Kindness come too late may be cruelty. I wonder whether I am too late.

The Administration has timed its decision on what sort of immigration reform to implement by Executive Decree so that the President can be informed by whatever occurs on 11 September. Any considered reforms that would, in light of 11 September, seem foolish to the voting public will be shelved. If nothing happens domestically, then the President will feel that he has a freer hand.

I've never voted in a General Election for a Republican Presidential nominee; and, the one time that I registered as a Republican, it was to vote against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 primary election by voting for a candidate who had withdrawn. One may fairly conclude that I was anti-Reagan; I remain so. But I was-and-am also anti-Carter and anti-Mondale; indeed, I have never voted in a General Election for a Democratic Presidential nominee. And my dog in the fight over Reagan's legacy is truth as such, not the development or defense of one of the narratives of either of the two major political tribes.

Part of the conventional narrative of progressives and of Democrats is that our problem of homeless people became a crisis as a result of a ruthless expulsion of mentally ill people from hospitals, by the Reagan Administration, simply to save money. One problem with this part of that narrative was that, at the time that people were being deïnstitutionalized, there was very little in the way of protest from the other tribe, nor much from any other part of the political continuum.

The forceable incarceration of the mentally ill simply for being mentally ill was and remains deeply problematic; it operationalizes as the criminalization of victimless behaviors. Further, like almost every other state programme (essential or otherwise), actual practice bore little resemblance to supportive pontifications by educators and by journalists, regardless of which party were in power. The captivity of the mentally ill was a great injustice, which many progressives, classical liberals, and indeed conservatives wanted to see ended. Not a lot of thought was given to what was to happen to the inmates upon release.

Some of these people had been getting-by before they were locked-up. But the problem now was that the structures that they had earlier found or created in order to get-by were largely demolished by their incarceration. They had spent months or years — sometimes many years — in an peculiar society in which all or nearly all of the people around them were ill-adapted to ordinary life. Most of the possessions of those deïnstitutionalized had been dispersed or destroyed during their institutionalization. The victims didn't have homes. Those released had the stigma of having been locked-up. But, no, few people, regardless of ideological commitments, had much considered what the incarceration itself implied for the ability of the incarcerated to reädapt to the outside world.

We have a very similar problem coming upon us even as I write. It's not coming at us so fast or so slowly that the speed-of-approach should blind anyone; but none-the-less almost everyone is again blind, regardless of ideological commitment.

Our nation may be moving in the general direction of decriminalization of drug-crimes. Some constituent states are decriminalizing marijuana, and the Federal state seems to be allowing that decriminalization. The Presidential Administration is looking to scale back the penalties for crimes involving crack cocaine. And these changes ought to be happening. Consenting adults ought to be able to buy and ingest whatever they want. (Unfortunately, contrary to the apparent trend of decriminalization, many progressives are looking to outlaw tobacco products and to turn sugars into controlled substances.)

But with decriminalization would come the release of a great many institutionalized people. Once again, those released would have spent months or years or even many years in an environment where most of the people around them were ill-adapted to ordinary society. Most of their possessions would have been dispersed or destroyed. Many wouldn't have homes. They'll confront the stigma of having been imprisoned. (If they don't report their imprisonments on job forms and rental applications, then they'll have large, unexplained gaps in their histories!)

I don't offer you a solution to the problems to come. If the progressives wake-up to the problems before any large-scale release, then they'll devise some scheme of half-way houses that in practice will bear little resemblance to progressive theory, and assuredly victimize tax-payers.

No matter what, narratives will be formulated that obscure the current failure to anticipate a predictable, large-scale problem.

It is recurringly claimed that omission and commission are morally equivalent, that failing to assist someone is as blameworthy as injuring that person. But, were that really the case then, by the same token, failing to injure someone would be as every bit as laudable as acting to prevent his or her injury by some other agency. The man who did not kill a random stranger upon whom he chanced would be as much the hero as one who rushed in to save one stranger from another.

I don't know that 'Net-neutrality were, in fact, a good thing; but, even on the assumption that it were, state action is not the proper way to promote it.

'Net-neutrality can be promoted by how people do business with ISPs. At one end, subscribers can consistently migrate towards those ISPs who deviate least from neutrality. At the other end, website owners can impede access by ISPs that do not practice an acceptable degree of neutrality.

In fact, Google and Facebook could effectively impose neutrality by announcing that, in one year, they would begin blocking access by providers who did not make pledges, renewed annually but each extending for ten years, to practice 'Net-neutrality. It might, however, require state inaction for these heavy-hitters to make such a demand. Specifically, Congress might need to clear a path in anti-trust law to allow such a policy.

I started reading Rethinking the Western Understanding of the Self by Ulrich Steinvorth, and in its first chapter came upon this passage

As subjects we desire satisfaction of our desires; as selves we strive for the enactment of reason and free will.

(Underscore mine.) It is not auspicious to find this sort of claim early in the work.

To say that something desires the satisfaction of its individual desires is no more than to say that it desires what it desires; nothing fails to do this, as things without desire present us with the trivial case of a null set.

The pursuit of satisfaction of each individual desire does not logically entail global satiation of desires (bliss) unless those desires are themselves somehow bounded. It's not clear what Steinvorth means by desire (a point that I will labor), but let's assume that he means something along the lines of uncontemplated cravings and the things that are craved, as for sensual pleasures or for hoards of material goods. I don't see that they're naturally bounded. I don't see that most people make a presumption, one way or another, about whether such cravings are bounded. The impulse to bound them by attaining ἀπάθεια or nirvana seems far from universal to me (and anyway is probably not an expression of what Steinvorth calls subject, but of what he calls self).

It's evident that he wants to distinguish desire as a verb from one more generally meaning to have a directed psychological impulse, and as a noun from one more generally meaning objective; but nowhere prior has Steinvorth given a definition of desire, as noun or as verb; the remainder of the chapter and use of the index indicate that he's not going to do it at all. I see declarations such as X desires the satisfaction of X's desires as the unconscious attempt to fill the need for a definition with a logically unassailable tautology. (Simply say X desires and the need for definition is more apparent.) The problem is that the latter cannot do the work of the former, and the tautology is vacuous.

It's further evident from the first chapter that Steinvorth wants to distinguish happiness from a noun simply meaning an emotional sense of attaining or of having attained one's objectives; and to distinguish utility from a noun simply meaning usefulness. One can tell that he means to equate or approximate what he means by happiness with what he means by utility. But nowhere in the first chapter does he actually provide more positive definitions. He does insist that if we consider such things as the glory of suffering to be a form of happiness then the idea of happiness becomes inflated and loses its meaning, but I want to know what meaning it would lose. Again using the index, it doesn't seem that he bothered with providing any of these definitions anywhere else in the book.

I'm going to step into a debate that no one has asked me to join, concerning the implications of a belief system that I reject.

In Matthew 12:31, Jesus declares that there is exactly and only one unforgiveable sin, and that is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. (It would here be tangential to discuss why he declared such a thing; the relevant point is that he said it.) Every other sin is declared to be forgiveable.

So let's apply that proposition to an issue about which the 'Net has been stupidly buzzing — suicide. A clergyman's son has killed himself, and some are insisting that this son is necessarily going to Hell, or at least that Christianity must hold as much. But how, exactly, can the act of suicide, if indeed a sin, be both forgiveable and at the same time ensure that one goes to Hell?

If, between every suicidal act and actual death, there were opportunity to regret and to repent, then perhaps this would be the way to forgiveness; which would of course imply that suicide weren't unforgiveable. But it seems that, in some cases, there just isn't enough time. Yet, somehow, if the act is a sin, it has to be forgiveable, even without the possibility of post factum repentance in this life. We must therefore conclude that, within Christian doctrine, either suicide is not a sin at all (which appears doubtful, in that the prohibition against homicide doesn't seem to make an exception for killing oneself), or that it is a forgiveable sin — that a person who'd otherwise been saved would not be lost for having deliberately killed him- or herself — which sin doesn't even require specific repentance in this life.

(I'm acutely aware that there are those who will claim that to commit suicide is, really, to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. In other contexts, I've heard some people go so far as to claim that any sin is, really, every sin. But, if this sort of logic holds, then the claim of Jesus that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit were an exception wouldn't. There would be nothing operational to the rule but that exception, and everyone would be going to Hell, regardless of works and of faith. The notion that people somehow more greatly insult the Holy Spirit by killing themselves than by other homicides or by other sins more generally is in sore need of more than hand-waving accompanied by beatific smiles or by stern looks.)

The mainstream Christian doctrine that suicide is a sure route to Hell just isn't supported by their Holy Scriptures. It arose because the existence of the Church here on Earth was threatened by the possibility of believers attempting a short-cut to Paradise. The Earthy flock would be reduced in number, and questions would be asked about the sincerity of those who lingered.

The term ambiguity is often applied to matters that are in fact not at all ambiguous. Sometimes the mis-application is simple carelessness, but in one application it is hard not to see a more active perversion.

Characters (fictional or actual) who are called morally ambiguous almost never are. Instead, the label is most often applied to two sorts of characters.

One sort is morally compromised. Those characters are not all bad; they may even be mostly good; but they are discernibly not all good. The person labelling them as morally ambiguous typically very much seems to be trying for a sort of special pleading on behalf of the character or of the moral short-comings exhibited by the character.

The other sort exhibits a combination of characteristics, some of which the audience will find attractive but some of which the person applying the label finds disagreeable, without his or her being able to make a sound case (or seemingly sound case) against those traits. By labelling the character as morally ambiguous, the labeller is insinuating doubt without reasoned foundation. Challenged, he or she will likely deny having issued a condemnation of the characteristics against which he is directing that doubt.

In application to situations, the term moral ambiguity is more likely to be legitimately applied than in application to characters. But calling a situation morally ambiguous is also often an attempt to introduce by back door a special plea for bad behavior.

(One of the papers on which I am presently working, and the paper of that lot that is likely to end-up the least mathematical, compares and contrasts some decision-theoretic states that are often mistaken one for another. One sort of these states entails ambiguity. So I have been thinking about real and specious ambiguity more generally.)

Assuming that you do much surfing of the WWWeb, you've surely noticed that there are a great many sites that now require one to use an account with an external social-networking service in order to access functionality that previously would have been available without such an account. For example, to comment to some sites which are not themselves hosted on Yahoo! or on Facebook or on Google+, one must none-the-less log into an account with one of these services.

From the perspective of the site-owners, reliance upon such external services can reduce the costs of managing site-access. The external social networks provide this management partly as valued-added to their account-holders, but providing this service is a means of building a behavioral profile of those account-holders.[1] (To this day, most people do not assimilate the fact that most social-networking services exist largely as profiling services.) As you might expect, I feel that efforts to build such profiles should be resisted.

I understand both the problems of the client-sites instead independently managing access, and the difficulties of knowing just where to draw some objective line that would distinguish acceptable and unacceptable external services. (For example, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to require a verified e.mail account, and even to require a verified e.mail account from a service that is not black-listed. But, once one requires a verified e.mail account from a service that is white-listed, one may be pushing visitors into allowing themselves to be profiled (by an e.mail-service provider), if the white-list is overly constrained.)

What seems inexcusable to me is not simply handing access-control over to an external service, but handing it over exclusively to one external service that is a profiling service. The very worse case of such inexcusability is handing control over to the biggest of these services, Facebook, but it remains inexcusable to give exclusivity to any other external service (unless that service has some real guarantee against building profiles).

Which brings me to a policy change that I will be effecting for my own 'blog, not-withstanding that it has never required an external account to access its functionality.

At this and some other sites, a list of implicitly or explicitly recommended links is provided, outside of the body of principal content. (With the present formatting of this 'blog, they are in a right-hand column.)

In the case of my own list, I will be removing (or refraining from providing) links whenever I discover that the only evident way to access those other sites or to comment to them is by using an account with exactly one external social-networking site.

For example, if a 'blog is not hosted on Facebook, but the only readily seen way to comment to it is by using a Facebook account, then I will not wilfully provide a link to it. I will continue to link to Facebook sites; I will continue to link to sites where the only readily seen ways of commenting use social-networking accounts, so long as accounts from more than one social network may be used.

This policy only applies to the sort of generalized recommendations represented by that list. I may continue to link within principal content to such things as news-stories at sites that are enabling such profiling.

[1] I don't know that those handing access-management off to such services receive side-payments for doing so, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Without some basis in fact — without at least a basis in the recognized structure of reality on some general level — fiction would instead be gibberish. And most fiction involves considerable factual elements — it describes a familiar world and may even involve passing reference to specific, familiar, real-life persons. Some fiction makes more than passing reference.

Satire normally involves more literal truth than does ordinary fiction. because some element of the real-world is a target,[1] perhaps for purposes of commentary or perhaps merely as an opportunity for absurdity.

Harlan Ellison has sometimes asserted that he might be called a paid liar. He does, after all, state things as if they were true that he knows to be false. But his fiction doesn't quite fit the ordinary notion of lying. Under this notion, to lie is to make a statement which one knows to be false, and to make it with intent to deceive. Ellison makes false statements, but presumably expects his readers to identify the fiction as such, and hence not to be deceived. Backing-up, the key is not merely that the false statement is presented in just any way as if true, but in a manner that one might hope and expect to be presuasive. Even if we should insist that any statement that one knows to be false would constitute a lie, clearly there is an important difference between willfully false statements which are hoped to mislead and those which are expected to be treated as falsehoods.

Sometimes the author of fiction relies upon immediate context to indicate the work as fiction — the work is wrapped (as by the label novel). In other cases, the content is sufficiently at odds with expectations that it would not be believed by anyone with at least an ordinary degree of rationality.

Satire — genuine satire — reveals its fictional content, as distinct from its factual content, in that the fictional component is presented to amuse by violating established expectations, while the non-fictional component does not itself seem an attempt to be funny.

Unfortunately, this convention, like many social institutions, is not consciously discerned by most of those who rely upon it, and that lack of awareness creätes an opportunity to use ostensible satire as a vehicle for deception. If one insinuates false-yet-unamusing assertions within a work, these may be taken as part of the factual component by a large share of the audience. If someone should protest that false statements are being presented as fact, that someone can be dismissed as ignoring that the work be satirical. (This dismissal will be more effective if the work also has falsehoods that few would take seriously.) Few people will be positioned to respond that genuine satire does not present deliberate falsehood as fact is presented. And so purported satire becomes a vehicle for deliberately false statements made with the intent to deceive. Lying is labelled satire, and ordinary defenses fail against it.

The use of ostensible satire to lie has been very popular since the rise of the Baby Boom Generation. But it's not as if one can give a public lecture on how to lie in this manner without undermining the device. In consequence, a lot of people are using it to lie without quite understanding how and why it works; others, more oblivious, have concluded that all these falsehoods really have been amusing, and imagine that when they too string-together falsehoods, these must likewise be amusing.

Yester-day and to-day, there was a fiasco on the American political left. First, Roger Simon made what seems an attempt to satirize the circumstances of Paul Ryan. The attempt was perhaps sincere, but it's hard to find much funny in it. And it was taken to be mostly factual by some of Simon's own tribe, including various prominent members. Tobin Harshaw is blaming this confusion on the literalism of Americans, but the primary cause is not so much literalism as it is the degeneration of the concept of satire.

(Of course, I expect those on the left who believed Simon's claims to attempt to excuse themselves by claiming that the political right has become so absurd that it is practically impossible to tell fact from fiction.)

[1] The real thing satirized may be a story or idea of something that is itself unreal; but, without some real referent (such as a story or idea), one does not have satire.