A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

The problem with nice things is that they get taken away or broken

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I had an exchange with Chris Hardie about Mayor Pete. He said:

I’m excited about Pete’s campaign, especially as a Hoosier tired of how our state is usually seen politically. Just hoping we don’t trade our appreciation of his candor, authenticity & thoughtfulness for the buzz of celebrity.

To which I replied:

I share your concern, but this is a very Hoosier reaction. Like when the weather is nice, and the assumption is that we’re going to have to pay for it with bad weather.

(And, as Chris pointed out, it was glorious and sunny yesterday; rainy, cold, and windy today.)

So, the assumption is that if Mayor Pete rises too high, a hammer of some sort will pound him down. Maybe there will be a Milkshake Duck situation (though I kind of doubt it). More likely that the zeitgeist and his political opponents will just kneecap him with some variant of a Dean Scream attack.

But it’s not just the weather or in politics where we can’t have anything nice. Last week, the news came out that a group of scientists were able to essentially use the planet as a giant telescope and coordinate data collection that resulted in the first ever imaging of a black hole. The work of Dr. Katie Bouman in developing an algorithm to process that data was instrumental to the imaging. There was a great picture of her excited as her work came to fruition. An earlier Tedtalk on the matter where her knowledge and enthusiasm about the subject was clear. At 29, she’s relatively young for a scientist. So, it was a good story.  Moreso in my household because she went to high school where my kids go and she grew up in our neighborhood. The message around here was “work hard and you can achieve great things”

But, the Internet being what it is, it was utterly predictable that trolls would try to bring her down, because having something nice is intolerable to some folks. In her case, there was a strong thread of misogyny — a sort of bitterness that a woman would become the face of an achievement where men were also involved. Social media having turned into a click-driven sewer of misinformation, the emotion-provoking misinformation featured as prominently on, say, YouTube as hard news because their algorithm and advertisers value eyeballs more than accuracy.

It’s difficult to resist the onset of cynicism. Why strive for greatness? Why seek to create something new and good? Why seek to improve upon the status quo? Any achievement of value will just get dragged down into the muck. Nevertheless, I guess like the song says, you gotta kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.

The Internet and Empire

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Stephen Dowling, writing for the BBC, has an article about the transient nature of the Internet and how so much of what was posted in the first ten years just isn’t there anymore.

If Brewster Kahle hadn’t set up the Internet Archive and started saving things – without waiting for anyone’s permission – we’d have lost everything.

. . .

“It’s not only the early material. Most of the internet is not being stored,” he says.

“The Internet Archive first started archives pages in 1996. That’s five years after the first webpages were set up. There’s nothing from that era that was ever copied from the live web.” Even the first web page set up in 1991 no longer exists; the page you can view on the World Wide Web Consortium is a copy made a year later.

The article also mentions the shift from tangible media to electronic media in terms of what we have in our private collections — email and pictures and whatnot. Almost none of that is going to be gathered by archivists. It notes that the British Archives, for example, has collected a lot of letters between people. MySpace recently lost years of music and photos. Google Plus is gone.

This isn’t entirely new or different. There are huge gaps in historical records, and I imagine future historians are going to have a wealth of material regardless of how much we lose. In the early days of television, they didn’t necessarily keep tapes of the broadcasts. But, I was put in mind of Harold Innis’ Empire and Communications. I’ve only read pieces of it, so take my descriptions and Wikipedia pastings with a grain of salt.

[He] argued that the “bias” of each medium either toward space or toward time helps determine the nature of the civilization in which that medium dominates. “Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone,” he writes in his introduction. These media tend to favour decentralization. “Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper.” These media generally favour large, centralized administrations. Innis believed that to persist in time and to occupy space, empires needed to strike a balance between time-biased and space-biased media.

What we have now in electronic communications do not emphasize time. With the Internet, we have an ephemeral media that almost entirely negates space. “While time-biased media favour stability, community, tradition and religion, space-biased media facilitate rapid change, materialism, secularism and empire. . . . [S]ocieties that depend on space-biased media . . .  tend to favour abstract thought and control over space. They have little regard for tradition and when compared with oral societies, their ways of thinking are apt to be more rational, linear and impersonal.”

I’m not sure I entirely buy Innis’ theories, but he was a smart guy, so there is probably something to this. Our preferred communications are going to shape our culture and politics. If Innis is right, we’ll tend toward more rapidly changing, materialistic, secular society governed in a centralized, imperial manner. Right now, it feels as if things are splintering, not centralizing. But, that could be the old power structures giving way before centralized structures develop. Or maybe it’s all a bunch of hooey and things will stay more or less the same.

Cable News is Mostly Garbage

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Another installment in my media navel gazing: cable news is mostly garbage. I don’t want to both sides this too much, but even if your cable news source is on the side of the angels, politically speaking, it’s still probably toxic. The cable news business model relies on keeping you engaged through the commercials. Pushing emotional buttons of various kinds, many of which are anxiety inducing, is the way to do that. Cable news ends up being a kind of fun house mirror in which you are asked to see the world through a particularly stress inducing filter. I think it tends to worry more than it informs.

Cable news is not the sole offender. I think even the most straight forward news outlet is guilty of this to one extent or another. Even if their editorial bias is simply toward novelty (e.g. they’ll run a “man bites dog story” but not a “dog bites man story”), there is still a tendency toward warping your perception of the world. (“Hmm, the ratio of people biting dogs compared to dogs biting people seems more skewed toward the former than I would have thought. That’s troubling.”) Social media is getting pretty terrible as well. Algorithms give you more of the kinds of stories you engage with. You, me, and pretty much everyone else is more likely to click on the junk food than on the vegetables.

This isn’t to say “don’t worry, be happy” or to encourage you to disengage from news altogether. But, we all have to be mindful of whether our anxiety is well placed or in proportion to the actual threat. We have to pay attention to how much of our anxiety is being caused by viewing the world through a skewed lens.

Quick thought on what makes good media

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I’ve been struggling for a pithy way to articulate this to myself and haven’t quite made it, but I wanted to get it down on paper, or pixels or whatever. It seems to me that a good, responsible, useful news story will either discuss a news event that’s important to people’s lives in and of itself or, if not independently important, is a fair representation of something larger that is important.

War erupts, a tax is imposed, your street is going to be closed – these are things that have their own importance. Family struggles because job is displaced by automation; Joe, like many others, is an addict and here are his struggles – both are important stories even though they don’t necessarily have a direct impact on readers if it’s in fact true that there is a statistically significant trend in job displacement or addictions.

Local politician or important politician says something awful – maybe news worthy. Random college kid, celebrity, back-bencher from far flung district says something awful – not so much. Again, I think the question is: does the news truly have an impact on our reader’s lives and/or is the story truly representative of something significant in the world? There is obviously a lot of grey area here, but I guess what I’m getting at is that if the media outlet is telling stories about something not particularly representative or substantial, just to push your emotional buttons or sate your desire to laugh at freak shows, that outlet isn’t doing you or society much good. It’s just manipulating you for profit and likely eroding the community by showing you the world through a fun house mirror.

Pete Buttigieg is smart, but if you like him you won’t dwell on it

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Mayor Pete is gaining some momentum in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary. As a mayor from a mid-sized city in Indiana, he has to be considered a very long shot, but I’ve enjoyed seeing his profile raising a bit. His auto-biography has been well-received and he made effective use of a town hall slot on CNN. However, I cringed a bit when I saw a tweet making the rounds talking about how he’d learned Norwegian to read more books by a Norwegian author for whom he could not find translations. I mean, that’s obviously very impressive, but talking about how smart he is doesn’t do him any political favors.

In a blog post about him I wrote about nine years ago when he was running for Treasurer, I mentioned, “we have an anti-intellectual streak a mile wide in this country where we want politicians to go with their gut and not any silly book-learnin’.” At the time, I believe I was still irritated a bit about Jill Long-Thompson’s campaign against Mitch Daniels for governor where she seemed to mention that she had a Ph.D. about every fifth sentence. That stuff does not impress American voters (and probably impresses Hoosier voters even less). We prefer “common sense” and “street smarts.” (Obligatory Einstein quote: “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”) I think our ambivalence about education has something to do with discomfort about the class system we like to ignore having in the U.S.

We don’t have titled nobility, and class warfare is for Communists. This is America where all men are created equal, and you rise and fall on your own merit. This cherished belief creates a blind spot which makes us ill-equipped to explain the success of mediocrities like George W. Bush or Donald Trump. Blue collar workers are resentful of the out-sized influence the professional classes like lawyers, doctors, and accountants seem to have on their personal lives — they feel keenly that these white collar types are looking down their noses at them. But, because we pretend to live in a classless meritocracy, we lack the vocabulary to talk about structural impediments to people rising or falling based on individual merit. So, to some extent, I think the unspoken resentments over social class gets translated into a distrust of highly educated, intellectual types.

Anyway, that’s a long way to go to say that I don’t think Pete’s self-teaching himself Norwegian will win him many votes. I suppose it’s some sort of progress that I think his educational achievements are likely to cost him more votes than the fact that he’s gay. (We’re maybe getting better at talking about social justice issues than we are about social class issues).

School Vouchers are not to help “poor kids escape failing schools”

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In The Beginning — or at least early on in the school voucher program discussion, the talking points were often along the lines that vouchers would help poor students escape failing public schools. Steve Hinnefeld, writing for School Matters, has a post with numbers showing that if that was ever the real intent (it wasn’t) the structure of Indiana’s voucher program is such that it’s serving a wealthier, whiter population that never went to public schools in the first place and probably wouldn’t have even in the absence of vouchers. Over 1,300 households participating in the voucher program make more than $100,000 per year. Overall:

The state is paying $161.4 million to fund the program, which provides vouchers to pay for private-school tuition for students who qualify by family income and other criteria. Some 36,290 students, about 3 percent of Indiana’s school-age population, participate. Nearly all the 329 participating schools are religious schools. Most are Catholic, Lutheran or Evangelical Christian schools.

Fifty-eight percent of voucher students are white, 21 percent are Hispanic and 12 percent are African-American. Given that three of five voucher students come from what the state classifies as “metropolitan” areas, that suggests white students are disproportionately represented.

This reinforces my view that the real intention of voucher supporters was and is: 1) hurt teacher’s unions; 2) subsidize religious education; and 3) redirect public education money to friends and well-wishers of voucher supporters. Also, a reminder: vouchers do not improve educational outcomes. I get so worked up about this because the traditional public school is an important part of what ties a community together — part of what turns a collection of individuals into a community. And community feels a little tough to come by these days. We shouldn’t be actively eroding it.

(Updated to include a link provided to me by Up North Progressive with notes from an early strategy session with regard to the Michigan “school choice” movement showing that the damage to traditional public schools was premeditated.)

HB 1113 – Telecoil in Public Address Systems

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HB 1113, introduced by Rep. Miller, passed the House by a vote of 94-0 and is moving to the Senate. It requires a person building a Class 1 Structure with a public address system in a Class 1 or Class 2 city to consider installing an audio frequency induction loop system (AFILS). (Class 1 structure in Class 1 or 2 city basically means a public building in a city with a population of more than 35,000 people). It also requires audiologists and hearing aid dealers to provide information about telecoil and audio frequency induction systems when they are fitting or dispensing hearing aids. Telecoil and AFILS is a technology used to transmit audio directly to the hearing aid which lets the audio be heard despite the crowd.

This bill has a pretty light touch, requiring only that people building these structures consider telecoil so it’s tough to argue against it from an undue burden standpoint. Advocates of the hearing impaired might argue that it doesn’t go far enough. The one concern I have — and I’m not at all well versed in the subject matter, so I don’t know how valid it is — is that the telecoil technology might become outdated in the near future. I don’t know how hard it would be to swap out or supplement the newly built PA systems with something new when that comes along. Nick Hunn (in a blog post urging the FCC not to approve the new or modified proprietary standard Apple wanted to substitute for telecoil requirements in smartphones) says of the technology:

[T]elecoil tech is now long in the tooth, and the limitations of its 1970s-era capabilities are becoming all too apparent. Take frequency response. That’s just one area where it no longer cuts muster. Telecoil tech is still adequate for speech, sure, but it’s miserable music. And there’s the antenna problem: Telecoils need them, but try fitting these antennaes into modern phones and hearing aids. Talk about an engineering challenge.

There appears to be work afoot to develop “a new version of the Bluetooth specification that will replace telecoils. This new standard will at once provide better audio quality and be simpler and more cost effective to install in buildings.”

Because its intent is laudable (help those with difficulty hearing) and its impact is minimal (only requires “consideration” of telecoil), I imagine this will pass. Hopefully people building these structures will be able to perform their construction in a way that lets them help hearing impaired people now while allowing them to upgrade to the new standard when it comes along.

 

 

 

Senate Guts SB 12 on the Floor

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You said you wanted a baby. We’re still giving you a baby. We think *all* babies are wholesome and cute.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Senate Republicans gutted SB 12 concerning bias motivated crimes. The version that came out of committee seemed to be pretty solid, passing by a margin of 9-1 with only Sen. Phil Boots voting against. The meat of the legislation was specifying that, in imposing a sentence, judges are allowed to consider as an aggravator whether:

The person committed the offense, including an offense involving the property of an individual or a group of individuals, with the intent to harm or intimidate an individual or a group of individuals because of a perceived or actual characteristic of the individual or group of individuals, including: (A) race; (B) religion; (C) color; (D) sex; (E) gender identity; (F) disability; (G) national origin; (H) ancestry; (I) sexual orientation; or (J) age; whether or not the person’s belief or perception was correct.

As it passed out of the committee, the legislation also had a variety of requirements that law enforcement receive training in recognizing, investigating, and reporting on bias motivated crimes.

As the bill moved to the floor of the Senate, the legislation took a turn for the worse-than-doing-nothing. Senator Freeman offered an amendment that was the legislative equivalent of #AllLivesMatter. His amendment removed the language quoted above and instead added two words to section (c) of that statute, having it say, “The criteria listed in subsections (a) and (b) do not limit the matters that the court may consider, including bias, in determining the sentence” There is no guidance in the amended legislation as to what constitutes bias. In other words, it deliberately and disingenuously misses the point of the original legislation. After extensive behind closed doors discussion in the Senate Republican caucus and a floor debate where Democrats spoke passionately against and Republicans mostly kept silent, the amendment passed by a vote of 33-16. Notably, the bill’s Republican author (Sen. Ron Alting) voted against.

Ultimately, I think the significance of Sen. Alting’s bill, as it passed out of committee, was as a recognition that groups have often been excluded from society’s definition of “us” based on the criteria in his list (e.g. race, sexual orientation, etc.). By passing Alting’s legislation, we as a people would be saying to these historically discriminated against and excluded groups, “that’s not how it is any more. You are one of us, and the people who persecute you are no longer us. If they come for you, we’re coming after them.” By dispensing with all of that and mumbling something non-specific about bias, the Freeman version of the bill cuts out its heart and makes it worse than doing nothing. It’s like the legislative equivalent of “All Lives Matter.”  In its current state, the legislation is a ghoulish mockery of what could have been. I’m reminded of a book I read when I was a kid. There was a line that said:

“There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.”

Hate crime legislation that’s this broken is worse than no legislation at all.

HB 1253 – Handgun Training for Teachers

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Rep. Lucas has introduced HB 1253 concerning handgun training for teachers. The heat I’ve seen surrounding the discussion of this legislation seems to go beyond what it actually does. I’m not a supporter because I don’t think we’re going to shoot our way to safety, but the practical impact seems fairly minimal. There’s a state school safety fund that can be used to make grants to various school safety initiatives (e.g. drug dogs, truancy enforcement, bully identification, etc.) This bill would add to permissible uses of that money by allowing grants to be given to teachers to receive handgun training. Among other things, the teacher has to receive approval from their school board to get such a grant. The legislation also sets a mandatory curriculum for a firearm training program to be eligible for grant money.

I think the idea that armed teachers will make schools safer is misguided. That said, I don’t think there is anything problematic about teachers knowing how to use firearms, and this leaves it up to school boards to decide whether they want teachers to request these grants. My only real concern is to what extent these firearm training grants will divert resources from the other uses of the school safety fund. I suspect (but don’t know) that the actual expenditures will be minimal.

The one item in the training curriculum that raised my eyebrow was the requirement that the trainer have NRA certification. On its face, this looks potentially like a bit of pork for the NRA, but it could very well be that any reputable trainer is going to have this certification. I’ve posed the question to someone knowledgeable on these issues and will try to update this when I find out.

SB 201 – Employer Cannot Require Pharmacist or Nurse to Dispense “Abortion Inducing Drug”

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SB 201 passed out of committee and is headed to the floor of the Senate. It expands the current law that says that a physician or employee of a hospital or other facility where abortions can be performed can’t be required to perform or assist with the performance of an abortion. The new legislation would say, among other things, that pharmacists and nurses can’t be required to administer or dispense an “abortion inducing drug” if they claim to have an ethical objection.

I don’t think this means that pharmacists and nurses can avoid being involved with, say, Plan B. “Abortion inducing drug” is defined by IC 16-18-2-1.6 as meaning  “a medicine, drug, or substance prescribed or dispensed with the intent of terminating a clinically diagnosable pregnancy with the knowledge that the termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the fetus. The term includes the off-label use of a drug known to have abortion inducing properties if the drug is prescribed with the intent of causing an abortion.” When Justice Kavanaugh and others call Plan B and other contraception “abortion inducing drugs,” I think they’re referring to the fact that the medication makes the lining of the uterus inhospitable for an inseminated egg. Even using that definition of “pregnancy,” however, I don’t think that it’s “clinically diagnosable.” Still and all, it’s probably going to be a headache for the pharmacy who wants to get rid of a grandstanding employee making it difficult for a customer to get Plan B or other contraception.

Beyond that, of course, there is the impact on women who want control over their own bodies. And there’s the question of why abortion should be entitled to special pleading when it comes to employee’s ethical concerns over their employer’s operations. What if a health care provider finds drug use immoral and objects to treating addicts? What if a gun store employee object to selling firearms to guys who abuse their wives? What if a bank employee objects to their employer’s lending practices? Usually we tell employees to go work somewhere else, but this legislation seeks to carve out a special exception for a medical service that, for the time being anyway, remains a Constitutional right.