On the previous thread, Tom’s comment caught my eye. In it, he links
White working class comedy gets a huge audience and success, NYT predictably pees their pants.
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‘Roseanne’: When a Punch Line Feels Like a Gut Punch
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/arts/television/roseanne-bad-joke-controversy-kelvin-yu.html
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Everything wrong with political correctness summed up nicely in one article. Though this is a 1000 words devoted to almost nothing, it is the high brows making sure Roseanne is outside the Overton window. You have been warned.
Naturally, I clicked and read the article by Kelvin Yu. Given Tom’s observation, you might think I’m going to discuss PC. But. No. I’m going on a complete tangent. 🙂
In the article, Kelvin Yu complains about Roseanne breaking the fourth wall and poses this rhetorical question:
“When was the last time you heard someone on “NCIS: New Orleans†go: “Quick! The killer’s getting away with the serum! Maybe ‘Kevin Can Wait’ … but we sure can’t!—
Many of you know my view on arguing by rhetorical questions. And Kelvin Yu has given me a golden opportunity to blather on about it.
I think Yu’s use is a perfect example of that using rhetorical questions is often evidence the writer lacks good argument to support a claim. This can often be shown by simply answering the question. Often the answer would lead to the opposite conclusion the writer appears to be encouraging us to take. In this particular case, the answer is …. uh… The fact that Kelvin Yu and whoever he considers to be included in the pronoun “we” can’t remember when this sort of thing happened doesn’t mean something similar to this hasn’t happened. It only means that, for some reason, at this very moment, Kelvin Yu and those he considers to be “we” don’t happen to remember it happening.
I don’t remember not breaking the fourth wall in a tv program, which does not mean something a TV show referencing another tv show this hasn’t happened. What I do know is it’s happened in musicals and movies. Allusions to other popular performances, literature and so on is pretty common in literature. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Penzance has a song that refers back to HMS Pinafore. (See: “Then I can hum a fugue of which I’ve heard the music’s din afore And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.”)
I think Gilbert and Sullivan do similar things in other plays. Audiences tend to find this sort of breaking fourth wall funny.
Since audiences do find it amusing, the fourth wall is sometimes broken in comedy. Some famous cases are discussed here. One of the ten movies it mentions is Annie Hall in which Allen breaks the fourth wall by bringing in Marshall McLuhan with the entire scene referencing things happening in the real world.
Blazing Saddles breaks the fourth wall referencing it’s own director.
Evidently, Deadpool (which I haven’t seen) is chock full of breaking the fourth wall. In particular, it specifically alludes to other movies when doing so. (Example: “I’m not going to name names, but it rhymes with Polverine.”)
Not mentioned above: Clueless in which the lead character interjects “I remember Mel Gibson accurately.”. Or Cary Grant in “His Girl Friday” mentioning “Archie Leach”.
So breaking the fourth wall and referencing other shows is hardly something that is “not done”. It is done. Audiences often find these breaks funny.
I take dance lessons during Roseanne, so I haven’t watched the show. I have no idea if the show is good, nor whether that joke came off as funny or offensive and so on. Kelvin Yu finds it somewhat offensive, so it was to him. That’s fair enough. I even agree with some of what he writes.
But with respect to the notion that there is something especially bad or wrong with breaking the fourth wall in comedy: Nope. That’s done in comedy. As usual, the fact the only “evidence” it was not done was the author’s rhetorical question was a good clue the author was mistaken.
Open thread.
This is almost everything that happens on Psych.
I’d guess that NCIS New Orleans HAS done things like this, probably with Lucas Black. The main NCIS did this with Tony all the time.
I thing the biggest consequence of your talking about rhetorical questions is people ask questions and then say (not rhetorical).
People do that here– and I think that’s a good thing. Then others know that they actually are hoping for an answer rather than thinking the question itself makes a point.
But people also avoid the rhetorical questions which I think is good.
Unanswered rhetorical questions just don’t work in comments at blogs. When they are allowed, the person who used one inevitably thinks their point landed because someone didn’t “come back”. But the point usually didn’t actually land.
I suspect Kelvin Yu think he made his point… but no. He did not.
Topical references aren’t what I would call breaking the fourth wall. An actor has to directly address the audience to break the fourth wall. IIRC, there examples of this in Shakespeare comedies. I’ll look.
A classic example is when Peter Pan asks the audience to clap if they believe in fairies after Tinker Bell is poisoned.
I often label questions (not rhetorical). There are times when I ask questions where I believe the answer is glaringly obvious. This feels like I’m asking a rhetorical question. But: Sometimes it turns out that (apparently) the common view around here is that the answer was indeed the obvious one. Sometimes not. Most often there’s some nuance to the issue I was overlooking or ignorant of.
So – I find it useful to ask these borderline rhetorical questions sometimes. Helps me figure out where people are coming from and/or what I’m missing.
shrug.
I don’t disagree with Lucia’s policy on rhetorical questions though. I just find it … causes me a certain degree of anxiety when I ask dumb questions to check premises or assumptions to try to get at the root of why I may disagree with someone, and as a result I go a little overboard with the (not rhetorical) qualifier.
Humm… asking rhetorical questions is breaking the fourth wall? Nah. Turning to the audience and addressing them directly, outside the context of the story, is breaking the fourth wall. (See closing act in Pippin, for example, where Ben Vereen’s character addresses the audience.)
No. Yu asked this rhetorical question.
He asked the question while advancing an argument that he claimed involved Roseanne breaking the fourth wall.
SteveF,
I should add: I think Yu must consider bringing up shows the audience might be watching around the current time “breaking the 4th wall”. I agree with you that’s not generally thought to be breaking it. Generally, the actors have to actually address the audience.
My examples include some where the actors both break the fourth wall and happen to mention shows or things going in the lives of the audience right now, some that only actually address the audience and some that only refer to entertainment or events the audience is likely living through.
No matter what you call any of these things, both are done, and both are sometimes done at the same time. It’s not that difficult to think of cases. ( Frank Underhill broke the fourth wall routinely as did Francis Urqut in Game of Cards.)
I haven’t watched the show, but I think on Roseanne what happened was something like
‘We missed show X’
“They’re just like us. Now you’re caught up.”
Is ‘us’ talking to the audience that show X is like show Roseanne
or is she just telling her husband people in show X are like Roseanne Conner &co.
Lucia, there are plenty of uses of the rhetorical question in the literature and arts.
But dare one attempt it here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question
MikeN (Comment #167756)
Let me start by saying I cannot stand Roseanne or her shows.
To me it was obvious that Roseanne is saying that the people on those shows are like the people portrayed in their show. I would think in context that she was making the point that in some basic way cultural and racial differences are superficial and that perhaps economic classes have something in common or maybe in broader sense that human beings have something in common and at the same time in a sort of comedic way relieving her husband’s anxiety about missing the shows. Yu I think was looking for something about the show with which to disagree and perhaps to prove his NYT credentials and he turned it into something to the effect that she was not taking these minorities seriously and grouping them into an inconsequential clump and further Yu as a minority could speak from experience and take it personally with maybe a little victimhood thrown in for good measure.
There now I have reviewed the reviewer and imparted motivations to those reviewed that fits my mood and finished it in fewer words than Yu would. Of course BS in any amount is still BS.
I read what the lines were. It seemed to me they might mean a number of things, but having not seen the show, I can’t say what they meant to me in context.
Just reading the words, she could have been implying
(a) What Yu claimed– waiving away minorities.
(b) That all Hollywood likes to suggest “every one is the same” in any number of ways, possibly including everyone has the same views and values and that they only “differences” Hollywood likes to see is in how we look.
She may have been implying something else.
But to me (b) would be the more complex implication. It would suggest that Hollywood doesn’t really like to see or show political differences, economic differences, educational differences and how these interact. So the message of everything– especially shows with asian or african american casts is “see, we’re all the same. Just like everyone in Hollywood”.
Like Roseanne or not, (b) sort of is the “Roseanne” message and always has been. Her shows have always shown people with different political views interacting. It also always focused on the reality of families who are struggling financially and are not in the academic, social, economic or political elite. Unlike many other shows, those who are financially struggling don’t magically live in what almost anyone would recognize as an expensive house, wear the latest fashions and so on.
If she meant (b), she wasn’t waiving anyone away.
On the other hand, maybe she was waiving them way. I didn’t see the show so I can’t say. It probably did feel that way to Yu.
The thing is, if you really dolive in a bubble and think “everyone” shares the same political view, you aren’t going to discern meaning (b) even if that’s what the script writers meant.
Comedy is often subtle and it can be difficult to interpret the precise “message” even when there is one. Obviously, it’s even more difficult to interpret if you didn’t even watch the show. I didn’t. So… my guess could be off.
Roseanne used to break the wall in the older series regularly. I remember in particular when one of the kids was played by a new actor, there were repeated references during her first appearance about how she had changed.
Evidently, both actresses who played Becky are back. Becky 1 plays Becky. Becky 2 will play a woman who wants to hire Becky to a be surrogate mother. Evidently, the script makes some references to the past show with one of the Becky’s saying something like, “When I look at you, it’s almost like looking in the mirror!”
My point about the lines is that one meaning is kinda breaking the fourth wall while the other is not.
MikeN,
Yep. The official definition of breaking the 4th wall involves turning and directly speaking to the audience. Roseanne didn’t do that in the show Yu discussed. She spoke to the character of Dan.
Yu is stretching the meaning…. well beyond the norm. To the extent one can certainly say that’s not breaking the 4th wall. It’s just making an allusion, and there has certainly never been any rule against that. Shakespeare did it all the time. It’s generally considered good.
That is just one example of breaking the 4th wall, which comes from the stage having three walls and the fourth is between audience and actors. However, anything that has the actors showing awareness they are fictional is breaking of the 4th wall. For example, Volunteers had Tom Hanks and John Candy reading the subtitles.
Yes Dear after they found out they were being canceled took it to ridiculous extremes, with a character who thought he was a sitcom character, can hear the studio audience laughing, etc.
Lucia, this is a bit OT, but …
I have a paperback copy of Unberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. This edition has author’s notes in addition to the novel itself. The notes describe how he came to populate the novel, what personality traits were needed in each charactor, and how they would interact – in a sense he described his planning for writing it.
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When I realized that in reading his notes, I was losing the reality of the events I’d acquired from the novel to be replaced my his machinations, I felt a great loss; an unnecessary and harsh awakening from my assumption of the reality of the events he portrayed.
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I had read the book some years after seeing the movie – both are exceptional. They speak to an issue which had occurred to me in college – that humor was inherently a sacrilege.
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I can’t offer examples but I think Mel Brooks’ work occasionally violates the fourth wall.
Mel Brooks *often* breaks the fourth wall. The famous tagline in History of the World, “It’s good to be the king!” is an aside to the audience. In Spaceballs, the actors watch scenes from the movie on a screen. And at the end of Blazing Saddles, a fight scene in the West breaks into the next set where they’re shooting a Busby Berkeley-type dance scene.
Perhaps the earliest example which I can recall is from a Marx Brothers movie, Horsefeathers.
jferguson, CS Lewis totally messed up The Chronicles of Narnia when in being nice to a kid Lewis told the kid he had the right ordering for the novels. Based on this letter, the publisher now publishes the set out of order, ruining the reader experience considerably.
HaroldW, that may be the earliest in film, but Don Quixote breaks the 4th wall, with characters reading the first half of the book. Before that, I think the author of the Mahabharata is a character himself.
I don’t know about the rest of you but good novels take on a reality for me that I treasure. I’ve read the Patrick O’Brian books – all of them – three times. I find I read less now, because I’m more tied up with projects. Too bad, too.
MikeM,
The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe is first, right? That’s the way my boxed set starts. It’s not in in order of time. The Magician’s Nephew is later, explaining how the witch got there. I like that order.
Shakespeare did it in Prospero’s Epilogue in The Tempest.
The tempest – reality or apparition(?)
All within a play of course, nice play
on how we human actors create our
own living dramas that clash with,
or sometimes catch an intimation of,
a mysterious reality out-there, perhaps.
Why the play’s very theme’s ‘deception.’
The very events we witness here on
Prospero’s island – used to be Caliban’s
but now it’s not – we view because of it.
Everyone’s landed on the island because
of a take-over deal between Antonio,
Prospero’s brother, and Alonso, king
of Naples, that robbed Prospero of
his dukedom in Milan, Alonso and
Antonio now brought to shore and
judgement by a seeming tempest, dire
spectacle of storm and shipwreck that
Prospero has ordered with his magic.
The play’s the thing, of course, to catch
the conscience of the king and perhaps
of Antonio, planned by that master
manipulator, Prospero, and ministered
by his airy servant Ariel. Nothing
but transmogrified scenarios from
beginning to end, masques, and music
that sends the actors into dreaming sleeps
like tricksy Ariel’s song to Ferdinand:
Full fathoms five thy father lies …
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Magic’s in the air and in the language too
that resonates with strange conjunctions
like ‘sea-change’ and ‘sea-swallowing’
and ‘heart-sorrow’ and ‘spell-stopped.’
Not that the actors need much confusing
when you see how easily they deceive them-selves.
Do Gonzalo and Antonio describe the same island?
One describes a place advantageous to life,
the other ‘as’twere perfumed by a fen.’
Then there are the case studies of confused identity,
Stephano mistaking Caliban for a moon-calf,
Caliban thinking Stephano fell from heaven,
Miranda seeing Alonso and Antonio for the first time,
marvelling at beauteous man-kind and exclaiming:
‘O brave new world that has such people in it.’
And just to confuse the audience, consider the
final scenario where Prospero addresses us
across the stage proscenium, breaking the magic,
you’d say, except that he’s asking us to release him
and his acting crew, asking us to breath air into the
sails of his craft and send him on his way back to Milan.
What are we supposed to do? Any wonder that
the audience departs the play still held in a kind
of waking dream.
Addressing the audience … What happened to
the spaces betwixt? 🙁
JF, Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander series, you are
there! Real battles from Admiralty archives fought by fictional
character, Jack Aubrey. Friendship of Commander and Surgeon,
someone said,’Jane Austin at sea.’ Yes. I’ve read them three
times too. Killick! 🙂
Hi beththeserf
we put a “.” to force a line feed. to wit:
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like this.
There’s a BBC comedy called “Miranda” (available on Netflix as well) where Miranda frequently talks to the audience/camera regarding the messes she gets herself into.
To make it slightly more absurd, sometimes another character will look puzzled and ask who she is talking to.
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thx, JF.
Lucia, that is the correct ordering. Publisher is no longer using that. Lion is now third I think.
TV and movies also seem to have some major rule against narration. I always like narration, particularity when it is expressing what the individual is thinking. Books express thought on a regular basis, and it is unclear to me why they decided it is verboten on the screen.
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I probably watched two episodes of Roseanne in my life, and not recently. I just got a laugh at how the NYT felt compelled to write a screed on it like Roseanne is some sort of serious social science that needs to be #resisted. I particularly enjoy the “I criticized something on Twitter and a random person was mean to me” melodrama and running to a fainting couch that is quite common lately.
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All the very serious people (TM) who scrutinize every line in Roseanne might try pointing their psycho-microscopes at The Daily Show et. al. some time.
That is to me an interesting comment, jferguson. I suspect that it is not uncommon for the reader to project onto the characters of a novel based on their own life experiences and away from what the author might have had in mind – and the better reading for it and a good reason to forego the authors notes.
I have read novels written by my brother and my son’s father-in-law and I can obviously see where their characters are built on their life experiences, but when it comes to the heroic and idealized actions of some of their characters and on the other hand the evil deeds of its anti heroes I sometimes see parts of the authors that are unexpected.
When I ask questions about their characters or even what is behind what they are attempting to portray they often appear to be a bit coy about it and as if to say: you decide.
Kenneth, I think the responses of your brother and son’s father-in-law are the right ones. I seem to very visual – if I can’t visualize it I have a hard time understanding it.
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I drove into a ditch at 65 mph some years ago while listening to The Perfect Storm being read on the radio. I was completely absorbed in the story and was seeing the events unfold – not the road ahead. I can’t talk on the phone and drive. When it comes to reading, if the words are there I can be there.
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I suppose it’s a bit childish but usually the only thing that grabs me in literature is the story. If there isn’t one, I have to work at it if I need to know the stuff. Maybe not much different from moving my lips when I read which I’m told I do.
The Race and IQ culture wars heat up again:
NYT: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html
As usual Twitter made everyone calm and collected and the issue was resolved. Or not. Sam Harris (who interviewed Charles Murray and was vilified by the thought police) gets fed up with Vox’s Ezra Klein and publishes an email thread they talked about it.
https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/
Klein publishes a long meandering anything but address the subject head on article:
Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve
Richard Haier, a leading researcher on intelligence, responds:
No Voice at VOX: Sense and Nonsense about Discussing IQ and Race
http://quillette.com/2017/06/11/no-voice-vox-sense-nonsense-discussing-iq-race/
Klein and Harris enter the ring for a two hour death match podcast debate:
https://samharris.org/podcasts/123-identity-honesty/
If you want to save yourself time:
Side 1: This is what the science shows, we shouldn’t undergo character assassination for saying it out loud.
Side 2: But slavery…you racist!
I think this excerpt from the Tom Scharf linked article in the NYT sums it up nicely:
My wife, son and I have recently had or genome tested by 23 and Me and AncestryDNA with some very interesting results for both disease related genes and ancestry. Much of the results make sense within the limitations of the estimated certainty of the results. We also submitted personal information that can be used in genetic studies.
My son’s friend on genetic testing found that he had a daughter of whom he was not aware. He had her visit his family with no apparent problems or retributions.
I did not read the other links that Tom provided.
Kenneth, that statement becomes false when you look at the extremes. Small differences in IQ at the ends of the bell curve makes for large disparities in populations. It’s why there are so few female chess grandmasters or other higher level math and science fields(well technically that is due to higher variance for men). It’s why you get the top student in Africa is Chinese. It’s why there are so few top scores on SAT among blacks that colleges have to lower standards to fill seats.
Kenneth,
Sure, if you only look at the group median IQ scores, the differences seem small. But as MikeN pointed out, variance is also important. Combine that with affirmative action and the disparate impact based only on statistics fad and you have problems.
During the exceedingly tedious “debate” where they spent the entire time personally insulting and psychoanalyzing each other, Harris brought up the example of the recent discovery that only white people have Neanderthal genes (conversely blacks have none, as we all know in genetic debates these are the only two races that exist). He asked suppose it had broke the other direction? Would we be banned from saying this? My guess is that would have been verboten. The culture warriors have “won” this public debate, you can tell from his tone and his words, Harris says he won’t ever talk about this again and is quite exasperated with the intentional and dishonest conflation of genetics and social policy. It is the academia genetic researchers who lose.
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It is worth remembering that Ezra Klein is the one who created the infamous secret JournoList server for leftist journalists where they discussed strategy and coordinated their efforts. This is a comment back in the Obama / Rev Wright era:
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“What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares and call them racists.”
I do not see how it becomes false when that statement was not about the extremes of the bell curve. MikeN, you will have to provide me with some references here about these extremes of the bell curve of IQ and validation that the scores are related to genetics. A bell curve implies symmetry and thus would in turn imply that for whatever group there is higher population at one extreme end there is one at the extreme lower end. Of course the racist attitudes are not about the extremes but rather about a group that avoids consideration of the individual.
Whether it be genetics or not I guess my gender can proclaim about chess masters if they be so disposed and humbly submit that we have to claim most of the mass murderers and violent criminals. As an individual this has nothing to do with me.
There is video of the Canada van killer trying to get cops to shoot him…unsuccessfully. This is pretty amazing. This cop is the furthest thing from trigger happy.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/apr/24/driver-kills-nine-toronto-live-updates?page=with:block-5ade5a2ee4b0d0cf980b90fb#block-5ade5a2ee4b0d0cf980b90fb
Kenneth, there would be extremes at both ends for men vs women, when the issue is different variance. For different IQ levels then the higher mean IQ then there will more on the high end for one group and more on the low end for the other group. The genetic basis is somewhere in Tom’s links I presume. I assume the link to reach my conclusion. The general statement that there is more difference within a population then between two is correct, but at the extremes there is more separation.
Generally, bell curve is 70% within one standard deviation of mean, 95% within two sd.
So if one population is mean 85 and the other is 100 while standard deviation is 15, then one population is 2.5% over 115, while the other is 15%. At 130, it is 2.5% vs .3%, 145, it would be .3% vs .007%, more than 40-1 ratio. For blacks and whites already at a 1:10 population ratio this is 400-1 whites over blacks.
Kenneth
This appears to be the case with men. The mean/median for the two populations are close. (Some studies put the male higher, some the female higher.)
The variance for men is larger. There are more male morons. There are more male geniuses. Most people are neither.
MikeN:
“Generally, bell curve is 70% within one standard deviation of mean, 95% within two sd.”
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I thought that the assertion that this might not always be true was the basis of the big flap when The Bell Curve was published.
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IIRC They asserted that over 80 years (??) of testing women and men tested with means of 100 but that women were more clustered near 100 than men. The implication was that there were fewer truly stupid women than men in a sample ot 10,000 but also fewer brilliant women. The implication, I suppose, was that if you were hiring for a situation which required 135 IQ, The female pool would be much smaller than the male.
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I have no idea whether this idea was ever intelligently put to rest.
j ferguson
It’s probably impossible to put to the test. By the time you are hiring for jobs that require high IQ, all sorts of sorting has happened. Much of this is self sorting based on interest and aptitude. Some is external sorting.
Obviously, a population of 1 can’t tell you much, but sometimes an example can be illuminating. Consider Heddy Lamar (inventor of frequency hopping.) She was clearly very intelligent. But at a very early age, she was a beauty queen, went into film, married to an arms dealer, ran off. Eventually, back in film, but she worked on inventions as a hobby. Her IQ was almost certainly above 135.
She was not formally trained. It’s quite likely no one “looking” to hire an engineer, lawyer, doctor or any other job that tends to need high IQ would have hired her. In fact: she was not qualified for most of these jobs — I’d guess she could not build a bridge even if she was familiar with a broad range of science principles and invent. (There is a certain tedium and systematic approach in applications that does require learning certain standard ways of doing things.)
Now, she is one example. But the fact is she does exhibit something typical which is: By the time one is 18 years old, one had generally been “sorted”. She was “sorted” into beauty. They then don’t pursue education in other area. The result is despite having a sufficiently high IQ to succeed any number of professions that do require a high IQ, they aren’t in any of those professions.
If someone were to try to do a “study” of the ratio of available men and women with IQ above X who also qualify for a job, the sorting issue might very well dominate. At best, the situation would be “we don’t know and have no way of determining if the results we are getting are due to sorting or actual IQ”.
So the best they can do is just have a lot of IQ data unrelated to job applications and see how men and women’s IQ’s spread. It appears that men’s IQ’s have larger variances than women’s IQs. This result has been known at least since I was a kid because I remember my mother discussing it in the 70s. (She was taking “gifted children” classes to get a specialization for school certification.)
The DNA guys are actually coming up with a variety of interesting explanations (I just can’t relate them all.)
Clearly environment, the way women were pushed away from high IQ jobs in the past, can play a role in the perception of IQ. Even today women are not near parity in areas such as engineering or physics. I haven’t seen anyone claim that the IQ testing reveals anything but near equality with the noted exception of a slightly wider bell curve for men. The wider curve for men may also be environmental, something similar to the Flynn effect.
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IQ and genetics are very messy, but not knowing answers definitively does not equal knowing nothing. You can apply many of the state of climate science knowledge tropes to genetics/race knowledge. The “racial genetic sensitivity” of IQ is not yet known but declaring this means “the earth isn’t warming” may be entirely ideological driven.
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It’s pretty basic that as the differential environmental gaps are removed between groups the IQ gap will narrow. It will narrow until it hits the wall of genetics. Social activists are concerned this will be used as an excuse to stop trying to narrow the gap. It is a valid worry that this would be used to prematurely stop working on the problem. Alternately it makes sense that if you are hitting the genetics wall that spending a lot of taxpayer resources on environmental solutions isn’t very smart. You can’t make cats as smart as humans by throwing money at the problem. You can divert those resources to more productive areas.
Tom
I’m pretty sure the geneticists think there’s a decent likelyhood it has to do with genetic expression. There’s something called “epigenetics”. I’d say more but I would probably say something pretty stupid.
My intention was not so much to make a social comment as to simply point out it would be difficult to actually do an experiment where one looked at IQ’s in a pool of potential job applicants. There is just too much filtering already done by that point and this is true for nearly all jobs.
They can be as concerned as they want to be. The fact is: if a portion of IQ is due to genetic factors, there is a gap that cannot be narrowed by changing environment. The only way to “narrow” it would be eugenics, which would (a) be horrific and morally reprehensible and (b) a pretty idiotic.
WRT to (b): IQ is not the only important trait in people. If idiots actually decided to use eugenics to narrow the gap in IQs, the would almost certainly end up narrowing the gene pool for other things.
Race and IQ is a sideshow to the real problem of the increasingly large difference of the opportunities and returns based on your cognitive abilities in today’s society. The devil’s spawn, errr…Charles Murray, covered this topic in detail in his book “Coming Apart”. A narrower “cognitive elite” are gaining more and more riches and cultural power. They are self sorting (i.e. marrying each other) and isolating themselves physically, culturally, educationally, and even genetically if it continues for generations. The bottom half is not faring nearly as well and the top quintile seems rather unconcerned to the point of open disdain for their deplorable fellow citizens. Aren’t they supposed to be smart?
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Equal opportunity is a fine system unless those with power start destroying the opportunity of others for their own self enrichment. Self interest is a very powerful force and we want those in power to work in the self interest of USA, not the interest of the global cosmopolitans, nor the interest of only the cognitive elite. Short answer is share the riches or deal with social upheaval.
As someone who has hired people for jobs with a wide range of technical requirements, I would think that anyone who hired based mainly on IQ, or perceived IQ, is an idiot.
Tom,
I haven’t read Murray’s book. I’m dubious of the claim that the cognitive elite is gaining more cultural power in any sustained way — or that the problem is any worse than it ever was.
There has always been some self sorting and con-commitent unsorting. I don’t think it’s quite right to think the top quitile are all unconcerned with those they group as ‘deplorable’. Hillary may have been, but that doesn’t mean the all or even the preponderance of the top quintile are unconcerned.
I’m not convinced socialism is the cure for what ever ills might result from the fact that intelligence can result in better pay for those who are intelligent and also work hard.
Kenneth,
Start a software company with people of random IQ’s and try to compete with a similar company that has IQ’s of 130+.
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“The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people,” Bill Gates once said in an interview. “There is no way of getting around that in terms of IQ, you’ve got to be very elitist in picking the people who deserve to write software.”
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It matters. It matters a lot for some professions and less so for others. It’s not everything, but it’s definitely something. If you are hiring with educational requirements, you are sorting by IQ. Exceptions are everywhere but higher cognitive ability is tied to better outcomes in numerous areas. Other things matter. Drive, work ethic, curiosity, people skills, refilling the coffee when you take the last cup.
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All things equal, hiring people with higher cognitive ability will produce better results. All things aren’t equal. If you are hiring for a prime time legal drama show, I suggest sorting by young, fit, beauty, and “smart looking” for much of your staff. You don’t put Albert Einstein on your manufacturing floor building the same cable over and over. And over.
Lucia,
It’s changing, and Murray backs that up with reams of data over decades. Now whether that means worse or better depends on which side of the line you are on. People marry between social classes less often, people live in mixed class neighborhoods less, etc. He also documents how increasingly distinct some differences are. Smoking is almost non-existent in the upper class. Having children outside marriage. Addiction. Teenage pregnancy. Unemployment. There have always been differences here, but according to Murray the size of the effect is increasing.
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He also documents how isolated the cultural bubbles are becoming. Test your bubbleness:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/do-you-live-in-a-bubble-a-quiz-2
Kenneth, I agree that hiring by IQ alone probably doesn’t make any sense, but … When you’re looking for bright eyes and bushy tails, the IQ’s may come along for the ride.
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Lucia, if you can remember it might be interesting if you coould share some of your mother’s observations on the vairance you write of and what people thought at the time.
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I think there was a lot of outrage at Murry’s ‘Bell Curve’ book at the time.
Tom Scharf,
I doubt this. 🙂 Seriously: I doubt it can be measured with “data”.
Define social class.
We have some social problems. We had lots of alcoholism before prohibition. It’s what sparked the social movement.
Uhmm… which tells us what about people marrying?
j ferguson
I couldn’t share it. She just shared info that happened to be in a course she as taking at the time. The course was for a certificate in teaching “gifted” children. It was simply observed that men’s IQ had a larger variance. I’m sure different people thought different things.
j ferguson
I read it at the time. I wasn’t outraged. But I remember being negatively impressed by his interpretation of data especially with some claims about statistical features. I wrote notes in the margin and then decided that I tended to doubt his interpretations. That’s why I tend to think I would find reading his later stuff a waste of time.
JFerguson, variance and IQ was not a controversy of The Bell Curve. The controversy was about race, which was really not a large focus of the book, and the race IQ link isn’t affected by variance. Coming Apart is essentially the same book but whites only to avoid the controversy(Have people taken Murray’s bubble quiz?).
At the time the book came out, I read a review that left out discussion of this controversy, and I thought Murray was a big liberal arguing for government intervention to deal with inequality caused by genetics.
Lucia I was surprised to read your mother knew this. But thinking about it, much of social science feels like it is finding scientific verification for common knowledge and practices. Still waiting to see if there is science backing up cousin marriages and the rules involved.
What is the bubble significance of ‘Have you bought Avon products?’
Tome:
On the bubble survey:
I am not a first generation person and my parents were not what most people call “working class”.
It seems I could fall in any number of bins.
I would note: given the categories Murray has on this, it seems people do not share the class of their parents. That’s what I anticipated. The fact that this is so makes it a big dicey to interpret “data” that say people don’t marry “different classes”. Suppose, for example that somehow in Murray’s classification scheme Jim and I are both upper middle class persons with middle class parents because we have Ph.Ds or something.
Yeah…. we married each other. We met in grad school. But even if we hadn’t, it was unlikely we’d marry low IQ floor sweepers who worked in a shelter because … well… come on! I seriously doubt that intelligent people married very unintelligent people in the past either.
Meanwhile, Murray might have “data” showing Ph.D’s married other Ph.D’s more than in the past. If so, my reaction would be: Well.. no shit Sherlock. Decades ago women were discouraged from and often prohibited from pursuing advanced degrees. So of course the make Ph.D’s didn’t marry Ph.D’s.
Data showing college grades married not-college grads in the past wouldn’t necessarily indicate that college grads didn’t tend to marry smarter than average women. It just meant that women with high IQ’s didn’t go to college so attending college wasn’t much of an indicator for female IQ in the past. The self selection effect might still have been just as strong.
RE: the fourth wall
I found it really annoying when Richard Harris did this during a filmed performance of “Camelot” that was broadcast on HBO about 30 years ago. There’s a time and a place for breaking the fourth wall — comedies seem to be particularly appropriate times for doing so.
RE: The Bell Curve
I don’t know if Murray has reams of data showing cognoscenti gaining cultural power but my observation is that self-ascribed cognoscenti have definitely been taking positions of cultural power. It’s long been an ill-kept secret that extremist liberals have been gaining more and more power in Hollywood and how and what is presented in entertainment media.
There have been several studies showing how self-ascribed cognoscenti have taken over news organizations and influencing what the common citizen “knows” (heck, the entire first year of the Trump presidency has been a textbook example of people who felt they were cognitive elite trying to forcefully influence the national culture).
What I find most comical is that I don’t think the self-ascribed cognitive elite are generally any smarter than the average population, they just think they are because they’ve had more access to “education” or hang out with other people who think they’re elite.
Twitter provides prime evidence for how truly dumb many people who THINK they’re cognitive elite truly are. Samuel Clemens would have so much fun with them …
MikeN:
Did I misremember that different male-female variances were discussed in the Bell Curve? Could be.
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Whether Murray discussed it, I can assure you that there was a lot of stress on the subject where I lived at the time, South Beach, I think.
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MikeN
I follow a DNA guy on twitter. I click over and read different articles from time to time. Evidently, the big danger isn’t necessarily you marrying your cousin or even your sibling. For a typical person in the US, the genetic problems would not be statistically very large.
The big danger is when a small sub-group forms and they all intermarry over generations, with no out-group members marrying in. Of course, in this context, marrying your cousin or sibling is likely to cause problems. These isolated groups can end up with people who aren’t literally cousins, but whose genetic heritage is just as close. Worse: because of the way genes pass down, you can have certain deleterious genes shared at very high rates. In these cases you can’t really escape the likelihood of shared deleterious genes, because lots of people in the group share those.
So, for example, Pakistanis’s in the UK seem to have formed a sort of intermarrying sub group, and may be having some problems with kids getting pairs of recessive genes passed from parents who are not cousins. Similar problems are not seen in Pakistan, where plenty of people do marry cousins, but those cousins aren’t all sort of 4th or 5th cousins of each other.
Derek
And also losing it due to the internet and things like netflix. And those you likely call ghe cognoscenti didn’t win the last presidential election.
If the argument is “over the last 30 years, there has been a periods of…” Ok. But things have their ups and downs.
Tom,
This is a pbs article synopsis of Murray’s argument.
This argument is as bad as I anticipated.
First: Yes, the high successful male at the end of the ’50s was likely to marry “the girl next door” — if that phrase is used to describe some girl who lived in the neighborhood or who in his social circle. But guess what? Neighborhoods and social circles were already segregated and “the girl next door” was likely the daughter of a the very successful male who lived next door. The future successful some of a successful man probably didn’t marry the scullery maid.
And the “era when few men thought that brains in a woman were sexy”… Oy. Sure smart wasn’t marketed as “sexy” back. But honestly, it mostly still isn’t. Despite that, guys have always found smart more attractive than dumb. They don’t like smart and nasty, but guys like smart. Heck, 6 year old buys like smart. Smart by itself won’t make you the most popular kids on the playground, but being smart has never actually hurt. Even as a kid on the playground, I could see the kids who got picked were rarely smart.
The current system may result in more income stratification because both earners contribute to the family pools. But I seriously doubt it has any greater stratification effect on IQ than the past sorting did.
Tom Scharf (Comment #167835): “It’s changing, and Murray backs that up with reams of data over decades.”
Over what time scale? The post-war period, up to the late 60’s (maybe the early 70’s) was a very peculiar period in American history. Changes from that time could well be just returning to normal.
Tom Scharf (Comment #167834)
Tom, I was talking about hiring for the job and not doing it by random IQ. In other words if my Human Resource department handed me a list of candidates scores for IQ that would hardly overrule what I learned about the candidates job capabilities in my interview – unless of course I were an idiot.
As an aside, it is well known that every generation in almost the entire would has a higher intelligence than the preceding generation. In some nations the generational increase is significantly more than in others. How would that affect a statistically derived IQ bell curve or even leave it with a lot of meaning.
Lucia,
43 points means you are a redneck, I only scored 27 since I am such a high society type. I definitely won’t be seeing you at the Shakespeare Summer Festival I guess, but I’ll wave at you on your way to your NASCAR race, ha ha.
NASCAR? Is that like a tractor pull? I’ve been to a tractor pull.
Honestly, I attribute some of my points to engineering. Of course I’ve been on a factory floor. Also, very brief stint where family income was low because Dad lost his job, we moved back from El Salvador and we moved in with my grandparents. So I got to check an answer that bagged me points.
(In case you were worried about my impoverished childhood….. hah. Grandpa Harry Tiernan was an attorney (at Tiernan and Krug) lived in the swankiest neighborhood in Buffalo and Dad got a job eventually. But in terms of honestly answering the question technically, my nuclear families’ income was close to zip for a while. My sister sent me a real estate listing for Harry’s old house. The room I always called “the garret” was marketed as “the ballroom”. Actually, it was a ballroom with a wood floor, but no longer decorated up to act as a ballroom. I came up with garret when I read some book when I was a kid and they described a room directly under the roof….)
Even for a bit after that, before my parents bought a house, we lived apartments not surrounded by college educated. So that bagged me points.
Also, Jim and I lived in an apartment in non-student area while we were in grad school. Our neighbors were blue collar, or retired farm widows with no degrees. So… points. I suspect living in Richland WA got me points based on something. I’m trying to remember what. But I looked up the population which was 48,000.
If I fished, I’d have gotten some more points. But I knit when forced to go on a fishing trip.
(Note: I get a kick out of seeing “Tiernan and Krug” in Buffallo. I’m 100% sure that was Harry’s company. He’s been dead decades. Neither Uncle Chico nor Dad became lawyers. I don’t know if some other distant Tiernan cousin came along to fill the position, but I strongly suspect there is no Tiernan at Tiernan and Krug.)
If you want to spend the time you can read Coming Apart and decide for yourself. It’s about an upper/lower class divide. It’s social science so it’s a furball of data that people can interpret different ways. He only addresses white society to avoid the nuclear reaction he got with The Bell Curve. Here is a review from David Brooks:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/opinion/brooks-the-great-divorce.html
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Murray wrote this in 2013, and it addressed a lot of trends and issues that were part of Trump getting elected.
Engineering got me the factory floor and the rest were primarily due to growing up in WV where fishing is a requirement and almost every school was mixed class. My kids would score pretty low I suspect. Points!:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/YrgY0hlBxZLQgpWs1
Hmm, I scored a 41. I fudged a little bit and counted working at a cannery one summer in Alaska as working on the factory floor. I think I flubbed the Jimmie Johnson question too. I think Jimmy was the coach and Jimmie is the driver.
I admit it, I’m a poser.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #167818)
“My son’s friend on genetic testing found that he had a daughter of whom he was not aware.”
Um? Paternity case but really the genetic testing was a comparison of two tests.
I read about a family recently where the child was that of the treating fertility clinic doctor [the child was being tested].
I seriously doubt that genetic testing can project out into the wide world.
Thank god for a lot of us [men] I guess.
lucia (Comment #167845) “science backing up cousin marriages and the rules involved.The big danger is when a small sub-group forms and they all intermarry over generations, with no out-group members marrying in.”
lucia (Comment #16783 The fact is a portion of IQ is due to genetic factors, there is a gap that cannot be narrowed by changing environment. The only way to “narrow†it would be eugenics, which would (a) be horrific and morally reprehensible and (b) a pretty idiotic.
to use eugenics to narrow the gap in IQs would almost certainly end up narrowing the gene pool for other things.”
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Eugenics is horrific and morally reprehensible when used by racist idiots. Or by people breeding weird looking pets.
Otherwise it is a useful and sensible device. Genetically modified foods genetically removed disease in the future.
The problem is not in the close and interbred marrying but purely in the presence of a disease that expresses genetically. Which can arise incidentally.
Some are even beneficial like sickle cell disease reducing malaria risk in heterozygote populations. Being tall might let you see dangers ahead but I would rather be a dwarf in trench warfare.
Re intelligence, we all have the genes for it but it is the rich complexity of interaction and expression that brings it out. Regardless of race and social status.
JFerguson, perhaps Murray talks about male female variance difference in The Bell Curve, but I don’t remember any controversy about it. The wikipedia page doesn’t have ‘female’ or ‘women’. Perhaps you are thinking of Larry Summers who resigned as Harvard President over a decade ago?
Lucia, I don’t know how common but in some societies there are rules that you can marry some cousins but not others. For example, father’s sister’s daughter OK, but not mother’s sister’s daughter.
angech
This is the definition of eugenics:
https://www.google.com/search?q=eugenics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1
Controlled breeding of humans is horrific.
Genetically modified food is not eugenics.
My bad. Sorry.
Huh. I’ve never been to a tractor pull and I’ve lived in the South my entire adult life. I need to get out more.
Looks like I’ll have a chance to rectify this oversight soon though!
https://alabama.travel/upcoming-events/alabama-championship-tractor-and-truck-pull-2
They should make tractor pull the first question, if you answer yes then you get a score of 100 and don’t need to proceed further, ha ha. Monster truck rallies should get at least 50. I’ve watched tractor pulls on TV and my Ohio cousins filled me in on the technical details. I’m sure everyone wants to know the engineering of that sled, so here you go so you won’t embarrass yourself on this subject at the next cocktail party:
https://youtu.be/njxZloBl4ms
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If you exchange an opera crowd and tractor pull crowd, who enjoys the new experience more?
Monster truck rally would have boosted my score. Then again, it was not what I was expecting at all and I’m not sure it should qualify. Apparently now it’s a competitive sport that appears on TV.
Tom,
I’ve been to Opera and to a tractor pull. I’ve also watched a pig evaluation competition and discussed what features made for a winning pig with a farmer. (The answer was quite detailed including information on how it’s changed now that consumers want lean meat vs. fatty meat.)
MikeN,
I did not watch the tractor pull on TV. No sireee.
I think having gone to both in person tends to suggest “not so much in a bubble”. That said, I can’t claim to be totally “not bubble”.
Dang Lucia. Got me beat. The closest I can come to this is to note that my wife’s best friend just moved from a home where two pot bellied pigs (names of ‘Bit-bit’ and ‘Chomper’, I’ve been told) would occasionally come visit and camp out in her yard for a few days at a time.
Oh well. It’s not so bad in my little bubble.
@lucia, I don’t think the self-ascribed cognoscenti have been losing positions to the Internet and Netflix (and as I said, I think some of them are self-delusional about just how cognitively elite they are).
If anything, the Internet and changes in popular media delivery have given them more positions of cultural power by letting them filter and influence what people see (and therefore think) — look at all the garbage Facebook has been doing with engaging in psychological and sociological experiments with their customer base (usually without letting the customers know).
The self-ascribed elite at Google, Facebook, etc. really think it’s their job/responsibility/privilege/right to determine what people think and how culture is shaped. It’s very much like the days of yellow journalism except that the Internet elite are much more mono-cultural and have more influential power without being as open or blatant about what they’re doing as Hearst et al.
The problem at places like CNN or NBC or ABC isn’t so much one of an active counter-cultural conspiracy as that they all think the same way and can’t think of any sane reasoning person who thinks differently, no matter how vacuous the foundation of their ideas or assumptions may be.
It’s someone ironic that PBS is hosting this bubble score survey because that bubble score points out the very problem in much of PBS’s target audience.
OMG, OMG, Lucia it is people like you that totally screw-up our classification systems. We then either have to come up with a 10,000 question survey and exponentially increase our classifications or throw up our hands and admit to unique individuals out there that defy classification. Are you sure you do not want to belong to a class? Sounds very lonely to me.
What was better, the opera, or the tractor pull?
Tom, I think you have to ask that question in terms of on a scale of 1 to 10 how do you rate the tractor pull and the opera. In order to obtain the proper details you would have to ask which opera is being compared to which tractor pull and who accompanied you to those events and were you sober.
Tom,
I prefer most operas to tractor pulls. However, I prefer a tractor pull to Die Frau ohne Schatten.
I prefer operas about tractor pulls, Les Misérables de Tractor for example.
Tom Scharf,
I think there was a Shostakovich opera which featured a tractor. Ivan Olen, I think it was. Not often heard today.
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Could have been the Green paint, not RED don’t you know?
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And then the rouser in the Opera was a variation on the Internationale. Maybe this would have been better recieved had it starred a tractor which was red, namely the International.
The Golden State killer was tracked down partly through an online DNA database, he wasn’t in it but his grandfather was, which was used to narrow down the possible suspects. This seems a bit unethical, I imagine most people aren’t signing up to have their DNA used for criminal inquiries of their future grandchildren. I expect privacy laws of DNA databases are going to start tightening up.
Wasn’t it the famous opera, Les Deplorables, that featured the infamous phrase “Strong like bull, smart like tractor”?
Bravo Earle!
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Too bad Les Deplorables is unlikely to hit the Met. There’s so much opportunity in that idea, although maybe not so much for a whining contralto.
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Of course there could be a follow-on; Nasty Woman. If I hadn’t so despised her, I could have bought a Tee-Shirt emblazoned with “I’m with Nasty Woman.”
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My favorite quote from an opera is “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.â€.
No tractor pull, but a mention of ploughshares.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWAgIVNzHKs
j ferguson,
I never quite understood how Hillary and her peeps thought the “Nasty Woman” slogan was a vote getter.
I could see it as a comedy sketch. But sometimes things that might make good Saturday Night Live skits are not vote getters.
I suppose I saw wearing a “Nasty Woman” Tee-shirt akin to wearing a Deplorable Tee shirt. Had i been more comfortable with Trump’s candidacy, I would have worn a Deplorable Tee-shirt in a flash.
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There were some “I’m with Nasty Woman” shirts down here. Not many, but some.
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I wish she would go away.
I took the bubble test (been traveling in Europe for the past week). My score was 49….. so a very thin bubble I guess. Lots of points for where I grew up, (relative) poverty, and blue collar activities like fishing.
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BTW, the news report are true: most Western Europeans loath Trump. The majority of news about the USA focuses on whatever Trump has done or said recently. My impression is that the European news organizations (at least the English language versions of them) are as strenuosly opposed to Trump as CNN is, and if anything, focused even more on his personal failings and “unpresidential” behaviour. He appears (no surprise) more loathed the more left/progressive the region, and more popular in formerly East Block countries that lean more right/conservative.
j ferguson,
“I wish she would go away.”
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The same wish I have had since her efforts to force single payer health care on everyone in the early 1990’s.
Honestly, I think a lot of democrats wish she would away. We’ll see if she ever does.
43. I worked in a factory for a year 10-12 hour days, too sore to do anything but sleep when I got home. Owned trucks at one point – the better to haul motorcycles. I flubbed the beer question – used to buy Bush Bavarian by case – corn not rice beer by the way – I’d forgotten.
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We found Brits on recent cruise of Caribbean who thought we needed Trump, although maybe he didn’t have to be so crude. They also favored Brexit and maybe there was some “stick-it-in-the eye of the Poshs” there as well. In each of the guys I talked to with this POV, there was strong concern that England would be over-run with folks admitted into the EU from countires they’d screwed up and now they wanted to screw up “our’s”.
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We ran into similarly inclined folks on a river cruise in 2016. A lot of them thought Trump would win. I didn’t.
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I would say that the Brits with this view would likely have scored in high 40s on the bubble-test. I think most of them were successful in blue-collar related businesses, no ‘higher education’.
I forgot that Trump started the Nasty Woman slogan at the debate. I was thinking it started with Ashley Judd.
Luica,
“.. I think a lot of democrats wish she would away.”
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For sure. But I am guessing she never will. Making people miserable without end is a defining characteristic of the “holier-than-you-deplorables” set.
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j ferguson,
I would be tempted to wear a “Les Déplorables” tee-shirt (the image is so very clever!), but probably never would. It’s the same reason I never put a bumper sticker on my car; I figure few people care what I think politically, since I care very little what other people think politically. Besides, I would likely offend about half the people, and it would only confirm (in their tortured minds) just how deplorable some of their fellow citizens are. Trump won; there’s no need to rub anyone’s nose in it.
(: Nobel Peace Prize for Trump
“The alternative Mad Genius theory runs this way: Donald Trump is incapable of succeeding at almost everything related to the presidency. He is unable to find and lead a strong cabinet and White House team. He cannot manage relations with Congress. His legislative agenda is in tatters, and after two years in office it looks like his domestic achievements will be limited to a single tax cut. But, in the realm of high-power global politics, he does have an incredible natural ability to count the cards. His “Rocket Man Doctrine†of making outrageous threats, belittling other leaders, fawning over traditional rivals, confusing allies and enemies with policy u-turns, and always threatening to simply walk away has ingeniously re-shuffled global politics and resulted in seemingly impossible victories.
……
I recognize that Occam’s Razor would favour the Dumb Luck theory. The simplest explanation is that Trump is merely bumbling through the corridors of global power, but among all the missteps there have inevitably been a couple of fortunate landings.
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But, personally, I am actually leaning towards the Mad Genius hypothesis. Trump, for all his ignorance and ineptitude, does have a genius for understanding that sometimes you need to just tip over the card table. The reluctance of NATO member states to increase military spending, the intractable Syrian war, and the decades old Korean crisis have all been stuck in repeating loops. They needed an external shock to break the stalemate and no other recent president has been willing to risk bold moves. Trump, in contrast, is happy to bet everything on red, and maybe he will win a Nobel Prize as a result.
http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/donald-trumps-diplomacy-mad-genius-or-dumb-luck/
Got a chuckle out of this.
JD
JD Ohio,
Hummmm… If Jesus himself returned to Earth as a holy spirit, and said on every cable and TV broadcast: “Nobel committee: Donald Trump is my right hand here on Earth, and he works his miracles under my divine guidance. Obey him as you would me…”. That would still not motivate the committee to consider Trump for the Nobel peace prize. The Nobel committee seems comprised of the same ignoramuses who populate Davos eacx winter; they are blind id!ots trying to lead the rest of the worlds left/numbskull Class into foolish endorsements of “progressive’ public policy.
Dumb luck makes the most sense. Trump just happened to be President when North Korea abandoned its quarter century policy of getting nuclear weapons and its 60 year policy that it is the rightful ruler of the entire Korean peninsula(assuming they aren’t planning on peace by winning the war). This was explained by Adam Sandler:
https://youtu.be/u_I1cW14Qlg?t=17
Mad Genius theory would suggest that Rocket Man tweets were to make Kim lose a sense of pride for conducting missile tests, trying to change his goals. The use of Rocket Man stopped with Kim wanting to meet with South Korea.
Back to breaking the fourth wall:
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At the end of the second (last) act of Massenet’s Cendrillon (Cinderella) which was the Met Opera Live today, the cast almost all of whom are on stage turn to the audience and sing that we should give this thing a pretty good hand beacuse it was so good.
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It WAS a good show, but I think Rossini’s was more musical.
MIkeN,
I’ve gotta admit it: WRT to north and south korea: So far so good!
Is the fourth wall broken by the charactors or the actors? It seems to me it can be either.
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I’m not so sure a reference to another ‘entertainment’ necessarily breaks the wall.
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Horatio Caine, lead detective in CSI Miami, was inspecting the remains of a plane that had performed an ‘off-airport’ landing (‘crashed’ to non-aviators) .
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He pointed to the salient defect and said something like “Look, the rivet runs through it.”
JFerguson, Joe Posnanski wrote something similar about Trump early on, calling it breaking the 4th wall when he talked about how he was doing in polls. Trump did something while Joe was interviewing him for a golf book, which he compared to Marlon Brando saying in Godfather, great scene there Oscar for sure.
ConservativeTreehouse noticed that Anthony Weiner’s laptop was not what was searched for Clinton e-mails. Weiner’s lawyer handed over the e-mails to DOJ, likely trying to get a deal.
Puh…leeze….
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If the Norks were doing this during the Obama time frame the WH would be getting a first priority FedEx package from Sweden every single morning with a trophy and pile of cash in it.
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Do results matter, or is it actually just style that means anything to our betters now? This is really a big part of the problem. Obama bombs 7 Muslim countries, masterfully manages Iraq into a global ISIS confrontation, the Ruskies invade the Ukraine, etc.
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The “it was an accident that person X happened to be a leader at the time” can be used at any moment. Adolf just happened to be leader in the 1930’s it was really…
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How do you take bias out of the system of judgment? Judge based on actual results as the first and primary method. Of course one needs to gauge actual cause and effect, but when the Nobel gets handed to Obama for effectively global pandering then it loses a bit of luster.
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There is arguable cause and effect here with Trump’s brinkmanship if one was inclined to care, chances of that happening are zero.
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Nobody should get too excited about North Korea Groundhog Day, we’ve seen this over and over. If there is one country that should get judged solely on actions and not on words, it is NK. I’ll believe they are serious only ten years from now after they have followed through.
Well then, tell us what you really think. What can only be called an epic literary rant on the “imagination police” that is now in the process of poisoning the publishing community.
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Zombie Lit
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/04/27/zombie-lit/
Here are the questions that Mueller supposedly wants to ask Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/us/politics/questions-mueller-wants-to-ask-trump-russia.html
Can a prosecutor actually demand answers to questions about what someone thought or felt? Very few of the questions are about what Trump did or said. Many of the ones that are appear (to me) to be covered by executive privilege and/or clearly outside Mueller’s scope. Also, many of the questions seem ridiculously broad. But then, I am routinely shocked by what the FBI thinks they are entitled to do.
Mike M,
Each question seems designed only to generate “investigative process” crimes of making false statements to FBI agents. Under no circumstances should Trump answer these, or any other, questions posed by Muller and his posse. If Muller has a legal case, then he should make it (I doubt he does). Trump should ignore all requests to testify against himself…. “based on advice of council, I refuse to answer questions”.
Trump should not voluntarily answer Muller’s questions. He should also have his legal team advancing argument that it is not even possible for the president to being “obstructing justice” when carrying out his decisions as executive. It’s his job to Whether what Trump is accused of doing could even be considered “obstruction of justice” is a constitutional issue and needs to go to SCOTUS before Muller “investigates” the it as a crime and certainly before Muller writes a report on whether or not said “crime” was committed.
I definitely thought of the FBI’s “create the crime in the interview” when I read several of the questions. I doubt Trump refusing to answer anything from Mueller will affect his public standing. The people who hate him will turn up their rhetoric to volume 11, but it’s already at volume 11, so no change. Everyone has Russia burnout as far as I can tell.
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If they were so inclined to answer questions I would tell Mueller this is your one and only opportunity to ask anything, there won’t be a back and forth, then pretty much every answer will be “I do not recall”.
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There is some benefit to Trump getting this thing over with, so answering questions might force this thing to not drag out forever, but I don’t really have much faith Mueller will close this thing out anytime soon. Re-litigating the 2016 election is getting less popular every day.
My suspicion is that Mueller is focused on one particular question in the bunch. The rest are there to distract Trump from this question, and Mueller is hoping Trump will say something at odds with what Mueller already knows.
Keep in mind, these questions are not verbatim from Mueller, but a hypothetical list produced by Trump’s lawyers after discussion with Mueller’s team.
Manafort revealed in court that Mueller told his team they have no evidence of contact between Manafort and Russian intelligence officials. Strange that this would be one of the very specific questions in the Trump list.
Guardian:”No direct contact between Manafort and Russian government officials has been alleged in court documents filed so far by Mueller’s team. ”
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Yah, I know, it’s the Guradian, but…
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MikeN, do you have a more specific source for your statement?
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There is a very long stretch between not charging someone at some point in time and not having evidence.
I’m not exactly sure when “contact” with foreign officials became a crime. If we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with all of Obama’s “Team Of Rivals(tm)” prior to him taking office I imagine all kinds of nefarious activities could be alleged, and God forbid one of them not remember everything in relation to that contact perfectly, off with their heads!
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Team media, which leads the search for justice, truth and facts, behaves like the justice department and the media are the fourth and fifth branches of government with all protections and power that implies.
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Like I have said from the very beginning of this campaign of truth searching, they BETTER find something or their credibility will disappear beyond the event horizon to never be found again. It will be an embarrassment even larger than misjudging the election.
The entire premise of this alleged contact just boggles the mind.
Trump team member: “Mr. Trump our reading of the polls suggest you may not win in November, we may want to consider an alternative plan”
Trump: “I know, let’s get the Russians involved! I hear they have a really good pulse of the American people and know some kick butt Facebook communications people!”.
Trump team: “Great idea boss! We will commence secret meetings with them immediately. I really don’t see any problem here”
Or some such nefarious vague activity. Who green lights that plan? I can imagine Trump doing lots of crazy things, but you really need to be outside the box on this one.
JFerguson, I don’t have a link, but now that Manafort has been indicted, Mueller is obligated to provide all evidence he is using, as well as any exculpatory evidence. Manaort filed in court that Mueller’s team said they had no evidence of the type Manafort asked for. Manafort is trying to have his conviction thrown out on the grounds that Mueller should never have been investigating him.
Tom Scharf,
“BETTER find something or their credibility will disappear beyond the event horizon to never be found again.”
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To those wedded already to the goal of Trump being driven from office, crusading jornos will remain heroes. To everyone else… not so much. No matter what happens, MSM types will remain in place and will continue spewing their lies and distortions. Such is the nature of the left: never apologize and never regret, no matter how wrong proven by reality to be. (see Saul Alinsky) Theirs is the long game of subversion of the Constitution, by whatever means available (see for example, B. Obama).
MikeN,
I think the way it works is that Manafort has a right to information which the prosecution may have related to things he has been charged or indicted with, NOT things that they have not charged him with. AS I understand it, he has NOT been charged with conspiracy.
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to repeat my earlier suggestion, Mueller may very well have evidence of Manafort’s participation in a conspiracy involving the ILLEGAL (caps for you Tom) contribution in funds or kind by a foreign government in our election process. And if he hasn’t yet charged or sought an indictment for such conspiracy, he has no obligation to share what he does know with Manfort or his counsel.
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JFerguson, Mueller may not have such an obligation, but Manafort has told the court that Mueller told Manafort that Mueller does not have such information.
WaPo: “Earlier this week, Manafort revealed in a court filing that the special prosecutor’s office has said it has no evidence to turn over of any recording or intercepted phone calls between Manafort and Russian officials.”
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MikeN, is this it?
Perhaps. I remember seeing screen shots with paragraphs quoted from the filing.
JFerguson, it’s not clear if it’s part of his case against Manafort, but Mueller has told at least one court that Gates and Manafort had contacts with Russian intelligence.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mueller-tells-court-paul-manafort-095116839.html
I think this was what I read.
https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2018/05/03/special-counsel-admitted-paul-manafort-no-contact-russian-intelligence/
Hi MikeN,
this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/paul-manafort-accuses-government-of-leaking-details-spreading-false-information/2018/05/01/9f3a5552-4d51-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html?utm_term=.d64d1afc7bdc
bears out what you posted above.
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I suspect that the allegation that Mueller had evidence of communication betweeb Manifort and a Russian official was BS. I think Comey was asked about it in a recent interview and said that a lot of what was reported about Muellers activities was BS.
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so you seem to be correct that mueller’s people told manafort’s people they had no tapes, recordings, notes etc about the surveillance because it hadn’t happened.
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at the same time we don’t know who the source was for the story that they did have surveillance records.
Discussing the Lewis and Curry paper at ATTP
One said,
“Back to basics: Climate Sensitvity (CS) is an index created to compare model runs. It is model output, not a model input.”
in contrast to
” Dessler’s point AFAICS is that if you take a suite of physics-based models, where you know the ECS in advance, and try to calculate it the way LC13 and LC18 do, you get the wrong answer.”
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My reply,
“The old chestnut, Lucia [whom I trust] used it as well, is that ECS is an emergent property of climate models. The truth is that the ECS is hardwired into all the GCM.
At around 3C.
Put 3C ECS in and 3C ECS comes out.
Compare it to the real world, the only one, where 3C rarely comes out unless you pick exact time frames of extra warming like a decade ending in a large El Nino.
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Consequence is shadow boxing, dodging the real questions and answers.
Dessler is right but so is Lewis but on two different stages.
It is so easy to answer a question on the first stage show in the second show arena.”
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The ECS range issue is getting a lot of airplay since reputable journal publishing with Judith’s scientific status and the hoi polloi are running scared and dodging the science.
Trump up to 44%.
North Korea or Comey.
Am I allowed to say that?
North Korea or Muller? Both. People are losing confidence in the Muller investigation, in large part because it has dragged on for so long, in part because the scope seems wildly out of control, and in part because DOJ has been unwilling to respond to Congress’s requests for information. Every rational person wants a murderous lunatic in Korea, who assassinates his own relatives, to not have nuclear weapons. Whether that will really happen is less clear.
angech,
To steal a quote from an old football coach: Climate sensitivity isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing. The justification for draconian public policy is at least in part based on high climate sensitivity… reduce sensitivity and you simultaneously reduce the urgency for draconian public policy. The climate alarmed are perfectly aware of this, and do their best to discredit anything which indicates sensitivity is relatively low.
CS may be an emergent property but it emerges based on “hand of God” settings deep inside the models or is likely correlated to input forcings / parameters. Is it possible to change the emergent CS by changing the models? Duh. This seems like a semantics argument. We will know if they are right in 25 years, until then just hyperventilate and run from the coasts as fast as possible.
JFerguson, these stories are coming out with regularity. There was a story that Mueller had evidence that Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague happened and he has the proof of all the details. Seems like they are designed just to keep the story alive. Michael Cohen trip is the most damning detail, evidence of a frame job. It seems like this should have been found out before they applied for a FISA warrant.
Lisa Page of infamous FBI texting and leaking fame, resigned Friday. She was McCabe’s assistant. Another person Jim Baker who was also involved in leaks is looking for new work as well. My guess is Stroz is also working hard on his resume.
It happens every single time. When the media decides to go activist on guns, they are shocked to find out:
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“Even after the impassioned response to the school shooting in February in Parkland, Florida, the NRA is not struggling with popularity or support: The group’s membership has reportedly risen in recent months. In March, its political-victory fund raised the most money in the course of a single month that it has in 15 years, bringing in a total of nearly $2.4 million.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/05/the-nra-is-still-a-staple-of-daily-american-life/559742/
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Here’s a real laugher, the media takes this seriously: “Gun injuries drop 20 percent nationwide during NRA conventions”. This study was covered by CNN, Vox, PBS, Scienitific American, Reuters, The Guardian, Boston Globe, Time, NYmag, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, ABC, LA Times, etc. (noted: NYT/WP did not cover this).
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The numbers don’t add up of course and the details are less sensational. Tiny sample sizes, etc. It is shocking that so many printed it uncritically when it screams spurious correlation using data mining from activist researchers. My point basically is that this was used to attack the NRA, now wouldn’t they also attack the NRA if gun injuries rose 20% during conventions? Another episode of science by the power of suggestion.
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…and of course…”The Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund is launching ads that it says highlight alleged ties between the NRA and Russia.”
Lisa Page and James Baker resigned, finally, because Horowitz and Huber were finished with them as witnesses. Not sure they are done with Strzok as a witness.
We still have Bruce Ohr (DoJ) hanging around. So they are probably not done with him yet.
hypothetical scenario
1) We know Judge Sullivan ever since the Senator Ted Stevens case has been maniacal about making sure prosecutors aren’t holding on to exculpatory evidence.
2) We know Judge Sullivan demanded that Mueller hand over any such evidence to Michael Flynn and anything that’s close to Judge Sullivan to make a determination.
3) HSPCI report says that Comey and McCabe both testified that FBI agents didn’t think Flynn was lying to them, no physical cues during interview.
My hypothetical, if Mueller hasn’t handed over this as evidence, and he has already handed over all evidence to Judge Sullivan, then what is the result for Mueller?
Mueller already has a history of involvement with improper prosecution and imprisonment, which I believe ended up costing taxpayers $30 million in compensatory damages. That sort of thing suggest he may simply ignore Sullivan’s demand for all potentially exculpatory evidence.
I revert to my previous statement on Mueller’s non-production of certain evidence that it was sought as related to activities for which Manafort has yet to be charged.
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He is charged with conspiracy among other things related to his Ukranian activities, but to date not for his Russian contacts. It seems to me that if Mueller is likely to be forthright about sharing all evidence (which you guys apparently doubt) he will hold off on a charge until he’s got everythibg he thinks he needs rather than screw up an ongoing investigation by publicizing his incompldete evidence.
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I concede that it is quite possible to be mislead by what one reads in the news.
j ferguson,
It is possible Mueller has not collected all the evidence he needs for additional charges against Manafort…. after all, he has had only a year and unlimited budget, not to mention an armed early morning raid on Manafort’s home… but I kind of doubt it. Mueller is just squeezing anyone involved with Trump for testimony against him. I would not be shocked by an armed raid on Trump Tower in New York. If I were Sullivan, I would demand, with a threat of contempt against Mueller, to see all evidence Mueller has against Manafort. After the Ted Stevens fiasco, Sullivan has every reason to not believe what DOJ prosecutors tell him. Heck, we all do. Mueller is out of control.
SteveF,
I was under the impression that the Manafort Enquiry predates Mueller’s appointment. I think that investigation was/is directed to his Ukranian adventures and creative banking practices.
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As to the length of time it might take to develop a prosecutable case, I can refer to one prosecution with which we have direct experience. It took over two years to bring any charges (indictments that time) even though the likely miscreants were known from the start, as well as the crimes – in documented detail, as well as identification of all of the other possibly non-criminal participants.
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The time was spent perfecting the charges against each of the 26, and squeezing each of them in the hopes of developing a convincing prosecution against the main man – which unfortunately they were never able to do – he went unindicted and un-mentioned in the resulting trials.
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I don’t know what the cost of error in prosecuting might be, possibly not career enhancing, although as you point out, screw-ups in the past have not prevented Mueller from holding serious govenment jobs, and now this one.
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Since this may involve the president, I can readily understand why he is taking his time. Surely you wouldn’t want him to fail to nail a truly criminal president from lack of care, not that I think it is likely that Trump is guilty of anything really serious.
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And of course none of us really knows what he knows and what he thinks he ought to know, and what he has to do to corral the “oughts to know.”
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Utah becomes first State to legalize “free-range kids.”
Not related to other topics, but some here are interested
in child education. I was a a free-range kid, and think it was
good for me. But I grew up in a small town.
Learned some new terms from the linked article, “helicoptering”
and “stranger danger.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43997862
j ferguson,
The investigation seems to have changed to investigating shut-up money for a consensual one-night stand (with a porn actress!) that happened a decade before Trump ran for office. Try as I might, I can’t see the connection to a Russian/Trump conspiracy to steal the election. Although I agree bedding a porn actress demonstrates both poor judgement and poor taste. But IMHO, the Russia investigation has degenerated into a hunt for anything (ANYTHING!) that could be used in an impeachment effort. I guess we will have to agree to disagree, at least until Mueller finishes…. assuming that ever happens.
JFerguson, it is not just news stories, but a court filing. Manafort’s lawyers say Mueller doesn’t have evidence on Russia intelligence contacts. If this is false, then either his lawyers have filed a false statement, or Mueller has lied to the lawyers.
I was talking about Flynn case above, not Manafort.
MikeN, my thought was that you are looking at a paraphrase of what they actually filed. I could be wrong.
jferguson
The judge asked about this, and yes, the inquiry predates. This is an issue for the current judge. That Ukranians are not russians is also an issue. There was some discussion of these things between the judge and the prosecutor’s attorney.
SteveF,
I could again be confused but I thought the porn star show was being conducted by a New York federai attorney’s office and the Russian conspiracy investigation by Mueller, simultaneously so to speak.
j ferguson,
Yes, but that is apparently not where it started; it appears to be an outgrowth of the Mueller investigation. There are now multiple parallel “open cases”, including at least two against Manafort, one of which was several years old, but recently taken up by Mueller, and one against Trump’s lawyer Cohen, which was recently passed to the New York district attorney’s office. The logic of Mueller adopting the old case against Manafort while passing the other case off to the NY DA is one of the issues the district judge in Virginia was objecting to. If Mueller refuses to produce the “scope” letter in un-redacted form for the judge, then the judge will likely make things more difficult for Mueller.
My objections are more fundamental: Where’s the beef? (I have seen not shred of credible evidence of “collusion” with the Russians.) What is the goal? (Seems to be get Trump, by any means possible…. banana republic stuff.)
j ferguson,
Here is Prof Turley’s take: http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/386409-mueller-puts-politics-above-the-law
It is not certain that Mueller handed over the Michael Cohen case to SDNY. Preet Bharara tweeted that he may have just had them do the warrant and raid.
The original Rosenstein memo that appointed Mueller gives him authority to do anything he wants, which is what has the judge so upset.
The judge hasn’t spelled it out, but here’s the issue:
1) Rosenstein assigned Mueller the investigation that Comey talked about to Congress.
2) This is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation. It is why Comey could tell Trump that he was not under investigation even though he clearly was.
3) Any crimes uncovered in a counterintelligence investigation get handed over to the criminal division.
4) Rosenstein has handed Mueller authority to do the counterintelligence investigation, as well as any crimes happening during and to obstruct that investigation per 28CFR600.4a
5) In his memo, Rosenstein also gave Mueller authority over any crimes arising from the investigation.
That last one is what was missed. Normally this should be an unnecessary line for a special counsel investigation. They have authority to prosecute related crimes uncovered by default. But because it is a counterintelligence investigation, normal procedure is to hand over these items. Mueller needed to be given separate authorization.
Now Mueller has a criminal investigation that is backed by FISA surveillance authority. No need to show probably cause/exhaustion to get wiretaps, at least thru Oct 2017 as everyone involved can be connected to Carter Page(and Cohen and Manafort may have their own FISA warrants).
The criminal matter to be investigated must be specifically stated is still a requirement under DOJ regs, but Mueller is claiming this does not need to be enforced as he was appointed under USC515. The judge is not buying this, regardless of the regs saying that there is no judicially enforceable right created by the regs.
SteveF,
Turley is a good reference. But look at this;
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Turley: “Yet, Rosenstein decided that those crimes could not be pursued by Mueller and sent the case to the Southern District of New York. Why?
The answer is clearly not based on the underlying crimes or the special counsel’s mandate. It appears based on simple political necessity. By transferring the Cohen investigation to New York, Rosenstein made it materially more difficult for Trump to scuttle the investigations of his associates. Even if Trump fired Rosenstein and Mueller, he would need to do the same with prosecutors in New York, in order to stop all of the investigations touching on his campaign.”
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Turley seems to be saying that dividing the prosecution to better protect it from squashing movements by the president is “political” to use Turley’s term. Huh???? i cannot see this as a ‘political’ act.
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Ellis is right, of course the drive is to ‘get’ the president. But wouldn’t you agree that ‘getting’ may be doing everything within Mueller’s means to discover Trump’s participation, if there was any, in an illegal conspiracy is more important to the well being of our democracy than anything else he has added to his menu?
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Why do you suppose you should, at this stage, be privy to any evidence that the crimes alleged are based on soemthing solid? It appears that if they are, Mueller hasn’t yet shared this information with anyoune outside Justice.
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JFerguson, the pardon of Scooter Libby, means that Michael Cohen will not cooperate. That side of the investigation is dead.
I think the purpose of the raid was to get his files. Regardless of taint team and whatever else they do, I figure they made copies on site, and now they know where to look. Handing off the raid allows them to hide their access to evidence.
Cc: John Ferguson
If the evidence on hand is classified, it is inadmissible in court
http://observer.com/2017/04/kremlingate-and-the-limits-of-classified-evidence/
You are wasting your time on the Trumpists though.
J,
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The whole ball of wax is political. Mueller is supposedly investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and any links between such interference and Trump’s campaign.
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No crime there, AFAIK. Point me to the statuette about collusion and I’ll quite honestly and sincerely thank you for it. I don’t believe such links would violate any laws even if they existed; even if they led to the President himself.
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This said, I (and I expect a goodly number of other people as well) would like to know if there’s any substance to this theory which is apparently not a legal issue but definitely is an issue with political ramifications.
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~shrug~
useful reference RB. Thanks.
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marc bofill. Not collusion, conspiracy. Never confuse what you read in the news, or see on tv, with the real world.
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I do like the concept of a collusion “statuette.” Maybe something like Rodin’s Kiss?
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The conspiracy if it ever turns out that there was one would be assisting a foreign entity in its attempt to domestically influence a US election. I think there isn’t any problem with foreign enitities trying to affect the outcome of a US election off-shore, but it’s serious if they try to do it here.
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And once, more, just because the news has not come to Harvard as Tom Lehrer was won’t to sing doesn’t mean that the thing didn’t happen, nor that Mueller doesn’t have solid information.
J,
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Nice statuette! :p
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Assisting a foreign entity in an attempt to influence a US election’s not illegal. One is supposed to register, certainly. I thought it was money & contributions that was the real issue there.
Many things are possible. Without evidence we generally don’t waste our time wondering I think. I’ve already shrugged, so.
Thanks for your response and for inspiring me to go google Rodin’s Kiss. 🙂
Hi marc, The idea of googling Rodin’s Kiss seems a bit risque.
I know. I’m in the office too…
A curiosity. Does it inspire outrage in anyone reading that the so called ‘Dreamers’ attempt to influence U.S. politics and elections? Real question. For myself my answer is ‘no’.
RB, this: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/R41742.pdf suggests that there are other ways to conduct a trial which may require the introduction of (or reference to) classified information.
Collusion may not be a crime, but it is still impeachable.
‘Conspiracy against the US’ is a non-crime that Mueller is trying to turn into a crime.
There has to be a conspiracy to commit a specific crime.
‘Everything is classified and inadmissible’ looks like a defense of a failed investigation.
mark bofill (Comment #167947): “Assisting a foreign entity in an attempt to influence a US election’s not illegal.”
I think there are legal and illegal things that could fall under that general rubric. I think that foreign entities are not allowed to contribute to U.S. campaigns. So it would be illegal for someone were laundering funds to make such contributions possible. I would think that offering a quid pro quo for damaging information on one’s opponent is also illegal. But I guess in that case it would not much matter if the informant is foreign or domestic.
MikeM,
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I agree. It’s sort of like saying ‘driving is legal’. WElll, sort of. You have to have a license. You gots ta obey the laws and regulations. So on.
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I think I saw video of one of Trump’s cabinet members driving once. Who knows. He might have broken some laws doing that.
In climate news, Eric Schneiderman, the lowlife AG who filed a fake suit against Exxon, falsely claiming to be attempting to protect Exxon investors has resigned on account of sexual abuse accusations. Glad to see him gone. In a totally fair, objective world, he would have been disciplined for abuse of process with respect to the Exxon lawsuit, which was simply an unethical attempt to use investment law as a means of obtaining legal discovery against Exxon.
JD
Lots of things going on today. H Clinton, following foot injury where she claimed to be running downstairs in high heels holding a cup of coffee and talking over her shoulder — now seen with apparent back brace under her jacket [worn in warm weather]. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5700455/Hillary-Clinton-spotted-wearing-supposed-brace.html
I haven’t forgotten that many in the media, and others, claimed that examining Clinton’s health during the presidential campaign was a bogus, unfair story. Seems like one thing after another.
JD
JD Ohio,
It’s pretty clear Hillary is not in good shape. There’s lots of tripping. But even beyond that, if you watch her walk, she’s wobbling and not placing her feet with confidence. My mother is getting like that– mom is 86 years old. Popsie-Wopsie got like that. It happens.
All this fuss about lying seems similar to the uneven fuss about health.
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The opinion at our house is that no-one ever successfully ran down a stairs in high heels with a cup of coffee while talking over her shoulder, nor would any sane woman, (or man for that matter) have attempted it.
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At 75, I notice a tendency to shuffle first thing in the morning, and I take a lot more care going down stairs even without the high heels. I think I wrecked my knees with 12k hours driving the boat while standing, also 2,000 miles bicycling in my 60’s.
When Hillary collapsed, and then came outside to greet the media with sunglasses, people accused her of sending out a body double, influenced by aspect change of the pictures.
You could tell it was not a body double by how Hillary was placing her feet making sure she didn’t tip over.
She’s probably getting hurt more because she’s drunk all the time. I thought the statements about this during the campaign were just attempts to humanize her. but they were really understating things.
JD Ohio,
Looks to me more like a poorly fitted bullet-proof vest than a brace.
Hillary is clearly not in great shape, “brace” or not. She looks bigger and “puffier” than in 2016. Her history of trips and falls is pretty extreme, and consistent with poor overall health.
MikeN,
Yes, drunk all the time is another good explanation for her trips and falls.
Drunk wouldn’t explain the back brace unless her back was hurt during a fall. I think if she was falling enough to hurt her back, foot and so on, we’d be noticing slurred speech and other symptoms. So I suspect the back physical conditions are more inherent.
Of course, she could be failing physically and drinking. I just suspect being drunk is not the cause of what appears to be the onset of decrepitude. She’s getting old. She never showed signs of being someone who worked out a lot. I’d generally expect someone with access to medical care to be doing better than she seems to be, but these things vary.
j ferguson:
One difference is you admit these things. You aren’t making up stories about injuries that do happen. (In fact, it appear you aren’t actually injuring yourself, which is even better.)
In fact, as much as some people like to say aging is just a state of mind…. well… no. It’s normal to decline physically with age. Some people more, some people less. Exercise and attitude makes a difference.
Hillary just seems to be declining physically somewhat more rapidly that women or men in my family. She also seems to very much want to cover this up.
That’s understandable. Many people want to project health for a variety of reasons. That goes double for politicians who know at least some voters prefer to vote for someone they think has plenty of vim and vigor.
FWIW: I became careful going down stairs after I tumbled while wearing new clogs I bought for a vacation in France. I had to walk down irregular stairs in an old building with rise/run ratio that wasn’t what we are used to. Clog.. well… the bottom slipped under my foot, I mis-stepped, fell tw steps and turned my ankle. No permanent injury, but it swelled and was not fun to walk on for the duration of the vacation. I now do hold hand rails. (I also don’t wear clog or anything that slips in the heel when going places where I am going to have to walk any significant amount. I thought they’d be nice on the airplane…. which they were. But I should just have packed penny loafers and slippers.)
j ferguson,
“I think I wrecked my knees with 12k hours driving the boat while standing..”
Yikes! I sit most of the time when driving my boat, except when docking. Well, most of the time the autopilot is actually doing the driving, and I just watch.
WRT to Mueller; if it turns out he actually has something factual related to Trump conspiring with the Russians to do something unlawful (or even unethical), then of course he should pursue that. What he should not be doing is searching for “crimes” like paying off a bimbo to keep quiet about a consensual encounter in 2006, or setting “false statement” traps to create a crime where one does not exist….. Trump would be foolish to ever talk to Mueller or his posse.
lucia,
Access to medial care doesn’t help much if you don’t follow the physician’s advice.
Lucia,
“She never showed signs of being someone who worked out a lot.”
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Yup. I saw a couple of video tapes where she was physically unable to climb the 3 or 4 steps onto a stage, and needed physical assistance from someone on the stage. Her strength relative to her weight seems very low, which is what you would expect to see in someone much older than 70. Maybe constant lying accelerates aging. 😉
Sure, just getting fat and out of shape…well, obviously the patient is the only one who can decide to exercise. Drinking a bottle of wine a day or, eating entire boxes of oreos while binge watching netflix: once again, patient has to decide to deal with that.
But somethings are easy. For example: if breaks or crumbling spine are due to osteoporosis, they now have medication to help build up bones.
jfergunson, as a man of age myself, I would recommend to you to give up high heels no matter where you may walk or wander.
Kenneth, shuffling in high heels is a real challenge. I don’t know how Hillary does it. I can’t.
Could it be a bulletproof vest? George W Bush was accused of being fed answers at a debate because of one.
The least surprising thing I read all week.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/opinion/democrats-partisanship-identity-politics.html
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The more educated you are, the more ideologically prejudiced you are likely to be. I guess love doesn’t always Trump hate for the over educated. My second grade playground analysis is that since appearance based prejudice has become unfashionable, it has simply been replaced by class based prejudice as a means to fulfill a primal human need for tribal based conflict. Don’t you just hate people who aren’t full of love?
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“Political knowledge tends to increase the effects of identity as more knowledgeable people have more informational ammunition to counter argue any stories they don’t like.”
HRC lost ten years off her life on the night of Nov 8, 2016. This was the most humiliating political loss I have seen in my lifetime, and that has got to take an emotional toll that would affect her physically. It almost makes her sympathetic, almost.
Schneiderman: Over zealous self imposed purity tests often damage the ones imposing them more than their opponents.
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It is perfectly fine for society to establish and change norms of behavior, it is not fine for society to retroactively punish those who lived under prior norms. This is not a healthy development.
Tom Scharf,
The loss was humiliating because people insisted that she was a slam dunk. In the minds of her team, and likely in her mind, the probability she would win was probably something like 99.99%. The poll were no indicating that.
Also, many Democrats have nothing but disdain for Trump. I get that. I don’t like Trump. I grudgingly admit some things are going well. ( Double snap and around the world for getting some captive back today!) So I can see how losing to him specifically makes it worse. She has to face the fact that she lost because a lot of people dislike her more than they dislike Trump. That’s hard to face if you disdain Trump.
The humiliation is definitely hard proof so many people think you are worse than Trump, which is so far outside of polite society thought that it’s unlikely she knew anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone that thought that. So it’s a binary world of horrible candidate or deplorable Trump voters. Maybe they should throw in deplorable liberal voters and maybe even policy preferences just for completeness.
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This situation is a perfect test case for those who are inclined to think that “competent political leadership” is more an illusion of manners, speaking well, and a popularity contest than legitimate causation of good results.
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If Trump bumbles and stumbles his way to good results then the theory of nice suits (or pant suits) and a good vocabulary being prerequisites for effective leadership takes a major hit.
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The tech world gave up that illusion a decade ago. I tend to lean towards leadership is mostly an illusion, but still a necessity. I’m obviously not enamored with today’s purity test gate keeping for leadership that seems like high school drama.
Yup. I still recall people like Ryan Grim beating up on Nate Silver for giving Trump as much of a chance as he did. Here was Huffpost on why 538 was supposedly wrong.
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I’m still fascinated with that whole train wreck in hindsight. So much for the consensus approach to epistemology.
[Edit: Oh sorry, that was second was NYMag, not Huffpost]
In 2004, Charlie Cook declared that the race was John Kerry’s to lose, on the grounds that undecideds would break his way. Kerry was roughly in the same position as Trump, but now pundits ignored the undecided vote.
Trump’s biggest impact is that he has changed what is possible. Imagine the shock value that Trump is President for the prisoner coming back from North Korea, who was in prison since 2015 before he announced, presumably with no news. Imagine you were arrested now and came back 3 years later. Is there any name that would shock you as much after Trump?
MikeN (Comment #167978): “Imagine you were arrested now and came back 3 years later. Is there any name that would shock you as much after Trump?”
Well over 300 million such names. Hundreds of them are famous.
Mike M.
Good point. Whoopie Goldberg would surprise me just as much as Trump. Arnold Schwarzenneger more– because he’s naturalized. William Shatner even more– because he’s Canadian!
Mark Bofill,
The HuffPo article on why Silver was wrong is pretty funny in retrospect.
There are some thoughts the author had that are just always wrong. For example:
The truth is: uncertainty is uncertainty. It makes no sense that uncertainty is “less likely” to produce one out come than the other. (Note: the argument in the paragraph above is not that the prediction is “biased”, but that, for some reason, uncertainty around the median favors Clinton. )
It is true that giant polling swings might just indicate a change in which party’s base is likely to hang up when a pollster calls. The proper conclusion should be that all polls could be biased. This includes the earlier ones. It was possible (and still is) that the early polls has underestimated Trump support because Trump supporters either (a) hung up or (b) lied to pollsters. It is also possible they became more willing to answer as the vote approached. There was no way to tell based on the polls themselves, so Silver’s approach that included more uncertainty was the right one.
If the uncertainty is unbiased then there is no reason to believe it helps one way or the other. Uncertainty can be biased. If one wants to claim this though, the burden is on them to prove it beyond a facile assertion. The reality in this case was the uncertainty was biased away from a Trump win, but looking at polling errors in the past doesn’t seem to show any consistent bias towards red or blue. In this specific case an argument can be made that there were a measurable number of “shy” Trump voters who wouldn’t admit to a pollster their support.
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However the more believable case was that this election was significantly different than past elections. Polling is a complex science. For example pollers don’t take random samples of the population, they weight the polls based on likely voters as determined by previous elections and so forth. It’s hard to predict a surge in voters of one group or another in one election. There was also a potential landline bias. I believe that pollsters must still use land lines and cannot poll over cell phones. The landline group may increasingly have different voting patterns.
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A 2016 Review: Why Key State Polls Were Wrong About Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/upshot/a-2016-review-why-key-state-polls-were-wrong-about-trump.html
Yeah. It seems to me that if uncertainty favors a particular outcome and you know that in advance and your expected value doesn’t account for this, you haven’t done a great job of coming up with your expected value.
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I think there are faint similarities between some of what Nate’s critics said and some arguments you hear in the climate science food fight. For example:
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corresponds with :
The consensus can’t be wrong. Look at all of these peer reviewed papers!
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corresponds with:
The science is on our side, and screw uncertainty.
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Interestingly, the complaint about Nate’s ‘adjustments’ reminds me of skeptics complaints about adjustments and assumptions.
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Finally, I think it’s interesting that anybody went after Nate in the first place. I honestly don’t get why this happened, although I have some ideas. Maybe pundits think what they predict determines what will happen (and maybe this happens in at least some cases) and these people were irritated that Nate was damaging the chances of their preferred candidate. Or maybe attacked Nate because they were truly frightened by the idea of Trump winning and they didn’t want to hear that it might happen. Or maybe something entirely different, I don’t know.
I didn’t express that first point very well. What I was really trying to say is – if you know something about ‘the uncertainty’ that affects the outcome, and you know that something and you KNOW it affects the outcome a certain way, it ought not be in the uncertainty bucket, I guess is what I was trying to get at.
The last bit I wanted to say regards the malleability of voters — I think history shows people are fickle and prone to being swayed at the last minute in some areas. Maybe not in their deep convictions but in an election like this between two undesirable candidates, sure.
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It’s when we get to assumptions like this that the HuffPosts and Ryan Grim’s of the world try to tread quicksand – it’s very easy and comfortable to believe that a majority of people out there share one’s deep convictions.
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Anyways.
>certainty and volatility of the race are less likely to produce a Clinton loss than a larger-than-anticipated Clinton win.
True, as some of the uncertainty in Trump’s favor would still produce a Clinton victory.
The high level of undecided made it an unusual race. Before the election, I went thru state polls, tossed out an outlier on each side, then assumed undecideds would split 2-1 for Trump and that half(net) the Gary Johnson vote was shy Trump supporters who would vote for him at last second. I ended up close on the electoral vote though off specific states, predicting a bunch of small states instead of Michigan.
Mark,
I agree voters can be fickle. The thing is even if they were not and the swing was due to different (evidently not fickle) people changing their habits in answering pollsters phone calls, that wouldn’t have meant the “early” polls must be the true ones. It could very well have been that the early ones were wrong. There really was no way to know.
But yes: it’s silly to discount fickleness.
This was likely true. It was and still is difficult for lots of people to say they are Trump supporters. Roseanne Barr seems to be playing the first Trump supporter on TV. (The actress herself is a Trump supporter.)
I think, in contrast, Stein voters were less likely to be secret Hillary supporters.
I also think anyone who thought a Johnson supporter was going to have a change of heart and vote Hillary had to be on drugs. My situation was more typical: I dislike both Hillary and Trump so much, I voted the third party. There was no way I was going to vote for either. But I don’t think there were any “secret Hillary” voters.
Tim Allen also played a Trump supporter I think. That show is returning to Fox.
>I also think anyone who thought a Johnson supporter was going to have a change of heart and vote Hillary had to be on drugs.
The Johnson supporters were mostly on drugs. Ann Coulter couldn’t get their ballot line over the issue.
I wasn’t “shy” about choosing the lesser of evils (AKA the Donald), but I probably hung up on 15 pollsters during the summer/fall of 2016. I doubt I am the only person who would not waste time on a pollster, and my guess is most of those were more likely to vote for Trump rather than Hillary (an incompetent buffoon over a career criminal). Calling polling a “science” gives far more credit that it deserves.
MikeN,
I voted for Johnson, not because I was a “supporter”. But under the circumstances, I want 3rd parties to have a chance to get election money so they can strengthen. Well… but not Stein’s party….
Lucia,
Yes, that’s true.
Regarding not admitting support for Trump, I think there’s no real upside for at least some people to do so. Some portion of a downside could include the possibility of getting hassled by the more rabid progressives on social media. There’s always the possibility that evidence will emerge that the Trumpster has done something truly horrid. So on – some risk, essentially no gain in showing support, of course the guy is unpopular.
Not to mention that it’s easy to dislike this President in the first place.
Stein did OK after the election raising money for ‘recounts’.
I think it is quite likely that those who resent social media mobs silencing dissent by public shaming would not admit to voting for Trump and took great pleasure in doing so when behind the curtain.
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It is not a coincidence that older people tend to be no fans of silencing of speech, they tend to be more aware that shutting down discussion isn’t winning a debate.
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A new term has been created for the rebels against banned thought, the “intellectual dark web”. There are more and more socially liberal people who just can’t stand this stuff anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html
mark bofill (Comment #167991): “Not to mention that it’s easy to dislike this President in the first place.”
Yes, it is easy to dislike Trump. But should that matter?
In 2004 much was made of the fact that Bush had an advantage over Kerry since Bush was perceived as someone people would enjoy having a beer with; Kerry not so much. Much scorn was heaped on people letting that affect how they voted. Justly, I think. Now the perception of Trump as a jerk is deemed a perfectly good reason to oppose him. Unjustly, I think.
Tom Scharf (Comment #167993): “A new term has been created for the rebels against banned thought, the “intellectual dark webâ€. There are more and more socially liberal people who just can’t stand this stuff anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html”
From the link: “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.†… A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,†none of these observations would have been considered taboo.”
Actually, such taboos were quite prominent among the academic left a decade and more ago. Lawrence Summers discovered that in 2005 when he started a firestorm by suggesting that men and women are different. That was at least part of what led to him being forced out as president of Harvard.
What has changed is that the worst attributes of the totalitarian left have gone mainstream. That has happened with remarkable speed, starting (or at least reaching escape velocity) during Obama’s second term.
Mike,
Yes. Likeability and fitness for office need not have much in common, and in my view probably don’t. Take Jimmy Carter maybe, I bet he was a helluva good guy. Trouble is Trump doesnt seem to meet the normal obvious criteria either like eloquence and polish or intellectualism..
Mark Bofill (Comment #167996): “Trouble is Trump doesnt seem to meet the normal obvious criteria either like eloquence and polish or intellectualism..”
I don’t see why those should be criteria, anymore than likeability or good looks. All may be assets in getting elected (maybe not intellectualism). But when it comes to doing the job, they are superficial (although eloquence can be useful, it is not essential).
Mike M,
Yep. I was typing on my phone or I would have elaborated / clarified that. The reason I say ‘trouble’ is because of perception, not necessarily reality. For example, President Obama was eloquent and polished and intellectual. Meh.
But I’ll admit that these little cues affect me too. I hate listening to Trump speak. For his first term, I generally didn’t mind hearing Obama speak (by his second term I couldn’t stand him anymore). It *does* affect my judgement. I think it plays a role in what we’re talking about too – it’s harder to voice support for someone who doesn’t seem to fit a part than for somebody who does, IMO.
But anyway – yes, I agree that those *shouldn’t* be criteria by which to judge performance. But those are criteria that I do believe influence support and current opinion about President Trump.
Read back. How many people here have called Trump a buffoon.
David Brooks made the observation that “lizard brain” Trump grew up dealing with low life crime families that control certain aspects of construction in NYC, corrupt unions, and all the assorted slimy problems trying to build in NYC. He went on to state that dealing with people in the real world like Iran, NK, and Putin are much closer to what Trump has been dealing with his whole life, as opposed to negotiating who pays for tea time at the country club (which Obama would excel at). You’d want Obama to deal with the effetes in Europe for most matters (except NATO), and a lizard brain to deal with nearly everyone else.
Occasionally, when a pollster calls me and depending on mood, I will tell them “because my opinion is valuable and they called me for it, my fee is $10.00 per answer. I will accept Visa and MasterCard, but not American Express. Please let me know when you are ready with the card number.”
The follow-on is pretty funny. Some just hangup, but I have had many who tell their cube mates Laughingly “this guy wants to charge for his answers!”
The pollsters think that you should be answering their questions for free, but they then charge someone to relay it.
mark bofill,
I think that we almost entirely agree. Superficial things have a big impact on perception, very often a much bigger impact than substance has. Hence, Obama was admired and Trump is despised. It affects my judgement too. Obama had me snookered for a long time and it took me quite a while to realize that Trump has a lot of substance. I suspect that people are slowly coming around on Trump, resulting in his slow improvement in the polls.
I suspect Trump’s poll improvement is because of the Michael Cohen raid.
Mike M,
“I suspect that people are slowly coming around on Trump, resulting in his slow improvement in the polls.”
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Sure, but I think Trump’s substantive policies, and especially domestic policies, are vigorously opposed by a large number of voters, and maybe by a numerical majority. Trump likely has a low upper bound for support, certainly not much above 50%, and probably below that. Put aside Trumps “non-presidential” behaviors, and there is still a deep left/right divide among voters on the substance of policy. So I doubt it matters much who is the Republican president: progressives called every Republican running for president (even St. G. Romney!) a racist, immoral, corrupt, selfish, dishonest, etc. Trump’s non-conventional behavior drives progressives even more crazy than other Republicans would, so they tun up the volume. But the progressive message is pretty much a constant.
SteveF (Comment #168003): “Sure, but I think Trump’s substantive policies, and especially domestic policies, are vigorously opposed by a large number of voters, and maybe by a numerical majority.”
I’d guess that the percentage who oppose all Republicans on policy is probably no more than 30%, those who oppose all Republicans on principle might be more like 40%.
A large majority of the public supports a strong economy. Trump’s main immigration positions have the support of the large majority. Strong support for Trump’s regulatory, environmental, and climate policies is probably well short of a majority, but so is strong opposition. Support for his judicial appointments is probably a minority, but probably a majority of those who care and pay attention to the judiciary. So far as I can tell, Trump does not know what he wants on medical insurance, but neither does most of the public.
Tom & Steve,
Although I haven’t responded to your comments, I did read and appreciate them.
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Pressure washed my house today. Something was wrong with the nozzle, and the water beam was arcing all over the place. Reminded me of the weapons from Ghostbusters.
Tom
Oh the Europe…. oh… do you? My view is the Europeans want us to send Obama. The people you really want to send: Franklin and Adams. Those two were neither Obama nor Trump. Both were willing and able to pull the wool over both the French and English eyes to negotiate our own treaty which was more favorable than the French would have gotten for us. (The French were “supposedly” negotiating “for” us. Heh.)
The thing is: you don’t want a pig but you also don’t want someone who doesn’t recognize that the job of American negotiators is… well… to use a phrase some don’t like “America first”. In fact, all countries should look to their own interest when negotiating treaties. That doesn’t mean screwing other people. But if you don’t put your own country’s interest near the top of the list when negotiating, no one else will.
Mike M,
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If Trump’s immigration policy is mostly to significantly reduce the influx of illegals, I’d agree that the vast majority of American’s do support him.
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If Trump’s policy is to significantly reduce legal immigration as well, I would doubt that this has the support of most Americans.
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What do you think?
Kan,
I love how you handle pollsters. for some reason we never get these calls but I have had some fun with folks who can lower our mortgage costs, especially the ones who claim to already have all of our information.
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We haven’t had one in 30 years.
j ferguson,
I answer telemarketers if I’m doing something like emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry. If I’m in the mood, I put the phone on speaker and fold and engage.
I’m constantly amused at the telemarketers who say “our records show….”. After telling me my records show something (bogus) they then start to ask questions. For example, Them: “What do you pay for electricity. Me: “I dunno. What do your records show?” I’ve had them suggest I go dig up my electricity bill. I tell them it’s in the attic and just leave the phone on the counter… continue to fold laundry…. Or, “Excuse me, someone is at the door. Can you hold?”
On the one hand, it’s mean to the individual phone operator. On the other hand, that’s the only way to hurt the business model.
There’s another annoying ploy I’ve experienced from fund raisers. I call them “faux friendly fundraisers”. The voice assume a cheerful laughing tone and says something like “You’re harder to get than my daughter” or some such. I’ve learned to respond with something like, “How sad. Why doesn’t your daughter want to talk to you?” They are often forbidden to go off script. When they won’t answer my questions, I ask if they are a ‘bot. Then I ask to talk to an administrator.
FWIW: The “faux friendly fundraisers” are usually trying to get my mother in law, who passed away. On the one hand, I sympathize with charities who do want to raise funds. At least superficially, some of these people seem like they might be real charities (though I don’t really check.) But on the other hand, even if they are a real charity, I think they’ve designed this to sort of prey on the elderly.
j ferguson (Comment #168007): “If Trump’s policy is to significantly reduce legal immigration as well, I would doubt that this has the support of most Americans.”
I am not aware of any policy of Trump’s as such. He wants to get rid of the visa lottery. Very few people would support that if they knew how it works. He wants to reduce chain migration. That has wide support. Those policies might reduce the total amount of immigration; I doubt most people would mind.
Mike M.
I agree that reduction of all legal immigration may not be a stated policy, but i suppose we can’t rely on his statements at his rallies as expressions of policy.
Lucia, you must drive them nuts.
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In the late ’80s our business used to get calls from folks who would tell the receptionist that it was time for us to reorder toner cartridges for our copier.
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Her previous employer had been “Solid Gold” on Miami Beach. She came to us because she found her role at Solid Gold a bit too drafty. I never liked the draft either, but I don’t think she meant the same thing.
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After a couple of these calls, she asked if she could handle them any way she liked. “Sure, as long as you don’t buy anything.”
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On the next call, she told the guy she was delighted he’d called, that we’d run through a case of cartridges over the last several years and would need more shortly. Guy asked for name and model of printer.
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“Browning A300”
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Guy asked if she was sure. She said she was. He asked if she could check on the machine itself. She returned with same make and model and this time a serial number, date of manufacture (20/12/1951) and that Browning was in Cologne, Germany.
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She’d been in Cologne in the Army so she knew some details about the place.
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The guy then confessed that he couldn’t find this machine in any of his catalogs and wondered how we got it. She told him she’d brought it back from Germany complete with the cartridges which we had almost completely run through. We loved it. Cartridges lasted almost forever, etc.
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There were some more questions. Then the guy realized she was pulling his leg, laughed, and thanked her for a story he could tell his colleagues. We never heard from him again.
j ferguson (Comment #168011): “I agree that reduction of all legal immigration may not be a stated policy, but i suppose we can’t rely on his statements at his rallies as expressions of policy.”
What statements would those be? Here is the text of Trump’s pre-election policy speech on immigration: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-immigration-address-transcript-227614
No direct proposal for reducing legal immigration. But he clearly says that it should not be unlimited. I’d guess 80-90% support for that. And he says “To keep immigration levels, measured by population share, within historical norms”.
Hi Mike M,
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My insights into this issue probably flow from the many articles like the one below that’ I’ve read in the las year or so.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/30/trump-legal-immigration-republicans-378041
Maybe you believe that limiting some bases of legal immigration is not an expression of an intent to limit legal immigration. It sure looks like it to me.
j ferguson (Comment #168014): “Maybe you believe that limiting some bases of legal immigration is not an expression of an intent to limit legal immigration. It sure looks like it to me.”
I did not make myself clear. I think this is one of those things where you get contradictory answers depending on how you ask the question. If you ask the public if they want to reduce illegal immigration, you might or might not get majority support. But if you ask about ending chain migration or the visa lottery you will get large majority support.
I suspect I am still not making myself clear. This thread started with SteveF (Comment #168003): “Sure, but I think Trump’s substantive policies, and especially domestic policies, are vigorously opposed by a large number of voters, and maybe by a numerical majority.â€
I have been disputing that. In particular, I think that the public strongly supports Trump’s position on immigration. But there is an ongoing framing battle between Trump and the media/Democrats.
Trump’s framing is that immigration policy should serve America’s interests. The number of immigrants should be set by how many our economy can productively absorb rather than at a level that suppresses wages for those already here. Who gets let in should be based on whether they can contribute to our society, not on race, religion, and family connections.
The media/Democrat framing is that Trump wants to reduce immigration because he is an anti-immigrant racist.
If Trump’s framing prevails, he will have overwhelming majority support for his immigration policies. If the media/Democrat framing wins, he will likely not have majority support. It is easy to get the impression that the media/Democrat framing is prevailing. That is certainly reducing support for Trump’s position. But Trump has proven skilled at circumventing the media. So it is not clear who will win that battle.
For the record, my money is on Trump. Recent history indicates that is the way to bet.
I suspect the best US negotiators with Europe are Obama on the outside, and Trump on the inside. It has always made me dizzy when people are against “America First” in international negotiations. It seemed blindingly obvious this would be the case, and the expectation is that everyone else would selfishly negotiate for their best interests. This model produces good results because many times “best interests” are different between countries and that’s were compromises are made.
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There are many in the faculty lounge who apparently seem to think we should be negotiating for the good of the world (queue golf applause for virtue signalling), which is why they shouldn’t be involved. It must be pointed out that when it comes time to reduce costs of education for the “good of the world” the attitude changes to self interest pretty quickly. Generosity with other people’s money isn’t much of a virtue.
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For all the bluster, negotiations do end up being fairly efficient. The only reason the Paris Accords or Iran Agreement were agreed upon was because they actually weren’t agreed on. Non-agreement agreements seem to curiously have a short shelf life.
Tom Scharf (Comment #168017): “I suspect the best US negotiators with Europe are Obama on the outside, and Trump on the inside.”
Good cop, bad cop.
lucia (Comment #168006): “The people you really want to send: Franklin and Adams.”
My recollection is that Franklin played good cop and Adams played bad cop. Both came naturally to those roles. It is my impression that the French regarded Adams as a pig, but really liked Franklin. The Brits were more familiar with the Adams type, but he still drove them nuts.
Mike M.
Yes. But also: both were negotiating with the British behind the French’s back. See
https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/treaty-of-paris
Basically: the French believed (and were encouraged to believe) the American’s were going to let the French be in charge of as it were. But… no….
I should add, I’m under the impression the following was also going on.
Franklin, who was so friendly and sociable with the ladies was in charge of “disinformation”.
Adams and Franklin also encouraged the notion they did not get along and disagreed on things. This wasn’t too difficult because their personalities differed. Franklin liked to party; Adams was stiff. Plus lots of people didn’t like Adams. So they could go out of their way to complain about each others personality traits.
In fact, Adams and Franklin, though having different personalities saw eye to eye on what was in the interest of the US. These were after all the two guys who pretty much collaborated to get the declaration of independence signed which included quite a bit of strategy. (For example: it was their idea the document must be written by a Virginian, because New England was already on board. It was their idea to pick Jefferson. And so on…)
MikeM
To add to this: Both Adams and Franklin were entirely aware of people reactions and to an extent intentionally behaved to make these reactions stronger. Both pretended to “leak” stuff.
A very long story from the WP on the state of mind and interviews of Midwest voters regarding Trump. It must have been a top secret project at the WP because it comes off as balanced and believable. This reporter did a lot of listening for a change.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/trump-voters
Trump supported Cotton/Perdue bill which I think reduces legal immigration.
Also ending chain migration would reduce immigration by itself as that has taken up a larger share over the years and is I think uncapped.
The Strzok / Page texts, starts about 10 pages down.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Appendix%20C%20-%20Documents.pdf
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Our trusted non-partisan elite educated professionals doing the hard earnest work of government without bias and instilling confidence in the governed. I read about 10 pages and it makes me ill that these people were in high level positions of high profile political investigations. Not helpful to the FBI. At all.
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Lovely example: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart, I could SMELL the Trump support…”
Mike M,
” But there is an ongoing framing battle between Trump and the media/Democrats.”
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I venture it is more than a framing battle. There are large and important differences in preferred policies, which arise from fundamental differences in values, morals, etc (disagreements about policy on fossil fuel use is but one of these!). WRT immigration policy, I agree that it is likely more voters would support immigration based on potential economic contribution rather than the lottery and “chain immigration” system we have now. But Trump, being Trump, seems unable to even get this perfectly rational choice in front of the voters (messing it up with comments like ‘those $hithole countries’!). Those who see immigration as just another means to make the world “more fair” (AKA progressives) are and will remain implacably opposed to a merit based immigration policy.
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In my original comment above (168003), I used “majority”, when I had meant to use “plurality”.
SteveF (Comment #168025): “I venture it is more than a framing battle. There are large and important differences in preferred policies, which arise from fundamental differences in values, morals, etc … WRT immigration policy, I agree that it is likely more voters would support immigration based on potential economic contribution rather than the lottery and “chain immigration†system we have now”.
I agree. On one side we have Trump advocating that we have a right to control our borders, a right to decide who we let in, and a right to make such decisions based on the good of the country. On the other side we have the establishment types advocating essentially open borders. There is little serious debate over the amount of immigration; the debate is over what control the government should exercise.
Given the actual debate, Trump’s position would have 70-80% support among the public. So the open borders crowd needs to obfuscate. They seek to frame the debate as being pro-immigrant vs. anti-immigrant. They also seek to characterize being anti-immigrant as racist. That lets them claim that the Trump position is racist and that anyone who supports it deserves to be cast out of polite society.
If the establishment loses the framing battle, they lose the debate since their actual position has very little support. Even if they win the framing battle, they are not absolutely assured of success.
The left doesn’t want to say out loud that it doesn’t support merit based immigration, and they never will. They will say they support this AND everything else. I imagine a big block of the left does support merit based migration. If you were from the right you would want to get them as close to claiming support for open borders as possible. The wedge you want to drive is showing they prioritize support of legal and illegal immigrants over lower class US citizens. They seem to be doing a good job of driving that wedge all by themselves.
A very curious sign that some organizations may have made it all the way to acceptance in their stages of grief after 2016. The Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute (if you know these think tanks they are polar opposites) released joint reports on “defending liberal democracyâ€.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/05/10/washington-wakes-up-to-authoritarian-populism-in-the-u-s-and-europe
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The goal of scaring the crap out of the establishment appears to have been met, and now after the wailing temper tantrum it is their move. Defend the castle, or appease the peasants.
Sad day. The war corgi’s watch is ended.
I’m going to miss that dog.
mark bofill,
No idea, really. Corgi? What? (not rhetorical)
Steve,
Yeah. Wasn’t my first choice; the wife wanted a corgi. But she was a good girl. Fierce, loyal. Im more or less at peace with her passing, she had a helluva good life. Im sorry I wasn’t with her at the end. Didn’t realize how bad off she was.
To Nutmeg.
Bunch of primaries coming up. I gotta figure out who’s who in Alabama; lots of unfamiliar names. What do y’all think of Kay Ivey, to the extent any of you have thought of her at all (I don’t much pay attention to governor races in other states, so..)?
Pet deaths are hard. Every single one is burned into my memory as a very clearly remembered experience. They always make me reconsider getting another pet, then I always do anyway. Features > Drawbacks. I brought my kids with me when we had to put our last dog down, you never know if you should block them from these things or show them the reality. Looking at my dog when I drive him to the vet for the last time on “that day” is not an experience I like to revisit in my mind. Yeah bud, Hitler is driving you to the gas chamber…ugh. Give them a good life, what more can you do. If there are days you look at your pet and want to trade places with him, you are likely doing your job.
Thanks Tom.
Driving her to the vet wasn’t that awful because I hadn’t decided to euthanize her. The vet didn’t realize what was wrong with her right away either, so it was more of a ‘she died while we were seeking treatment for her’ rather than ‘I put her down’.
But yup. Animals living in my house as pets have pretty much won the Mega Millions lottery. I wouldn’t want to live as a pet, and it’d take (at least a little :/) more to keep me occupied, but that aside, yeah. It’s a pretty sweet deal for them.
Anyways.
This fairly long read is like a book report of Murray’s Coming Apart. If you want a big dose of white upper middle class guilt, you can get it here. It is informative if you haven’t been read into this theory yet. It is better to read this information as an observation of a social problem, not an indictment of good parenting.
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The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy
The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
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Very aggravatingly, and very predictably, they don’t even mention Murray’s name. They do say this though: “We are, as some sociologists have delicately put it, a “cognitive elite.†Really? This article name drops like crazy everywhere else.
Tom,
I thought that was interesting. The author doesn’t seem to come up with very much in the way of solutions though. Conservatives tweaking formulas won’t work. Ok. Coffee shop radicals who want a revolution are on the wrong track. Ok. The rights of human beings can’t be established in a handful of old phrases or declarations. Ok. So… what’s the answer? All he gives us is that the Federal government is going to have to be involved in the solution.
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I’d hate to jump the gun and assume the author thinks more redistribution is the answer. If so, thanks, but no thanks.
mark,
Acknowledging the problem is the first step. There has always been inequality and that is an acceptable result by design with an equal opportunity system. The question is whether what we have now is “fair enough” equal opportunity. All us libertarian types should be on board for fixing equal opportunity problems, regardless if the usual suspects are crying white guilt, shaming others (excluding their own virtuous selves of course), and so on.
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Responsible parenting and a good family structure is not unfairly exploiting a system. Secret knowledge of how to get into elite colleges is exploiting a system. Requiring college degrees for jobs that shouldn’t is rigging a system. Skyrocketing tuition rates is unfairly limiting the field. Trade policy, automation, and low skilled immigration is punishing the lower classes regardless of intent.
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It’s expected that the rich and powerful will build barriers to entry into their kingdom and protect / advantage their progeny. You fix the problem by identifying and dismantling the unfair parts of their wall. Many of these walls were built without malice, but they need torn down anyway.
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Ground zero I believe is the education system. One example would be requiring elite institutions to use a lottery after an initial bar (e.g. SAT score) is reached. Holistic admissions is code for unfair elite secret handshakes.
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Multi-generational family success should not be punished, neither should kids who have parents who make bad life choices. Waxing lyrical about your summer in Haiti should count for exactly zero, demonstrating a work ethic and baseline ability (e.g. IQ) should matter. It is scandalous to me that volunteering is seen in a better light than working full time at a real job.
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Lately it’s been all in all, just another brick in the wall. The less educated then built themselves a low tech catapult and lobbed Trump over that wall, ha ha.
The Supreme Court’s landmark Griggs v. Duke Power decision gave us the infamous disparate impact standard for discrimination. Duke’s aptitude tests for a job were found to be unconstitutional due to unequal racial results even though the tests weren’t themselves found discriminatory. The key point being the generic test wasn’t directly job related.
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Companies must now prove beforehand any employment tests are directly job related and non-discriminatory, and getting sued under disparate impact can result in huge settlements. Companies don’t want to open themselves to this liability, thus few aptitude tests now.
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College and high school degree requirements pass constitutional muster for employment. Thus, the college degree bubble.
Tom Scharf, why would college or high school degrees pass the disparate impact standard?
Tom Scharf,
Do they really need to prove beforehand? If so, who do they file their proof about employment tests with? (Real questions.)
The problem with disparate impact is that on the one hand companies have created tests to intentionally discriminate in the past. On the other hand, sometimes similar tests are necessary for a job. So, for example: strength is important for fire fighters. It is not important for line managers in retail stores. And yes: strength along with minimum height standards were in the past sometimes used to block women from positions.
Oddly: in the military, absolute strength and endurance is important for some positions, but not others. So, for example: being able to run a mile in under “n” minutes was never about an officer needing to do it. The various physical requirements were only actually useful to ensure a basic level of fitness which is required for a certain long term endurance at standing up to a high stress job and also to promulgate a certain level of respect for not being a “fat slob”. Adjusting those requirements for male and female officers made sense. Adjusting them for Navy seals…. not so much. So other positions in between? We’d need to discuss the position. (Programmer types, running is fast not required. Feet on the ground? Absolute speed and strength probably pretty dang useful.)
So I do think you need to look carefully at a job test or requirement to gauge whether it’s there because those skills and attributes are really needed or whether it’s just an excuse to exclude the “wrong types” who could otherwise do the job perfectly well.
Gods, what a bad idea.
Disparate impact and unintentional discrimination:
This whole legal theory was a ‘yuge’ frickin mistake. Affirmative action violates equal protection is what it boils down to.
No, actually I probably am not following this properly. You can’t be a racist in trying not to be a racist, unless you’ve got “a strong basis in evidence” that you’ll have disparate impact liability if you don’t, is what I’m walking away with from Ricci_v._DeStefano. Still seems like a muddled mess to me.
It is a bit of a head scratcher that companies are allowed to effectively outsource aptitude testing to colleges, and to say that is good for the bottom line of academia is an understatement.
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I’m no legal scholar but I believe that requiring a college degree in the area you are hiring for is much more defensible than * creating your own test *. In theory you aren’t supposed to be allowed to require a college degree to be a janitor.
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You are allowed to aptitude test employees, such as Google giving potential employees coding problems to solve in an interview. My reading here is that if you make this the primary screening mechanism you better pray it doesn’t produce disparate racial results, even by an unfortunate statistical accident of the potential hiring pool … which happens …
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(Oops, I see Mark covered this already) In Supreme Court Ricci v. DeStefano the results of New Haven firefighting promotion testing didn’t produce enough minority candidates, fearing they would be sued under disparate impact law they threw the test results out. This was found to be racially discriminatory against the white candidates.
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You can’t win. Employee testing is apparently a legally perilous enterprise. It can be easily argued that the people these laws are intended to protect are conversely being punished by being forced to get an expensive college degree which only allows them to go “employment fishing” instead of receiving a job when they are done. This isn’t helping the lower classes.
Tom,
That’s what I was thinking too. All of these laws and decisions taken together seem to me to setup a gauntlet [that] organizations must run where there is no definite safe path.
mark bofill,
” Affirmative action violates equal protection is what it boils down to.”
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For sure. You don’t fix past discrimination with more discrimination, because that always leads to non-equal treatment under law… it’s illogical… just nuts.
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But it is perfectly consistent with the sad reality that the SC is, in most every “landmark” case (and far too many non-landmark cases), guided by politics, not by interpretation of the law or the Constitution. The only good thing I can say about the SC is that the lifetime appointments tend to impede sudden unwise shifts in public policy. The flip side is that political activism by the court can (and does) regularly damage the rule of law via sudden “discovery” by the SC justices of interpretations of the Constitution which were never recognized before, and which seem always unrelated to the actual words in the document, but closely related to the personal policy preferences of the justices. ‘Orwellian’ seems to me a good description of these interpretations.
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I think district courts and appellate courts are politically motivated, wildly out of control, and completely unaccountable to the voters. Some wacko judge in Oregon can block presidential executive orders… I can’t find that power in the Constitution. So I would like to see Congress severely restrict the legal purview of all district and appellate Federal courts, (which the Constitution clearly provides for). But sadly, I doubt that will happen in the foreseeable future.
lucia,
I think I probably stated that wrong.
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“Griggs v. Duke Power Co. also held that the employer had the burden of producing and proving the business necessity of a test”.
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I guess this means the burden is on the business to prove it is valid, versus the government having to prove it is invalid. The net result is that businesses had better legally review any potential testing before they give it, and unintentional discrimination is still a violation.
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Given the known racial disparities in IQ testing and high school graduation rates it is unlikely you can design a test for many industries that would produce acceptable results no matter how fair it actually is. Being sued without any merit is still going to be crazy expensive. It’s setup to be a legal goldmine, and people are mining it, especially the DOJ who recently attacked the loan / housing industries with this. It seems too risky for the private sector.
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There is no doubt that a test can be created with malicious intent, but we also need to allow the job market to open up to non-college people. How many people really use that college knowledge in their job? Big Oil, Big Pharma, now Big Education.
Steve,
Yep. Lifetime appointments are a double edged sword.
Yep. Not holding my breath either though. But – I suspect it’s double edged again not unlike the lifetime appointment thing. There may be instances when we really do need judges to protect us from executive orders, I’m not sure.
I don’t know. What’s bothering me right now is that once the SC steps in crap, it seems that it becomes precedent that gets twined into the system forever with no good way of undoing it. Over time the legal system is bound to drift off course as a result in my view. Not sure what could be done about it though.
It goes without saying that if you start expanding the identities (LBTQIA…) that can be potentially discriminated against in hiring then the chances of unintentional discrimination shoot up dramatically based on statistics alone.
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The courts have laid out some sort of 80% rule. If you are within 80% of whatever it is supposed to be (a moving target) then you are safe.
mark bofill,
“There may be instances when we really do need judges to protect us from executive orders, I’m not sure.”
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I do not doubt there are instances where we need protection from presidential fiat… there are at least two: the SC, and Congress. I suspect that is enough. Congress could just pass a law saying: “No Federal district court or appellate court may hear a case brought against the executive branch; only the Supreme Court shall hear a suit brought against the executive branch.” Of course, less complete restrictions, and/or explicit prioritization of cases that involve suits against the executive branch could also be adopted. For example “No Federal Court’s ruling against the executive shall be enforced until that court’s ruling has been formally accepted and approved by the Supreme Court.” In other words, no immediate relief without SC acceptance. This alone would eliminate most of the of the politically motivated cases, since most cases either become moot due to changes in circumstances or are overturned at some point. No immediate relief means little motivation to bring a suit which will likely be reversed later.
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But the bigger point is: the Constitution provides for Congress to pretty much completely control the role and purview of the Federal courts. But Congress has consistently failed to address politically motivated abuses by the courts. If a timely ruling on a case really matters (eg Trump’s immigration restrictions on specific countries), the SC owes it to the country to hear the case and provide a ruling promptly. I find their hearing of cases which are of little general import, rather than those which demand immediate resolution, extremely odd. The long delays in hearing cases that need quick resolution are contrary to good government.
Steve,
I won’t argue with that.
SteveF,
It might be sufficient to have a ban against courts below the level of “circuit” hear cases. That would mean cases always involved at least a few judges and would speed things along. Also, it could spare SCOTUS in cases where circuits don’t split and SCOTUS pretty much thinks it’s not worth hearing to overrule a set of unanimous circuit rulings.
Prompt hearings are useful. But some time is also useful. Having some arguments at circuit level also lets arguments come out be heard by the public. That may not be legally important, but it is somewhat important if later we are to consider legislation to change things so the order is either permitted or overturned. (In many cases, legislation can make the order illegal or legal where otherwise the opposite applied.)
These being heard at district level is somewhat ridiculous as either they apply everywhere or they aren’t valid anywhere. They impact is pretty broad. So if worth throwing out, it should be done. Of valid, it should be held up at a fairly high level fairly quickly.
Did Trump put O’Reilly up to this?
hmm.
Tom Scharf
College isn’t a pure aptitude test. I have a degree in mechanical engineering. I don’t have a degree in accounting, or business, or music and so on. While some people don’t learn much in college, many people actually do learn something in college. That learning is relevant to many jobs and it is often job specific.
Finishing college also shows some amount of “stick-to-it-iveness”. That said: that indication should be balanced against family resources and the willingness of parents to pay. Kids from families with mega-bucks don’t need as much stick-to-it-iveness to finish as kids who need to work part-time during college to make ends meet.
The discrimination problem here is obvious.
(a) The threw the results out because of the proportion of candidates in different racial groups. Had they suddenly discovered the tests didn’t predict who could do the job well, the court finding would likely have been different.
(b) If I’m not mistaken, they threw the results of the test out after people who studied for the test took it and some passed and some fell. So they created a specific set of candidates one could compare.
I realize the irony that the company did this because they thought they would be dinged for disparate outcome otherwise. But that was a misinterpretation on their part.
The fact is: If you are going to have a screening test for employees, you need to make sure you can argue that the test is specifically relevant to the job. A coding test for coders is specifically relevant. An IQ test is not. This is rather obvious because there are tons of high IQ people who cannot code. The population of doctors and lawyers are often thought to contain quite a few high IQ individuals, none of whom would be suitable coders due to lack of training (and for that matter interest.)
If a high IQ happens to help people become good coders, it’s still pointless to test IQ. Because you can still pick the good coders out by testing coding. You’ll happen to incidentally hire a pool of people with higher than average IQs but you will achieve this result by testing coding.
Tom Scharf
It’s probably fine that you could not design an IQ test that use valid for hiring decisions because IQ per se is generally not specifically valid for any job. See my comment about coders above. You need good coders? Test coding. You need waiters strong and agile enough to carry trays full of beer through crowded rooms? Test whether they can hold trays of beer and walk around a series of tables.
It’s plausible some employers who hit on the idea to use IQ tests didn’t have malicious intent. The problem is that even though many people want smart employees, those tests are almost never job specific. When they end up having the ‘feature’ of discriminatory outcome, there is no good argument left in their favor. The employers could almost certainly have come up with a valid test, but did not.
But besides that: disparities in IQ outcomes have been know to exist for a long time. So allowing those to be used when they are not remotely job specific opens a big door to let people “accidentally on purpose” discriminate. That happens.
It should be pointed out the SC did in fact take an emergency hearing on the Trump travel ban and overturned the blocking of it before the case was heard. Obviously a signal of displeasure, and the SC should only have to do an immediate smack down of lower courts on rare occasions, but this seems to happen much more often in politically tinged cases. They also heard Bush vs. Gore pronto. So they do take control when they judge things are out of line or need immediate resolution. They are the most reputable of the 3 branches by far in my view, even if they have offended my ideology occasionally by not letting me vote on an issue.
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The most ridiculous current example is DACA, Obama can start it on executive order and multiple courts rule Trump cannot rescind on executive order because legal technicality X, even though they all admit Trump has the power to rescind if he just worded it correctly in an unspecified way. That should not be an immediate block.
> only the Supreme Court shall hear a suit brought against the executive branch.â€
You’d need to add another ten Justices to handle the workload.
Oh. I didn’t realize that the ‘business necessity’ defense trumps the disparate outcome thing. Ok, fair enough.
lucia,
In Ricci that is exactly what they found, New Haven had no evidence to show it was reasonable they would be successfully sued for disparate impact. This may be valid, but the fear is not really being successfully sued, it is just being sued in which case the likely outcome was settlement before an expensive trial to avoid a jackpot jury.
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I think getting into college is primarily a not job related generic aptitude test. The point being that this is the gate a company would like to screen it’s potential employees for but it is not allowed to perform generic testing. It’s getting done anyway.
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I’m thinking more along the lines of inusrance companies requiring a college degree of almost any kind rather than STEM jobs, but even with STEM a person Bob who taught himself programming shouldn’t be penalized. I think what the definition of a degree is should be changed. It should be a demonstration of competence, not competence and I found $100K of funding somewhere and spent 4 years doing bong hits. For example if Bob took and passed every test an MIT CS major did, he should be able to claim an MIT equivalent degree. There is some value at MIT other than passing some tests, but Bob should be able to get a MIT-lite degree if he pays the costs of the test taking and passes.
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I’m asking for accredited alternate routes instead of BS/BA gate keeping that can arguably be seen as limiting equal opportunity. Effectively a low cost GED, or home schooling for college.
MikeN,
“You’d need to add another ten Justices to handle the workload.”
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The justices can simply refuse to hear cases that are obvious garbage… so not much work at all.
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But the alternative I suggested (prohibit enforcement of a lower court order unless affirmed by the SC) reduces the load even more. The SC could always affirm a lower court without hearing any argument at all if the case is nutty (circuit court in Hawaii blocking nationwide an executive order on imigration?!?). I am guessing that case will go 6-3 or more to overturn the lower courts. It is a case where “no power to enforce” by the lower courts would make a big difference in the attraction of such suits. I suspect the SC would usually not even bother to hear arguments in a garbage case like that.
There are very few companies that test coders with coding tests as their primary screening mechanism. You can’t get in the door without a degree.
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A more realistic scenario is what if a company wants to screen potential employees for some very industry specific and expensive training they provide? Monitoring the nuclear reactor at the power plant, etc. This is not something that is taught at college, but a skilled job a smart responsible person can do straight out of high school. How do you screen and stay legal?
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Maybe the job requirements perfectly correlate to SAT scores and the ability to write a good essay. The employer can’t give an SAT test without risking legal jeopardy, but a college can. Alternately maybe they just require a high school degree and then a personal interview occurs where the person is judged to be bright or not in 10 minutes. This personal interview can’t possibly introduce racial bias into the equation as we all know, ha ha. They end up requiring a college degree because they can get the people they want, and smart high schoolers are locked out.
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Maybe a good idea is to just allow a requirement that you were admitted to a decent college and forgo the college experience requirement.
Tom Scharf,
Employers are allowed to test job candidates. It’s the “generic” that is the problem. The outcome of the test has to predict likelihood of success in the actual job. If the word “generic” applies that suggests the test is not suited to predicting likelihood of success.
In Ricci, the employers really did a number of themselves since the fact they initially chose the test, said they were going to use it, and had candidates take it suggested they actually believed the test was one that would determine aptitude for the job. That is: they actually thought it was valid. Then, they threw out the results of a test they thought valid on the basis that it excluded too many minorities.
Depending on the job and degree the “college” requirement is not generic though. That said: if the “college” requirement is only a hurdle and not actually required to succeed in the job, then companies could hypothetically be sued for disparate impact for using just “college degree” in a generic way. I suspect if an employer uses “college” with no particular degree type, they could get themselves jammed up.
Nah. Or…. well he can claim anything. But people can scoff.
Bob can’t get and MIT degree without going to MIT. He might be able to take tests written by someone who claims to write equivalent tests. But they won’t actually be all the tests done by the student at MIT. Also: MIT might also argue that the homework and projects count too. Those aren’t “tests” and MIT would argue they are important to their credentialling project. Bob (and others) can of course claim “Credentialling agency X” is just as good…. but no one has to agree.
The fact is: you can’t force MIT to give MIT credentials to someone who does not meet the exact requirements MIT sets up. Same with Caltech, Stanford and so on.
Many companies would just as soon you had CISCO credentialing in somethings or other training in other things anyway.
Tom Scharf,
I really think you’ve developed a mis-impression of what is not allowed and why these things are allowed or not.
There is a very good reasons why a school can use the SAT for screening and a job would risk legal jeopardy. It’s because the SAT was specifically designed to “predict” (in a probabilistic sense) freshman year scores and likelihood for graduation. There’s lots and lots of data showing it is a good predictor. It’s not perfect, but SAT, ACT and high school grades all have positive correlations with those things.
If someone complained about the SAT, the schools could show the tests do correlate with the outcomes they are intended to predict. The test isn’t jut a “generic” test. It’s specific to “likelihood of success in college studies.”
In contrast, the SAT not designed to predict how well one would do at specific jobs. It might turn out it was positively correlated with some jobs. But the employer who just says, “Hey, why don’t I use SAT scores to screen?” almost certainly doesn’t have the data to back up a claim it tests aptitude for the job. The test wasn’t designed to do it. The test writer (college board) doesn’t claim it does it. And so on.
So: that’s right. The employer risks a disparate impact claim if they use it to screen for jobs. The risk this because there is very little reason to suspect it’s useful for assessing job aptitude (and actually it’s probably no good at it.) Meanwhile: we all know using it will have a disparate impact. So: don’t use it.
This doesn’t prevent an employer from writing or using a meaningful test– provided “meaningful” is job specific. If an employer wished to, they could develop a screening test that provides the candidate a prompt (or choice of prompts) and asked them to write a 1 or 2 paragraphs essay– perhaps summarize it. Then they could have someone grade it.
They could require copy-editors to pass a brief test on grammar, spelling and punctuation including proof reading.
I knew engineering students who took summer jobs and were required to pass a quick test of simpler calculus facts that required application of 1st-3rd semester calc problems. That tends to screen out people who might have cheated, or been involved in some sort of faking of credentials. These things are allowed.
Companies can test employees, but the key phrase was “without facing legal jeopardy”. Companies almost never test employees this way. The question is why not? It is either (a) not effective, (b) not necessary, (c) illegal, or (d) not worth perceived risks for other reasons. It’s about 99% (b). If your option is to take a legal risk/expense and test people yourselves or a less risky option of taking people who had 4 years and $100K of training that costs you nothing, it’s an easy pick. Is that equal opportunity for someone who needs to provide for a family now?
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IQ predicts success in many industries and jobs and the SAT test is more of an IQ test than an accumulated knowledge test. I don’t want get bogged down in IQ. It probably isn’t the best predictor for any specific job, but it’s unclear whether outlawing it for job screening is really protecting anybody from anything, especially if the current system’s alternative is a more arduous mandatory expensive college degree.
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In Bob’s case he was taking the actual same MIT tests as the students. In this imaginary world it would be legally required by MIT to provide these tests (but not grade them). Real MIT students can have more cred, fine. Two things:
1. If elite institutions are pipelines to the 1% (they are) and they are being unfairly (fill in your own definition of unfair here) monopolized by the elite (maybe, maybe not) then 18 year old Bob is being locked out due to the inferior culture of his parents and their finances, not Bob.
2. Bob with no degree is much less desirable to employ than Bob with no degree who scored 96% on the MIT exams. This cannot happen now.
Superior kids from superior parents should be rewarded and the culture encouraged. If the system is artificially rigged in their favor, it needs fixed.
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I imagine without any evidence that the perfect tests for a large portion of knowledge economy jobs will correlate highly with an SAT score that has disparate impacts. Specific tests are better, I’m just not sure it fixes anything at all. Writing tests have disparate impact if you examine ACT writing scores.
So, just an aside. I don’t have any direct knowledge of MIT kids. I did have friends at GA Tech in computer science. Slacker that I was, I went to GA State. We compared classes. GA Tech wasn’t just more prestigious. They really did teach and test a deeper and more comprehensive level of knowledge. One illustrative example (there were others) – I had a OS class where we develop[ed] parts of an operating system and ran them in simulation. My friend had a class where they wrote an operating system from scratch.
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All I’m saying is, IMO you’re talking about a heck of an exceptional case, somebody who can just walk in and perform at the level of an MIT grad. That’s going to be one in ten thousand or something.
And maybe the times are a-changing. I don’t really know what this is, but I bump into it from time to time. I think it’s basically a coding challenge / test for companies to use to find developers:
https://codefights.com/recruiter
I grant you though that most of the jobs I see advertised for do indeed require at least a bachelor[s] in a science, usually some sort of computer related degree like compsci or software engineering.
I would say that 95% of the people rejected by MIT could complete the coursework. If you don’t get into HYPSM then spending a crap-load of money to go somewhere else likely doesn’t pay off relative to attending a strong in-state school.
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Just to repeat my repetitiveness, ha ha. Colleges can have real value and simultaneously be too costly for the lower classes and perform an unnecessary gatekeeping function for some industries.
Ok.
[Edit: 19 out of 20, really? 7.8% of those admitted drop out without completing. I think 19/20 is a little on the high side. This is a quibble though. [And it was rhetorical. Sorry.]]
I found it! Ha, ha.
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Credentialism. Big word. Serious sounding. Most people don’t even know what it means. High scorer in Scrabble. The best part is that it is an ‘ism! This means when I feel I am losing a debate all I need to do is label and shame the opposition as credentialists, then call on my Twitter army. I’m feeling the power.
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So, I rest my case until someone can refute me with an even higher Scrabble scoring counter-argument that has an equally shameful label attached to it.
OK, mark the credentialist, Any moral preening anti-credentialist knows that most people drop out of MIT for reasons other than the inability to complete the coursework. We, the righteous, are so sick of this debunked credentialist trope. We hope you have fun at your next credentialist rally saluting Hitler.
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Wow, this is way easier than engaging in a debate. I’m going to start a Facebook page.
I didn’t know that. 🙂
According to Quora, Hitler didn’t have much in the way of credentials. Just sayin.
Tom Scharf
If what you mean by “without facing legal jeopardy” is “have no risk of having a suit filed against them”, no company or person anywhere can do anything “without legal jeopardy”. Anyone anywhere can file a suit. That fact it’s unwinnable doesn’t bar it from being filed.
Beyond that, no one can run a business without risk of legal jeopardy for something. I could buy a hot dog from a street vendor, fall ill, claim it was food poisoning and sue them. So you can’t run a food truck or restaurant “without legal jeopardy”.
You’re going to have to firm the claim about “legal jeopardy” so that I know what precisely you mean by it. After that, we can discuss whether that definition just makes it fall in the broad “so what” category of all the possible types of “legal jeopardy” we all fall in.
Which choice a business makes will certainly depend on what job they are trying to fill. There are costs associated with testing individuals; but you might get better people at lower salaries if you do. While you might say the pick is “easy”, its clear that different companies make different choices. So easy doesn’t mean everyone makes the same decision. Some do the former, some the latter.
Your paragraph ends with a rhetorical question. I don’t know what point you want to make. But individual employers are not required to solve every single potential inequity. They are merely required to avoid giving preferential treatment for categories like race, sex and so on. They are allowed to give preferential treatment for potential employees based on reasonable evidence those candidates have potential to do the job in question well.
What they can’t do is devise a “test” that has virtually no ability to predict potential to do the job and also results in disparate income.
It’s not remotely unclear! Banning IQ tests from use as a screening in cases where it does not predict aptitude for a job most certainly is protecting some people. It’s specifically protecting people who are competent, can show so based on credentials and do poorly on IQ tests. This is crystal clear and claiming otherwise just suggests blindness.
I think I’ve made this point before: If an employer can show the IQ test predicts competence on the specific job the employer wants to fill, they could win a lawsuit that is brought. The problem for employers who want to use this tests is it doesn’t predict competence on the specific job. Of course the “might” get sued. But they “might” get sued for lots of things. (Jim worked at a hockey rink in high school. It got sued often. People would slip and fall, then sue. Yet, few would complain that you can’t operate a hockey rink without legal jeopardy. In fact: you can’t. You also can’t run a beauty salon without “legal jeopardy”. Big whip.)
So I understand your point: Are you suggesting MIT, for some reason, should be legally compelled to provide someone who does not enroll at MIT some same set of tests as students enrolled at MIT? That’s a lot of legal compulsion.
As for not grading them: If MIT staff doesn’t grade them, you have no point of comparison to how Bob’s performance compares to MIT students. Some other agency might grade more or less easily.
I don’t think you are grasping the problem.
A correlation might exist. But that’s only because people hired to code generally are coders and have shown evidence of ability to code.
Successful lawyers generally had high SAT scores. Some kids I tutored this year have stellar SAT schores. They’ve taken no coding. If you hired them to code, SAT scores would lose correlation with job performance. In fact, SAT scores tall you almost nothing about ability to do a specific job, and this is true even though SAT scores are alomst certainly positively correlated with later job success.
To make a test useful, it needs to do the former. Arguing that they do the latter just suggest someone doesn’t get the point about what’s wrong with certain types of tests when used for “screening”. You seem to want to argue the latter.
“Fixes anything” relative to what? Requiring those tests that are used to specifically predict aptitude for a specific job reduces the likelyhood that the only or main function of a test is to screen out people for reasons other than their ability to do the job.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone would object to companies being prohibited from using test that simultaneously (a) don’t predict how well a job candidate is likely to do a job and (b) act as a screen to filter out people of a particular race, gender, religion and so on.
I could see the problem if employers weren’t allowed to use valid tests because they happen to pick out more people of one race/gender and so on. But that’s allowed.
What employers can’t do is use an invalid test that just screens out candidates of the “wrong” race, gender and so on.
Lucia,
“I could see the problem if employers weren’t allowed to use valid tests because they happen to pick out more people of one race/gender and so on. But that’s allowed.”
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It is formally allowed. But if it leads to “undesirable” outcomes in terms of who gets hired, then there will be a lot of tearing of hair, and maybe lawsuits by those who did not get hired. SAT tests and high school grades are the most accurate predictors of college performance, yet any selective college which uses SAT scores and high school grades to determine admissions will have a whole lot more Asian, Jewish, and WAPS students than the college administrators “desire” and a whole lot fewer Hispanic and African American students than the administrators “desire”… not to mention the likely paucity of “legacy students” with very rich families! So many colleges and universities do actively discriminate against the most capable students to get the “right” mix of gender and races. Their admissions policies are anything but non-discriminatory, and I remain astounded that there are not many more lawsuits like the one filed against Harvard by rejected Asian students.
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I rather suspect “progressive” companies like Google do much the same in their hiring and promotion. Any large company the hires based on tests, even when those tests predict performance, is in grave danger of lawsuits.
SteveF,
Schools are allowed to use those scores. But yes, current schools do actively discriminate. We’ll wait to see what happens with the Harvard case. As it progresses, we’ll hear their arguments. Either they are going to claim they don’t discriminate or they are going to admit they do and try to provide a justification.
I think right now they are claiming they don’t discriminate but want a class that is diverse on multiple dimensions. Presumably what “multiple dimensions” means will be explained further and perhaps they can distinguish between that and imposing quotas.
(For “multiple dimensions”, going by text here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/harvard-asian-admission.html )
I think it may all come down to knowing what a valid test is. Some interesting information on disparate impact:
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Recent disparate impact settlements/judgments:
Countrywide – $335M
Wells Fargo – $175M
Suntrust – $21M
C&F Mortgage -$140K
New Orleans HUD – $62M
PrimeLending – $2M
Target – $2.8M
etc. Perhaps these are egregious violations, but one assumes these companies have competent lawyers who thought things were legal. Lending is a hornets nest because there are racial disparities in qualifying for a loan.
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One Example: Federal judge rules Boston police exam had racially disparate impact:
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“The court found that the exam was not consistent with a business necessity. The test did measure characteristics that are important elements of behavior for the job, but the department did not prove that the results of the test were good indicators of whether the candidates actually met those elements. The test, according to the court, failed to measure skills such as interpersonal skills, oral communication and the abilities to make quick decisions or counsel subordinates.”
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The test was OK, but not complete enough. You can’t get a test approved, you can only wait until you are sued and hope you can prove it to a judge/jury. As shown above this is a minefield with obscure definitions, and the court will inform you of your own requirements post-hoc. There are companies out there that sell these tests to cities now.
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The courts suggested other requirements (quick decisions, etc.) are almost impossible to test in an unbiased manner. Subjective hiring requirements are even more fraught to interpretation.
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This case was like a lieutenant exam or something. Boston showed that all their examination statistics in total had no disparate impact. The court rejected those statistics and focused on this one test with N = tiny. The use of aggregation using time or company wide is determined by the court with little guidance.
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In another case, Teal, a written screening exam was used, and blacks passed at a rate of 68% of the whites. The company then fixed this by simply promoting the blacks who passed at 170% the rate of whites. No harm, no foul. The court still ruled against the company in favor of black plaintiffs, the “bottom line” defense is not allowed.
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A company fired white employees at a rate of 35% of black employees. They were sued under disparate impact. They showed they just hired more black employees to replace them and maintained a legal employee ratio. The company won that one.
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Kind of a crazy case is Jones vs City of Boston, Boston was sued under disparate impact because black police officers failed drugs test more often. About 10 out of 2000 fail this test every year, disproportionately black. Ultimately the claim was hair follicle testing was racially biased. This was never proven or even a major part of the case. It was statistics interpretations.
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How much difference is too much? Very difficult problem, a rule of thumb within 80% compliance, and/or > 2 standard deviations certainty of a difference are sometimes used, but no standard for size of the effect. “Intuitive judicial judgment†of statistics is used. Smaller companies are more threatened by random hiring / firing noise.
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Let’s say a company is hiring an engineer. Black graduates are 4% of the pool, 13% of the population. If the company has ~4% black engineers with an engineering degree requirement it is clean. If it tested the general population by itself and has ~4% black engineers it is potentially liable. If it was sued it would bear the burden of the costs to prove it was innocent with the plaintiff only needing to show disparate employee ratios.
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This is building a quota system in all but name through litigation. If society wants a quota system then I’ll accept it’s choice, but this seems more like a back door quota system with a lot of arm waving.
Google is an interesting case because they work in a zero sum hiring game with other technology companies. With almost all competent engineers in their industry getting hired, if they filled their ranks with more equitable ratios, the rest of the industry sees an even more unbalanced potential employee pool.
If any lawsuit got access to all the admission data from Harvard there is a pretty good chance they will find straight out discrimination in apples vs apples student comparisons. Everyone knows it is happening. Harvard probably triple wipes their admissions data disks the moment decisions are complete.
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It is still beyond me why they simply don’t go to a much less objectionable economic class affirmative action policy. Once the SC eventually kills affirmative action this is likely the next step.
Tom
Without more information, a list of companies who were fined adverse outcomes due to employment testing doesn’t tell us much about whether the testing was or was not valid. My reaction to that list is: maybe they did use invalid tests. I wouldn’t necessarily assume the companies had competent lawyers or even if they did, I wouldn’t assume the companies structure ensured all branches followed procedures lawyers had vetted.
Your paragraph on “one example” starts
Well…that would be precisely the problem If the exam is not consistent with the business necessity, and it then has a disparate outcome, there’s a problem.
Well… what creative genius thought this was a way to handle a screening test? If the thought the test was good they should have stuck with it. But instead, their decision was to behave as if the test was capricious and arbitrary and not a valid indicator.
Tests that are not valid indicators shouldn’t be used. They are precisely what can get you in trouble.
That case appears to be on going? I’ve found a higher court vacating a judgement for the plaitiffs in 2016.
http://media.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/15-2015P-01A.pdf
It’s been kicking around with the department generally winning, but on appeal is remanded with lower courts asked to have a jury decide on question of facts. One of those is whether the hair tests does result in more false positives for black. The other is whether the city of boston refused to adopt a equally effective way of testing for cocaine use that would not be subject to false positives. (That method could be hair folical followed by urinalysis by those who failed.)
Honestly: If its even remotely plausible that the hair folical test has false positives for anyone, the city did refuse to follow hair folical tests with urinalysis for the 1-2% who failed and they are also having disparate impact, I think the city ought to lose. I don’t see any good reason for the city to refuse to confirm with urinalysis and that would hold true even if the people disagree on the false positives for the hair folical test.
All in all, when I do find these cases, I don’t see their existence as big problems. I have read disparate impact cases I find ridiculous. For example, I’ve heard at some where they used speculative statistics to infer the color of borrowers and then based on that decree there was some sort of disparate impact in lending. But the ones above don’t strike me as evidence of a problem.
Either they company clearly did something ridiculous (Teal) or the company did not lose the suit or the hiring entity (police) may have refused to pick an existing better method that would result in less disparate impact, but decided to keep the less good method. The police one would be a little bit like using SAT scores to as a screening tool to hire brain surgeons rather than hiring people who graduated from medical school and did residencies in brain surgery.
They may want to admit as many kids who pay full tuition as possible. Also: kids whose parents will donate. Kids who will inherit parents businesses and hire other kids….
Lucia,
“I think right now they are claiming they don’t discriminate but want a class that is diverse on multiple dimensions.”
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The reality is that they want a “diverse” class, not the best/most capable students. The claim they don’t discriminate based on race/gender/geography, etc is risible, they clearly do. Whether the Federal courts will accept this or not is the only question: “Is it OK to discriminate if it is for a good purpose, and if so, who decides what is a good purpose?” I am pretty sure the Asian students will be in their late 20’s before this is sorted out, and liberal judges being liberals, I think “good” discrimination will almost certainly continue to be accepted by the Courts.
SteveF,
I’m sure specific Asian applicants involved in the suit are not going to get into Harvard as a result of this action. College admissions discrimination suits are never really “about” individuals. The potential students need to get on with their life, which means go to school somewhere else.
I agree they want “diverse”. I’m intrigued by the “multiple dimensions” part. I tend to think having a broad range of majors tends to make the student more “diverse” on on “multiple dimensions”, but I suspect that’s not what they mean.
I’m just waiting to read how these arguments flesh out. I’m also interested in learning more about their admissions process; lots of details may come to light. The suit is advancing.
The settlement list is for demonstrating potential legal jeopardy.
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All these companies want to use valid legal tests. There is little guidance on * how to know * the test is valid. If good faith judgment differs between the company and the court, the company is liable even though it did its best and has no malicious intent. This presumes the court understands the business’s requirements. If the company had implemented the test as the court desired, it seems the results would be the same unless one assumes those new suggested characteristics have racial disparities. That’s a tough standard to start with, followed by dubious legal statistical interpretations by a judge.
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The Jones case has been going on for at least 10 years. I couldn’t find any resolution to it when I looked. Boston supposedly showed hair follicle results were the same racially as other forms of testing. I was looking at this document:
https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3276&context=vlr
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“Officers and cadets who failed the drug test were offered a second, more sensitive hair test and a medical review to determine if the first test was inaccurate. If neither of these steps exonerated offenders, the officers were given the option to remain at the Department so long as they agreed to seek rehabilitative treatment for drug abuse and accept a forty-five day unpaid suspension; if not, the offending officer or cadet was terminated,”
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Urinalysis clears cocaine in a matter of a days, hair would retain it for months and is difficult to defeat. Different tests, different uses. They still use it. The allegation wasn’t about test effectiveness per se, it was that it was racially discriminatory and how unpredictable statistical interpretations by the judicial system are a big problem.
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The case appears to now be about just the efficacy of the test. From what I can tell the alleged racial bias, if it is real, is actually a dark hair bias, and that bias is that drugs are retained longer not that it is less accurate.
https://www.bna.com/hairfollicle-drug-testing-n57982078835/
The SC has several recent ruling on affirmative action. Operating from memory:
It is constitutional for a state to outlaw it’s use (California, Florida, etc. have done this). The decision was “who gets to decide”.
It is acceptable to use a more diverse class as a parameter if the candidates were already equal.
Texas’s Top 10% program was deemed legal. This allows the top 10% from all high schools entry in UT. This has “disparate results” from the top 10% of Texas, but not racial on its face.
The SC seemed to signal that affirmative action was now on a countdown timer. Robert’s famous quote is “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.â€
Tom
Can you tell me what “potential legal jeopardy” means to you? (Real question.)
FWIW: It may well be they realized some tests they applied were not valid for predicting who was going to succeed at the job, and also had a disparate impact.
If so their “legal jeopardy” was “well deserved legal jeopardy” which was caused by them doing something that was illegal and discriminatory. In which case, that they were in “legal jeopardy” for was a good feature not a bug!
I think I made it pretty clear above that I think it’s trivially true businesses can land in “legal jeopardy” for things. I gave the hot dog food truck vendor example. They can find themselves in “legal jeopardy” if I get sick after eating at their food truck. So showing a company landed in “legal jeopardy” elicits a big “so what” unless you can explain why it was “undeserved legal jeopardy”. Merely showing the Target example certainly doesn’t show that.
This is a good thing. The asian case may be the thing that turns it off. No one thinks Asians as a group were responsible for the historic injustice of slavery. So people can’t even argue that they should sacrifice for that.
Although on a different topic, I find “The Slants” trademark case heartening. The SC threw out the trademark “protective” rule preventing “The Slants” from calling their band what they wanted to call it. The ridiculousness of the rule was highlighted by the fact that the Slants were somehow insulting themselves. It may well be the incongruity of asians being dinged for injustice to blacks will be something that highlights how affirmative action as implemented at colleges is …. well…. odd.
(To the extent society contributes to educational injustice for minorities, the real education problem for blacks happens long before college.)
Lucia,
“I agree they want “diverseâ€. I’m intrigued by the “multiple dimensions†part.”
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I suspect they mean admitting all manner of students, whether or not they are academically capable (think Obama). That would mostly be the politically favored and the offspring of the rich, the famous, and Harvard alumni (who are often rich and sometimes famous of course).
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Here is a list of 9 reasons why I think there is little chance selective schools will ever be forced to not discriminate based on race:
Harvard/Harvard
Stanford/Harvard
Holy Cross/Yale
Cornell/Harvard
Stanford/Harvard
Princeton/Yale
Princeton/Harvard
Colombia/Harvard
Princeton/Yale
Those are the undergrad and law schools for the current Supreme Court justices. The observant might see a pattern here, and it is one that is utterly lacking in “diversity”. Only one justice in nine attended anything except the most elite school (Holy Cross), and that was followed up with Yale Law. A reasonable person might expect 6 of them to recuse from ruling on the Harvard case, but not one will. These folks are unlikely candidates to rock the boat of the “elite”.
“the real education problem for blacks happens long before college”
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For sure. Demographics may be destiny for a society, but culture is destiny for the individual. Poor Daniel Patrick Moynihan was reviled for stating the obvious in 1965 (“The Negro Family: The Case For National Action”). It has only grown worse since then; you can’t even discuss the real problems because it is not politically correct to talk about.
MIT has lots of courses online, so perhaps you can take the tests.
95% of MIT rejects can’t complete the coursework, as 95% of those admitted don’t do it. It is a big stretch of ‘could complete’. The science and engineering requirement for undergraduates stops at Calc 2 and Physics 2, so 95% of the people who graduate couldn’t pass tests like build a compiler or file system, or a lab with VHDL.
MikeN,
What do physics and calculus have do with writing a compiler? (Not rhetorical.)
Riding up Pike’s Peak with a couple from Savannah, TN. We were discussing the effect of altitude on packaged food like Fritos – bags puff up and sometimes burst near the top. ???
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they both work in an ice cream factory in Tennessee. Factory’s first shipment to Colorado blew up on reaching 7,000 feet. It was a trailer load of bulk ice-cream – 14 inch cylinders of cardboard with plastic ends. The ice cream in question was a lighter mix with entrained air, which is what our friends thought was the problem. Apparently the truck burst open, ice cream went everywhere and made a quite impressive mess. Even worse the insurance company wanted to see it before agreeing to cover the loss. Clean-up delayed accordingly.
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They said the plant redesigned the mix for future shipments to the mountains and there had been no more explosions.
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I doubt their understanding of the cause. They said there was no fire. Does this sound possible?
j ferguson,
The cabin is not pressurized. The pressure outside the cylinder will drop. The plastic ends are aren’t very strong and may not be able to withstand force = ΔP * Area over the sides. When some force is exceeded, the ends could pop off. When that happens, the ice cream now experiences a very low pressure– so the air bubbles may expand pretty rapidly. (How rapidly depends on whether the “cream” part has any cohesive strength, and it’s inertia.) That expansion might possibly be explosive.
Might happen. It would be fun to test exploding ice cream in a properly designed in a vacuum chamber. 🙂
j ferguson (Comment #168089): “The ice cream in question was a lighter mix with entrained air, which is what our friends thought was the problem. Apparently the truck burst open, ice cream went everywhere and made a significangt mess. …They said there was no fire. Does this sound possible?”
Sounds like shaking a can of pop, then opening it. I can easily imagine that bursting the cardboard containers and making a huge mess. I can not imagine it damaging the truck, beyond the need for cleanup.
Apparently, cheap ice cream can be as much as 40-50% air. That would expand by 25-30% at 7000 ft. So maybe if all the containers went at once, it could damage the truck.
MikeN,
A person with the wrong degree from a great college will not be the appropriate hire. Using “college X” and nothing more as the “filter” for a specific job category could result in a company losing a differential impact suit.
Even if the company didn’t get sued or didn’t lose, they’d probably be unprofitable if they hired economics majors from MIT to run their chemical plant, write code or do other things economics majors don’t study. I suspect no company is stoooooopid enough to do that.
But it happens to be precisely a hypothetical that provides evidence that (a) filters that have nothing or little to do with job skills that (b) do result in differential impact should result in legal liability. Companies that do that well deserve being fined, sued and so on. If (a) happens without (b) and the effective job performance is sufficiently critical to the bottom line, they’ll probably just go bankrupt.
Tom Scharf (Comment #168083):
I have no problem with that one, at least for private schools that are mostly residential. The student body is a big part of the experience.
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Tom Scharf:
That seems to me like a very good approach for public schools.
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Tom Scharf:
I can remember when discrimination on the basis of religion and/or ethnic origin was common. Funny how that disappeared without AA.
lucia,
Potential legal jeopardy to me means if people are considering a screening test for employees, somebody needs to say “even if we do the best we can with no racial intent, and this test produces racial disparities, we can be successfully sued for millions of dollars”. I think we disagree on whether one can reasonably predetermine a test will not produce disparities, and if it does whether it is legally valid. Legal jeopardy is not a dichotomy, it is a range. Almost every web page on employee testing discusses legal issues.
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Creating your own test seems very risky and will require legal review, buying one that has stood up legally sounds better, and using it as a formal pass/fail screening tool is a really bad idea if disparate results are suspected, instead make it one part of a vague and obscure holistic process. Stay away from aptitude testing and instead rely on the smoke screen of credentialism.
“No one thinks Asians as a group were responsible for the historic injustice of slavery. So people can’t even argue that they should sacrifice for that.”
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Hilariously the NYT’s has figured out how to thread that needle.
White Students’ Unfair Advantage in Admissions
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-unfair-advantage-in-admissions.html
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White people should sacrifice their spots for Asians, not any minority.
Things like potato chip bags are sealed with Nitrogen which allows them to stay fresh longer. Your chips go stale much faster once you open the bag. I often thought of designing a re-Nitrogen-ing-a-bag device for this reason.
“Even if the company didn’t get sued or didn’t lose, they’d probably be unprofitable if they hired economics majors from MIT to run their chemical plant”
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That rule does not apply to Wall Street and the Ivy League. At the height of the financial bubble, 47% of (all) Harvard graduates headed to jobs in finance. In 2010 36% of Princeton grads went into finance, in 2006 it was 46%. This is the elite school – banking gravy train, all the while moralizing the down trodden on values.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/why-do-so-many-ivy-league-grads-go-to-wall-steet/253245/
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“What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.”
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https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/out-of-harvard-and-into-finance
The very strange history of the FBI’s spy in the Trump campaign
https://theintercept.com/2018/05/19/the-fbi-informant-who-monitored-the-trump-campaign-stefan-halper-oversaw-a-cia-spying-operation-in-the-1980-presidential-election/
Nitrogen works pretty well in Guinness cans, too.
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For some reason I find the image of an exploded ice cream trailer truck hilarious. Folks who worked at ice cream plant never found out whether managment was amused.
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too bad there isn’t a photo. It could probably licit some wonderful captions.
Tom,
I think that tells you something about finance. Bear in mind: finance is not economics. Also, some “finance” jobs aren’t really “finance”.
I should add: the younger brother of my best friend from high school went into banking finance. His undergrad degree was something ins STEM (physics or engineering). He then served in the nuclear navy. Then he went into finance. . .
There’s a reason I didn’t pick “finance” as the job that needs specific training. They do very well hiring people who know math, algorithms and can think. That, or people who can “sell”– that is present stuff to customers for bargaining purposes. Ivy leaguers probably have that in spades.
Tom
I wouldn’t focus on predicting legal disparaties first. . I would focus on making sure the test results can distinguish who is more likely to succeed on a job and that there aren’t other screens that are better.
Take the SAT for example: It can’t plausibly tell you who is going to run your chemical plant well. Lots of kids did well on the SAT and know nothing about chemistry, chemical engineering, process control and so on. It’s rather obvious you’d be better off requiring a degree in chemical engineering. (Or at least a certain number of courses and some experience.) If you use the SAT you are going to be up s**t creek.
If you do something reasonable like require a degree: yes, you are more likely to hire a non-minority and a male. But you aren’t likely to get sued. If you are, you probably won’t lose.
Tom Scharf,
Somehow this whole business of having Halper interview suspected Putin “dupes” in Trump’s team seemspretty clownish. You wouldn’t suppose this was a charade for them (FBI)to point to and the real inquiry was done by someone else?
I hired quite a few women (and men!) to run process control at a large chemical plant. Doing a half-decent job requires knowledge that only comes from a combination of education and process-specific experience. Nobody I hired from college was worth a pinch of cow dung. A year or two later, most, but not all, were capable of contribution.
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The only thing a degree from a reputable college does is ensure that the person knows the utter basics of the subject area and is able to learn. I suppose a test could serve the same function, but it would have to be,a very good test.
SteveF, my point is that lots of MIT grads not majoring in STEM fields would not be able to do the work that someone posted could be done by 95% of MIT rejects.
Remember the days when somebody accused the government of snooping on Trump’s campaign and there was moral indignation about the accusation and all kinds of snide comments? The media certainly doesn’t. They are doing all kinds of arm waving to not look at the man behind the curtain as the Oz of Russian collusion screams.
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1. Perhaps they had a good reason to do investigate Trump.
2. Perhaps they will find some significant wrong doing
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This isn’t a big issue unless the answer to the above are suspiciously incoherent. I’m very interested in the answer to #1 and I believe how that decision was made needs to be explained clearly to the Trumpsters, who as it turns out are US citizens with rights. I find it very hard to believe that decision wasn’t made at the highest levels with careful review.
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I’m a class A media basher, but these are the type of things if the media ignores, or becomes a spin doctor for, that create my very bad attitude.
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This is the 1% of the time that Trump bypassing the media with Twitter is effective, they can’t kill the story. The NYT demonstrates cognitive dissonance of the very highest order:
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“President Trump on Sunday demanded that the Justice Department open an investigation into whether the department or the F.B.I. “infiltrated or surveilled†his campaign at the behest of the Obama administration, following through on his frequent threats to use his own government to target his political opponents.”
Past quotes:
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Comey: “With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets and we have looked carefully inside the FBI,” Comey said. “The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components. The department has no information that supports those tweets.”
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Obama spokesman: “A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice, As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen, any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
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Looking back these seem like very carefully worded denials of people who knew what was going on. Comey is denying an actual hard wiretap, not surveillance. Obama is saying “no interference” and “no orders”, not “no knowledge”. Trump may finally have a real reason to be outraged, too bad he has no credibility.
>at the behest of the Obama administration, following through on his frequent threats to use his own government to target his political opponents.â€
Wow New York Times is reporting that Obama frequently threatened to use his government to target his political opponents!
We now will have a week of the media shrieking and attacking Trump for wanting to investigate if his campaign was investigated by the FBI and DOJ at the direction of his political opponents.
> decision wasn’t made at the highest levels with careful review.
John Brennan appears to be the ringleader at the highest level along with Clapper. They went to some lengths to put Comey on the outside, along with perhaps Bill Priestap, Peter Strzok’s boss.
Tom Scharf (Comment #168106)
Remember the days when somebody accused the government of snooping on Trump’s campaign and there was moral indignation about the accusation and all kinds of snide comments? The media are doing all kinds of arm waving to not look at the man behind the curtain as the Oz of Russian collusion screams.
j ferguson (Comment #168103)
Somehow this whole business of having Halper interview suspected Putin “dupes†in Trump’s team seems pretty clownish.
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Clowns, scary, happy, foolish and dopey. Alexander Downer ex leader of the Australian Liberal party was severely satirized in a play ‘Keating, the musical” for his choice of wearing fishnet stockings.
Yet he again graces the world stage. All I can say is that if I was a Democrat having him on my side would make me break out in cold shivers. He has that anti Midas touch that leads to everything he is involved with going wrong. Like poor Jimmy Carter.
WSJ editorial pretty much sums up the liberal media attitude: “A secret source insinuated himself with Trump campaign officials. Ho hum.”
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If one wanted to take a stroll down conspiracy lane, the infamous texts had them in a meeting with McCabe talking about an “insurance policy” and also later referenced McCabe going to England for a day to meet a person who was not to be named.
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Normally I would call this crazy, but if Trump has one known super power, it is bringing out the worst in his opponents. The NYT also compared Trump demanding an investigation into spying on his campaign with Nixon firing his own investigator. I don’t think those are … ummmm … the same.
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That kind of comment in a “news” story indicates this situation has simply gone off the rails. Aaaaghhhh, we are losing the narrative, emergency evasive maneuver delta! It should be pointed out that Trump demanding an investigation here is not the action a guilty person would take, but let’s not go too far in attributing rational thought to Trump.
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I would much prefer that we find out the FBI was justified in probing the Trump campaign than to learn that DC has gone completely insane and is now a psychotic version of the Game of Thrones.
Tom Scharf (Comment #168107):
But this gives Trump credibility. Slowly, but surely.
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Tom Scharf (Comment #168110):
Welcome to the club. Some of us figured that out a while ago.
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p.s. Isn’t “psychotic version of the Game of Thrones” redundant?
I see the NYT secretly updated their story without any reference.
Before:
“President Trump on Sunday demanded that the Justice Department open an investigation into whether the department or the F.B.I. “infiltrated or surveilled†his campaign at the behest of the Obama administration, following through on his frequent threats to use his own government to target his political opponents.â€
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After:
“President Trump on Sunday demanded that the Justice Department investigate whether the department or the F.B.I. “infiltrated or surveilled†his campaign at the behest of the Obama administration, following through on his frequent threats to intervene in the special counsel inquiry as he targets those he views as political enemies.”
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I guess they realized how ridiculous their leading paragraph really was, and one assumes they were properly ridiculed for it. The update isn’t much better.
SteveF
My view is if you or any employer used a test (any test) that does not work well, and that test also resulted in disparate impact, then…. yeah… you should be liable for disparate income.
Even without the disparate impact liability problem MikeN is worried about no one should want to use a poor screen when hiring employees. That’s precisely why most employees (and I assume you) identify whatever you think relevant and using relevant background, education and so on to screen is entirely allowed.
In your case, if you want someone to run a plant, past experience in a plant is beneficial, and you require that. You’re allowed to require that even if it turns out that by requiring people to have past experience running a plant means fewer than 50% of your hires end up women. The reason that “disparate” result is ok and would be found so in the hypothetical event someone filed a suit is that it’s pretty easy to explain that the way people learn a lot about how processing plants run is to be involved in operation of processing plants!
Trump brings out the worst in his opponents, another example of “just because Trump says it, doesn’t mean you need to oppose it”.
Vox: MS-13, explained
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/26/16955936/ms-13-trump-immigrants-crime
“It’s easy to see why MS-13 has become Trump’s perfect antagonist.”
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A while back: What Trump Doesn’t Understand About MS-13
https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/06/trump-ms-13/528453/
“In many ways, the gang is Trump’s perfect villain.”
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MS-13 was born in America and it is America’s immigration policy and mass incarceration that created it (deporting criminal illegals is apparently responsible somehow), and made it as bad as it is, and Trump will of course make it worse. Using their horrific crimes as anecdotes for policy is misguided, now back to the latest police shooting and alleged hate crime of the week. I’m awaiting puff pieces on the tragedy of society creating the white supremacists and how they actually pose little to no threat.
“…but if Trump has one known super power, it is bringing out the worst in his opponents.”
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The worst was there all along (eg Hillary and the ‘deplorables’ comment, Bill making sure the fix was in place during his “unplaned meeting” with Loretta Lynch). Trump just makes it more difficult for his opponents to hide “the worst”.
Tom
” would much prefer that we find out the FBI was justified in probing the Trump campaign than to learn that DC has gone completely insane and is now a psychotic version of the Game of Thrones.”
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CIA briefs Trump people on possible Russian dirt on Hilary. Flies them to London, conveniently sets them up to get drunk with a VIP politician who innocently asks have you heard any dirt on Hilary from the Russians.
Bingo.
Now a man in a pub telling another man in a pub about a conspiracy theory is now a conspiracy theory. Littlefinger on steroids.
In a related matter, auto loan discrimination guidance was removed by Trump today. Ally (GMAC) was fined $80M for discriminatory loans. Curiously the lender is prohibited by law from collecting data on the race or ethnicity of its borrowers, and the CFPB determined discrimination without any racial data on the loans. It’s a bit of a mess.
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Apparently the dealer can add extra interest (dealer markup) to interest rates it gets from their loan company. Minorities were apparently charged about $5/month more. First it’s not clear if the dealers actually tried to charge minorities more, or if minorities are simply not as sophisticated shoppers and took bad deals more often. My guess is bad deals correlate well with education level.
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The CFPB never disclosed how it determined discrimination but it used last names and zip codes to infer race for settlements, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding. Disparate results, pay up.
Humorously people were critical that this method might end up sending settlements to white people, not that it might not be accurate. Intent matters, reductionist low variate analysis is a lawyer or social activist’s best friend when you can’t be bothered with intent.
Tom, the second version of the NYT story is worse. Trump has threatened to use government against political enemies, the media. Investigating if his campaign was surveilled is not interfering with the Special Counsel investigation.
Tom Scharf
Well…. if it does, that will be proof the method doesn’t work. Which would be embarrassing for those advocating it and the legal system.
I’m sure those advocating the use would much prefer it was found “accurate” through the “peer review” of “the system” which involves reading, thinking arguing and so on. After that, I bet they’d rather the method was never actually put to the test against actual data– which is what sending payments to actual purported victims would do.
But really, if an award is given out, the money should go to the actual “victims”, not all to the lawyers. But in this case, they actually can’t identify victims, which is certainly weird.
Tom,
“… it used last names and zip codes to infer race for settlements.”
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Boggles the mind. Reminds me of the silly ESPN decision last year to reschedule the broadcast work of TV sports announcer “Robert Lee”, of Korean descent, in the midst of the “Robert E. Lee” commotion, so as not to suggest the network was supporting Robert E. Lee the Confederate general…. only even more stupid.
They said they just sent checks to people they were 95% certain were a minority, but then later I read they sent a letter to the least certain 50% which had to be sent back affirming they were a minority. One could question why this was done after it was determined there were racial disparities, not before This method has been used before in healthcare studies, I suppose somebody has some statistical data.
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It becomes a bit frustrating when the CFPB can do a private sector shakedown without showing intent or disclosing how they determined disparate results. It’s a bit bipolar when the CFPB et. al. demand everyone be treated as individuals but they themselves reward people based on group identity. Activist overreach and weaponized social stigma based on group identity has gone catastrophically wrong multiple times in the last 100 years in world history, both left and right. It’s just not good for society.
“Some FBI officials, like then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, knew as early as September 2016 of the emails, but the bureau did not obtain a warrant to review them until the following month.”
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So McCabe was allegedly sitting on these new HRC emails and wasn’t going to examine them until after the election. Sounds like he is getting thrown under the bus again, maybe deservedly so.
NYPD was getting angry about the FBI not doing anything and were talking to Giuliani.
Loretta Lynch responded by replacing prosecutors at EDNY and threatening to prosecute NYPD over the Eric Garner case, at that point more than two years old.
Erik Prince said this at the time, and this is surprisingly brought up in the McCabe IG report.
Don’t know why Pence and Trump were talking about Libya.
This sort of language makes more sense.
https://twitter.com/jeneps/status/999647233543991298
If you’re not willing to walk away from a bad deal, it’s not a negotiation but a capitulation. That’s how we got the bade trade deal with China and the bad nuclear deal with Iran. Note that junking the Iran deal was also a negotiating ploy with Kim. If the Iran deal had still been in place, that would have been Kim’s starting point for a deal with North Korea.
Determining who got to go to Engine School in Mannheim Germany, 1947
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Dr. Eng. Gustav Mesmer was a professor of engineering when I was at Uni. He had a daughter whom I dated. He also taught strength of materials and indeterminate structures. And he was really good. He told us that if we couldn’t feel (REALLY FEEL) the deflections under load in a structure we’d never be any good at this stuff. He used to mimic deflections in class. There was something a bit Igor-like – re:Young Frankenstein – to this but this only surfaced in retrospect, the movie being much later than his classes.
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He had been a stress analyst at Junkers during the war.
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At the end of the war, many of the returning veterans wanted to take up engineering. Gustav’s political affiliations were sufficiently indeterminate that he was chosen by the Allies to restart the Engineering program at Mannheim.
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Most of the guys who wanted to enroll were veterans and because of that had shortages in their preparation having been outside Germany causing problems for other people rather than preparing for engineering careers, some of them for six or seven years.
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There were far more candidates than could be accommodated by the facilities and faculty Mesmer was able to assemble so they tried entrance exams.
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This proved difficult and required a number of iterations before they were not admitting incompetents and yet not filtering out guys who weren’t quite there yet, but would make it if the program was organized right.
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But there were still too many apparently qualified applicants.
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The solution was to assemble the applicants in a large hall which Herr Speer had provided (and we hadn’t blown down) and ask that each applicant draw a bicycle from memory. Mesmer said they’d really had no idea what the result would be but agreed that if you didn’t know how a bicycle worked, you probably shouldn’t be an engineer. And the filter worked, they got the number of students down to a manageable size, and the New Engineering School at Mannheim was off and running. I can vaguely remember his observation that the most popular misunderstanding was how the front fork and steering worked. ???
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I never had the presence of mind to ask what they did the following year after everyone presumably knew about the bicycle test.
This is what happens with the Norks every time. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown with a football.
The latest insanity, one of many, from college campuses. In this case some racist graffiti was left in a bathroom stall and a park, it is unknown who did it. Behold the reaction. I grant students the option to be idiots as they work their way in adulthood, the faculty I do not.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/depauw-descends-into-race-madness/
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In other news from the gutter in the past week, it turns out that police having body cameras can work for everyone. False rape accusation:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sherita-dixon-cole-rape-claim-texas-state-trooper-body-camera-video/
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NAACP leader accuses officer of racism:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/05/20/naacp-leaders-racial-profiling-claim-challenged-after-bodycam-footage-released.html
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These aren’t just disagreements over what happened, they are flat out lies with no accountability. Realistically the media has stopped rushing to justice on these accusations because of too many embarrassing false flag operations that blow up in their faces. Activist self sabotage is increasingly common.
Isn’t a false accusation prosecutable?
John,
I suspect so if the false accusation is made to law enforcement investigators, and certainly if made to federal investigators.
It’s pretty rare, but they do occasionally arrest people for false crime reports.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/nyregion/manhattan-yasmin-seweid-false-hate-crime.html
Falsely accusing a police officer of sexual assault in the course of his duties seems highly likely to provoke a prosecution for a false charge. The accuser must be a few pieces short of a place setting.
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She failed to notice the body camera.
j ferguson,
I think it was a DUI stop, so not noticing the camera seems not so big a surprise.
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OTOH, the NAACP chapter chair who accused a cop of racial profiling ALSO did not see the camera, and the video was proof that guy is either delusional or just an a$$hole. Heck, the cop didn’t even give him trouble when the car turned out to not be properly registered.
It’s not very surprising in an environment of “accusation = truth” with police shootings and MeToo that some people in these groups with low character are going to overplay their cards in the same manner that criminals can make astoundingly bad decisions in retrospect. That is if we can agree that victim groups might possibly have any members with low character. Too many of these movements spiral into oblivion because they refuse to hold their members to any detectable standard. They will not excommunicate anyone that belongs to their designated group, while simultaneously broad brushing their entire opposition group with the behavior of it’s very worst members.
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We apply criminal laws to individuals and not groups because sane people recognize the foundation of most anti-social behavior is poor individual character, not being members of social or ethnic groups.
Tom
The DUI woman was probably angry being stopped and was also somewhat dim. I wouldn’t assume she’s acting as any sort of member of a “group” nor part of a “movement”.
(The stop being legitimate doesn’t necessarily make people less angry.)
This episode does show police cameras are good.
The rape accuser will not be charged:
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/05/25/no-additional-charges-woman-made-up-story-trooper-sex-assault/
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Long story short, she never made a formal documented accusation to a “peace officer”. They definitely considered charging her apparently.
Yep. She defamed him, but didn’t actually go so far as to break the law by filing.
Perhaps he could pursue a defamation claim. But she may not have deep enough pockets to cover the legal costs.
Beth the Serf andJF,
Horatio Hornblower forever.
I’m guessing the state isn’t going to be very interested in a plea bargain on the DUI charges here, ha ha. She passed the DUI tests and blew under the limit so normally she stood a good chance of having the charges dropped. She may very well be found not guilty of DUI by a jury unaware of the later accusations.
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Realistically the fact that she drove 3 or 4 miles before pulling over put the cop into a less interested in cutting her a break mentality.
What, TomFuller????? I’ve read both series, although not three times for Hornblower.
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I thought Hornblower pretty good, but O’Brian great.
Being tried would be a PITA even if she gets off. That might happen.
Hornblower’s good, I Claudius, likewise. But…
Jack Aubrey, Stephen Maturin ‘n all the crew, battles at sea,
repairs, food, snitchin’… you are there!.
I meself have read the series twice and god willing shall read again.
The sea, the sea! Herewith some thoughts on M and C.
https://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2015/05/30/29th-edition-part-2-serf-under_ground-journal/