We Are Not Supermen

There is a popular Hebrew song, “לא תנצחו אותי” (“You Won’t Beat Me”), sung by Yoram Ga’on and written by Naomi Shemer, which gives me goosebumps whenever I hear it. It’s the last line of each stanza, “לא מנצחים אותי כל כך מהר” (“I can’t be beaten so quickly”). Most people in Israel take it to mean, “We can’t be beaten” but I have always taken it to mean that we can be beaten but we won’t make it easy on our enemies and we’ll fight to the last man, woman, and child.

We have our own country, finally, since 1948. It’s a little sliver of a country that you could cover with your thumb on a map of the Middle East, surrounded by 21 very big countries that would like nothing more than to erase our country from their maps. Our army is small but our weaponry is pretty good, thanks to America, a few other allies, and our own ingenuity, but we don’t have enough manpower and firepower to cover all our enemy fronts all the time. We have to constantly move our army assets around according to where the threats are most urgent. We are not supermen. We are not all off-the-chart geniuses. We are pretty much like everyone else in the world: the same percentage of smart people and not-so-smart people, good people and bad people, believers and non-believers.

In short, we are vulnerable. There are a lot of reasons why we are vulnerable:

• We are dependent on the support and assistance of other countries.
• We are surrounded by hostile countries and weak countries hosting terrorists.
• We are smaller than any other country in our region.
• Our country has no strategic depth. We have populous towns and communities on our northern and southwestern borders, and at our narrowest point, enemy tanks could cross our eastern borders to our western border (the Mediterranean Sea) in under an hour.
• Our population is smaller than the population of any other country in our region.
• We are a democracy. All democracies are vulnerable to a certain extent because they depend on all their citizens to be motivated by the common good and to vote responsibly; unfortunately, that doesn’t always hold true.
• There are probably other reasons too, but these are all that come to mind.

Anyone who says or thinks we are invulnerable or invincible is either selling snake oil to the crowd or drinking it himself. The danger of thinking we are invulnerable is that we think everything, including our enemies, is under control and we don’t have to change the way we do things because we’re doing the right things. Of course, I’m talking about Israel, but the same goes for all other countries including the US. Thinking we were invulnerable opened us up to a monstrous surprise attack on our southwest flank by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and a large mob of Gazans.

People who think we want to take over the Middle East are either crazy or selling Hamas and company snake oil.

The Two-State Solution

I asked Google, “Who has the most Canaanite DNA?” and received the following response: “Saudi Arabians, Bedouins, and Iranian Jews had the highest ratio, hovering around 90 percent. These were followed by Palestinians, Jordanians, and Syrians, with 80 percent of ancestry shared with the ancient Levantines. Moroccan and Ashkenazi Jews had a roughly 70 and 60 percent contribution.”

While the Bible tells us that Abraham, the first Hebrew or Jew, was supposed to come to Canaan from Ur in what is now Iraq, it’s clear that Abraham’s progeny (us) intermingled with the Canaanites and probably did not kill them all.

Non-Jewish Canaanites continued to exist in Israel since before Abraham. During the time of Jesus and thereafter, many Canaanites converted to Christianity and maintained a presence until today. Saudi Canaanites, such as Muhamed and others, including Palestinian Canaanites, converted to Islam after the rise of Christianity.

Given that Ashkenazi Jews carry roughly 60-70% of Canaanite DNA, I would conclude that Jews and Palestinians have equal rights to have their own country, but should they have their own country within Israel’s current borders? If you say “yes”, then there are at least two problems that should be first addressed:

1. Whether one calls it Israel or Palestine, the country is hardly big enough for one nation, let alone two. After World War II, before the states of Israel and Jordan were established by a United Nations declaration, the proposed solution to the Jewish-Palestinian problem was to divide the land under the British Mandate between Israel and Jordan equally. The Arabs adamantly refused, arguing that they had occupied these lands since the 7^th century, and their opposition was strong. The Jews had maintained a small presence in the land since their exile by the Romans in the 1^st century, had begun to return from Europe in growing numbers with the advent of Zionism, and in larger numbers at the end of World War II, under the British radar, as death camp survivors were liberated by the Allies and the Soviet forces, but they were much weaker and could barely defend themselves against the Arab wrath. In the end, the UN followed the expedient path and partitioned Israel-Jordan into a small sliver for Israel and a vast and mostly unoccupied country for Jordan, in which roughly half the population was Bedouin, ruled by a monarchy, and half was Palestinian. In 1970, the Palestinians attempted to overthrow the Bedouin monarchy and there was a disastrous civil war. They would have succeeded if the US Army hadn’t intervened to save the monarchy and put down the revolt. The defeated Palestinians were expelled from Jordan. To this day, the Jordanian Bedouins look with disdain on Palestinians, although they lip-support the Palestinian cause in Israel. That’s also the case in many other Arab countries in the Middle East and Africa. The people of those countries don’t particularly like the Jews, although some of their government leaders are willing to make peace with Israel (the Abrahamic Accords). All this aside, I’d say there could be a Palestinian state within the current borders of Israel, but it’s not likely to be as big as the Palestinians would like, due to the current spread of the Jewish population.
2. Support for a two-state solution (one for Israel and one for ‘Palestine’) varies depending on how the question is phrased, and the current balance of terror and governmental fairness at the time of asking. “In December 2022, support for a two-state solution was 33% among Palestinians, 34% among Israeli Jews, and 60% among Israeli Arabs. 82% of Israeli Jews and 75% of Palestinians believed that the other side would never accept the existence of their independent state. At the end of October 2023, the two-state solution had the support of 71.9% of Israeli Arabs and 28.6% of Israeli Jews” (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_solution). Just a reminder, 6:30am on a Sabbath morning, October 7th, 2023, was when the Gazan Hamas and Islamic Jihad executed an unprovoked surprise attack on Israel, killing, kidnapping, raping, and torturing 1400 civilians. Israel was in shock, and it took several days to organize its armed forces to respond to the attack while searching for Gazan terrorists who had infiltrated during the attack and threatening to carry out further attacks deeper inside Israel. Jews had not experienced such extreme cruelty since the Holocaust. Israelis were used to being wounded or killed by terrorists by knives, guns, and bombs, but nothing like what happened that day. Whatever the local polls state, when you see or hear about the pro-Hamas or pro-Gaza demonstrations around the world, when they chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free”, they don’t mean a two-state solution; they mean a one-state solution (for Palestine only). Since last October, more than a hundred civilian and military hostages are being held under subhuman conditions by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and by Gazan citizens at gunpoint! Most Israelis don’t trust a Palestinian peace deal. Although a cold peace between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan has held since 1973, the Palestinian Authority, under Abu Mazen, in the West Bank and Gaza under Hamas both educate their people, from childhood onward, in mosques and schools to hate Israelis and die as martyrs killing as many Israelis as they can. Their school and children’s books. Please note, that I’m not talking about Israeli Arabs, Druze, Bedouin, Palestinians, Circassians, and all other Muslims and Christian Arabs. Druze and Bedouin are integral parts of the IDF (army) and rise to the highest levels of command. I believe that Israel Arabs have the greatest freedom and the highest living standards among Arabs in the Middle East and Africa. 40% of our nurses and 20% of our doctors are Israeli Arabs. It may very well take a new generation of West Bank and Gazan Palestinians, educated by more enlightened standards, to overcome the current brainwashing of their populace. It will certainly take a long time for Israelis to trust the West Bank and Gazan Palestinians to make and keep a peace deal, and to normalize relations.

Source:

“Jews and Arabs Share Genetic Link to Ancient Canaanites, Study Finds”

(https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-05-31/ty-article/.premium/jews-and-arabs-share-genetic-link-to-ancient-canaanites/0000017f-eb8f-d4a6-af7f-ffcf4f190000#:~:text=Saudi%20Arabians%2C%20Bedouins%20and%20Iranian,70%20and%2060%20percent%20contribution.) 31 May 2020

We Are the Yinyang … Resistance Can Be Enjoyable

We are the yinyang. For the few people who don’t know, the yinyang is a very old Chinese philosophical symbol that represents, among other concepts, the male and female principles (or if you will, the female and male principles). The yinyang symbol is a circle inscribing two spaces, one positive and the other negative. Some people see the top space as a backward nine and the bottom space as a six. Some see the two spaces as constantly whirling around so that what appears on top now will be on the bottom a moment later, and vice-versa.

              Most people would probably view the yinyang as representing male biological entities and female biological entities, ignoring the fact that there are androgynous biological entities and asexual biological entities. Approximately 50% of any population is male and 50% female, though sometimes it’s 51% or more for one and 49% or less for the other. At any rate, those views probably assume physically isolated individuals. But I would like to suggest another view of the yinyang.

              To me, the yinyang symbol represents a self-sufficient entity containing both principles, male and female (or female and male). A self-sufficient “we” represents an entity possessing female and male principles; e.g., a family. An “I” is, by definition, an insufficient entity; he or she cannot biologically propagate the species. A “we” of only males or only females is also insufficient, from the perspective of biologically propagating the species.

              I don’t know whether females really think and/or act fundamentally differently than males. Of course, I am aware of the social and cultural differences between males and females, but I suspect those differences are emergent rather than fundamental. Social and cultural differences vary from society to society and from culture to culture, and they seem to be learned in childhood. It’s a shame that nobody ever did a rigorous study of the Amazon society on the island of Lesbos. You can’t really trust mythology if you want facts.

              I know there are parts of the brain that are different in males and females, mostly dealing with the different sexual organs and their related activities, but male and female brains are pretty much wired the same. That means to me that females and males would probably think, feel, and act the same most of the time, if society and culture played no role.

              So, my interpretation of the yinyang is that we all, each one of us, individually and together, actualize both the male and female principles, and if we don’t, then that’s an anomaly. That means “it ain’t normal”.

Philosophers and Kings

In modern times, philosophy is only useful to two kinds of people: you and kings.

I just said “kings” because of Plato who once said, “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils.”

I think Plato would have widened the scope of his statement to all countries and all styles of government leadership, if he had guessed how screwed up our future would be.

Why do you need philosophy? Because there comes a time, for instance, times of uncertainty (which seems to be most of the time, these days) when it might behoove you to think for yourself, without asking for someone else’s opinion, be he or she your religious or political leader, or drinking buddies, and you don’t know enough about the relevant subject (or nobody else does either), and your life or that of your loved ones might depend on your action.

There’s a lot of overlap between philosophy and religion, but religions generally contain a single source and a single narrative, whereas philosophy usually contains many sources and narratives, allowing you to select the one (or ones) that makes the most sense to you. Both philosophy and religions deal with what is true and what one should do or say. Most people are born into a religion; that is, they adopt the religion of their parents, though some convert to a different religion for one reason or another. Nobody I know is born into a philosophy. You study several, decide which one feels worthy, and then you deepen your knowledge of it, “testing” it against the realities you face. I put “testing” in quotes because you don’t apply the scientific method to philosophical questions, just your best intuitions.

Of course, some people have totally off-the-wall intuitions, believing what they want to be true, rather than what they really think is true, and they can be pretty persuasive to themselves.

War and Games

Wars are not games (although war games are). Wars are not anything like cricket, tennis, golf, or football. They’re not even like rugby, although rugby is pretty violent.

Games have rules and judges to make sure players abide by the rules.

I know, wars have rules and laws, and international courts. But nobody pays attention to them, except the losers and some smaller countries that are fighting for their lives.

Oh, I forgot to mention that guerillas and terrorists are allowed to ignore the rules and laws of war because they aren’t countries. That’s why these groups are so popular as proxies for some countries. But some of these groups are so big and powerful that they can rule all the people in a country, like Hezbollah in Lebanon (or a large group of people that want to be a country, like Hamas in Gaza).

Wars, these days, are fights to the death. If you want to start a war, like Russia against the Ukraine, or Hamas against Israel, you’ll probably ignore the international rules and laws, but you can’t ignore the consequences. The country or people you are attacking should be expected to do everything and anything in order to survive. If you live in an attacked country, that’s what you’d expect your country to do for you.

The international courts would like the two sides of a conflict to respond to each other’s actions and responses proportionately. The only problem is that if the attacker can expect a proportional response to everything he does, he could go on like that forever. The only thing that can stop a war cold in its tracks is a disproportionate response. If you can’t handle a disproportionate response from the other side, then you’d best not attack them.

Look throughout history and see what attacked countries had to do to stop the war.

Wars are unpredictable and incalculable.

Unfortunately, diplomacy doesn’t really work either, at least the kind our idiot politicians like to engage in.

We might try logic and empathy for a change. Maybe the next species, after us, will get it right.

The Problem with Ethical Relativity

I remember taking a Philosophy 401 course during my first year at Ohio State University back in 1965. One of the subjects taught was Ethical Relativity, the idea that Good and Evil were relative, that one man’s Good was another man’s Evil, and that there were no moral or ethical absolutes. Of course, most if not all religions would assert that morality and ethics derived from God (or gods) are absolute. Much of philosophy had been based on moral or ethical absolutes, but modern philosophy appeared to favor relativity. Maybe Einstein had something to do with that.

Anyway, I remember rebelling against the ideas of ethical relativity. I believed that if morals and ethics are relative, then there are no morals or ethics, only meaningless sophistry, but I couldn’t come up with a compelling argument why that was so

Until now.

There is an aspect of pure evil that differentiates it from lesser evils and all manner of goods; that is, it is totally unnecessary. It has absolutely no utilitarian value. It is unnecessary to win a battle or a war, it has no military objective or goal, it does not nourish, create, or discover anything. Nothing is gained by it. Not only is it bad for the victim, it’s also bad for the perpetrator because it diverts his/her efforts toward a necessary objective or goal.

What we see in the videos filmed by our enemies in their bloodthirsty depravity during their attack on the border villages of Israel, videos of infants, children, and elderly people, tortured, decapitated, dragged through the streets of Gaza, young girls and women, raped, tortured, and killed. The videos were enthusiastically shared on the Internet.

The world instantly split into two: those who were disgusted, couldn’t watch the videos, turned away feeling the vomit rise from their stomachs, and those who watched the pornography of evil and justified and supported the behavior of the attackers.

What I see when I look at those videos is pure, unadulterated, absolute evil.

What do you see?

Quarks, Leptons, and Free Will

Perhaps particles, like quarks and leptons, can be decomposed ad infinitum, or perhaps not. But one thing is certain (at least to me): the more you break down things into component parts, the simpler their causes and effects become, but also the less they explain the reality that we observe.

All people, each of us, are relatively large conglomerations of those fundamental particles and we are as complex as any stock market, perhaps even more complex. The only way that we can understand our meaning, purpose, or free will is statistically, not at the level of particle physicists, but at the level of financial market analysts. I am not saying that only financial analysts can understand human behavior; I’m not saying that human behavior is the only subject we should study; I’m saying that understanding our behavior can only be approached at that level or above.

Particle physicists do not threaten the philosophy of free will.

Abiogenesis

How Can Life Arise from Non-living Things?

Life comes from and depends on non-living things. We should understand this even without some scientist creating a living cell in a petri dish. Some of those non-living things are passive, like the lipids (fatty proteins) in our cell membranes. And some of them interact chemically and create or utilize energy and matter from external sources (sunlight, oxygen, CO2, water, etc). Living cells merely organize and utilize these non-living things (organic and inorganic molecules) in order to eat, excrete waste products, convert chemicals into different forms or functions, grow, reproduce, maintain internal homeostasis, and sense and respond to their external environment.

Viruses share many things in common with cells but there are several important differences: they are not living, they don’t eat or excrete, reproduce on their own, maintain homeostasis, or respond to their environment. They do contain their own specialized DNA or RNA which they inject into a cell by passively binding to one or more of the cells receptors, thereby infecting the cell. The viral RNA is taken up by the cell’s protein production machinery and reproduced instead of the cell’s own RNA, thereby recreating new viruses which escape the cell to infect other cells.

Could We Create a Living Thing?

It should be relatively simple to create a virus in a petri dish.

It should not be too much more difficult to create a “living cell” that does almost everything a “natural cell” does. The only issue is that living cells have been evolving for the last 2 billion years. It might take scientists a long time to recreate the functions and products that have evolved through minute random mutations over the course of such a long time.

Earth’s Life Timeline:

Our solar system, the sun and all our planets including Earth, coalesced into their current configuration about 4.5 billion years ago (BYA).

From the swirling gas and dust, Earth had a central core of iron providing it a protective magnetic field, a rocky mantle, and a solid crust. It was a hellish planet under constant bombardment from comets, meteors, and huge speeding rocks and random debris and flooded with molten lava from volcanoes and fissures in the crust.

The early atmosphere contained methane, ammonia, water vapor, and neon gas, but no free oxygen molecules. Free oxygen can only be produced by photosynthesis.

Life began as soon as the physical conditions on Earth became a bit more hospitable. Comet ice melted into water and filled the lower areas with oceans and lakes. From scant fossil evidence from about 3.8 BYA, anaerobic life appeared in oceans, probably around heat vents from the molten core.  Anaerobic organisms probably would have had to use minerals present in the ocean to generate energy.

Around 2.7 BYA, Cyanobacteria evolved the ability to perform photosynthesis, generating energy from sunlight and water, and producing free oxygen as a by-product. Over a period of 200-300 million years, cyanobacteria oxygenated the oceans and the atmosphere. Atmospheric methane was mostly replaced by oxygen between 2.4 and 2.1 BYA. This is known as the Great Oxidation Event, which caused the extinction of all the anaerobic organisms that could not metabolize oxygen.

The depletion of much of the methane from the atmosphere caused the Earth to cool down significantly, causing one of the first ice ages.

The sun’s UV radiation split atmospheric O2 into two atoms, which recombined to generate ozone (O3). Atmospheric ozone blocks UV radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface.

Evolution following the cyanobacteria adapted to aerobic metabolism or remained anaerobic and probably died from oxygen toxicity.

Around 600 million years ago, between 1.5 and 1.8 billion years after the cyanobacteria had filled the oceans and the air with breathable oxygen, the first multicellular organisms appeared on Earth, allowing for far more complex organisms (including us).

Some Predictions and Potential Risks

1. A living cell will probably be created in the not-too-distant future.

Risk: We might create something that would destroy or endanger humanity.

• The conditions under which life occurred on Earth are probably fairly common throughout our galaxy and possibly our universe: orbiting a star in the Goldilocks zone, an iron core, a rocky mantle, a solid crust, and bombardment from outer space. Oxygen seems less of a requirement for life than water. Visits to or from aliens (other than robots) from other exoplanets will remain unlikely until we figure out how to travel faster than light.

Risk: Aliens might destroy or endanger humanity.

• If we don’t change our ways, we will cause the depletion of plant life, which will initiate a chain of events that may cause the extinction of the animals in our food chain, and possibly breathable oxygen in our atmosphere.
• We will begin sending out space probes to look for planets that could be terraformed and made suitable for our life.

Risk: We might not find or be able to terraform another such planet before a human extinction event on our planet.

References:

Formation of Earth

Onset of Life on Earth.

Onset of Multicellular Life.

The Problem of Other Minds, the Turing Test, and Consciousness

The problem of other minds usually refers to the ideas of the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, regarding the conundrum of how we can know for sure that other people besides ourselves have minds at all. I know that I have a mind because I have access to it (at least to some of it). I think, I have doubts, and all that (but that’s Descartes). I don’t have access to any other minds besides my own; not even my wife’s. I can assume it or believe it, but I can’t prove it or test it, logically or scientifically. We can’t even tell whether a person who is on life-support and incapable of communicating or moving a muscle is conscious or not.

The Turing Test usually refers to a test proposed by the English mathematician, computer scientist, cryptanalyst, and philosopher, Alan Turing, involving three “players” in three separate rooms. “Player” #1 is a theoretical machine, computer, or whatever, containing hardware and/or software. Player #2 is a human being. Player #3 is another human being who has to determine which of the other two players is human only by asking them questions: any questions that he thinks will zero in on the genuine human. Player #3 would be aware that one of the other players was human and one was a computer, and his questions could only be relayed to the other players as text messages.

The Turing Contest, based on a variant of the Turing Test and called “The Loebner Prize”, has been running annually since 1991. Apparently, over the years, it has taken increasingly longer for Player #3 to be able to differentiate Players #1 (the computer) and #2 (the human). Computers have been getting faster and adding more functionality per buck, watt, and cubic meter as time goes on. Although it is possible that we’ll never be able to create a machine that cannot be differentiated by a human being from a genuine biological human being, I believe the opposite assertion will be true one day.

I’ll even climb out on a limb and make the following prediction: we will succeed in creating a non-biological machine that can behave as though it has a mind like any human being long before we understand and agree upon the nature and composition of consciousness. The reason is as follows.

Our population will decline because of global warming. Food and freshwater resources will decline. Fewer children will be born. The percentage of people too old or infirm to work will increase. Japan and China are already dealing with this problem today. We will need to fill the gaps among workers and caretakers with AI-capable robots to survive as a human society. People will learn to live with robots of any shape or form and even form an emotional attachment to them (it’s our nature to do that), as long as they help us to survive.

It’s not a perfect solution but it might be good enough.

References:

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/

2. Turing, A., 1950, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 59 (236): 433–60.
3. Turing, A. 1992, The Collected Works of A. M. Turing, edited by P. Furbank, London: North-Holland.
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/

5. Wittgenstein, Ludwig [d. 1951], 1953, Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen), G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.), New York: The Macmillan Company.
6. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1958, Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations” Generally Know as The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell.
7. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1992, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume two: The Inner and The Outer, 1949–1951, G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (eds.) and C.G. Luckhardt & Maximillian A.E. Aue (trans.), Oxford: Blackwells.

Two Israeli Allegories

First: The night Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated (November 4, 1995) by Yigal Amir, a right-wing extremist, ultra-Orthodox Jew, and law student at Bar Ilan University in Israel, Amir fired three shots into Rabin at close range, shouting “Blanks! Blanks! Blanks!”, hoping to persuade the police and Rabin’s protection detail that he was only firing blanks, in order to persuade them that this was part of an exercise to test their alertness and readiness and, perhaps, to escape capture. It didn’t work because Rabin fell to the ground in a pool of blood. Amir was captured around ten meters from where he shot our prime minister. Rabin died on the operating table later that night. Amir is still serving a life sentence although there are some right-wing extremists who think Amir should be released from prison.

The moral: just because someone shouts “Blanks! Blanks! Blanks!” doesn’t make it true. The current right-wing extremist, ultra-Orthodox Israeli government coalition is rushing through a set of new laws which will effectively prevent the Israeli courts from protecting minority rights, guaranteeing fairness and transparency under the law, and protecting our unwritten constitution as it was declared when the State of Israel was officially recognized by the United Nations in 1948. The coalition government claims that it will protect the citizens of Israel, without checks and balances, or transparency. They call these new laws “judicial reforms”. Reforms are good, right? Just because someone says “Reforms! ReformsReforms!” doesn’t mean they’re not attempting to replace our democracy with a dictatorship.

Second: There is a well-known parable about a frog in a pot on the stove (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog). It goes something like this: if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to jump out of the pot; but if you put the frog in a pot of tepid water and then slowly turn up the fire under the pot, the frog will remain in the pot until the water boils and it is cooked to death.

The moral: The Authoritarian’s Playbook (see https://thegroundtruthproject.org/the-authoritarians-playbook-seven-steps-populists-worldwide-are-taking-to-undermine-the-democracies-that-elected-them/) describes seven steps for dismantling a democracy that appear to be followed by successful and would-be authoritarians around the world.

• Embrace a language of violence, promote a more punitive culture, and leverage military might at home. Give critics reason to believe they’ll be harmed if they oppose.
• Stoke the fires of xenophobia by demonizing immigrants and foreigners. Blame domestic problems including economic woes on these scapegoats, and depict political opponents as sympathetic to these imagined enemies.
• Take over the courts, eliminate checks and balances, undo established treaties and legislation that limits executive power, and weaken protections for free and fair elections.
• Exert control over schools and the media to indoctrinate the public with beliefs that reinforce autocratic power.
• Appeal to the religious majority while targeting minorities. Conflate national identity with religious identity.
• Use hate speech and encourage violent actors to widen social rifts and use manufactured crises to seize more power.
• Attack the press as an “enemy of the people”; dismiss negative reports as “fake news,” counter legitimate information with disinformation, or “alternative facts.” Blast the media landscape with endless scandals and contradictions to overwhelm the traditional fail-safes.

The time for us to upset the pot or jump out of it is as soon as the cook starts to turn up the fire if we want to protect our democracy from those who would dismantle it. Let’s through the cooks in the pot and turn up the fire until they jump out and desist. Then we should chisel our constitution in stone tablets that won’t change with a simple majority.