Some of these sausages are based on recent items; some… are not. At least it's not the latest antisocial-media influencer fad, the Taco Bell Diet. Maybe we can get some of those TPUSA youngsters complaining about $20 burritos to try the less-expensive ones there; that would move their explosive diarrhea to the correct orifice, anyway.
- A college president with a bachelor's degree in political science from a third-tier university fired an English instructor for continuing to teach a story with an unreliable narrator in her English class. At least it wasn't a "biographical study" of a fictional character (that in some more-fashionable literature departments slides toward psychoanalyzing the author) (yes, that's foreshadowing for a later sausage). In the current political environment — something allegedly close to that college president's academic knowledge — one would think it very important to understand unreliable narrators… unless the point is to prevent students from obtaining such expertise.
It should surprise precisely no one that this took place at a state institution in Florida. Apparently, Florida Man is more sophisticated than Florida Educational Administrator.
- But at least they're reading, right? That first sausage was about only a short story, so maybe — just maybe — it was within the capability of those students to read. I'd argue instead that there are three other causes: The relentless demand for replicable metrics in the education system, which drives the measuring devices (papers and exams) toward the clearest, simplest, least-ambiguous, and as a consequence shortest material.† Then there's the absolute load of self-congratulatory crap that makes its way past the cultural/commercial gatekeepers (gatekeepers are necessary to at least some extent — just not these gatekeepers). Lurking underneath, there's the question of whether the teachers can or do read book-length works themselves; we surely don't incentivize those in the classroom already to do so, let alone incentivize those who do so to spend time in the classroom.
- And then there's the uncontrolled spew of social media, which is harmful enough even before considering darker enabling behavior. That, in turn, becomes one of the ingredients in the first sausage on this platter, and not just because social media is a target-rich environment for finding unreliable narrators.
- The obvious linkage among the preceding sausages is that in many ways, they all involved unreliable narrators — often in multiple layers. It can become even darker when courts intentionally ignore attempts to make the narrative reliable. That, in the end, is what lower-court "factfinding" does: It first turns individual pieces of evidence — often of varying reliability, and virtually always incomplete — into "facts." Too often, though, those facts (and/or the evidence behind them) are subordinated to ideology. Eppur si muove, figlia di puttana — which is not about any particular judge (or at least not out loud!), but about theocratic mindsets: Not final due to infallibility, but treated as infallible because they're final.
I suppose it could be worse. It could be memoirs and not court records. Tell me, how many lies are acceptable in a memoir? Perhaps a few more than in legal decisions that themselves did inadequate fact-checking (as to the long-prior proceeding described there)…
† This is not yet another veiled criticism of the bar exam, and especially not the multiple-choice multistate bar exam (for both substantive law and ethics). Or at least it's not veiled.