There’s an old wisecrack that with the aid of a computer you can make a mistake in a matter of a microsecond it would have taken years to make by hand. Apparently, that’s true about map-drawing in spades. Consider this article by Khang Vu at RealClearDefense:

On 9 September, the U.S. embassy in Hanoi published on Facebook a map of Vietnam on a poster to commemorate the 25th anniversary of U.S.-Vietnam diplomatic relations. At first the map did not attract much attention, given both countries had celebrated the occasion on 11 July, the official date of the anniversary. Yet several days later, a small number of Vietnamese netizens recognised that the map included the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea as a part of Vietnamese territory.

The inclusion appeared of major significance. The U.S. official position regarding these heavily contested islands has to date been one of neutrality. Instead of taking sides, Washington has declared it will use its influence “to discourage the use of military force or unilateral expansion of claims of sovereignty”. Yet including the islands in a map of Vietnam suggested the United States was not only now taking sides, but also backing Vietnam in a dispute with five other countries, including China, as well as the Philippines ­– a U.S. treaty ally.

or, in other words, the difference between relative peace and wellbeing and an international incident can be just a matter of a few pixels here and there. Read the whole thing.

It also illustrates a point I’ve made from time to time here: don’t discount how much policy is inadvertently being made by relatively low level employees simply because management doesn’t understand the implications of what they’re doing until it has already been done. That isn’t just true in government. I have never encountered an organization in which that was not the case.

Wow. Joe Biden hasn’t even been elected yet and there are already people predicting power conflicts within a future Biden Administration. In this particular case in his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead notices a gap between “climate hawks” and “China hawks”:

As policy makers in Beijing weigh their options in the event of a Biden victory, one of the subjects that will most engage their attention is climate change. Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that he will put the goal of slowing climate change at the heart of U.S. foreign policy. Washington would rejoin the Paris Climate Accords and urge all countries to enact measures to keep Earth’s temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, as the Democratic Party platform states.

China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Does this mean a Biden administration would add another dimension to U.S.-China tensions? Beijing likely hopes it’ll ease them.

For Chinese officials, the goal would be to get the Biden administration to negotiate with itself—the climate hawks persuading the incoming president to squelch the China hawks to save the planet. Beijing is the key to climate change, climate warriors will say, and America can’t persuade China to help cool the Earth by harassing it on trade, imposing sanctions against its companies, arming Taiwan, and encouraging its neighbors to form alliances against Beijing.

This is an approach China can work with. Beijing wants to fight climate change, its diplomats will whisper to U.S. climate hawks, but Chinese hard-liners need to be convinced. Help us to help you: If America demonstrates a spirit of compromise and cooperation on issues important to the hard-liners, well, who can say? We might even give up our coal plants. Someday.

There are Democrats to whom this will seem like smart statecraft. Global governance, they will tell Americans, transcends the petty stakes of geopolitical competition. Our common interest in saving humanity outweighs ephemeral disputes over maritime boundaries. Can we really let a conflict over Taiwan, a small island that America already officially recognizes as part of China, stand in the way of a climate treaty that could halt extinction?

Not only is China the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, it has continued to increase its emissions despite lockdowns, and its emissions are expected to increase for the foreseeable future at a pace that means that nothing the United States can do will actually slow emission. It continues to build coal-fired power stations not only within China but around the world. Each additional dollar of GDP in China requires additional emissions. Worse yet there is no way to verify China’s compliance with any accord.

It’s just 43 days until the election and I’ve been counting yard signs. “Black Lives Matter” signs outnumber Biden-Harris signs about 5:1. I have seen a grand total of one yard sign supporting Trump’s re-election. That’s not particularly surprising. This is a pretty Democratic area and self-preservation is probably enough to account for it.

Either the Biden-Harris campaign is taking the Chicago turnout and vote for granted, there isn’t much enthusiasm for Biden, or yard signs are obsolete. Maybe some combination. I haven’t seen a single yard sign supporting Pritzker’s “Fair Tax”.

In the wake of Justice Ginsburg’s death I have seen a number of, frankly, stupid suggestions made. I’m going to collect my reactions to them here in a single post.

A. Puerto Rico should be made a state.

The reality is that Puerto Rico just is not a good fit with the other states. It is poorer by far than the presently poorest state (Mississippi). Only a minority of its people speak English. Whatever you may imagine being an informed voter in the United States requires some command of the English language. Additionally, to the best of my knowledge no state has ever been admitted to the Union with an armed separatist movement which Puerto Rico has. Puerto Rico should be independent and what the Puerto Ricans want should make no difference.

B. Washington, DC should be made a state.

If your complaint is that the people who live in the District are disenfranchised there are simpler, fairer solutions. DC is too small to be a state. What’s next? Indianapolis? It’s larger than DC. Making DC a state fails the Rawlsian test for a just act—it does not increase the total amount of justice. Making New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and other large cities states on their own is the hotdog solution to our Congressional structure problem. It would be better to limit the federal district to the few blocks containing the White House, the Capitol, and adjacent park areas, prohibit residence other than by the president within the federal district, and cede the balance of the federal district to Maryland.

C. We need majority rule.

I think that the present obsession with majoritarianism is purely instrumental. We heard no such objections in 1992 and 1996 when Bill Clinton became president without a majority of the popular vote. At least arguing for a majority requirement has some basis. Arguing for the tremendous virtue of plurality rule leaves you debating absurdities like the greater legitimacy of 34% of the popular vote compared with 33% of the popular vote.

If you really have a burr under your saddle about majoritarianism, why not direct democracy? That’s where a strict belief in majority rule leads. And majority of what? Voters? Registered voters? Residents?

There needs to be acceptance that we have a rules-based system and sometimes the rules result in presidents being elected without a majority of the popular vote. If you don’t like the rules, change them. If you can’t change the rules, suck it up or leave.

D. Democrats should “pack” the Supreme Court.

My arguments against “packing” the Supreme Court are, essentially, five:

1. It invites reprisal. Okay you increase the number of justices to 11. Why not 13? Or 15? Or 17? Or 127?
2. Group dynamics tells us that 9 is just about the limit for effective participation by all members.
3. Varying the Supreme Court’s numbers to achieve your objectives reduces its legitimacy.
4. There is no fixed number on which you can rely to grant you a permanent majority. Supreme Court justices are notoriously hard to corral. Justice Breyer turned out not to be as conservative as was thought when he was appointed. Justice Ginsburg proved less of a consensus-builder than Bill Clinton claimed when he appointed her.
5. Just as in the 1930s “packing” the court is a strategy for getting approval for expansions of federal government power which would otherwise be ruled unconstitutional.

If you really want a more politicized Supreme Court, why not abolish judges entirely and have the legislatures rule on all cases? I think we need to depoliticize the court rather than making it more political. I think the better strategy for that is to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. That is within the Congress’s enumerated powers. The problem is they don’t wanna.

An editorial in the New York Sun that begins as a tribute to the late Justice Ginsburg and a call to “lay aside politics for a moment” almost immediately transitions into something else. First, the editors point to an anecdote which you may not have heard:

At Ginsburg’s confirmation hearing, there was a remarkable moment. It came when Senator Carol Moseley Braun erupted angrily over something said by Senator Orrin Hatch in reference to the Dred Scott case. Ms. Braun demanded to speak on a point of personal privilege in her capacity as “the only descendent of a slave” in the hearing. Judge Ginsburg sat still, declining to correct the senator. We clapped our head in disbelief.

For Senators Metzenbaum, Feinstein, Cohen, and Specter were, among others present, either Jewish or descended from Jews, and the future justice herself was Jewish. So we thought she could have pointed out that every year, for three millennia, Jews have made a point of beginning the Passover Seder by remembering precisely that they were slaves in Egypt. It was not that we wanted to mark that Ms. Braun was wrong.

The point we’d wanted Ginsburg to have made is that she comprehended fully that slavery can mark a people for millennia — that it can never be forgotten. We thought it would have underscored Senator Braun’s fury and sketched a unifying view. Yet Ginsburg had just sat “quiet as a mushroom,” we once wrote, and let the moment pass. Soon enough we came to realize that she took the wiser course.

I certainly hadn’t. They conclude by quoting another anecdote:

The local interviewer, in a thoughtful conversation, noted that Egypt was writing a new constitution and asked whether it should look to the constitutions of other countries as models. “I would not look to the U.S. constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” Justice Ginsburg said. She recommended the longer, more detailed bills of rights in the constitutions of Canada, South Africa, and Europe.

The answer shocked us down to the ground. Not because we doubted the Justice’s patriotism (not even for a moment). Rather, it was that the constitutions to which she was directing her interviewer gave positive rights, meaning that the constitutions granted them. Our Constitution rarely grants rights. It establishes negative rights, meaning prohibitions on government interfering with rights granted by God.

There are dramatic differences between the United States and those other countries, not the least of which is that other than Canada none of them have common law systems (South Africa’s system is a mixture of common law and civil code). I wish fewer Americans and in particular fewer jurists admired civil code systems so much. I don’t think they understand the value of our system and the deficiencies of a civil code system.

In a piece at RealClearPolitics Charles Lipson pretty aptly characterizes the struggle that will follow Justice Ginsburg’s death:

Replacing any Supreme Court justice is important, but substituting a conservative for a liberal giant like Ginsburg or the 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer, when he retires, would be far more consequential. That’s why the fight over the Ginsburg’s vacant seat will be so fierce, worse even than the brawl over Kavanaugh, who was smeared by multiple, last-minute allegations of sexual assault, none of which were substantiated. That fight was so toxic that several senior Democrats openly rejected the idea that Kavanaugh should be presumed “innocent until proven guilty,” a bedrock assumption of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence for over a thousand years.

The Democrats’ immediate demand is for Ginsburg’s seat to be left vacant until a new Senate and president can fill it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made that demand Friday night, shortly after Ginsburg’s death was announced. All other Democrats will follow. They will pointedly add that the Republicans, who controlled in the Senate in 2016, refused to give Merrick Garland a hearing or vote after President Obama nominated him to fill Scalia’s seat. Republicans said then that nine months was too close to the election. It would be grossly unfair, Democrats say, for those same Republicans to move forward with their own nomination now.

McConnell has already rejected that argument, promising to fill every vacancy on every federal court during the current Congress. He is saying that the current situation is different since the presidency and Senate are now controlled by the same party. He will quote Democrats’ statements in 2016, when they insisted on voting immediately to fill the Supreme Court vacancy.

That both Republican and Democratic leaders are hypocrites, as Mr. Lipson goes on to aver, is obvious but my observation when Senate Republicans rejected President Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Scalia is more to the point: they are politicians. That is what all politicians do. Not just the ones you don’t like but the ones you like, too. It ain’t beanbag.

One of the ways in which the rabid partisanship that afflicts our present political process weakens and harms and weakens, not just us as individuals but as a society, is that we become so focused on the villainy of our political opponents that we become blind to the foibles and downright mistakes of our political allies.

There are very few true villains in the world but there are equally if not fewer true heroes. What actually exist are men and women responding to the incentives they have before them, striving for their objectives, and generally failing to achieve them.

The way in which seeing the world in terms of heroes and villains harms us is that it obscures the actual requirements for achieving objectives. “Defeat that guy” or “get rid of that woman” rarely solves anything. That guy or that woman were responding to the incentives before them and trying to achieve objectives. As long as the incentives and objectives remain the same, they will merely be replaced by others doing the same things to achieve the same results.

Here’s the peroration of Joshua Mitchell’s piece at RealClearPolitics in defense of institutions:

The burden of each generation is to mediate between past and future, not to destroy the past in order to secure a future. Democratic adherents of identity politics see the past as irredeemably stained — “systemically racist,” to invoke the fashionable phrase. But if we trample on our past, we will trample on our future, too.

What do our fragile institutions still have to teach us? The art of ruling and of being ruled. In our woke age, this idea sounds harsh to some ears, so let’s rephrase it: we learn the give and take of human affairs. This is an art, not a science, which is to say that we learn it by doing, whether in family life, in our religious institutions, in our informal civic associations, or in our local political life. We watch, we speak up, we listen, we lead, we follow, we act, we desist from acting. Through all this, our character is developed, and our judgments are formed. Some of us will be very good at it; some not.

If we are to take seriously the idea that we are citizens, equal under the laws, then learning the art of ruling and being ruled must be the most important measure of success in this democratic age. No book can teach it. No state can secure it. Only life lived in our institutions can help us master it. Is it any wonder, then, that as these institutions whither, we witness deeply distorted expressions of ruling and being ruled? Rather than learning humane ways of mastering this art, we observe a citizenry that alternates in a seemingly bipolar fashion between riotous violence in the name of social justice and deferential and unquestioning obedience to the state in the name of public safety. When the art of ruling and being ruled is not learned in humane form in our institutions, then it will appear in inhumane form outside these institutions — where it becomes the despotic art of mastery and servitude.

I was reminded of a passage from Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons:

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

The law is just one institution. So are religion and customs. Philosphers from Confuciuis to Kant have emphasized the importance of respect including respect for institutions.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project has compiled data on the political violence that has been wracking the U. S. since the end of May:

Applying ACLED’s rigorous methodology for monitoring political violence and demonstration activity around the world, the US Crisis Monitor collects data in real-time and publishes weekly updates to inform research, journalism, policymaking, and civil society initiatives. Drawing on more than 1,500 national, regional, and local sources, the first data release comprises over 1,800 total events, including over 1,790 demonstration events and over 10 political violence events, as well as 20 strategic development events that provide additional insight into potential changes to the political environment. Events are recorded in all 50 states and the District of Columbia during the three-week period from 14 June to 4 July 2020, ranging from nearly 200 in California to four in South Dakota. The vast majority of events are peaceful protests linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has led to a massive surge in demonstration activity across the country, with a total of nearly five times as many events recorded per week relative to ACLED’s US pilot project last summer. New data tranches will be released at the start of each week covering the previous week and supplemented with historical data for 2020 as available.

It looks like a good resource to me.