The fight for diverse and conscious voices

When I was growing up, I was taught please, and thank you, and you're welcome. I even learned the ASL for those, as part of trying to give our kids more communication channels. Over time, and I think particularly in the last decade, our language has shifted and now you almost never hear people say, "You're welcome" anymore.

Instead, we respond to "thank you" with "thank you". This is interesting to me because I think it reflects on a presumed response to power dynamics. If you thank me, and I say "you're welcome" I'm apparently evincing a kind of superiority. You should be thankful, it seems to say, and I am generously giving what you have received and been thankful for.

That's very different from how I learned it as a child. "You're welcome" was originally taught to me as a way to acknowledge the values of sharing and gifting. By giving things, or time, or favors to others, we were affirming the others' value as a person. The same logic that, today, encourages us not to avert our eyes from, say, people begging on the streets, or people suffering homelessness sleeping under bridges was the logic I learned as a child. When I failed to say "you're welcome" or if I said something self-deprecating like "oh, it was nothing" it was somewhere between false modesty and a denial of the importance of the other person.

There are, however, other values to the responsive thank you. For example, it helps us call out more equal exchanges. If you come to my party I might say "Thanks for coming" and then you might respond "Thanks for hosting." We acknowledge that we've each done something valuable and appreciate it. Reading over more writing prompts (yes, I'm doing more of that) I've been reading about peoples' gratitude projects. It seems like those that have more impact are those that ask people to be more specific about their gratitude. I'm not just grateful for the people in my life, I'm grateful for the people who take the time to respond to my posts; I'm grateful (thankful) for the people who trust that I have good intentions even when I have bad words. If people thank me for this, I want to thank them in return because I feel an equality of interchange.

Where do you guys fall on this spectrum? Were you taught the way I was? Have you changed your language (deliberately)?

Question: Can Trump pardon himself?

(it's important to contextualize the following theorizing with "I am not a lawyer". Then again, neither is Trump and he also has idiots on his legal team, a handicap I don't have. Although I use "he" throughout this entry I think the logic would apply equally if Ms Clinton or any other-gendered person was president.)

The question is one of those that law professors love to swat around abstractly. The closest we've ever gotten to a real formulation of the question is, reputedly, Nixon asking it of his Justice Department. He got back a "hell no!" answer, apparently. Then again, I recently discovered that Nixon did not want Ford's pardon, which contradicted a long-held belief so I remain open to learning new things.

I also believe the answer is "no" but not because it's written into the Constitution; rather, I think it's so evidently no that the Founders never considered it necessary to write down. To understand that, let's go back to some basics.

First, why does the President have a pardon power in the first place? Why write that into the Constitution? The best theory I've heard (and I'm also not a Constitutional scholar, so take this with a grain of salt) is that Article II enumerates a Presidential pardon power because the President is also head of the branch of government that prosecutes crimes. Prosecutors have discretion about which crimes to pursue, and the pardon power then gives that branch the ability to say "these are the things that we as a society choose to forgive; those people are considered to have paid their debt and can be forgiven."

Like any discretionary power it can be abused, but this is the core justification - somewhere, there must be a way to state what we as a society forgive and that power should not rest with those who make the laws nor with those who decide if the laws have been broken. It's true that the pardon power was traditionally vested in monarchs, but even though nobody wanted the new Executive to be a king, they left this in.

The Constitution is both weirdly silent and weirdly specific in its notion of crimes. That is because at the time of framing, all crime was state crime and as such a person - including the President - would be prosecuted for such crimes. The Presidential pardon power doesn't extend to state crimes so the framers likely anticipated that a President would not be able to pardon himself for the vast majority of possible infractions. It's pretty well accepted that the founders did not imagine the growth and eventual supremacy of the Federal government. Estimates I've seen say that there are now over 3600 enumerated Federal crimes.

By contrast, the only three specific Constitutional crimes are piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. Elsewhere, the Constitution limits what a President can pardon for, specifically excluding impeachable offenses. But then the language of what someone can be impeached for is itself vague (high crimes and misdemeanors). So the President can, in theory, pardon someone else for treason, even a treason he's involved in (how apropos!) but the remedy for that is impeachment.

So the President can pardon and that's why; can he self-pardon? The framing of having trials that are outside the presidential prerogative (state level) and the ideal of both the Declaration and the Constitution establishing no one as above the law lead me to say no, because the alternative is a contradiction. That is, if the President can self-pardon then he becomes above the law. A presidential self-pardon violates the commonly accepted intent of the founding documents.

Unfortunately, the law doesn't operate by this kind of logic. It operates by reference to original sources (laws, the Constitution) and precedents (previous relevant decisions). This is what permits Trump and his legal monkeys to claim that he can self-pardon. There's nothing in the source documents, nor is there good case law, to say the opposite. You have to go back to contemporary writings, such as The Federalist (http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm) where you find language like: "No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause..."

Ironically, should this matter ever come to the courts, the people most likely to refer to these types of documents are the so-called Originalists, of whom the late Justice Scalia was probably best known. That we might have to rely on the most right-wing conservatives to defend us against a rogue president seems like the most 2018 thing this week. But stay tuned, it's only Thursday.

This grew out of a rant on a semi-private email list. That list is full of high-power geeks and I can assume they care about this stuff. Maybe my general readership here doesn't. You are not a bad person if you don't care and skip this.

Someone posited that Zuckerberg was "between a rock and a hard place" in his testimony on Capitol Hill. That's completely false. The only hard thing about that appearance was that the Congresscritters bounced over a wide array of topics, from the Cambridge Analytica data breach to privacy to security to fraud to past failures. Facebook's motto is "move fast and break things". The unspoken coda is "...and then meaninglessly apologize afterward while changing nothing."

Zuckerberg is not stupid. He realizes this Congress can't get its act together to pass a budget. The odds of them agreeing on "regulation" as he vaguely called for are zero. However, while Congress flails and gets distracted by... oh, I dunno, the likelihood that our Dear Leader will get us into an actual shooting war with Russia or North Korea or maybe actually find a stooge willing to fire the person who appears to have both the authority and integrity to uncover how a corrupt foreign-funded group of oligarchs hijacked our government, Zuck gets to shrug and say "Well, you saw I called for regulation; we're waiting on the government now."

Mr not-stupid Zuckerberg also controls the vast majority of actual working Facebook stock. Even if he steps back from day-to-day running of the company (which I expect him to do; it'll look good and free him up to do more of what he actually wants to do) he'd still be the real power there and have things his way no matter who sat in the hot seat.

The only downside for him I see from this is that he's likely going to have to quash or at least long-term backburner his political ambitions. If you're reading this and going "what?" then stop and think. Imagine that you controlled a tool some third party kind of ineptly used to get a really stupid and venal version of Forrest Gump elected president of the US. You, however, have access to ALL of it. You know how it works, and can instruct the engineers to make it work better for you. You are not stupid and if you think you couldn't do a better job of this than DJT you're just not thinking big enough. Zuck has the ego, the money, and the means. Right now, though, his name is mud. Let's see how well this prediction has aged in 2028 when (if I've done my math right) he will be 44 years old. Obama was 47 when he won his first presidential election.

Now let's turn to the question of what Facebook actually could do, if it wanted to solve this problem. It's completely capable of doing so - don't let anyone tell you otherwise - but it would require significant revamp to its business model. The short form is that FB (and Twitter and pick-your-favorite-social-platform) could operate as a fiduciary. That is, an entity that holds something of value (property, power, information) in a relationship of trust for another.

Facebook would become a fiduciary for our personal information and by default that information would not be released to others, but would be released for specific purposes to known individuals and named groups. The only widespread model we have in America right now for information fiduciaries is HIPAA. This regime enables for-profit entities to hold sensitive data (medical records, mostly), use that data for its own benefit and, under agreements, share those data with authorized other for-profit entities. Medical privacy isn't perfect, nor do I think HIPAA is without flaws. But right now it's the best model we have. Banking secrecy laws such as you find in places like Switzerland might also be another fiduciary model but I'm not as familiar with them.

Imagine, then, that Facebook was your personal info fiduciary. There would be language saying that accepting a "friend" request included permission for FB to share some data with that person, etc. You'd sign forms (much as you do when you visit a doctor) that allowed Facebook to share data with partners. FB would profit because other companies would pay to become such authorized partners and get access to those juicy data. Probably not enough, though. I imagine that FB would end up being some kind of "freemium" business model, where you'd pay something like $5-10/month to have Facebook act as your fiduciary. You pay fees to your bank and broker now - larger fees than that much of the time. If you didn't want to pay, Facebook could behave as it does now, sharing your data freely with whoever.

Changing over to this kind of model wouldn't be easy, or cheap, but I think it would be much more profitable for the company in the long run. There's also a significant first-mover advantage to be had here. Setting the standards for this kind of thing - even if they were released freely for others to implement - would be an advantage. You'd have the first and best implementation.

This also doesn't require any sort of government regulation. HIPAA and many fiscal fiduciaries work with the backing of the government, which is good but not a requirement. Third-party services such as auditing companies and insurance companies exist to spread risk around and increase trust. Financial markets are largely self-regulated, with only some oversight from the Feds, and do just fine. Facebook could contract with existing companies to have audits of its (hypothetical future) fiduciary practices, and to have insurance against breaches. Of course those business expenses would get passed on to the users and partners; Facebook would have to lay out money up front but would expect to make it back once the system was fully up and running.

In summary, there's nothing stopping Facebook from solving this problem today - certainly the lack of government "regulation" is at best a red herring. Neither they, nor Zuckerberg personally, are in any sort of difficult situation. Solving this problem could be quite profitable, which leads me to think that either they're working on this kind of a solution or more likely they just don't care and will sit back and let the money continue to roll in while ignoring all the shit they've broken because there's no actual consequence to breaking such things.

Some people say that to be happier we should not compare ourselves to others. There's always someone better, richer, more good-looking, more talented. Comparing to that is a way to misery for lots of folk.

By contrast, it's often healthy to compare ourselves to our past selves. Five years ago were you better off? Smarter? Had better relationships? Had more skills?

These are, it seems, more helpful comparisons to make, given that we're by nature going to compare ourselves anyway...

I was startled to read (on one of my tech mail lists) that a person felt firing the Google employee who circulated the position piece on the inferiority of women (henceforth G) was "petty." It was not petty, nor done without thought.

I've never worked at Google, nor do I have any insight into their internal processes. But I've worked at a lot of tech companies and talked to many people at many others; I believe my experience generalizes. I have also worked at companies that have made the transition from private to public, which is significant. And finally, I have a background in cognitive science and experience working in Compliance. Both are relevant here.
( First, let's deal with the science )
( Now let's talk about tech companies for a minute )
( Being a public company matters )
( and this all explains why this guy got fired and why he didn't get fired faster )
( You know who else should be fired? )

[1] Note this is not why Summers was fired; see Cathy O'Neill's explainer from a few years back about what actually got him fired. But that's a digression. Summers was wrong, and G is wrong.
[2] There's a whole lot to say about what's wrong with tech companies in these areas but that's sort of aside. Take as given please that I think places like Uber are a cancer and should be cleansed with fire if nothing other than serving as a warning to everyone else.
[3] My actual background is in financial compliance - NASD, SEC and so on - but the principles are the same across industries. Financial compliance is just more complicated and more expensive.
[4] It's possible that the PR firm did advise them on this and Google didn't take that advice - I have no inside insight.
[5] Google's stock price doesn't per se exist since it's part of Alphabet, Inc and listed on the NASDAQ that way. In the last five days the price has been pretty stable so maybe this is a tempest in the tech teapot and the rest of the world doesn't give a hoot. If the stock was nosediving you'd be hearing a very different tune from Pichai.

Once upon a long ago I used to merrily blog music. Yay, it was fun. Sometimes people would leave comments telling me they liked this or that or otherwise indicating that I wasn't just blogging into the void. That's always nice.

Then mizarchivist pointed out that LJ has these things called "tags" and I could tag my music entries. This is helpful to know what's going on, and particularly helpful for back-reference and finding things that are particularly notable. Eventually I got enthusiastic enough to go back and tag my existing couple years' worth of music entries... at which point I promptly ran out of tags. This more than anything else prompted me to move to a paid LiveJournal account because I needed more tags. All is fine until the company owning LJ decides to move the servers into Russian airspace and I decide it's time to move over here to DreamWidth. Which, I shall not bore you with details, will not allow me to have unlimited tags, even if I do pay them.

For a while this has stymied me. I really like the convenience of being able to go back and revisit things I've blogged in the past, and I blog a lot of new artist/DJs in a given month so the list of tags grows with no obvious way to condense them. I'm tired of being stymied though and it finally penetrated my thick skull that this convenience I've grown used to is just that, a convenience. I don't actually have to tag music entries in order to write them. So I'm going to start blogging music again, only with erratic-to-nonexistent tagging. You've been warned.

I realized this because I have re-remembered (I keep forgetting, somehow) that music is important in my relationships. Intimate, certainly, and otherwise. If you and I don't share some musical taste or other, it's likely we're less close of friends than we would be if we did share. For example...

This morning Pygment and I responded to a wedding invitation that included a request to list something that would cause us to get up and dance. At first I snarked that my music tastes would appall most people and DJs wouldn't play it at weddings anyway. Pygment agreed and said something like, "Yeah but imagine if they would, we could get them to play..." and in two clicks I had the track linked below, which we put on the RSVP card. I'll let you know if it plays at the wedding because I will sure as shit be dancing if it does.

We Can Make the World Stop

Or, why I'm a First Amendment fundamentalist. jducouer pointed to this article from Yonatan Zunger. As often with Zunger, it's a bit long but very well thought-out and worth your time to read. It just happens to be wrong*.

"wrong*" is a shorthand I use for not factually incorrect but that does not hold up to detailed scrutiny. People can disagree whether something is wrong* while still agreeing on fundamental principles and factual bases. In this case I think Zunger is wrong* in part because he's avoiding the hard part of his argument and in part because he's not considering enough points of view.

Zunger starts off agreeing with Zoé Samudzi who made the claim that "...implicit incitement to violence via hate speech is protectable" and identifies this as a weakness. Zunger elaborates that the reason such things ought not to be protected is because hate speech, which he equates with harassment "silence[s] the weak and amplif[ies] the powerful." That's the first wrong* thing. Harassment, a specifically targeted attack, is not the same as hate speech.

I'm not even going to address defending harassment. I know people do defend it, but they're wrong (not even wrong*). Both in law and case precedent, harassment is not protected speech. So that leaves us with a discussion of hate speech. Zunger argues that hate speech amplifies existing social asymmetries - the targets of hate speech are most often people (women, people of color, people of different gender expressions and orientation) that already have unequal burdens just in daily living. "Talking while female" and "driving while black" are actual expressions of the systemic factors that disadvantage leads to. We want to counter that, so let's take seriously a point that a system (of free speech in this case) promotes that disadvantage.

Hate speech, Zunger argues, "has the particular ability to shut down speech by minority groups more than that by majority groups." True. The question is, what do you do about that? Zunger's answer is fuzzy and he doesn't really suggest a way to deal with the problem saying things like "Devising good speech policy is profoundly hard" and "the law must wrestle with this hard problem, and try to place a meaningful dividing line". Which, I'm arguing, is exactly what it does right now, where it comes down permitting a wide array of distasteful and offensive speech.

Having shied away from one hard question it's easy to see how Zunger has shied away from an even harder question, which is why I think his view is wrong*. Ask yourself:

What constitutes "hate speech"? What is "implicit incitement"?

My guess is that you, my mostly white mostly American mostly liberal readers will come up with answers similar to mine. It's no coincidence that Zunger illustrates his article with a comic of Captain America punching a Nazi. We all agree Nazis are bad and antisemitism (and its dual Islamophobia) are bad and that's it. Right? Easy. Done.

Except, what do you say to someone who believes that your insult to their religion is hate speech? What do you say to the person who believes their king is an incarnate god and any statement portraying that person or their family as less than divinely perfect is implicit incitement? What do you say to the person who honestly believes that the Bible is the literal word of G-d and any statement questioning that is an attack on par with saying that women are inferior creatures fit only to bear children? That latter is clearly hate speech so what allows us to restrict that and not restrict someone who questions whether Jesus literally rose from the dead?

Other people see things differently[1]. An attempt to define hate speech in a way that can be applied outside our (first world, white, etc.) preconception circle has to acknowledge that difference or we are simply imposing our views on everyone. Without a clear description of "implied incitement" you are left in a situation where no one can know if their speech is to be permitted, except perhaps if it's cleared by The Group Appointed To Check Speech for Hatred and Implied Incitement. Please tell me who gets to be part of that Group - I'm quite sure it won't be freaks like me but I'm curious to know your selection process. I'm also quite certain that any situation that requires speech to be pre-cleared is going to be far worse for the people who are unfairly targeted and harassed today. History shows that when you have to pre-clear things you get prohibited from stuff like publishing poems about gay love, or comics showing interracial kissing. And on and on. It's not like we're new at this.

Zunger says that the "marketplace of ideas" requires regulation. I agree; we have those. And for very good reasons our chosen regulations target harassment and not hate speech, prohibit actual incitement not implied. The US used to have sedition laws and other things that kept free expression down. We've spent the better part of the last century learning - often the hard way (sorry Eugene Debs) - that these restrictions are generally a bad idea.

So I think it's wrong* to equate harassment and hate speech. I think it's wrong* to slip "implied" in front of incitement while pretending they're the same thing. and most of all it's wrong to assume that everyone shares the same speech values and ideals as we do.

[1] If you have not already read it I highly recommend Bruce Sterling's short story titled We See Things Differently.

There's a meme going around vis-a-vis punching Nazis. I am not a pacifist - I believe that violence is sometimes necessary and that non-violent alternatives are not always the best choice. But I try not to instigate violence, even against fuckin' Nazis. Talk about your conflicted feelings.

http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/01/26/chancellor-statement-on-yiannopoulos/

I was (h/t Popehat) then directed to this statement by Chancellor Nicholas Dirks of UC Berkeley on the planned appearance on that campus of noted troll and gay-bashing hatemonger Milo Yiannopoulos. I think this statement gets it exactly correct. There are rights each of us enjoys, including the f'ing Nazis, and we must respect and uphold those rights even in the face of extreme provocation. We do so not out of some abstract loyalty to a code of rights, but because upholding such rights is consistent with the values of the communities we wish to build.

I forget who said it first, but I've always held to the principle that free speech is not necessary for popular speech - free speech is necessary for the unpopular. Lots of things my side says and will say are not popular, such as calling Drumph and his cronies liars. And some of the things the other side says are also unpopular.

When it becomes hard to uphold the unpopular rights we have to take a wider view and see who is not just having a hard time but who is actively being threatened. Who is potentially harmed by this exercise of rights? Because rights exist in a culture of values, we therefore value extending extra care and protection to those who are at risk. Our values call us to balance rights such as free speech with rights of safety and the basic liberty associated with being free of threat.

This stuff is hard even in the best of times and I suspect it's going to get harder and harder in the next four years. I want to come out of this dark period not only with my rights intact, but with my values still solid.

Discussion and reflection on giving aid at an accident. It didn't seem like a big deal to me. In part it is (as Pygment pointed out) not my first rodeo. I've not been at many serious incidents, thank G-d, but I've aided people in shock (keep them warm, remove constricting items like watch with elastic band), a person having a grand mal seizure (keep them propped on their side in case of vomiting, remove any hard objects from the immediate vicinity), a person with migraine so painful they needed ambulance transport (keep the lights off, keep people quiet, don't touch them more than needed to help them onto the stretcher, ride with them in the ambulance so they have a familiar contact).

In a way this sort of thing plays to my strengths. I have enough knowledge (First Aid, Advanced First Aid) to know the basics (blood, breathing, brains, bones) as well as knowing my limits. Mostly what I want to do is make sure nothing gets worse until the professionals can take over. I also do much better when I'm in a 1:1 interaction than in general. Anyone who's watched me at a party versus having a dinner out with me can tell you about that. I still remember a past gf exclaiming how different I was in person versus in a group. So when there's a person in need I can focus pretty well on helping them, particularly when they're right in front of me.

I also don't tend to freak out in media res. I will freak out beforehand - I get terrible stage fright 24 hours before a show, but when it's time to go on I'm over it. I am used to pushing through, and Just Dealing.

This all reminded me of a line about keeping one's head. I've been known to like problematic things, among them Kipling. Those who know the source of my journal's tag line are likely unsurprised. It's been a while since I read this poem by him, but it's a favorite.

Titled simply "If..."
( poem )

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/do-you-live-in-a-bubble-a-quiz-2/

How thick is your bubble?
( My results )
The fact that one of the few online quizzes I'm willing to do comes from PBS says a lot about my bubble, I think.