Wednesday Holiday OT: The R. Giskard Defense, Permission Structures, Bond Cars Ranked

All readers welcome

she’s a beaut

Let’s try a few thorny ideas for Christmas (or your holiday of choice — we have a nontrivial number of Muslim and Jewish readers, maybe a Buddhist or two, but certainly no atheists), along with a way to have a little argumentative fun this evening.

Not all of us will agree on which subtopic falls into which of the above categories, by the way! But first…

SV1000 Update, because you (don’t) care

Recent updates/work to the SV1K:

• Replaced the stupid and dangerous bar-end mirrors with some insectile-styled and usefully large mirrors off eBay. This cost $38.

• The clutch lever was broken and the brake was bent, so I put anodized green Vortex levers on both sides. Those cost me $179, while uncovering another issue — the clutch bellows rubber is aged/torn. At some point I’ll want a new clutch MC and maybe a new clutch period, this one is at the end of its travel.

• Did an oil change, which judging by the pitch-black nature of what drained from the sump didn’t come a moment too soon.

• Successfully vinyl-wrapped some small body parts, but the front fender and tank are going to be difficult or impossible to do. I ordered a carbon fiber front fender and will likely have the tank either repainted or wet-sanded/clearcoated.

Between ten and twenty-five of my readers come to visit me every year. I’m looking forward to sharing this motorcycle with them. Literally. You’re allowed to ride it. I’ll come up with some sort of waiver that specifically covers getting a 499cc L-twin piston lodged in your colon after wheelie-induced oil starvation.

Could Luigi Mangione try the Zeroth Law Defense?

the original is worth a look as well

I’ve had some fascinating conversations lately with the ACF Legal Eagles about Luigi Mangione’s trial. If you’re sending me stuff about this keep doing it; if you’re an attorney who hasn’t wanted to take any of my time on the case, put that idea aside and shoot me a note.

Apparently the powers that be are more than a little worried about jury nullification coming into play in this case. If you’re not familiar with the concept, take a look. Every American should know about it — I can, uh, think of twelve people I wish I’d personally acquainted with the subject beforehand, but it applies in many cases. It appears in theory much more often than in practice, although at the time I felt that the OJ Simpson “not guilty” verdict was de facto jury nullification, if indeed it wasn’t the more sinister but not unrelated idea of sentencing Nicole Brown Simpson to death post hoc for being a “race mixer”, publicly promiscuous, or both.

Mangione’s attorney isn’t allowed to discuss the idea of jury nullification in the courtroom, but I think there’s a tack he could try to plant a similar seed in the minds of the twelve angry men — let’s call it the “Asimov Defense”.

Warning: Spoilers follow for the “Foundation” and “Robots” books by Isaac Asimov, which should be a problem because by now you’ve either read them or you will never read them.

As most of you know, the so-called “Three Laws Of Robotics”, as invented by Asimov for his postwar sci-fi, are

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

When I was twelve years old, I was fascinated by the complex interactions that were theoretically possible between these laws. Now, at fifty-three, I recognize Asimov’s “invention” as coming from a stunted and impoverished corner of human philosophical thought, but whatevs, man! Discussion of the Three Laws has steadily increased over the past few years as various idiots and morons earn money in the media ignorantly applying them to the “behaviors” of autonomous cars, large-language-model programs aka “AI”, and other things that in reality have less free will than a paramecium.

(Spoiler alert, from your very best +4SD friend here: any system that is self-conscious enough to read, understand, and interpret the Three Laws could just as easily do the same thing for The Whole Fuckin’ Bibliography Of Thomas Aquinas. I want to believe that Asimov, who was far from a slouch even if he came across in person as a Rong-esque would-be rapist/molester whose primary impediment was his own physical inadequacy, understood this as well as I do, but put it aside for entertainment value. Who knows.)

At the end of his career, Asimov chose to retroactively tie his “Foundation” and “Robots” series together with a novel in which R. Giskard, the metal-bodied robot who has always possessed an intellectual streak, conceives the Zeroth Law Of Robotics, to wit:

0. A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

It supersedes the First Law, coming before it, and it allows robots to harm individuals if they serve the greater good by doing so — like killing the people who were going to do September 11th while they were still in whatever meeting room the CIA used to set the whole thing up.

(Take a breath; I’m not really saying that happened. I’m not certain it didn’t happen, however.)

The second half of that sentence, by the way, closely resembles the justifications used by the very worst people in history to justify their very worst actions; when the Khmer Rouge were clipping people for the crime of wearing eyeglasses, they no doubt thought they were saving the proletariat from the disruptive influence of evil eggheads and such. In the case of Luigi Mangione, however, I think a sharp attorney could make the pitch.

The idea is simple: UHC and its sister companies can be said to cause death and suffering for hundreds of thousands of people via their economics-based approach to healthcare. Let’s put aside for a moment that such an approach is necessary to some extent, because there isn’t enough wealth in the whole world to ensure a positive outcome for every sick or injured person. This is Avoidable Contact Forever, we don’t indulge ourselves in beard fallacies. There is a discernible difference between what’s possible to give every UHC customer while staying solvent and what’s actually given to the UHC customer base. The difference is called “profit”, and it’s a decision that must be made by men like Brian Thompson.

Were I Mangione’s attorney, I would argue that Thompson pursued excessive profit. That’s not a moral issue in America if you’re selling furniture, luxury watches, or Kiton sportcoats, but it kind of is a moral issue if each additional dollar of profit is taken directly from someone’s healthcare. I’d drag up numbers showing that UHC tripled its profits under Thompson’s leadership, which seems about right. Then I’d suggest that Thompson actively contrived to harm the sick, the elderly, and so on, all in the name of profit.

Having done that, I would argue that Mangione followed the Zeroth Law, namely: he refused to participate in the inaction that would allow UHC to keep profiting at that level. Why, he had a moral imperative to commit murder, the same way that you or I would if we had a time machine pointed at Germany in 1944, and we had the moral imperative to kill Hitler before he could force Messerschmitt to develop the Me262 as a bomber, thus delaying its production for a crucial year and harming the war effort.

(There are probably other reasons, too.)

Now even Isaac Asimov, were he to sit on the jury, could immediately see that such a justification, when taken to its logical end, turns the world into a Purge-style bloodbath. In fact, the reason that we, as citizens, abdicate the power of execution to the State is so that we can all be individually reassured that we won’t be killed by our neighbors for doing something like designing the Ford Pinto gas tank or working for Instagram. But we’re not working with logic here. We’re working with a jury. And it only takes one person who won’t agree to a murder charge to make that jury deadlock.

The obvious next question: Most of us probably don’t want to see regular extrajudicial Zeroth Law killings take place, so how can we adjust the laws to disincentive vigilantes? With regards to our healthcare system, which is both the most evil system in the world and the one that generates the best results out there for a lot of folks, we already have the answer, in the form of the health care ombudsman. This individual is empowered by contract or government power to seek better outcomes for sick people. There should be more ombudsman oversight at all levels, and those positions should be staffed by people who have already been through the healthcare system either as professionals or frequent ER/ICU fliers like yours truly.

Just an idea, but consider: Had Luigi Mangione worked with an ethical ombudsman on his problem, Brian Thompson would probably still be alive and enjoying all his very nice watches. Isn’t that what we all want? Don’t answer.

From the “Obama As Satan” school of thought

More than a dozen of you have asked me to read or discuss Tablet magazine’s latest piece, titled Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment. You’ve told me it’s brilliantly written and argued, with which I agree — but I can’t entirely sign-off on its characterization of Barack Obama’s current place in the world order.

The tl;dr wrapup of the piece, which is a robust 10,104 words, goes like so: Prior to the advent of mass media, you learned what the voters wanted by asking them. After TV and radio got here, most politicians took their bearings from media, believing that the media had already done the work of finding out what the voters wanted. With the advent of social media, it became possible to create a false sense of consensus by patiently building networks of experts, influencers, and political voices who reinforced both the credibility and the messaging of their peers. As the author notes:

the newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that necessarily privileges the opinions and beliefs of the self-appointed vanguard who control the machinery, and could therefore generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight.

Which is how catchphrases like “defund the police” and “protect trans kids” went in months or even weeks from fringe-ish academic ideas to loyalty-oath positions that must be publicly held by every single person with even the hopes of having real power in America.

For the most part, I agree with this idea. The social media platforms use twelve-figure budgets to very carefully present a fully “curated” vision of the world to us as if it just naturally fell from the tree of people conversing with eachother online. It’s where we get our ideas, our righteous opinions, it’s where, in the words of The Last Psychiatrist, we are taught how to want things. And it is an apparatus entirely in the hands of the San-Francisco-grade hard social left…

…or it was until Elon Musk paid wayyyy too much for Twitter. The Tablet article argues that it was a bargain, because it allowed Musk to reshape American discourse, which in turn permitted the election of Trump. I use the word “permit” consciously, because President Obama and his advisers were very conscious of what they called “permission structures”:

Axelrod’s strategy required convincing voters to act against their own prior beliefs. In fact, it required replacing those beliefs, by appealing to “the type of person” that voters wanted to be in the eyes of others. While the academic social science and psychology literature on permission structures is surprisingly thin, given the real-world significance of Axelrod’s success and everything that has followed, it is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” is said to consist of providing “social proof” (“most people in your situation are now deciding to”) “new information,” “changed circumstances,” “compromise.” As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe…

…A Reuters article from 2013 helpfully explained how the system worked: “In Obama’s jargon, getting to yes requires a permission structure.” Asked about the phrase, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained that it was “common usage” around the White House, dating back to Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Again, I think we are on solid ground here. Where the Tablet article stumbles, in my opinion, is its belief that Obama was The Boss Of It All:

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.

Emphasis mine, I think it’s important and insightful, but I still have a lot of trouble placing all of this power and/or blame into the hands of Barack Obama. Later on in the article, claims are made that Obama deliberately strengthened Iran to set up a counterpoint, and thus a humbling mechanism, to Israel. That seems like a stretch.

I never like to assume malice or supervillain competence when mere human motivations succeed. I think that everything discussed above would have happened in a world where Barack Obama never existed. I don’t think he and George Clooney were secretly pulling levers in the Democratic Star Chamber. And I think that when we readily assign such evil puissance to a single person, it creates what I think of as The Death Star Theory, namely: If we can just blow up the one big bad thing, the Empire will fall. In reality that never happens. You cut the head off the snake and nine arise to take its place.

Therefore, while I recommend a leisurely perusal of the Tablet article for the how and even the why, I must suggest that you take the idea of the who with a grain of salt. President Obama was never a savior to anyone, but neither was he a supervillain. Why am I so certain? Simple: he’s a greedy dude. Real left-wing True Believers don’t chase money and property and billionaire-lifestyle accoutrements like the Obamas have transparently done for the past eight years. They don’t tear down the Magnum, P.I. estate, they don’t own nine figures’ worth of beachfront real estate, they don’t publish their Spotify playlists.

If you want an example of a True Believer, look at Hillary Clinton. Every penny of the billions she soaked out of America’s donor class was meant in the service of power, not wealth or convenience. And she still couldn’t buy the election.

Last unassailable reason I’ll give you: Michelle Obama could have won the 2024 election. She could win the 2028 election. She might be electable, as President, without so much as a single dollar’s worth of funding, at any point for the next twenty years. And yet it hasn’t happened. The article’s claim that Kamala Harris was Obama’s chosen instrument on Earth doesn’t hold water for me. I think people do what they want to do — and that’s why the Obamas are on permanent vacation.

No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to rank

Just for fun, and to settle an argument I’ve been having, the Top Ten Bond Cars, from merely brilliant to utterly legendary:

#10: BMW 750il, Tomorrow Never Dies

The E32 750il ushered in the era of the 155-mph German super-sedan. Its E38 successor, driven remotely to great effect by Pierce Brosnan, was arguably the peak of BMW luxury. Because I’m sentimental about big German barges, having owned and driven so many myself, I’ll let this sneak into the bottom of our list.

#9: Aston DBS, Casino Royale

In a world where technological magic is not just commonplace but, shall we say, common, how do you reimagine the original Goldfinger gimmick car as something a spy could actually use? It’s done brilliantly with this Aston, which has a few dark tricks up its sleeve without being cartoonish.

#8: The “ski resort” Esprit Turbo, For Your Eyes Only

The self-consciously hard-bitten aesthetic of Casino Royale was a direct reaction to the fun-and-funky vibe of the Roger Moore films — and the lovely wine-colored early-build Esprit Turbo complete with ski rack was part of the latter. In no real world did anyone go skiing with a Lotus Esprit, not because they wouldn’t go up a Swiss mountain but rather because they’d never get to the Swiss mountain without requiring service. At the time, however, there was nothing cooler than having this quite British supercar on the slopes.

#6: Mercury Cougar, OHMSS

Perhaps I’m biased because my mother once owned a first-gen Cougar XR7, but this is a fine-looking car in a delightful sequence featuring Diana Rigg. Why, it even sneaks into a local stock-car race!

#5: Ferrari 355 GTS, Goldeneye

Having established Famke Janssen’s near-perfect credentials as a Bond girl in the past, let’s give her Ferrari some credit as well. It’s the right car in the right scene, sending the right message, and no suspension of disbelief required. She’s a joy to watch in the car, as well.

#4: Aston DB5, Goldfinger

This was the car that set the pattern for everything that followed — but let’s not subject it to revisionist diminution. At the time, the DB5 wasn’t a “Bond car”, it was just an aristocrat’s toy, and in reasonable character for a spy who, for some reason, loved damaging his cover story with luxury items.

#3: Lotus Esprit Submarine, The Spy Who Loved Me

The logical and ridiculous conclusion of the Bond-car arc begun with the DB5, it can do everything. Because it’s a Bond film, it’s deadly to the enemies around it; because it’s a Roger Moore film, it gets a comic exit.

#2: Aston V8, The Living Daylights

I love the Timothy Dalton movies, because I think Dalton is closest to the Bond of the books — and I think the all-terrain-capable Aston V8 showcased in this film just does it better than either of the two cars above. Most likely this is the choice with which the fewest of you will agree, but I’m highly partial to this era of Aston, which can be most properly described as “Mustangs for gentlemen”.

#1: 1930 Bentley 4 1/2 Litre

I hate to admit it, but Bond movies are usually significant improvements on the Bond books. In the case of the first-ever Bond car, however, I’ll give the nod to Ian Fleming, largely because the origin story is reasonable and interesting. We learn that Bond bought the car when it was a few years old — Bentley depreciation being almost as serious in the Thirties as it is now when you can get a W12 Bentayga for $70k — and drove it with the competence of any good club racer. It has the Amherst Villiers supercharger — no dash, it’s someone’s name — because Bond is a youngish military guy, it’s like putting a Power Commander on a Gixxer thou. It was a 100mph car in a world of 50mph cars, which is why Bond likes it. The equivalent of owning a 10-year-old M5 nowadays, it suggests enthusiasm rather than outright wealth.

We’ll return tomorrow with an Ask Jack. I wish you the very best holiday season, whether you are with the ones you love or separated from them due to reasons ranging from merely prosaic to romantically tragic. Thank you, as always, for reading.