Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 16,666]

 

[Fernando 6,417]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

 

But is it really Israel that did that?

And if they did that, that's insane!

How can you do something like that? 

 

[Fernando 6,417]

20 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Israel blowing up laptops and walkie talkies now in Lebanon and Syria - children maimed and murdered. 

The Israeli regime is a danger to its own people - only time before Israeli civilians will be killed in return

That sounds like science fiction come true. I'm surprised that this can be done if Israel did it. 

But has Israel said they done that? Because I'm surprised they have that ability to do that. 

I wonder if someone can do the same with our phones? Can they make our phones blow up from afar? 
 

[Vesper 28,291]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

 

But is it really Israel that did that?

And if they did that, that's insane!

How can you do something like that? 

 

Simple. They intercepted the shipment of pagers from Taiwan to Lebanon, loaded thousands of the pagers them with explosives that could be triggered remotely, and sent the shipment back on its way to Lebanon. 

[Fernando 6,417]

41 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Simple. They intercepted the shipment of pagers from Taiwan to Lebanon, loaded thousands of the pagers them with explosives that could be triggered remotely, and sent the shipment back on its way to Lebanon. 

Oh interesting, it's much different then what I was thinking. lol 

I thought it was some crazy technology that you can do it with any electronic in the world. Like the power to control every technology in the world with one button. I watch too much scifi

 

Edited 11 hours ago by Fernando

[robsblubot 3,457]

3 hours ago, Fernando said:

Oh interesting, it's much different then what I was thinking. lol 

I thought it was some crazy technology that you can do it with any electronic in the world. Like the power to control every technology in the world with one button. I watch too much scifi

 

Yeah it's likely possible to overheat a device with hacking: just need to find the instructions that generate the most heat and make them spin faster. Some devices would break in specific ways, and some could potentially explode, but that'd be a design flaw in my book. 😆

Actually putting explosives inside the devices is far more effective eh.

[cosmicway 1,296]

Trump slips further
Bet365 Harris = 1.72, Trump = 2.10 (from 1.80 - 2.00)/

[cosmicway 1,296]

5 hours ago, Vesper said:

Simple. They intercepted the shipment of pagers from Taiwan to Lebanon, loaded thousands of the pagers them with explosives that could be triggered remotely, and sent the shipment back on its way to Lebanon. 

You don't know where they will be stored and it was n't maximum security.
I shipped a piece of furniture from England to Greece once upon a time and it came via Yokohama !
It was no mistake as I phoned the British company to ask what was happening and they said "there is no problem sir, but the ship has to go to Yokohama first" !
So the Israelis break into a depo and do their stuff and then wrap up everything as original.

There are other ways of doing it such as inserting an active voltage into a device.
In a post 1984 world we are all going to have a chip embedded in our head -or shoulder maybe- and this if we don't behave will be fed with an active voltage causing an electrical shock.
This of course requires a system of antennas to be placed perimetrically around the cities for big brother's signals to travel, but in any case it's not normally possible with the devices we normally carry now.
So the Israelis did what I said before.
There is a rumour that they done Yassir Arafat the same way. Somehow they got hold of his medicins, replaced them with poison and then put them back in their boxes.

 

Edited 6 hours ago by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,291]

How Nietzsche used philology to explore morality

The value of our values

When Nietzsche used the tools of philology to explore the nature of morality, he became a ‘philosopher of the future’

https://aeon.co/essays/nietzsches-ideas-about-morality-were-shaped-by-philology

In Human, All Too Human (1878), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘A lack of historical sense is the original failing of all philosophers.’ In accusing philosophy of lacking historical sense, Nietzsche was echoing broader trends in 19th-century thought. In comparison with the ‘philosophical’ 18th century, the 19th century is sometimes described as the ‘historical’ century, one in which investigation into more universal features of human reason gave way to increased focus on how particular historical trajectories influence language, culture and moral assumptions.

The 19th century is also what one might call the ‘philological century’. Philology is the critical study of written sources, including their linguistic features, history of reception and cultural context. Today, the term sounds outmoded, evoking dusty, learned tomes of fastidious source criticism. However, philology was a leading intellectual discipline in 19th-century Germany due to a flurry of methodological developments that revolutionised our understanding of ancient and sacred texts. New rigorous techniques of verifying sources were developed, merely speculative hypotheses were discouraged, more detailed comparative studies of language were conducted. While such methods were scholarly, sometimes bordering on scholastic, their application had significant cultural impact, spilling out of scholarly journals into broader public consciousness.

Nietzsche imbibed these trends as a young man. An all-round talented student (mathematics was a notable exception), he gained admittance as a 14-year-old to Schulpforta, one of the most prestigious humanistic schools in Germany. A training ground for scholars and teachers, the school’s specialty was classical antiquity, and Nietzsche received a rigorous education in Greek and Latin, read historical works by Voltaire and Cicero, and wrote philological treatises on topics such as the saga of Ermanarich and the Greek poet Theognis.

This philological education informed not only his early works that deal directly with Greek antiquity, such as The Birth of Tragedy (1872), but also his later books on morality and moral psychology. Appreciating this philological influence is crucial for understanding the significance of his philosophically most important work, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and the ‘genealogical’ method of philosophy it has inspired.

On the Genealogy of Morality is a puzzling book. It deals with many classic topics of moral philosophy, such as the concept of good, free will, moral responsibility and guilt. However, it does not investigate them in a typical philosophical fashion – for instance, by asking ‘What is good?’ or ‘Do we have free will?’ Rather, it takes a historical approach, asking where our ideas about the good, or free will, or guilt, have come from.

Nietzsche’s answers to these historical questions were and continue to be, to put it mildly, controversial. Not for nothing did he describe himself as ‘dynamite’. For instance, he argued that contemporary Western egalitarian and altruistic assumptions were a form of ‘slave morality’ that emerged from the frustrations and ressentiment (roughly, resentment) of a priestly caste. This slave morality was a reaction against what Nietzsche calls ‘master morality’, an archaic ethics that emphasises virtues of excellence, health and respect for social hierarchy. Master morality valorises strength and denigrates the meekness and bookish intellectualism of the religious leaders of the priestly caste. In response, according to Nietzsche, the religious leaders invented a new evaluative framework in which they come out on top – one in which aggressiveness is classified as ‘evil’ and meekness and altruism as ‘good’ – a revaluation of existing values. These moral assumptions are then taken up by the lower slave caste, as they valorised their lowly status and enabled them to reinterpret their impotence as principled choice. In sum, on Nietzsche’s view, many of our fundamental moral assumptions derive from archaic status competition.

What has puzzled many readers of Nietzsche’s genealogy is how these historical claims are supposed to be relevant to philosophical questions about morality. Nietzsche states that his ultimate aim is to assess ‘the value of our values’, but it is not clear how his historical claims could or should contribute to this assessment. In turning to history, it might seem that Nietzsche is simply shifting the subject of moral philosophy, following the adage that if you don’t like what is being said, then you should change the conversation. After all, the question of where our values come from just seems like a different question from philosophical questions about their nature, value and authority. If Nietzsche is trying to use this history to answer these philosophical questions, then it might seem he is committing a fallacy, the ‘genetic fallacy’.

Showing that something has a bad origin isn’t sufficient to show that it is bad

The genetic fallacy is the purported mistake of evaluating something on the basis of its origin or past characteristics. For instance, imagine a friend tells you that you should not wear a wedding ring because wedding rings originally symbolised ankle chains worn by women to prevent them from running away from their husbands (the example is from Attacking Faulty Reasoning (7th ed, 2012) by T Edward Damer). Even if wedding rings have such a dubious history, this history does not show that it is bad or objectionable to wear them now. When Nietzsche suggests that he should reevaluate Christian morality on the basis of this origin story, we might suspect he is employing a similar type of fallacious reasoning.

Concerns about falling prey to the genetic fallacy are part of what explain moral philosophy’s lack of a historical sense. Showing that something has a bad origin isn’t sufficient to show that it is bad, as the previous examples indicate. Neither does examining the origins of our values seem necessary for evaluating them. To evaluate our moral beliefs and practices, it seems that we need only look at the reasons for and against them, not the causes of our beliefs in them. For instance, to criticise egalitarianism, we should consider potential objections to egalitarian attitudes, such as that they recommend levelling down, prevent the achievement of human excellence, or fail to honour supposed differences in moral desert. Whatever one thinks of these criticisms, it seems that making and assessing them does not require looking at the history of our values. If these points are correct, we can see why moral philosophy would proceed ahistorically: if moral philosophy aims to critically scrutinise the value of our values, and origin stories are neither necessary nor sufficient for this purpose, then origin stories are irrelevant to moral philosophy.

Nietzsche thought this reasoning mistaken, although exactly why he thought so is a matter of scholarly dispute. His historical critique is typically understood in one of two ways: either he held that historical information was directly relevant to the authority or justification of moral norms, or he held it was indirectly relevant by providing evidence that moral attitudes are motivated by ressentiment and/or hinder great human achievements.

To grasp how history might be directly relevant to the status of our values, we might begin by acknowledging that the value of many human artefacts depends on their history – Picasso paintings are more valuable than perfect replicas because they come from Picasso and not from a copyist, and your family heirlooms hold special value because of their historical connection to your family. Something similar may be true of our values.

For instance, if our values include or imply commands, then their history might be relevant to their authority, our obligation to obey them. Many commands depend for their authority on the authority of the commander, and vengeful clergy with status anxiety do not seem like authoritative commanders. More specifically, one might think that the authority of moral commands depends on their coming from God or pure reason, so insofar as historical investigation reveals that they derive from a secular ‘human, all too human’ source, then history might undermine their authority. If Christian values turn out to have been born from resentment, then that, on this sort of argument, undermines their value to us today. In a similar way, philological work that traces the Bible back to secular origins might undermine the authority of the moral teachings contained within it by undermining the claim that those teachings come from God or Jesus.

Another way that the status of our values may depend directly on their history is if they include or imply beliefs about value claims, as historical information can affect whether our beliefs are justified. I might destabilise a belief by coming to know that the process by which I acquired that belief is unreliable. For instance, say I believe a rumour that my grandfather used to pilfer money from the church collection jar, and I acquired this belief from my father. However, I then learn that my father heard this rumour from his brother, who is a notorious liar and resentful of his strict religious upbringing. Given that my belief traces back to an unreliable source, I might reasonably think that my belief is no longer justified.

If moral norms were originally motivated by ressentiment, then this directly ‘taints’ them in some fashion

Similarly, it might be that we acquired our moral beliefs from our parents (and broader culture), who acquired them from their parents (and broader culture), all the way back to the vengeful clergy. But if vengeful clergy are not a reliable guide to the moral truth, then I should distrust my parents’ teachings and therefore my moral beliefs. Nietzsche’s historical story might therefore help emancipate us from illusions by exposing information that challenges our faith in cherished but unjustified assumptions.

These points about authority and justification are points that philosophers sometimes make about the relevance of history for moral philosophy, and it is possible that Nietzsche was making points of this kind. However, this interpretation does not capture what many commentators and lay readers typically take to be the main insights of Nietzsche’s text. For instance, when undergraduates read the Genealogy, they usually take with them the idea that Nietzsche’s history shows that much avowed concern with virtue, rightness and justice is less noble than it purports to be – it is motivated by some concoction of petty vengefulness, self-valorisation and resentment against powerful and high-status others. Here, it is Nietzsche’s claims about the particular interests and motives of the priests, warriors and slaves that is crucial, not merely the fact that none of these figures is divine or reliable.

How might these interests and motives play a role in Nietzsche’s critique of morality? Perhaps Nietzsche is assuming that, if moral norms were originally motivated by ressentiment, then this directly renders them objectionable by ‘tainting’ them in some fashion, even if those who conform to them nowadays are not motivated in the same manner. However, Nietzsche need not make this assumption. It is more likely that Nietzsche sees his historical story as relevant in a more indirect manner, as evidence of similar psychological dynamics in contemporary society. On such a view, genealogy is relevant to a critique of morality because it provides evidence that contemporary morality has objectionable features, such as bad motives, that are not themselves historical.

The idea that many avowed moral views have dubious motives is not a hard sell, particularly given modern internet culture. So one might wonder why one need turn to history to make this observation. There are two reasons. First, Nietzsche’s history helps us see these dynamics more clearly by telling a historical story in which they are present in a simple and unmasked form. While contemporary morality is overlaid with complexities and rationalisations, if we look to the past, we can better see psychological dynamics that have now been obscured. History, on this interpretation, is used to unmask the present.

Second, because we are less personally and emotionally invested in viewing past situations in a particular manner, we are better able to take a less credulous, more realistic perspective of it. While we might bristle at thinking that our political convictions are motivated by ressentiment, we are more likely to recognise this dynamic in historically distant others, which then enables us to recognise it more easily in ourselves. Historical perspective prevents us from giving in to wishful thinking.

These points form an important strand of Nietzsche’s thinking. However, there are challenges to reading Nietzsche as using history in this indirect, evidential manner. Such interpretations treat the past as merely a simplified version of the present, differing from contemporary society only in minor ways. Consequently, this approach overlooks the kinds of significant historical change and contingency that are central to historicist perspectives on our social practices. If this account of Nietzsche’s genealogy were the whole story, it would seem that Nietzsche himself would lack a historical sense. If we want to understand how Nietzsche’s Genealogy might honour such historicist assumptions, we should turn to the history of Nietzsche’s genealogical method itself. That is, we should return to philology.

Much philological research in Nietzsche’s time was interested in investigating the way in which ancient and sacred texts are complex composites, with diverging elements stitched together from conflicting sources. For instance, Julius Wellhausen argued that the Pentateuch, the Hebrew Bible, was a human artefact that could be decomposed into four independent sources, each of which originated significantly after Moses (who was previously thought to be the sole author, a kind of ghostwriter for the divine). This source criticism enables us to see the Hebrew Bible less as a unified work and more as an amalgam of distinct elements with differing histories. This information discourages looking to the Bible for a unified theology, and therefore encouraged taking a less theological approach to the Bible generally.

As a teenager at Schulpforta, Nietzsche learned this broad philological approach to ancient texts. For instance, his teacher Friedrich August Koberstein (himself a revered scholar and historian) suggested that he research a poem on the saga of the 4th-century Ostrogoth King Ermanarich. The poem is puzzling because some parts describe Ermanarich as a noble hero while others describe him as a coward and someone who murdered his wife. It is not obvious how readers are supposed to evaluate Ermanarich. Adopting a historical perspective, young Nietzsche argued that these conflicts arise from the fact that the poem does not have a single author but rather derives from a variety of sources – it is a layered construction with some parts from the Near East, others from Germany, as well as some from Denmark and Britain.

Nietzsche traces back different aspects of our moral framework to distinct sources

This broad approach to texts informs Nietzsche’s thinking about contemporary morality, which he describes in the Genealogy’s preface as a ‘long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script’. When we look at our contemporary values, there are some ostensible tensions. For instance, many believe that excellent human achievements deserve special admiration and rewards, but also that it is only fair to receive special rewards for things that one has earned. But excellent human achievements are often due, at least partially, to innate talents that are not earned, so these views seem in tension. Much moral philosophy involves teasing out such intuitive judgments, finding tensions among them, and considering ways of resolving these tensions, much like a theological approach to the Bible involves identifying explicit and implicit theological claims in the text, finding tensions among them, and considering ways of resolving them.

However, Nietzsche’s philological approach is different. Like Wellhausen’s historical analysis of the Hebrew Bible, Nietzsche traces back different aspects of our moral framework to distinct sources. The perfectionist elements come from the warrior caste, the egalitarian ones from the priestly caste and slave caste, and other aspects of our moral framework – such as respect for ancestors – have still other sources. Rather than simply different strands coming together, we have a ‘document’ that has been rewritten and reinterpreted over time, often by those with complex and conflicting motivations. A philological approach to morality understands it as a complex amalgam rather than a unified evaluative framework.

This historical approach differs from more typical forms of moral philosophy because it does not assume that there is a unified answer to questions like ‘What is the good?’, at least if that answer is supposed to fit with many of our intuitive judgments. Rather, it brings out the competing strands of our moral thinking by providing an explanation of their presence that suggests that there won’t be a way to reconcile them. That is, just as a scientific philology of the Bible might undermine the presuppositions of Christian theology – that one will be able to construct a unified theology that fits sacred texts – so too a philology of morality undermines a presupposition of a certain strand of moral philosophy, that there is a unified moral theory that will make sense of our moral assumptions and practices. When one takes the historical perspective, much moral philosophy looks like it is engaged in a hopeless apologetic project of trying to reconcile what cannot be reconciled. There is no higher compromise between masters and slaves.

Now, if Nietzsche’s philological approach were relevant only to philosophical methodology, it might seem of little interest outside academic debate. However, this approach to morality does not just highlight a problem for contemporary moral philosophy. It also highlights a problem for us. For the fact that our modern moral views are fragmented and disunified itself poses problems. It means that it is difficult to act effectively and consistently, as there is no overarching framework for reconciling competing considerations in practical decision-making. It means that we might be committed to assessing ourselves according to conflicting criteria, ensuring that we are never able to measure up to the standards we set for ourselves. It sets us against ourselves. Nietzsche considered this kind of fragmentation and tension in our views a kind of illness, one of the ways in which modern society is sick.

Once one sees how the tools of philology can be applied to morality, it is easy to see how they can be extended to other parts of contemporary culture. If we examine the history of the norms that structure various social identities, we are often able to make salient forms of internal conflict that are latent in everyday life. For example, by examining the history of gender norms, we may more clearly discern tensions within contemporary conceptions of gender – eg, if you’re a woman, you are supposed to be both an angel of the house and a girlboss, and if you’re a man, you need to be an alpha while avoiding being toxically masculine. These competing norms often create conflicts within those who are invested in these identities, and clarifying the conflict may help avoid fruitless and frustrating attempts to reconcile these competing elements.

Of course, fragmentation and tension need not always be negative – there can be productive tensions, as Nietzsche recognised. Later theorists who have wanted to apply this philological approach to the cultural sphere have often aimed to emphasise its emancipatory potential. For example, understanding national histories as multifaceted genealogies, yielding political communities that are complex composites rather than unified cultures, enables one to appreciate the dynamism of cultural richness and challenge simplistic views of cultural homogeneity. ‘Unity’ is not a virtue in every domain.

Stepping back, a central puzzle about Nietzsche is why a self-styled ‘philosopher of the future’ should be so interested in the past. By examining the history of Nietzsche’s historicism, we can discern an answer. If employed critically, philology is not merely a tool for exploring the past but one for actively shaping the future.

[Vesper 28,291]

How Republicans Are Waging an All-Out Assault on the Election System: “The Whole Thing Can Fall Apart”

Voting rights advocates warn that Donald Trump and his allies have drastically “scaled up” their election-denial efforts, from lawsuits to rule changes to state board takeovers. “The antidemocracy movement is constantly shape-shifting,” says one expert.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/election-denial-donald-trump-2024

 

Protestors in support of former President Donald Trump gather outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum where Ballots from the 2020 general election wait to be counted on May 1, 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Maricopa County ballot recount came after two election audits found no evidence of widespread fraud in Arizona.Getty Images.

Donald Trump’s lies about his 2020 election loss may be tired and familiar—but the MAGA efforts to undermine the democratic process have only grown more sophisticated over the last four years.

While Trump’s attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory were largely haphazard and desperate—culminating in a violent insurrection he continued to defend in his debate against Kamala Harris last week—the former president’s allies have since mounted a much more coordinated attack on the system: They’ve passed laws designed to make it more difficult to vote. They’ve waged a legal campaign to make it easier to contest election results. They’ve even sought more control over the gears of the system, as seen in the takeover of Georgia’s state board of elections by right-wingers earlier this year, which drew praise from Trump himself at a state rally in August and added to fears that Republicans could refuse to certify a Harris victory. Just this week, The Guardian reported that a “behind-the-scenes network of county election officials” in the Peach State is pushing an agenda that would cast doubt over the results before any ballots are even cast.

“It has scaled up,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, the Atlanta-based voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams. “The right wing has gotten very energized and organized,” she tells me, and is trying to “create the conditions…to be able to overturn the results this time.”

Many roads of election denial run through Mike Johnson, who—in the event that Harris wins and Republicans hold the House—could throw sand in the gears of Harris’s certification at the federal level. Democrats told Politico this week that the House Speaker could scramble the rules of the electoral vote count; convince House Republicans to oppose slates of electors; or even seek to challenge the Electoral Count Act altogether. Meanwhile, governors, under the influence of Trump, might refuse to certify the winner of their respective states—a scenario that nearly 20 former governors have launched a pressure campaign to prevent, as Politico reports. The states most vulnerable to foul play, as Axios notes, include Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona—the last of which notoriously suffers from processing delays, which Trump’s allies could capitalize on to file bogus legal challenges and goad Trump voters into taking radical action.

Taken together, the GOP’s goal would be the same as it was in 2020: to help Trump and others on the MAGA right “steal the election” and erode Americans’ faith in the integrity of the process. However, the means election deniers are using to achieve those ends have intensified, Groh-Wargo says: “There is now one of our two major parties whose entire sort of strategic focus is primarily on the lie of voter fraud and elections.”

The American election process has thus far withstood the attacks, experts emphasize: “We see a system that has been tried and tested and proven itself to be secure,” says Joanna Lydgate, cofounder and CEO of States United Action, a nonpartisan election law organization. Nevertheless, the effort to gum up the democratic process could make things “extraordinarily difficult” this cycle—especially if the November election is close, as is expected. “The antidemocracy movement is constantly shape-shifting,” Lydgate tells me. “And we have to always respond to that.”

Doing so is its own challenge. Officials say the legal challenges remain unlikely to succeed, and election denial itself appears to be a losing issue, but the doubts Republicans are sowing in the system can be destructive on their own: “Our systems are so robust and they are so strong—when you have that overlaying civic faith,” as Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes, whose state has been on the front lines of MAGA attacks on democracy, told me at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month. “But if you pick up the veil of that civic faith, the whole thing can fall apart really easily, right?”

Indeed, the constant stream of lies has already made many on the right suspicious of the process; a recent CNN poll found that an average of just 15% of Trump voters in six key battleground states expressed confidence in the integrity of elections, and to “try to dissuade them after they’ve made up their minds that there is a problem is…very, very difficult,” as North Carolina secretary of state Elaine Marshall told me in August.

Nearly three quarters of Harris voters in that poll did express confidence in the election processes of their states. But experts and officials warn that the MAGA threat to the system could shake people’s faith in it, even if it holds. “What we always are concerned about is that there is kind of an exhaustion right now,” Lydgate tells me. “What we don’t want to do is make people feel like, Oh well, there are going to be all these threats and challenges, so why even bother?”

The good news: If the election-denial movement has escalated its attacks on the system since 2020, the pro-democracy coalition has also worked to fortify the country’s election infrastructure over the last four years, ramping up efforts to counter the legal attacks and seeking to highlight the threats for voters. “Yes, [Trump] is going to try to do a bunch of things,” Lydgate says. “Those things will not succeed.”

The public, of course, should help make sure of that: “If their vote wasn’t so dang powerful, they wouldn’t be trying to screw with it,” as Groh-Wargo puts it. The MAGA attacks on the election should “motivate people,” she says, “to throw these goons out of office and continue the work to shore up our democracy.”

Edited 1 hour ago by Vesper

[Vesper 28,291]

UN vote adds to international pressure on Israel over Gaza and West Bank

https://www.semafor.com/article/09/18/2024/un-votes-to-demand-israel-end-occupation-of-palestinian-territories-in-12-months

The News

The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution Wednesday that demands Israel withdraw from the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank within 12 months. Some 124 members voted in favor, with 14 voting against, including the US, and dozens abstaining.

The resolution is the first to be put forward by the Palestinian Authority since it gained a seat among UN members in the assembly hall this month. The Palestinian UN ambassador called the vote a turning point in the “struggle for freedom and justice,” meanwhile the Israeli ambassador described it as “diplomatic terrorism.”

SIGNALS

Israel becomes more isolated on the world stage

Sources:  

The Associated Press, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera

The resolution, though not legally enforceable, is symbolic of the growing global pressure on Israel to reach a ceasefire and hostage return deal in Gaza. The consensus also reinforces Israel’s isolation on the international stage and demonstrates a desire to ratify the power of the International Criminal Court, on whose advisory the Palestinian-drafted resolution was based. The EU said in a statement that the UN General Assembly had “forcibly reaffirmed its commitment” to Palestinian self-determination.

The US keeps up its defense of Israel

Sources:  

The Associated Press, The Economist

The United States’ UN ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, opposed the resolution, arguing that it undermined the two-state solution and failed to address Hamas’ role in the conflict in Gaza. The US is Israel’s most powerful international ally but has come under increasing pressure from other nations to oppose Israel’s deadly offensive in Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack. The vote’s passage, The Economist argued, signaled the US’ “weakening clout” over the UN, even as it remains its biggest financial contributor, suggesting that the Americans “stretched by multiple crises” — domestically and internationally — are losing their diplomatic “supremacy.” The outlet argued that resolution or not, Israel was unlikely to be dissuaded from continuing its military offensive in Gaza and the West Bank.

[Vesper 28,291]

Endgame: The Risk of a Trump Coup and How to Prevent It

https://washingtonspectator.org/endgame-the-risk-of-a-trump-coup-and-how-to-prevent-it/

Donald Trump’s plans for overturning the election result if he loses again have become increasingly visible. This year, Team Trump’s attack on our election system encompasses three distinct phases.

In Phase One, state and local officials loyal to Trump—aided and abetted by outside pressure groups and lawyers—erect obstacles designed to suppress votes for Harris, Walz, and Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. The Brennan Center has documented the systemic enactment of laws designed to make it harder for eligible Americans to register, stay on the voter rolls, or vote. These Republican schemes were enabled by the Supreme Court’s shameful decision in Shelby County v. Holder, in which the conservative majority voted 5-4 to narrow the Voting Rights Act.

That opinion, written in 2013 by Chief Justice Roberts (a Republican appointee and life-long crusader against voting rights), led 29 states, including the entirety of the former Confederate States other than Virginia, to enact at least 94 voter suppression laws over the following decade. Those laws recurrently limit absentee voting, permit partisan interference in elections, and threaten the people and processes that make elections work.

Trump’s Phase One strategy now includes massive purges of the voter rolls in key states like Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It also extends to Republican strongholds such as Florida, which has removed at least one million registered voters since 2022, of whom 90% are reported to be Democrats or unaffiliated; and in Texas as well, where Governor Greg Abbott has trumpeted that state’s removal of another million registered voters—all in the name of election integrity.

Phase Two involves multiple initiatives. First, Trump and his team are sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt about the validity of the elections, with the goal of weakening public confidence in the process and the results, and laying the groundwork for challenges to election outcomes in key jurisdictions that the Trump/Vance ticket actually loses.

Trump supporters have already promised they will challenge electoral count certifications in any swing state in which election officials have found that Trump lost. They are enacting laws that have the goal of enabling them to shut down vote counting and vote certification, such as the new Georgia law that gives power to a new MAGA-controlled Georgia election board to delay and potentially prevent certifications that are adverse to Trump.

There is also the risk of direct action by Trump supporters seeking to physically block electors in states narrowly won by Harris from meeting in compliance with state law to cast, sign, seal up and certify their electoral votes on December 17.  Such illegal and potentially violent interventions would be aimed at preventing the state from submitting its electoral votes in the time and manner required by the ECRA.

In a recently released report, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) identified 239 election deniers in eight swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).  50 are Republicans running for the House or Senate, 6 are Republicans running for state executive office, 102 are sitting state and county election officials, and 81 are leaders of state and county Republican organizations.

While the strategic positioning and overtly anti-democratic views of some of these individuals have gained serious mainstream attention in major media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, the same level of focus has not been afforded  Phase Three, the MAGA team’s post-election endgame.

Phase Three would be activated should the Harris/Walz electors certified by the states constitute a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Phase Three has three minimum prerequisites. First, MAGA forces must achieve control over at least one house of Congress – and preferably both. Second, they must be united in their determination to overturn the election by decertifying the electoral votes for Harris/Walz in one or more states in which the state executives have certified the Democratic ticket has won. Third, the MAGA-leaning majority of the Supreme Court would have to find that Congress has the power to throw out electoral votes that the Congressional majority doesn’t like.

Let’s look concretely how Team Trump would get there.

Using Control of Congress to Control the Presidential Result

The easiest pathway for the MAGA forces to overturn a Harris victory would be for Republican members of Congress to secure a majority in both houses in the November elections, and then award the presidency to Donald Trump in the upcoming Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2025.

Following the requirements of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), the bi-partisan bill enacted in 2022 in response to pervasive election denialism in 2020 and Trump’s orchestration of the January 6 insurrection, at least 20 Senators and 87 Members of the House would first need to notify the Joint Session that they object to the counting of electoral votes in just enough states won by Harris to leave Trump with a majority of the remaining electoral votes.

The objections would presumably cover both of the grounds for rejection as authorized under the ECRA: Republicans would argue that electoral votes were not lawfully certified in the given state or states under the laws of those state(s), and they would contend that votes were not “regularly given,” on the basis of unproven claims of mass voting fraud or other asserted election failures.

Under the ECRA (as with its 1887 predecessor, the Electoral Count Act [ECA]), the two houses of Congress would then meet separately and vote on whether to accept or reject the certification in those selected states. The risk for Trump is that some Republican members would be unwilling to go along with this strategy. But in practice, that risk is primarily in the Senate, as he has effectively purged non-MAGA Republicans in the House.

If Trump can get a MAGA majority in both houses, that partisan majority could reject certifications of just enough states to take away a Harris win in the Electoral College, thereby granting Trump an outright majority of the remaining votes that were certified. Once Trump’s Congressional supporters threw out the electoral votes of the disputed states, Trump would become President.

Any such decision would then immediately be challenged in the Supreme Court.

Tyranny of the Majority

Such an abuse by a MAGA majority control of the House and Senate, and its ratification, would fly in the face of constitutional history. Since the founding of the country, voting for president has always been seen to be a power granted by the Constitution to the states, with state legislatures establishing the rules for determining who has won the electoral votes in the respective states. Indeed, the provision in the Constitution that established the Electoral College, the Presidential Electors Clause, reads, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” How we count votes for President is a matter in the first instance covered by state law, subject to judicial review, as reflected in Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 78, and not a decision by federal legislators.

Consistent with that framework, Team Harris would argue that neither the 12^th  Amendment nor the ECRA allow partisan majorities of Congress to toss out state-certified results of a state’s electoral vote unless they have been first invalidated by the courts. Congress has no constitutional authority to substitute its own judgment to reinterpret state election law. All that the ECRA permits is for Congress to have the right to deal with the unlikely scenario in which a rogue state executive has denied the results of the popular vote, by certifying electors for the losing candidate – or has failed to certify the correct electors based on the popular vote.

Team Harris would state that as a matter of due process and equal protection of the vote, members of Congress do not have the right to disenfranchise a state (or Congressional district) on the basis of claims of “fraud.”  The case for Harris might even cite language from the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore  holding that once a person has been granted the right to vote, it is unlawful to “by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”

Team Trump would argue that the Constitution and the ECRA do grant the Congress the right to reject any electoral votes they choose. They’d likely cite the language of the 12^th Amendment that the President of the Senate “shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” They could argue that this language is meant to enable them either to assent to those certificates, or to object and seek to invalidate particular certificates of electoral votes.

They could further state that consistent with their interpretation, the ECRA, like the ECA before it, specifically provides a mechanism to make such objections and have them heard. Should a majority of both bodies object to the acceptance of the electoral votes of a particular state, their objections must be sustained, and the votes deducted from the total required for a majority, reducing the number needed for Trump to declare victory based on the total number of electoral votes that remain, in accord with the electoral vote counting procedures set forth in the ECRA.

In this scenario, it would not be unimaginable for the six Republican justices of the Supreme Court who voted to grant Trump “absolute” immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts” within his “core constitutional powers,” including crimes involving his direction to officials at the Justice Department, to find a similarly breathtaking authority in  the 12^th Amendment and ECRA. This wing of the Court could find that a MAGA majority of both chambers of Congress does have the authority to make the final determination of whether particular electoral votes are “regularly certified” or “regularly given,” whatever state officials, state courts, or even federal courts have determined.

Thus, a Harris electoral vote majority could be overridden by a Republican congressional majority in both houses, backed by a MAGA-leaning Supreme Court majority deploying raw political power in a legislative and judicial coup to return an unpopular and, in fact, unelected Trump back in the White House. There he could become, as he has promised, a dictator on “day one.” The despotic end would be achieved through despotic means.

Tyranny of the Minority

Given the risks for democracy of this kind of outcome, some might hope that it would be enough for the Democrats to win a single chamber of Congress – in 2024, this would most likely be the House of Representatives – to prevent MAGA Republicans backed by the Supreme Court from simply handing the Presidency to Trump counter to the expressed will of the American public.

The ECRA expressly says that the electoral votes of a jurisdiction may only be rejected if both chambers of Congress have rejected them. Surely this language expressly protects the country from the risk that an out-of-control majority of a single chamber of Congress might try to overturn a Presidential election by simply refusing to accept the results of one or more states.

Here, Trump partisans might still try an end-run around the ECRA rule designed to prevent a party holding a majority in just one house from kidnapping a Presidential election. Their argument: no one elected to either the Senate or the House is a potted plant. Each body has the right to determine whether to accept an electoral count certificate. The ECRA is therefore unconstitutional in purporting to limit the right of members of either the House or the Senate to pick and choose what electoral votes they will deem to be valid.

Unfortunately, there is precedent for invalidating electoral counts of states on the basis of decisions of just one chamber going back to 1865.  In the wake of the Civil War, Congress enacted the “Twenty-Second Joint Rule,” which created a one-house veto that authorized the House of Representatives to reject electoral votes from former Confederate states. The House then used this authority to unilaterally reject electoral votes in some Confederate states in the Presidential elections of 1865, 1869, and 1873. Accordingly, Team Trump would contend that a majority of the votes of either house is sufficient to throw out electoral votes and to subtract them from the total required for a majority.

In response, the Harris team would likely argue that the Joint Rule was probably unconstitutional. More importantly, whatever authority the post-Civil War Congress may have had to enable one body of Congress to throw out those votes in the aftermath of the Civil War, the current Congress has no such authority now, given the Equal Protection rights guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment and the enactment of the ECA in 1887 and the ECRA in 2022.  Each of these legislative acts expressly states that electoral votes may only be rejected by a concurrent decision of the majority of both houses.

It is hard to imagine that even this Supreme Court would rule it lawful for Trump partisans in a divided Congress to reject electoral votes that have been deemed proper by the state’s own legal processes. Furthermore, the Court could be confronted by Democrats in the other chamber engaging in tit-for-tat to invalidate Trump electoral votes, leading to chaos.

The Court, however, would have still another dangerous option to consider.

The Dangerous Solomonic Alternative – Moving to a Contingent Election

The Supreme Court’s MAGA-leaning members could choose an option that appears neutral and fair, but would guarantee that Trump wins. That option would be to find that in cases where the two Houses do not agree on upholding the electoral count certifications in a given state, those votes would not be counted, but also would not be deducted from the total.

To justify this outcome, the Supreme Court might build on the equal protection language from Bush v. Gore, finding that to disenfranchise the voters in some states but not others would violate the principle of equal protection, and would in turn invite the two chambers of Congress to engage in dueling disqualifications whenever they were controlled by different parties.

Perhaps citing Justice Jackson’s famous statement that the Constitution is not a suicide pact,  the MAGA-leaning members of the Court could rule that the portion of the ECRA which mandates that invalidated electoral votes be deducted from the total required for a majority is itself unconstitutional and inconsistent with the 12^th Amendment, which requires “a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed” for a candidate to be elected. As neither candidate would then have enough electoral votes to elect a President, the decision would move to a contingent election in the House of Representatives, where a state-by-state vote of the congressional delegations would determine the result.

As I have previously described in detail, such a procedure would almost surely result in the selection of Trump as President. It is almost impossible for Democrats, even if they were to win control of the House of Representatives, to win a majority of the individual state delegations.  Given rampant gerrymandering, in 2025, Republicans are likely to retain control of the majorities in at least 26 of the 50 states.

At that point, a House controlled by a Democratic majority might well have tools to stop, or at least stall, an illegitimate contingent election, and thereby place the Speaker of the House in the White House under the terms of the Presidential Succession Act. But any President (or acting President) entering office as a result of a cooked-up contingent election or by tactics employed to counter one would face a crisis of legitimacy from the outset, amid grave risk of widespread civil unrest.

A Scenario To Save the Republic

All of these nightmare outcomes remain avoidable. Should Harris win, and Trump try to overthrow the election through such legal stratagems, the ultimate safety valve will be for enough congressional Republicans of conscience to opt against disenfranchising the electoral votes of any state.

In a seemingly encouraging development last Thursday, September 12, six Republican members of Congress joined a unity pledge, committing to acknowledge whoever is certified at the joint meeting of Congress in January 2025 as the winner of the election. While a step in the right direction, the pledge does not address the possibility that majorities in either the House or Senate may attempt to overturn a legal certification made at the state level.

To vote against such an attempted coup in a situation in which Republicans controlled both houses would take political courage. But in practice, a few Senate Republicans choosing to uphold the certification of every state whose votes have been certified by its executive and not invalidated by the federal judiciary prior to January 6, 2025 would likely be sufficient to prevent the Senate from taking state-certified electoral votes away from anyone.

Senate Republicans matter most because the Senate is the chamber most likely to be controlled by Republicans in 2025. In 2022, Susan Collins (R-ME), was the principal Senate sponsor of the ECRA. She described its purpose as ensuring that the electoral votes tallied by Congress accurately reflect each state’s vote for President, and recruited other Senate Republicans to join her. Some of those Senators, such as Mitt Romney (R-UT), will have departed by January 6, 2025. But Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Todd Young (R-IN), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), all of whom cosponsored the law, would still be in office.

If this group of Republicans were to join their Democratic colleagues to uphold all of the electoral votes submitted to the Senate by the executives of the various states and the District of Columbia, on January 6, then the Joint Session should be able to elect a President and avoid a major Constitutional crisis without any intervention by the Supreme Court.

Other Republican Senators might even support them to protect their wider institutional interests.

Outgoing Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has spent decades building a Supreme Court with his personal stamp on it, and might want to protect the Supreme Court from itself, seeking to arrest the Court’s already collapsing legitimacy. There is no love lost between him and Trump. After the January 6 insurrection, McConell made clear that he blamed Trump for inciting the insurrection, privately referring to him as a “son-of-a-bitch” who deserved impeachment.

McConnell could decide it is in his interests to join Collins, Murkowski, and a handful of additional  Republican Senators to keep Trump from illegitimately entering office with the help of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

While a rump partisan Republican House could still ask the court to invalidate electoral votes by finding the ECRA’s bicameral requirement unconstitutional, a strong stance by enough Senate Republicans to certify all of the electoral votes in the Senate would provide the Court breathing room to steer the country – and the Court itself – away from the maelstrom and toward the process of healing American democracy in the post-Trump era.

Jonathan M. Winer is a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement.

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The Undecided Voter