AND RIGHTLY, RIGHTLY SO: Starbucks Apologizes for Idiot Employee Who Asked Cops to Leave.
Archive for 2019
July 7, 2019
SPIRIT OF ’76: Forty years on, America’s bicentennial cohesion may be unrecoverable.
The Bicentennial was blessed with good timing, arriving on the heels of a long post-1960s hangover that culminated with two bleak closing acts, less than a year apart: the fall of an American president elected in large part to quell the previous decade’s disorder, and the fall of Saigon to the Communist North Vietnamese, bringing a tragic end to the war that had inspired much of the disorder. With that depressing coda, there was nowhere to go but up, and the Bicentennial became, as Lance Morrow wrote in Time, “a star-spangled ceremony of self-forgiveness.” After a long gaze inward, many concluded that the country and its republican traditions still looked pretty good.
That pride was reflected in the American Freedom Train, a 26-car locomotive loaded with historical exhibits and decorated in stars and stripes. It stopped in all 48 contiguous states from April 1, 1975, in Wilmington, Delaware, to December 31, 1976, in Miami. “It was by far the greatest event on rails since the end of the steam era,” declares a commemorative website, which estimates that tens of millions of Americans stood to watch it pass by and that more than 7 million bought tickets and attended.
I was one of those 7 million, or at least my parents were—they paid for the tickets. We stood in the Freedom Train’s fabled long lines on a hot summer day in suburban Illinois. Sometimes people waited for hours before they could get on board and see the exhibits, and even then, they were hustled along on a moving walkway that rushed them through in 15 minutes (later slowed to 22). It was all a bit overwhelming: “Zuni necklace, golden spike, first English Bible, first edition of Poe, Henry Aaron’s home run bat, Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar, the familiar, sinister voice intoning ‘The Shadow knows,’ Thomas Hart Benton’s painting, Gerald R. Ford proclaiming, ‘Our Constitution works’—more than half a thousand features flash by before one has a chance to focus,” the New York Times observed. Still, the Freedom Train is remembered fondly, and, like the gifts sent to President Ford, it’s hard to imagine it happening again. The political battles alone—from what stops to make and what exhibits to include to whether to employ unionized workers or use renewable energy—would probably keep a twenty-first-century Freedom Train stranded in the station.
In-between Walter Cronkite droning on about the impending eco-disasters of a new ice age and overpopulation to viewers of the CBS Evening News, and episodes of M*A*S*H as a thinly-disguised Vietnam War commentary full of moral equivalence between the US and North Korea, CBS could still muster up some of its biggest stars to host “Bicentennial Minutes” on the important events that led up to the nation’s founding. Today, the network would likely draft Stephen Colbert and Colin Kaepernick to opine on how the nation was born in Original Sin. Perhaps it was the lack of a 24-hour cable news cycle, or the increasingly left-leaning network remembering that it still needed to serve a wide swatch of viewers. In any case, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Bicentennial proved that as late as 1976, the Democratic Party-dominated overculture still offered room for all, decades before today’s “no escapism” mentality on the elite left.
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Malcolm Gladwell, Yale Dean Heather Gerken, And The Dialectic Tension Within Legal Education. “When we decide who is smart enough to be a lawyer, we use a stopwatch.”
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WEIRD THAT BRITISH VOTERS ARE ANGRY: Five ex-heads of Scotland Yard call for public inquiry into state of policing as they warn country has ‘descended into lawlessness.’ Maybe if they spent less time policing Twitter they’d be able to address real crimes.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Genes, yes, but obesity pandemic mostly down to diet: study.
STEPHEN KRUISER: Reeling, Entitled Joe Biden Shocked That Kamala Harris Came After Him.
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy.
In ever more areas of life, algorithms are coming to substitute for judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account. The rationale offered is that automated decision-making will be more reliable. But a further attraction is that it serves to insulate various forms of power from popular pressures.
Our readiness to acquiesce in the conceit of authorless control is surely due in part to our ideal of procedural fairness, which demands that individual discretion exercised by those in power should be replaced with rules whenever possible, because authority will inevitably be abused. This is the original core of liberalism, dating from the English Revolution.
Mechanized judgment resembles liberal proceduralism. It relies on our habit of deference to rules, and our suspicion of visible, personified authority. But its effect is to erode precisely those procedural liberties that are the great accomplishment of the liberal tradition, and to place authority beyond scrutiny. I mean “authority” in the broadest sense, including our interactions with outsized commercial entities that play a quasi-governmental role in our lives. That is the first problem. A second problem is that decisions made by algorithm are often not explainable, even by those who wrote the algorithm, and for that reason cannot win rational assent. This is the more fundamental problem posed by mechanized decision-making, as it touches on the basis of political legitimacy in any liberal regime.
I hope that what follows can help explain why so many people feel angry, put-upon, and powerless. And why so many, in expressing their anger, refer to something called “the establishment,” that shadowy and pervasive entity. In this essay I will be critiquing both algorithmic governance and (more controversially) the tenets of progressive governance that make these digital innovations attractive to managers, bureaucrats, and visionaries. What is at stake is the qualitative character of institutional authority—how we experience it.
The establishment is always telling us that hey, it’s not their fault, the rules just somehow work out so they always win. This is just an extension of that principle.
HOW, INDEED?
Worse, the left’s response to Trump has been totally counterproductive: ‘Do you want to tell people how bad they are? Do you want them to repent because they’re bad racists? Or do you want them to pursue a left-wing project?’
‘Those people are ours to win’, says Frost. The populist moment is an opportunity, she says, but one which ‘I can totally see us pissing away’. ‘The self-identified left are very sceptical of the populist stuff. Look at their takes on the yellow vests: “They’re all fascists!” They’re probably just fucking French people – and who can tell the difference?’
Just as significant as Trump’s victory was Hillary Clinton’s loss, they tell me, in that it represented a rejection of an era of neoliberalism. ‘I’m from Indiana’, Frost tells me. ‘Bill signs NAFTA. That obliterated the towns where I’m from. People are extremely bitter about Bill Clinton for very good reasons. And she is married to that, literally and figuratively – she defends that legacy. How did we not see Trump coming?’
What’s more, Trump represented a repudiation of the entire establishment – Democrats and Republicans. ‘There is a severe crisis of legitimacy in our institutions’, says Frost: ‘The Republicans did not want Trump to win either… He was nobody’s first choice, except the American people’s, apparently.’
Yep. Plus: “It’s huge in Silicon Valley. They like games and rules. These are people who consider themselves leftists but probably don’t like anything about socialism except the gulags.”
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IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: “A Belgian woman who invited migrants to set up a makeshift camp in her garden now says she wants them to leave after incidents of aggression and violence.”
PAUL BEDARD: 20% federal inmates are immigrants, mostly Mexican.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What You Didn’t Know About the Apollo 11 Mission.
SAD THAT THIS IS IMPORTANT: UK Court Rules Bible Facebook Posts Are Not ‘Discrimination’ Against LGBT People.
DON’T GET COCKY: Democrats Just Had Their Worst Week in 47 Years.
33 TOUGH QUESTIONS MUELLER SHOULD BE ASKED: The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson has broken multiple stories in the Spygate epic, so answers to these queries will shine new light in numerous important places that remain dank and dark.
Questions nine and 14, for example, probe, respectively, Mueller’s ignoring the ties between the Hillary campaign and the DNC to Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele and the Steele Dossier, and the Russian ties of Fusion GPS.