Louisiana v. Calais

In its decision in Louisiana v. Calais, just released today, the US Supreme Court struck down, as an illegal racial gerrymander, Louisiana’s SB8 voter-redistricting plan, which tried to establish two majority-Black districts out of five total, for the roughly one-third of Louisiana’s population that is Black.

In its decision, the Court’s majority (of six) relied on two key rulings from prior decisions. First, partisan gerrymandering is legal; at least the courts can’t (or won’t) do anything about it. Second, apparently racial gerrymandering is illegal unless challengers can demonstrate that it had a partisan purpose, i.e., unless it can be explained as an attempt to provide partisan, rather than solely racial, advantage.

In other words, unless all other ways of redistricting for partisan advantage provide less racial advantage, the plan cannot survive legal scrutiny.

Think about that logic. If all are roughly equal in population, two out of five districts include 40% of the state’s population. Putting the 33% (one-third) of all voters that are Black in a position to control those districts boosts their political power from 33% to 40%, or about 21%.

But in order to do that legally, you would have to show that every other way of drawing districts for partisan advantage has less impact on race. In order to do that you would have to know, in detail, not only the general correlation between race and party, but the details down to where each registered voter lives and his or her race and party affiliation. Then you would have to use those data to find the gerrymander map that produces the absolute most partisan advantage and select it.

But if you could do all that, wouldn’t the easiest approach be simply to redistrict straightaway for the absolute most partisan advantage possible and avoid the “middleman” of race? Isn’t the whole import of Louisiana v. Calais to put partisan gerrymandering into hyperdrive, with the aid of modern computer data and AI?

Don’t you wish the Supremes—especially the current so-called “conservative” majority—had a little more training in math and mathematical logic and a little more common sense? I sure do.

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A Way Forward with Iran

Seldom, if ever, does a mere newspaper reporter combine a superb piece of journalism with a pathbreaking coup in international intelligence. But that’s what NYT reporter and UN Bureau Chief Farhad Fassihi did with a piece published today.

She discovered and published something at which reporters and spooks have been guessing ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She mostly figured out how Iran works.

And she figured that out for today, after the most cataclysmic event in the Islamic Republic’s history. In the opening days of our War on Iran, we killed its second and (by far) longest-ruling Supreme Leader and gravely wounded and hence marginalized his son and anointed successor Mojtaba. So it’s unlikely that, any time in the near future, Iran will be ruled absolutely by such an old man, or by a younger cleric with no worldly experience.

I won’t insult Fassihi’s superb analysis by attempting to summarize it, except to make three points. First, the Ayatollah Khamenei was eighty-six years old when assassinated. In comparison, Joe Biden was 82 when he stepped down, and Trump today is 79. If you think either was or is senile, imagine how the Ayatollah was when about half a decade older. I’m not aware of any worse gerontocracy in human history except perhaps among the ancient Pharaohs, whose rudimentary medical knowledge made the seventies more than equivalent to the eighties today.

Second, as Fassihi analyzes in some detail, political and military power and decisionmaking in today’s Iran are widely dispersed among dozens of people (a “deep bench”), most of whom have known and worked with each other for decades. That means decision-making will be slow, ponderous and contingent. But it also means that it will be based on realism and practical strategy, not vague abstractions derived from the words of Islamic Prophets in the Middle Ages.

Third, although there are many so-called “hard liners” among surviving Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) active leaders, there are also some moderates. They include the duly elected Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. It is reasonable to conclude that leaders like him have significant influence, at least in domestic affairs, if not foreign military adventures. It’s also not unreasonable to conclude that Iran is in the formative stages of democracy, as was England in 1215, when the Barons met King John on the Fields of Runnymede and, instead of fighting, he signed Magna Carta. (All the IRGC leaders, plus the remaining Ayatollahs and elected civilian officials, would be analogous to the Barons.)

One other point is my own. I have never believed that Iranians are hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. Why? I think that nukes are literally against their religion, Islam. It’s one thing to contemplate individual “martyrdom” and sacrifice yourself for a communal and “holy” cause. It’s quite another to vaporize millions of people, good and bad, willing and not, in a single explosion. That’s not heroic martyrdom; it’s senseless slaughter, an appalling atrocity, and, I suspect, entirely un-Islamic.

Anyway, I went to UC Berkeley with an Iranian physics student in 1962 (when the Shah was in power). Iran surely had sufficient expertise in physics to build a nuke even then. If it had desperately wanted one, it could surely have had several by now, if only by borrowing technology and fissionable material from North Korea or Pakistan. Accordingly, my view has always been that Iranian leaders have kept a skeleton nuclear program going as a feint and something to bargain away. (And the knowledge that we have enough big nukes and stealthy delivery means, like submarines, makes intelligent Iranians aware that a nuclear war with us would be national suicide.)

One other thing is worth mentioning. I once called Russia modern history’s most battered nation. That’s probably been true for the last two centuries. But in the grand scheme of all of human history, the world’s most battered nation may be Iran. It’s one of the most unfortunate nations in the middle of the vast Eurasian land mass that has had armies marching over and through it since the dawn of time. (There’s an interesting twenty-minute clip circulating on YouTube streaming these days, recounting some five thousand years of Iran’s battering and survival.) With all our plaintive angst about “ungrateful” Canadians and our relatively paltry (but real) problems with Mexican drug cartels, we might try applying a little empathy to what may have been human history’s biggest punching bag.

So what does this all mean for the immediate future? First and foremost, Fassihi’s superb reporting suggests that Iran may be more likely to do something sane and practical now than at any time since 1979. But second, it means that progress will be slow and halting. It will require patience, restraint, forbearance and perseverance, all qualities that our own Supreme Leader, with his eye ever on our fickle stock markets, self-evidently lacks.

So what should we Yanks do? We should do precisely what Iranians have been doing for the past several years, if not a decade. We should marginalize our own Supreme Leader by putting deal-making with Iran in independent hands, perhaps under an independent body of our own Executive or, even better, the UN. We should work to make a deal and, at the same time, strive hard to bring Iran and its 93 million people into the circle of modern nations that benefit from, and contribute to, a global economy with global technology.

Protected by vast oceans and historically weak neighbors, it’s easy to get lost in hate, or just distaste, for a nation that’s spent five thousand years learning every form of deception and treachery to resist battering from every direction. But as our British “betters” and our own Founders might have said, “noblesse oblige”. We can find a way out of this if we are patient and harbor a modicum of sympathy. But it’s going to take time and leaders a lot smarter, more thoughtful, more skilled, and more experienced than those we’ve put to the task up to now. Maybe Ms. Fassihi should be one of them.

Shame and Other Civilizing Emotions

I had an epiphany recently. I was reading an article in The Atlantic about Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It recounted how he’s strengthening his nation and making progress in repelling Russia’s atrocious, unprovoked invasion. Apparently he’s pivoting away from the US and toward more reliable partners in Europe and among the Gulf Arab States.

But my epiphany wasn’t about Zelenskyy’s and his people’s heroic defense. His pivot was natural, a matter of both desperation and reason. Instead, my epiphany was about my own emotions.

Like everyone else, I had looked on, through the “miracle” of TV, as our president had publicly rebuked and humiliated Zelenskyy during a 2025 press conference in the Oval Office. He had shouted at Zelenskyy, “Without us, you don't have any cards!” in defending against Russia’s unprovoked invasion. And then he had rejected Zelenskyy’s most important pleas for help.

Like many other viewers, I immediately went into rational mode. I began calculating Zelenskyy’s chances for getting help elsewhere and his likelihood of doing so before Russia closed in.

It was over a year later when I read again of that outburst in The Atlantic—and in particular a reader’s comment about emotional responses—that I even thought about how I had felt. In retrospect, my strong feeling was crystal clear. It had been shame.

Did I hold myself personally responsible for Trump’s Oval Office atrocity? Not really. I had voted against him every chance I got. I had even spent enough to buy a small car, donating to Democratic-leaning GOTV organizations working against him the second and third times he ran for office.

So my emotion wasn’t guilt. It was shame. Shame that our own national leader had treated perhaps our species’ single greatest living national leader—an international hero, really—as shabbily as an unwanted itinerant peddler. Shame that our own idiot “leader” could have been so catastrophically and abjectly wrong. As it turned out, Zelensky did have “cards:” an estimated 7 million of them in this new year. They’re called “drones,” the world’s smallest, most agile, most adept and most autonomous, and therefore the most effective and deadly. Our own nation is now copying them and hoping to improve them in the course of updating its woefully outdated arsenal.

I was and am ashamed, deeply ashamed, to be part of a nation whose top leader could so brusquely, rudely and illogically dismiss and humiliate a foreign leader who, in my judgment, was and is a wiser and better man and a more effective leader in every way. As I later recalled it, my shame was a hot burning ember in my psyche. I was and am ashamed merely because I am an American and I had been taught to, and mostly do, love my country despite its flaws.

In our modern, commerce-obsessed, supposedly “rational” capitalist society, we don’t think much about the “civilizing” emotions any more. We think much more about science, engineering, commerce, politics, money, and profit and loss. And, of course, we think about simplistic, “them or us” ideology. The epitaph of our society, graven on our collective gravestone, will likely read “Here Lies Shareholder Value.”

But when we think that way, we neglect a large part of what makes us human. We ignore what has made us humans the dominant species on our small planet.

Individually and unarmed, we are no match for a lion, tiger, leopard, mountain lion or even a bobcat, let alone an elephant, gorilla or humpback whale. Yet collectively, and with the arms and armor we have built for ourselves and each other, we have dominated our planet to the point of driving many other species close to to extinction.

What gives us this power? It’s not just our not-so-big brains. Elephants’ and whales’ brains are much bigger. Many other species’ brains are not only comparable in size, but also coupled with much more acute senses of smell, sight and/or hearing.

Our much-vaunted opposable thumbs are useful, but much more useful are our language skills and ability to cooperate in making things (and in fighting). We are the only species on our planet that can even imagine making an airplane, an MRI machine, an automatic weapon, a drone, or a nuclear device. And we can do these things only because our abilities to communicate through language, and to control our baser instincts, let us cooperate in detail, en masse, in depth and for an endless series of entire workdays.

So what keeps us working together, in large groups like armies and corporations, and in nations, despite centrifugal emotions like resentment, hate, rivalry, envy, jealousy and lust? The best antidotes I know are countervailing emotions like shame, embarrassment, guilt, regret and remorse.

I call these, among others, the “civilizing” emotions. They can be as strong, or nearly as strong, as our survival emotions—fear and love—which promote our survival, respectively, as individuals and as families, groups, and (eventually, one hopes) our whole species.

When they work properly, these civilizing emotions can internalize and promote our norms of civilization as much as our survival emotions assist our individual survival. In that way, our civilizing emotions are as much a part of our social evolution as our survival emotions are part of our individual, biological evolution.

Are our civilizing emotions innate, like fear and love? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it. I think they are mostly cultural artifacts, which have to be taught.

What I’ve noticed as I’ve reached my present age of nearly 81 is that these beneficial, limiting emotions seem to be disappearing, slowly and surely, from our American news, from our collective consciousness, and even from our increasingly violent entertainment. We seem to be casting them off like obsolete relics, when in fact they have been the hidden secret of our Western civilization, our Enlightenment culture, and our nation’s and Europe’s economic and military success.

To someone my age, they now seem mostly creations of strong religions, like Roman Catholicism. When was the last time you heard a friend, let alone a public figure, confess to feeling shame, guilt, embarrassment, regret or remorse?

I’m a Jew, albeit mostly assimilated and not very religious. Through loves in my life, I’ve learned a lot about Roman Catholicism, and I’ve attended more than a few Catholic services. So I have some respect for its influence on Western history.

It’s one thing to have laws against crimes like murder, theft and rape and harsh punishments for committing them. But individual human hubris, calculation and self-deception are endless. It’s easy to delude yourself that you can hide your crimes or somehow get away with them. (Have you noticed how so many of our modern male politicians seem to have tried to do this with sex crimes?) This is especially so if your circumstances, through no evident fault of your own, are desperate.

It’s harder, but still not impossible, to convince yourself that wrong is right, like the private-equity mavens who buy up, loot and destroy nursing homes on the pretext that accumulating capital and eliminating “waste” and “inefficiency” are good for society. But it’s much harder to get away from your own conscience and self knowledge, if properly inculcated.

If you are taught to know right from wrong and to feel shame or guilt when you do wrong, you are far less likely to do wrong than if the choice is solely a “rational” calculation based, for example, on profit and loss or the risk of getting caught. And as physical blushes show when people are shamed or embarrassed, well-inculcated moral values can be as much physiological and psychological, as rational and “legal.” At least they can have visible physiological manifestations.

So maybe we should listen more to Pope Leo and less to the likes of J.D. Vance, let alone to an idiot, “mad” leader clearly suffering from advanced senile dementia. Maybe we should try harder to give our kids an innate sense of shame, embarrassment, guilt, remorse and regret, when appropriate, as they grow up. And maybe all of us, regardless of our own religion (or our atheism) should show more respect for institutions like the Roman Catholic Church, especially when they express convictions drawn from centuries of dismal history and monastic thinking about causes and effects.

The modern Catholic Church no longer conducts Crusades. The last of its history’s vicious conflicts with modern Protestantism seems to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, signed on 10 April 1998.

Lessons like these, learned the hard way, are especially valuable, even if they come late. And what other institutions in our society have literally had millennia to contemplate their own mistakes and the best way to make progress from the Dark Ages to the light?

At this worldwide—indeed species wide—historic crossroads of good and evil, isn’t it far better to listen to people who’ve made a career of assessing good, evil and historic mistakes, than to those whose most salient personal characteristic seems a precipitous, opportunistic lunge for secular power, territorial conquest or obscene wealth? Might not today’s Israel and Iran, let alone our own nation, learn something useful from Pope Leo?

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Could Trump’s Relentless Self-seeking Work a “Miracle” with Iran?

“Language is not logical; it’s psychological.” — Ira Kleinman, my high-school Russian teacher, circa 1960.

“Love thy enemy.” — Jesus of Nazareth, circa 0 CE.

Before you click out, consider two things. The first is the greatest “miracle” in our species’ short, six-thousand-year recorded history.

Our most brutal and devastating war ever caused a huge loss of life. An estimated 6.9 million fighters and civilians died just in Germany, and 2.6 million just in Japan. Yet today those two nations, despite all of Trump’s craziness, are still our strongest and most important allies.

Our own postwar behavior—the Marshall Plan (in Germany) and our enlightened postwar occupation of Japan—worked this “miracle.” For more on how this “miracle” confirmed Jesus’ admonition, click here.

The second uniquely human thing to consider is how little boys sometimes make friends. It doesn’t happen every day. But sometimes a lifelong friendship begins with fisticuffs (which cause no permanent damage). The fight leads to mutual respect, curiosity and eventually to liking. Friendships like that expand my Russian teacher’s observation about language to human behavior generally.

How might this work with Iran? Well, out of the blue, Trump has proposed that the US and Iran share some sort of “dominion” over the Strait of Hormuz, charge some kind of “toll” over the oil and gas passing through it, and so share a steady source of revenue.

Presumably, the US would provide the “heavy lifting” of military power to police the strait and keep it safe. Iran, through propinquity, acquiescence and perhaps some cooperative policing, would help keep the flow of fossil fuels strong and peaceful and the global economy on track. The two nations would share a steady revenue stream that, because of the high prices for oil and gas (no doubt increasing as they run out), would hardly impair the global economy.

The basic elements of a post-World-War-II-type reconciliation are all there. Like both Germany and Japan, Iran is half a world away from us. It’s hardly a natural enemy. (If we were neighbors, that would bring Jesus’ second great admonition into play: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Arguably that’s the harder one to follow, as in Israel’s West Bank.)

Despite all the emotion on both sides, our longstanding enmity with the Islamic Republic of Iran has been mostly a war of words. In the present conflict, for example, Iran has lost a lot of buildings and a lot of weapons and infrastructure, but its estimated deaths of civilians range from 2,076 to 7,650, and of fighters from 1,221 to over six thousand. (These wide ranges reflect the uncertainty of the estimates amidst the fog of war.)

Every unnecessary human death matters, of course. But compared to the losses in World War II, which helped forge our strong alliances with Germany and Japan, these are minuscule. A medium sized near-city earthquake in that part of the world can cause more loss of life.

Such a reconciliation—maybe even an alliance—between the US and Iran could have several advantages for both nations and for our species. First and foremost, it would guarantee a steady supply, as well as stable and lower prices, for fossil fuels globally during the crucial period of transition to renewable and nuclear energy. Second, by raising the prices a bit to accommodate the US’ and Iran’s “toll,” it would help motivate a global transition to renewable and nuclear energy, thus reducing the acceleration of planetary heating and saving remaining fossil fuels for use as feedstocks for paint, chemicals, medicines and other industrial uses. Third, by turning our enmity with Iran into an alliance, it would provide a bulwark in the Middle East (even if shaky at first) against Russian expansionism and meddling. Fourth, by providing Iran with money to invest in desalinization plants, it would help solve Iran’s most pressing medium-term problem: the drying up of its rivers and other sources of fresh water amidst planetary heating. Finally, by putting Iran’s enmity with its strongest enemy to rest, it would provide a basis for rapid industrialization, modernization and economic progress throughout the entire Middle East—something that the Gulf Arab states seem increasingly interested in pursuing.

I yield to no one in my disapproval and loathing of Donald Trump. In almost every way, this demented, erratic, senile narcissist is a menace to our nation’s and our species’ welfare. But if, in this specific instance, he can “make a deal” that resolves a half-century-old mindless enmity based on little more than other deranged old mens’ reading of ancient scriptures, I’d be all for it.

Perhaps more than most, I can appreciate what kind of a friend Iran could be to us. In the 1960s I knew a physics student from Iran at UC Berkeley. He was a good man with a great sense of humor and humanity, albeit an over-the-top skirt chaser. Decades later, while I was a law professor, another educated Iranian reached out to me to inquire about my treatise on the law of licensing and establish a working relationship over half a globe and an immense cultural divide.

Both seemed fine men, well educated and “modern” in every way. I won’t name them for fear of having an adverse impact on their lives in what is now precariously balanced between theocratic Hell and a modern, educated, economically powerful nation. But what an ally Iran would make if we could just tilt its now-precarious balance in the right direction!

Today, the greatest threat to global peace, to our weaning ourselves rationally from fossils fuels, and to a rational global order to replace the Enlightenment’s dying embers is, by far, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. If we have a chance, with a simple monetarily favorable deal, to turn Iran from an enemy into an ally as we did with postwar Germany and Japan, we should grab it with both hands and never let go.