State of the Uniom-Busting

This entire entry was written prior to hearing anything this evening from Donald J. Drumpf, Genius. Although one must wonder if he has a sideline in herpetology, having popularized the twitting maga… if, that is, he could either define or spell "herpetology."

• Given the entire context of the State of the Uniomn, perhaps a bit on "partisan gerrymanders" is in order. That's the nice, polite way to say "rotten borough" — and if you don't know what that is without following the link, the success of American proprietors of rotten boroughs in hiding them should be obvious. (I lived immediately adjacent to the former boundaries of one of these jurisdictions for a while when I was stationed Over There, and in some ways not a lot had changed in a century and a half…)

  The courts have punted the "partisan gerrymander" issue on the ground that it is a political question. Perhaps it is in some sense, given the constitutional imperative that each house of Congress is the judge of its own elections (Art. I § 5) — but it is a peculiar kind of political question, one that implicitly asks quis custodient ipsos custodes? The obvious answer is "The voting public, of course, because it can vote out the bastards"… but the whole point of partisan gerrymanders is to make that in practice impossible. In other words, determining that partisan gerrymanders are political questions not subject to judicial oversight is at best circular logic that presumes both individual and institutional good faith on the part of the legislators, when a "partisan gerrymander" by its nature is not in good faith.

• Sometimes scientists are short, sharp, and serious:

  Does reanimating the dead require IRB approval? Asking for a friend.

  Matt Blaze (HT: Grimmelmann). And sometimes they're not quite as short, even sharper, and even more serious:

  And then there was this, a quote from one of the speakers:

  If you follow your passion life takes care of itself.

  This just strikes me as almost the most owning-class, privileged, ugly position one can take. Yes, passion is important. Yes we all need to figure out What We Want, and what we want To Do in Life. Very important. But following your passion is sometimes only possible with a full support team (including nannies or cooks or secretaries or lab trainees that make it possible to work that 4-hour day) and, needless to say, lots of money. If you are 17 and pregnant and unemployed, there is not a lot a room for following passion.

  Working class women with three service jobs, none of which include health benefits, kids, perhaps an absent spouse, or perhaps a partner that is also working like that, or perhaps has a significant health issue, do not have the luxury of passions. Maybe they get to exercise or have one of their adolescent kids make dinner once in a while. Or get fast food, because there is just no time for cooking.

  "Potnia Theron" Of course, the bonus is that the apparent gender-specificity of the latter arises only because the target audience for the confidence game involved is primarily women — not because there are no males in substantially the same circumstances (excepting the pregnancy).

• And sometimes, even the "short version" isn't short, being just the beginning of a journey. This is something I began struggling with in the 1980s, when confronting the differential treatments and prognoses offered in the Air Force for alcohol abuse (and even leaving aside the differentials in "referrals"). It took a long time to see what the nonscientists in charge of policy were actually basing things on… and it wasn't even as scientifically valid as "just say no." (As if that was ever an acceptable response in any context, let alone the land of officers' and NCO clubs!)
• Serious gedankenexperiment: Consider an informal group of control persons in a defined industry grouping, whether among "all" participants in that industry or just the substantial leaders. This defined industry grouping depends upon multiple skill sets — especially skill sets eligible for H1B visa treatment — not just for profitability, but for effective function; there just aren't "enough" American trained workers with those skills…

  …that is, not "enough" at the compensation that this group of control persons wants to provide them (always, naturally, significantly less than the compensation being earned by the control persons. Which leads to the underlying question: Do various customary means that these control persons use to help keep compensation for these critical workers low (including, ironically enough, the H1B visa program itself), or at least limited, demonstrate a combination in restraint of trade in the relevant labor market, whether these means are unconscious, consciously parallel, or intentional? And if not, why is this type of concerted action exempt from scrutiny? Whether as a matter of statutory language or logic, it shouldn't be.

• Let's consider something a little less controversial. Like controlling hate speech on Faceplant. Even Drumpf is going to be challenged in displaying more sheer arrogance than is on display on any "side" in that particular dispute. But I'm confident that he can (and will) in tonight's speech; he managed it at the inauguration.

More Link Sausages Regarding Self-Inflicted Wounds

After the first sausage on the platter, the ire used to season these gets a bit… intense. There's even some ire in the first one.

• RIP Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the three or four leading American novelists of the last half of the twentieth century (and stretching into the twenty-first). She'd be endlessly amused by the placement of the initial short death notice piece at the Grauniad UK edition, right above a story discussing the Westminster Council's rejection of plans for a statue of the Iron Lady.

  And here's The Finger to the selectors for the Nobel Prize for Literature who ignored her candidacy for so many years, primarily for political reasons often blending into overt national-origins bigotry (see, too, below).

• "Prospero" at The Economist wonders about opera's awful role models while somewhat missing the even bigger problem with established opera. Yes, "he" is right that idiot plots abound, as do sex and violence and misogyny. Those are lesser problems; the fatal flaw in opera tends to be that the characters almost never learn anything. They might (if they're lucky) achieve contemporaneous-to-the-libretto semblances of romance, usually symbolized by an "appropriate" marriage… but that's about as close as it gets, even in the more-subtle-than-most satires of Gilbert and Sullivan and the occasional work adapted with respect from another form. In short, opera tends to be very badly, if often cleverly, written; even the musical themes too often fail to develop, being quoted essentially in full in the "overture" (perhaps the epitome of spoilers…).
• The correct answer to this inappropriate question was the same as the correct answer to assholes doing exit polling: "What part of 'secret ballot' do you not understand?" Democratic institutions do not function well — and, ultimately, cannot function in crisis — when there is any inquiry into actual votes cast by actual individuals after actual elections. Only the fact that one voted matters.
• The entire point of a truth-and-reconciliation process is that it works if, and only if, the abusers of power collectively acknowledge responsibility… and collectively give up power. A scapegoat isn't enough. So: The white privileged 50+ men who dominate the USOC and its affiliates have to go, and not just to be replaced by people entirely from the same demographic. And it will still be hard thereafter, especially in avoiding institutional backlash (Exhibit A: South Africa — which is immenseley better off now than in the mid-1990s, but trying to pretend that there's no "It's my turn to crack the whip now!" crisis there is more than slightly impossible).
• General note for organizations: One does not "stay out" of a dispute — even one purportedly unrelated to the substance of an award one is about to give, or to supporting "senior" members/potential members of the organization — by accepting the first (often self-serving) narrative to come along, especially without inquiring into the agenda behind that narrative. This is the third time in a decade that this organization's leadership has engaged in the principle failure mode of organizational function with significant legal implications: Refusal to gather facts — let alone evaluate them or acknowledge that there's a difference of opinion — even when offered on a silver platter. This time, it spilled over into the personal; and so I'm gone, even though these were many of my friends. I can't remain around them when they demonstrate this collective inability — refusal — to learn; I'd just be enabling, in the same sense as enabling an addict.

  This is, of course, the excrutiatingly civil and nonspecific version that applies to many organizations throughout the arts — definitely not excluding those with the loudest voices and biggest egos based in the Manhattan echobox. The organization in question's leadership has received/will shortly receive (whether the individual members of the leadership actually read their bloody e-mails is another matter) more detail involving their collective and individual dereliction of duty.

* * *

Last for the day, and far from least, the Supreme Court has agreed to review the latest Drumpf antiimmigrant order. I implore the Court to heal a self-inflicted wound with its decision in this matter — and it can do so almost no matter how it rules.

The decisions below (both Ninth Circuit and Fourth Circuit, and both District Court and Court of Appeals) have uniformly cited to the dissent in Korematsu. Even some of the dissenting passages and opinions have done so. It is long past time for this Supreme Court to formally state something very much like the following in its opinion in these matters:

Insofar as Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), holds that national origin is itself a sufficient rationale for disparate treatment of individuals by the Executive — even when the Executive states without more that national security concerns motivate such treatment — that case is overruled as wrongly decided.

The real bonus is that it has the opportunity to do so regardless of how it rules in the current matters… because any conceivable outcome that "it was within the scope of executive power as established by the statute and the Constitution" (the narrowest possible ground for reversal and upholding of the Drumpf executive order, whichever version we're talking about) still presumptively relates to the very issues misstated in the majority opinion in Korematsu.

Plus, that's part of a long-overdue healing process necessary from this Court as part of this Court's protection of its own credibility. It took a century for Dred Scott; hopefully, we'll be closer to the Plessy timeline (about seventy years — which actually just passed) on religion and national origin than on race.

Link Sausages From Shithole Countries

There's this great honkin' statue in New York harbor that bears an inscription explicitly welcoming people from shithole countries. OK, it doesn't say "shithole countries," but is there any doubt that is what this means:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

unless, perhaps, you can't bloody read English?

• Ben Yagoda offers some interesting thoughts on reviewers, properly citing the intent of Sturgeon's Law even if he somewhat mangles the "canonical" version of the quote… and comes nowhere near the fundamental differences among the entertainment industry's understanding and use of reviews, reviewers' understanding and use of reviews, and the various reading publics' understanding and use of reviews.

  "Reading publics" is plural. Although both they and I read speculative fiction, I'm not part of the "reading public" consisting of fans — whether those who focus on a particular series or those whose reading decision is guided by whether a work has been compared favorably to the purported "tradition" of Favorite Author X. This is an incredibly common distinction, but because it doesn't lead to easy, thoughtless application of unproven and unprovable marketing memes, it gets almost no attention from anyone.

  But more to the point is this: I cannot judge a reviewer's credibility without seeing what the reviewer disapproves of. Knowing that a reviewer likes some of the same things I do is not helpful if the reviewer's reasons are incoherent, or infected with a secondary agenda (e.g., "must be good because it's libertarian"… with no explanation of whether that means economically, civil-rights-style, or some other aspect of accepted libertarianism, let alone hidden one), or flat wrong. Knowing that a hypothetical reviewer always gives a substantially better evaluation of any mystery that includes a defense attorney as a major character — even when ineptly depicted or worse — is important to understanding reviews of, on the one hand, Reversal of Fortune and on the other of The Firm (the reviewer I'm thinking of — a well-known one — gave them the same rating when they were first shown).

• From the Department of Multiple Wrongs Making Right(?): Apple has accused the PTO of succumbing to (Apple's words) "lobbying" by an opponent in an administrative-law trial. That's pretty bad (and probably a case of the pot calling the kettle black, given Apple's own history with the PTO). Reading between the lines of the story, however, raises my eyebrows regarding the definition of "lobbying": I'm not sure pointing out potential conflicts of interest is "lobbying". Indeed, it's arguable that Apple's own in-house counsel violated the duty of candor — which applies to administrative proceedings as much as it does to courts — by failing to itself immediately disclose that at least one of the three administrative-law judges assigned to the matter was its own former lawyer… especially in the particular context. Of course, things get worse farther down the road, and once the spin attempts are discounted, nobody emerges with much (if any) credit. The initial purported "lobbying letter" may well have had merit on the substance, but the method was entirely screwed up, and later communications don't appear to have had the same merit.
• And from the same department, the House has voted to extend paranoid surveillance powers. The problem is not with those operating in good faith now; it's with what the gathered data can (and will) be (mis)used for by those who are not operating in good faith, both inside the government… and outside it when the inevitable Snowden-like leak and the inevitable data breach(es) and the inevitable political blackmail occur. And I didn't even have to raise the spectre of a free and investigative press!

  If you can't get a warrant, you don't know enough to make sense of the surveillance material anyway. If it's too administratively difficult to find a judge, pay for more judges… it's much cheaper than long-term data storage anyway. If you've never even thought about converting masses of documents/recordings from today's storage formats and hardware to something useful in five years, a decade, or more down the road — and that's what it takes to deal with these things — just consider the historical and present example of IRS computer systems, let alone the VA.

Stable Genius(?)

There's really only one stable genius who is truly part of the American zeitgeist:

One wonders what he'll do with himself if he ever catches Hilary in the popular votethat bird…

Intellectually Honest Link Sausage Platter

First, a short note for the entertainment industry and its various hangers-on and commentators:

If you review a work, and you've been provided with documentation that the purported "author" is one or more of a self-deluding narcissist unable to acknowledge third-party contributions, a selfish bastard claiming a third party's work as her/his own without attribution, or just an egotistical lying sack of sh*t regarding credit for co-creators, it would behoove you to mention this in your review… especially when said "author" has invited consideration of the issue with public statements regarding authorship and contributions (and even moreso when those public statements are themselves ghostwritten and internally inconsistent). You don't help the credibility of your review or the source it appears in by pretending that this type of context either doesn't exist or is irrelevant to the review.

This minirant has nothing to do with the Wolff/Drumpf "book"/gossip column. It's about works of avowed fiction… not works purportedly of "nonfiction" that are so inconceivable to a rational mind that they can't be accepted as coherent fiction or indeed coherent narrative of any kind. It was, instead, "inspired" by multiple reviews of multiple works (both printed and audiovisual) that have appeared in the last ten days or so. The general issue is called "intellectual honesty," you undereducated boors… and it matters.

• On the "free speech" front, Germany has implemented some restrictions on online speech that don't pass First Amendment scrutiny… but then, there's no such thing as a hardcore, bright-line rule that does. The First Amendment is a standard, not a rule — that's what makes dealing with it so difficult, especially to advocates of alles in ordnung. Like radicals of all types. Like computer systems. Like advertising aggregators. Like management gurus and stock-pickers. All of which explains a great deal of the problem with online speech: Suppressing the "bad bits" requires both human judgment and trust in (and backing for) the humans exercising that judgment by organizations answering to the mythical gods of "Economic Efficiency." Nothing less than clones of top management will do for that purpose, and more is probably required; of course, top management doesn't want that because the clones will want top management's jobs…
• Then there's the issue of museums. Whom to charge for admission, and whether whatever (admittedly difficult) decision is made in the face of general governmental disdain is appropriate. And whether to have them at all. Or what belongs in a "museum" in the first place.
• An interesting piece on medical/health quackery leaves one wondering — as a good scientist might — whether there are boundary conditions beyond which having all the best soundbites and buzzwords is no longer a marker for self-defeating lack of humility. If there are, I haven't encountered them yet. Historically, the problem has come when those pushing back against questioning from nontraditional sources have allowed their own self-interest in power and economics to get in the way of the inquiry. Too often, that's what is happening now, even — perhaps especially — when the scientific inquiry has adverse financial/entitlement implications for entrenched interests. "Climate change denial" is just one obvious current example; there are lots of others, such as the handgun industry's historical (if often subtle) suppression of research on ranged nonlethal force, the opioid crisis, the Laffer curve…