The Only Winning Move

I think a useful thing for someone to do at some point would be to compile - in book format, I guess - a handy list of all those contradictions you’re in danger of espousing if you don’t properly contextualize your political points of view. To cite a gratuitous example: latte leftists who are all about marriage rights for gays regard as outragous the idea that there could be marriage rights for polygamists. Or another: feminists who make a touchstone out of spousal rape on the grounds that a woman owns her own body even after marriage are unwilling to extend the same ownership rights to unmarried prostitutes. Or Republicans who complain about the tax burden but don’t mind deficits. It isn’t that I think these positions can’t be reconciled with an appropriate amount of logical contortion - it’s that the slogans these groups use simply don’t fit. If your support for gay marriage amounts to “love shouldn’t be political,” then you end up having to say that a polygamist union can never be loving to stay consistent, and that’s an unenviable position to try to defend. And if your argument that husbands cannot take advantage of their wives hinges on “my body my rights,” then you’re kinda stuck when a woman is willing to sell use of the body that you unambiguosly just said was hers. And if you oppose tax hikes on economic grounds, it does look rather Keynesian of you to then sit on your hands about the budget deficit.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this because Matt Yglesias has a fun post on the Arab-Israeli conflicts, basically calling out people like Jeffrey Goldberg for reducing every question about Israel to “b-but if only the Palestinians had accepted the 1948 settlement everything would be peachy now!” Here’s Yglesias with an ace dissection:

It does today seem like if you could go back in time and persuade the Arabs to accept the original UN partition plan, that contemporary Palestinians would be much better off. But what’s the cash value of this with regard to a humanitarian crisis in the contemporary Gaza Strip? And of course once you’re just constructing pure counterfactuals, all kinds of ways to postulate a better outcome become plausible.

Right. Absolutely right. But I wonder how this position sits with someone who on a typical day spends about a third of his column space calling Republicans racist for not supporting affirmative action? Here’s my thinking: the Palestinian leadership undoubtedly made a mistake in the 40s not accepting the partition plan, and Yglesias seems to want to say “so what? People make mistakes, and there’s no reason why dumb decisions made in 1948 should be paid for so heavily by the now-deceased decisionmakers’ descendants.” Well, sure, but if that’s your take, and the statute of limitations on bad political decisions runs out over a 60-year timespan, then surely it’s run out for white people on civil rights as well? Granted that a lot of opposition to the Civil Rights Bill of 1965 was driven by racism, what about that suggests that white people in general continue to be racist today, such that it would be OK to penalize poor whites for being white in the way that affirmative action policies always do? Because it sure isn’t the children of connected rich whites who have to worry about being passed over for jobs so that black people can have them instead.

Again, I’m not saying Yglesias can’t reconcile these positions, I’m just saying that it would help him be more consistent if there were a helpful list of reminders for political commentators on potential points of inconsistency. It would say things like “if the government is required to issue marriage licenses to all people who claim to be in love, then this will include polygamists. Either have a cogent response for this, or think of another flagship argument for official gay marriage.” It would say things like “if people own their bodies, then they are allowed to sell sexual favors just as readily as they are allowed to sell manual labor services. Either come up with a cogent qualification on legal prostitution, or stop claiming that you believe in self ownership.” It would say things like “if current taxes are a burden on the economy now, then future taxes will be a burden on the economy in the future. Either acknowledge this and justify defering the tax burden, or drop the pretense that you’re opposing tax hikes for economic reasons.”

And yes, it would also say things like “if decisions that leaders made decades ago are inadmissible as evidence of the kinds of decisions we expect their descendants to make today, then this is just as true of whites in America as it is of Arabs in Palestine.” And Yglesias would then be obligated to explain is support of affirmative action on more solid grounds than “some bad stuff happened generations ago.”

Because politics, ultimately, is a Humanities subject. And one cliche about Humanities subjects that I think is misstated is that there are no wrong answers. Actually, I would prefer if people said there are no RIGHT answers, or at least that there is no answer that is unambiguously right to the exclusion of all others. Because in fact there is no shortage of wrong answers in humanities subjects. It is always possible to analyze a book wrong, or come up with a philosophical argument that’s just plain fallacious, or spin a reading of history such that it gets the facts right but interprets them in a completely self-serving and misleading way. There are wrong answers in humanities - very definitely so. The issue is distinguishing the best among the “not wrong” answers - that’s the rub, and it is from this, rather than the supposed lack of wrong answers, that accounts for the Humanities’ reputations as being “open-ended” subjects. So education on how to reason over literary pursuits, it seems to me, should really recalibrate - take an approach more like that of medicine, i.e. take “do no harm” as a starting point. And so in line with that, we could do worse than start by reviewing a list of known mistakes and discussing how to avoid them.

There’s a “homeless” man who stands on a corner near where I work with a sign asking for free money. Even if I hadn’t seen him get out of a car to put in a hard 3-hour day of begging recently, I would have my suspicions: he’s been doing this since at least summer of 2005. I get that sometimes people fall hard on their luck and need a leg up - but you don’t need one from 2005-present if you’re really trying.

Anyway, I mentioned something at work about the “homeless” man - drawing my shock quotes in the air like a metrosexual corporate powerpoint addict - having gotten out of a car prior to begging and got an angry retort from one of the resident leftists. It turns out I don’t know his situation. Which is true - I don’t. But once again I find myself marveling at the credulous tacit assumptions some people have to make to keep their ideologies afloat.

Consider the assumptions going in to this temper tantrum. It won’t surprise you to hear that this person is one of those who thinks that pretty much anything a corporation does is evidence of it being up to no good, deliberately scamming people to line its pockets. Which means she’s in a position to believe that all currently operative con artists consistently dress the part and that she can tell the difference. Which is just astoundingly naive when you think about it.

In her world, someone apparently thinks to himself “I wanna be a con artist when I grow up.” And then he studies up on con artistry, which in a great deal of cases involves getting an MBA. And having gotten this golden ticket, he then proceeds to dress and act like a con artist, so that everyone knows just exactly what he is and is up to, and yet somehow for some reasons that we’ll just wave our hands over, despite the fact that all con arists have what ammounts to a name tag that says “Hello my name is Con Artist,” people continue to be conned. Meanwhile, you can rest assured that anyone who appears to be homeless is completely sincere - because while it’s easy to imagine that someone would exchange goods and services for money in a dishonest way, it could never ever be the case that someone would put on a costume and pretend to be someone they’re not for handouts.

I mean, what does she honestly think con artistry is? Isn’t deceiving people about who you are and what motivates you the whole mechanism by which it typically operates? And what would possibly explain why people who were willing to lie and cheat and steal on the million dollar scale would be completely unwilling to do so on the $10-100,000 scale? You know, there’s Burger King and Burger King, and the main difference between the two is that the former was founded by ambitious people and the latter not so much. Why would con artistry be any different? Just like any other occupation, there are talented con artists, mediocre con artists and downright inept con artists. There are take-no-prisoners scorched earth ambitious con artists, merely successful con artists, and lazy con artists. Coming up with the formula for success is difficult in any field, involving, as it does, a complex interplay of innate talents, personality traits, and facts about the environment in which an aspiring climber finds himself. Why would that be any different for con artists? Why would con artistry alone among human endeacors be the kind of thing that you could identify by the fact that everyone who tried it was not only a roaring success, but the fact of his success is the very thing that tipped you off as to what he does? If that were the case, would there be any honest men left? And if it really were the case that the more successful in business you were the more likely to be a sham were your products, then what would these successful people spend their ill-gotten gains on? Also sham products that they well know - they better than anyone! - are shams? Or is there some mythic parallel economy where everything’s high quality, and “they” know about it but “we” don’t, and which nevertheless accepts money from this economy where everything is a crappy fraud, even though it knows that everything in this economy is a crappy fraud?

No, it’s just too much. I don’t have that kind of faith. It’s just easier for me to believe that there are hucksters at all pegs on the income totem because hucksters, like everyone else, are successful at what they do to varying degrees, that all that is required to entice a dishonest man into hucksterism is the perception (true or not) that he is better off conning than doing an honest day’s work - that calculation being carried out at whatever level of potential he operates - that hucksters can and will prey on the good intentions and community instincts of their better-meaning but more naive fellow men, that it follows from this that a certain percentage of beggars are deceiving us about their circumstances, and that when you see one get out of a car to go stand on a corner he’s been begging on for 5 years, he’s probably one of them.

The CommGAP Blog has a fascinating story about worthless currency in India. No, not the usual kind. This kind is literaly worthless - as in, it’s a zero rupee note. The idea is to fight the rampant bribe culture in India. Read the original for more detail, but the broad outlines are that an Indian physics professor suggested the idea to 5th Pilar, an anti-corruption NGO. Citizens request the notes and then hand them to officials in place of bribes.

Shockingly, it’s actually been effective. You wouldn’t think so, right? Bribery is, unsurprisingly, a criminal offense in India, but then isn’t it everywhere? And yet, 5th Pilar reports a lot of success stories. What gives? Well, there are a lot of theories, but the one that I buy is this one:

This last point—people knowing that they are not alone in the fight—seems to be the biggest hurdle when it comes to transforming norms vis-à-vis corruption. For people to speak up against corruption that has become institutionalized within society, they must know that there are others who are just as fed up and frustrated with the system.

This is of course related to earlier discussion of Senator-elect Brown. A lot turns on knowing that people are organized. It’s one thing to experience corruption, realize how unpleasant it is, and make the obvious assumption that everyone else finds it unpleasant too. If you’re not convinced that they’re going to do anything about it, then you lose, plain and simple. Whatever erstwhile free service it is that the official in question has decided to start charging people for, you’re not gonna get it while others willing to pay the bribes will. It’s quite another thing, however, when you know that a lot of people are going to stand up as well - and you know that if an organization is issuing official “anti-corruption” currency that you can pay to an official in place of a bribe. It makes it look like an organized thing that a lot of people are participating in. It doesn’t have to be everyone - it just has to be enough people in your locale that the official in question has a real fear of being reported. And really, this only needs to be a handful.

In second place - I’ll bite - probably comes personal shame. I guess government officials who are enthusiastic about bribe-taking are actually in the minority - and that’s just because I genuinely believe that most humans are basically decent. Bribery spreads like anything else - padding your resume, for example. I guess most of us would prefer to just do good work and list our relevant accomplishments, but faced with the prospect of losing a job to someone less qualified than us just because he is willing to outright lie and we’re not, we shrug, tell ourselves it can’t be helped, and find ways to list technically irrelevant things like everyone else. I guess most government officials would prefer to live in a world where there are no bribes, but if everyone else around them is taking bribes, and not taking bribes will obviously be seen as a threat by those people, then promotions and even continued employment have a way of being on the line, or at least so he imagines. And like everything else, the first time is hard, but a couple more times after that and it comes to seem normal. Eventually, when your life plans come to include your bribery income, you start to see it as an entitlement.

Well, I wish the zero rupee campaign the best of luck. I imagine they will hit a wall at the corporate level, but you never know.

Well, well. The Colts won the AFC championship, which means the Super Bowl is gonna be a pretty big deal around here. And they’re playing the Saints, who are headed to the big game for the first time ever, after winning an NFC championship that went into overtime for only the third time ever (the AFC has only done it once - which makes three plus one equals four total playoff games that have gone into overtime), and also, incidentally, marked the first time since 1993 that the top seeds in both conferences made the final. OH, and it’s the first time in all of human history that a team has entered the Super Bowl with a leadup losing streak of three or more games. And several other hugely fascinating things that I would have no clue about if not for the internet, because I don’t give a papal shit about NFL, and my only dog in this race is that the Hoosiers around here are going to be more Hoosier than normal for the next two weeks (note: I use “Hoosier” as a synonym for “annoying in a Hoosier kind of way.” And that definition is “recursive” rather than “circular” thank you very much.).

No, my interest in this - and I would really like to know - is whether sports trivia has become more obscure since the advent of near-universal internet access? I wonder if there is a way to test. It has to have, right? Because if even I can know things like that the Vikings were the league’s first 0-4 Super Bowl team way back in 1977, what do you have to do to signal you’re a real NFL fan? Someday someone should write a science fiction book about a geek who develops a supermemory technique and uses it in a conspiracy with a bunch of other geeks to memorize everything there is to know about football, so that football knowledge is completely redunant as a signaling mechanism, and speculate on what happens. Really, I bequeath this sparkling gem of an idea to the world, because I’m generous and care deeply about All Humanity.

I think Arnold Kling has hit the nail on the head with regard to Ayn Rand’s enduring appeal. What he says isn’t the whole story (call me old-fashioned, but I still think making convincing arguments has something to do with it), but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an important part of it.

The thesis is that Rand appeals to “low agreeableness” people - that is, people who rate “agreeableness” comparatively low as a virtue and therefore resent all the evidence that they see around them that being agreeable pays dividends (in terms of career advancement by having the right connections, etc.). Kling suspects - and I suspect he’s right - that Libertarians are disproportionately represented in this crowd. We are people who, for whatever reason, don’t make the right friends, are unwilling to brownnose to get where we want to go, and generally just like to be left alone to do our own things. For obvious reasons, if you’re such a person, then meritocracy takes on a greater importance for you than for most. Ayn Rand is nothing if not a pro-meritocracy extremist, and she underscores the point by making her heroes hard to get along with. Suffering fools gladly is not something that her characters do well, and given the adversity they tend to face and the way they react to it, they cannot be accused by even the most disingenuous reviewer of having exploited social connections to get there they got. Rand is comforting for us “disagreeables” because she reassures us that if you just keep putting your best foot forward and giving the finger to people who deserve it, you’ll eventually achieve all your goals. Keep on keepin’ on - that’s something we CAN do. Playing golf to get a promotion? That not so much.

This will be taken by many as a denigration of Rand, an attempt to paint her as a panderer - but I don’t think it should be. It is as good as inarguable that the world would be a better place were it a total meritocracy, and it IS inarguable that there is a brazen hypocrisy to advancement by agreeableness. To see that this latter point is so, ask yourself when the last time was you heard someone admit to a crowded room that “I promoted Bill because he makes such great cocktails,” or “Shelly got the job because she flirts with me and makes me feel attractive,” or “I voted to give Jane tenure because she finds ways to cite my papers.” As recently as never, right? Right. And in fact, I think we can go a step further. I think the main reason why so many people put up with so much bullshit without complaining, even when there is no obvious immediate reward for doing so, is because they fear that maintaining a general tolerance for hypocrisy will benefit them in the long run. It’s sort of like supporting the welfare state because of the outside chance that you’ll fall on hard times and need social assistance: if the world were completely honest, a lot of people who are afraid of the verdict would actually be judged on the quality of their work. Can’t have that…

If Rand can be accused of anything, then of making a virtue out of being DISagreeable. Here there is cause for some blame. A lot of people have taken the stark lines with which she draws her characters as a license to be an asshole, and that is indeed unfortunate. But this cricism only goes so far in the end, as it’s based on mistaking style for substance - on par with blaming Star Wars for all those kids who actually practice summoning the Force.

In fact, I think far from shielding - what do you call people like me, anyway? How about “anagreeable?” You know, the a from amoral - not disagreeable per se, just indifferent to whether we are agreeable or not. OK, I think far from shielding anagreeable people from reality, she prepares us for it. Think of The Fountainhead. Howard Roark wasn’t an instant success, after all. He toiled in obscurity and poverty for most of his adult life, was a virgin until his late 30s, and when he finally did come to the public’s attention and garner some measure of financial success, he was immediately the target of a pretty nasty smear campaign. Melodramatic I’ll buy, but it can hardly be accused of sugarcoating the price for refusing to join the country club!

No, I think Kling’s right on. What’s more, I think Rand would’ve agreed.

There are so many different ways to be annoying that it’s probably pointless to have a Distinguished Number One Most Annoying Category of Person type award, and so I don’t try. But one that surely makes my hypothetical top ten is the Non-Racist Racist.

Everyone in America has met this guy - though my honest impression is that there are a lot more of them “up here” (in the North) than there are “back home” (in North Carolina - nominally part of “The South” - though not, of course, the Alabama South). He’s the chap who will take any and every opportunity to condemn the most specious expressions of “racism,” but then doesn’t mind turning around and - stricly in confidence, of course - making a couple of COMPLETELY racist jokes on the sly.

I work with such a person, and it’s starting to get really fucking annoying. Some examples follow.

As a joke, someone hung up this image on the back door:

Along with a caption that went something like “If you can’t find the book you want, you might be at the WONG FOOK HING bookstore!” HAHAHAHA!!! Ok, actually, I admit, I DO think it’s funny. I chuckled a couple of times. And everyone generally thought it was funny until the completely Non-Racist Racist showed up, at which point we had to hear him sigh a lot and carry on about how completely unfunny he thought this was. I bit. “What’s wrong with it?” “Well,” he explains, he lived in Taiwan and was the butt of racist jokes by Chinese people, so he’s just really sensitive about racism in general.

Uh-huh.

In what way, exactly, is this racist? It’s a pun. Sometimes it just so happens that completely innocent syllable combinations in one language happen to strongly resemble not-so-innocent syllable combinations in other languages. This is one of those cases. I’m pretty goram sure the person who snapped the photo wasn’t anti-Chinese, he just noticed one of these coincidences, chuckled a bit, and then applied the Wonders of the Information Age to share it with his friends … who then shared it with their friends who then shared it with their other friends and me and the Completely Non-Racist Racist are in the transitive closure of that somewhere. Laughing at coincidental syllable chains may be juvinile, but it’s pretty certainly not “racist.” When I put this to him, he says “yeah, because they [the people who put up the sign] assume that all Asians talk like that.” Which is a COMPLETELY asinine thing to say considering that billions of Chinese people DO talk “like that.” “Wong Fook Hing” is presumably someone’s name transcribed in some reasonably faithful way - which I can corroborate with evidence from orthographically-descended Japanese, in which the second character from the left would be pronounced “fuku” (aka “fook” in a parent language with closed syllables) and the last character is the first of a compound that means - what else? - “bookstore.”

Which is what’s alternately hillarious and tragic about Completely Non-Racist Racist type people: what counts as “racist” to them isn’t actual racism, it’s just any time anything at all negative is said about someone non-white it’s assumed to be “racist.” In this case, it’s not even negative, really, it’s just us having a laugh at a linguistic coincidence, but because it’s in some broadly-defined sense “at the expense” of Chinese, it must be racist. Great.

Anyway, here’s the punchline. Not three days later the same guy is complaining to me about how women can’t drive. And he finishes up with the normal invocation to the PC Gods - “I’m not sexist or anything, but when I see a driver do something boneheaded it’s just usually an Asian woman.” Got it? The guy who’s so totally concerned about anti-Asian racism that he can’t even bring himself to laugh at the “Wong Fook Hing Bookstore” can nevertheless generalize with impunity that Asian women (ASIAN WOMEN!) are shitty drivers.

Fuck. off.

It happened against recently. Some black kids pelted him with rocks for no reason when he was walking about town recently. Which was the best thing that could’ve happened to him, actually, because now he gets to come to work and bait people into asking him what race the kids were. Much to his chagrin, he’s only had two takers (no, I’m not one of them thank you very much!), which probably isn’t as many as he was hoping. But much to the rest of our much greater chagrin, the number is still non-zero, which licenses him to tell everyone who will listen that colleague X’s first question was “what color were they?” And having said this, in turn, licenses him to launch into a pious rant about how that has absolutely nothing to do with anything - how it can’t possibly matter, etc. etc.

Of course, it can and does matter. If a group of black kids is throwing rocks at white people, it might be that they’re equal-opportunity rock-throwers, sure. It might also be that they’re racist rock-throwers. After all, I’m pretty sure the Completely Non-Racist Racist would have no trouble believing in and loudly denouncing the idea of redneck white kids throwing rocks at black people. Don’t get me wrong - technically he’s right that barring further evidence we don’t know that race was a motivation in the rock-throwing. But since race frequently IS a motivation in these types of petty crimes, I’m likewise not sure it’s fair to leap to the conclusion that anyone who asks what the race of the rock-throwers was is automatically racist. They might just be concerned about racism in general, rather than white racism exclusively. And of course it need hardly be pointed out that anyone who thinks that black kids are incapable of forming gangs and pelting white people with rocks for racist reasons is themselves a racial essentialist - becuase it assumes that there’s just something especially evil about white people that only they would ever pelt members of different ethnic groups with rocks for no reason.

Here’s the other punchline. IU lost pretty bad to Kentucky here in Bloomington yesterday, and the Completely Non-Racist Racist was there to see it happen. He, in fact, showed up almost two hours late to work without telling anyone he was going to be late for that reason. To hear him tell it, IU’s major disadvantage was that “their side had lots of kids who were a lot bigger and a lot blacker.” Because, the guy who believes that race cannot possibly be a factor in whom gangs of similarly-ethnicized youths decide to pelt with rocks apparently has no problem correlating it with basketball ability.

Fuck. OFF.

Here’s the moral of the story. Just SAYING you’re opposed to something doesn’t make it so - you have to ACTUALLY practice what you preach to get credit for it. If you want to be non-racist, I’m all for it. Yay you! But your goal is NOT achieved by simply telling everyone who will listen how totally non-racist you are. It’s achieved, rather, by NOT DRAWING SPECIOUS RACIAL GENERALIZATIONS, THAT’S HOW! If you want to be non-racist, you might start by not automatically assuming that any asian woman you meet is a bad driver. Or by not automatically assuming that the more black people a basketball team employs the better it will be. Oh, ho, ho - but what if these are honest observations? What if, after 40+ years on the planet (this guy is at least 40), the numbers are in and that’s the obious conclusion? Well, so be it - you can’t unsee what you’ve seen. But if you’re going to go around saying things that can be construed by overzealous PC types as racist without actually meaning them in a racist way, then you owe everyone else the courtesy of not being “that guy” when they’re doing the same thing.

The thing is, I think Completely Non-Racist Racists are made not born. They’re the inevitable product of any approach that tries to regulate attitudes rather than simply arguing the point - such as America’s approach to dealing with its racism problems. Don’t get me wrong - such approaches are frequently better than doing nothing at all, and they do tend to have as side-effects that real, underlying changes result. Pious public disapproval of the appearance of racism has no doubt done SOMETHING to alleviate the racism problem in this country. But such approaches are nevertheless still always inferior to actually attacking the actual problem - and that’s because they also provide cover for the guilty. When even innocent puns come under public suspicion, people like my Completely Non-Racist Racist colleague will have no trouble finding inexpensive opportunities to remind everyone how non-racist they are.

Never send a computer to do a man’s job; never send a man to do a computer’s job. You wouldn’t hire your analyst to add millions of columns of small digits any more than you would ask your computer to talk you through your marriage problems. 20 years after home computers became ubiquitous, most people seem to get this right almost all of the time.

Which is why it’s so puzzling to me that after well over 500 years of dealing with the modern corporation people aren’t similarly able to separate out things that companies are good at from things that individuals are good at.

I think about this a lot, actually, and what got me thinking about it again today was this blog entry of Cody Brocious’ about some truly abysmal customer service he was on the receiving end of recently. Short version: he ordered something online only to find out that the distributor was pretty much just down the street, so he emailed and asked if they could skip the shipping middleman and him just come pick it up in person? Their response went something like “No, douchebag, we deliver; if you want pickup call Papa John’s.” OK, so they didn’t say “douchebag,” but the rest of it is pretty much as it happened.

Shitty, right? I mean, there’s just no excuse. And it’s all the worse for being over email. Sometimes in realtime your emotions get the better of you and you say shit you don’t really mean, but over EMAIL? Surely there’s enough distance there that even the world’s most childish person can take a step back and write something appropriate.

But here’s where it goes wrong. Mr. Brocious wants to conclude from this that the company is simply incompetent or even malicious. He closes with “If you don’t want to do the job, don’t do it; don’t act like the customer is doing you a disservice by giving you money.”

Well, sure. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that you hesitate to call “good advice” because it’s so obvious that it’s basically impossible to imagine a company that doesn’t already know it. Sort of on par with “try the door before you cut a hole in the wall” or “don’t drink gasoline” or “don’t drive through South Carolina with an out-of-state license plate.” Common sense. Can you imagine a company anywhere that makes a conscious policy out of insulting its customers? Well, OK, clever netizens, I’m sure there are some somewhere that do it as a schitck, but in the general case, it just doesn’t happen.

Now, that’s not to say that the company is off the hook. It’s just that there are different standards of judging organizations than there are of judging individuals, and before we go concluding that the organization in question is bad, we have to first make sure that we’re accusing it of failing at something that organizations are expected to be good at. One thing that organizations are really bad at is human relations consistency. They can’t empathize, they can’t be your friend, and they can’t make special exceptions for you. All of these are things that only individual people can do. So if a company makes a special exception for you, or treats you nicely, or demonstrates real affection for you, then only because some individual who represents that company is doing these things. The company itself can only put you in touch with that individual and run a system such that that individual is empowered to cut you whatever slack you need cut.

To the extent that a customer service problem is the fault of the organization and not the individual sending the email, then it’s because the organization is set up in such a way that there’s a big disconnect between the people sending the email and the people who make the policies. Verizon and Comcast stand out in my mind as companies that can be reasonably said to be bad - as companies - at customer service, and the reason is because they don’t give their customer service representatives the training, the authority or the incentive to do anything to help you. The nicest person in the world would be useless working for Comcast just because the way Comcast is structured gives them no outlet for their niceness. But as to the example at hand, well, I’d need more information to know if this was a company failing or just some random dick being randomly dickish on company time. No organization in the world has the time or resources to watch every one of its members all hours of the day - just ask the Feds how the War on Drugs is going, for example. To be certain that this was a company failing, we’d need to file a customer service complaint and see how they handle it. THAT would tell us something about the corporate structure and corporate commitment to customer satisfaction.

And there are tons of related things. For example, people just can’t help themselves blowing up at customer service reps that they know good and well aren’t personally responsible for their companies’ shitty policies. It may be how we are, but it’s also deeply unfair. When I’m dealing with a low-level customer service rep, I try to keep that in mind. It doesn’t mean you have to cut them slack, necessarily - they don’t care about you any more than you care about them, after all - but it does mean that if you want to rant you really need to make sure you’re ranting at someone who gets paid to listen and/or can do something about it. Ranting at the minimum wage phone operator is just mean. For another example - if I get some bad service and complain about it and the company does something worthwhile to fix it, I make a point of continuing to shop with that company. Most people’s instinct in that situation is to jump ship and take their business elsewhere, and they see the fix as a kind of entitlement. And so it is - but it’s something more than that too: it’s evidence that the company in quesiton can be relied upon as an organization to provide good service. Mistakes happen, systems break down - even the best systems. But if they then fix the problem and it doesn’t happen again? I consider that a win. Why take my business to some other company that will inevitably screw up someday but I don’t know how they’ll handle it when I’m already doing business with one that’s demonstrated real commitment to fixing problems? This came up recently with TeaGschwender, actually. They completely screwed up my order over the summer, sent me someone else’s instead, and then sent me a second helping of that person’s order and tried to charge me twice. So something really broke down - and I sent them a fairly angry email. But the response from them was very polite, they immediately admitted the problem and shipped me my twice my original order to make up for it, and let me keep the other person’s order, all free of charge. I admit, my first human instinct was to find another tea company. But once I calmed down I realized this was stupid. Every organization will screw up eventually, and this one had just demonstrated that the mechanisms were in place to fix their screwups. Why stop shopping at a store like that?

I guess it’s the fact that there is a human voice behind the counter that short circuits our brains about these things. When it’s a computer, it’s easier to remember that it’s a thing, not a person, even if it sometimes has quirks that make it seem almost human. But somehow we just never learn that lesson about organizations. I wish we would. I wish we would because I think a lot of annoying and harmful bullshit in the world comes of expecting organizations to be your friends. And I think this is true all the way up and down the scale. It goes all the way from increasing wait times at grocery stores, where some confused and lonely people abuse the cashiers for attention, up to expecting the govenrment to care about us and project the right “national image,” whatever that is. People are people and organizations are organizations, and if it’s hard to keep the two separate, then maybe it’s something we should remind ourselves of more often.

Some nits to pick with Shikha Dalmia’s November 6 Reason Online article What’s Wrong with Ayn Rand?.

Dalmia’s argument starts from the observation that the resurgence in Rand’s popularity means that she’s failed rather than succeeded: if Rand had actually made the world safer for Capitalism, there wouldn’t be bailouts and talk of nationalizing the healthcare industry (to preemptively respond to a tired objection: while the actual proposal on the table is indeed not to nationalize healthcare wholesale, proponents of the plan have not even addressed the crowding out issue, which is the basis for my assumption that their plan leads to this result, intentionally or not). That is of course correct as far as it goes, but the question is just how far it does go? What’s the timeframe for “success” here? Rand’s opus magnum is 52 years old, and in the meantime the world has become quite a bit less socialist. I would hesitate to attribute all or even most of that to the writing of Ayn Rand - but it’s fair to say she’s played her part. 50 years seems like an awfully short window for judging success, especially when the standard of comparison that Dalmia cites is John Locke!

Still the question remains, if she is so influential, why are we on the brink of socialized medicine today? … The point is especially powerful if one considers the influence that some of the other great philosophical defenders of liberty have had in the past. John Locke set out to release the individual from the tyranny of religious authorities by enunciating the doctrine of the separation of church and state. Today, this doctrine is the cornerstone of every liberal democracy in the world.

Uh-huh, but how long has this been true? Barely 50 years, in fact, and Locke was writing nearly 350 years ago. To say that the world didn’t rush out to implement his suggestions would hardly do the matter justice. If Locke gets 300 years to be effective, why is Rand a failure at 50?

But see, I’m not even sure that she is a failure. The world of 1957 was considerably more socialist than it is today, even, arguably, here in these United States, where the government happily took 90% from the top income bracket. Why does the proposal of a national health insurance plan count as advancing Socialism when the fact that taxes have been cut in half on the wealth-creating class can’t be cited in her favor?

This assumption strikes me as convenient. The only thing that can be said about how influential Rand has been at this point is that the jury is out. Hasn’t even been assembled, in fact - since while I read a lot of specious claims (on both sides) about how influential she has or hasn’t been, I’ve yet to see any study cited to bolster such claims. Granted, it seems unlikely, given how well her books sell this long after her death and how many people informally cite her as formative, that she’s had no effect on world history whatever. But what that effect is and whether she would consider herself a success are, I think, off limits to serious discussion without a lot more spadework.

Dalmia’s purpose is trying to convince us that we need to rethink Rand if she’s to succeed. An old and obvious ploy. It assumes that it’s somehow Rand herself rather than her ideas that we find attractive. For me and, I suspect, most Objectivists, just the opposite is true. I never met Rand, which does tend to limit just how attached I can be to her as a human individual. It’s precisely her ideas, and not the details of her biography or the pronounciation of her name, that I’m loyal to. And actually as I feel perfectly free to pick and choose the subset of her ideas I personally agree with, discarding the rest, it’s not even true that I have much of a stake in Objectivism as a unified philosophy - a thing which is true of most Objectivists, as it is of adherents to any sane philosophy.

So why all this talk of revisionism if there is nothing to revise?

But if Rand is going to play a starring role in the long-term battle to defeat statist ideologies, rather than making episodic, cameo appearances, her work will require a radical overhaul. Ultimately, the best way to honor her is by making her cause succeed—even if that means jettisoning some of her intellectual baggage.

I dunno, call me old-fashioned, but I think once the author is dead and buried, the novels and essays stand as written, and there’s just nothing we can do about that. The only person who can revise Rand is Rand, and she’s gone. Her historical legacy is what she chose, so I, for one, am not going to lose any sleep over it. What I CAN do is add some precision to Dalmia’s advice. I think it would be better to say not that we should revise Rand, but that we should be more public about picking and choosing the parts of Rand that we find useful. Like with any author, it is possible to debate Rand’s legacy and talk about which parts of Rand that are relevant today and which are not. Further, to talk about which parts of Rand are good advice for any time period and which are not.

Dalmia’s suggestion is that we need a “kinder, gentler” Ayn Rand if her work is to be appealing. That may well be true, but I’m also not sure it isn’t the harsh and absolutist tone of Rand that’s attractive in the first place. Would Atlas Shrugged have been a best-seller without The (Infamous) Speech? It’s difficult to say, and so I vote we don’t try. Dalmia seems to want Rand to be just as famous and just as engaging an author as she is, but have it be a completely different version of her. Or else, have the Rand that actually existed and took the world by storm in the early 60s continue to be there in history, but then apply some kind of Star Trek phase shift where we take our current reality, where Rand’s legacy is real and vital, and splice it together with some other reality where Dagny Taggart was a loving mother type who worked in soup kitchens, and THEN roll the dice on healthcare. Fantasy is fun, but it makes for poor politics, and I’m anyway not sure this is even valid fantasy…

No, a more intelligent thing to say would be that Randians need to do a better job countering the opposition’s straw mans. The supposed harshness of Rand’s characters is hard to find in her books - well, not in Atlas Shrugged, anyway. Aside from possibly John Galt, everyone is quite forgiving of real character reform - see “The Wet Nurse.” And all the characters are actually quite generous with their time and effort (again, save Galt) - Hank Rearden even paying his workers well above union rates. The point doesn’t seem to have been so much that it is necessary to despise humanity as just that one should avoid the guilt complexes that freeloaders employ. It’s fine to be generous to people who aren’t your enemies. The problem with being generous to people like Jim Taggart and Philip Rearden is that they are your enemies - and that, folks, is just good advice. Atlas Shrugged, at least on my reading, is neither misanthropic nor unfeeling. But even if it were, it isn’t mine to rewrite. The problem with public perceptions of Objectivists isn’t that the public thinks Objectivism requires people to be what Andrew Cosello calls “Ayn Rand Assholes.” It’s more that the public seems to think that all Objectivists are mindless automatons who apply their philosophy literally as written, like it’s some kind of absurdist cult. While there is that element - as there is with any philosophy and most popular TV shows - I defy anyone to name a famous and/or influential Objectivist who doesn’t think the philosophy through and revise it a bit for himself. The only famous member of Rand’s ironically-named “Collective” who didn’t trade on his association with her for position is Alan Greenspan, and Greenspan is hardly what anyone (anyone informed, anyway) would call an orthodox Randian.

Dalmia is fighting the wrong fight. We don’t need to retool Rand. We aren’t even allowed to. What we can do is be more public, and spend more time pointing out the silliness inherent in the fraudulent treatments of her that appear in the funny papers every time there’s an upsurge in her sales.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

That’s Joseph Conrad’s money quote. And if the proof is in the pudding then the pudding of the moment is Ayn Rand.

One of the more curious side-effects of the recent “Great Recession” has been not so much the increase in Ayn Rand sales (businessmen out of work have to do something with their freetime) but the increase in vituperative criticism of her. It’s as though certain people were afraid that the rest of us might find something in there that struck a chord, so they’re scrambling to stack the deck, just to make sure no one gets “the wrong idea.”

Exhibit A is this character assasination in GQ called “The Bitch is Back.” Subtle it ain’t. And informed? Well, that’s something else it ain’t. Here’s the premise:

This is because there are boys and girls among us who have never overcome the Randian infection. The Galt speech continues to ring in their ears for years like a maddening tinnitus, turning each of them into what next year’s Physicians’ Desk Reference will (undoubtedly) term an Ayn Rand Asshole (ARA). They constitute a relatively small percentage of Rand readers, these ARAs. But they make their reading count. Thanks to them, the Rand Experience is no longer limited to those who have read the books. It’s metastasized. You, me, all of us, we’re living it. Because it’s the ARA Army of antigovernment-antiregulation puritans who have spent the past three decades gleefully pulling the cooling rods out of the American economy. For a while, it got very big and very hot. Then it popped. And now the rest of us have to spend the next decade scaling the slippery slopes of the huge suppurative crater that was left behind.

A bold thesis, no? Ayn Rand caused the recent financial crisis from beyond the grave by inspiring all the people who actually did cause it to do what they did. Fortunately, he has evidence to back up his claims.

First, there’s some guy named Michael Malice who’s apparenty so full of himself that he even owns the domain name assholism.com. Oh, and someone wrote a comic book about him called Ego and Hubris. And he caused the financial crisis nearly single-handedly by being a New York celebutante! Oh, wait, hold on, that can’t be right… OH, I see - he’s just the evidence that Ayn Rand Assholes exist. OK, well, sure. And the next goth girl who believes in vampires will, like, TOTALLY be cause to avoid Anne Rice books! Dear All J.R.R. Tolkein Fans Everywhere: Hobbits are NOT REAL and you are NOT Aragorn. Mkay? And that goes for ALL of you. And that dude you know who speaks fluent Klingon? He would be a well-adjusted, productive citizen - probably making more money and getting hotter chicks than you - if only there were no Star Trek.

OK, I admit, I don’t have Mr. Corsello’s superhuman ability to generalize from a single example, which is why all mine seem lame. Anyway, we’ll just take his word for it that when someone makes an ass out of himself in an Ayn Rand way it’s a wholly other transcendental plane of annoying and dangerous in a way that leaves All Those Other Things that People Take Too Seriously and Pervert to their Own Purposes in the dust. Ya’ll. And it probably caused the financial crisis.

OH yeah, about that. Mr. Corsello’s evidence. Like, for example, that there’s this guy John Allison who was the CEO of BB&T - which is a mortgage lending firm - and Mr. Allison really likes him some Ayn Rand and really actually consults his Ayn Rand for moral advice. And this all sounds great except for the part Corsello leaves out, in which John Allison explains at great length how his study of Ayn Rand led him to order his firm NOT to participate in the derivatives trading that caused the crisis because he thought it was fraudulent. OOPS! Ok, so that example didn’t turn out so well for Mr. Corsello. Good thing he has A SECOND ONE.

POP QUIZ: Which individual has most influenced the lives of Americans in the past twenty-five years? He’s an Ayn Rand Asshole, yes, but old-school. Married one of Rand’s friends. Rand herself called him the Undertaker. A good moniker, with its whiff of luchador, but she should have dubbed him the Deregulator.

The answer, of course, is Alan Greenspan. Now here’s a pop quiz for Mr. Corsello: name one thing that Alan Greenspan, as head of the Fed, even had the power to deregulate, let alone actually did deregulate? Yeah, well, the reason why you can’t is because the Federal Reserve doesn’t actually set regulatory policy. You moron. Pretty much all it does is act as a holdings lender of last resort, a power that has been abused almost from the get-go to indirectly (note: indirectly) control the money supply by influencing the inter-bank lending rate. It’s true enough that what the chairman of the Fed (and any central bank) has to say on fiscal policy moves the market. But the Chairman of the Federal Reserve has no more power to add or remove financial securities regulations than he does to control the plumbing system. It’s just not his job, nor has it ever been.

Now about Ayn Rand and the Federal Reserve setting monetary policy. Anyone who’s so much as cracked one of her books will know that she was a big opponent of fiat currency in general. All her characters insist on being paid in gold because gold is a freely-traded commodity the value of which the government cannot influence. And if you can’t be bothered to read one of her admittedly long novels, there are countless 6-page essays making the same points - some of which are in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal - alongside, incidentally, some other essays written by one Mr. Alan Greenspan making the same points back in the early “Mad Men” 60s when he actually was an Objectivist. (A money quote from one of those essays.) Another pop quiz: when you are estimating the influence of a philosophy on a person’s actions, do you take as more authentic the things the person says and does when he is actively involved in the philosophy, or 40 years later, when he isn’t?

OK, so the Greenspan example doesn’t work out so well either. But fortunately Mr. Corsello has another example to … oh, oops, no he doesn’t.

Alright, well, so, Mr. Corsello’s argument that Ayn Rand caused the financial crisis from Beyond the Grave rests on two examples, one of which is actually a counterexample, and the other of which was only an example before the guy in question took a government currency-tinkering job of which no known Objectivist would approve and in direct contradiction to essays that he himself wrote back when he was actually an Objectivist. I think the popular term for this kind of an argument is “fraudulent.”

Exhibit B is Adam Kirsch’s New York Times review of a new biography of Rand. As many other bloggers before me have noted, this passage gives away the goat that Kirsch either hasn’t actually read any Ayn Rand, or doesn’t mind that he’s grossly misrepresenting her:

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre.

He’s referring to her agreement to give up $0.07/copy in royalties on Atlas Shrugged in order to cover the extra paper costs that printing Galt’s Speech would cost the publisher. In other words, she took a profit hit to make sure that her book came out the way she wanted it, and Kirsch thinks this is inconsistent of her.

Never mind, of course, that every one of Rand’s protagonists in both of her two major novels took even more drastic profit hits to preserve the integrity of their visions. She didn’t mean those completely essential parts of her novels. What she had in mind was more something along the lines of Gordon Gekko and just expressed herself badly - where by “badly” I mean by “saying the exact opposite of what Adam Kirsch takes her to have mean?”

OR - here’s a thought - Kirsch’s review is no less of a fraud than Corsello’s.

And so it goes. If there has recently been a glut of Ayn Rand reading, then there’s been a concomitant and disproportionate backlash of misrepresentative Ayn Rand bashing from the literary and political press. What’s up with that?

Conrad’s got the goods, if you ask me. When your enemies have to resort to misrepresentation exclusively to make their points, it means you were right.

And she was.

Well this was nothing if not inevitable. Pepsi has had to apologize for the “Before You Score” iPhone app, which, if you’re one of the few who still hasn’t heard, classifies girls into 24 groups, gives you tips on how to get them and even does things like provide links to nearby vegan restaurants if it’s, say, the granola type you’re pursuing.

A couple of thoughts on this.

The double standard here just added a whole dimension of breathtaking. I have yet, in my life, to pick up a copy of a woman’s magazine that doesn’t contain at least one article about the girls’ version of exactly this. Granted, my only exposure is 5 min. here and there while waiting in hair salons, but that just underscores how common these things are. Classifying guys for the purpose of attracting their interest ranks just behind tips for staying thin in column space share. Women have killed approximately a continent worth of old-growth forest printing exactly the kind of thing they’re now supposedly so offended by. Stop to marvel.

What is it with cola companies and brain farts? I’m old enough to remember New Coke. And Wikipedia confirms that Crystal Pepsi really happened (though I admit I wasn’t sure until I looked it up). Well, OK, I guess any industry gets two faux pas-es. Cut me some slack, I’m trying to blog here! My point is just that I can’t imagine what, in 2009, would convince a bunch of corporate executives that it would be AOK to launch an app that helps guys get girls. Maybe some corporate executives are so privileged that they’ve been living in a skyscraper penthouse since 1973? EVERYONE by now has gotten the memo that whatever guys do to get girls is deeply wrong, never mind that girls want to be gotten.

Alright, a third thought. Girls who are honest about golddigging probably love this app, even if they wouldn’t say it in public. It helps guys feel like they have an ace in the hole, which gives them confidence, and hooks them up with suggestions for places to take girls and things to buy for girls. AND it eliminates any need to feel guilty about ditching the guy at the end of the night. He was playing his game, you were playing yours, right?

Public opinion is a weird thing is all I’m saying. New Coke is actually a case in point. All taste tests showed that it was the most popular drink in America. It flopped IN SPITE OF tasting better than either Coke Classic or Pepsi. And the reason has everything to do with brand perception and herd mentality, for which product quality has never been a match. Create an app that helps guys give girls what they want and what do girls think about it? It’s EEEEEVILLLL…. Which is how I know there is no God: only Evolution could’ve produced a mating system this ridiculous.