the Commerce Clause actually means anything (hint, if it always applies, it is meaningless).  I find the situation rather encouraging.  Here's why:

A slight majority of the population wants to see it struck down by the Supreme Court.  If that happens, it will cost the Court quite a bit of institutional prestige.  I suspect this is what will happen, probably on a 5-4 vote.
If the Court on the other hand decides NOT to strike it down, it'll cost tremendous amounts of prestige as well---again, it'll probably be a 5-4 vote--at least as much as Roe v Wade.  Since I'm all about the delegitimization of the Judicial System, this is a no-lose situation, unless the court can pull something truly Solomonic out of its hat.  I'd prefer they strike it down---considering I have zero confidence that a Republican administration would, even if it had both houses of Congress and the executive.

Behold the Awesome Power of Demographic Hegemony

http://traditionalchristianity.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/when-minorities-discriminate

Essentially the Cherokee nation just decided, and their Supreme Court confirmed, to eject all of the descendants of slaves that were previously considered official members of the tribe.
No doubt this raises the reader's hackles. There is of course a substantial amount of money involved (their casinos earned the tribe over 25 billion back in 2009).

But this is what a group that has demographic hegemony can do. By their vote, they concentrated their share of the tribe's loot. It shouldn't surprise anyone that race is used as the point of coordination. It is, after all, one of the easiest Schelling Points to use in such games, and it has the most history of use. If another group has the demographic hegemony, you're at its mercy in such matters. Also, it doesn't matter what you identify yourself with---many of the freedmen doubtlessly identified themselves as Cherokees first. What matters is who the other identify YOU with. Groups that are heavily atomized and individualistic will always have a major handicap in such status competitions, and the stakes are often very high indeed. This case is just an abnormally clear object lesson. One can't even expect a constitution to take such issues off the table, because even if a constitution is abundantly clear, there has to be an official arbitrator, and that means somebody (i.e., not you) gets to vote, and such things are amendable anyway, even though the modern preference is to simply interpret them into uselessness.
I've heard it said that the Constitution is the White Man's Ghost Shirt. I tend to agree.

Oh, but I hear you saying, I'd NEVER do that to them, so they'd NEVER do that to me. Get this through your head right now---the Golden Rule is a command, not an if-then conditional promise.

More encouraging developments regarding the degradation of the prestige and status of the Judiciary

http://news.yahoo.com/colo-woman-accused-groping-tsa-agent-ariz-215702921.html

Essentially a 61 year old woman decided to give a TSA agent a taste of her own medicine, and was charged with sexual assault.

The really interesting thing is the comments. They're overwhelmingly hostile to the TSA and especially to anyone who defends them or expresses sympathy for the agent. And check this out

188users liked this comment 12users disliked this comment
This would be a jury I would be proud and pleased to serve on:
"Your Honor, we the jury find that since the TSA can cop a feel,
so can the public. Not guilty"

185users liked this comment 12users disliked this comment
about time. i hope the jury just laughs there butts off as they let jher go with a big thank you.

Just on the first page you've got 2 people expressing Level 6 Anti-Judiciary sentiment openly and margins of 180something to 12 agreeing with them. This isn't a reactionary blog but yahoo news and an AP feed at that. Clearly the campaign to delegitimize the Judiciary continues apace. Onward the Reaction!

Another Judge Caught in the Dread Grasp of Reaction

http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2011/07/spare-and-spoil-not-in-us.html

As I mentioned in my earlier post about the campaign to delegitimize the Judiciary and thereby sack that massive edifice of the Moldbuggian Cathedral, most of the work has to be done by the opposition in the form of 'own-goals'. That's a terribly frustrating way to have to operate, not even having too much capacity to even toss banana peels for the minions of the Cathedral to slip upon. But look here, less than a few days from our last discussion, another such creature of the Cathedral has done Yeoman service for us. Were he a covert agent of Reaction he could not have worked better for us. Catch the magnificent condescension (quoted from AE's post)

"You don't spank children today," Judge Jose Longoria told Rosina Gonzales.
...
"In the old days, maybe we got spanked, but there was a different quarrel," Judge Longoria of 214th District Court told Gonzales. "You don't spank children. You understand?"

Damn if I wanted to be inflammatory I could scarcely have written this better myself. Anyone want to bet that lots of folks moved upwards on the judicial delegitimization scale? Spanking is pretty popular in the US, even among fairly highly liberal groups (AE breaks down the GSS findings on the topic in his most excellent post). Sometimes I think that God may be granting me the famous prayer to make my enemies ridiculous.

Two Federal Circuit Judges Play into the Hands of Reaction

http://blode0322.blogspot.com/2011/07/guy-cole-and-martha-daughtrey-hate.html

By way of Pluralism and Clarity, we have the story of two Federal circuit court judges playing into the hands of reaction by ruling, in a purely Orwellian fashion, that the 14th Amendment rather than forbidding discrimination before the law, requires it, thus overturning an anti-discrimination law passed by the voters in Michigan in 2006.

How, might you ask, does this play into the dread grasp of Reaction?
By enraging those sections of the conservative and moderate population that are paying attention. See, for reaction to prevail, one needs to destroy, weaken, and/or subvert the fundamental centers of power in our society. The Judiciary is one of the big ones in my model, and one of the biggest edifices in Moldbug's Cathedral model as well. For my brand of reaction to prevail, the population needs to go through these steps. Most of them require my adversaries to score lots of 'own-goals'. Fortunately, they frequently do that.

1. The population most become convinced that the Judiciary is not like them.
2. The population must further believe that the Judiciary is their enemy.
3. The population must believe that the Judiciary has breached the rules of engagement substantially enough that it is no longer legitimate and possesses only brute force.
4. The population must believe that it is 'cricket' or 'kosher' to use naked political aggression against the Judiciary
5. The population must be willing to remove Judges by any legal means under the formula--what is an impeachable offense---whatever the requisite majority or supermajority SAYS is an impeachable offense. This is the reciprocal of Judges deciding that a law or constitutional provision or administrative ruling means what they say it is by their respective required majority, plain meaning of the text be damned.
6. The population must be willing to employ 'Fight Club' style Jury Nullification as a means of raising the escalation temperature with the establishment. Such jury nullification occurs by setting the acceptable probability of convicting an innocent person at a level beyond the resolution of one's senses. If you have a 1 in 10^15 probability of perceiving the entire court trial incorrectly, as in some sort of extended delusion, and you set your probability of acceptable condemnation of a person who is not guilty to, say, 1 in 10^18, you'll never convict anyone---anyone, that is who the Who...Whom rule applies to. Frankly I wager that most court trials scarcely pass even the 1 in 10^6 level in practice.
7. I won't talk about 7 here, in keeping with the 'Fight Club' convention. Suffice it to say that when around 10% or so of the population hits stage 6, I don't think that the Judiciary as an institution can survive.

Every ruling like this helps advance the population along this spectrum. Almost everyone is at stage 1, and an awful lot of people are at at least stage 3. Iowa recently shows that majorities in certain areas for stage 4 are available (I wrote on this earlier as the Iowa Solution) when they are sufficiently antagonized. Stage 5 and 6 are on the near horizon. Some of us are already there.

The Iowa Solution

http://iowaindependent.com/46917/iowans-vote-to-oust-all-three-supreme-court-justices

Conservative (and reactionaries as well), have long complained about judges legislating from the bench, being 'politicians in black robes', and engaging in social engineering. This election cycle though, some of them actually got the right idea and actually did something about it.
Normally conservatives have a huge disadvantage in contests---that being, they tend to try to obey a lot of meta-rules (sometimes they call it 'the spirit of the rule') that aren't actually binding or enforced, or enforceable for that matter. For instance, the notion that you shouldn't just remove judges because you don't like their decisions.

That is the BEST reason to remove a judge.
Let's face it, the notion of strict constructionism, and 'words meaning things' in a legal context is pretty much dead. Didn't Roe v Wade convince you guys of this? There's really only one question to ask in such cases and it's Who...Whom.

What's more, an impeachable offense is merely, what the requisite majority (usually 50%+1 or 2/3, depending on the statute) says it is. You can't bind the guys that actually make the decision to any sort of actual objective standard. You'd be foolish to try. Laws or constitutional provisions forbidding something only are meaningful when the set of people who will obey them when they'd rather not plus those who they protect constitute a majority. I implore you to cease being the last group of people that still play by the 'rules'. Existential matters such as demographic hegemony are on the table.