Two Cents on Rove

The best observations I've made and seen others make:

1) He's treated as history making when in fact he made few innovations, had little real power, and made little impact. All the big historical things that happened would have happened, or come very close to happening, if he had not existed. Pre-existing trends, chance events, and a reliably ineffective opposition did the work, while Rove took the credit.

2) He's treated respectfully and asked his views, even as his interviewers wink to him with the knowledge that about 78% of everything he says is a lie.

3) He's regarded as a genius in all probability because he's mastered the art of getting perceived as a genius without ever having to prove it. He has no academic credentials, but drops names and historical references, constantly makes mistakes which people credit for being clever lies or part of a secret strategy, and he travels among the easily impressed.

4) He's very much a product and exemplar of the corrupt and juvenile College Republican milieu, where dirty tricks are virtually all that matter. It is a culture steeped in petty criminality which its practitioners tend to lose only when they move into some part of the real world where crime is looked down upon, or graduate into adult politics and the potential for actual felonies.

5) He's regarded as an ideologue rather than a functionary, but there is precious little evidence that he had any agenda other than accumulating power for himself and his team.

6) The supposedly big idea at the center of his philosophy ultimately reduces to conceiving politics as total war without any ethical limitations: you get away with whatever you can, and that's a lot. You lie because the lies have no adverse consequences. You deny the opposition access to information. You phony up evidence. You create token programs whose effects you can exaggerate. You smear without mercy or restraint. You are absolutely loyal to those with you and seek to destroy those who are not totally loyal in return. You manipulate voting rules, voting machines, districting, use all the arms of government to promote political over policy interests. In short you rely on short attention spans, public impatience with partisan bickering, and the media's tendency to frame every debate as an even and honest one no matter how lopsided and dishonest. You shovel coporate welfare at the money base and an endless stream of empty platitutdes and symbols at the social base, knowing that 50.002% of the voters will not notice.

7) Even as congratulations and applause greet him, it is widely recognized that he is leaving under a cloud, getting while the getting's good.

UPDATE: Hey, I have a comment! Yes, No. 1 is probably overstated. We may find out later that it is terribly wrong. But I thought this was a great observation since the tendency throughout most of the punditocracy has clearly been excessive in the opposite direction, crediting him for nearly every significant political event in the last seven years.

Executive Privilege

Aziz Huq has a bylined editorial in the Nation this fortnight on executive privilege, which is very nice, but it does take him to paragraph 8 to make the point I would put first: what good is it?

The standard explanation is that shielding a communication from inspection is required in order to achieve candor. You can see this in attorney-client or priest-penitent privilege: the attorney or confessor function would be completely frustrated if secrecy could not be guaranteed. You can quickly think of most of the functions that might be considered important enough to make a guarantee of a controlled communications environment: gathering information on the transmission of a communicable disease, or for an individual's diagnosis or treatment, anonymous reporting of crimes, support groups and brainstorming sessions, or when spouses confide in one another.

There are lots of laws shielding eliberations of various bodies: when judges caucus, or jurors especially, or even when job interviewers speak openly to decide whom to hire. Hence it is argued that officers of the executive branch, in order to obtain candid advice, must have blanket secrecy over their internal (and some external) discussions.

Huq questions this, and rightly so. My own immediate thought was what kind of exchange might occur if there were no executive privilege, what Bush and Rove might have been like in a room where the contents of their discussions was subject to general release:

President: So, what ought I to do about this here thing?

Adviser: I, I.. I'd rather not say, Mister President.

President: What's wrong, rover-dover?

Adviser: I, I'm ascared, Mr. President. What if I tell you what I think and then someone finds out and doesn't like what I said? They might make me feel bad.

President: Well, you know, it's like I always say, you don't come here to be popular, you got to stand up for stuff. Just tell me what I should do.

Advisor: I can't. I'm still afraid. I, I just wet myself. Waaaah!

As you can see, eliminating executive privilege would have completely crippled Karl Rove's ability to advise the president, which would have been a loss for us all.

As a caviat, I don't doubt that observing a privilege for executive advice is appropriate in proper circumstances. Executives may also be penitents or spouses or clients or patients. There may be times when effective advice depends on disclosing some matter which is rightly secret for other reasons. And there may be genuine occasions where the value of secrecy outweighs its costs. Maybe an advisor is has a special basis for concern but they're indospensible and no one else can give the advice. Likewise, there are also exceptions going the other way, where a privilege fails: the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, for example: if a client and attorney conspire to break the law, the exchange is not privileged. In any unclear case, a court may have to examine the content of the matter in chambers to decide what is privileged and what is not. That's life.

Applemilk1988 is offline

Perhaps the most lamentable quality of the popular internet is the forum it provides for, and the representatives it attracts from among, people who are just crude and vicious.

The accusation of expressing ignorant, hateful thoughts online has been abused by rightwing pundits as a means of putting down the progressive blogosphere: some of those thin-skinned, delusional pundits can hardly find a political opinion at variance with their own that does not set off their martyr complexes or promote a surge of unexpected solicitude towards a group they had villified only the previous day.

But it occurs quite a lot, either coming from the right, or in politically neutral settings.

Today I opened up youtube and saw that many of my favorite videos were gone. A few months ago I had gotten the account just so that I could favorite a few clips from a girl in South Florida named Emily. She had reminded me, in some superficial ways, of an old friend of mine, and the videos were entertaining in a modest way. Emily's videos have gotten probably a million views (I stopped adding the figures at half that) and have been the object of a lot of hype, fan mail, and -- to the point of this post -- hate mail. I wont compare her to Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick, but for a teen (Her login name is Applemilk1988; I can only guess 1988 is her birth year) just doing these quick simple postings from the local mall or Starbucks or from the couch in her family home, they had a lot of humor and personality. Some were definitely better than others. Her best, an "intense" lesson in the Japanese language which spawned four sequels of varying quality, made me understand why she had fans. In contrast, she had regular posts in an entirely different, more natural and subdued persona, that invited a sense of familiarity and empathy.

At least for me. As I noted, Emily has gotten a lot of hate mail. I know because a huge amount of the hate mail is in the completely public form of open video posts on youtube. I continue to be shocked at the vicious character of some of the writing and posting about Emily. Just to give some idea, there is a lot of abusive language and epithets. I would guess that youtube probably deleted others because of use restrictions; either that, or the vloggers have maximized the hostility while evading those restrictions by design.

Anyhow, I noticed that the videos of hers that I'd saved were gone. Despite being a busy guy, I searched first youtube, which had still had others' videos about Emily, and then the broader web, and discovered that Emily's accounts on youtube and various other services had been hacked, apparently by people who specifically targeted her. This all happened just about a week ago, while Emily was (and maybe is still) in Japan. Their celebratory posts reveling in this attack should not have been surprising. Again, I would guess that use restrictions may have weeded out some that were more threatening or sexually graphic than what I see there, but yes, there are gratuitous references to her speculated sexual practices. They also linked to a (former)boyfriend's site, who included some personal gripes against Emily because, he said, they increased traffic to his account due to her fame. He sounds like a real prince.

Emily is such a minor celebrity, known to a fairly small segment of the public for a few short homemade videos. I don't even know her last name, or what city she's in. Nor do I want to know these, and while her more intimate videos invite some empathy with the events of her daily life, I really have no desire to know what she does in private. And yet, there is a following out there for material attacking her, calling her names, exposing her passwords, exposing her alleged doings offline, alleged failings, intimate matters, and who knows what next. This cottage industry of hate against a young woman whose worst crimes, as far as I can tell, are well within the bounds of small interpersonal matters where none of us are perfect.

This seems to me like an interesting case lesson in the proper bounds of discourse, as well as the perils of fame, and it reminds me of the Don Imus ruckus, but of course Emily's haters have not withdrawn their attacks or apologized, but let them persist and metastasize. They have gone to the point of silencing their enemy by force. And I don't see anyone defending her yet, but I'm not sure whether her fans know what's going on.

Wrecking the bus system

Cutting the bus system is an extremely stupid policy.

I was going through some old newspapers lying about my house when I noticed an article from May when vast cuts to the county bus system were being announced. I saw a detail which I had not noted before, though perhaps this is because I have paid too little attention to the issue. The article stated that the proposed cuts would create a net savings of something over $2 million, but at the cost of 7 million riders per year. I don't know what riders means, but let's assume it means full fare equivalents. Then there would be a gross loss to the system of about $13 million. This is a stunning statistic, and even if my figures are a little off, it would still be stunning, and perhaps moreso.

This is ridiculous from two standpoints. First, from the perspective of the bus system, it means a substantial reduction in service for a comparatively small benefit. The analysts have figured that by dumping unprofitable routes, they can achieve a net gain in strict economic terms. To the extent such a marginal change is a requirement, it may be the best among bad options, but it is still a bad option.

I recall my own experience in business running a small newspaper. The former publisher, deep in debt, had decided to economize by reducing the size, circulation, and use of color in the paper. The result was an immdiate net savings, to be sure, but the paper was locked in a spiral of decline. Ultimately, producing a less attractive, less frequent paper with less in it to read could not have anything good to do for readership, or the value of advertising in the paper. And economies of scale meant that a 50 percent reduction in service only produced, say, a 15 percent reduction in cost. Failure of the paper was palpable when, with a new strategy, the paper was saved.

Finding better ways to cut costs, my staff and I expanded and promoted the paper, with the result that we grew out of our debt. Similarly, a bus system in decline will only continue to decline if the best strategy its leaders can advance is to shrink service. The question that leaps to mind is what other options have been evaluated: Identifying potential efficiencies? Differential pricing of routes? Creative efforts to attract riders? Partnerships with popular
destinations? More effective use of grants and subsidies?

The other standpoint from which the proposal is ridiculous is the public standpoint. Although the bus system, on paper, will be made $2 million more profitable, the loss to citizens would be far greater than the $2 million necessary to maintain the current level of service. The fact that the equation is so lopsided suggests we need much more public investment in the bus system.
The loss of 7 million riders means that some riders will see their access to the city shrink, especially the blind and disabled, and the unlicensed, who are predominantly minorities. They will be forced to forego employment opportunities, opportunities to save on services, and bear the costs of less efficient modes of transportation, such as borrowing rides from friends, or using taxicabs, or simply driving themselves. Inequality and poverty can be safely predicted to increase. Lost employment or consumer transactions will also affect the would-be employers and sellers. Establishments that depend on bus service for customers or employees will be stressed and some may close. Increased auto traffic will increase pollution, traffic congestion, parking congestion (increasing fees for oher drivers), and will increase the number of drivers on
the road who are intoxicated or have suspended or revoked licenses, diminishing public safety. Milwaukee's reputation as a successful modern city with progressive values will be injured, and the loss of a public service will make the city less attractive to tourists, skilled immigrants, students, and businesses that may otherwise wish to locate here.

Did I leave anything out? Probably.

None of these losses will appear on an internal bus system spreadsheet. They will all have a long-term negative effect on the bus system, because the bus system depends on a thriving city and a thriving tax base. But more importantly, these losses will affect the entire public, which should invest in preventing these losses.

Of course, the question is who among the architects of the plan is: (1) actively trying to destroy public services for selfish reasons; (2) merely acting out of ill-considered ideology; (3) duped into following the plan because they have been brainwashed into thinking it is necessary; or (4) actually went through some rational thought process and concluded for a good reason whether it was necessary or not. All four exist. Only (1) and (4) know what they're doing, the former for evil, the latter for good. All that it takes for the (1)s to triumph is for the potential (4)s to become (2)s and (3)s.

Habilus Erectus

I'm back, after a ridiculously long hiatus. Nothing for all of July? Two months gone? Absurd! I promise my estimated 0.06 readers that I will do better.

Lots of ideas have come and gone. Oh, well.

Today's inspiration was a pretty stupid AP story that I saw yesterday in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It was a science story, and they're always bad. Basic information buried. Phony spin. No context. Oversimplified for idiots in a way that makes the story nearly incomprehensible to anyone with a whit of understanding to begin with.

Here's the deal. There are lots of species (or proposed species, or subspecies) of genus Homo, which includes the species of modern humans, Homo sapiens. For example, H. ergaster, H. neanderthalensis, H. heidelbergensis, H. georgicus, and so on. No one can be completely sure if a piece of skull from here or seven individuals from there is really a distinct species or not, so there could be at least a dozem, or maybe not. The two really old ones that are known, which are common and well established, are Homo erectus and Homo habilis. H. habilis is the oldest known, followed by H. erectus. There's been a longstanding puzzle exactly how the family tree looks for those old days because remains are scarce. Maybe there's more "missing links" to be undug.

The story is that they found a really old erectus -- older than any previously known -- in the same general area as an old habilis of about the same age.

This shows that erectus came about earlier than previously understood, and that it could co-exist with habilis without either species (presumably the newer and better erectus) driving the other out of existence by its superiority in a general competition to survive. This further implies the two species occupied distinct niches, and may have been under evolutionary pressure to dissimilate. The discovery also makes it more plausible that erectus might have existed even earlier than did the newly discovered , and that it could have evolved not from habilis, but from some as-yet undiscovered precursor.

I found that very hard to figure out from the article, which is larded with pseudoscientific garbage about whether human evolution is "linear" or not.

Now, the missing link idea I referenced above is mostly popular mythology. No one who does evolutionary anthropology has thought for a very long time that there was any validity to the idea that humankind evolved up a ladder or across the panel of a newspaper comic, gradually but inexorably growing less hairy and more erect through an orderly progression as though with a target end form in mind. This is so much old-fashioned simplistic magical predestination, nature is good, the world is orderly wishful thinking carried over from a 19th-century religious mindset.

Instead, you have a complicated family tree. Evolution is a natural process with lots of trial and error. Looking back, you can make up a linear progression from primoridial ooze to any modern form of organism you pick by simply ignoring all the side lineages along the way. Such a constructed linear picture, particularly when manipulated to make change appear gradual and homogenous, may be accurate as far as it describes the direct ancestry of an organism, but it carries with it a misleading message to the lay public that evolution is an arrow pointed at a final form.

Yet the news article proceeds from the premise that what is really important about some new Homo bones is that it puts further to rest an image which has long been relegated to the unschooled and those using outdated elementary school textbooks. It is full of stuff about whether erectus and habilis are "sister" species or "mother and daughter," which is itself misleading, since all mother and daughter species are sisters as well -- it's not as though a magic wand could have passed over all the hibiles and turned them into erecti -- the daughter is always a sister for at least some period. Likewise, although the use of the phrase "common ancestor" is scientifically correct, it should be noted that the common ancestor of species A and B might well be one or the other and not necessarily a third: any two species have a comon ancestor if you go far enough back.

I cannot say the article was inaccurate. But it said very little and took a lot of effort to make sense of because it really wanted to tell me things that it thought would have some lay currency, but made me wonder, "scientifically, what is that supposed to mean?" I have the same problem with a lot of legal reporting. If the reporting is not wrong, it's simply confusing. For example, a report will say a judge ruled that Mr. X can stand trial for Y. What does that mean? Was there a motion to declare him incompetent to stand trial? Was there a motion to dismiss? Was there a preliminary hearing? A challenge to jurisdiction? Was Y the only charge? Was there something specific about Y? Even if the report is accurate, I have to question, based on experience, whether it is.

It's frustrating.