Some Much Needed Civil Service History

From the August 31, 2024 LA Times: [Note the digital and facsimile editions have different titles.]

 

As someone who taught public administration at the graduate level, I'm well aware of the lack of knowledge of what 'the civil service' is.  So let me give you some background.  

Before the civil service was created in local, state, and federal governments, we had what is often called "the spoils system."

Briefly, 'to the victor, go the spoils.'  Winning candidates gave jobs to the campaign supporters.  This was the payoff for working on a campaign.  Qualifications were not nearly as important as loyalty.  This included positions as low as garbage collector and as high was head of the budget.  

Aside from the incompetence and corruption this led to, it also meant that whenever someone from a different party won, the whole government was thrown out and new people were put in place.  And had to learn from scratch, generally without any help from the fired former workers.

Political machines, like Tammany Hall in New York, would recruit new immigrants coming off the ships to work on their campaigns with the promise of a job if they won.  [US citizenship was not required to vote back then.  That changed later.  The Constitution gave the states the power to run elections and decide qualifications to vote.  The Constitution didn't ban women from voting, the states did.]

At the national level, this came to a head when Andrew Jackson was elected president and invited 'the riffraff' that elected him to the White House in 1830.  But it wasn't until a disgruntled office seeker assassinated President Garfield in 1881 because he didn't get the position he sought, that Congress got serious. 

In 1883 they passed the Pendleton Act that set up a civil service system based on merit.  

Merit, as in the 'merit system' means that positions are filled based on merit, or on one's qualifications for the job, not who you know.  

Local governments in New York and Boston didn't move to merit systems until the early 20th Century.  

Those merit systems weren't perfect.  The inherent biases of the day meant that women and Blacks weren't qualified except for what Trump would call 'women's jobs' and 'Black jobs.'  

And even today, the top level jobs in most governments are still filled with people who are loyal to the head of the government - whether that's a mayor, governor, or president.   Not only does that include cabinet officials but a top layer of 'exempt' positions.  Exempt meaning they are not covered by the merit system.  They can be hired and fired at will.  Usually the newly elected official picks people based on their loyalty to his policy as well as his professional qualifications to do the job.  But clearly that second part doesn't always happen.  The only check on this, is a required vote of approval by a legislative body - the US or state Senate, a City Council.  But if the newly elected executive  has a majority in the legislative branch too, that approval is often pro forma.

People hired through a merit system process also have job protections.  They cannot be fired except for cause - for violating the law, the policies or procedures, for gross incompetence etc.  Whereas the appointed (exempt) positions don't have such protections.  

After his 2016 election, Trump was frequently frustrated by career civil servants, who didn't jump to follow his often illegal instructions. The media have dubbed these people (who included many appointed positions as well) 'the guardrails' that kept Trump somewhat in line. He wanted the Justice Department to punish people who opposed him.  He did battle with the civil servants in various regulatory agencies who followed the law rather than Trump's illegal bidding.  

So, when we hear that Trump wants to destroy the civil service, as stated in the LA Times headline above, this is what we're talking about.  

He doesn't want a system that hires qualified people who cannot be fired except for cause.  (Again, for cause, means they have to do something that violates the laws, the rules, or is grossly incompetent or corrupt.)  He wants government workers that do his bidding without any resistance, without them telling him 'it's against the law.'

He wants to fire all those people who were hired based on merit (their qualifications to perform the job).  These include Democrats, Republicans, and non-partisan employees, and replace them with people whose main qualification is undying loyalty to Trump.  

That's pretty much all I want to say.

One of the very best books on this subject is Robert Caro's The Power Broker.  It's a biography of Robert Moses who played a major role in getting a merit system in place in New York.  It's a massive [1168 pages] book.  But it is also riveting as it goes into detail on how the idealist young Moses evolved into the powerful and corrupt power broker of New York. And in doing so tells the story of the civil service. Not only did the book win the Pulitzer Prize, it was also selected on most lists of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th Century. I challenge you to read the first hundred pages and not want to turn the page.

Back To Third Grade

Yesterday was one of those on again off again sunny cloudy days.  This is better than weeks with no sun.  As long as your daily routine is flexible, you can go out when it's sunny.  Riding to Grow North Farm yesterday, the clouds were doing their best to block out the sun even though there was lots of blue.  

At the garden, everyone (the subscribers) got collard greens, parsley and garlic.  Then we got to choose two from this table which included:  cauliflower, radishes, beets, bak choi, salad greens, and carrots.  (Except maybe for the carrots, the picture doesn't do them justice.)

On the way home the sun was getting closer to breaking through the clouds.

I know I promised something about 3rd grade.  Here it is.  

Today the sky was similar.  I went to the school I volunteered at last spring.  

Last year the teacher had 30 kids!  The average elementary school class size was 23 and the recommended size for 1st-3rd is 15.  

This year she has only 21 and you could see the difference on her face and attitude.  (But maybe that's also the difference between the beginning of the school year and the end.)

It looks like I'm going to focus on a kid with limited English.  He did some of the work with a lot of help and did a find-the-words puzzle with a lot less help.  I'm hoping mastering basic English will make help this kid blossom.  The school doesn't have an teacher for basic English (can't fill the position I was told.)  They have tablets with lots of educational stuff on them.  There has to be stuff for learning English.  I can also check what the library has.  And I'll just create stuff to help him build his vocabulary and speaking and listening skills.  He did tell me, in careful English at the end, the names of his brother, sister, and mother.  

Last year was very rewarding and I think I can do a better job this time round.  

From Offensive To Disgusting Ads That Litter Online Landscape

I just sent an email to editor of Florida Bulldog complaining about an ad that kept appearing as I scrolled down an article that pointed out that Donald Trump had failed to register as a convicted felon as required by Florida law and that as a convicted felon he probably voted illegally in the Florida primary.  That was something I wondered about after reading an article a while back about how Florida was making it difficult for former felons - who'd won the right to vote via referendum - to actually do so.  

This certainly isn't the worst of the online ads I've seen.  And it's not even terrible, but looking up these nostrils every time I scrolled down was really annoying.

I was polite and understanding.  It's a non-profit publication that seems to write important stories.  I'm sure it doesn't have much clout.  

[I was letting this post sit until tomorrow when I could reread it and edit.  But I'd note that I got this response from the Florida Bulldog's editor about two hours later:

"Thanks Steve. I agree with you and have let our ad server know to exclude such ads from Florida Bulldog’s pages.

Should you check us out again, please let me know if this returns.

Regards,

Dan Christensen - Editor"]

[And as I looked at the article again this morning, it seems better.  There's a no-sugar ad that showed up three times, but it was not nearly as bad as the nose hairs.  But then the nose hairs makes these other ads seem 'ok.'  That's part of the normalization process.  Trump lies so much that it is no longer news, but Walz gets attacked for saying he got an award from the Chamber of Commerce when it was really the Junior Chamber of Commerce.]

But I'd like to see the multitude of online platforms that take ads to join together to demand a little more taste from advertisers.  Am I being priggish?  I don't think so.  It's really like litter along the road and in our parks.  It's like how we've become used to the nastiness of the GOP - the lies and disinformation and racism.  And then suddenly we saw the Democratic convention that, for the most part, had none of that.  (And the Dem's attacks and snide comments about Trump and the GOP were the necessary response to the years of unanswered bullying from the other side.)

We don't need to live in the garbage pit that online advertising has become.

Advertisers don't want to be next to offensive online content.  Why should good online content be surrounded by trashy ads?

I get it.  Advertisers believe (and possibly correctly) that the more disgusting their pictures are, the more viewers look at them.  

And one publication like the Florida Bulldog or even The Anchorage Daily News, or even The Los Angeles Times can't fight this alone.  This goes for media that are only online as well.  

But they are all part of professional associations that can collectively fight the trashing of their sites.  

Another problem is when pictures are placed next to a story in a way that makes the viewer think the picture is related to the story rather than an ad.  

And have you  ever let an ad on Youtube go past the 5 second skip ad period?  I have a few times just out of curiosity.  They're old time scammers that reel viewers in with outlandish claims and the promise of an antidote if you listen long enough.  The two I looked at longer then linked me to another video, that dragged me along without ever telling me the 'newly discovered treatment that doctors don't want you to know about because it will cost them billions of dollars.'

These ads are sitting there waiting to spread conspiracy theories, sell quack medicines, and generally replace factual and science based information with nonsense. This sort of crap used to be confined to outlets like the National Inquirer  where the average normal person laughed at the absurdity of the headlines about alien invasions.  Now this stuff saturates our lives.  It's helped made Trump seem like a viable presidential candidate to some, whereas the slightest peccadillo used to immediately disqualify a candidate.

I original thought I should offer more images to make my point.  But you all know what I mean.  It's hard to escape for anyone who spends any time online.  

But when you come across something like the nose hairs above (or the more gruesome images you see regularly) copy it and send it to the editor or the publication and ask them to fight back.  You can send a link to this post if that's easier.  And as the response I got from Dan Christiansen of the Florida Bulldog shows, sometimes they listen.

Note:  When I decided to not have ads on this blog, it was more a general aversion to everything being commercialized.  I'd once had a subscription to Ad Busters* which supported my adversion (yes I intended that). I didn't then imagine how trashy online ads would get.

*I linked to Ad Busters, but it's really evolved way beyond just critiquing ads when I used to read it.  

Yes, there are ad blockers.  My computer says I have them turned on.  But the advertisers seem to have outfoxed the blockers.  But if any of you have successful ad blockers, let me know.  Here are a few links I found looking up ad blockers:

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-skip-youtube-ads

This one is focused on YouTube.  Says you can pay a monthly fee to be ad free.  Isn't that like the mafia?  We won't break your windows or your knee caps if you pay us a monthly tribute.  

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2765944?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop

Suggestions from Chrome

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102524

Suggestions from Apple

This Lady Has Put It All Together For You

 A good, clear, emphatic explanation of why people need to vote every election for Democrats.  She explains how the government works for people who don't seem to get that presidents can't do most things without Congress.  How the Supreme Court can also stymie and president, especially the one that the Federalist Society has stacked in favor of the rich and against most people - especially people of color and women.  

It won't take long and it will seem to go by faster because of how she presents it.  

This is one to share with others, particularly those who don't vote cause "it's not their thing."    

Hmong New Year Celebration

When I taught English in Thailand as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 60s, there
were 'hill tribes' up in the mountains to the west of my town.  But we were also told there were communists in the mountains too, and to stay away.  Hmong was not the name that Thais used.  Their word, the one I knew them by then, I learned later was more of a slur than a proper name.  

Despite the alleged presence of Communists in the mountains, I kept insisting I wanted to visit a 'hill tribe' village and eventually the Assistant Police chief, whose daughters I was teaching English to, arranged a trip.  We were also given a big box of medicine to leave with the village.  It was a very poor village and as I recall, monitored by the Thai government.  

[To be clear, the pictures are all from today in Anchorage.]

  

As a volunteer, I had one significant interaction with a Hmong person.  I was on a bus (long distance, not within a city) and sitting next to a Hmong young man about my age - early 20s.  Both of us were sitting next to a kind of person we never really ever had a chance to talk to - an American and a Hmong on a rural bus in Northern Thailand. Our common language was Thai.  He wanted to know about US president Nixon and asked questions about the US and US politics.  He listened to Voice of America.  No Thai had ever asked me those kinds of questions, so I was surprised and interested.  We had a connection and it would have been nice to be able to follow through, but we were just meeting, accidentally, in passing.  

There are a number of different kinds of indigenous peoples living in the mountains of Northern Thailand, Burma, and Laos, and into China.  All with different customs and languages.  

Many years later when I volunteered in Chiang Mai with the American Jewish World Service, Joan and I connected with S a young Karen man.  The organization where I worked asked if Joan could tutor him in English because he had been selected for a nine month long program in Japan for indigenous people from Southeast Asia, that would be conducted in English.  Like the man I'd met on the bus, he was very bright and fast learner.  He took us up to his village one weekend.  Here's the blog post I did of that day.  There are 78 posts listed under the label AJWS mostly from the two times I volunteered in Chiang Mai. [As I scrolled quickly through some of the old Thai posts, I noticed that the videos are all blank spaces.  I'll have to check and see if I can track down the originals and get them reposted.]

The Hmong of Laos have a special connection to the US because they assisted the US military in fighting the Communists in Laos during the Vietnam war and so they were given special rights to immigrate to the US after the Communists took over.  Many spent years in refugee camps in Thailand before gaining access to the US.  

So I wanted to to to the Hmong New Year Celebration in Anchorage today.  Just because.  And despite it being a gray day, it was the most colorful event I remember in Anchorage.  Even more colorful that Pridefest.

Note: I try to blur faces of kids

Unfortunately I didn't think like a blogger and do some homework before I went.  I didn't think like a blogger when I was there.  I should have asked a lot more questions.  

For instance why are they celebrating in August?

"Hmong New Years is celebrated in early December. Luang Prabang and nearby Hmong villages are great places to participate. The festival lasts for three days and according to the tradition of "Noj Peb Caug" ten different dishes of food are prepared for each day. So, this is probably the best time and place to try 30 different Asian dishes.

In-house customs involve shamans who honour spirits of wealth and healing. They release spirits to wander for awhile and then welcome them back. This is called "Hu Plig" (Spirits calling).

Outdoor New Years celebrations typically include a traditional game called pov pob (tossing a cotton ball), ox fighting, spinning-top races, and music concerts. Unique ethnic instruments like teun-flutes and khene pipes can be heard during the performances. Also, New Years is a favorable event for Hmong youth to meet a future wife or husband. In Hmong communities, ​it isn't allowed to marry within the clan group, so finding a partner is preferable during joint celebrations. Thus, young women and men dress in their best ethnic costumes to show off."  [This comes from what appears to be a travel website, so take it with a grain of salt.]

So why are the Anchorage Hmong celebrating in August?  I didn't know to ask earlier today.  Maybe because they want to celebrate outdoors (they were playing what I assumed was soccer, but I didn't look too closely) and that would be less appealing in Anchorage in winter.    

I had thought I should wear something Hmong, but wasn't really sure if I had anything.  Somewhere there's a box with different shirts from Indigenous peoples of Thailand.  I used it on a school visit once.  But I couldn't find it.  I'm not sure any of the items are Hmong.  So I ended up taking a cloth bag that I got at the 45th Anniversary of Peace Corps Thailand that had some woven strips in them.  I wasn't sure if they were Thai or possibly Hmong.  

So I stopped at a tent that was selling Hmong clothing and asked a woman there what she thought.  

No it didn't look Hmong.  Then she proceeded to point out the various different Hmong styles.  There's green Hmong, red Hmong, striped Hmong.  These are al different groups of Hmong.  She pointed out that much in this particular tent was machine woven instead of hand made.  

Based on clothing, I would say the Hmong well outnumbered the rest of us and it appeared that most of the Hmong were splendidly dressed in traditional Hmong outfits.  The woman I spoke to about the patterns on my bag said that styles were changing radically in the US and it was hard to keep up with them.  

Ranked Choice Voting Back On Nov Ballot/Nancy Dahlstrom Drops Out of US House Race

 Let's see if I can write a quick, short post.  

1.  The Alaska Supreme Court approved a lower court ruling putting a ballot measure to repeal Ranked Choice Voting after there were a number of challenges to how the group operated.  I didn't read the court case [I went back and looked and it's very short and says, 

"An opinion explaining this decision will be issued at a later date."

but the Anchorage Daily News reported today that a) they have traditionally decided in favor of putting measures on the ballot and b) the technical issue (a notary's license had expired) wasn't the fault of the petitioners and so getting a signature booklet notarized again, after the deadline, was acceptable.  There were other irregularities for which the petitioners got a hefty fine (like hiding funding sources by forming a 'church' in Washington State) but in the end, it will be on the ballot.  

2.  The anti ranked choice voting push is coming from the die-hard Republicans of Alaska.  They keep talking about it hurting them.  In one sense, they are right.  The change to ranked choice voting includes getting rid of closed primaries.  In closed primaries the more extreme and partisan Republican candidates tend to get elected.  Open primaries combined with ranked choice voting dilutes the partisanship because more than die-hard Republicans vote in the open primary.  But, ranked choice voting means that if there are several people from the same party in the final four from the primary, they don't have to split the vote and lose to a Democrat.  They just have to it cooperate and get Republicans to rank other Republican candidates second and even third.  If they only vote for one candidate, they aren't helping the party to get the most out of ranked choice voting.  

But they can't quite seem to take advantage of it.  Last time round (2022, the first time we used ranked choice voting) lots of voters chose one of the two top Republicans first and then either did not rank anyone else or chose the Democratic candidate.   

3.  Today, we also learned that Republican candidate Nancy Dahlstrom, who came in third behind Democratic incumbent Mary Peltola and Republican challenger Nick Begich III, dropped out of the race.  Begich had pledged to drop out if he wasn't the top GOP candidate, but Dahlstrom hadn't made such a pledge.  But she got A LOT of comments on Twitter yesterday telling her to drop out.  Will it matter?  She could have just told her voters to vote for Begich as their second choice.  

Rather than take advantage of ranked choice voting by cooperating on ranking, they've pushed Dahlstrom out altogether.  

4.  But the Democratic incumbent got just over 50% of the initial primary vote.  The turnout was very low.  Only 16% of voters participated.  This does not count the people who voted by mail though, and the numbers will go up somewhat and that 50% might change.  But that's a formidable lead.  And there were 12 total candidates.  If a candidate drops out, the next highest candidate moves up to the fourth spot on the ballot.  

Also, this primary was not a high interest election.  Voters had only the Congressional race, which with ranked choice voting, wasn't going to eliminate the top Democratic or Republican choices, plus a state house race in each district.  And one third of the districts had Senate races.  [It's supposed to be 1/3 of the senate get voted on each election, but right after redistricting, the first election may have more.  (I just went back and checked - there were ten senate races, which is 1/2 of the senators.)] 

Unfortunately, I suspect most voters don't really know much about their state house and senate candidates.  I was surprised Tuesday at how long some people spent in the voting booths to vote for three races. (I was a poll worker so I could see that.) 

But I think there will be a lot more interest when the presidential candidates are on the ballot in November.  The US House race will essentially be a two person race.  Dahlstrom, the third place candidate had 20% of the vote.  The fourth place candidate, Matt Salisbury, had .60% (that's less than one per cent) as of the Tuesday night tally.  With Dahlstrom dropping out, there will be room for the next highest vote getter, John Wayne Howe, the Alaska Independent Party candidate who got .57% of the vote.  

I suspect a lot of voters who absolutely don't want Trump will put Peltola (the Democrat) first or second, but will skip the strongly anti-abortion Begich as a second choice.  

5.  Ranked choice voting was approved in 2020 by a slim majority by voters.  But I think Alaskans got to see how easy and sensible it was in 2022 (I was a poll worker and got to hear from voters as they brought their filled out ballots to the voting machine).  I did have one voter on Tuesday (I worked at the polls again in the primary) who was vehemently opposed to ranked choice voting.  "It's unconstitutional.  It's one man one vote, not four votes."  But I'm guessing he doesn't represent most Alaskan voters, who, I believe will endorse it more strongly this time.  

Also, the national organizations supporting ranked choice voting are putting a fair amount of money up to make sure it stays in Alaska.  (See the ADN article linked above)

Poll Working - And Peltola Does Well

 Yesterday was primary election day in Anchorage.  It was a beautiful sunny day and I biked over to Kasuun Elementary school (and passed the 1200 km mark for the summer so far). 

It was basically unremarkable.  People came, showed ID, got their ballots, voted in a voting booth, then brought the ballot to the voting machine where it was scanned.

None of the ballots were rejected by the scanner. (In 2022, the first time we had ranked choice voting, the machine did reject some of the ballots.  But the screen explained why - usually the person had voted for more than one person with the same ranking.)  

But this election was simple.  One US Congress seat.  One state house seat.  And in some districts there was also a state senate seat.  

After the ballot was scanned, voters got a choice of Alaska themed "I Voted" stickers.  

I did notice that the scanner was touchy.  Most people had a bit of trouble getting the scanner to suck in their ballot.  I'm not sure what the people who got it scanned in right away did differently from the others.  

But I did discover, toward the end, that if voters turned the privacy sleeve (with the ballot inside) upside down, then took the blank side of the ballot out of the sleeve and put it into the slot on the scanner, it went in with no problem.  (They scan from either end of the ballot, whatever side is up.)  Because the ballot choices were so few, the backside of the ballot was blank.  So no one's votes were visible. That won't be the case in November.  

There were also four first time voters I got to congratulate - three young men and a young woman.  Maybe there were more, but I wasn't aware.  Okay, some will ask how I was aware, so here's how.  The first two were very young looking and I just asked, "You're not a first time voter are you?"and they smiled and said yes.  The parents of the other two alerted me.  

On the negative side, the turnout was really low.  Not sure exactly what the percentage was, but we had over 2000 registered voters on the list and when we finished the scanner said that 294 had voted.  If we round it off to 2000 total (and there were more than that) 200 votes would be 10%.  300 votes would be 15%.  But then I don't know how many people voted by mail.  That's easy to do.  At least four people dropped off their mail in ballots, which go in the box with the questioned ballots and don't get scanned.  

Actually, I can figure this out more precisely.  I looked up the Division of Elections page for House District 12.  

My estimate wasn't pretty close.  I said 300 would have been 15% if there were 2000 voters.  There were 2174 registered voters and the turnout was 13.53%.  Not an impressive number.  The chart also lists 117 Absentee voters and 438 early voters.  But that's for the entire district, not just the one precinct. I would have thought there were more.

I'd also note that when I left there was a discrepancy in the numbers.  The number of voters listed on the rolls (they are highlighted in yellow and sign their name) was 293.  And when the counted all the questioned and special needs ballots and the checked the ballot stubs, minus the spoiled ballots, that came out to 293 as well.  I'd helped take down the voting booths and putting away other things and since I was biking, I wanted to take off and asked if I was needed further and so I left without finding out how the discrepancy was resolved.  But these counting issues come up every year and the training program spent a fair amount of time on this. 

The whole house district voted for the NON incumbent, with a 14.11% voter turnout.  I assume that NON refers to non-partisan.  The Division of Elections page on parties lists N as non-partisan.  Schrage has been part of the House Coalition comprised of Democrats and most Republicans.

The whole Senate district gave the Democratic incumbent a plurality.   

And of more interest, I assume, to non-Alaskan readers, voters gave Democratic US House of Representatives member Mary Peltola 50.38% of the vote in a 12 way race!  The two major Republican vote getters were Alaska Republican Party endorsed candidate Nick Begich with 26.98%, and Trump and major Congressional Republicans supported candidate Nancy Dahlstrom with 20.01%.  

Remember, this is an open (all candidates together) primary and the four top candidates go on to the general election which will be ranked-choice.

The turnout in the Congressional race was also low - 15%.  As impressive as winning a majority in a 12 person race with two well supported  Republicans, the general election, being a presidential election, will have a lot more voters.  While she may not win a majority in the first round, Peltola is in a good position to win enough second place votes to pull 

Nick Begich had promised to drop out if he was in third place behind Dahlstrom.  Dahlstrom made no such commitment.  

In 2022, many who voted for the top Republicans as their first choice vote, gave Democrat Peltola their second place vote.  Not another Republican. I would say this is a good sign for the Democratic House elections.  

One final note - House District 18, which includes two military bases, had less than 5% turnout.  Ouch.  

From Stolen Intellectual Policy To Heteropessimism To Climate Catastrophe Greeting Cards

A link to Capacious led me into a rabbit hole that didn't let go for several hours.  As an academic, I found the first story too real and too chilling a possibility. And also quite relevant to one of the presidential candidates. The other two I'll touch on here were much further outside my normal world.  The journal Capacious does have room for many things.

A Tweet sent me to Capaciousjournal to read an article ["How Intellectual Property Theft Feels"  Jordan Alexander Stein] by an English professor who submitted a book proposal on Cotton Mather to Yale University Press.  One reviewer gave it a green light.  The other said no.  Several years later, she gets an email about a new book from Yale University Press - on, you guessed it, Cotton Mather with a blurb that very closely copies her original proposal.  And then she finds out the author is the reviewer who nixed her proposal and the editor is the one she originally sent the proposal.  

She finds that her options are slim but minimally she wants an apology and an acknowledgement of the hurt this has caused her.  She gets neither. 

Her article covers a wide range of topics.  Money wasn't particularly an issue, because, as she says, books on Cotton Mather are aimed at a tiny niche audience. Aside from the deceit, a general despicableness of this sort of crime (I call it a crime, she says the law is fuzzy. The university classifies it under moral lapses) it caused real damage to the writer.  

"Having to look back at the past five years of my career, I suddenly saw that I’d mostly stopped researching and publishing on Puritan writers. Nor in that time had I attended even a single one of the field’s multiple annual conferences. All the Mather books in my office had been pushed into a corner where I now found them hibernating under five winters of dust. The humiliation I had felt years before as a response to the ad hominem nature of George’s reader report had knocked me off my professional course. It had happened by no means necessarily, and perhaps not on anyone’s part deliberately, but, I reluctantly found myself admitting, it had happened absolutely." (p. 103)

Essentially the reviewer/thief/author and the editor got away with it.  Nothing bad came of it for them (at least in the awareness of Jordan Alexander Stein.)  

And this seems emblematic of the age we live in.  Where the norms have broken down and the wheels of justice are too slow to keep up.  Trump perhaps will become the patron saint of sociopaths.  The Supreme Court has even awarded him with immunity that is probably broad and slippery enough for him to escape punishment for anything.  

Stein goes on to say this was not about money, but reputation.

"Universities meanwhile don’t operate at merely human levels; they have more abstract things like brands to protect. From their perspective, this kind of dust-up wouldn’t be about personal relationships, even when financial considerations are not involved. (Never mind that the university whose press Martha works for and which has published George’s edition of Mather is so incomprehensibly wealthy, and again the money at stake would be so little, that even the upper-limit damages from any hypothetical lawsuit of mine would be to them about as negligible as a rounding error). More typically, the issue is about the priceless thing called reputation. Universities do not want to be seen as having done something for which any liability must be assumed. What universities seek to protect is symbolic. And they protect it very well." (p. 106) (emphasis mine)

It's not like any of this is new.  Professors stealing the ideas of others is an age-old practice.  What is new is that there are many more platforms from which to call it out.  

 

While scrolling through the online copy of Capacious, I found several other articles that reminded me that people are thinking about and writing about things I have not given much attention to.  

[I'd note the links here.  The basic Capaciousjournal.com goes to a table of contents for the current edition - Vol. 3 No. 2  (2024).  This page has links to some of the articles in this edition - including the next one on Heteropessimism.  But the other articles can be found by clicking the PDF file for the whole edition.  Which I had to do to find the article above.  So for Stein article, you have to scroll down.  The Heteropessimism link takes you directly to that article.  The Greeting Card article you have to scroll down - it's right below the Stein article.]

"Heteropessimism and the Pleasure of Saying 'No.'”Samantha Pinson Wrisley

I have reactions to this article, but it's a discussion I have not been a party to (the article has 42 or 43 references) so I'll keep my thoughts to myself, just listen, and offer this quote from the author. 

 "I take the heteropessimistic connections between feminism and incel to their logical conclusion, showing that feminist heteropessimism’s inherent essentialism affectively cements the incongruous ideological positions of feminism to incel’s sexual nihilism. I conclude with an argument for the naturalization of negativity as part of a broader move toward accepting the ambiguities of heterosexual desire and the antagonism(s) that drive it."

After rereading this quote, I realize it most readers won't catch the drift of the article.  Basically, as I understood it, Wrisley argued that one area of feminism looks at heterosexual relations as difficult because they can't stand the men necessary to have heterol relationships.  She saw a similarity between this attitude and that of incels who are virgins because they can't attract women to have sex with them.  Both, thus being characterized as 'heteropessimistic.'

Finally:  "Greeting Cards For the Anthropocene"  Craig Campbell 

This one starts out with 

"In 1971 it cost only 50¢ for an eight page list of twenty-five Greeting Card companies in the USA and Canada that were buying greetings, captions, and ideas from hopeful writers."

He offers some examples of what the card makers wanted in people's pitches.  Using this idea, he moves closer to the present:

"In 2019, under the auspices of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography, we launched the Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene project.2 We sought to understand climate feelings first by making cards for an invented category of ‘Climate Catastrophe’ in the greeting card aisle of the local pharmacy."

 The article includes some examples of related letters and such greeting cards. 

In many ways Capacious does what I set out to do in this blog long ago - look at things we often overlook, or look at what we see, but differently.  It rearranges the furniture of the brain.  And reminds me to do more of this sort of posts.  

Election Worker Training

 Last Thursday I went to training for election workers for the primary (August 20) and the general election in November.  This is another effort on my part to contribute to a fair election.  

There was a morning training at 9:00am and I opted for the afternoon training at 1pm.  I also dropped off our absentee ballots since the training was at the elections office on Gambell.  Plus there was early voting going on too.

The door to the training room was closed - the morning training was going on longer than scheduled.  By 1:30 people came out and we went in.  

The trainer, who had done the morning training, stayed to do ours.  She was there for four and a half hours already and then started our training - which took a little over four hours - without a break.  

There was a training manual which covered things like getting things set up the night before (mostly signs and tables and things that didn't need security), set up in the morning (starting at 6am to be ready to open at 7am), then how to work the various stations - 

• checking names on the register, 
• giving out the ballots, 
• questioned ballots (if the name isn't on the register or no ID or other irregularities) 
• disabled voting procedures (including a large screen for voting with audio and manual controls in braille and other touch sensitive controls), 
• special needs voters
• the voting machine for scanning the ballots
• spoiled ballots

Those are most of the topics that were covered.  I went through election training in 2022, but that was during COVID and it was all online.  

Some things I learned:

1.  Questioned ballots - anyone that has any irregularity - they aren't on the register, no ID, at the wrong precinct, or basically any situation where someone insists on voting when they aren't clearly eligible (ie coming after the polls close).  We were told that all questioned ballots will be examined by election officials and they will determine if the vote should count.  

Since the questioned ballots are in special envelopes with the voters name and info on them, I asked about what we say if they ask if people will know how they voted.  The answer was that there's a clear procedure for sorting questioned ballots by what will be counted first.  If they vote out of their district, they won't get to vote for the local candidates, but will get to vote for US House, for example.  Then the ballots, still in the secrecy sleeves, are taken out of the envelopes, so the ID is gone.  Later they get put through the appropriate scanner.  

2.  Special Needs Voters - these are people who cannot come to the polls for any reason.  A representative comes and fills out a form on an envelope, gets a ballot, goes to the voter, lets them vote and fill out the rest of the form.  The representative has to sign again after the ballot is filled out and bring it back to the polls.  Who does this?  People in nursing homes was an example, but they also mentioned a busy chef who couldn't leave the restaurant.  The ballot has to be returned by 8pm election day and the form has to be filled out correctly, including the representative's second signature.

It seemed to me that for most situations, it would be far easier for everyone to get a mail in ballot.  There's less to fill out and less running around.  This certainly would be a better option for the nursing home people.  The only people this makes sense tome for, are people who are incapacitated at the last minute.  Say someone who tests positive for COVID the night before the election.  It also seemed to me that this option is ripe for abuse. 

3.  Tracking Ballots.  There are lots of measures to insure that all the ballots are accounted for.  The pads with the ballots have numbers on them (but not the ballots when they are torn out of the pad).  The scanners count the number of ballots inserted successfully.  All that has to be tallied against the registered and the number of questioned ballots and special needs ballots and spoiled ballots (torn up because the voter made a mistake.)  But that still leaves the possibility of someone playing with card in the voting machine.  There are paper ballots that could be counted to see if they match what the machine says, but the state doesn't really test many if any precincts to check.  

4.  The training was thorough.  More than most people can digest in the four plus hour training.  The manual is a backup, but doesn't have all the information we were given.  Our trainer knew her stuff thoroughly.  I'm hoping that the others I work with will remember the things I missed or forget.  

5.  There was additional training for people who will be in charge of the equipment - like the voting machines and the touchscreens.  

6.  There's a number to call if there are non-English speakers to connect to someone who, hopefully, speaks the voter's language.  It wasn't clear how many languages are available.  There are no interpreters for the hearing impaired.  

Brian Taylor Cohen Interviews Heather Cox Richardson - Watch This!

This is an important interview by Brian Taylor Cohen, one of the brightest and most articulate commentators (I want to say on the air, and he does appear on cable news, but he's also a powerful presence on the internet via Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms) and Heather Cox Richardson, an important US historian who uses history to inform current events.  

A couple of points they make that jumped out at me. 

1. Taking Over World Money Supply. She talks about how Trump is 78 years old and not in great health, and could leave Vance in charge.  Vance is Thiel's pawn.  Peter Thiel is a 'tech bro' interested in crypto currency and this could lead to taking control over the world money supply.  

2. Whenever there is a new technology, and she lists mining, cotton, diamonds, copper, oil as examples, there are no regulations at first and a few people get very rich and powerful to the detriment of everyone else.

(#1 and #2 are intertwined starting around 5:45 to about 7:40)

3.  Trump's succeeded because his actions are so outrageous that people can't conceive he's being real.   They want to take away abortion, get rid of medicare, etc. people don't believe it.  They're planning that.  We need to take it seriously. (about 8:30 min)

4.  The Big Lie. If your roommate steals $20 you can get mad at him.  But if he schemes to take over your family's bank account, retirement funds, your family's  house, it's beyond comprehension.  Don't have emotional groundwork to get mad because it's too outrageous to imagine.  That's what Trump has done.  Of course the Supreme Court wouldn't give the President to commit crimes in office, but they did.(about 10:50)

5. History- Turning on a Dime - History taught me that American society can turn on a dime.  I've been waiting and it didn't happen.  But since Biden pulled out of race, the US has turned on a dime.  (about 17 min)

There's a lot in between that links each of the points together worth listening to.  

This video has two very bright people dissecting what's happening and where we seem to be going.  

At the end they push two of their books probably worth reading:

Richardson:  Democracy Awakening coming out in paperback in October

Cohen:  Shameless  How Republicans used long term plans to change the US, which we can see most clearly with the Supreme Court.  

Consumer Alerts: Netflix Plan Change; Costco Tandoori Wrap

 The email the other day told me that the plan I'm on with Netflix is being discontinued.  They announced that I would save 40%.  But then in the smaller print it said, I'd get ads at that lower price.  

A few short ads.  Few is pretty vague.  So is short.  Anything over 5 seconds is too long for me.  And in the middle of a movie?  That's sacrilege. 

"Designed not to interrupt you during a scene" - So does this mean at the end of the scene, but in the middle of the movie, they will interrupt?  Totally unacceptable.  

My current bill is $11.99 per month.  That's up from $9.99 a month not that long ago. [I looked on line.  Seems they announced the increase in June 2023 and it went into effect in October 2023, best as I can tell.]

That's less than a year ago.  Can we expect annual bumps from now on? 

Compared to going to the theater, Netflix is a great deal.  So great that we find we are spending way too much time watching.  At least we limit to after dinner, generally not starting until 8:30 or 9:30.  And trying to end around 11pm.

But as I think about it, we lose a lot of reading time and a lot of time when we used to talk to each other.  And I have noticed that blogging gets cut back by Netflix.  

So I replied that we did not want ads and were ready to cut loose from Netflix. 

I got another email - My current plan would end September 30.  I replied that our Netflix addiction would end September 30.  Of course, the emails from Netflix were not ones you could reply to and I got notices that they weren't delivered.  

Prices go up because people are willing to suck it up and keep paying.  In this case I need to figure out how to let Netflix know, I don't plan to pay after September.  

Meanwhile, I had to go to Costco to get a repair on one of my hearing aids - which they did and it worked.  But as I gathered some fruits and veggies and fresh salmon, I saw some Tandoori Chicken Wraps.  Looked good and they had a $2 off sign, so I thought we could try them.  

Today, when I looked to see if and how to heat them up, I saw there were no directions.  Just the longest list of ingredients I can remember ever seeing.  

From what I could tell checking a Reddit discussion, you were supposed to eat them cold.  We did.  

Boring!!  (Does it make sense to put exclamation points after boring?  Probably not)  Despite all the ingredients it didn't really taste like anything.  It was mushy. Avoid.  

Back To Netflix 

And if you have Netflix, and you're also unhappy about this, you can go to manage your account and play around until you find the contact button.  Then you have a choice of phone or chat.  

I chose chat, because I can make screenshots of what was said, but I'm pretty sure it was a bot responding.  When, at one point, I asked how many siblings do you have and where are you in the birth order, the response was 

"I'd be happy to answer Netflix-related questions today. Do you have any questions about your account or our service?"

At the end when they asked if I had more questions, I said that they hadn't answered whether they were a bot or human and the answer was "I am a human."  Must be depressing having people think you aren't human all day - assuming that was true.  

Maybe we need to have legislation requiring customers be told whether the chat or voice they are talking to is a human or not.  With consequences if they lie.   

I'd suggest people go into your accounts and tell them you are going to cancel your accounts at the end of September (or whenever your basic service ends).  If enough people do that, perhaps they will reconsider.  And you can always rejoin later if you have severe withdrawal symptoms.  

 

Erkek or Adam?

Bear with me for a bit. (Or don't and just scroll down to JUMP TO HERE below.) I've been learning Turkish on Duolingo for a while.  It's good for vocabulary and some grammar.  There is a listening component that is helpful.  But this is language learning like I had in Jr. high and high school.  It's aimed at teaching through vocabulary and grammar.  For Peace Corps training (and later with the Confucius Institute) we were taught by memorizing dialogues.  

This latter method was much more effective for learning to speak.  We just repeated the dialogues, over and over and over, mimicking native speakers until the sentences were imbedded in our heads. This is how children learn a language.  By mimicking what they hear.  And only later when they instinctively know the grammar, do they learn the rules that explain why they say it the way they do.  There were also substitution drills - where the instructor would say a word and we had to use it to replace a word in the sentence.  For example:

I am going to the store.  

"office"

I am going to the office.  

When I arrived in my town, I had lots of useful sentences that I would roll off my tongue without thinking.  But when I learn the Duolingo way, with grammar and vocabulary memorization, I struggle to remember the rules so I can put a sentence together correctly. 

Today as I was doing my Turkish lesson, I was wondering why they sometimes used the word üzürinde to mean 'on' and sometimes used üstünde.  Googling got me to a Quora page which had several explanations.  Basically they are used interchangeably said one responder.  Another agreed that practically, that is the case, though üstünde means more 'above'.

JUMP TO HERE

Below the explanation of two Turkish words that mean 'on' there was another explanation of two words for 'man' - erkek and adam.  These are also words I've learned and never asked why one or the other. One is longer and uses a story.  One is short and to the point.  

Emre Sermutlu

Knows TurkishAuthor has 613 answers and 1.6M answer views5y

Related

What is the difference between adam and erkek in the Turkish language?

Let me put it that way, only a small percentage of all “erkek”s are also “adam”s.

Here's a famous story about the concept of “adam”ness. Once there was a boy who was good for nothing. His father, after seeing his attempts for reforming the youth frustrated, said finally “You will never be adam! “

(This is the part that is difficult to translate. The father means “upright man” when he says “adam”, but the boy in his ignorance perceives it as “great man”)

Later, the boy leaves his village and after a lot of adventures, becomes the grand vizier of the Sultan. One day he remembers his father (whom he never visited) and his harsh words. He sends a group of soldiers to fetch him, without ever telling them he is his father. So they bring the old guy in terrible condition, as if he is a criminal.

In the palace, the son proclaims “You said I would never be a man. As you can see, I am the vizier now! “

Which the father responds:

“But I never said you will not be vizier. I said you will not be “adam”. Seeing how you treat your father, I can say you still haven't become an adam!”

Serkan Narin

Bachelor in Language, Marmara University (Graduated 2010)3y

Related

What is the difference between adam and erkek in the Turkish language?

Erkek is how you are called when you are born with a dick while adam is how you are called when you are not a dick. 

The second answer cleverly gets right to the point.  Though I'm sure having read the first explanation, helped me appreciate the second.  

And I immediately thought that this would be a great way to differentiate between Kamala Harris' newly announced vice presidential running mate and Trump's.  

Now I need someone who knows Yiddish and Turkish to tell me whether my guess that adam is akin to mensch.