war crime

Why risking nuclear war should be a war crime

pnrj ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 19, JDN 2458078

“What is the value of a human life?” is a notoriously difficult question, probably because people keep trying to answer it in terms of dollars, and it rightfully offends our moral sensibilities to do so. We shouldn’t be valuing people in terms of dollars—we should be valuing dollars in terms of their benefits to people.

So let me ask a simpler question: Does the value of an individual human life increase, decrease, or stay the same, as we increase the number of people in the world?

A case can be made that it should stay the same: Why should my value as a person depend upon how many other people there are? Everything that I am, I still am, whether there are a billion other people or a thousand.

But in fact I think the correct answer is that it decreases. This is for two reasons: First, anything that I can do is less valuable if there are other people who can do it better. This is true whether we’re talking about writing blog posts or ending world hunger. Second, and most importantly, if the number of humans in the world gets small enough, we begin to face danger of total permanent extinction.

If the value of a human life is constant, then 1,000 deaths is equally bad whether it happens in a population of 10,000 or a population of 10 billion. That doesn’t seem right, does it? It seems more reasonable to say that losing ten percent should have a roughly constant effect; in that case losing 1,000 people in a population of 10,000 is equally bad as losing 1 billion in a population of 10 billion. If that seems too strong, we could choose some value in between, and say perhaps that losing 1,000 out of 10,000 is equally bad as losing 1 million out of 1 billion. This would mean that the value of 1 person’s life today is about 1/1,000 of what it was immediately after the Toba Event.

Of course, with such uncertainty, perhaps it’s safest to assume constant value. This seems the fairest, and it is certainly a reasonable approximation.

In any case, I think it should be obvious that the inherent value of a human life does not increase as you add more human lives. Losing 1,000 people out of a population of 7 billion is not worse than losing 1,000 people out of a population of 10,000. That way lies nonsense.

Yet if we agree that the value of a human life is not increasing, this has a very important counter-intuitive consequence: It means that increasing the risk of a global catastrophe is at least as bad as causing a proportional number of deaths. Specifically, it implies that a 1% risk of global nuclear war is worse than killing 10 million people outright.

The calculation is simple: If the value of a human life is a constant V, then the expected utility (admittedly, expected utility theory has its flaws) from killing 10 million people is -10 million V. But the expected utility from a 1% risk of global nuclear war is 1% times -V times the expected number of deaths from such a nuclear war—and I think even 2 billion is a conservative estimate. (0.01)(-2 billion) V = -20 million V.

This probably sounds too abstract, or even cold, so let me put it another way. Suppose we had the choice between two worlds, and these were the only worlds we could choose from. In world A, there are 100 leaders who each make choices that result in 10 million deaths. In world B, there are 100 leaders who each make choices that result in a 1% chance of nuclear war. Which world should we choose?

The choice is a terrible one, to be sure.

In world A, 1 billion people die.

Yet what happens in world B?

If the risks are independent, we can’t just multiply by 100 to get a guarantee of nuclear war. The actual probability is 1-(1-0.01)^100 = 63%. Yet even so, (0.63)(2 billion) = 1.26 billion. The expected number of deaths is higher in world B. Indeed, the most likely scenario is that 2 billion people die.

Yet this is probably too conservative. The risks are most likely positively correlated; two world leaders who each take a 1% chance of nuclear war probably do so in response to one another. Therefore maybe adding up the chances isn’t actually so unreasonable—for all practical intents and purposes, we may be best off considering nuclear war in world B as guaranteed to happen. In that case, world B is even worse.

And that is all assuming that the nuclear war is relatively contained. Major cities are hit, then a peace treaty is signed, and we manage to rebuild human civilization more or less as it was. This is what most experts on the issue believe would happen; but I for one am not so sure. The nuclear winter and total collapse of institutions and infrastructure could result in a global apocalypse that would result in human extinction—not 2 billion deaths but 7 billion, and an end to all of humanity’s projects once and forever This is the kind of outcome we should be prepared to do almost anything to prevent.

What does this imply for global policy? It means that we should be far more aggressive in punishing any action that seems to bring the world closer to nuclear war. Even tiny increases in risk, of the sort that would ordinarily be considered negligible, are as bad as murder. A measurably large increase is as bad as genocide.

Of course, in practice, we have to be able to measure something in order to punish it. We can’t have politicians imprisoned over 0.000001% chances of nuclear war, because such a chance is so tiny that there would be no way to attain even reasonable certainty that such a change had even occurred, much less who was responsible.

Even for very large chances—and in this context, 1% is very large—it would be highly problematic to directly penalize increasing the probability, as we have no consistent, fair, objective measure of that probability.

Therefore in practice what I think we must do is severely and mercilessly penalize certain types of actions that would be reasonably expected to increase the probability of catastrophic nuclear war.

If we had the chance to start over from the Manhattan Project, maybe simply building a nuclear weapon should be considered a war crime. But at this point, nuclear proliferation has already proceeded far enough that this is no longer a viable option. At least the US and Russia for the time being seem poised to maintain their nuclear arsenals, and in fact it’s probably better for them to keep maintaining and updating them rather than leaving decades-old ICBMs to rot.

What can we do instead?

First, we probably need to penalize speech that would tend to incite war between nuclear powers. Normally I am fiercely opposed to restrictions on speech, but this is nuclear war we’re talking about. We can’t take any chances on this one. If there is even a slight chance that a leader’s rhetoric might trigger a nuclear conflict, they should be censored, punished, and probably even imprisoned. Making even a veiled threat of nuclear war is like pointing a gun at someone’s head and threatening to shoot them—only the gun is pointed at everyone’s head simultaneously. This isn’t just yelling “fire” in a crowded theater; it’s literally threatening to burn down every theater in the world at once.

Such a regulation must be designed to allow speech that is necessary for diplomatic negotiations, as conflicts will invariably arise between any two countries. We need to find a way to draw the line so that it’s possible for a US President to criticize Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine or for a Chinese President to challenge US trade policy, without being accused of inciting war between nuclear powers. But one thing is quite clear: Wherever we draw that line, President Trump’s statement about “fire and fury” definitely crosses it. This is a direct threat of nuclear war, and it should be considered a war crime. That reason by itself—let alone his web of Russian entanglements and violations of the Emoluments Clause—should be sufficient to not only have Trump removed from office, but to have him tried at the Hague. Impulsiveness and incompetence are no excuse when weapons of mass destruction are involved.

Second, any nuclear policy that would tend to increase first-strike capability rather than second-strike capability should be considered a violation of international law. In case you are unfamiliar with such terms: First-strike capability consists of weapons such as ICBMs that are only viable to use as the opening salvo of an attack, because their launch sites can be easily located and targeted. Second-strike capability consists of weapons such as submarines that are more concealable, so it’s much more likely that they could wait for an attack to happen, confirm who was responsible and how much damage was done, and then retaliate afterward.
Even that retaliation would be difficult to justify: It’s effectively answering genocide with genocide, the ultimate expression of “an eye for an eye” writ large upon humanity’s future. I’ve previously written about my Credible Targeted Conventional Response strategy that makes it both more ethical and more credible to respond to a nuclear attack with a non-nuclear retaliation. But at least second-strike weapons are not inherently only functional at starting a nuclear war. A first-strike weapon can theoretically be fired in response to a surprise attack, but only before the attack hits you—which gives you literally minutes to decide the fate of the world, most likely with only the sketchiest of information upon which to base your decision. Second-strike weapons allow deliberation. They give us a chance to think carefully for a moment before we unleash irrevocable devastation.

All the launch codes should of course be randomized onetime pads for utmost security. But in addition to the launch codes themselves, I believe that anyone who wants to launch a nuclear weapon should be required to type, letter by letter (no copy-pasting), and then have the machine read aloud, Oppenheimer’s line about Shiva, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Perhaps the passphrase should conclude with something like “I hereby sentence millions of innocent children to death by fire, and millions more to death by cancer.” I want it to be as salient as possible in the heads of every single soldier and technician just exactly how many innocent people they are killing. And if that means they won’t turn the key—so be it. (Indeed, I wouldn’t mind if every Hellfire missile required a passphrase of “By the authority vested in me by the United States of America, I hereby sentence you to death or dismemberment.” Somehow I think our drone strike numbers might go down. And don’t tell me they couldn’t; this isn’t like shooting a rifle in a firefight. These strikes are planned days in advance and specifically designed to be unpredictable by their targets.)

If everyone is going to have guns pointed at each other, at least in a second-strike world they’re wearing body armor and the first one to pull the trigger won’t automatically be the last one left standing.

Third, nuclear non-proliferation treaties need to be strengthened into disarmament treaties, with rapid but achievable timelines for disarmament of all nuclear weapons, starting with the nations that have the largest arsenals. Random inspections of the disarmament should be performed without warning on a frequent schedule. Any nation that is so much as a day late on their disarmament deadlines needs to have its leaders likewise hauled off to the Hague. If there is any doubt at all in your mind whether your government will meet its deadlines, you need to double your disarmament budget. And if your government is too corrupt or too bureaucratic to meet its deadlines even if they try, well, you’d better shape up fast. We’ll keep removing and imprisoning your leaders until you do. Once again, nothing can be left to chance.

We might want to maintain some small nuclear arsenal for the sole purpose of deflecting asteroids from colliding with the Earth. If so, that arsenal should be jointly owned and frequently inspected by both the United States and Russia—not just the nuclear superpowers, but also the only two nations with sufficient rocket launch capability in any case. The launch of the deflection missiles should require joint authorization from the presidents of both nations. But in fact nuclear weapons are probably not necessary for such a deflection; nuclear rockets would probably be a better option. Vaporizing the asteroid wouldn’t accomplish much, even if you could do it; what you actually want to do is impart as much sideways momentum as possible.

What I’m saying probably sounds extreme. It may even seem unjust or irrational. But look at those numbers again. Think carefully about the value of a human life. When we are talking about a risk of total human extinction, this is what rationality looks like. Zero tolerance for drug abuse or even terrorism is a ridiculous policy that does more harm than good. Zero tolerance for risk of nuclear war may be the only hope for humanity’s ongoing survival.

Throughout the vastness of the universe, there are probably billions of civilizations—I need only assume one civilization for every hundred galaxies. Of the civilizations that were unwilling to adopt zero tolerance policies on weapons of mass destruction and bear any cost, however unthinkable, to prevent their own extinction, there is almost boundless diversity, but they all have one thing in common: None of them will exist much longer. The only civilizations that last are the ones that refuse to tolerate weapons of mass destruction.

Why are all our Presidents war criminals?

pnrj core principles, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457443

Today I take on a topic that we really don’t like to talk about. It creates grave cognitive dissonance in our minds, forcing us to deeply question the moral character of our entire nation.

Yet it is undeniably a fact:

Most US Presidents are war criminals.

There is a long tradition of war crimes by US Presidents which includes Obama, Bush, Nixon, and above all Johnson and Truman.

Barack Obama has ordered so-called “double-tap” drone strikes, which kill medics and first responders, in express violation of the Geneva Convention.

George W. Bush orchestrated a global program of torture and indefinite detention.

Bill Clinton ordered “extraordinary renditions” in which suspects were detained without trial and transferred to other countries for interrogation, where we knew they would most likely be tortured.

I actually had trouble finding any credible accusations of war crimes by George H.W. Bush (there are definitely accusations, but none of them are credible—seriously, people are listening to Manuel Noriega?), even as Director of the CIA. He might not be a war criminal.

Ronald Reagan supported a government in Guatemala that was engaged in genocide. He knew this was happening and did not seem to care. This was only one of many tyrannical, murderous regimes supported by Reagan’s administration. In fact, Ronald Reagan was successfully convicted of war crimes by the International Court of Justice. Chomsky isn’t wrong about this one. Ronald Reagan was a convicted war criminal.

Jimmy Carter is a major exception to the rule; not only are there no credible accusations of war crimes against him, he has actively fought to pursue war crimes investigations against Israel and even publicly discussed the war crimes of George W. Bush.

I also wasn’t able to find any credible accusations of war crimes by Gerald Ford, so he might be clean.

But then we get to Richard Nixon, who deployed chemical weapons against civilians in Vietnam. (Calling Agent Orange “herbicide” probably shouldn’t matter morally—but it might legally, as tactical “herbicides” are not always war crimes.) But Nixon does deserve some credit for banning biological weapons.

Indeed, most of the responsibility for war crimes in Vietnam falls upon Johnson. The US deployed something very close to a “total war” strategy involving carpet bombing—more bombs were dropped by the US in Vietnam than by all countries in WW2—as well as napalm and of course chemical weapons; basically it was everything short of nuclear weapons. Kennedy and Johnson also substantially expanded the US biological weapons program.

Speaking of weapons of mass destruction, I’m not sure if it was actually illegal to expand the US nuclear arsenal as dramatically as Kennedy did, but it definitely should have been. Kennedy brought our nuclear arsenal up to its greatest peak, a horrifying 30,000 deployable warheads—more than enough to wipe out human civilization, and possibly enough to destroy the entire human race.

While Eisenhower was accused of the gravest war crime on this list, namely the genocide of over 1 million people in Germany, most historians do not consider this accusation credible. Rather, his war crimes were committed as Supreme Allied Commander, in the form of carpet bombing, especially of Tokyo, which killed as many as 200,000 people, and of Dresden, which had no apparent military significance and even held a number of Allied POWs.

But then we get to Truman, the coup de grace, the only man in history to order the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. Truman gave the order to deploy nuclear weapons against civilians. He was the only person in the history of the world to ever give such an order. It wasn’t Hitler; it wasn’t Stalin. It was Harry S. Truman.

Then of course there’s Roosevelt’s internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans. It really pales in comparison to Truman’s order to vaporize an equal number of Japanese civilians in the blink of an eye.

I think it will suffice to end the list here, though I could definitely go on. I think Truman is a really good one to focus on, for two reasons that pull quite strongly in opposite directions.

1. The use of nuclear weapons against civilians is among the gravest possible crimes. It may be second to genocide, but then again it may not, as genocide does not risk the destruction of the entire human race. If we only had the option of outlawing one thing in war, and had to allow everything else, we would have no choice but to ban the use of nuclear weapons against civilians.

2. Truman’s decision may have been justified. To this day is still hotly debated whether the atomic bombings were justifiable; mainstream historians have taken both sides. On Debate.org, the vote is almost exactly divided—51% yes, 49% no. Many historians believe that had Truman not deployed nuclear weapons, there would have been an additional 5 million deaths as a result of the continuation of the war.

Perhaps now you can see why this matter makes me so ambivalent.

There is a part of me that wants to take an absolute hard line against war crimes, and say that they must never be tolerated, that even otherwise good Presidents like Clinton and Obama deserve to be tried at the Hague for what they have done. (Truman and Eisenhower are dead, so it’s too late for them.)

But another part of me wonders what would happen if we did this. What if the world really is so dangerous that we have no choice but to allow our leaders to commit horrible atrocities in order to defend us?

There are easy cases—Bush’s torture program didn’t even result in very much useful intelligence, so it was simply a pointless degradation of our national character. The same amount of effort invested in more humane intelligence gathering would very likely have provided more reliable information. And in any case, terrorism is such a minor threat in the scheme of things that the effort would be better spent on improving environmental regulations or auto safety.

Similarly, there’s no reason to engage in “extraordinary rendition” to a country that tortures people when you could simply conduct a legitimate trial in absentia and then arrest the convicted terrorist with special forces and imprison him in a US maximum-security prison until his execution. (Or even carry out the execution directly by the special forces; as long as the trial is legitimate, I see no problem with that.) At that point, the atrocities are being committed simply to avoid inconvenience.

But especially when we come to the WW2 examples, where the United States—nay, the world—was facing a genuine threat of being conquered by genocidal tyrants, I do begin to wonder if “victory by any means necessary” is a legitimate choice.

There is a way to cut the Gordian knot here, and say that yes, these are crimes, and should be punished; but yes, they were morally justified. Then, the moral calculus any President must undergo when contemplating such an atrocity is that he himself will be tried and executed if he goes through with it. If your situation is truly so dire that you are willing to kill 100,000 civilians, perhaps you should be willing to go down with the ship. (Roger Fisher made a similar argument when he suggested implanting the nuclear launch codes inside the body of a US military officer. If you’re not willing to tear one man apart with a knife, why are you willing to vaporize an entire city?)

But if your actions really were morally justified… what sense does it make to punish you for them? And if we hold up this threat of punishment, could it cause a President to flinch when we really need him to take such drastic action?

Another possibility to consider is that perhaps our standards for war crimes really are too strict, and some—not all, but some—of the actions I just listed are in fact morally justifiable and should be made legal under international law. Perhaps the US government is right to fight the UN convention against cluster munitions; maybe we need cluster bombs to successfully defend national security. Perhaps it should not be illegal to kill the combat medics who directly serve under the command of enemy military forces—as opposed to civilian first-responders or Medecins Sans Frontieres. Perhaps our tolerance for civilian casualties is unrealistically low, and it is impossible to fight a war in the real world without killing a large number of civilians.

Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps we are too willing to engage in war in the first place, too accustomed to deploying military force as our primary response to international conflict. Perhaps the prospect of facing a war crimes tribunal in a couple of years should be an extra layer of deterrent against any President ordering yet another war—by some estimates we have been at war 93% of the time since our founding as a nation, and it is a well-documented fact that we have by far the highest military spending in the world. Why is it that so many Americans see diplomacy as foolish, see compromise as weakness?

Perhaps the most terrifying thing is not that so many US Presidents are war criminals; it is that so many Americans don’t seem to have any problem with that.

Beware the false balance

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457046 PST 13:47.

I am now back in Long Beach, hence the return to Pacific Time. Today’s post is a little less economic than most, though it’s certainly still within the purview of social science and public policy. It concerns a question that many academic researchers and in general reasonable, thoughtful people have to deal with: How do we remain unbiased and nonpartisan?

This would not be so difficult if the world were as the most devoted “centrists” would have you believe, and it were actually the case that both sides have their good points and bad points, and both sides have their scandals, and both sides make mistakes or even lie, so you should never take the side of the Democrats or the Republicans but always present both views equally.

Sadly, this is not at all the world in which we live. While Democrats are far from perfect—they are human beings after all, not to mention politicians—Republicans have become completely detached from reality. As Stephen Colbert has said, “Reality has a liberal bias.” You know it’s bad when our detractors call us the reality-based community. Treating both sides as equal isn’t being unbiased—it’s committing a balance fallacy.

Don’t believe me? Here is a list of objective, scientific facts that the Republican Party (and particularly its craziest subset, the Tea Party) has officially taken political stances against:

  1. Global warming is a real problem, and largely caused by human activity. (The Republican majority in the Senate voted down a resolution acknowledging this.)
  2. Human beings share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. (48% of Republicans think that we were created in our present form.)
  3. Animals evolve over time due to natural selection. (Only 43% of Republicans believe this.)
  4. The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. (Marco Rubio said he thinks maybe the Earth was made in seven days a few thousand years ago.)
  5. Hydraulic fracturing can trigger earthquakes.(Republican in Congress are trying to nullify local regulations on fracking because they insist it is so safe we don’t even need to keep track.)
  6. Income inequality in the United States is the worst it has been in decades and continues to rise. (Mitt Romney said that the concern about income inequality is just “envy”.)
  7. Progressive taxation reduces inequality without adversely affecting economic growth. (Here’s a Republican former New York Senator saying that the President “should be ashamed” for raising taxes on—you guessed it—”job creators”.)
  8. Moderate increases in the minimum wage do not yield significant losses in employment. (Republicans consistently vote against even small increases in the minimum wage, and Democrats consistently vote in favor.)
  9. The United States government has no reason to ever default on its debt. (John Boehner, now Speaker of the House, once said that “America is broke” and if we don’t stop spending we’ll never be able to pay the national debt.)
  10. Human embryos are not in any way sentient, and fetuses are not sentient until at least 17 weeks of gestation, probably more like 30 weeks. (Yet if I am to read it in a way that would make moral sense, “Life begins at conception”—which several Republicans explicitly endorsed at the National Right to Life Convention—would have to imply that even zygotes are sentient beings. If you really just meant “alive”, then that would equally well apply to plants or even bacteria. Sentience is the morally relevant category.)

And that’s not even counting the Republican Party’s association with Christianity and all of the objectively wrong scientific claims that necessarily entails—like the existence of an afterlife and the intervention of supernatural forces. Most Democrats also self-identify as Christian, though rarely with quite the same fervor (the last major Democrat I can think of who was a devout Christian was Jimmy Carter), probably because most Americans self-identify as Christian and are hesitant to elect an atheist President (despite the fact that 93% of the National Academy of Sciences is comprised of atheists and the higher your IQ the more likely you are to be an atheist; we wouldn’t want to elect someone who agrees with smart people, now would we?).

It’s true, there are some other crazy ideas out there with a left-wing slant, like the anti-vaccination movement that has wrought epidemic measles upon us, the anti-GMO crowd that rejects basic scientific facts about genetics, and the 9/11 “truth” movement that refuses to believe that Al Qaeda actually caused the attacks. There are in fact far-left Marxists out there who want to tear down the whole capitalist system by glorious revolution and replace it with… er… something (they’re never quite clear on that last point). But none of these things are the official positions of standing members of Congress.

The craziest belief by a standing Democrat I can think of is Dennis Kucinich’s belief that he saw an alien spacecraft. And to be perfectly honest, alien spacecraft are about a thousand times more plausible than Christianity in general, let alone Creationism. There almost certainly are alien spacecraft somewhere in the universe—just most likely so far away we’ll need FTL to encounter them. Moreover, this is not Kucinich’s official position as a member of Congress and it’s not something he has ever made policy based upon.

Indeed, if you’re willing to include the craziest individuals with no real political power who identify with a particular side of the political spectrum, then we should include on the right-wing side people like the Bundy militia in Nevada, neo-Nazis in Detroit, and the dozens of KKK chapters across the US. Not to mention this pastor who wants to murder all gay people in the world (because he truly believes what Leviticus 20:13 actually and clearly says).

If you get to include Marxists on the left, then we get to include Nazis on the right. Or, we could be reasonable and say that only the official positions of elected officials or mainstream pundits actually count, in which case Democrats have views that are basically accurate and reasonable while the majority of Republicans have views that are still completely objectively wrong.

There’s no balance here. For every Democrat who is wrong, there is a Republicans who is totally delusional. For every Democrat who distorts the truth, there is a Republican who blatantly lies about basic facts. Not to mention that for every Democrat who has had an ill-advised illicit affair there is a Republican who has committed war crimes.

Actually war crimes are something a fair number of Democrats have done as well, but the difference still stands out in high relief: Barack Obama has ordered double-tap drone strikes that are in violation of the Geneva Convention, but George W. Bush orchestrated a worldwide mass torture campaign and launched pointless wars that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. Bill Clinton ordered some questionable CIA operations, but George H.W. Bush was the director of the CIA.

I wish we had two parties that were equally reasonable. I wish there were two—or three, or four—proposals on the table in each discussion, all of which had merits and flaws worth considering. Maybe if we somehow manage to get the Green Party a significant seat in power, or the Social Democrat party, we can actually achieve that goal. But that is not where we are right now. Right now, we have the Democrats, who have some good ideas and some bad ideas; and then we have the Republicans, who are completely out of their minds.

There is an important concept in political science called the Overton window; it is the range of political ideas that are considered “reasonable” or “mainstream” within a society. Things near the middle of the Overton window are considered sensible, even “nonpartisan” ideas, while things near the edges are “partisan” or “political”, and things near but outside the window are seen as “extreme” and “radical”. Things far outside the window are seen as “absurd” or even “unthinkable”.

Right now, our Overton window is in the wrong place. Things like Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Social Security and Medicare are seen as reasonable when they should be considered extreme. Progressive income taxes of the kind we had in the 1960s are seen as extreme when they should be considered reasonable. Cutting WIC and SNAP with nothing to replace them and letting people literally starve to death are considered at most partisan, when they should be outright unthinkable. Opposition to basic scientific facts like climate change and evolution is considered a mainstream political position—when in terms of empirical evidence Creationism should be more intellectually embarrassing than being a 9/11 truther or thinking you saw an alien spacecraft. And perhaps worst of all, military tactics like double-tap strikes that are literally war crimes are considered “liberal”, while the “conservative” position involves torture, worldwide surveillance and carpet bombing—if not outright full-scale nuclear devastation.

I want to restore reasonable conversation to our political system, I really do. But that really isn’t possible when half the politicians are totally delusional. We have but one choice: We must vote them out.

I say this particularly to people who say “Why bother? Both parties are the same.” No, they are not the same. They are deeply, deeply different, for all the reasons I just outlined above. And if you can’t bring yourself to vote for a Democrat, at least vote for someone! A Green, or a Social Democrat, or even a Libertarian or a Socialist if you must. It is only by the apathy of reasonable people that this insanity can propagate in the first place.