Ghost Peppers and Classic Rock

This platter gets overspiced rather rapidly, I'm afraid. I'm just trying to cover the faint odor of rot from the less-than-wholesome ingredients.

• The least-spicy sausages on this platter are the IP-flavored ones. These days, IP-flavored almost certainly involves something calling itself "artificial intelligence", especially when hoist by its (their?) own petard. Of course, one need not rely on advanced technology to find IP perfidy — mere humans can breathe deception, too.
• Senator Turtle thinks the present somewhat resembles the past, specifically the 1930s? No, really?

  Leaving aside that he's almost got first-hand memories of the 1930s,¹ and the obvious and parallel counterproductive tariff bullshit, and the overobvious aspirations to become Reichskanzler just down the street from him — not to mention familiarly-named right wingers in the news in Italy — consider "lifestyle" problems all too familiar to the 1930s (as invoked without specific identification in the musical seasoning of this sausage). One might also consider, on a similar basis that also ignored intertwined side issues,² whether "lifestyle" problems like this one are more than just "lifestyle" problems.

  I suppose I'm expected to be happy that Senator Turtle showed up to the party, however late he is. Unfortunately, he showed up while the paid-off-the-books-below-minimum-wage janitorial gig workers were cleaning up afterward. So, no, I'm not happy. You shouldn't be, either — not even with that gold-plated kazoo you snatched from the table on your way out.

• At least it wasn't a gavel being snatched from the table by rude guests. The fundamental contradiction of completely distrusting the ICC's ability or intent to engage in actual, careful consideration of facts as part of the rule of law, especially when compared to internal dissembling amongst and concerning a plethora of bad actors (and by that I mean the target institutions, not the individual grantees) and/or treating "appalled by atrocities in the Levant, regardless of who commits them" as necessarily meaning "antisemitic," appears beyond the understanding of anyone involved. Which should surprise precisely no one.

  The usual aphorism has things precisely backward: Sure, he's our bastard, but he's still a bastard (and therefore untrustworthy). Delving into that is the ICC's role — even, and perhaps especially, when it's inconsistent with immediate interests.

• Of course, the ICC seldom sticks its nose into mere civil rights when violations are short of death. Whitesheetingwashing that is a domestic issue. (Foreign source chosen with malice aforethought.)
• And then there are apologists who get things partway right (and then implicitly expect praise for their vision and forthrightness). The fundamental problem with both that opinion piece and attacks on the "university system" is that they are searching for "the soul" and "the purpose" in the singular. The entire point of bringing scholarly development, and education, and research (distinct from mere "publication"), and public service together into a university is that there isn't a singular soul, a singular means of advancing civilization — that not all problems are nails to be pounded into well-seasoned wood produced off-campus by less-prestigious craftspeople, meaning in turn that the toolbox needs to be smarter than a box of hammers. Professors Russell and Patterson do not demonstrate any familiarity whatsoever with laboratory- or field-based research in their piece, nor with the interface and implications of with "social and political issues" at the core of their concerns; engineering, healthcare, etc. are right out. This tunnel vision disserves both their rhetoric and their conclusion and reminds me very much of what happened last Friday in St. James's Library. Then, as they're both law professors, an underinclusive understanding of "research" is probably to be expected.

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1. Presuming that there's no dementia involved… which, because I've had no direct observation relevant to that, is only an assumption. "Good faith," "grasp of reality," and "actual intelligence as distinct from cleverness" are each another issue entirely.
2. Cf. my late client (and friend) Mr Ellison's contribution to a six-decade-old TV series, and the implications of attempting to apply "alternate history" models in reverse. Not to mention the costs involved no matter what. <SARCASM> But then, externalizing costs is a good thing, right? It supports higher stock prices, and thus higher executive salaries and bonuses! </SARCASM>

Gov Mander's Territory

Gerrymandering is once again a thing. These battles between unaccountable gatekeepers — the elected legislators who pass the bills are almost never those who actually draw maps; instead, it's a combination of outside hired guns who lie about their actual purposes and "senior party leadership" seldom in elective office — demonstrate utter ignorance about, invidious stereotyping of, and contempt for voters.

Voters and districts do not belong to elected officials. Elected officials belong to the voters.

A distressingly-large, even dominant, aspect of gerrymandering is a result of continuing to apply eighteenth-century social concepts to even the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. During the eighteenth century, "born, lived, and died within 25 miles of point X" was the default; by the time the Voting Rights Act was passed more than half a century ago, it described only a minority, and today that minority is even smaller. During the eighteenth century, for those who "worked," the "workplace" was within two miles of the "residence" for well over 99% of the population; by the time of the VRA it was somewhere between 40 and 60% (depending upon the definition of "worked" and of the "workplace"), and today — even with the COVID remote-work-from-home disruption — it's probably less than 25%. Education, court appearances, government offices, libraries, shopping for both necessities and discretionary/luxury goods, internet access itself… the list goes on. And it's going to continue to change.

I therefore suggest, in an effort to prevent the legislators of America from being a burden on their voters or country, and for making them beneficial and responsive to the Public, that we minimize use of maps at all.¹ This modest proposal is to eliminate "first past the post" elections in all federally-established multimember electoral allocations and in as many others as possible, and instead use a combination of proportional representation and ranked-choice voting. Regardless of the exact mechanisms chosen, this would ultimately show far greater respect for the voter who, say, lives on the north side of Austin, Texas, but commutes to school/a job on the south side of San Antonio, or vice versa; or Baltimore and DC. Even more relevantly, consider other pairings like Naperville and Chicago, Redmond and Seattle, San Mateo and San Francisco — all of which represent a far-more-common circumstance than two major nationally-known cities whose centers are only an hour's drive apart (traffic permitting!).² The map is not the territory, and it's long past time that we actually acted like it — especially regarding elections, when many of the relevant boundaries have drawn themselves through behavior decades or more after being put in place by all-too-often marginally-literate sailors.

Of course, this is merely a "modest proposal": The probability of it even being taken seriously by people who have obtained power based upon electoral maps asymptotically approaches that of the current Administration nominating any current law professor at Columbia to any Supreme Court vacancy opening before the end of this year.³

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1. "Eliminate" would be even better, but there are multiple Constitutional problems with that, beginning with the fiction of "states." Rigid federalism is all well and good until somewhat gets hurt by the fights on the playground, like a little over a century and a half back… This particular modest proposal requires only statutory change, because the power of internal allocation is in fact committed to the states. See U.S. Const. Art. I § 4; cf. also Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) (declaring a federal right to voting equality within a state, but ultimately after remand deferring to state determination of methodology and division except when the methodology or division implicates another established federal right).
2. I'm afraid that the voter who lives in Kansas City, Kansas and commutes to Kansas City, Missouri; or lives in New Jersey and commutes to New York City or Philadelphia; or lives in Vancouver and commutes to Oregon — that is, has substantial personal and community connections to multiple states simultaneously — is SOL under the Constitution as it stands. Of course, voters who live in New Jersey are SOL for a lot of other reasons, albeit not nearly so compellingly as those who live in Illinois (let alone Cook County)…
3. With all due respect — no, with virtually no respect whatsoever: Bite me, Senator McConnell. Better yet, read both your oath of office and U.S. Const. Art. II § 2 cl. 2, and consider that they refer to the body as a whole and not any subpart thereof.

Imperfections

Things are slowly returning to normal in the Sharknest, which reflects a rather disturbing linguistic slippage of "normal."

• Professor Sarat muses on the propriety of jail terms, using as examples two… apparent sociopaths. Professor Sarat is well known for his opposition to the death penalty — an opposition that I share because, having been inside the machinery short of and including death, I will not tinker with the machinery of death — which is all well and good. This short piece, however, fails to acknowledge two brontosaurii in the room, both of which are busy trampling the greenery (and leaving herbivore droppings everywhere).

  First, and perhaps most obvious, the purple and orange-striped beast: If not prison, what? Does that alternative do a better job with "punishment" than does prison, is it equally (or more) administrable, and is it equally (or more) ethically acceptable in a context of imperfect human imposition of punishment? (That the death penalty fails all three of these inquiries is not coincidental.) This is the argumentation problem underlying most attacks on public institutions: There's seldom equally-rigorous consideration of potential substitutes — not even when the substitute is "we don't need it at all!" Life and policy and society are not binary Oxford-style debates…

  Second, a bit better camouflaged, the mottled green-and-grey-and-brown beast: What is the objective of imposing adverse consequences upon those convicted of criminal offenses (leaving aside, for the moment, those guilty but not convicted or pardoned for no good reason)? If that objective is not uniform, how do we tailor what we do without undermining "adverse consequences for getting convicted of criminal offenses," especially when we've got imperfect humans involved in the "convictions"? (Don't even think about proposing hallucinating "artifical intelligence" as an alternative…) Whether under the classic "four distinct purposes" model underlying "modern" criminal jurisprudence or another rubric, the individual psychology of the offender inevitably would destroy uniformity, even coherence — and that's no way to win a struggle.

• In an entirely expected result of the initial hearing, the Army demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with aviation anywhere near civilian aircraft. Even moreso when Army aviation standards and culture are such that they can't tell when they are near civilian aircraft.

  This is, in part, a problem with training methods. "Local area familiarization" should largely be handled through intense simulator sessions, especially when that interfaces with "daily life that isn't about the Army." That will not eliminate the need for at least some actual flights, but it should vastly reduce them — to the point at which they can be scheduled and routed to avoid "daily life" or, as in this instance, "needless death." The incentives for doing so, however, are minimized by both historical and cultural pressures, especially within the Army aviation community. (BTW, don't think the Marines, the Air Force, and the Navy are off the hook here — just ask any resident of the southern end of Whidbey Island, including the orcas, about that! Their pressures are different in detail and extent, albeit not in kind.)

• On this blawg, my few persistent readers have probably noticed over time that I try to apply scientific standards where they fit. (They don't fit in evaluating individual works in the arts…) But what are they? Is a free spirit of inquiry enough, or does it require something more? Do standards require adjustment, or is the problem not with the standards imposed on science but the standards imposed on scientists and their careers? Can I write a bunch of obvious rhetorical questions?
• It's not limited to "the sciences," either. History professors have similar problems, reinforced by watching government officials fall off the edge of the world (which is nonetheless round — eppur si muove, figli di puttana) based on fundamentally inaccurate and dishonest data collection (that doesn't even meet any need of the organization collecting the data).

Eminences Grís

These fat bangers are well past the expiration dates on their labels.

• It's always amusing (and almost always disheartening) to watch thinly-disguised partisan-but-self-interested cheerleading, especially regarding elections more than a year out, from the perspective of the "opposition" party. Right now, that amusement is primarily concerning the Jackasses (although locally it concerns the Heffalumps) — especially the refusal to engage with fundamental factors, instead focusing on minutiae. It's fascinating to see "analysis" of Mamdani's primary victory and successful candidates' obsession with "image" that won't engage with the primary problem both parties have: The widespread near-senility of party gatekeepers and candidates. Unless and until the party mechanisms agree that "retirement age means from elective office, too," we're going to have these problems — and that's not happening any time soon, as internal advancement to "gatekeeper" status, not to mention "party consensus candidate" status, is almost entirely by seniority. (And I'm saying this as well within that "retirement age" demographic.)

  Militaries are frequently, and rightly, criticized for being prepared to fight the last war, and for selecting leadership from those successful in the war before that. Even out here in a state so blue it looks like a continuation of the ocean on a map, our "senior senator" is in her sixth term, is about a decade older than I am, and shows no sign whatsoever of stepping aside (which would require generation-skipping!). But nobody is making Castro-going-on-forever jokes about incumbents. Yet.

• This is also reflected within the arts community, especially regarding public access to the arts. Whether based on distribution of copies (even of "newer" acceptable forms of works) or nineteenth-century perspectives on "copying" applied to actually faithful (probable) copies, it's almost entirely being shaped by people too old to be innovative creators who can support themselves (let alone families). Even worse, most of those who control the arts aren't qualified to engage in them — often not even as amateurs and dilletantes.

  Lurking in the background remains the usual problem: cui bono? Certainly not anyone working in areas not already considered "mainstream" — and the demographics of that particular list of "nontraditional" means of trying to profit in the arts are cringeworthy at best. Nor, at the margins, are parallel problems that ignore "age".

Not Irascible

Instead, permanently irasced. Fortunately for those of my three regular readers who have sensitive dispositions, Life has gotten in the way of blawgging of late. There are only so many times one can point out that all officers of the United States (including both the military and everyone else) take an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Not to support and defend one's personal interests, or tribal allegiances, or self-righteous moral doctrines — the Constitution. A document that had embedded in it both a self-awareness of possible error and an inherent, limited, and direct mechanism for change (which is one of its two fundamental innovations — most others, however radical in substance, are mere more-extreme examples from late-eighteenth-century systems).¹ A document that proclaims itself as less than perfection, a mere guide toward creating a "more perfect"² union.

OK, then. On to the rather unappetizing platter of sausages — a platter that epitomizes "you really, really wouldn't want to have seen these sausages being made."

• The Grauniad yet again wonders about the Problem of the Dishonest Memoir, which sounds like — but isn't — Sherlock Holmes fanfic. Maybe the problem isn't with the books, but with the selection process for them (and the marketing process thereafter). As a thought experiment, it would be worth comparing the reality games played in Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 with those in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, and pondering that one author successfully used the form of the memoir to comment on reality and evolution of a single soul, while one… did not. Then reverse the marketing categories plastered onto the books…
• That may be too much heavy thinking for a July heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere. How about the much simpler "eat the rich"? It's not like there are no examples, all in very poor taste, ranging from housing bubbles to succession crises IRL and even "meritocracy" as the emperor's new clothes. Or maybe we could just consider "entitlement as practiced by the fictional rich," either in the present tense or a century in the past (as carefully elided by Disney in a "classic period" animation involving lots and lots of puppies).
• That last aside leads into this month's episode #2716 of musicians are getting ripped off by the distribution system at least as much as audience-victims of TicketBastard while questioning whether there has ever been a middle class of musicians earning their living from music — or whether that would be a good thing in the first place. The irony that both of those links go through "begging walls" may be a bit much for a hot Monday afternoon, though.

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1. What this says about the intellectual dishonesty of slavish adherence to a vision of "original public meaning" is for another time. At that time, we'll consider things like "who is the public," "what nature of evidence is there of the 'public meaning,'" "must, or even should, clearly technical contexts always use 'public meaning' as their touchstone, as in the word 'judg[]ment,'" and perhaps most egregiously "does the 'public' of 'who is the public' form a union-set with the sources of evidence of 'public meaning.'" But what would I know about that, after struggling with the disjunctures within Beilstein as both German and the underlying knowledge of chemistry evolved over a century, or after dealing directly with [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted] with their overt temporal shifts in meaning in my first profession?
2. Perhaps examining the use of the word "perfect" in mathematics, and particularly the mathematics of the late eighteenth century as well known to (among others) Franklin, Jefferson, and Samuel Adams, might be valuable virtually impossible given the utter lack of basic mathematical and scientific literacy (past the "rocks for jocks" general education courses) endemic in the legal and political communities. Except, that is, among some economists and MBAs who have fun manipulating the numbers to support their preconceived notions, supremely confident that no one who they might otherwise respect will challenge either the numbers… or the data-gathering methods. It would also require thinking about "boundary conditions" — something that advocates of "original public meaning" try desperately to evade.

Not on Safari

I can neither confirm nor deny that there's an elephant in the room, nor whether I've noticed (or fed?) any crocodiles near the waterhole.

• I long wondered if Motel 6 left the light on for you to keep cockroaches out of sight, but it looks like the new ownership forgot to leave the light on in its own boardroom. Don't get me started on Kars for Kids (carefully choosing an unmistakeable homonymative after the hyperformalist trademark frenzy that was possible only due to the 19th-century economic concepts underlying trademark law) — or the utterly-misnamed "legitimate theater." Rather distressingly, the entertainment industry is structured on a by-design bait-and-switch, exacerbated when it's hired out for side gigs by the advertising industry — so all of this is entirely predictable.
• Speaking of cockroaches running from the lights, it's not a new problem in NoVa.
• Don't ignore this important message from our sponsors: Leaving aside that QR codes are themselves built on a bait-and-switch system designed to make users not pay attention to what they're doing, the actual use of "you don't really need to know who the sponsor actually is" just feeds the egos of exactly the wrong segment of undesireables (I say that as a not-recovering hacker from the solder-it-yourself era). Just ignore the secondaries…
• Speaking of undesireables, it's all about whose desire is being suppressed, and how, and why. We'll just ignore how actual undesireables speak out; pondering the irony of reducing a complex argument to a t-shirt slogan worn by a less-well-known part of a less-regarded sport is too much for Monday morning, though — even in the abstract or through disfavored language.
• No elephants are being shot here or otherwise harmed in the production of this blawg entry. Not even rabid bull elephants rampaging around the waterhole damaging the entire ecosystem and not incidentally making their own future prospects even more bleak. Just legislators not fully and enthusiastically participating in theocracy. But they matter no more than lawyers defrauding everyone for decades to popular acclaim. Neither does that kind of lawyer's real clientbase, not even Over There.

The Moon in June

…being what I'd like to show current-Administration buffoons. They wouldn't look, though — that sounds too much like science. Oh, you thought I meant the other "moon"?

• About a month back, the Chicago Tribune demonstrated its conscious ignorance of history. It probably wasn't the reporter, who actually works for AP. There's actually only one word — ok, one acronym — that you really need to know to understand air-traffic control problems in the US: PATCO. The same complaints and problems from the 1970s have resurfaced now — overstressed controllers (and not nearly enough of them), unreliable and out-of-date equipment and communications, purported military training exercises planned without regard to, well, reality that impair traffic control (perhaps inevitable when groundpounders fly, especially off-base; a little interservice rivalry never hurt anyone, right?), a management attitude that the lowly employees don' know nuthin'…
• How 'bout a little more of that interservice rivalry? Perhaps pointed at this Administration's pretty-much-universal mishandling of military personnel, or maybe at just SecDef? I'd refer those undereducated blithering idiots to historical studies of which I'm aware bearing directly on "the meaning of 'warfighting' in conflicts without rigidly-defined front lines," but (a) that would mean they'd have to actually read them and (b) letting them handle that material would just create more opportunities for mishandling of classified information (notwithstanding that some of that material is at minimum overclassified). That last parenthetical reflects reinforcement of "civilian" ignorance and, thus, the classification itself causes grave damage to national security that can be specifically identified, but that's for another time… and might well itself be classified.

  Perhaps part of the problem is that those "warfighters" — like SecDef wants to portray himself — don't have a clue about what it takes to fight a war above company/single-vessel/single-flight level. Or to train for it, get to the battlefield, sustain operations for longer than a couple of gaming sessions, plan for all of the above, train for all of the above… The American Way of War is now, and has been since the late 19th century, to pin the opponent in place, degrade the opponent's logistics while building up friendly in-theater forces, and then overcome our own generally below-average top leadership with well-trained and well-motivated working-class cannon fodder deployed forces. It hasn't ever been about being a superior first-person-shooter player… especially considering that in the real world, you don't get a new life by restarting the game.

• Let's ponder something a little easier than "effective civilian control of the military by means other than Stalinist purges leading to Russian Roulette." Perhaps we could just ponder what constitutes antisemitism, or if we can't agree on that appropriate responses thereto. That latter failyuah to communicate reflects a more-fundamental failure: Not understanding that "Never Again!" means everyone; it means always. Objecting to what's going on in Gaza need not be "antisemitic" — maybe it's just "antiatrocity." (We just don't need to get into the technicalities — legal, sociopolitical, linguistic, propagandistic — among "genocide," "genecidal acts," "unlawful selection of targets for military force," or any of the other buzzwords; "atrocity" will do just fine, focusing on the act more than the rationale.) That some who are objecting to what's happening in Gaza really are, or at least are really expressing in the mode of, the antisemitic, doesn't mean everyone who objects is; "one," "some," even "most" is not all… and making that error is the very foundation of European antisemitism.
• It was bad enough when McCarthy et al. went after "the arts" with their witchhunts seeking to identify any of the fifty-seven card carrying communists in the Department of Defense. Now they're going after those who would respond (within the decade) to Sputnik (an undoubted Commie achievement!). Of course, this latter is perhaps inevitable when virtually no member of this Administration has even been in a laboratory in decades (and even that was probably a freshman-level survey course). Even history professors right across the river from disreputable, uncooperative private colleges like Hahvahd understand that. That said, one must wonder if there's a history of rejections from (various parts of) Hahvahd somehow at issue…
• Next it'll be the humanities faculties. Then, probably at "less prestigious" institutions that don't study "popular" fiction on the grounds that if the great unwashed like it, it must be easy and therefore unworthy, we'll see many of the mistakes in this screed — from which I dissent, and align myself with Voltaire (and, ultimately, Tolkein — however much I disagree with some aspects) and against John Crowe Ransom. The content revealed by "close reading" of the text while ignoring its context is somewhere between merely ignorant and actively misleading.

Where Stolen Roses Grow

Fortunately, this Memorial Day I'm not annoyed by the vegetarian crawling out of the marinade; fish don't crawl, because they'd just flop around on the kitchen floor. Unfortunately, that's given me some extra time, as a veteran of a time of increasing internal divisions and dishonesty about their sources, to fear somewhat for the Union.

It's worth remembering that in the aftermath of the nearly-ultimate Othering¹ that's most prominent in US history — and, perhaps inevitably, descended into partisanship and excuses and greed, and has been thoroughly twisted since to the point that almosts no conversation can take place without self-contradiction — Memorial Day originated to celebrate deaths among Union soldiers, whether POWs or in the field (without yet acknowledging Andersonville for, well, Reasons). The difficulty at this time is a slight — ever so slight, given yet more inconvenient precedents — target shift both backward to religion and sideways to place of birth (notwithstanding that statue in the harbor and the nearby island). No, that doesn't make it "better."

And for all that, the US is still at least somewhat better than just about everywhere else (even Canada; just consider the word "Francophone" for a moment); that we even have an argument about "sanctuary cities" demonstrates that we're not all nutcases. Which, frankly, should embarrass and shame everyone. I don't think the US is to the point of truly working toward a "more perfect Union" quite yet, but at least in our critical document (and lawful object of allegiance) we admitted that we had work to do. Still to do.

Conscious acceptance of that would be the real memorial, whether to those Union soldiers, or all American military casualties, or more generally those who fought for it despite — not because of — "assimilation" and cramped visions of "America First".

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1. The Ultimate being actual extermination, or at least attempted actual extermination, with obvious historical exemplars (and that's just Europe, just rationalized-in-the-moment by religion). Whether you believe the trailer or the prologue to the first episode, Murderbot is right: Humans are assholes/idiots.

Just Eat It

I think I've finally gotten the sausage grinder under (at least temporary) control. The last four months have been almost non-stop output, even without any real inputs.

• So, the Orange Menace thinks that WalMart should just "eat" price increases caused by his tariffs. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose: If costs increase over time at his "luxury condominium and apartment complexes," perhaps Trump Tower (Chicago) rents should snap back to their 2007 levels (from what I've been able to determine, about half the current rate). Oh, that's not what he meant? He meant that just the price rises due to tariffs he personally and imperially imposed should be eaten? (We'll just ignore how much the steel to build that luxury complex came from, or had price influenced by, import tariffs on steel.) Oh, wait, he's a special snowflake; this is about appropriate behavior for the little people, not for Very Important Real Estate Speculators (With Substantial Histories of Bankruptcy and Tax-Loss Carry-Forwards, resulting in at least a decade of not paying any federal income tax despite Being Yuuuuuuuugely Rich)…

  No kids in Japan were starved in the production of this link sausage. I cannot say the same, however, for the kids of those holding "good manufacturing jobs" in Japan once the tariffs hit — that would be trickle-down economics, wouldn't it?

• Speaking of "the little people," consider early-career (and popularity-passed-them-by-with-no-other-skills-developed) artists. Or, as is all too apparent, don't; the objective of "ensuring" that there are more "good manufacturing jobs" for Real Americans has much more to do with ensuring that those Real Americans have not the resources, time, energy, or education to object… or retrain for new "good manufacturing jobs" fifteen years or so in the future, when the products and processes of their current jobs will no longer result in above-market returns for passive investors.
• The NEA, however, is just a tiny piece of artists' property interests. Like in their good government jobs… oh, wait, she's not an artist, never mind; I therefore shouldn't be considering the interests of a black woman doing an impossible job, well out of public awareness… It's almost like there's a hidden agenda involved, such as replacing the de facto Zeroth Restatement of Copyright Law (immensely flawed as it is, both in detail and in its underlying assumptions that favor transferees over natural-person creators and reject "creative process" as at all relevant) with one more favorable to techbros.
• But perhaps it's time for a sweeter, apple-flavored sausage (although nobody really wants to see how that one was made). Perhaps Mr Cook should just eat it… like he didn't do almost exactly a decade ago (just in case you're wondering, cert. denied).

Vox Populi, Vox DEI

…until it appears to impinge upon someone's sense of entitlement. Then, it's NIMBY Time.

The ahistoricity of the anti-DEI movement is rather amusing to those of us with a really, really sick sense of humor. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a substantial portion of this nation's colonial history was as a destination for those who were disadvantaged by the lack of DEI in the Old Country (not just Europe, either). If one plots the regions of origin — especially England — of major immigration in the New World against religious preferences in those regions, things begin to get rather interesting. Consider, for a moment, the virtual lionization of the Puritan immigrants to what we now call New England… separately from witchcraft trials, which are usually treated in courses and books on American History as slightly quaint exceptions to the all-around goodness of the Protestant Work Ethic, and then ignored all the way through Executive Order 9066, after which the post hoc rationalizations shifted to "we've learned and wouldn't do that ever again." That last is rather a forlorn hope, I'm afraid.

The real problem with the anti-DEI movement is apparent in something all too visible when those proponents appear as talking heads: Irrational fear that DEI programs will adversely impact those very proponents by increasing competition for perceivedly-limited benefits to which they are entitled by virtue of their ancestry.¹ In this, it is parallel to NIMBYism ("Yes, we're all in favor of shelters affording treatment to drug addiction among the homeless, but not in my neighborhood"). The irony is that the most virulent NIMBYism I've directly observed is in the purportedly "liberal and therefore unAmerican" parts of Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle with the highest proportions of real-property-passed-down-through-inheritance.

Consider, too, that there's a mathematical presumption underlying the anti-DEI movement. That presumption is best illustrated not through cake-cutting but through slicing pies of varying sizes. The anti-DEI movement presumes that the proportionate share of slices must remain constant. Of course, this is inconsistent with American perceptions (especially, but not only, Manifest Destiny) because to be true, the overall size of the pie must either remain constant — therefore resulting in a measurable diminution in the amount of pie provided to those already sitting around the table — or, slightly less pessimistically, grow at a slower rate than the increase in the number of diners. One representation of the argument looks something like this:

{quantity of each slice n=6}

≟

{quantity of each slice for n>6 after growth of the pie by proportion p}

Whether the pie is "economic" or "job opportunities" or whatever, if the pie grows by 40% (p) and the number of diners grows by 33% (n), each diner gets more pie. In a Rawls-compliant universe, the greater quantity of pie on each plate (or, at least, not-diminished quantity of pie on each plate) is a satisfactory outcome… except against greed and in light of the endowment effect as applied to an entitlement to the share of the pie, rather than the quantity of pie on the plate.²

Even inside this illustration, there are several different assumptions that bear very little scrutiny, especially when considering a non-Rawls-compliant universe:

• That a "just society" requires, in at least a general sense, "fairness"
• That past performance does indeed predict future performance, meaning that we can readily predict both n and the overall size of the pie
• That entitlement to "scarce" outcomes/opportunities is valid (and sound)

And we'll just leave aside for the moment that the very worst sin that can be visited upon sons (to the third or fourth generation³) is "unfortunate/nonmajoritarian birth circumstances," ranging from economic class to race to place. Not for too long, though.

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1. Of course there are exceptions — but they are almost always exceptions traceable to a narrower view, and often a nonconsensus view, of not what the entitlements are but of to whom the entitlements must benefit to be valid. There's usually one "shock factor" in these exceptions that, on closer examination, operates as a distraction from other alignments.
2. I am carefully ignoring later health effects of weight gain from consuming too much pie at a sitting — but only because this metaphor is already somewhat overextended. This is about letting the entitled eat pie…
3. Compare, e.g., Deuteronomy 5:9 with Deuteronomy 24:16 in whatever translation you prefer. Of course I'm being subversive with those citations — and their fundamental conflict. That, however, is for some future discussion of the parts of the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37) seldom acknowledged — such as that the entire parable makes sense if, and only if, one presumes that stereotypical views of "Samaritans," priests, and "Levites" (not to mention Jews) have been validated by consensus — are both factually correct and justified.

After-Bedtime Sausage Platter

I've had several false starts on the blawg this month (not to mention shepherding tax returns through — Beware the Ides of April, even though that's technically the 14th). I've started on several pieces only to have somebody in DC up past his bedtime make things worse.

• Every generation has some variation on complaints that "young people don't read [the right kind of] books, leading to the collapse of civilization." Here's another example, that I'm afraid evades two aspects of "reading" by teens.

  First, and perhaps most obvious, the definition of "book" (and "[right kind of] book") is more than merely "problematic" — note that every single example cited concerns "dead-tree books." I'm old enough to remember Respectable Adults sneering at mass-market paperbacks, even when they were A Clockwork Orange and 1984 and The Dispossessed and, perhaps most to the point, Fahrenheit 451… mostly with covers conceived and executed by people who were not the target audience, let alone teens themselves. It wasn't just judging the books by their covers, but by their very format — and that continues with e-books, especially when those e-books are being read on something other than a dedicated e-book device. (If you spot me on the bus or the train staring at my phone, I'm not doomscrolling — I'm reading We or some other book that the self-appointed Guardians of Culture consider suspect at best.)

  Second, there's a glare of condescension in there — the unstated assumption that "what is worthwhile in Western Civilization exists at 'book length' (usually novels and textbooks) only." A voracious reader does need to read some at book length… but they could do that by reading the archives of this blawg from front to back. More, a voracious informed reader is going to read in the lengths established by the fields of interest/study. As an obvious example, law is far, far more oriented toward individual opinions (whether common law, civil law, sharia, whatever) and journal articles. Even moreso in the sciences, both as to "generalities" and "breaking topics." There's no need to point out the problem of long, descriptive passages revealing that the author was paid by the word and not the concept, especially with fiction: The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas has a great deal more to say about "virtue" than, say, The Faerie Queen. In short, the purpose of reading matters; and it especially matters to teens who have largely been stuck with badly-written, often ill-conceived textbooks as the exemplars of "book length."

• Young people would probably run for office more frequently if the gatekeepers would (a) do a better job of gatekeeping, (b) figure out that elected office has an expiration date, and (c) knock off the "pay your dues, and only in the way that past generations have" crap. Then we end up with wide-eyed credulous crap like this piece that almost entirely misses the point: Party gatekeepers gave us both candidates for President last year, giving us a choice between the lesser of "who cares?" Unfortunately, it's actually difficult to choose rationally between bad alternatives — and people do a remarkably poor job protecting their own interests when all choices offered are against those interests.

  In short, my generation (and the prior generation) needs to shut up and get off the ballot. That's different from not listening to the old farts at all (seeing as how my generation paid the price in Vietnam, we know a little bit — perhaps all too viscerally — about conflicts serving shadowy purposes either forgotten or never revealed). The only dominoes we should be actually making decisions about are the double-nine sets in the rec room, and definitely not for others.

• From the Department of Everything Old Is New Again, a new generation has created its own Gilded Age via multinational "tech companies" that cut corners on the tax bill (translation note: the UK phrase "tax avoidance" doesn't mean the same thing as the American phrase "tax avoidance" — it's much more condemnatory, often reaching what would be called "tax evasion" Over Here). Which, I suppose, beats outright theft, although anyone who actually knows enough sophomore-year computer programming, and how the von Neumann-compliant processors of today work, should have figured out long ago that "generative AI" necessarily gets its input by making copies — precisely what copyright law is concerned with. This is not to say that copyright law couldn't benefit from some considerable rethinking and revision; it is to say that imagining that copyright law has already changed to be exactly what generative-system proponents think it should be (just ignore the massive conflicts of interest) rather resembles a different kind of thinking one's way to success.

Dress Right… Dress!

Speculative fiction isn't prophetic — or at least not in the sense of predicting, in detail, what will actually happen. That goes exponentially for filmed speculative fiction, which leaves no time to ponder between sentences, little opportunity to back up and reread a passage. Instead, it uses a perspective shift to think about something in the present, ranging from destruction of multiple civilizations through misunderstanding and a hubristic desire to enlighten (e.g., Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1995)) to use of utopian/dystopian tropes to comment on present social structure (more examples than I can conveniently count)¹ to the continued power of the Rule of Names — that names have and grant power over people and concepts — in even relatively-near-future "pure science fiction" stories (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin, The Diary of the Rose (1976)).

Sometimes, however…

CMDR LEVITT	Captain, I wasn't about to let Captain Hall get the rest of my crew killed defending [President] Clark's policies. I happen to disagree with those policies, but that doesn't mean I agree with your actions, either. It's not the role of the military to make policy.
CAPT SHERIDAN	Our mandate is to "defend Earth against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Now Clark has become that enemy. Your oath is to the [Earth] Alliance and to the people back home, not to any particular government.3
CAPT MACDOUGAN	You're splittin' the hair mighty thin, John.
CAPT SHERIDAN	Am I? Night Watch. Ministry of Peace. Ministry of Truth. Is this the same Alliance that you joined, or has it become something else? The orders you've been getting — do they represent the ideals of the Alliance… or of a dictatorship? You've been ordered to open fire on civilian targets! Is this what you signed on for? •  •  •  • I'd like you to join us. We'll kick out Clark, and the Night Watch, and the rest of that bunch, and we'll turn it over to the voters. Let them decide if what we did was right or wrong! Because in the final analysis, those are the people we work for.
No Surrender, No Retreat, Babylon-5 (Seas. 4 Ep. 15, 26 May 1997) at 37:42 et seq..

…those comments do have uncomfortable predictive value, often playing out in headlines and soundbites and social-media nonsense. The less said about what happens well out of public awareness, probably the better — if only because verification would be impossible without betraying at minimum personal confidences.

One final note to ponder: Voters make mistakes, too, especially when influenced by the Big Lie and/or believing that they can choose only a lesser evil. The alternative — as the course of history illustrates — is almost inevitably worse, and perhaps especially so when an electoral loser foments insurrection.

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1. From a classical-logic perspective, both utopian and dystopian fictions operate by exaggeration. In that sense, they form the fourth type of speculative fiction, with significant overlaps with at least one of the other types, usually science fiction. See, e.g., George Orwell, 1984 (1949); see also, e.g., Alan Moore & David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (ser. 1982–85); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974); Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888).

   The logical landmine in utopian/dystopian fiction is that the means by which the society depicted has been constructed seldom get more than a paragraph — and in the exceptional instances that do pay attention to means of transformation, everything is an off-stage fait d'accompli. Even those epistolic passages in 1984 from Emmanuel Goldstein's "treatise" are mere theory. The actual events appear nowhere, and certainly not with any detail comparable to even a synopsis.

2. See generally James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890); see also Ursula K. Le Guin, The Rule of Names (1964). I think that's enough distracting literary theory for the moment.
3. It is entirely not a coincidence that this oath tracks that of American officers… both military and others. But that is about as close as B5 ever gets to discussing the means by which that universe came to be; at most, there's a presumption of future American hegemony, which was all too plausible two years after the First Gulf War while the Soviet Union was breaking up into its historical antecedants, reflected further in titles, ranks, and monolinguism. Not to mention that it was on American TV.

New! Improved! 60% Less Political!

Mostly nonpolitical/nonpartisan today… for values of "political" and "partisan" that carefully ignore Orwell's pithy explanation of the flaw in that objective: "[N]o book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." (Why I Write (1946))

• Every so often, "covert operations" aren't just another excuse for skullduggery. Sometimes — even if unintended — they can be a bulwark against madness. But that requires focus on the arts, not on intentional disinformation; unfortunately, the latter is by far more common. It almost leads one to question whether all of those Ivy League graduates recruited in the 1950s and 1960s were the wrong ones. Maybe they should have been looking for literature majors…
• Speaking of "unwarranted exclusivity," consider the problem of actual creators from "working class" backgrounds. (The stark contrast with "nepo babies" justifies a little scrutiny, too.) The music industry is particularly annoying in this regard, given the pathetically small portion of the revenue stream allocated to them — even paperback writers are better off. (Not much.) Having family support so that "artistic failure" doesn't mean "starvation" requires a family that can afford that support in the first place. "Cui bono?" is almost always concentrated away from those actually creating and/or acting as necessary infrastructure for the arts (like the set-builders and other stage crew for live theatrical productions). Funny how one hears of musicians of the past now surviving on charity, but not music-industry (or Ticketbastard) executives…
• Then there are really, really hard questions, like how much of a father's sins must be visited upon their sons when interviewed in a documentary. Not having seen this piece, I can't even begin to evaluate its substance. I'm reluctant to assume that a 13-year-old boy in a patriarchal culture has views independent of his father's… or in lock-step with them. (Specific example, albeit much older: The just-sworn-in Secretary of Health here in the US isn't exactly in tune with his late father's views, and hasn't been for decades.) Thus, I don't think there's a bright-line rule, in general or as applied to this documentary — especially since there are atrocities on both all sides in the Levant. And "disclaimers" are worthwhile only when viewed, understood, and as necessary acted upon beforehand, so I doubt this particular disclaimer is actually worthwhile.
• Things don't get much better over in the other of CP Snow's "two cultures." Science gets respect in the US only in the abstract, and pretty much only as useful technological applications that make their way toward the general public (especially if useable with no directions or training, like the microwave oven). There are lots of high-falutin' theoretical constructs out there, some more plausible than others. As someone who has had a foot in both of Snow's cultures for decades — I have degrees in both, and indeed in the neglected "third leg" of the theoretical and applied social sciences — I've often felt more like the wishbone about to be torn apart based on superstition…
• "Cui bono?" is also at issue regarding DEI programs. There's a disturbing, much-less-optimistic-than-Manifest-Destiny background in there, whether overtly in the "Great Replacement" handwavery or more subtly, the various "anti-DEI" theories are as much about cutting the pie as anything else. The disturbing background is that individual slices can be a smaller proportion of the whole and still have more "food value" if the pie is growing faster than the number of additional "diners." Consider the Friday Night Massacre for a moment — and remember that the two highest-ranking "DEI hires" identified here managed to achieve their current ranks largely fighting against precisely the assumptions of those who just fired them.

  Or just remember that the opposite of "woke" is "comatose."

I did say "mostly."

In Praise of [In]Efficiency

I offer no apologies to Erasmus¹ for an ironic twist on his ironic twists. Ambiguous, infinite reflexiveness is kewl!

The unsanctioned "Department of Government Efficiency" has been on a rampage of late², because "efficiency" is a necessary universal objective that only a business orientation can achieve — and that "government" (and, in particular, the Deep State) can never achieve. There's a tiny, tiny problem with this pathway, though: Almost by definition, planning for crises is not efficient precisely because there is neither certainty nor sufficiently precise (and accurate!) predictability of the time, place, and context of a crisis.

Consider, for the moment, an objectively-clear crisis: Hurricane Katrina.³ If one actually looks even cursorily at the four years leading up to the devastation in New Orleans and the bungled response thereto, one sees increasing emphasis on efficiency… primarily so that any "savings" could be plowed into responding to another (manufactured? not-objectively-clear? resulting-from-the-response-as-much-as-the-putative-cause?) crisis.⁴ No plan survives contact with the enemy — or reality — because neither one actively cooperates with the plan.

More disturbingly, consider the particular rampage noted a couple paragraphs above. There might be a microefficiency possible through a fresh-eyes oversight of payment systems. Assume, hypothetically, that the deterrent effect of knowing that the DOGE⁵ Is Watching will automatically cut all fraud to zero. (Yeah, right.) Has anyone considered the costs of any of:

• Securing the data retrieved from the payment system from internal misuse, like some staffer at DOGE using the payment data to track down his ex… or estranged daughter?
• Securing the data retrieved from the payment system from external attack, like hackers choosing to attack off-the-shelf software now being stored on dubiously-secured computers in Alexandria? Or, more to the point, hostile foreign governments doing so?
• Distinguishing between the fact of a payment and the reason(s) for that particular payment — an effort (if actually undertaken) that inherently requires correlation of individual payments with specific, private, oft-protected-by-other-law personal information?
• Actual enforcement efforts against any discrepancies actually discerned (whether or not factually/ethically verified)?

I didn't think so; and even that comparison assumes (with no warrant, let alone relationship to reality) complete success.

Beginning down the path of internalizing negative externalities⁶ — necessary to determine the efficiency of a system even more than the efficiency of a particular incidence — further exposes the real problem. DOGE is attempting to count the number of angels (or, in this instance, devils⁷) on the head of a pin not by assuming just the existence of the angels and devils, but by assuming that they are necessarily — and accurately — countable through the magic of modern accounting. It further flies in the face of a critical lesson of both the events of military history and the theory of conflict resolution. "All teeth and no tail" is a losing strategy precisely because it presumes that the world is a chessboard, that no pawn ever repels the actual assault of a knight, that the terrain is known and fixed and unchallenging, that the simplest case is always an accurate model of the real world — and that no one ever responds to a demand to surrender with "Nuts!," but instead accedes to the "inevitable." But it's only "inevitable" to those making the same set of a priori assumptions, and slavishly following the same path of reasoning, as those making the demand.

Mu5k's Schlieffen Plan to remake the government as smaller and more efficient is little more than an attempt to convert the slogan "greater efficiency is always good!" into reality. Instead of considering the facts, or the law/other methods of reasoning, railing against "government inefficiency" is merely pounding on the table⁸ — or, perhaps, the on-screen keyboard in 140-character soundbites that couldn't even complete this sentence, or include the footnote. And the footnote(s) is/are part of the point: The "inefficiency meme" is at best a postulate that has not been proven.

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1. Desidarius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly (1509, this trans. 1876); see also Anthony Grafton's helpful context-setting foreword to the Princeton University Press edition (PDF) which, nonetheless, glosses over a critical aspect of the work: That it also functions as a pre-Enlightenment criticism of the argument from authority, and in particular transferrence of authority between fields of expertise. Directly confronting this problem would need to wait a couple centuries more…
2. Keep in mind that it's still during the government/business day in DC as I'm writing this. There is a nonzero chance that something even more outrageous, or at least even more remarkable, will have occurred between its writing and whenever you read this.
3. This concerns the fact and context of the response, not its competence. It wasn't a heck of a job, by any means. It's also important to remember that the management-level response failures came from those appointed to "supervise" the Deep State by the political masters, not the Deep State itself — and included a substantial proportion of "successful" businessmen (dubious genderization entirely intentional) brought in to make things more efficient.
4. It would be rather churlish for me to point out that the sum total of all such "savings" didn't make much of a dent in the cost of that earlier crisis (PDF) … and even that is just the immediate cost, as the human and consequential costs have yet to be acknowledged (let alone quantified). Consider where you're reading this: "Churlish" is probably the most-civil thing you should expect.
5. I propose giving the publicly-known leader a floppy hat and status as a spokesbacterium, carefully neglecting conflicts of interest, monomaniacal focus on twigs and not trees, not-well-hidden agendas, and attempts to deflect attention from nonmonetary (indeed, inherently inefficient) intentional side effects. Just like a disturbing nominative ancestor. Wait, you don't really think I'd suggest ridicule of a government official in a blawg piece that explicitly invokes satire, do you? Or that such ridicule just might be merited?
6. See, e.g. Prof David Zilberman, chapter 4 of course texts for Spring 2006 (PDF), and it's worth noting that this is from an introductory-level course.
7. "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911) (quoted at Britannica.com).
8. Cf., e.g., Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (1936) (convenient direct quotation).

The Way It Isn't

[Dr] Martin Luther King [Jr] Day was formally established as a federal holiday in the 80s, falling on the third Monday in January. This year, it happens to fall on 20 January — the first time it has been on Inauguration Day {ETC: of a new Administration}. So Dr King's commemoration coincides with… this. And this. And this. I think I'll have to shift to a new cliché-like aphorism, perhaps "the paper calling the snowflake white"; I can't very well use the old one, about cookware, as the hue is rather ironic (and they don't get irony — not even, perhaps especially, cast-iron[y] cookware).

• One area that is just not going to get an awful lot of public attention from the incoming Administration (not that past Administrations have done much more) is the region surrounding Mu5k's childhood home — before his adventures with a US immigration "system" that would have astounded Kafka with its arbitrariness and culture of secrecy. At least now, though, Leopold's ghosts are clanking loud enough to be heard; even slightly further afield.

  You can scream "America First!" all you like, guys. All you'll be doing is trying to deflect attention from nearly a century of America screaming exactly the opposite to the rest of the world — which, when it didn't believe it, at least heard it.

• Sometimes, by sticking to their "areas of competence," academic organizations can (often inadvertently) provide a window onto incompetence. In particular, the American Historical Association has condemned destruction not even of historical monuments, but of education and particularly teaching of history in Gaza. One should carefully note two things here: This statement is confining itself to present efforts by the theocratic government of Israel, and making no claims that can support even a conspiracy-theory-tinged claim of "antisemitism" — particularly since Palestinians are a semitic people, too; and the OP is unduly generous in saying "Historically (ha), the AHA has functioned as a moderate-to-conservative organization, often loath to weigh in on political matters." My past professional interactions indicate that "moderate-to-" has little support in the AHA's ahistorical — ha yourself! — silence on a broad range of adventures and the narratives arising therefrom, precisely because in a very McLuhanesque fashion, the historical narrative is the educational/scholarly/political positions because the historical narrative shapes and controls their scale and form.
• The AHA is far from the only "learned organization" with an undeserved reputation for true and neutral rigor; I'm a refugee from four others! Sometimes, those clubs for "experts" don't even try to be neutral (or rigorous); even more often, the hidden agendas are dangerous precisely because they're hidden, and all too often undermine or contradict that carefully-shaped reputation (for example, anyone who claims that the American Bar Association is "leftist" or "liberal" has never actually read the ethics rules it sponsors, let alone pondered the structures and silences).
• The less said about the "evolution" of gaming, the better. It's rather distressing that a pasttime based on a literature of the imagination, of difference, of above all turning failure to conform to expectations into a virtue, has been appropriated via the somewhat misnamed Lamarckian inheritance of political affiliation, of religion, of vice — and of virtue. Ironically, many of those who object to the place of outliers in character-based adventure gaming choose to ignore the vast variations built into character generation, themselves typically rolling a five for wisdom (yes, I still have my original-edition three-volume set and the heavily annotated copy of Chainmail needed in large spaces and outdoors; get over it). Snide remarks about how "wisdom" was/is all too often a proxy for "socialization aligned between sociopathy and extreme conformity" will have to wait for another time, especially when applied to the "original gamers" in and around Lake Geneva… and their corporate successors…
• Unfortunately, there's a common spicing on this platter: The power of (self-aggrandizing) narrative to overwhelm inconvenient, unfavorable-to-self-image/interest facts. The real problem with Mr Walther's piece is that he stops before closing the methodological loop. I'm sure there are some differences, somewhere, somehow, among Goebbels, Alex Jones, and organizations acting the same way — but those differences are not in methodology, and only marginally in viewpoint. Which is not to say that, historically, that sort of thing has been confined to the mislabelled "right wing"; it is only to say that the "right wing" is at present more obvious/oblivious about it.

  tl;dr "Good" and "evil" are seldom pure, no matter how they're presented for marketing purposes. Means used limit and shape the ends actually achieved; when those means rely upon deception…

Not Braving the Mall for Boxing Day

…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.)

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1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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…