Baruch Dayan HaEmet
Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un

My heart is with the victims and families affected by the murderous attack at Bondi Beach. No faith, including my own, condones the killing of innocent people. Anyone who tells you otherwise has an agenda.

As Hanukkah begins, I want to express my solidarity with my Jewish friends who may be feeling fear alongside celebration. Violence and antisemitism deserve unequivocal condemnation.

To my friends who are expressing their grief through anger at Muslims - you are hurting more than I am, so I accept it. But I hope you remember that I am not the one who hurt you.

Caricatures and polemics against an ethnic or religious group - especially on social media - lead to real world harm. I always refuse to succumb to such temptations in the heat of the moment.

I mourn Jewish victims and I honor Hanukkah’s meaning. I reject antisemitism and Islamophobia. These are universal, humanist principles I uphold without qualification.

Simultaneously, I am proud to be a Muslim and I will not apologize for my true faith, and I will not engage with caricatures or polemics about my religion. I choose to affirm this here because those caricatures and polemics are rampant right now, and I fear where they can lead - violence against me and mine. This is also why I am your ally against caricatures and polemics against you and yours.

Given Trump's plan to create an External Revenue Service, here are other ideas for government departments he can create

• Department of Homeland Insecurity

• Environmental Destruction Agency

• Department of Offense

• Department of Injustice

• National Pseudoscience Foundation

• Corporation Financial Protection Bureau

• Centers for Disease Surrender

• Federal Tariff Commission

Let the Kakistocracy commence!

President Joe Biden nominated Kasubhai in September 2023. The following month, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled Kasubhai during a confirmation hearing that focused less on his jurisprudence and more on gender, race and other culture war flashpoints.

“What I try to do when I sit on the bench is I extend to people graciousness and patience so that they have not just the opportunity to be heard,” Kasubhai said during his Oct. 4, 2023 confirmation hearing before the committee in Washington D.C. “When I issue a ruling whether somebody prevails or doesn’t prevail, I want that ruling to be conveyed in a way that helps them to think of the court as a place in which decisions can be decided impartially without regard to who they are and that they were heard.”

…

Democrats are moving quickly to appoint federal judges nominated by Biden before they lose control of the Senate, following Republicans’ sweeping victories this month in both U.S. Congress and the White House chambers.

Judge Kasubhai is the only the third Muslim ever to serve as district court judge. I am particularly proud because Judge Kasubhai is from the same ethnic community of Indian-origin Muslims as myself :)

Judge Kasubhai was confirmed by Democrats - the GOP senators were purely focused on culture war nonsense:

“I looked at some of your readings and writings, your decisions, you seem to have an affinity for Marxism,” Sen. Marsh Blackburn, R-Tennessee, said to Kasubhai.

She referred to a 1994 essay in which, in her characterization, Kasubhai criticized the concept of private property. It was written around the same time Kasubhai was attending law school at the University of Oregon.

“You argued that and I quote ‘property incites rebellion.’ This is one of the many positive statements that you have made about Marxist approaches and Marxist policies,” Blackburn said. “It disturbs me when I see this leaning to Marxism in your writings. So a yes or no question, are you a Marxist?

“No, Senator,” Kasubhai replied.

“OK, will you right now disavow the tenets of Marxism that you have praised in some of your writings?” Blackburn asked.

“Senator, I have not praised Marxist ideas, and I would disavow any other system than that would be supported by our US Constitution and our laws,” Kasubhai responded.

That’s a class act response to a bad faith attack. There are more examples in the article, including a real howler by Ted Cruz.

The judiciary always gets stacked with appointees during the lame duck session, but the Democrats nominate people with actual credentials. The vast quality differential between them and Trump appointees - both during his last term and the new incoming cabinet - is indicative of the coming “Crank Era” of conservative politics.

This is what democracy looks like. If there is to be a contrast, let it be big enough to be instructive - elections have consequences. That’s an essential lesson to learn if we are to persuade the Potential Purple Majority to get off the sidelines.

Microsoft is literally investing in nuclear power - that gives you an idea of the energy requirements for training these models. The required amount of training data itself is also scaling geometrically, as the models get even more complex, and if you feed AI-generated training data to these models instead of genuine human data, the models quickly degenerate into essentially garbage output. Given that AI is already being used to generate vast amounts of public content on the web, which is the primary source for training data, this is a serious problem. Finally, the legal framework for training data is getting tighter (the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI is a masterpiece). The best training data will end up being licensed - and not for cheap.

The practical upshot of all of this is that LLMs (and for similar reasons, their generative image counterparts) have a ceiling beyond which it won’t make economic sense to develop bigger and bigger models. There may be a ChatGPT 6 but there won’t be a ChatGPT 10.

The underlying technology is ripe for disruption itself, however. The entire industry is only 10 years old! Whatever replaces LLMs will have to be faster and cheaper to train, and trainable on far lesser amounts of data. Or the technology will stagnate and end up at a equilibrium governed more by economics than by technological advancement.

Human knowledge workers are probably safe for a generation, at least. In the meantime, AzizGPT will always beat ChatGPT.

Original is here, and allows you to zoom in and get actual numbers.

Bear with me a moment.

On Disney Plus, I have been watching Chris Hemsworth’s Limitless under the National Geographic imprint. Episode two is all about the shock of cold, and the counter-intuitive benefits of extreme cold exposure. As he enters freezing water the first time, he experiences what his trainer describes as the “gasp reflex” - a whole-body shudder that is the entire body sounding the alarm. Devotees of ice-bath therapy know that this is a physical reaction that can be overcome, mentally, and with repeated exposure. In fact the episode was so compelling that I am resolved to try it myself, in baby steps, during my morning shower. The point however is that the immediate reaction is a defensive one, and it can not only be withstood, but embraced.

The metaphor I am laboring towards here is probably obvious, but I think for all liberal folk today, we have experienced the gasp reflex upon waking up and seeing that WI and PA called for Trump and realizing that, since NC and GA were called last night, it truly is over and Trump is the President-Elect. The repeated exposure to this fact over the next few weeks is one we have to embrace, and allow to change us. What we need now is resolve.

Resolve is a quality that is difficult to grasp, harder to learn, and impossible to teach. The resolve we need is that of the Stoic philosophy, to determine what we can control, what we cannot, focus on the former, and utterly ignore the latter.

The resolve we need is to focus on our lives at the scale in which it matters: the hyperlocal scale. Devote ourselves to our families, our communities, our neighbors. Focus on our jobs and careers and strengthen ourselves so that if there are rough times ahead, we have the resources and the friends and family to weather the storms ahead.

And there are storms ahead, indeed. Anyone who argued that “we will survive Trump 2.0 just fine” is as unserious as those who argued a Trump victory would genuinely lead to mass deportations and fascism. We are going to take a bad hit on the national scale in every realm of policy. Every lever of power is going to be tuned to extract and exploit wealth from the vast majority to the benefit of a tiny few. The looting of America will begin. A lot of Americans will die, but a lot more are going to suffer, needlessly, because the true solutions to our problems as a nation require leadership and courage and wisdom, and of these, Biden had two, and Trump has none. The judicial system will be entrenched with judges who rule based on dogma, the civil service will lose its institutional knowledge as experienced public servants are chased out and replaced with partisans, and the health system will bend to its breaking point. The Supreme Court will be 7-2, and the dismantling of the federal safety net and undermining of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will now begin. It is all spelled out right here in detail. All of this will be to the detriment of the poor and the middle class, the elderly, minorities, and women. It is going to be a hard four years and “we will survive” is glib nonsense. Of course we will survive. But only a select few are going to thrive. We have replaced the concept of the rising tide with a gilded escalator.

Hindsight is a good teacher, if you let it be. I was completely wrong about my prediction of how the election would go, though part of that was an attempt to rationalize my increasing fear. I defended the process of Kamala Harris being the nominee, but she under-performed Biden 2020 in every single county, meaning that a primary process might indeed have provided validation to get the base to the polls. And my argument against Jill Stein was ultimately moot because her numbers weren’t the spoiler in WI and PA. The lesson here is that the process matters, there are no shortcuts, and hope is not a plan.

So, find your resolve. Decide what is important to you and focus on that above all else.

But there are two more things we can do, and should do. The first one is to engage. I think that we may feel betrayed by people who voted for Trump (or Stein) and may ask ourselves, how can anyone possibly have voted like this? The answer isn’t an easy one. What is needed is engagement more than ever, not turning away. Trump didn’t the popular vote on the backs of MAGA alone. These are real people who made a decision based on information they had.

And we did the same, right? Arguably, there are three realities here - one for them, one for us, and the empirical one that actually exists despite the first two. Which means that the other thing we should do is reorient. It’s time to stop letting the political tribe determine where we stand. Everything is polarized and we have gotten lazier about thinking about where we actually stand on issues and we just default to the tribe. We need to figure out what we value, what we believe, for ourselves, and then articulate that so that our identity isn’t defined by who we are, but what we do, and what our values are.

And that’s what I intend to do here.

I started political blogging a long time ago. Specifically, March 2002. My earliest blogs are still online - Unmedia/City of Brass 1.0, Dean Nation, City of Brass 2.0 at Beliefnet, and then Aziz for America at Patheos. It’s a lot of writing, and most of it was an attempt to explain to myself what I think I believe. My goal here now, at Aziz For America 2.0, is to engage in a more formal exploration of my own political values. I am going to try and analyze the issues and assess what I think is right, wrong, smart, and foolish. I want to articulate a platform of sorts that can find consensus rather than compete, be rooted in common sense instead of ideology, and provide an alternative to the tired left/right red/blue axis.

In a way I am returning to my idea after the 2016 election, in which I articulated the idea that there is a potential purple majority that still hasn’t been represented. The main point was this graph:

As I noted then, this graph is important to understand that this country did not actually elect Trump in 2016. In fact, less than 1 in 5 citizens in the US voted for him. Only 27% - less than one third - of the eligible voters voted for him. We do not have final numbers for 2024 yet, but it is going to be substantially similar. Compare, however, to the 2008 results for Obama’s victory over McCain:

As I argued back then,

When visualized this way, you can see that Obama’s victory wasn’t nearly as broad based as the electoral college outcome made it seem. Obama recruited a few percent of the purple non-voters to his cause, and that was enough, because those voters were in the right place – specifically, a few rust belt states.

No one has really tried to persuade the purple pool to join in our democracy. That means that our election doesn’t represent them – the plurality of eligible voters who didn’t vote for Hillary or Trump or McCain or Romney or Obama or Bush or Kerry or Gore.

Articulating a platform that can attract 5%, or 10% of the purple pool is how you win, not on a technicality, but with a true mandate of representing the true majority.

What would such a purple platform look like? That’s the answer that both sides need to be asking. The answer is likely to be in the realm of policy rather than identity. What do Americans fundamentally want? They want the Dream: that you can come here from anywhere, work hard, and succeed. The promise that you will be rewarded for your effort and you will thrive, not just survive.

Well, we have a chance the next four years to try and answer that question. I certainly am going to try, and I hope you join me.

And for those who voted for Jill Stein, or for Trump, as a protest vote against the Democrats - I don’t know how you are feeling this morning. It’s probably not a feeling of victory, that much is certain. For you, I hope this helps you:

Nevada: Harris, due to the high correlation to CA and the legacy Harry Reid / Las Vegas union establishment.

Arizona: Trump, because of a consistent polling lead. I don’t think Harris ever had a lead there in the averages.

Georgia: Trump. I actually think the vote will favor Harris by a margin, but post-election shenanigans will ultimately make GA’s vote unreliable. I’m just ruling GA out for the electoral math.

North Carolina: Harris. Vibes from the scene at Trump rallies today and corresponding Big Kamala Energy. The trend lines and polls over the weekend suggest a subsurface shift.

Michigan: Harris. Despite the protest vote on Gaza, the underlying trend suggests something happening under the radar. I’m drawing inferences from the Selzer poll of Iowa that something is going on, and is correlated across the Midwest, though Michigan is not so deep red as IA and therefore this puts it over the top. The Muslim vote will be a green herring.

Wisconsin: Harris. The same Iowa subsurface movement, plus my read on state local media that I still follow despite leaving there ten years ago, suggest that the Badgers will rise to the occasion. Plus, Kamala herself went to Green Bay and La Crosse, which is a huge deal.

Pennsylvania: Harris. In this bridge between Midwest and Northeast, I think both halves of PA come through with turnout ground game.

My scenario here doesn’t require Georgia for a win, and if you drop Pennsylvania, Harris still wins. Since outcome of the above does not require PA, I would consider it a landslide victory.

Here’s the map:

Tomorrow, I will find out if I’m right or wrong, but really what I want to know is whether I have any political intelligence or not. Have I drunk the Kool Aid? Maybe. Tomorrow will tell.

The truth is that Harris ran for the nomination in 2019 and lost to Joe Biden, but then Joe Biden picked her as his running mate because he wanted a safe pick that he could rely on.

Biden said, during his announcement of his VP pick (apologies for the caps, this is cut and pasted from the transcript):

WHEN I AGREED TO SERVE AS PRESIDENT OBAMA'S RUNNING MATE, HE ASKED ME A NUMBER OF QUESTIONS THAT I ASKED KAMALA. THE MOST IMPORTANT TO ME, HE ASKED WHAT I WANTED, MOST IMPORTANTLY? I TOLD HIM I WANTED TO BE THE LAST PERSON IN THE ROOM BEFORE HE MADE IMPORTANT DECISIONS. THAT IS WHAT I ASKED KAMALA. I ASKED HER TO BE THE LAST VOICE OF THE ROOM, TO ALWAYS TELL ME THE TRUTH, AND SHE WILL CHALLENGE MY ASSUMPTIONS IF SHE DISAGREES. ASK THE HARD QUESTIONS.

Choosing Harris was his prerogative as the nominee, and then it was up to every voter whether or not they wanted to choose between option 1, Biden-Harris, or option 2, Trump-Pence.

I voted for Biden in the primary, and then I chose to vote for Biden-Harris as a ticket with the understanding that the Constitutional role of the Vice President is to step in for the President when called upon. The VP is trusted by the President to be loyal to the administration ready to act in that capacity if needed from day one.

And indeed, my ballot on election day read as follows:

Joseph R. Biden and

Kamala Harris

Democratic Party Nominees

There’s an “and” and a plural “s” in there that are meaningful. And along with my vote, the Biden-Harris ticket received 81 million other votes, the most votes ever cast for a candidate in a U.S. presidential election.

Kamala Harris has faced the voters of the United States and been elected with the understanding that she is ready and qualified for that job, and that job includes being President if necessary. And to defend our democracy, it became necessary.

If you are a Democrat and you think she was unfairly appointed as the 2024 nominee, would you have thought the same had Biden resigned during his term?

If you are not a Democrat or voting for Democrats, then if you care about Democracy, and you are voting for Trump, then I disagree with your choices. But you have no right to lecture me on mine.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

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My friend Irfan Rydhan and I decided to engage in a cross-blog conversation about our disagreement on voting for Kamala Harris vs. Jill Stein in this election. Irfan’s post is the first in this conversation. This is my reply.

I am proudly voting for Kamala Harris. There is a positive case to be made for this on policy alone, and I think absent the issue of Gaza, there would be little need for debate. However, given that the Gaza genocide will be 13 months by Election Day, there is an obligation to do so. But this is a time of great emotion, which is not conducive to reasoned discussion. We are angry, afraid, and anxious. The negative case against Harris is founded on these emotions, at precisely the time when we as a community of Muslim Americans are considering whether we have any influence and if so, how best to use it.

The case against Harris is simple. Her major sin is that she has not committed to a policy position of refusing arms to Israel. This is a monumentally unreasonable expectation that we, Muslims, have never held for any other candidate for President: not Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama. It would be instant political suicide, because denying Israel’s Orwellian-named “right to self-defense” is the one thing that no candidate can do.

The Gaza genocide is worse than everything that came before. Harris and Biden should have used the leverage of arms sales against Israel months ago, at least rhetorically. However, it is not as simple as saying in dramatic baritone, “make it so.” U.S. law since 2008 requires supplying Israel to maintain a “qualitative military edge” against all its armed enemies (state and non-state alike). The weapons lobby is not to be underestimated. And AIPAC has been greasing the wheels for decades.

Despite this, Biden and Harris have moved the needle. In summer, they stopped providing the huge 2,000 lb. bombs that can flatten entire blocks. And Biden has, for the first time, linked arms to humanitarian aid, albeit with a 30-day delay to avoid any impact on the election. And for this, they are successfully painted as anti-semites and traitors by the opportunistic, hypocritical right wing.

Harris’ minor sin is not letting Palestinian activists on stage, either at the convention or subsequent rallies. This is understandable because that stage is for her allies, and we, the Muslim community, are not acting like allies. We are publicly saying, “You will commit political suicide for us, or we will ruin this election for you.”

And that’s exactly what we have threatened, haven’t we? As Irfan points out,

But in the end the only real leverage and power that our community has at the moment is to block vote in swing states which will ensure that the current party in power, who is enabling and no doubt complicit in this modern day holocaust in Gaza, will lose!

If Harris loses in the swing states like Michigan which has the largest population of Arab and Muslim voters in the country, then she will most likely lose the presidential election.  

This will send a clear and strong message to the democrats, and others that they cannot just brush aside an active genocide as a small "one issue" item which they assume no one, except Muslims cares about.  

The Democrats will certainly receive the message, which is that Muslims are not reliable when there is an existential threat to democracy at home. But even worse, Muslims themselves have violated their values and morals because regardless of how they plan to vote, every Muslim agrees that a Trump Administration will be worse for Palestine than a Harris Administration. Irfan doesn’t deny this, because it is undeniable, except among the most committed leftists who read Jacobin and would not be voting for Harris even if there were no genocide. Moreover, no Muslim voting for Jill Stein believes she will win. It is purely a protest vote intended to cause Harris to lose and Trump to win.

In other words, Muslims who vote for Stein are saying, we want the Palestinians to suffer more (as they will under Trump instead of Harris) so that we can make a political point! The Palestinians are used to being political pawns, at best. But they themselves are clear - they want Harris to win.

And if you are making a protest vote, based on principles against genocide, then Jill Stein is the worst choice because she has cynically used Gaza to gain political power and relevance. Is this a principled stand? It seems not, since she has denied the cultural and physical genocide against the Uyghurs:

rayhanasat

A post shared by @rayhanasat

This is a pro-autocracy, pro-genocide, pro-China candidate, not a pro-peace candidate. She is, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, a predator:

If you have been your party's nominee for 12 years in a row, and you cannot grow your movement, pretty much at all, and can't peruse any successful strategy...and all you do is show up every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, you're not serious. To me, it does not read as authentic, it reads as predatory.

Irfan suggests that if enough people vote for Stein, she may cross a 5% threshold, which would somehow lead to third-party viability in future elections. However, this 5% funding is a poorly understood red herring. They would get 5% of the funding from people voluntarily checking that $1 donation box on their tax returns. This might be at best $10 million. This is all post-facto rationalization and in any case, sacrificing not just the Palestinians but also your fellow Americans to a second Trump Administration for the sake of a future election someday where you can vote for a lesser of three evils is hardly a principled stand.

Where I do agree with Irfan is this:

the American Muslim community is politically weak, we do not have major lobby groups which pour in millions of dollars to political campaigns all over the country, nor do we actively volunteer for campaigns or even run in local elections, except for the past 4 years when we have seen some growth in that sector.  

Correct! And if you were to articulate a vision for a political identity for Muslim Americans, then you’d find that vision doesn’t exactly align neatly with progressive leftists, libertarians, or whatever the heck the Greens are. And then we are right back where we started.

And if we are going to get real, let’s ask ourselves, what exactly is wrong with voting for the lesser of N evils? In fact, according to certain Islamic principles such as taqleel al mafaasid, voting for the lesser evil is not just permitted, but obligatory!

There are no easy answers. I am no scholar. I am just this guy, you know? These are my opinions and my best shot at persuading my fellow Muslim of my point of view.

But I do know, and so do you, that Trump will hurt our fellow Americans. Trump will hurt the Palestinians. Trump will damage our democracy. There is only one way to stop him. Jill Stein is going to lose, and a magic 5% vote share won’t help the Palestinians today. And demanding that Kamala commit political suicide in the middle of the hardest-fought political campaign of our lifetimes, down to literal coin-toss poll forecasts and averages, is not just unrealistic, but performative self-sabotage.

We must stop Trump. We must vote for Harris.

Addendum - read this letter from a coalition of 100 Muslim leaders in Arizona.

Read the letter and sign your name to it here.

I tried for weeks to get a chance to go outside and see it but was repeatedly foiled. Finally, I got my chance - well past the peak viewing - and managed to go out and catch a glimpse. it wasn't much, but it still stunned me. In my mind, I asked myself, who will I be when it comes back? At age 12, you are old enough to understand enough about yourself to be able to ask that question, even if you aren't old enough to understand what the answers might be.

On Saturday, Dec 9th, 2023, Halley's comet reached aphelion, the furthest point from the Sun. As of that date, just two months ago, Halley's comet is no longer leaving. It is coming back. It has been slowing these past few decades until now, it is barely crawling along at about 2000 mph. That may seem fast but compare that to 121,000 mph at perihelion! Even though it is on one level just a big snowball obeying Kepler's Law, I think it is fitting. Big decisions require you to slow down.

Since my teenage and young adult years, I've long had this strange idea that my fate was bound in some way to the comet, the thought of which had enormous power over my impressionable romantic mind. I think I still believe it - that no matter what else happens, the comet will be a bookend between the fading in of my consciousness 38 years ago at age 12, and my fading out, 38 years from now, at age 88.

And here I am, literally in the middle, just like the comet, slowing down and reorienting. Unlike the comet, I only get one trip, but it's more than enough.

Just a few moments past aphelion (measured by the comet's perspective) I turn 50, a mystical and meaningful number, and the new path before me is incomprehensibly different from where I started. New career, new city. Loss of loved ones. Kids now on the cusp of adulthood. And I am in many ways at the peak of my physical and mental power. This middle is not a mid-life crisis, but a sea change.

I have slowly and painstakingly learned, error by error, that the most important thing is to define myself in terms of myself. I have discovered, through experience, what Gibran meant by "life's heart." It is a revelation and still a mystery. Loki speaks of Glorious Purpose. Mobius retorts, "Most purpose is less glory and more burden." Leaving glory behind, what remains is essential: the self.

I don't know what the next ten or twenty years will be like or where I will be when I get there. This milestone is also the end of a journey outwards, and now I am coming home, just like the comet. Indeed, to Him we belong, and to Him is our eventual return.

The comet obeys the law of tawhid; the one true sun, the center of its orbit, the hand that carries it forever also consumes it. I know what that is like, to submit, to fall inwards, to orbit. Every time Halley's comet comes home, it loses pieces of itself. Eventually, the comet will fade away completely.

But luminous beings are we - not this crude matter!

I don't intend to fade away. I am not a comet - I control my path. I appreciate and accept the path I had to take, and the control I had to surrender. Now I have orbited long enough, and I decide where I go from here. In another 37 years, if I am still here, I am going to greet the comet at perihelion, and then maybe it and I will go home together.