Author Archives: Bill Humphrey

Bill Humphrey

About Bill Humphrey

Bill Humphrey is the primary host of WVUD's Arsenal For Democracy talk radio show and a local elected official.

Egypt’s Sisi selflessly offers to be leader forever

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fake-time-magazine-egypt-200In the least convincing denial yet that he is building a cult of personality and permanent personal dictatorship, Egypt’s General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has told voters there that they should vote for his new constitution in this week’s referendum if they want him to run for president:

“If I run, then it must be at the request of the people and with a mandate from my army,” General Sisi said at a military seminar, according to the website of the state newspaper, Al Ahram. “I can’t turn my back on Egypt.”

 

Sisi added that it would be embarrassing for him if they didn’t vote for it, and you don’t want to disappoint the Dear Father.

“Don’t embarrass me in front of the world,” he said, “not me personally but the military, because in the military we are as united as one man’s heart, and we adhere to democracy.” He noted that the new charter authorizes the military to “protect the will of the people” and he vowed, “We will protect it in any circumstances.”

 

Fortunately for Sisi, campaigning against the proposed constitution is not allowed. Seems like a pretty fair way to check on public opinion before you run for something, right? And just to be sure, the state propaganda engines are grinding away toward victory:

The state news media and Egyptian private television networks, all supportive of the military takeover, are effusive in their endorsements of the new charter and contain scarcely a word of criticism. A group of Egyptian movie stars has recorded a television commercial singing a song in praise of the new charter, ending with a call for a thousand yeses to the new Constitution. And the military itself has produced a television advertisement in which a group of children sing their own endorsement to a martial theme.

“It’s to be or not to be,” the children sing, warning listeners that they will be judged by God for their vote and urging them not to “leave my country for destruction.”

 

So, to recap: If you vote against this, you’ll embarrass the national armed forces and its leader and then God will smite you. This seems compelling.

Feds have questions about NJ tourism ads

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More trouble for Christie in New Jersey. CNN via Daily Kos:

In the new probe, federal auditors will examine New Jersey’s use of $25 million in Sandy relief funds for a marketing campaign to promote tourism at the Jersey Shore after Sandy decimated the state’s coastline in late 2012, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone told CNN. […]

Pallone wrote that he was concerned about the bidding process for the firm awarded the marketing plan; the winning firm is charging the state about $2 million more than the next lowest bidder. The winning $4.7 million bid featured Christie and his family in the advertisements while the losing $2.5 million proposal did not feature the Christies.

 
I saw those ads a lot while I was in Delaware (unsurprisingly) but it never occurred to me that they were funded with Federal relief aid, let alone through a sketchy contract awards process. This is the kind of waste that makes Gulf Coast and inland Republicans suddenly look righteous instead of monstrous for trying to block Federal disaster relief to New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. (They’re still monsters, of course. They just look less so.)

Anyway, with these scandals coming out into the open, it’s increasingly clear to the public why Romney passed on Christie as a running mate between the final two picks. In the words of Double Down, “The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record.”

Giuliani recalls scandal that never happened

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Rudy Giuliani (who is still a thing?) was on TV today trying to compare Chris Christie’s bridge scandal to “the IRS scandal.” You may remember this as the firestorm whipped up by the House Republicans on one of their many Oversight Committee witch-hunts, led by Darrel Issa, which asserted that the IRS was targeting conservative political groups unfairly for heightened scrutiny. Giuliani feels that Christie could have not known about the bridge closures by his senior aides, like how President Obama didn’t know what the IRS was up to.

Did someone forget to tell Rudy that it turned out that the supposed IRS “scandal” was made up? Like, not even partially a thing that ever actually happened? Because, you know, the rest of us got that point cleared up quite a while back, last June. As I wrote then:

The so-called IRS scandal just fell apart completely as documents surfaced showing they were also scrutinizing applications for left/liberal/progressive code words, not just tea party code words. In other words, they were doing their jobs, not being partisan.

So why did it take so long for IRS documents showing targeting of progressives to show up after those showing tea party targeting? Oh, no reason, except that House Republicans specifically asked the IRS to audit ONLY its records on tea party groups. So NBD, they just 100% manufactured a fake scandal from thin air.

 
The IRS doing its job, and applying that equally to both conservative and liberal scofflaws, is not a scandal. The Port Authority closing part of a major bridge to punish a political opponent of the Governor of New Jersey is.

Will “smarter” cars start snitching on us?

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After a Ford exec in a panel talk raised a (supposedly) hypothetical scenario whereby the company could collect live driving data like speed and relative location from embedded GPS and other services linked back to headquarters by satellite, and noted that it would include illegal/dangerous driving behaviors, Eugene Volokh of TVC started thinking through the legal implications of such a world. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

Ford could technically gather this information, and could use it to prevent injuries. For instance, if GPS data shows that someone is speeding — or the car’s internal data shows that the driver is speeding, or driving in a way suggestive of drunk driving or extreme sleepiness, and the data can then be communicated to some central location — then Ford could notify the police, so the dangerous driver can be stopped. And the possibility of such reports could deter the dangerous driving in the first place.

Ford, then, is putting extremely dangerous devices on the road. It’s clearly foreseeable that those devices will be misused (since they often are misused). Car accidents cause tens of thousands of deaths and many more injuries each year. And Ford has a means of making those dangerous devices that it distributes less dangerous; yet it’s not using them.

Sounds like a lawsuit, no? Manufacturer liability for designs that unreasonably facilitate foreseeable misuse is well-established. And the fact that the misuse may stem from negligence (or even intentional wrongdoing) on the user’s part doesn’t necessarily block liability, so long as the user misconduct is foreseeable. I should note that I’m not wild about these aspects of our tort law system, and think they should likely be trimmed back in various ways; but there is certainly ample legal doctrine out there — whether one likes it or not — potentially supporting liability in such a situation.

 

The full piece is pretty long and gears gradually toward the technical side, for legal professionals, as it progresses, but the opening sections are for a more general audience. It’s certainly thought-provoking — the idea that companies might be able to use increasingly computerized and data-rich vehicles to monitor driving behavior and report it to the police (or to insurers, or… who knows where it ends).

Might they even make the data signals go two ways so they could control someone’s vehicle to slow them if they’re speeding out of control (or aid the police in controlling it, to stop a high-speed chase for example)? After all, some of these cars already have automated lane-finders and swerve-correctors as well as numerous other safety features. But those are locally-run by the onboard systems. Does the company have an obligation to control or report its vehicles when they’re being used dangerously or illegally? If they don’t, will they be sued? Interesting (and troubling) questions from a brave new world…

Study: Rich pretty sure they’re inherently awesome

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This is one of those studies with results that more or less obvious to those who aren’t the ones being studied, but Matthew Huston’s Slate analysis of it is still an interesting read. Excerpt:

In several experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley explored what they call social class essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that surface differences between two groups of people or things can be explained by differences in fundamental identities. One sees categories as natural, discrete, and stable. Dogs have a certain dogness to them and cats a certain catness.

[…]

Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.

Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)

Higher-class Americans may well believe life is fair because they’re motivated to defend their egos and lifestyle, but there’s an additional twist to their greater belief in a just world. Numerous researchers have found that upper-class people are more likely to explain other people’s behavior by appealing to internal traits and abilities, whereas lower-class individuals note circumstances and environmental forces. This matches reality in many ways for these respective groups. The rich do generally have the freedom to pursue their desires and strengths, while for the poor, external limitations often outnumber their opportunities. The poor realize they could have the best genes in the world and still end up working at McDonald’s. The wealthy might not merely be turning a blind eye to such realities; due to their personal experience, they might actually have a blind spot.

 

I also, in particular, recommend checking out the second page of the article, where Huston gets into assessing the practical ramifications of these findings.

Understanding the psychology of both the wealthy and the reasonably comfortable economic strata will give us a better idea of which rhetoric by supporters of various social justice agendas (and justice system reform agendas) is effective or ineffective, in terms of selling the agenda to the unconverted. That kind of thing — figuring out whether rhetorical appeals are landing or missing the mark within people’s existing worldviews — is right in my area of interest.

There’s also reason to be very concerned about the high levels of wealth in Congress here in America (as well as in the ruling Conservative Party in the UK, according to Huston) in terms of what legislative actions they might take to reinforce existing inequality. It’s one thing to casually neglect a population because you’re just wildly out of touch with the plight of the impoverished. It’s an entirely other and even more pernicious thing to intentionally start rolling back prior efforts to help the poor or propose expanding harsh sentencing targeted at low-income populations and (poorer than the average) minority racial populations because you think they somehow “deserve” their condition and should be kept away from the superior humans. In recent decades, that agenda is exactly what we’ve seen a lot of.

If we don’t figure out the political communication pathway to appeal to the middle classes effectively and convince them that this worldview isn’t true, we’re in for a big resurgence of open social Darwinism.