…particularly since the malls near here are a quarter or more empty. Which doesn't diminish the parking lot madness. Or the threat of being run down by delivery vehicles.
- Misconduct in the "c-suite" in corporations is everywhere, from health insurance to water utilities. This is what happens when more than one generation reads the LLM-generated summary of The Wealth of Nations and never realizes that there's a word before "self-interest." It's bad enough to neglect "enlightened"; too often, though, executives forget what the "self" is when they're directing operations of a company with a lot of non-equity stakeholders. Big hint to MBA programs: The "self" in "self-interest" is most emphatically not related to the "take any opportunity for personal advancement and withdrawing an arbitrageur's commission";1 insurance policy holders are in fact the company's creditors, the water utilities exist at the suffrance of the landowners served, and so on.
Insert a comment — with footnotes and photographs and a paragraph on the back of each one — about "the reason for the season" being inconsistent with the prosperity gospel (which is, itself, inconsistent with actions by the protagonist, but since we're already in cognitive-dissonance territory what's a little more?) right about here.
- Or maybe right about here. Sadly, the publishing industries (frequently including the "indie" segment) epitomize the problem. Those in charge — whether in editorial, S&M, or "general management" — are almost invariably not qualified to practice in the field.2 This should remind the excessively scholarly of Holmes's Lament:
It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke. It may be more than doubted, for instance, whether the etchings of Goya or the paintings of Manet would have been sure of protection when seen for the first time. At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge. Yet if they command the interest of any public, they have a commercial value — it would be bold to say that they have not an aesthetic and educational value — and the taste of any public is not to be treated with contempt. It is an ultimate fact for the moment, whatever may be our hopes for a change. That these pictures had their worth and their success is sufficiently shown by the desire to reproduce them without regard to the plaintiffs' rights.3
- Which leads directly into musing about blind spots in the law that itself displays an immense blind spot: The inept equation of "extremism" with "ideology," without adequate consideration of deception, of claiming the mantle of victimhood to evade real examination, of rage (however justified/unjustified) relating to self-identity. Bluntly, "hurt feelings" do not equate to, and seldom result in, coherent, or indeed any, disinterested inquiry into details of an ideological position. Justified? Distrust of Manifest Destiny by Native Americans. Unjustified? The disturbingly-corresponding Great Replacement Theory, which is not in fact an "ideology" at all. Hint: Just because the FBI and Geheimstaatssicherheitbüro declare that something has an "ideological origin," coming from agencies that gave us self-interest-masquerading-as-principle ranging from Cointelpro to [redacted, much more recently] doesn't make it so. I do not think that word means what they think it does — let alone what they say it does. This is just excessive fandom — disturbingly similar to belief that if the opponent wins he/she/they must have cheated.
- Issues with bullying, lashing out, and self-interest shading into the cognitive dissonance of limited-scope megalomania (with elements of "simple" narcissism and sociopathy blended in) often arise in retrospective legal proceedings regarding "war crimes." This is by no means saying that, for example, on available evidence a certain recently-fled dictator guy doesn't merit such scrutiny. The irony that, in the medium and longer term, formalized reconciliation really hasn't worked, just points at how hard the problem is — especially when applied to businesspeople, not government officials. When all of the other tools for dealing with misbehavior by the powerful are taken away, "the law" becomes a hammer… and all misbehavior starts to look like nails.
- At least they're not nails viewed in a mirror. Yet. What kind of holiday season would it be without an existential threat? (Not one I've ever experienced.) No more sugar chirality for you, guys. (Or proteins, or nucleic acids, or…)
- Those who lost the last American election are the most likely (not certain) to propose dragging us out of the eighteenth century and landowners' franchise. It does bother me that my vote for President this past election was worth about 82% of that of a resident of Montpelier, just in terms of population disparity between districts… and it gets worse when one factors in that I was "only" voting for one tenth of my state's "undivided whole" of electoral votes. (And the less said about Iowa and the "representativeness" of the caucuses, the better.) The real problem is that every electoral system has distortions built into it; comparison is a highwire balancing act, with very hungry
litialligators below…That this is a natural consequence of "gatekeepers" is for another time; the US certainly isn't alone in having severe difficulties. The real problem is that our betters don't trust us not to elect demogogues. How's that worked out in the last century, guys? (There's a reason that "divide and conquer" leads almost inexorably to "plurality claiming a mandate"… and the math just isn't that hard. Well, it's hard to put into HTML.)
- Analogies to Maxwell's Demon, Szilard's seldom-challenged-never-refuted demonstration (three quarters of a century ago) that the Second Law problems with Maxwell's Demon apply not just to heat but to information and indeed all ordering, and of executives to demons are entirely intentional.
- Hell, they're often not qualified to even consume in the field! So as to avoid a defamation action (if the individual is still alive), I am carefully not naming the c-suite executive of a major NYC commercial publisher — one that included a "literary fiction" imprint — who boasted in the bar at a convention a while back of never having read any literary fiction.
- Bleistein v. Donaldson Litho. Co., 188 U.S. 239, 251–52 (1903) (citation omitted). I'd call this a safe and seasoned precedent, but of late the Court has been ignoring the imprecation to limit lawyerly egos to the law. Take your pick: basic biology, lab technique, nonscholarly 18th century linguistics applied to people whose progenitors had no preserved voice in that era…