Tag Archives: politics

It Wasn’t Political

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Recall that the Hampshire College President, Jonathan Lash, pulled the US flag down from all campus flagpoles, along with “all other flags.”  Recall further that he took this action after he

had lowered the US flag to half-staff after Election Day[]

followed by the US flag being burned on Veterans Day.

Lash, though, as he finally was forced by the public’s hue and cry to restore our nation’s flag to its proper place atop flagpoles, is still denying that he did it for politics.

We did not lower the flag to make a political statement. … We acted solely to facilitate much-needed dialogue on our campus about how to dismantle the bigotry that is prevalent in our society.

As an aside, what you mean “we,” Paleface?  You’re the President; it was done at your order. Full stop.

More importantly, how are lowering the flag to half-staff and then taking it down altogether under the circumstances in which you ordered these things done not political statements?  Anything done with the flag beyond its normal handling is political.

And then: Lash thoroughly contradicted himself within his own statement: the free speech that is the “dialog” engendered by his actions is at the center of what is political.

The Law Professor Misapprehends

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Jacob Gershman has a piece in The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog about the increasing use of software algorithms to assess newsworthiness and the implications of that increasing use on legal assessments of the tradeoffs between individual privacy and what’s fit to print.  In it, Gershman quotes Georgetown University Associate Professor of Legal Research and Writing Erin Carroll.

Given the dominance of platforms like Facebook, the related influence of algorithms on how news is made, and specifically how algorithms are beginning to supplant editorial discretion and the editorial process, courts need to rethink their rationales for deference to the press. In the realm of privacy law, courts have long trusted the Fourth Estate to vet the newsworthiness of a subject before publishing, so that the courts themselves did not have to. Today, that trust is becoming misplaced.

Carroll is right that courts need to “rethink their rationales for deference to the press,” but for reasons wholly independent of the existence of news algorithms.  On the contrary, Carroll has a couple of misapprehensions here.  For one, editors (and publishers, come to that) certainly are outsourcing the work of assessments in making editorial decisions, but they cannot outsource their own responsibilities in the newsworthy judging process.

For another, related thing, there’s no reason to believe the courts’ trust “is becoming misplaced” due to the use of news algorithms.

In both instances, Carroll has missed the key factor: it’s entirely the editors’ and publishers’ decisions to use new algorithms, and it’s entirely the editors’ and publishers’ decisions to use any part of the algorithms’ outputs.  The editors and publishers remain entirely and solely responsible for the material they publish—whether that material originates from interns, news algorithms, or journalists.

Full stop.

Update: Missing word is no longer missing.

Republic of China and President-Elect Donald Trump

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It’s time to start correcting some errors of long standing, and it may be (it is too soon to be confident of this) that President-Elect Donald Trump is beginning to do that with his telecon with the President of the RoC.

“The one-China policy is the cornerstone of the healthy development of China-US relations and we hope this political foundation will not be interfered with or damaged,” [Chinese Foreign Minister Yi] Wang was quoted as saying.

This illustrates one of those errors.  The Republic of China is separate from the People’s Republic of China—that’s why Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang followers and lots of others left the mainland for the island of Taiwan.  They wanted no part of Mao Tse-tung’s butcherous communist state, including declining to be a part of that.

[RoC President Ing-wen] Tsai also told Trump that she hoped the US would support Taiwan in its participation in international affairs, the office said, in an apparent reference to China’s efforts to isolate Taiwan from global institutions such as the United Nations.

It said the two also discussed “promoting domestic economic development and strengthening national defense[.]”

Indeed.  We need to be plusing up the RoC’s ability to defend itself and loudly repeating our commitment to the nation’s defense, especially against the backdrop of the PRC’s naked aggression in the East and South China Seas and its occupation of the latter.

Of course, the Obama administration objects to this apparent show of non-timidity.  A carefully anonymous “senior Obama administration official,” who’s not supposed to be talking at all “because of the sensitive diplomatic relations involved” complained

The White House learned of the conversation after it had taken place

No hypocrisy here at all.  Its not at all like Congress learning of the White House’s immigration moves with “refugees” that Australia had rejected only after the fact.  Nossir.  Never mind that the President-Elect, nor does any American, have any obligation to seek the President’s permission to make or take a telephone call.

The administration isn’t the only gang with trouble with this call, though.  The whole of the Left is up in arms; their dismay is exemplified by this from Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

I think privately, they [the PRC] will definitely seek to educate this incoming president and ensure that he understands the sensitivity of Taiwan[.]

Because an American President should be taking guidance—education, even—from America’s enemies.  Glaser (and the PRC) are right, though, that matters relating to the RoC are sensitive–just not for her reasons.  The island nation’s freedom is hanging on a thread.

Along these same lines, I look forward to the new President Trump hosting the Dalai Lama at a State Dinner sometime this winter.

A couple of small nits from the article at the link, too: it’s the Republic of China; the island on which the nation sits is Taiwan.  Also, the citizens of the RoC have been increasing their push for independence from the People’s Republic of China over the last several years; Tsai Ing-wen was just elected President of the RoC in no small part because of her and her party’s long-standing push for independence.

In sum, we absolutely need to tighten and strengthen our relationship with the RoC, and that includes working closely with them politically, economically, and militarily.

Teaching Opportunity Successfully Avoided

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Because safe spaces are more important than education spaces.

A Virginia school district has “temporarily” banned the classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, after a parent complained that her high school-aged son was traumatized by racial slurs used in the books.

Would a trigger warning have helped this snowflake masquerading as a Mom to do her job as a parent?  Probably not:

I keep hearing, “This is a classic, this is a classic[.]”  …  I understand this is a literature classic.  But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part—the literature part, which I’m not disputing.  This is great literature.  But there are racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.

No, the children can’t.  Not when their parents won’t let them learn how to do so.  And: I read Huck Finn in junior high and Mockingbird as a high school sophomore.  The slurs, aside from being part of the stories—they were, after all, tales of their times, another aspect of this teaching opportunity away from which this school, this “parent,” slunk away—they were minor incidents in the tales.

And: if these minor parts of the tales really are that important to today’s youth, to today’s infantile parents, then how better to teach these children how to deal with the slurs, the racism, the ugliness that still exists, for all the progress we’ve made since those days when I read this stuff without a hazmat suit to protect me, than to do it in a controlled environment where such words can be put in the contexts of their times and then in the context of our times?

The alternative, after all, is that these children will eventually leave their safe space homes and their safe space schools and encounter such behaviors out in the world without having had a chance to learn how to deal with them.  Then these children will learn how badly cheated they’ve been by those whom they thought they could trust because those homes and schools were not even close to safe because of “safe” space shielding.

Some Context For The Latest Headline Unemployment Rate

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Here are some graphs, via The Wall Street Journal, that show why that headline rate of 4.6% isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.outdidelaborforce

The WSJ emphasized two points here, aside from the fact that this age group being outside the labor force has nothing to do with retirement or being in school:

First, a small but ever growing minority of 25-54-year-old men are no longer in the labor force. In the 1960s, just 2.7% of men that age were outside the labor force. As of November, it’s 11.5%.

Second, from the 1960s to late 1990s, 25-54-year-old women became less and less likely to be outside the labor force (this is primarily driven by a decline of stay-at-home mothers, as more women took jobs). But in the last 15 years, the share of women outside the labor force has been growing too. It’s now up to 25.3% from 23.2% in November of 2000 just before George W. Bush took office.

Which might contribute to and why, perhaps, there’s so little wage growth, as shown in this graph:wagegrowth

There’s just too much slack in the population’s ability to work.