Category Archives: Politics

112

28 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by in Biology, Musings and ponderation, Politics, Science, Uncategorized, Utopia and Dystopia

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Today the temperature on our backyard weather station topped out at 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently the reading at the Portland International Airport was 116 degrees. It was the hottest day ever recorded in the history of Portland. Indeed, it was very likely the hottest day that has ever occurred in this valley in the entire history of human habitation at this site. The second hottest day in Portland’s history was yesterday; the third hottest was the day before that.

For years, ever since I knew what climate change was–ever since we used the term global warming instead of climate change–experts have cautioned the public not to point at any specific weather event and say “See? That’s climate change at work.” With my own students, I’ve taken pains to differentiate weather from climate and to help them understand that extreme weather events have always been with us, that extreme weather is a natural consequence of living on a planet with an atmosphere and oceans and an axial tilt. However, extreme weather events do not happen by magic. And I am thankful that more and more Americans seem to have awakened to the reality that these shocking extremes in the weather are being driven by human-caused climate change.

A few years ago, I decided to devote the rest of my career to fighting anthropogenic climate change. Like a lot of people, I feel overwhelmed by how puny my influence is in relation to the scope of the problem. But I can work to address climate inaction at my college, and I can help shepherd into being academic programs devoted to restoration ecology and climate remediation and environmental policy change. And I know that I can work with students in ways both formal and informal to help them see the political and economic transformation ahead of us.

You can see the transformation ahead of us as well. It will cost you and me a good deal of money to address the catastrophe that is upon us. However, you and I will pay it: either we will pay the cost to save human civilization or we will pay for our civilization’s collapse.

I hope that a few locals who have been snookered by Fox News and its ilk into climate change skepticism (some of them students of mine) will be jostled into cognitive dissonance by the heat of the last three days. I have less hope for the cynics and nihilists that broadcast to them or who pretend to represent them politically. But it was ever so: those who today claim that climate science is unsettled are close cousins of those who used to argue that cigarettes don’t cause cancer or that black people were happier as slaves than as free people. For whatever social evil one cares to name, there is a powerful constituency that benefits from its existence and that will fight to keep it. For the last several decades, that force has been concentrated in the Republican Party and its various media outlets. The names may change at some point–just as the Republicans used to be a far more progressive party than today and the Democrats far more socially regressive–but there will always be a group of powerful people ready to defend an exploitative or oppressive status quo.

But here’s the good news, to the extent that any news about what is happening to us can be good: climate change is not going away. The problem will continue to knock at our doors more and more insistently. And in the words attributed to my favorite Republican, “you may fool people for a time; you can fool a part of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

A Message for My Students

12 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Politics, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

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I found myself facing an unexpected challenge as a teacher this week: I had to make a case, for the first time in my life, in favor of democracy as a form of government. It was a hard, and surprisingly emotional, writing task. I don’t know whether it reassured any of my students or shook anyone awake, but I’m glad I wrote it nonetheless.

US Capitol, photo Robert Easton

After she read it, my wife suggested I post it more broadly. So, for anyone who happens to chance across this blog, here is what I wrote my first-year writing students this Monday:

Welcome to week 2, fellow scholars:

While I have been meaning to experiment more with video announcements, I felt that this week, given everything that has been happening in our nation, it was important to me to write out my announcement. Writing helps us to clarify our thoughts, to identify what we really believe, and I can’t think of a time in my life when it was more important to me to clarify to my students what I believe.

I have some information about how the course is proceeding, but before I get to that, I want to begin by addressing the elephant in the room. Last week’s violence at the United States Capitol is unprecedented: never before in the history of the republic has a mob of citizens taken over the seat of American government. While I am sure we all have our own strong feelings about what has happened and what is happening now, I want to make sure that students understand my values and expectations as regards this class.

Let me make my allegiances clear at the outset: I believe in democracy. I am committed to government of the people, by the people, for the people. That principle is much easier to talk about than to practice, as Abraham Lincoln could surely have told us when he coined that phrase in the Gettysburg Address. Make no mistake: our country has a daunting amount of work ahead on questions of race, of political representation, of equal justice and opportunity. But, regardless of the difficulty involved, life in a democratic republic is preferable by far to life in any of the various authoritarian or totalitarian alternatives to democracy.

It is this commitment to democracy that brought me into my career: I would not teach at a community college if I didn’t believe that people can learn how to participate fully in a democratic republic. We study rhetoric, the ancient art of argument, for many reasons, but chief among them is so that we can learn to represent our interests with dialogue rather than with violence. If we do not have enough citizens who can make that simple—yet very difficult—commitment to dialogue over violence, the country will falter. We will not recognize the country that results, I promise you.

What does all of the above say about what happens in this class? In this class, I will guide my teaching practice by the following value: Every student, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, sexuality, ability, or political beliefs, is welcome here, as long as they conduct themselves with respect for all other students in this class community. In other words, I am making two commitments to you:

  1. No matter who you are, you are welcome here, and
  2. I insist that you treat one another with mutual respect.

Much of what we read, write about, and talk about in this class will relate to social or cultural issues which are by their nature political. Whether your political beliefs on these issues are similar to mine, or similar to the beliefs of others in the class, will have no bearing on your grade or your place in this class. As I said above, all are welcome here. However, I also expect that when you encounter someone else in this class with different political, cultural, or social beliefs than you, you will speak with that person as an equal, as someone worthy of your respect, as one who has as much right to participate in this classroom community as you do. Because part of my job is to maintain this classroom community in a way that provides a healthy learning environment for all, I will not tolerate behavior that belittles, ridicules, or otherwise disrespects any student or their beliefs. I trust you, as fellow scholars and as decent human beings, to commit yourselves to an environment of mutual respect.

Cataclysm 2020

07 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, Politics, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

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It’s hard to have much love for 2020. This year–which, I remind myself when I am feeling down, is only about 77% finished–feels like a self-reinforcing system of catastrophes. I suspect I would find this a tough year even without the basso continuo of a global pandemic: the corner of the world I live in has suffered the most ruinous wildfires in decades; the president of the United States has announced his intention to replace democracy with authoritarianism and minority rule; his party, long ago one of the great intellectual traditions of the country, has shown itself to be led by nihilists, cynics, time servers, and predators. I’ve awakened in the middle of the night more than once this year overcome with the thought that life as we know it is ending, to be replaced by something more solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Perhaps my 3:00 am dread is an accurate picture of what is to come. Perhaps, like Job, “the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me” and we are watching the collapse of the American experiment. Or, perhaps, what we are witnessing are the beginnings of the wholesale collapse of the entire human experiment, as the planet’s many life support systems go offline one by one. These outcomes seem possible: the beginning of the end of the republic by next month, the end of human civilization by the end of my children’s lifetimes.

And yet, what wakes me at 3:00 in the morning is not the certainty that those are our fates. Rather, what wakes me is uncertainty, the sense that much of what I could count on for the first half of my life can’t be counted on today. A related dread is the knowledge of the limits of my influence: I can work towards a civic renewal and towards ecological restoration, but the outcome of my work is out of my hands.

Paradoxically, this cloud of unknowing is also where I have taken some comfort. Old things are passing away–because of the pandemic, because of climate change, because of the presidency of an authoritarian strongman. It does not necessarily follow, however, that what will follow must be worse. The United States of America still purports to be a democracy. It is not impossible–if we vote, if we participate, if we work towards it–to build a more just society than the one we live in today, a healthier society, a more sustainable economy, a restored ecosystem.

By whatever name you care to call it–providence, karma, feedback loops–we are in a moment when the world itself seems to be pushing back on the outrages of the last four years, or four centuries: not just the fires and the supra-alphabetical roster of hurricanes, but Donald Trump’s own infection with COVID-19. Because he is a public man, his illness and suffering take on symbolic dimensions, as though he were a character being punished for his hubris in Dante’s Inferno or the Book of Daniel. Trump’s posturing about his strength, even when it’s obvious that he is in pain and struggling for breath, only goes to show that he is as unprepared for his life as a metaphor as he is for his life as President of the United States.

The times are cataclysmic, but they will pass. A new day may be closer than you think. And there will be a moment on the other side of the cataclysm that calls for new balances. It’s time to vote Donald Trump and his enablers out of office. It’s time to push. It’s time to work.

Facebook delenda est

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, Politics, The Time of Troubles, Uncategorized, Utopia and Dystopia

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I’ve spent months away from The Subway Test and from social media in general, deep in the burrows of a new writing project. And, as exciting as that new project has been (it’s so exciting that I can’t really tell you much about it), I have missed the writing practice that I had before, working on short stories, my novel Pacifica, and the odd blog post that most people read when I cross-post it to Facebook.

But regarding Facebook, I have had another reason for my radio silence: I just haven’t known how to respond to the mounting news about what a monstrous company Facebook is. On the face of it, I’m not sure it should be such a hard decision for me to leave Facebook (and its horrible little sister, Instagram): a company that seems devoted to permitting, even encouraging, the spread of political disinformation, up to and including disinformation that drives genocide, is a company I want nothing to do with.

Copyright Adbusters

One of the only reasons I’ve had trouble leaving is that I don’t normally think of Facebook the company when I’m connecting with friends over Facebook the platform. That is, until about six months ago I was doing a fair amount of compartmentalization regarding my Facebook feelings: I would hear the news about Facebook’s business practices with mounting disgust, then log on and hand out a bunch of likes and haha faces and hearts to my friends’ pictures and memes and political links. Part of me knew that Facebook’s poetic PR language about connecting the world was just so much corporate bullshit. But then I would get on Facebook and act like all of that bullshit was true.

That’s because Facebook has very effectively built a business model which exploits our love for our friends and family. There’s nothing inherently wrong with such a business model: a thousand major companies, from Hallmark to Hasbro to TGIFridays, monetizes our desire to connect with people we love. But I do expect such a company, if it claims to be devoted to connecting me with my loved ones, not sell my personal data to political dirty tricks operations, to voter suppression outfits, to election oppo researchers. And I definitely expect such a company to step in when their platform is being used to encourage genocide.

So, please consider this my last post on Facebook. If you are reading this post on that platform, know that I will miss you. You I like. But so long as Facebook continues under its current leadership, with its mix of smarmy public apologies accompanied by no meaningful change in policy, I won’t be back. As a small potatoes writer who would like to have more exposure, I do understand that leaving Facebook behind will mean cutting off one of the few channels by which most people see my work. But the internet is a big place–there will still be lots of places that an interested reader can find me.

If you happen to be an interested reader, feel free to subscribe to my blog, The Subway Test –you can also find the blog simply by googling “Joe Pitkin.” Until then, I’ll say goodbye and deactivate my accounts on New Year’s Day.

I’m open to coming back someday. In fact, I’ll be happy to come back to Facebook and Instagram if the company will take meaningful action to clean up its act. For starters, the Board of Directors needs to fire Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. I know that Zuckerberg can go ahead and fire the board in return–he is after all the majority shareholder in Facebook–but the board needs to grow a spine and do its job. If Zuck wants to fire the board in return, let him go ahead and do that: at the very least his doing so will make public what a morally bankrupt human being he is. If the board is able to replace Facebook’s top executives with people who will shepherd a transformation at Facebook, creating a company with meaningful privacy policies, meaningful informed consent about how our data is used, and a serious effort to clamp down on disinformation and incitement, Facebook could be fun again.

Goodbye until then–much love to you, friends!


The Author Gratefully Acknowledges

06 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in My Fiction, Politics, Science, Science Fiction, Stories, The Time of Troubles

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My story “Potosí” recently came out in Analog, and it’s gotten lots of the positive and negative attention that I had hoped it would. In the case of this story, I looked forward to some negative attention, as “Potosí” is a not-so-veiled indictment of the Trumpian worldview, and some readers of science fiction, unfortunately, are also white supremacists. (This is not to say, by the way, that everyone who hated the story is a white supremacist. People could have any number of reasons for disliking the story; however, a few people who hated it had objections which were rooted in a white supremacist worldview).

I’ve also been happy with how the story looks in Analog. Even though the magazine is print-only, it’s still nice in this internet age to see one’s name in print. However, I do have one regret about how the piece looks: my bio was omitted from the end of the story. That’s normally not a big deal at all for me–I suspect the editors left it off for space-saving reasons, and the folks at Analog have done more than just about anyone to promote my work. They were even kind enough to run a full page biosketch on me a couple of years ago. But there was a line in my bio for this story that I really wanted to appear in the magazine. Here is is:

“The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Phil Ekstrom in working out the physics of this story.”

Phil is a friend of mine whose knowledge of physics not only exceeds my own (that’s an exceedingly easy accomplishment), but his knowledge of physics also exceeds my knowledge of any field at all, including writing. He’s a man of great accomplishment in a wide number of fields of physics and engineering; while it’s hardly his greatest achievement, some will recognize his work in the photo below: Phil was one of the people who wired up the young Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s first computer.

young gates and allen

A teenage Bill Gates looks to the top of an imagined stack of 100 billion dollar bills –Getty Images

“Potosí” involves a decent amount of classical mechanics–most of the story takes place in the microgravity of a small asteroid being pushed this way and that by space tugs, mass drivers, and the imaginary forces of human greed and anger. I’m reasonably good at describing  the greed and anger part, but I needed a lot of help with the physical forces. I can tell Phil has years of experience explaining things to undergraduates of varying talent; he certainly needed to call on those skills in order to explain my story to me.

The story has some (I hope small) violations of physical laws, where I did a little handwaving in order to accomplish an artistic goal. But to the extent that “Potosí” is any example of hard sci-fi–as opposed to the science fantasy of Star Wars or the kilomoles of handwavium in Star Trek–I have Phil Ekstrom to thank for giving the story some semblance of rigor. Thanks, Phil.

What’s Your Science Fiction Pen Name?

26 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in fantasy, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Politics, Science Fiction

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I’ve really been getting into ambient music lately, and I’m noticing that many ambient artists–maybe most of them–have stage names. Loscil, Biosphere, Oöphoi–many of these folks name themselves as though they were themselves science fiction characters.

I’ve also been wondering a lot about identity in my writing, whether the fact that I’ve been published many times before makes it likelier for new editors to accept a story of mine for publication (it doesn’t seem to–I’m definitely an opening act as far as magazines and podcasts are concerned). But I do like the idea of my writing having an existence which is separate from my gender and ethnic and religious and sexual identity.

If fantasy and science fiction writing were more like ambient music (or if I thought it would accomplish something for me to take on a mysterious, Banksy-esque persona), I would choose the name Gravitrope or Pánfilo for my nom de plume. Both of these names resonate with me for personal reasons: for much of my thirties I was in a band called The Gravitropes, and I feel a kind of spiritual affinity for gravitropism, which is the ability of sprouting seeds to send their first shoots away from the pull of gravity and their first roots towards it. Pánfilo is a wonderful old Mexican name pulled from ancient Greek; the name means “lover of all.” I picked the name for one of my alter egos in my next novel, Pacifica.

One might wonder whether my taking on a writing name like Gravitrope or Pánfilo would be an attempt to game the publication system of speculative fiction. To their great credit, fantasy and science fiction editors are actively working to publish voices from a full diversity of genders, ethnicities, and sexualities. Would a writer with a pen name that seemed less white and male get a little more attention from editors today? Inasmuch as I hold the most privileged identities on the planet–I definitely present as white, male, straight, cis-, Christian, and it’s not worth quibbling over ways that not all of  those labels are perfectly, scrupulously accurate when the labels are definitely more true than not and when they are really markers of social privilege that I’ve held my whole life–it’s fair to say that if I took on a name that suggested a different gender, or genderlessness, or a different ethnicity, I would be dismissed as a poseur. I also don’t want to do anything that will make it harder for people from the full spectrum of humanity to get greater attention for their work. And, if there’s something I can do to help others from that fuller spectrum get published (short of refraining from writing myself), I’ll do it.

Having said that, there is something liberating in sending a story to a magazine under a different name, or to a magazine that uses a blind submissions process (i.e. you send the story in anonymously and the editors only learn who you are if they decide to publish your work). I don’t know whether I’ve had any better luck–or worse luck–getting published in blind-submission venues than in others. But I do like the prospect of my writing being read on its own terms, irrespective of who I am or who editors think that I am. I’d like to imagine my work reaching across boundaries of ethnicity and gender and history to tap at the bedrock of the human condition–in other words, I hope that my stories might function as works of art rather than simply as statements about what it means to be white and male in America.

That’s a fantasy, I know. But hey, I’m a fantasy writer.

And you? If you were to write sci fi under a pen name, what would you choose?

 

hierher

Photo credit: Hierher

 

The Big Red Carpet

14 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Politics, The Time of Troubles

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Lots of people smarter than me have written about how Trump is a pushover in international negotiations: Trump’s two week sojourn in Asia brought out a round of such analyses here, here, and here. But for me our current president’s addiction to flattery and fawning appeared in his remarks about the red carpet treatment Trump (and, well, America) was given:

“It was red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever received. And that really is a sign of respect, perhaps for me a little bit, but really for our county. And I’m really proud of that.”

red carpet

photo courtesy of The White House

It’s hard to watch our country get played for a bunch of suckers by the government of China, of Russia, of really any nation with leadership savvy enough to understand Trump’s fragility and neediness. I just happened to have stumbled across James Madison’s sentiments on the matter, written back in 1788:

Every nation, consequently, whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability, may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of their wiser neighbors. But the best instruction on this subject is unhappily conveyed to America by the example of her own situation. She finds that she is held in no respect by her friends; that she is the derision of her enemies; and that she is a prey to every nation which has an interest in speculating on her fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs.

–Madison, Federalist #62

Madison’s remedy for our “fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs” was a brand new constitution. What’s our remedy today?

Hint: the remedy is in the Constitution!

The Founding Bloggers

23 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Book reviews, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, Politics, Reading Roundup, The Time of Troubles

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When a musical like Hamilton comes along, a rational response to the buzz is for folks to, you know, want to see Hamilton. Others might be overwhelmed enough by the positive press to look to Hamilton‘s source material, the gargantuan Ron Chernow biography of the man on the ten dollar bill.

Others, the cheapskates and musical theater philistines, might turn instead to The Federalist Papers.

Yes, I started reading The Federalist Papers because I heard Hamilton rapping on NPR for a minute and I realized that I hadn’t really read anything Hamilton had written.

I suppose if I’m really honest with myself, I do have to admit that fear for the future of America, at least as much as Lin-Manuel Miranda, is really what sent me to The Federalist Papers. As I watch the current president’s bumbling yet earnest assault on the Constitution–his flouting of the emoluments clause, his apparent ignorance of the establishment clause, his barrelling through each conversation as though the separation of powers didn’t exist–I realize that I don’t know enough about the document that the president is trying to subvert.  I have read the Constitution, and I’ve sure been going back to my pocket copy a lot lately, but like a powerless fanboy, I want to know more, to know it better. And The Federalist Papers, I’ve been told, are the inspired commentary on the US Constitution, the brilliant liner notes to that Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of legislation.

I’m about a third of the way through so far, and it’s very slow going. All three of the authors–Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay–learned to write in an age when a man showed his genius by teasing each sentence into a froth. Each sentence has a multi-layered, architectural quality, like the 18th century wigs that Hogarth lampoons in Five Orders of Perriwigs.

William_Hogarth_-_The_Five_Orders_of_Perriwigs

By William Hogarth – Scanned from The genius of William Hogarth or Hogarth’s Graphical Works, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2714934

Of the three, John Jay is the most straightforward of the writers, the one least inclined to pile on the relative clauses. Imagine my dismay, then, to learn that John Jay wrote by far the fewest of the papers–only five of the 85–before illness forced him to give up the project. Hamilton, who wrote by far the most of the papers, is also the hardest to read. Every sentence of Hamilton’s is like listening to a Yngwie Malmsteen guitar solo: his paragraphs are spattered with commas, packed with dependent clauses that double back on themselves and seem to eat their own tails. And they are also filled with some of the most brilliant and vigorous writing I’ve ever seen.

This sentence, from Federalist #29, is typical Hamilton:

There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia, that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery; whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians; as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price; or as the serious offspring of political fanaticism.

Wow–I had to crawl through this sentence few times before I could tell what Hamilton was actually arguing: that militias are no danger to public liberty. However, one look at the rigging of this sentence is enough to warn me not to treat his ideas with raillery. A sentence like this demands to be treated with gravity.

I was also fascinated to see, in this sentence and elsewhere, how current Hamilton’s ideas are. Dust off the perriwig of his prose, and you can see that we are still  debating “the idea of danger to liberty from the militia” in this era of Cliven Bundy.

But what has impressed me the most so far about these letters is the high-wire act their authors pulled off. The three men, all writing under a single pseudonym–“Publius”–managed to pump out 85 of these essays over just ten months. That’s one letter every three or four days, each one a Niagara of commentary intended, I imagine, to bury the Constitution’s opponents under a flood of historical references, musings on American geography, and speculations on human behavior.

The newspapers these essays appeared in, The New York Packet and the Independent Journal, were two of that enormous flock of early American newspapers. I remember reading somewhere that most such papers had a circulation of about 1000. Publius was, in other words, much like an early blogger: a pseudonymous team of writers with a tiny audience, writing their asses off to produce brilliant content several times a week.

Dilettante that I am, I have nothing comparable to offer the country here at The Subway Test. I post a couple of times per month, sometimes about politics but usually not. Usually my topic is, in Homer Simpson’s words, “what some nerd thinks about Star Trek.” Yet I can reach back those 230 years to the brilliance of Publius and see that I am pushing my little cart up the great track they laid. If you want to resist the depredations of the current presidency, you have to educate yourself. Read The Federalist Papers. It is one of those books that will comfort you with the underlying genius of the republic. More importantly, it will help you understand what the hell you are defending when you stand up to the current president.

I Marched for Science

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, Politics, Science, The Time of Troubles

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March for Science2

Photo credit–Carlyn Eames

I’m not a professional scientist. I do have enough training to work as a lab tech if there’s ever some neo-Maoist Cultural Counter-Revolution where we’re all rounded up and forced to work in research facilities–it goes without saying that that won’t be happening during this administration. I’d be reluctant to call myself a scientist because I have published no peer reviewed papers, and my field work is competent at best (and often in graduate school I wasn’t at my best).  Having said that, I have actually worn a lab coat and safety goggles as a part of my job–for a week here and there, anyway–and I  have all the love for the scientific enterprise that an enthusiastic amateur science fiction author can have.

Across the republic, the streets were filled with people like me last Saturday at the March for Science. Well, based on the signs people were carrying, I’m sure that a lot of the marchers were bona fide scientists–at least bona fide lab techs and grad students. And, while there has been a healthy debate within the sciences about whether this kind of public advocacy is helpful or harmful to the cause of science, put me down as one who believes it’s valuable for scientists and science-lovers to stand up and be counted.

MArch for Science1

I appreciate a properly footnoted sign. Photo credit–the lovely Carlyn Eames

There has been push-back from some scientists–this article at Slate is a typical example–that the march was an orgy of uninformed and misinformed pro-science good-feelery from non-scientists. That is, according to Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust, the folks marching mostly don’t understand science enough. If marchers did understand the state of science, with its almost guild-like patronage system, its rampant data mining and cherry picking, its Potemkin peer review, they wouldn’t be so eager to draw up witty signs and march in its defense.

Faust does have a point: I suspect few of the people on the march this weekend understand what statistical significance really refers to, and even fewer would be ready to talk about the many misuses of p<.05 that researchers engage in because they’re trying to score a publication (or, more likely, because most scientists are not statisticians and often use statistical tools in ways they were not intended).

And yes, that’s a problem. But that’s not what the march is about. One can support the scientific enterprise, be willing to march in the rain for it, without knowing everything about science. None of the marchers, even the scientists, have a full understanding of all of the sciences humans engage in. The geologists on the march don’t know any more than I do about high energy physics, and the high energy physicists know less about environmental biology than I do.

Many of the scientists out there, even the duffers like me, know that there are deep problems with the sociology of science, with the misuse of methods and publication and statistical analysis. But something the marchers all had in common, scientists and non-scientists alike, was a support for the idea underlying science: that the scientific method can be used to describe our environment and make useful predictions. Faust is right that the scientific method is a roundly abused idea even within the sciences, to say nothing of non-scientists. But one can love and support a good idea without understanding it fully.  Whether any individual marcher can be picked out of the crowd and made to follow the scientific method to Dr. Faust’s satisfaction is beside the point.

The scientific enterprise is flawed, just as representative democracy is flawed. I marched because I believe in the idea of science (and, for that matter, representative democracy). The way to reform the institution of science is the same as the way to reform the republic: it will be saved by people who care for and love those institutions. Science and civil society won’t be reformed if we roll over when the administration attempts to hobble the EPA or reverse even modest US actions to counter climate change.

Remake the Electoral College, Part II

19 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, Politics

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It’s exciting  to see people’s increasing enthusiasm about replacing America’s 18th-century sop to the slave states, the Electoral College. Oregon is currently considering a bill–HB2927–that would join the state to The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. New Mexico and Connecticut are considering similar measures. Oregon friends, now is the time to contact your state representative in support of the bill!

To explain the beauty of The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, below is the repost of my original message on the subject, written last November before the Time of Troubles had actually begun:

Friends all over the place are talking about how and where to support civic engagement with their time and money. The ACLU tops the list for many of my friends–as well as for a whole lot a friends I didn’t know I had.  There’s good reason today to support The Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, The Sierra Club, The Council on American-Islamic Relations–all places to devote your efforts if you are interested in preserving civil society during the Time of Troubles. I’ll be giving loved ones memberships to these for Christmas.

And there’s at least one more that deserves your support, even though the issue it covers–electoral reform–may seem like small potatoes compared to the threats we are facing. FairVote.org has been doing the quiet, patient work of improving the way elections work in the United States since 1992. And, among the many forward-thinking reforms that they have advocated, one of the most timely is the reform of the Electoral College.

Democrats have ample incentive to support Electoral College reform: Democrats have won the most votes in four of the last five presidential elections, yet we’ve had a Democratic president for only two of those electoral cycles. One can be forgiven for believing that, along with persistent gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics, the Republicans have used the Electoral College to hold on to power despite being a minority party in the United States.

Yet, the Republicans have just as many reasons to support the reform of the Electoral College. Yes, over two recent cycles (2000 and 2016) the Electoral College has favored the Republicans, but there’s no structural reason that this should be so. Indeed, some of you remember the scenario (and personal fantasy of mine) that in 2004 John Kerry would win the Electoral College in spite of losing the national popular vote. If I remember correctly, he came within 70,000 votes of winning Ohio (and hence the election) that way.

I had hoped in part that the election would swing that way in 2004 because I believed (and still believe) that if the Republicans had suffered the same kind of defeat that the Democrats had in 2000, there would be a bipartisan consensus to do away with the Electoral College.

But for better and worse (mostly for better), it will be extremely difficult to do away with the Electoral College entirely. Doing so would require an amendment to the Constitution, and that’s a pretty high bar to clear: the last amendment to the Constitution(the 27th) occurred nearly 25 years ago, 202 years after if had been proposed in 1789.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was some way to reform the Electoral College without having to amend the Constitution? It turns out that there is such a way. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has just the kind of wonky name that puts people to sleep. However, it’s one of the most fundamental advances we could make to our presidential election system today. And we can make it law without having to amend the Constitution.

Here’s how it works. The Constitution is helpfully vague about how states choose who their electors will be:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…

In other words, individual state legislatures have wide latitude to decide how electors are appointed. And, if a state legislature decides that electors should be appointed on the basis of whoever wins the national popular vote, there’s nothing in the Constitution to forbid it.

Yet, what would be the incentive for a state to give up its influence over the electoral process by choosing its electors that way? That’s a good question, and certainly swing states like Ohio and Florida have little incentive (beyond an interest in democracy) to do so. Those states receive millions of dollars in ad revenue from the presidential campaigns every four years–they have a much greater stake in the status quo. However, the so-called “safe states” like California, New York, and Oklahoma–states which are reliably red or blue in every election–have less influence over presidential elections today than they would have if they simply banded together and agreed to choose electors on the basis of the national popular vote.

And that’s what the compact aims to do. As soon as enough states agree to appoint their electors that way–that is, as soon as states representing 270 electoral votes agree to it–the compact would go into force.

I’ll write more later about the benefits of such a plan, as well as about its constitutionality. But for now, check out the map of states which have already voted to implement the compact. Check out the states where the compact has almost passed–that is, where the compact has a reasonable chance of passing in the future. Check out how many times it took some of the states to pass the compact into law.

One of the beauties of this kind of work is that it is a concrete step for the public good that can be accomplished in state houses, where individual voters can bring more pressure to bear. Friends in Oregon, friends in Colorado, friends in Oklahoma and Tennessee: find out what your state legislator is doing to support this compact–which is to say, find out what your legislator is doing to support democracy in the United States. FairVote.org can help hook you up with this project.