Today is International Women's Day

"Liberals should give up on the judiciary"

The title of this post is a TL;DR summary of an article in Harper's Magazine entitled "Courting Disaster."  Herewith a few of the most salient arguments:

To purify the court, the good court’s disciples tell themselves, they need to expose the fraud of originalism, to devise rival philosophies, to outmuscle and undermine the cabalists. The high court, made good again, will then resume the righteous work of its fabled forebears.

This story gets told because it offers a straightforward lesson for liberals at a moment when little else seems simple: if Democrats could only reclaim the judiciary, it would rescue them from a political sphere that increasingly seems to have gone off the rails. There’s comfort in talk of restoration, of a halcyon era recovered. But this is the wrong lesson. The good court of the postwar period was an aberration. The court has rarely been friendly to progressive ideals, and what it giveth, it can taketh away...

Law is a conservative profession by nature. It attracts rule followers. Its practitioners tend to come from the moneyed classes, and then cater to their interests. The courts, too, tilt in this direction. They’re principally backward-looking, with the authority to maintain the status quo or restore the status quo ante. Federal courts are generally given the prerogative to curtail government programs but not to create or expand them. Likewise, judges often block regulatory action but rarely order it. This asymmetry lends itself to libertarian outcomes more naturally than progressive ones.

Given this structural and sociological bias, it’s not surprising that for most of American history the courts have been aligned with political conservatives and capital—the elites, who had the most to lose from popular democratic rule...

... they misdiagnose the deeper problem the court poses for the left, or any group whose policy agenda—unlike the present-day GOP’s—depends on enacting federal legislation. With judicial supremacy uncontested, the Supreme Court has installed itself at the apex of national politics. The justices hold an absolute veto on almost any government action. They endorse and demote individual rights at will, picking political winners and losers along the way. After all, American constitutional rights are “trumps,” as Dworkin put it, that defeat most, if not all, competing claims of interest. Who controls the court matters, but more important still is what the court controls. And for decades now, it has controlled far too much.

    

Objections to judicial supremacy from both the left and the right are most often articulated in terms of its undemocratic character, what the constitutional theorist Alexander Bickel called the “counter-majoritarian difficulty.” The basic critique is compelling: core political rights and even the most popular laws exist at the mercy of five unelected justices insulated from accountability by life tenure and a salary that can’t be docked...

Some might raise the specter of the political philosopher Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear”: judicial supremacy as a check against the bad things an unrestrained state can do. But the courts won’t stop an able autocrat. In countries that have recently slid toward authoritarianism, judiciaries either have learned to love the tyrant or have been crushed by him. When constitutionalism thwarts effective governance, moreover, it supplies the ideal conditions for populist authoritarians to rise. The greater risk today isn’t that Congress will occasionally pass bills that many of us won’t like. It’s that five well-to-do lawyers will prevent Congress from responding to the country’s needs.

Others may wonder who, if not the Supreme Court, will articulate and secure minoritarian rights against the tyranny of the majority. The courts, in truth, recognize relatively few rights; most of those we enjoy derive not from the Constitution but from federal statute. To name just a few: voting rights; labor rights; disability rights; rights against discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. As the legal scholar Jamal Greene argues in How Rights Went Wrong, Congress has the institutional capacity to weigh and reconcile various values and interests, not only to pick which interests get to trump all others. When it comes to statutory rights, the court’s primary role since the Eighties has been to undermine them by curtailing, and at times usurping, congressional power...

“Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society,” the scholar Grant Gilmore argues at the conclusion of The Ages of American Law, his classic survey of American legal history. The worse a society’s politics, he claims, the more it will lean on the law to resolve deep-seated disagreements, which tends to deepen them further still. “In heaven there will be no law, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb,” Gilmore writes. “In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”

Much more in the source article at Harper's Magazine, which should be read before starting to argue the points made.

Here's how the system works

Related:

A Canticle for Leibowitz

I don't have time/energy to excerpt from this book; just wanted to list it to add to my list of recommended books.  Here's a quick preview:

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it....

In 1961 it was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Novel by The World Science Fiction Convention. In the years since, praise for the work has been consistently high. It is considered a "science-fiction classic ... [and] is arguably the best novel written about nuclear apocalypse, surpassing more popularly known books like On the Beach".

It's curious that this book has never been adapted into a movie.

Red-eyed tree frog

Always nice to end the blogging day with an impressive photo.  Credit for this one to Manuel Rodriguez, from the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards, via a gallery of nature photos in the Washington Post.

Clickword for word puzzle enthusiasts

The Clickword daily puzzle presents you with several initial starting letters, then invites you to add twenty more groups of three to form words (detailed instructions at the link).

At the end your score is tabulated and compared to other participants.  Without knowing what letters are coming up later, there's a lot of guesswork involved in deciding whether to harvest small words or try to save for possible higher-scoring larger ones.  I presume everyone gets the same letters every day, so cheating would be possible if one collaborated with a friend.

The corollary puzzle Squareword is less challenging.

"Dust corners" on a stairway

Found in the Damnthatsinteresting subreddit, where the discussion thread indicates that these are still available commercially.

Creepy

For the past year I have studiously avoided adding to the hundred posts in the Trump category of TYWKIWDBI, but if he's going to keep pushing himself forward, I may have to keep pushing back.

This comment at the CPAC conference was obviously a dogwhistle to the Quiverfull faction, but the added comment about "lucky men" is just unutterably creepy.

I'll leave the comment thread open for a little while but will probably shut it down soon.

Advice for vaccine deniers

Via the MurderedByWords subreddit, where the discussion thread includes salient comments about sörströmming.

See also my 2012 post about Surströmming.

Narrowboat ride on an English canal

 

One of a long series of soothing videos, seemingly narrated by the voice of Wallace and Gromit cartoons.

Reposted from 2020 to add this interesting video about living on a narrowboat:

"Beer poking" explained

Beer poking basically involves heating a metal poker in a fire until it's glowing red and then plunging the tip into a glass of beer for a few seconds. The poker flash heats and instantly caramelizes the residual malt sugars abundant in certain types of beer.

The result is variously described as adding smoky, roasted, smooth, soft, creamy or toasted marshmallow notes to the flavor profile of your brew. The hot poker also creates a foam cap on the top of a glass of beer, but it isn't kept in the glass long enough to make the beer warm.

Drinking a poked beer is a little like drinking a hot chocolate with whipped cream on top, but in reverse. Instead of tasting warm milk coming through cool whipped cream, you get cool beer coming through a warm, sweet foam. Food & Wine magazine called it "The Beer Equivalent of S'mores."

Beer historians say the practice has been around for more than 400 years. In the winter, when beer might be too cold to comfortably drink, colonial Americans were said to use hot pokers to warm their ale a bit.

Weihenstephan, a Bavarian brewery that has been making beer for close to 1,000 years, says the practice is called bierstacheln in Germany, or beer spiking. It credits blacksmiths who always had hot pokers handy to warm up their drinks.

More information at the StarTribune.

"Car debt" in the United States

Chris Martin knew he needed a bigger car as the birth of his fourth child approached, but he and his wife were already $14,000 underwater on their two vehicles.

So the couple proposed an unusual two-for-one deal with an Atlanta-area auto dealer in 2020: trading in both of their vehicles so they could afford a three-row Ford Explorer. Their total loan after factoring in negative equity, a service contract, fees and other costs ballooned to $66,000 on the $49,000 Explorer.

Despite a lot of progress on the debt, he feels uneasy. “I don’t want to be paying interest on cars that I don’t even have anymore,” said Martin, a 36-year-old data engineer.

The build-up in negative equity  — or the amount that debt exceeds a vehicle’s value — is rattling consumers and raising alarms within the industry. Though it’s not unusual for drivers to carry negative equity, some dealers say more people are arriving at their lots up to $10,000 underwater, or “upside down,” on their trade-ins. They’re buying at still-sky-high prices and rolling debt from one car to another and even onto a third. Loans are commonly stretching to seven years. 

“As trade-in values begin to cool, each month more and more consumers will find themselves falling from positive to negative equity,” said Ivan Drury, director of insights at auto-market researcher Edmunds. “Unless American car shoppers break their habit of buying again too soon, we’ll see the negative equity tide continue to rise.”

The article continues at Bloomberg.  Any comments Jesse?

"Eliminate the hostage, eliminate the problem"

Maybe it was intentional rather than a misunderstanding of the image.  Via.

Fungicides may alter the flavor of produce

Have you ever bitten into a plump, red strawberry, only to find it bland and watery? Certain pesticides might be responsible. A team reporting in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has found that two common strawberry fungicides can impact cellular mechanisms, creating berries with subdued flavor and sweetness, as well as a lower nutritional value.

The flavor profile of any produce, including berries, is a result of its taste and smell—sweetness often arises from the amount of dissolved glucose or fructose, and a unique aroma comes from volatile compounds, such as esters and terpenes. In addition, many fruits are also full of nutrients, including vitamin C, folic acid and antioxidants.

But because fungicides are designed to disrupt the cellular processes of detrimental fungi, they could accidentally interfere with these processes in crops, inhibiting production of these important flavor and nutritional compounds. So, Jinling Diao and colleagues wanted to investigate how two common pesticides used on strawberries—boscalid (BOS) and difenoconazole (DIF)—affect specific molecular pathways in berries...

Looking more closely, the team found that BOS had a direct effect on the regulation of genes involved in cellular pathways related to producing sugars, volatile compounds, nutrients and amino acids. Finally, in a blind taste test, people consistently preferred the untreated strawberries.

More info and a link to the primary source at Phys.org

Apparently this is real

Related: "Law against the Founding of New Parties"

Embedded image from the WhitePeopleTwitter subreddit, where there is a relevant discussion thread.  I have nothing to add.