by liberal japonicus
With apologies to Katy Perry and Zedd, it's been 3 days and it seems like a year. Maybe the superpower is to make things so bad that time slows down. It's like hitting the event horizon of a black hole. And, just like the event horzon, I'll put the rest of this after the break
Posted by SuperUser at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)
by liberal japonicus
I'm sure everyone is following the various clown cars the Orange the 1st is setting/has set in motion, and you are welcome to talk about them here. But, a bit of meta (surprise, surprise), I think it is illuminating to identify what is the 'superpower' that underlies all these things. While I'm tempted to suggest the pathological lack of a sense of shame, I've come to the conclusion that it is the ability to rationalize and to do so concerning any outcome. Some examples
Of course, there was a build up to all this. Phillip Morris arguing that smoking was a net benefit because it reduced health care costs, the idea the climate change will benefit humanity by increasing areas where crops can be grown and increase crop yields, I'm sure you all can add to the list. But the feeling of dread I have is that it has reached a point where no outcome is bad enough to resist this superpower.
Anyway, a thread to refresh the page a bit and give y'all a place to put your thoughts. Have at it.
Posted by SuperUser at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (60)
by liberal japonicus
It seems like it's time to take a step back and see if we can come to some agreement about the use of AI here. This is primarily directed at Charles, which is highly unfortunate, because I don't want to make him an object lesson, but it seems unavoidable.
A while back, Charles fed a comment thread into ChatGPT and then linked to the summary. I was really taken aback by that, the idea of having a conversation and the person says well, I just fed everything we said into this machine, and here's what it said you said (oh, and it will continue to use your words and ideas in the future) was rather off-putting. Not that what I write here would not have gotten into chatGPT, the whole model is built on scraping the net in its entirety and I don't have the time or patience to do what is necessary to chatgpt-proof ObWi. But it seems to be an escalation to actually feed stuff from here intentioanlly and with purpose. So I definitely think that is a step too far and would ask that Charles (and anyone else) not do that.
I didn't write this immediately when that happened, but it has been on my mind. But just now, Tony P. asked Charles:
Do you (or Reason, or Chat-GPT) accept that John D. Rockefeller amassed a huge personal fortune from his businesses? I have to assume you do, because you're not ignorant.
Charles took Tony's request as 'please use a prompt to feed this question into ChatGPT'. I don't think that was what Tony intended (Tony is welcome to clarify this) I think the point was that Rockefeller's wealth was a fact regardless of independent of Charles, Reason, or ChatGPT 'opinions', not a request to have ChatGPT explain how Rockefeller's wealth should be considered different in light of different contexts.
Which has me wonder what precise line to suggest here at ObWi, bearing in mind that I can't force anyone to behave in a particular way, especially in regard to chatGPT, except to ban them, which would be overkill. So it seems important to discuss parameters.
If I had my druthers, I'd prefer that when people tackle a question, you don't simply link to or reprint chatgpt output. The link is particularly insidious, because it pulls anyone who wants to engage with you into the ChatGPT ecosystem. If someone abstains from clicking, you can believe that they won't engage with your arguments, where they are simply wanting to avoid giving Sam Altman anything. However, I think it is important to acknowledge using ChatGPT, which sounds like a bit of a catch-22.
I should also add that I use ChatGPT quite a bit, for things like 'please give me 10 examples of this grammatical pattern', 'please outline this student's paper', 'please make grammatical corrections to this essay without changing the content or the style'. I understand that this opens me up to the charge of hypocrisy. Here I am, feeding student work into ChatGPT and getting in high dudgeon when it's my stuff. Folks are welcome to discuss that, I am a bit uneasy with drawing lines here for other people and not doing it for myself. But there seems to be a difference when I am exchanging and offering my own opinions about something as we do here versus when I am in a situation where I am teaching writing to second language learners and trying to get more examples or show them how to use it
Trying to boil this down, I make the following suggestions
-don't simply post chatgpt (or any other AI) output verbatim with no comment
-if you do feel that the output is better than what you could have written, at least add your own points to it
-if you are going to use LLM, acknowledge any points that you get from them
-realize that in doing so, you are making those points yours, so saying 'well, that's chatgpt, not me' is essentially an abdication of responsibility and makes the process of exchanging opinions much more difficult
This is all unfocussed, so I'm hoping that others might be able to weigh in so we can have an understanding of what the boundaries are. I have to wonder that, if there were some variant Charles from another reality who was as committed to syndicalism as this reality's Charles is to libertarianism who employed ChatGPT in the same way, would I come down as hard? On the other hand, it seems that using ChatGPT in this way is a perfect example of why libertarianism is such a mess: A huge amount of sub-rosa assumptions are fed into it and it miraculously comes up with justifications that seem robust until you start examining those assumptions. When used this way, ChatGPT is just another tool to obscure those assumptions so they are never questioned. Discuss.
Posted by SuperUser at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (43)
by liberal japonicus
I'm sure everyone who hangs out here realizes that this isn't going to be the place where we do try to cover every moronic proposal/action by the Orange Turd. (though if anyone has something that they want to opine on as a front page post, let me know) However, given my history and where I am, the whole question of tossing out birthright citizenship is one draws my attention.
My grandparents from my father's side immigrated from Japan to Hawai'i in 1899 and 1903 respectively. They were ineligible for citizenship according to the 1922 Supreme Court case Ozawa v. U.S. which ruled that Issei were "aliens ineligible to citizenship", not that they tried to become US citizens. Previous to that, it was governed by the Naturalization Act of 1906, which said that only 'free white persons' were eligible. Previous to that, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 forbade Chinese from naturalizing. There is a very intriguing set of records in the National Archive related to this:
Declarations of intention, 1887-1909 (2 volumes, less than 1 cubic foot.) These declarations of intention by about 20 Chinese nationals renouncing allegiance and fidelity to Kuang Hsu, Emperor of China, provide only each individual's name, signature, nationality, and filing date. They are noteworthy because they were filed during the period when the Chinese exclusion laws prohibited the naturalization of Chinese, yet the U.S. district court in Marquette accepted them. They were filed in the rather remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, suggesting that a certain number of Chinese were residing in the region. Finding aids include a list of declaration numbers, names, and filing dates.
As for my family, there is a lot of family gossip about what went on. The oldest uncle was, as was the custom, sent back to school in Japan (an experience which he did not enjoy) Given the Japanese education system of the time, it was only elementary school, but it did give him fluency in Japanese. These nisei were referred to as kibei and fortunately, he came back before the beginning of the war, thus avoiding being conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army. However, ones who were in Japan after 7 Dec were conscripted, which highlights the vagaries of citizenship. The oldest uncle was the only one to go back, and the other children stayed in Hawai'i. My father said that pre-war, the whole brood went to the Japanese embassy to renounce allegiance to Japanese emperor before the war, but other aunts and uncles say they have no memory of that. Also, when I went to apply for my Japanese citizenship, it was discovered that there was a family register for my grandmother in Okinawa, which led to a lot of interesting stuff. As best as I can make out, my grandmother had apparently reapplied to be placed on the family register in Japan when she visited relatives in Okinawa. (Japanese citizenship is based on a family register system, called a koseki, which creates its own complications). It's a mystery how she would have done that, but a stubborn old woman back when the bureaucracy was all pen and paper could probably get something done.
Another family story is that after the fall of Okinawa, Japanese prisoners of war were brought to Hawai'i and some of them were family relatives who were imprisoned where they were already holding selected Japanese-Americans. Again, the family story has my grandmother making food to take to them, which was passed through the barbed wire fences. This is another unbelievable story, but the Japanese POWs were kept in Honouliuli Internment camp, which was already holding selected Japanese-Americans (it had to be selected, because of the labor needs of the island economy, to have interned all the Japanese-Americans in Hawai'i would have ground everything to a halt, so only selected leaders who were deemed to be threats were kept there), so I imagine that there was already a system for people on the outside to bring packages to prisoners. I did met one of those relatives in Okinawa who was taken prisoner as a 15 year old and he confirmed that, though his strongest memory was being doused with DDT powder on arrival. If it were now, one can imagine a twitter or instagram video taken as evidence of 'material aid and comfort to an enemy of the state'.
On the other side, my mother was a naturalized citizen, immigrating from England in the 50's. My mother's mother was first married to an American who worked in India and died of scarlet fever and the decision was made to send my mom's step-brother to the states to live with his father's relatives. I don't know about his citizenship, but he joined the USAF and was a navigator on a B-17 in the 306th Bomb Group which was lost (the events were part of prelude of the story dramatized in the Gregory Peck war movie Twelve O'Clock High). Because of his death, my grandfather was in touch with one of his regular crewmates (he had volunteered to join a different crew on his final mission to try and accumulate 25 missions for rotation) who sponsored my grandfather, grandmother and my mother to come to the States. There was also my uncle, a child from my grandfather's previous marriage, but he a lung removed as a result of flying in a Liberator crew and he was told he couldn't immigrate with my grandparents and my mother because his health was considered precarious, so he stayed in the UK (and lived to the age of 90). Would the inability of the whole family to come over have been held up as suspect? If my mom's family had really wanted to come, wouldn't they all have come?
I tell these stories because it seems to me that there tons of points in time where both my father's and mother's 'intention' of become an American can be questioned. Without the simple mechanism of jus soli, where citizenship is granted to those who were born in the country, you've can easily poke and prod to find a reason to find a reason why my parent's citizenship is suspect, and so to question my citizenship. Josh Marshall, I think, made a parallel point (If anyone can find that article, I'd be grateful) that birthright citizenship is a remarkable way to simplify record keeping and makes things more efficient. If someone's birth is recorded as being in the US, they are a citizen. And therein lies the rub.
When MAGA types were claiming that Obama wasn't a citizen, they had to construct a conspiracy of mysteriously forged documents/dual citizenship claims and people in high places actively changing records to allow Obama to be a US citizenship. If you think about it, you can see how eliminating birthright citizenship would allow people to raise questions ore easily. Obama was born in Hawai'i to Stanley Ann Dunham, an American citizen and Barack Obama, Sr., from Kenya. Would birthright citizenship extend through both the paternal and maternal lines? Rather than spinning out more and more elaborate conspiracy theories, you can simply take up the question in the courts.
There is a tenor to the reporting that focuses on how impossible the cancellation of birthright citizenship is. (Here and here) Others focus on the paradoxical nature of the order.
The Trump administration’s legal argument seems to hinge on the idea that children who are born in America to parents who are here unlawfully or on temporary status are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. What do you make of that argument?
Okay, if that were literally true, then they couldn’t be deported, right? In other words, the ordinary way in which everybody understands “subject to the jurisdiction” is you’re subject to the law and legal authority. And everybody agrees if you’re here illegally, you’re subject to the law. You can be deported. So, what are they trying to say? They’re trying to say, “Well, it doesn’t really mean that.” It means something else, which somehow means something about whether your parents are here legally or not. So, that’s the part where it kind of falls down.
Trump's Executive Order, with the NewSpeak name of Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, limits it to 30 days from the date of the order, but that is just a number. I think a lot of the reportage minimizes the chances of it happening, but I think that is founded within people who don't have any problem or questions with their citizenship/identity, not realizing how insubstantial the framework that undergirds our citizenships really is.
During my undergraduate study, a book that made a huge impact on me was Richard Rubenstein's The Cunning of History. The inspiration for the novel Sophie's Choice, one of the key points he highlighted was that what the Nazis did in the Holocaust was all done with strict attention to the legal framework.
The situation of the Ukrainian with a Polish passport would have changed drastically had the Polish government suddenly canceled his citizenship. He would have become a man without a country and, as such, without any meaningful human rights whatsoever. In the twenties and thirties denaturalization and denationalization were increasingly used by governments as ways of getting rid of citizens they deemed undesirable. One of the first large groups to suffer denationalization were the White Russian opponents of the Bolshevik regime who escaped to the West. Approxi- mately one million five hundred thousand Russians were deprived of their citizenship by the Soviet government in the aftermath of the revolution and the civil war period. In the civil wars of the twentieth century, there has been little if any reconciliation between opposing sides. Expulsion and extermination have often been the preferred methods of the victors in dealing with the losing side. The denationalized White Russians were followed by the Spanish republicans, the Armenians and, of course, the Jews.
[...]
Neither the apatrides nor the German political prisoners were outlaws because of any crime they had committed, but because their status had been altered by their country's civil service or police bureaucracy. They had been deprived of all political status by bureaucratic definition. As such, they had become superfluous men. Those apatrides in the detention camps were among the living dead. Sooner or later, most of the living dead were destined to join that vast company Gil Eliot has called "the nation of the dead," the millions who perished by large-scale human violence in this bloodiest of centuries. What made the apatrides superfluous was no lack of ability, intelligence, or potential social usefulness. There were gifted physicians, lawyers, scholars, and technicians among them. Nevertheless, in most instances no established political community had any use for the legitimate employment of their gifts. This was especially true of the Jewish refugees, but they were by no means alone.
Before World War II, the number of stateless persons increased with every passing year. Statesmen and police officials were agreed that a solution to the problem had to be found. The stateless could neither be assimilated nor, in most cases, expelled. International conferences on the "refugee problem" were held, but to no avail. There seemed to be no solution. In reality, there was a "solution" that was obvious to Hitler. When one has surplus livestock that are a drain on resources, one gets rid of them. Neither Hitler nor Stalin saw any reason why people ought to be treated differently. The "solution" had logic on its side, yet there remained a sentimental obstacle: In the prewar period, it was not yet possible to exterminate surplus people the way a farmer might kill off surplus cattle.
It's telling to me that Trump's lackeys are also being legalistic about this.
In court, the Justice Department used the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins as a legal analogy to justify Trump's executive order. Arguing that "birth in the United States does not by itself entitle a person to citizenship, the person must also be 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States," it said the case found members of tribes "are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States and are not constitutionally entitled to citizenship."
That case has another point that I also note, which is that the plantiff, a John Elk, petitioned the court to be eligible for birthright citizenship because he had "voluntarily separated himself from his tribe, and taken up his residence among the white citizens of a state". Ultimately, how much one assimilates is not the point. The point is to find a mechanism which can used to brought to bear. And citizenship is the perfect lever. It's a construct built upon national borders and history that we often take for granted, but when poked at, can fall apart. From this article:
Last year, the Brennan Center partnered with VoteRiders, the Center for Civic Democracy and Engagement (CDCE) at the University of Maryland, and Public Wise to survey Americans about what identification they possess and what they know about voter ID laws in their state. We also asked respondents whether they had documents that prove their citizenship — a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers — readily available. Our research indicates that more than 9 percent of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, don’t have proof of citizenship readily available. There are myriad reasons for this — the documents might be in the home of another family member or in a safety deposit box. And at least 3.8 million don’t have these documents at all, often because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen.
We also uncovered evidence of racial disparities in these numbers: while just over 8 percent of self-identified white American citizens don’t have citizenship documents readily available, that number is nearly 11 percent among Americans of color.
It does seem of a piece, questioning birthright citizenship and efforts like this.
But as I say, this is something that I tend to focus on. So, any interesting nationality stories? If pressed, how would you prove you are a citizen?
Posted by SuperUser at 06:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)
by liberal japonicus
When you have Charles making a privatization argument based on some tragedy that, if not caused, certainly exacerbated by the Orange Cretin, it's time for an open thread!
Posted by SuperUser at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (92)
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