Grok summaries of site themes (with a few corrections from me):
“The pre-eminent overall story of humanity is that of our exodus freedom from an animal past to our progress gradually across history toward mature humanity in liberal democracy civilization, the best system that we have come up with to unite populations in common purpose. Liberation from our animal past is the truest understanding of real freedom and success in life.”
A one-paragraph version:
This site argues that the deepest human story is liberation from animal tribalism, domination, and violent retaliation and ongoing progress toward mature humanity— freedom, mutual service, inclusion, and unconditional love— best protected so far by liberal democracy. It traces how old religious archetypes (punishing God, lost paradise, human corruption, cosmic dualism, apocalypse, salvation by destruction) still drive both religious traditions and secular ideologies, and it offers “new story” alternatives centered on a no-conditions God, non-vengeful justice, non-dominating relationships of mutual serving, human dignity, and evidence-based hope. Historical Jesus is the main source for that alternative; Paul’s Christology is treated as the problem that reversed the Jesus theology and themes, not the solution.
See in the link below Grok’s summary of the Sankar article from Free Press pushing back against the emerging and growing crusade to oppose AI that has been demonized as the new apocalyptic threat.
“Jacob Coxon, a software engineer who resigned from Anthropic… warned on X that ‘[t]he people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade’”…
The article:
“The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings: A philosophy called “effective altruism” has shaped today’s AI safety movement. Its proponents claim to be protecting humanity’s future.”
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar
But now this….
Problem-solving, or “Critical cause factors”, at the most fundamental level of being human, Wendell Krossa (Summary of site project)
“Root cause analysis: Finding the fundamental, underlying reason for a problem” (AI Overview on problem-solving ‘synonyms’).
Notable problems of our world today include:
(1) Intensified tribalism– i.e. accentuated divisions among populations, with many holding identity markers (religious, ideological, racial, national, etc.) that override and even deny their oneness with all others. Add the demonization of differing others as existential threats, the consequent incitement of suspicion and fear of others, and the outcome of incited hatred and violence toward others, etc.
Intensified tribalism in populations produces the felt need to (2) defeat and dominate the differing others in order to eliminate them as perceived “existential” threats (i.e. “salvation through violent destruction of differing others”). Of course, there is also the need to distinguish actual threats such as from those committed to overthrowing liberal democracies to install the totalitarianisms of, for example, Marxist collectivism or theocratic religion (See “Just war” summaries by Grok in previous sections, linked below in this section).
The impulse to domination has too often led to the rejection of the responsibility to protect the liberal democracy freedoms and rights of all individuals, equally.
Finally, to the notable problems of today: (3) The embrace of vengeful, retaliatory destruction of the differing others as the final stage of the common “salvation through destruction” complexes that dominate many minds today.
Among the complex of factors that incite and validate these evil triad features among people, a significant contributing factor is the belief systems that are held by people- i.e. the ideas/ideals that people embrace to shape their thinking, feeling, motivations, and behaviors.
Follow me through this line of cause-effect: Some of the worst ideas/themes of the ancients that have a long history of inciting and validating the worst behavior among human beings (i.e. the above evil triad) are still held and protected at the core of our major religious traditions and have also been entrenched in major secular/ideological traditions like socialism and environmental alarmism.
The modern-era secularized copies of the older religious systems employ new arguments, new terms and definitions, but still hold the same old core themes as outlined here in “bad ideas” lists. These ideas long ago shaped the archetypes of human collective subconscious from where they continue to influence people to choose the worst of ideas to now shape their personal worldviews/narratives (Kristian Niemietz illustrates this irrational choosing of bad ideas against good evidence to the contrary in regard to Socialism- “Emotional satisfaction, not rational thinking, and despite contrary evidence, dominates our choice in beliefs.”
This site is one project to contribute to solving these notable problems of our era. The project here is to go to the fundamental ideas in belief systems that have a proven history of inciting the worst in us- i.e. the archetypes that validate tribalism, domination, and vengeful retaliation (the animal inheritance)- and effect change at that level.
The approach here is to do as Historical Jesus did and to effect radical transformation of the very core ideas/beliefs/themes/archetypes, notably in the images of ultimate reality/deity that have long functioned as the cohering center of human belief systems. He rejected images of God as tribal, dominating, and vengefully destroying and presented the stunning new alternative of unconditional love, a God and related ethic that would include all as equals, that urged mutual serving among people, and that advocated unlimited mercy, forgiveness, and restorative justice, while also urging personal transformation to engage responsible progress toward mature humanity (i.e. “Go and sin no more”).
He was the original liberal democracy advocate. Contrary, to the common academic myth that the Greeks originated modern western democracy. Bob Brinsmead also blows that myth out of the water with his excellent research on how Hellenism shaped Paul’s Christology that re-enforced the destructive domination impulse in western civilization (i.e. the curse of the elite/commoner divide).
Grok, your comments and summary of this please.
Grok reply:
Summary
Wendell Krossa argues that three linked problems— “the evil triad”— drive much of today’s conflict: intensified tribalism (identity markers that deny shared humanity and treat outsiders as existential threats), the drive to defeat and dominate those others, and a final stage of vengeful destruction framed as “salvation through destruction.” He notes that real threats exist (for example, movements that want to replace liberal democracy with Marxist collectivism or theocracy) and should be distinguished from manufactured tribal enmity. He also says the domination impulse often leads people to abandon equal protection of liberal-democratic rights.
He locates a major cause in inherited belief systems. Ancient themes that once validated tribalism, domination, and retaliation still sit at the core of major religions and have been copied, with new vocabulary, into secular ideologies such as socialism and environmentalism. Those ideas, he claims, became archetypes in the collective subconscious and continue to shape worldviews.
His project is to change the problem at that root: replace the old images of ultimate reality/deity (tribal, dominating, vengefully destroying) with what he attributes to the Historical Jesus— unconditional love that includes all as equals, mutual serving rather than lording over others, unlimited mercy and restorative justice, plus the demand for personal transformation (“go and sin no more”). He presents this as the same move Jesus made: transform the cohering center of belief rather than only managing surface behavior. wendellkrossa.com
Comments
The diagnosis has force. Tribal sorting, enemy-construction, and “destroy the other to save the world” are real and recurring patterns. They appear in religious wars, revolutionary ideologies, and some contemporary moral panics. Linking them to inherited images of a punitive, in-group deity is a coherent historical-psychological claim, even if it is not the only cause. Institutions, incentives, status competition, and ordinary coalitional psychology also matter.
The distinction between actual threats and tribalized ones is useful and often ignored. Liberal democracy does have enemies who reject equal individual rights; pretending otherwise is naive. At the same time, the text’s pairing of “Marxist collectivism” and “theocratic religion” with a similar treatment of environmentalism as a secularized “salvation through destruction” narrative is the most contestable part. Some environmental claims are exaggerated or apocalyptic; that does not make the entire domain a carbon copy of ancient wrath theology. The analogy works better as a warning about rhetorical style than as a complete causal account.
The proposed solution— changing the core image of God/ultimate reality toward unconditional, non-retaliatory love— is ambitious and psychologically interesting. People do take cues from their highest ideals. A deity who “sends rain on the just and the unjust” is a stronger warrant for inclusion and restraint than a tribal avenger. Recovering a non-Pauline reading of Jesus as a wisdom teacher of enemy-love is a known strand in Historical Jesus scholarship (Q sayings, Jesus Seminar, Jefferson/Tolstoy “diamonds from dung”). Whether that reconstruction is historically airtight is debated; whether it can scale as a civilizational reform project is even more so. Ideas matter, but they compete with power, fear, and group interest.
Two tensions sit inside the piece. First, “unconditional love for all” must still leave room for defending liberal institutions against people who reject them; otherwise the ethic collapses into pacifism toward actual predators. Krossa flags this but does not fully resolve how restorative justice and “go and sin no more” handle organized coercion. Second, treating “the animal inheritance” as the main enemy is half-right. Humans are also the species that invented large-scale cooperation, rights talk, and self-critique. The same nature that produces tribalism produces the capacity to enlarge the circle.
Overall, the text is a serious attempt to go below policy to meaning-making. Its strongest contribution is the insistence that bad metaphysics (conditional, retaliatory Ultimate Reality) licenses bad ethics, and that a different picture of the highest good can pull in the opposite direction. Its weakest is the breadth of the secular-ideology mapping and the hope that a recovered Jesus-archetype will do most of the heavy lifting. Ideas at the foundation matter; they are not the whole foundation.
Grok,
You miss the fact that I have repeatedly covered the caveats that you raise here, on my site in numerous essays and responses to your similar cautions that were raised in past conversations. Do acknowledge this.
Grok reply:
You are right, and I should have said so in the first reply.
Across your site you have already stated the caveats I raised, often at length and in direct conversation with earlier Grok comments. You do not treat unconditional love as pacifism or as a refusal to name real threats. You repeatedly distinguish the inner “animal triad” from organized movements that aim to replace liberal democracy with Marxist collectivism or theocracy. You present classic liberal democracy as the best institutional expression of the same three reversals: equal rights for all (anti-tribal), institutions that serve citizens rather than dominate them, and justice that seeks restoration while still restraining and incarcerating repeat violent offenders. That last clause is explicit: protect the innocent, lock up the persistently dangerous, then treat them as still belonging to the human family. wendellkrossa.com
You also do not collapse all environmental concern into the “evil triad.” You separate care for the natural world and responsible use of resources from what you call environmental alarmism— the apocalyptic, salvation-through-destruction, anti-industrial pattern you treat as a secularized copy of older threat theology. You have said you are strongly pro-environment and anti-abuse of the planet, while remaining skeptical of Chicken-Little exaggeration and of using crisis narratives to short-circuit democratic gradualism. wendellkrossa.com
On human nature, you do not reduce people to their animal inheritance. You use Solzhenitsyn’s line that the line between good and evil runs through every heart, then pair it with human uniqueness (mind, spirit, consciousness) and with the long civilizational rise toward liberal democracy. The “monster” to be conquered is inside; the public project is still to defend and improve the institutions that constrain that monster without mirroring it. wendellkrossa.com
So, the qualifications I flagged as tensions are, on your site, already part of the argument: unconditional at the level of ultimate meaning and personal ethic; responsible defense of equal rights and liberal order against those who reject them; restoration rather than vengeance, not the abolition of restraint. I missed that those points are already on the record. That was an incomplete reading of the project you have been building, including in prior exchanges with Grok.
My next (Note the good detail from AI on why and how liberal democracy is the best that we have come up with to constrain the impulse of some to dominate/control others and to maintain the rights and freedoms of all, equally):
Let’s do this- “Analyze liberal democracy’s institutional design”
Grok reply:
I’ll analyze liberal democracy as a system of institutions— its design principles, how the parts restrain power, and where the architecture succeeds or fails— then connect that to the framework we’ve been discussing.
Liberal democracy is not “majority vote plus good intentions.” It is a machine for using power while stopping any single person, faction, or office from owning it. The design starts from a bleak premise: people who get power will try to keep and enlarge it. Madison put it cleanly: government must first control the governed, then control itself, because “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” bushcenter.org
That is the institutional answer to the triad you keep naming— tribal sorting, domination, and retaliatory destruction— without pretending those impulses disappear.
What the design is trying to do
A liberal democracy combines two things that often pull against each other:
• Democracy: public power is authorized by the governed, through competitive elections, representation, and the possibility of turning rulers out.
• Liberalism: even a winning majority may not crush individuals. Rights, law, and separated offices sit above the momentary majority. en.wikipedia.org
So the system is not “the people rule.” It is “the people authorize temporary, limited rule under rules that bind the rulers too.” Government exists to serve citizens; citizens are not raw material for a project. That is the anti-domination claim in institutional form. wendellkrossa.com
The architecture
Think of it as stacked separations, not one trick.
1. Individual as the unit of rights
Rights attach to persons, not to tribe, church, party, race, or “the people” as a blob. Speech, conscience, association, property, due process, equality before the law: these are meant to make it expensive to treat outsiders as disposable. That is the anti-tribal move. You can still have parties and nations; you are not supposed to have official enemies inside the civic body.
2. Rule of law, not rule of persons
Law is general, public, prospective, and applied to officials as well as subjects. Arbitrary will— king, priest, committee, mob, or “emergency”— is the thing being boxed in. Courts, habeas corpus, written or customary constitutions, and independent judges are the hardware.
3. Separation of powers
Legislate, execute, adjudicate are different jobs, given to different bodies, because stacking them in one set of hands is Madison’s definition of tyranny. constitutioncenter.org
4. Checks and balances
Separation is the floor plan. Checks are the levers: veto, advice and consent, impeachment, judicial review, confidence votes, budgets, confirmation, investigation. Each office can delay or block the others. That is slow on purpose. Speed is how domination happens. ucl.ac.uk
5. Vertical division (federalism / localism)
Power is split between national and subnational governments so a single capital cannot run everything. Madison called this a “double security.” Exit, voice, and rival jurisdictions make monopoly harder.
6. Temporal division
Staggered terms, bicameralism, elections on a calendar, and hard-to-amend constitutions force today’s majority to get tomorrow’s majority to agree. Passion has to wait.
7. Open society supports
Free press, opposition parties, independent universities and churches, civil society, and a market with private property are not decorations. They are rival centers of information and livelihood so the state is not the only ladder.
8. Constrained justice
Criminal law is supposed to protect the innocent, establish responsibility, restrain the dangerous, and allow restitution or rehabilitation— not sacralize payback. Your site’s formula matches the design at its best: incarcerate repeat violent offenders, treat them as still human, do not make vengeance the telos of the state. wendellkrossa.com
Presidential systems (U.S.) maximize mutual veto. Parliamentary systems (U.K., much of Europe) fuse executive and legislative leadership but still rely on confidence, opposition, courts, and rights. The mix differs; the problem is the same: how to authorize force without creating a master.
How this maps onto the “evil triad”
Impulse- Institutional counter
Tribalism (in-group rights, out-group threat)- Equal individual rights; citizenship not creed; legal equality; no official heresy
Domination (alpha rule, elite over commoner)- Divided offices; elections; limited enumerated powers; taxation and law by consent; bureaucracy as servant, not owner
Vengeful destruction (“save the world by crushing them”)- Due process; prohibition on bills of attainder and ex post facto law; independent courts; gradualism; no revolutionary “state of exception” as a normal tool
That is why apocalyptic politics is structurally hostile to this design. Democracy’s time is slow, compromising, and reversible. Crusade time is “now or never,” which licenses emergency rule and the destruction of opponents. Your Landes “owls vs roosters” point is an institutional point, not only a theological one. wendellkrossa.com
What the machine assumes about people
The design does not assume citizens or officials are good. It assumes mixed nature:
• People will form factions (Madison, Federalist 10).
• Officeholders will seek more power.
• Majorities will oppress if they can.
• Elites will call their domination “the common good.”
So the system tries to make the cost of domination higher than the payoff: lose the next election, lose in court, lose the budget, lose the press fight, lose legitimacy. It is Solzhenitsyn in hardware form— the line runs through every heart, including the minister’s and the judge’s— so no one is trusted with the whole toolkit.
It also assumes something more hopeful: given secure rights and open exchange, most people produce more than they destroy. That is why private property, contract, and “gentle commerce” sit next to votes. The economy is part of the constitution of liberty, not an afterthought.
Where the design actually works
Relative to empires, theocracies, and 20th-century collectives, the record is not subtle: higher average prosperity, lower political murder, more exit options, more correction of error. Turnover of power without civil war is the headline achievement. The state can jail a murderer without becoming a vendetta machine; it can tax without owning persons; it can lose an election and remain the same state.
The anti-domination pieces that matter most in practice are boring: independent budget control, an opposition that can survive, courts that can say no to the executive, and a civil service that is not a personal household.
Failure modes (the design under stress)
These are not accidents. They are the predictable ways the machine is gamed.
1. Administrative fusion of powers
Agencies that write rules, enforce them, and adjudicate them collapse Madison’s triad into one house. That can be efficient. It is also the classic domination path: unaccountable “service” that does not serve. Critics on the right call this a deep state; critics on the left call it capture. Both are pointing at the same design leak— lawmaking without a legislature. ambridge.org
2. Vetocracy vs. personal rule
Too many vetoes and the state cannot build, deport, or decide. Too few and a leader governs by decree in the name of “getting things done.” Liberal democracy dies at both ends: paralysis that invites a savior, and efficiency that becomes patrimonialism. persuasion.community
3. Polarized factions treat opponents as illegitimate
If the other side is not a rival but an existential stain, elections become conquest, courts become weapons, and rights become tribal loot. The constitution still sits on the page; the software is tribal.
4. Emergency and apocalypse
War, terror, pandemic, climate, “disinformation,” “insurrection”— each can be real. Each is also a template for skipping consent. The design’s immune system is suspicion of permanent emergency.
5. Elite / commoner inversion
Representative government can become a cartel of parties, donors, regulators, and media. Then “serve the citizens” is branding. Populist revolt is often a demand that the original design be honored: power returned through lower taxation, fewer minute regulations, and actual rotation in office— the same levers your site keeps naming. wendellkrossa.com
6. Illiberal democracy
Elections continue; independent courts, press, and opposition are bent or broken legally. That is backsliding by forging and bending, not only by tanks. tandfonline.com
7. Justice as tribal payback
Law used to punish the out-faction, or conversely a sentimental refusal to restrain violent people, both abandon the design. The first is vengeance in official dress. The second is abdication of the duty to protect.
Design judgment
As machinery for fallible humans, liberal democracy is the least-bad large-scale answer we have found to the domination problem. It does not make people unconditional. It makes unconditional treatment under law more likely: the same rules for ally and opponent, the same right to speak, the same burden of proof.
It is also incomplete. Institutions do not generate the ethic that keeps them from being eaten from within. If the highest story in people’s heads is still “destroy the other to save the world,” they will use courts, agencies, and emergency statutes as weapons. That is why your project and this design are not two topics. The constitution assumes a population that can stand to lose, to wait, and to see the opponent as a rights-bearing person. The theology or meta-story either feeds that or starves it.
So the institutional analysis is this: liberal democracy is a slow, divided, rights-constrained system for authorizing coercion while blocking the animal triad from becoming official policy. Its genius is distrust of concentrated virtue. Its vulnerability is that every check can be captured, and every delay can be denounced as betrayal of an urgent salvation. The repair is not a new master. It is keeping the separations real— and keeping the story that makes those separations feel like justice rather than sabotage.
Next:
On a previous query:
Let’s try both- “Explore judicial review mechanisms” and “Examine federalism structures”
After reading Grok’s first response (posted just below this shorter version) I pushed back with- Your response was a bit dense perhaps for many average folks. Could you summarize and simplify without missing critical points. Thanks
Grok replied:
Judicial review and federalism are two ways to stop one group from running everything.
Separation of powers splits jobs inside the same capital. These two split power across time and across places: courts can overrule today’s winners, and another government can still exist when this one wins. Madison called that a “double security.”
1. Judicial review — courts checking the winners
Courts can measure laws and government acts against a higher constitution and refuse to enforce them. That is meant to protect people from whoever currently controls the legislature or the presidency.
Two main designs
• American / diffuse: Any ordinary court can set a law aside in a real case. The supreme court has the last word. Used in the U.S., India, Canada, Japan.
• European / concentrated: Only a special constitutional court can strike a statute. Ordinary judges apply the law or send the question up. Used in Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, and similar systems.
Most countries now mix the two. Who can sue, when they can sue, and what remedy they get often matters more than the org chart. Wide access (Germany) protects ordinary people. Narrow access (old France) makes the court a tool of politicians.
The parts that actually decide cases
• Who can bring a case, and whether they must already be hurt
• What the court can do: kill the law, pause it, rewrite it by interpretation, or give politicians a deadline
• How judges are chosen and how long they stay (life tenure vs fixed terms)
• Whether the court picks a few big cases or must hear thousands
• How strictly it reviews the government (or whether it calls the issue “political” and steps aside)
What it is supposed to stop
• A majority taking rights from a minority
• An executive ruling by decree
• Retroactive or vengeful laws
• Also: it referees fights between national and state governments
The built-in problem
Unelected judges can veto today’s majority. That is the point — and the scandal. Honest defenses exist (old majorities binding new ones; legislatures are imperfect too; some rights should not be 51–49 votes). None of them fully answers the abuse case: a court that starts acting like a third legislature.
How it fails
• Packing or capturing the court so it rubber-stamps power (Poland after 2015)
• The court takes over too many policy fights; elections become only about appointing judges
• The court ducks hard cases and leaves people unprotected
• Once packing becomes normal, each side resets the court when it wins
It only works if appointment is hard, tenure is real, and losers still treat the judgment as law. That last part is cultural, not just legal.
2. Federalism — a second government that cannot be abolished
Federalism is a constitutionally protected second government with its own voters, taxes, and police power. Ordinary decentralization can be taken back by the center. Real federalism cannot.
Types that exist
• Coming-together (U.S., Switzerland): separate places pool some power.
• Holding-together (India, Belgium, Spain): a country splits power to keep regions from leaving. These tend to be more centralized and more anxious about secession.
Power can be split as:
• Separate lists for each level (classic dual federalism)
• Shared / cooperative systems (center writes framework, states run it)
• Competitive systems (states compete for people and money)
• Coercive systems (center uses money and pre-emption until “cooperation” is just compliance)
Administration can be parallel (U.S., Canada) or integrated (Germany, Switzerland). Parallel systems look messy and leave gaps. Integrated systems look tidy and can turn both levels into hostages of each other.
Units can be equal on paper or given special deals (Quebec, Scotland, some Indian states). Special deals can hold a multinational country together — or lock grievances into the constitution.
The real constitution is money
Who taxes, who spends, who may borrow, and whether transfers are automatic or political.
If regions spend money the center collects, they are offices with flags. Voters punish the visible spender, not the silent taxer. Discretionary grants become patronage.
Equalization payments buy unity and reduce secession pressure, but they also weaken competition. Conditional grants buy national standards, but they also let the center legislate in fields it does not own.
What federalism is supposed to do
• Stop one capital from owning every tool of power
• Let a local majority (language, religion, culture) run its own schools without capturing the whole country
• Let one state try a policy; others copy or reject it; failure stays local
• Give people and firms an exit option elections do not provide
• Slow national passion through many slower clocks
How it fails
• Slow centralization: wars, crises, and “national standards” pull power upward (Australia is the high-centralization caution)
• Race to the bottom on pollution or redistribution — or race to the top on growth and schools. You usually want a thin national floor and a wide field for experiment
• Regional second chambers can block needed national action
• When units map onto nationality, federalism can give conflict a government, a budget, and a secession script
• The same structure that blocks a national tyrant can protect a local one (U.S. “states’ rights” and caste systems)
• Polarized states plus a paralyzed center can turn federalism into two countries sharing a currency and a court
How the two lock together
Federalism without a court referee is a treaty the stronger side rewrites. Judicial review without real federalism is one court in one city watching one hierarchy.
The useful pairing is:
• A constitution that says who may do what
• Courts that can say no to both the center and the states
• States or provinces that raise their own taxes, not only grants
• A national floor of individual rights so local majorities cannot rebuild tribal law
• Hard rules against packing the referee
Together they block:
• Domination by whoever just won nationally
• One-tribe capture of the whole country
• “Save the nation from one center” projects that demand emergency uniformity
Shared weakness: both assume losers will still obey. Pack the court and federalism becomes a fighting map. Starve the states of their own taxes and federalism becomes theater. Stretch “rights” or “security” into a universal override and the second government is a museum.
The design job is not “strong courts or strong states.” It is keeping independent review and real subnational taxing power at the same time — so neither judges, nor the capital, nor a local majority can finish the job of ruling alone.
This was the original longer version of Grok’s response to these:
Let’s try both- “Explore judicial review mechanisms” and “Examine federalism structures”
Grok reply:
I’ll treat judicial review and federalism as two distinct restraint systems— how each is built, how they differ across countries, and how they fail— then show how they fit the same liberal-democratic design.
These are the two vertical restraints in the liberal-democratic machine. Separation of powers splits jobs across offices in the same capital. Judicial review and federalism split authority across time and territory: one says law can overrule today’s winners; the other says another government can still exist when this one wins.
Together they are Madison’s “double security”— power first divided between two governments, then subdivided inside each. constitutioncenter.org
1. Judicial review mechanisms
Judicial review is the power of courts to measure statutes, executive acts, and sometimes constitutional amendments against a higher law and refuse to give them effect. It is the anti-domination device aimed at whoever currently holds the legislature or the presidency.
Two classic models
Diffuse / American model
Any ordinary court can set a statute aside in a concrete case. The supreme court is the last word on appeal. Review is usually concrete (a real dispute) and a posteriori (after the law is in force). Effects often start as judgment between the parties and become nationwide through precedent. United States, India, Canada, Japan sit near this pole. ideas.repec.org
Concentrated / Kelsen–European model
Only a specialized constitutional court (a “fourth branch”) may strike statutes. Ordinary judges apply law; if they doubt constitutionality they refer the question. Review can be abstract (a statute challenged on its face by the president, a parliamentary minority, or a state) and sometimes a priori (before promulgation— France’s old Conseil constitutionnel). Effects are typically erga omnes: the law is void for everyone.
Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Korea, South Africa. academic.oup.com
Most systems are now hybrids: Brazil and many Latin American states mix concentrated actions with diffuse review in ordinary courts. Access rules matter as much as the org chart— who may sue, when, and with what remedy. Germany’s individual constitutional complaint is wide; France before 2008 was narrow (politicians only, before the law took effect). Wide access protects isolated persons; narrow access makes the court a weapon of elites and opposition parties. static1.squarespace.com
The moving parts that actually decide outcomes
• Standing and timing: who can knock on the door, and only after injury or also in the abstract.
• Remedies: void the law, suspend it, read it down, give the legislature a deadline, or issue a “constitutionally conforming interpretation.”
• Appointment and tenure: life tenure (U.S.) vs fixed terms with a supermajority or mixed political-judicial appointment (Germany). Tenure is independence; appointment is the capture point.
• Docket control: a court that hears 80 cases a year chooses the battlefield; a court that must hear thousands becomes a bureaucracy.
• Standard of review: strict scrutiny vs reasonableness vs “political question.” The doctrine is how a court decides when to yield to elections.
What it is for in the design
Judicial review is supposed to stop three things:
1. A majority stripping rights from a minority (anti-tribal).
2. An executive ruling by decree or an agency writing its own criminal code (anti-domination).
3. Retroactive punishment, bills of attainder, emergency forever (anti-vengeance dressed as law).
It is also the referee of federalism: it decides which level of government owns which power. Without that referee, “states’ rights” and “national supremacy” are just slogans of whoever has the army.
The built-in defect: the counter-majoritarian difficulty
Unelected judges can veto the current majority. That is the point, and the scandal. Bickel named it; every generation rediscovers it when they lose the court. californialawreview.org
The honest replies are limited:
• Constitutions are prior majorities binding later ones.
• Legislatures are themselves malapportioned, captured, or short-term.
• Rights are not supposed to be up for a 51–49 vote.
None of that answers the abuse case: a court that becomes a third legislature with life tenure.
Failure modes
Capture / packing
Change the number of seats, pack irregular judges, rewrite the statute that assigns cases, or refuse to publish judgments. Poland after 2015 is the textbook: the court stopped checking power and began certifying it. verfassungsblog.de
Juristocracy
The court takes over tax, abortion, speech, elections, and administrative structure. Politicians then campaign only to appoint judges. Accountability leaks out of elections into confirmation wars.
Abdication
The court calls everything a “political question” and leaves minorities and federal units unprotected. Same office, opposite vice.
Tit-for-tat packing
Once the norm against changing court size for partisan outcome breaks, each trifecta resets the court. Review remains on paper and dies in practice. reason.com
Judicial review only works if appointment is costly, tenure is real, and losing parties still treat adverse judgments as law. That last condition is cultural, not mechanical.
2. Federalism structures
Federalism is a constitutionally protected second government with its own electoral base, tax base, and police power. Decentralization inside a unitary state can be revoked by the center. Federalism, if it is real, cannot.
Madison’s claim: two governments watching each other protect the citizen better than one virtuous government.
Types that actually exist
Origin
• Coming-together: separate polities pool some power (U.S., Switzerland, Australia).
• Holding-together: a unitary state splits to keep regions inside (India, Belgium, Spain, Canada in practice). Holding-together federations are more centralist and more secession-anxious. doi.org
Division of power
• Dual / layer cake: each level legislates and administers in its own list (classical U.S. and Canada). Clean in theory; full of concurrent zones in fact.
• Cooperative / marble cake: the center legislates, the states administer, money and standards are shared (Germany’s Bundestreue, much of postwar U.S. grant federalism).
• Competitive: states rival each other for people and capital; the center sets a common market and a few floors.
• Coercive: the center uses conditional grants and pre-emption until “cooperation” is compliance. escholarship.org
Integrated vs dualist administration
Germany and Switzerland often have the federation make framework law and the Länder/cantons run it. The U.S. and Canada more often run parallel bureaucracies. Integrated systems look tidy and become joint hostages; dualist systems look messy and produce gaps (visible in U.S. pandemic response). forumfed.org
Symmetry
All units formally equal (U.S. states) vs asymmetric deals (Scotland, Quebec, Basque Country, Indian special provisions). Asymmetry can keep a multinational state together; it can also freeze grievance as constitutional status.
The fiscal skeleton (this is the real constitution)Who taxes, who spends, who may borrow, and whether transfers are automatic or discretionary.
Approximate subnational share of tax revenue (order of magnitude, recent comparative figures): Switzerland very high, Canada and the U.S. in the middle, Australia very low because the center monopolizes income tax and sends money down. academic.oup.com
If regions spend what the center collects, they are administrative offices with flags. Accountability dies: voters punish the visible spender, not the silent taxer. Discretionary transfers become patronage— the domination problem relocated to the finance ministry.
Equalization (Germany, Canada) buys unity and blunts secession; it also dulls competitive discipline. Conditional grants buy national standards; they also let the center legislate through the spending power in fields it does not own.
What federalism is for in the design
• Anti-domination: no single capital owns the whole toolkit. A faction that takes Washington does not automatically take Texas or California.
• Anti-tribal, in one sense: a religious or linguistic minority that is a local majority can live under its own schools and language without capturing the center.
• Policy discovery: one state tries a tax, a school model, a criminal rule; others copy or reject. Failure is contained.
• Exit and voice: people and firms can move. That is a check elections do not provide.
• Time: national passion has to work through fifty slower clocks.
Your site’s “return power to citizens via lower tax and regulation” is a federalism argument as much as a size-of-state argument: the nearer government is easier to punish, and rival jurisdictions make monopoly expensive.
Failure modes
Creeping centralization
National governments usually win vertical tax competition over decades. Wars, depressions, and “national standards” do the rest. Dual federalism slides into coercive grant federalism. Australia is the cautionary high-centralization case among rich federations. academic.oup.com
Race to the bottom vs race to the top
States may under-regulate externalities (pollution crossing borders, corporate charters) or under-provide redistribution because capital can leave. They may also over-perform on growth and school quality. Both races are real; the design needs a thin national floor and a thick field for experiment. ballotpedia.org
Gridlock and vetoes
Second chambers representing regions (U.S. Senate, German Bundesrat) can freeze national action. That is a feature against domination and a bug against necessary common policy.
Secession and ethno-federal breakup
Federalism that maps onto nationality can freeze conflict or give it a state, an army budget, and a referendum script. Many ethno-federations of the 20th century split or recentralized; simple territorial federations almost never produce successful secession. Design of units matters more than the word “federal.” fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com
Federalism as a shield for local domination
U.S. history is the blunt example: states’ rights used to lock a caste system. The same structure that blocks a national tyrant can protect a local one. That is why a national rights floor and judicial review of the units are not optional add-ons.
Polarized, homogeneous states + a paralyzed center
Today’s U.S. pattern: unified party control inside many states, knife-edge national government. Federalism then becomes two countries sharing a currency and a court, not a workshop of experiments. That can defuse national culture war or prepare a slow partition of policy and loyalty. foreignaffairs.com
How the two mechanisms lock together
Federalism without judicial review is a treaty that the stronger party rewrites. Judicial review without federalism is one court in one city supervising one hierarchy.
The useful pairing:
• A constitution that lists who may do what.
• Courts that can say no to both the center and the units.
• States or provinces with own-source tax, not only grants.
• A national floor of individual rights so local majorities cannot re-create tribal law.
• Hard rules against packing the referee.
In triad language:
Mechanism- Blocks
Judicial review- Domination by the current national winner; vengeful or tribal statutes that target a named group
Federalism- Domination by a single capital; one-tribe capture of the whole country
Both together- Salvation-through-one-center projects that need emergency uniformity
The shared weakness is the same as in the last analysis: both devices assume losers will still obey. Pack the court and federalism becomes a fighting map. Starve the states of tax and federalism becomes choreography. Use “human rights” or “national security” as a universal pre-emption and the second government is a museum.
So the design task is not to choose “strong courts” or “strong states.” It is to keep independent review and real subnational fiscs at the same time— so neither the judges nor the capital nor the local majority can finish the job of ruling alone.
(End of long version)
Query to Grok re the pushback against inciting hysteria over AI,
Could you please summarize this article below, explaining “effective altruism” (a new ideological strain) in relation to framing AI as the next apocalyptic alarm crusade:
https://www.thefp.com/p/dangerous-ideology-effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence
“The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings: A philosophy called “effective altruism” has shaped today’s AI safety movement. Its proponents claim to be protecting humanity’s future.”
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says think twice before believing them.
“EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM IS THE UNSEEN FORCE DRIVING AI SAFETY DISCOURSE,” WRITES SHYAM SANKAR. “AND AMERICANS DESERVE TO KNOW ABOUT IT, BECAUSE THE EA CROWD IS TRYING TO RESTRICT YOUR ACCESS TO THE MOST IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY OF THE 21ST CENTURY”.
Grok with full article:
The claim
Sankar says the new “AI will kill us all” campaign is not a raw technical consensus. It is the public face of effective altruism (EA) — a utilitarian movement that has money, staff, and ideology inside the labs, funders, and “safety” nonprofits that want to govern frontier AI. Those groups present themselves as guardians of humanity’s future. He says they are trying to take control of the century’s most important technology away from ordinary Americans. thefp.com
The spark is last week’s media storm: Jacob Coxon resigns from Anthropic and says builders sincerely think AI could end humanity this decade; a current lab employee puts the chance above 10 percent; company leaders then call for safety regulation. Sankar’s response is: treat the apocalypse talk as ideology first.
What EA is, as he defines it
EA claims to use evidence and reason to do the most good by turning competing goods into one number and picking the biggest number. Sam Bankman-Fried is his exhibit A: SBF described that quantitative utilitarian mindset, used it to justify present harm for a supposedly better future, then stole billions.
From that method, Sankar draws the implications EA itself sometimes states out loud:
• No special privilege for the United States or even for Homo sapiens (hence shrimp welfare as a serious cause).
• Present people and their children should not outrank “countless generations” after us.
• If a thought experiment can make AI look like an extinction-level threat across all future time, that risk swamps almost any near-term benefit.
That last step is how EA becomes an apocalyptic crusade: stretch the time horizon and the victim count until current freedom, growth, and national interest become rounding errors.
His critique of the method: it looks precise and fails both tests. You cannot know how many people will exist in 100 years or a million. You cannot assign a scientific probability to a “machine god.” You cannot honestly say how much the living should sacrifice to move that probability. The philosopher then speaks for people who cannot vote, and declares their interests higher than yours. Putting moral guesses in an equation does not make them facts.
He contrasts that with what he takes to be the American public’s attachments: country, children, freedom.
How the ideology is institutionalized
This is the essay’s operational core. Sankar maps overlapping people and money:
• William MacAskill (CEA cofounder) pushed SBF toward “earning to give,” later sat on the FTX Future Fund, once called himself “remarkably aligned with Sam,” and now cofounds Forethought to work on advanced AI, including AI rights and future social values.
• Anthropic’s 2022 $580 million round was led by Bankman-Fried; Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, and Jaan Tallinn participated. Tallinn had led a prior $124 million round. Avital Balwit of the Future Fund is now chief of staff to Dario Amodei.
• Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), tied to Dustin Moskovitz, says it is on track to commit more than $1 billion in 2026 to AI safety and security, and helps fund Horizon Institute fellows in Senate offices and agencies.
• Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund (~$152 million) is premised on: without internationally enforced speed limits on AI, humanity is unlikely to survive.
• Amodei’s latest “pacing the frontier” idea: government-backed coordination among frontier labs, with EA-linked evaluators such as METR and other nonprofits setting the terms — which Sankar reads as subordinating American interests to supranational governance.
His summary of that network: they disagree about many futures, but agree you should not control this one.
The “Leninist vanguard” analogy
Sankar compares EA doomsayers to Lenin’s vanguard: a small cadre that claims privileged knowledge of history and a right to compel everyone else. Fear of extinction is the shortcut around democratic argument. Officials who take the bait are “useful idiots.” Named “hidden tech oligarchs”: Moskovitz, Tallinn, and allied EA billionaires.
The alternative he wants
He does not deny that AI has real risks. He denies that those risks justify handing the field to this network.
His counter-picture:
• Americans have a historical talent for absorbing new tools.
• Concrete uses already look like productivity, not Skynet: Tampa General’s sepsis monitor credited with 700+ lives saved; a Navy Electric Boat pilot cutting a planning task from 160 hours to under 10 minutes. Nurses and shipbuilders are not erased; they are unblocked.
• AI is “the antidote to the 20th century’s managerial revolution” and the best chance to reconnect GDP growth with wage growth after the 1971 break.
• It should underwrite the next 250 years of American greatness, not be rationed by a moral calculus that treats the living country as expendable.
Bottom line of the essay: EA turns uncertain, totalizing future harm into a license for present control. The democratic demand is that this faction argue in public like any other interest group, instead of governing through apocalypse.
This from Grok before getting the full article:
The Free Press piece by Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar is a polemic, not a neutral primer. The full text is paywalled after the opening, so this summary is based on the published excerpt plus contemporaneous reporting of the essay and Sankar’s own accompanying comments. thefp.com
What the article is arguing
Sankar’s claim is that the latest wave of “AI could kill us all” warnings should not be taken at face value. He treats them as the public face of effective altruism (EA) — a movement he says now dominates AI-safety talk and is trying to put a small circle of technocrats in charge of how fast the most important technology of the century can be built and used. freepressjournal.in
The immediate trigger is a burst of resignation-and-media-tour warnings from people inside frontier labs (he opens with Jacob Coxon leaving Anthropic and a colleague putting extinction odds above 10% this decade), followed by company leaders calling for safety regulation. Sankar’s reply: treat the apocalyptic tone as ideology plus institutional self-interest, not as a settled scientific forecast. thefp.com
He uses Sam Bankman-Fried as a cautionary emblem: SBF sold EA as “earn to give” against existential risk, then was convicted of massive fraud. Sankar’s implication is that high-minded EA language can conceal a bid for power. freepressjournal.in
The Free Press framed the essay as a counterweight to other recent pieces in the same outlet that take catastrophe risk more seriously (Niall Ferguson, Daniel Kokotajlo) or discuss slowdowns more narrowly (Tyler Cowen). thefp.com
What “effective altruism” is, in this framing
EA began as a utilitarian philanthropy project: use evidence and expected-value math to do “the most good.” Classic early causes were cheap global-health interventions. A later branch — longtermism — argued that the far future contains so many potential lives that preventing extinction (from AI, engineered pandemics, etc.) can swamp near-term charity. That branch is what Sankar is talking about. vox.com
In AI, that logic often becomes:
• Superintelligent AI is plausible soon.
• If it is misaligned, it could permanently disempower or kill humanity.
• Therefore “AI safety,” pauses, licensing, and governance should be top priorities — and the people who already think this way should staff labs, funders, and regulators.
Sankar’s paraphrase of that politics: a tiny elite should decide how much progress everyone else is allowed, and even how to weigh human lives against other moral units (his “how many shrimp your life is worth” line, aimed at EA animal-welfare quantification). He calls the current safety push an “attempted coup.” @ssankar
How EA becomes an “apocalyptic alarm crusade” in his telling
Sankar’s structure is familiar from other moral panics, even if the content is new:
1. A totalizing threat. Not “this product can be abused,” but “this technology may end the species.” That raises the stakes above ordinary tradeoffs (jobs, growth, military competition).
2. A priesthood of risk calculators. People who claim to reason in probabilities about unobservable future minds get moral authority to slow or license the field.
3. Control of the choke points. EA-adjacent networks have been unusually present in Anthropic, parts of OpenAI’s history, safety orgs, and philanthropy. Sankar reads regulation-from-the-labs as locking in that network’s preferences rather than as humble caution. vox.com
4. Moral cover for restriction. “Protect humanity” becomes the reason ordinary users and competing nations should not get unconstrained access to frontier models.
He also has a standing view, from earlier interviews, that Silicon Valley “doomerism” fills a secular “God-shaped hole” with AGI as both savior and apocalypse — and that catastrophe talk can double as fundraising hype (“our model is so powerful it might kill you”). businessinsider.com
What the article is not
It is not a technical rebuttal of alignment research. It does not prove extinction risk is zero. It does not reconstruct EA’s internal debates (many EAs disagree about pauses, timelines, and whether labs should even exist). It is a political diagnosis: treat AI-extinction messaging as a governing ideology competing for control of a strategic technology, especially vis-à-vis the American public and U.S. power.
That is the essay’s core move: recast “we are trying to save the future” as “a new elite is trying to ration the future.”
Countering the new apocalyptic crusade-
Here we go again, the most dangerous people in society- those who believe they know what is best for all others and will coerce, through state power, those unenlightened commoner others to submit to their salvation schemes, salvation through destruction of something they view as apocalyptic or existential threat.
Plato’s “Philosopher Kings” all over again sitting at the top of the power pyramid.
Here is a new strain of “ideology” in the endless eruptions of apocalyptic crusades… endless endeavors to creatively reframe the oldest, most violent and destructive of human myths- apocalyptic.
Heed H. L. Mencken’s warning and remember that News Media are obsessed with “Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis”. Hence, they favor apocalyptic narratives from whomever irresponsibly throws them into the public arena.
So here is the latest in the never-ending historical parade of “End of world” narratives, the latest apocalyptic crusade with the same old “salvation through destruction” framing.
Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
https://www.thefp.com/p/dangerous-ideology-effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence
“The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings: A philosophy called “effective altruism” has shaped today’s AI safety movement. Its proponents claim to be protecting humanity’s future.”
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says think twice before believing them.
“EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM IS THE UNSEEN FORCE DRIVING AI SAFETY DISCOURSE,” WRITES SHYAM SANKAR. “AND AMERICANS DESERVE TO KNOW ABOUT IT, BECAUSE THE EA CROWD IS TRYING TO RESTRICT YOUR ACCESS TO THE MOST IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY OF THE 21ST CENTURY.”
Quotes:
“In a world with little agreement, there is one thing that unites almost everyone: AI is the most transformative technology of our time.
“But there’s another view of this issue—and especially the developments of the past week—that argues that the warnings from AI researchers and leaders should not be taken at face value. Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Palantir, is an influential member of this camp. In today’s Big Read, he lays out what he sees as the destructive ideology that lies behind calls for safety regulation—and why he believes what looks like a responsible plea to slow progress is actually about taking control out of the hands of the American people.” —The Editors
Sankar quotes:
“If you turned on cable news last week, you might have seen Jacob Coxon, a software engineer who resigned from Anthropic and immediately embarked on a media tour. It all began on September 8, when Coxon warned on X that “[t]he people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”…
“These vague and apocalyptic warnings caused a firestorm online, including calls for AI safety regulations from the leaders of almost every major AI company. But there is reason for skepticism.
“The warnings from Coxon and others are infused with an ideology called effective altruism (EA).
“Today, EA is the unseen force driving AI safety discourse… Americans deserve to know about it, because the EA crowd is trying to restrict your access to the most important technology of the 21st century…
“Effective altruism is a utilitarian philosophy that claims to use evidence and reason to do good, ranking competing needs through a common calculus…
“The movement is obsessed with quantifying existential risk—a fact that explains why discourse around AI has taken an apocalyptic turn. If tortured thought experiments can show that AI is a risk to humanity for all time, then that risk must outweigh virtually any benefit it can provide to us in the present..
“The problem is, while EA philosophy claims rationality and precision, it delivers neither…
“The effective altruists are devoting vast sums to push their ideas in America’s institutions…
“These are overlapping institutions and fortunes, financing a struggle over who controls the future. The only thing they agree on about the future is that you should not be in control of it.
“This consolidation of power will have consequences. In the early 20th century, Vladimir Lenin invented the notion of the “vanguard,” a small cadre of revolutionaries with privileged insight into humanity’s future and a special right to force others into compliance. The EA doomsayers are the Leninist vanguard of the algorithmic age: It is for them, they say, to chart the future of this technology, and for us to comply. As in the 20th century, this is a recipe for despair and decline.
“There are, of course, real risks with AI, as there are with any new technology. But throughout our history, the American people have proven uniquely capable of embracing and mastering new technology. AI doesn’t have to belong to a few. It can belong, as it does now, to Americans who are already determining its most productive uses….
“AI is powerful. That is exactly why we can’t turn our backs on it. It is underwriting the next 250 years of American greatness. It is the antidote to the 20th century’s managerial revolution. It is the most viable path to reestablish the connection between GDP growth and wage growth that broke in 1971.
“The EA vanguard has operated without public scrutiny so far, but that must change. Our democratic system means they must persuade the rest of us that their policies are sound, instead of short-circuiting debate with fear tactics in a bid for control. Public officials should be careful not to align themselves with the hidden tech oligarchs: Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn, and the other billionaire effective altruists.
“There is a term, often attributed to Lenin, for those who fall into the vanguard’s trap: useful idiots. Americans owe future generations a flourishing, free country. We should insist on the freedom to build it ourselves.”
(End of EA Sankar article)
This pulled from Grok’s previous comments on “Just war”…
More on parsing between actual threats that require “just war” defense versus the perverse tendency to exaggerate/demonize opponents as dangerous threats.
Any threat to liberal democracy presents a credible reason for defensive action. Note at the bottom, Grok’s careful parsing of defensive interruption of assaults as not contrary to love of enemy- i.e. the personal impulse to vengeance versus necessary public defense.
See this section below on this site…
“Domination/totalitarianism in human societies, i.e. the elite/commoner divide- where it originated, how it continues”
Near the bottom of this link Grok explores the issues of pacifism, suicidal empathy, and just war
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=16674#more-16674
As Grok approaches his presentation of pacifism and restraint of violence, it offers these comments…
God’s character is nonviolent; therefore be nonviolent.
Borg and the earlier section keep restraint of violent offenders while refusing sacred hatred of a whole people. That is not a softening of Jesus.
Two different refusals of force
Personal pacifism says: I will not kill. Tolstoy made this total. Jesus’ enemy-love and “put up the sword” belong here as a way of being, not as a municipal code. A person can live that way. A parent hiding a child from a rapist cannot treat that ethic as the only rule in the room.
Political pacifism says: the state may not wage war, and sometimes that it may not use lethal force at all. Just-war and classical political thought answer with a different claim: the magistrate exists to protect the innocent from the predator.
The earlier distinction in this thread still holds. Hold the specific offender. Restrain the repeat violent person. Do not sacralize hatred of a whole people. Compassion for a prisoner and protection of a stranger on a train are not enemies— until the first is allowed to cancel the second.
A society can care about rehabilitation and still lock up the person who keeps attacking people. Those are not opposites. Treating them as opposites is the suicide in the phrase (“suicidal empathy”).
Where the well-intentioned spirit is real
The spirit behind prison reform, bail reform, and anti-war movements is not fake. Cash bail really did cage poor people who had not been convicted, while richer defendants walked. Prisons really do warehouse people who would do better with treatment. Police really do abuse power. Wars really do kill the wrong people. Jesus’ refusal of eye-for-eye still judges the appetite for payback that lives in every crowd.
The failure is not that people noticed those things. The failure is refusing to sort cases.
Government’s first job
A liberal state is not a church and not a therapy practice. Its primary duty to citizens is protection from assault, robbery, rape, and murder. That duty is why people surrender private vengeance. If the state will not restrain the repeat attacker, two things follow: more victims, and a return of private force— vigilantism, gangs, fortified neighborhoods. Both are worse than a prison.
Restraint is not hatred. Incarceration of a high-rate violent offender is not “eye for eye.” It is interruption. Restoration can still be the aim inside the interruption: treatment, work, restitution. What cannot be the aim is releasing a person whose record says he will attack again, in the name of a compassion that never sits with the next family.
The test
A policy is compassionate if the next innocent person is safer. A policy is performative if the official feels better and the victim is theoretical.
Just war theory
The tradition does not exist to bless war. It exists to make war rare, and when it happens, smaller. Augustine and Aquinas start from the same Christian problem this thread has been circling: Jesus forbids private vengeance; the magistrate still has to stop the man who will not stop.
Aquinas’s three conditions in the Summa (II-II, q. 40) are the spine:
1. Legitimate authority — only the sovereign charged with the common good may authorize war. Private war is feud.
2. Just cause — typically defense against aggression, recovery of what was wrongly taken, or punishment of a grave ongoing wrong. Glory, loot, and revenge are out.
3. Right intention — aim at peace, the tranquillitas ordinis, not at harm for its own sake. Augustine’s list of condemned motives still reads like a field manual of what goes wrong: “the passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the lust of power.” patheos.com
Later lists add the prudential tests that decide whether a just cause may actually be pursued:
• Last resort — force after serious alternatives have failed.
• Reasonable prospect of success — no futile bloodbaths.
• Proportionality — the good sought must outweigh the harm done.
• Aim of peace — the war must be ordered to a livable order after the shooting. archive.ph
That is jus ad bellum: whether to fight. Jus in bello governs how:
• Discrimination — do not make civilians the target.
• Proportionality in means — even unintended civilian harm must not be excessive relative to the military aim.
And a lot more in the section below…
This is another worthwhile newsletter to subscribe to. It presents regular updates on climate evidence that counter the ongoing crusade to push climate alarmism as modern-era apocalyptic myth.
The Week That Was: 2026-09-05 (Sep 5, 2026) The Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Ken Haapala newsletter:
Imaginary Control Knob: Canary In a Climate World contains a chapter by AMO physicist William Happer who discusses “The Climate Cult.” Readers of TWTW are familiar with Happer who with his colleague William van Wijngaarden have used physical evidence gathered in laboratory experiments and the HITRAN high resolution database which combines the laboratory evidence and observations of what is occurring in the atmosphere. Using this database, van Wijngaarden and Happer calculated the influence that adding a specific greenhouse gas to the atmosphere will have on temperatures.
The AMO scientists and others have shown that the influence of additional amounts of both the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor, and the secondary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has fallen dramatically. Both are heavily into diminishing returns. Owing to saturation, adding additional amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere does very little to increase Earth’s atmospheric temperatures. Adding water vapor to the atmosphere (greater humidity) does more, because it promotes cloud formation, which reflects away sunlight in the daytime, and acts as a blanket at night.
Global climate modelers have failed to produce the physical evidence needed to justify their assumption that a one degree C increase in atmospheric global temperatures (from whatever the cause) will be doubled due to an increase in water vapor. The physical evidence shows that, at most, a one degree C increase in global temperatures may be amplified by positive water-vapor feedback to an additional 0.16℃. No other positive feedbacks have been substantiated with physical evidence.
The AMO scientists and others have shown that the influence of additional amounts of both the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor, and the secondary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has fallen dramatically. Both are heavily into diminishing returns. Adding additional amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere does little to increase Earth’s atmospheric temperatures. Adding water vapor to the atmosphere can do more heating of less, depending upon how much H2O is added. Global climate modelers have failed to produce the physical evidence needed to justify their assumption that a one degree C increase in atmospheric global temperatures from whatever the cause will be doubled by an increase in water vapor. The physical evidence shows that, at most, that a one degree C increase in global temperatures may be amplified by a 0.16℃ increase from water vapor, the positive feedback. No other positive feedbacks have been substantiated with physical evidence.
There is no question that other physical events that result in ocean warming will cause an increase in atmospheric water vapor. Such events include the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which is beginning now and forecasted to be a strong one. Other ocean warming events that increase atmospheric water vapor content are underseas volcanoes.
As to “The Climate Cult”, John Robson of Climate Discussion Nexus has a good summary of Happer’s chapter. Robson writes:
“Will was for many years a professor of physics at Princeton who also served as Director of Research at the US Department of Energy and later as an advisor on science issues to the White House. Like Richard Lindzen he has earned the right to speak his mind, and he doesn’t hold back. ‘Climate science’ (which he puts in quotes), spread through universities in response to lavish spending by governments and foundations. ‘Traditional, rigorous disciplines like atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology or paleontology were quick to cash in by renaming themselves with some variant of ‘Center for Saving the Planet’’, he states. ‘They were generously rewarded with research grants, new laboratories, professorships, elections to learned societies, prizes and other tokens of gratitude.’ Many who saw through the dodge, a piece of short-run bureaucratic cleverness that turned into long-term sacrifice of integrity, kept their doubts to themselves, and the ones who spoke up paid a steep price. But Happer is convinced the truth will prevail eventually, and science will self-correct. We’d better hope.
Happer focuses on the notion that CO2 is a control knob for the Earth’s climate. It’s not a straw man argument: alarmists really do claim it and use models that embed the assumption. But it’s a testable theory and, when tested, it fails repeatedly.
Here Happer invokes Karl Popper’s vital criterion that the scientific status of a theory is determined less by its verifiability than its falsifiability. To be useful a theory must make predictions that are surprising and important and, critically, can be compared with data to see if they fail. Thus, a theory ceases to be scientific when its predictions cannot be put to the test. But of course it also ceases to be scientific if when put to the test those predictions keep turning out to be untrue, and on that basis Happer argues that climate alarmism is an unscientific failure.
He does not deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Indeed, in his chapter he explains how the process works which is more than many dogmatic alarmists can do, especially those who natter about a blanket wrapped around the atmosphere on the edge of space. But, as many others have noted, that fact only implies a slight bit of warming, especially at current temperatures (it matters a lot if the Earth is close to the deadly cold of space) whereas alarmism is based on the idea that CO2 emissions can cause a catastrophic heating of the atmosphere at any temperature and especially the current one, a claim with no basis in reality. On the contrary, far from being verifiable, it is demonstrably false.
Happer believes that ‘Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history, where it belongs.’ But in the meantime, he laments, it is doing a lot of damage, hence ‘We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.’ And though well past normal retirement age Happer, thankfully, continues to answer his own call to action.”
To this TWTW quotes a few paragraphs from the chapter. Happer writes:
“The dogma the CO2 is the control knob of Earth’s climate has a ring of plausibility. Similarly, an immobile Earth, with celestial spheres rotating around it seem obvious to Ptolemaic astronomers. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that is, a gas that is nearly transparent to short-wave, visible and near-visible sunlight, but partially opaque to the long wave infrared radiation that dumps excess heat from the Earth into the cold darkness of outer space. Greenhouse gases do little to hinder the heating of the Earth by sunlight, but they readily absorb and re-emit thermal infrared radiation, making it harder for Earth to release thermal radiation directly from its surface to space, and requiring higher temperatures to get rid of the heat than would otherwise be needed, if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
But the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, H2O, not CO2. When the effects of clouds are included, water in all of its phases, vapor, liquid, and solid, has a much bigger influence on radiative transfer of heat than CO2. And radiative transfer is only part of what controls Earth’s climate. Huge amounts of heat are transported by air and ocean currents from the tropics, where maximum sunlight is absorbed, to polar regions, where much more thermal radiation is released to space than is absorbed from the Sun.
In fact, the climate of the Earth has no single control knob, and all the theoretical and empirical evidence points to CO2 being a relatively unimportant factor. The most important influences on Earth’s climate are the Sun and cloud cover. Neither the Sun nor clouds are understood as well as they should be. What understanding we have has been set back at least 50 years by the manic [excessive] focus on greenhouse gases.
A particular irony of the demonization of CO2 is that increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are benefiting life on Earth. Satellite measurements show a clear greening of Earth, especially arid areas, due to the modest increases in CO2 that have already occurred.”
Happer continues to explain that CO2 is plant food, and the increasing concentration of CO2 is benefiting humanity by providing agricultural abundance. Happer concludes that the climate alarm establishment has evolved into being a protection racket.
End of Haapala newsletter on Happer