Because LiveJournal has again broken its support for OpenID, I am again locked-out of reading Friends-only entries.

This time, instead of struggling to find a work-around (while the LJ support team does nothing but collect information which will be ignored by the LJ programmers, and then eventually expresses regrets at the lack of action), I am simply done with it. I won't be reading LJ entries.

I won't even bother with the more public entries at LiveJournal. If there's something that my LJ Friends want me to read, then it will have to be written elsewhere.

I am presently undecided as to whether I'm willing to enable LiveJournal to the extent of allowing it to continue to access my RSS feed. If you find that entries from this 'blog stop appearing on your Friends pages, then you might check as to whether that's simply because the 'blog has become quiescent, or because I've blocked the LJ server.

[Addendum (2013:02/06): I am informed that LiveJournal's alleged feed of this 'blog hasn't delivered any of the entries from this year anyway, so the question of whether to permit it to do so might perhaps be put aside.]

Perhaps I'm a Constitutional hipster, in-so-far as I was talking about section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment before it was cool to do so. After it had become cool, I felt moved to explain

[The Fourteenth Amendment] is indeed [the law that empowers the President to increase the ceiling] — where the only way not otherwise in violation of the Constitution to pay debt that has come due is to borrow beyond the existing limit. If the debt can be paid in some other way, then no special authority can be found for the President in section 4.

[…] The President doesn't get to say that he or she must raise the limit to continue funding institutions to which he or she can apply profound and moving terms, unless those institutions are indeed Constitutionally mandated.

With talk of the President raising the borrowing limit by decree again heating-up, I feel moved to labor aspects of what I'd earlier explained.

As debt comes due, for which sufficient funding has not been allocated, the Federal government can do one or more of five things:

• Default.
• Increase tax collections.
• Decrease other expenditures to allocate more revenue for debt service.
• Liquidate assets.
• Engage in new borrowing to service the debts from previous borrowing.

Advocates of the President raising the ceiling by decree want to pretend that the Constitutional prohibition of the first of these five options empowers the President to effect the last of these options by decree. But there would be three other options; it is appropriate to ask why the President wouldn't instead be required to choose one or more of the other three.

And, if a decision must be made amongst some or all of the four options not prohibitted by section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, it is not evident that it is the President's decision to make, even if the Congress will not. In the absence of Constitutional guidance, there is no apparent reason that abdicated legislative responsibility should go to the executive branch as opposed to the judicial branch.

Various unhappy things have occurred in my life since my last entry here. The worst of these was the death of the beloved cat of the Woman of Interest.

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Some years before she and I had ever had any contact, the Woman of Interest was passing by a dumpster, and heard a cry as if from a tomcat trapped in it. So she went to free the creature. What she found, to her surprise, was not an adult, but a truly tiny little black kitten, with preternaturally beautiful green eyes. He had been closed in a box with a toy, put in the dumpster, and left for death. (We can only speculate about this combination of apparent affection and ruthlessness.)

He was far too young to be properly weened and separated from his mother — the Woman of Interest was horrified when a veterinarian estimated his age — but she became the best possible substitute for that mother. He grew to be a cat with an rather large frame (though she took care not to let him become obese, and put him on a diet when he became a bit pudgy).

Actually, though, he really never ceased to be a kitten, and a pretty rambunctious one at that. And, as far as he was concerned, she was always his Best Mommy. When he and I would be alone in her apartment, he would spend a fair amount of time laying where he could watch the door, waiting for her return; I'd not before seen an adult cat do that. (My family had a cat, and I had a cat of my own, so I'm not without prior experience.)

He was a talkative cat, who usually made something more like the sound of a duck quack than a typical meow; and, if he were awake and she were at home, then he'd usually be vocalizing at her — I think that usually what he was saying could be translated as Mom! — though sometimes he'd just roam-about, engaged in apparent commentary to himself. I'd be especially amused when I'd hear him trying to tell her something after she'd fallen asleep while on the phone with me.

He and I got along quite well. I was looking forward to spending years hanging-out with him. Without conscious categorization, I thought of us as buddies.

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I won't here rehash the details of how he was lost. Not long before he died, tests established that he had developed diabetes; this was caught much sooner than is typical in house cats (because the Woman of Interest was very mindful of his health), and she began treating it as per the veterinarian's instructions. But what was also discovered at the same time was that he had a common heart condition. Neither, by itself, would have proved fatal. But, jointly, they were too much. She found him dead on the morning of the fourth.

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I'm not writing here to grieve (though I sometimes still cry about him), but because I observe something qua social scientist.

My relationship with the Woman of Interest wasn't well-bounded by just the two of us. Her cat played a significant rôle in our relationship, and it was the relationship more of another person than of an impersonal thing. A relationship that I would have categorized as between two persons was actually somewhat rather like one amongst three persons. With his death, the relationship of the three of us took a terrible hit, and the relationship of the two of us is henceforth informed by that injury. He did not mean — and could not have meant — the same thing to each of us individually, but he meant something shared in the relationship as such; and, even if the loss to the relationship could be fully decomposed into our losses as individuals (an issue that I don't propose here to labor), still it is important to recognize it as a sort of loss to the relationship, albeït not one to cause us to love each other less or to become more distant.

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(Many years ago, I lost my dog while I was in a relationship, but the nature of that relationship was different. For my part, I knew that, without radical and unlikely change, I needed to be freed of that wretched woman; and, for her part, she had already been preparing to discard as much of her responsibilities as she might, including any that were had for the dog. He died before she left us, but she was going to leave him too. So I didn't observe then anything analogous to what I observe now.)

Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I got into an argument, about a real-world crime statistic, with another student who didn't have much math-sense. The mathematics itself is very simple, and yet at least one implication of it seems to run counter to the intuïtions of many people.

Let's say that a population p is divided into groups, each i-th group with population p_i p = ∑(p_i) And let's say that the i-th group has a propensity c_i to commit crimes, such that c_i · p_i gives the sum of the crimes committed (however measured) by members of that population.

If criminals from within each group draw their victims with each person having an equal chance of victimization regardless of his or her own group, then the proportionate share of victims that they draw from the j-th group will be p_j / p The total number of crimes then committed against the j-th group by members of the i-th group will then be (p_j / p) · (c_i · p_i) and the ratio of i-on-j crime to j-on-i crime will be [(p_j / p) · (c_i · p_i)] / [(p_i / p) · (c_j · p_j)] = c_i / c_j So, if c_i = c_j, then the ratio of i-on-j crime to j-on-i crime will simply be 1:1.

The other graduate student had been sure that, if group i were the smaller group, then the ratio should be larger than 1:1, because group j furnished more potential victims. The proper intuïtion here is that, if one group is larger than another, then it furnishes proportionally both more potential victims and more potential victimizers; or, to say the same thing differently, if one group is smaller than another, then it furnishes proportionally both fewer potential victims and fewer potential victimizers.

If we see a very different ratio, then the difference implies that one group has a greater propensity to criminality than the other, or that one group is seeking (or avoiding) the other in its acts of criminality, or both.

It should be noted that members of the j-th group may be sought or avoided for reasons other than their being members of that group as such. For example, members of the j-th group may happen to have more portable wealth. Still, if one sees a ratio of, say, about 50:1, then it's hard to explain this lop-sided ratio in terms simply of the j-th group having more wealth, or of the i-th group simply having a greater propensity to criminality. With a ratio like that, one should expect that members of the j-th group are indeed being targetted for being in that group, by members of the i-th group.

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.)

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[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.

And the truth is, it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades.

A decade is of course a period of ten years, so that decades would refer to twenty or more years. Now, perhaps President Obama was allowing that problems had continued to build-up during his term, though it would seem more likely that he meant to refer to twenty or more years before he took office; but, in any case, he must have been referring to a period that began no later than 1992.

I'm not seen the main-stream of the media nor the right-wing alternative take note of the implication here. President Obama has once again given part of the blame for the present economic situation to the 1993–2001 Administration of President Clinton.

During the 2008 campaign, I noted

There had been a sort of forced nostalgia for Bill Clinton, but once Obama came over the horizon, Democrats became more willing to look critically at Clinton and at his Presidency;

The base of the Democratic Party were imagining Barack Obama as a leader who would show, after all, that Clinton had been mistaken to declare The era of big government is over, that instead a considerably more humane nation and world could be shaped by extending still further the sort of management by the state of economic resources which had characterized the New Deal and the Great Society. As a candidate, Mr Obama had even at one point gone so far as to assert that some of the foundations of economic problems in 2008 had been laid by the Clinton Administration (though Mr Obama quickly retreated from that claim in the face of outrage from the Clinton camp).

But as the economic crisis continued through the Administration of President Obama, there has been a return to that forced nostalgia, noting of course that President Clinton were a Democrat, and not paying a great deal of attention to what had determined his policies.

(Mr Clinton ran as a New Democrat — one with a more skeptical eye towards state intervention. But, once elected, he tacked to the left. One of the political results was that the Democratic Party lost control of Congress in the next mid-term elections. It was after these losses that President Clinton gave the speech in which he declared the death of big government. For the most part, he thereäfter chose his policies by discerning where things were going, and running out in front, pretending thus to lead. One notable exception to this approach was in his support for adjustive discrimination (affirmative action), which appears to be something to which he had a genuine commitment.)

For his part, Former President Clinton has been glad to be called for help. William Jefferson Clinton enjoys the game of politics. He enjoys playing the game. He enjoys demonstrating, to those who can see what he does for what it is, how good he is at it. He very much enjoys coming to the rescue of Barack Obama, as proof that Mr Clinton is better at this game than is Mr Obama. Mr Clinton has not forgot that the Obama campaign and its allies treated the Clintons as, well, Republicans during the 2008 race; that Mr Obama took the nomination from Hillary Clinton; nor that episode of laying some of the blame for the economic crisis on Mr Clinton's door-step.

Mr Obama recognizes this motivation, and would resent his dependence upon Mr Clinton's greater present popularity even were Mr Clinton not seeking to rub Mr Obama's nose in it. And, while part of his reference to challenges that have built up over decades was simply because challenges that have built up over the previous eight years doesn't sound nearly so persuasive, there was a deliberate slap at Mr Clinton there. Mr Obama had already got a speech out of Mr Clinton, who would be unlikely to try, somehow, to take it back. And it wasn't Mr Clinton's best effort anyway.

On the other hand, as the Woman of Interest noted when I was talking about this slap, Mr Clinton may be many things, but he is not too stupid to see that what Mr Obama did. So it's not likely that there will be much more help from Mr Clinton, without some sort of profound obeisance from Mr Obama. Barack Hussein Obama may come to regret his act of petulence.

Yester-day or this morning, I encountered yet another instance of argumentation over what Keynes really meant in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. I don't plan to labor here what I believe that Keynes intended to say; rather I want to draw attention to something about many of these arguments over the meaning or intention of some works.

When I consider the meaning or intention of the works of people who in turn attempt to interpret something else, I regard my interpretation of their interpretation as concerned with thought as such; I am thinking about how someone is or was thinking; my interpretation might be informed by my own understanding of the subject about which they thought, but the interpretation is of their thought.

It's good to know what any one of these people intended to say; it's good to know what they actually did say (whether intended or not); but it's almost always more desirable to have best approximations of the truth about which they ostensibly spoke than to have best approximations of the claims that they intended to make. It is a fortunate error when someone gets closer to the truth about the underlying subject by misinterpretting the work of someone who was mistaken about that subject. And, if one simply doesn't know which interpretation to make, but finds the truth amongst the possibilities, then there isn't even a positive misinterpretation.

It's different when one is attempting to interpret words which themselves impose rules, as in the cases of legislation, of formalized games, or of works of fiction. In those cases, the words creäte the relevant reälity.

Some people believe in prophets. By prophet I do not mean simply a forecaster, but a person through whom G_d (or something like G_d) speaks (perhaps about the future, but perhaps not). Amongst ostensible prophets I would count those believed to have a direct knowledge of external reälity, unmediated by the senses. Unsurprisingly, I do not believe in prophecy.

But, if one does believe in prophecy, then it makes sense to concern oneself with its meaning as-if resolving its meaning were the same thing as getting a best approximation of the underlying subject — because, indeed, prophecy would be just that best approximation. Of course, I take exception to the presumption that this-or-that work were holy scripture; but I take rather greater exception to an unacknowledged presumption to such effect.

And that brings me to what is so wrong with so many of the arguments about what Keynes really meant: Too many of the participants are perfectly sure that, whatever he really intended, it must have been right, and that it is for this reason that we must discover what he intended. One sees even more of this sort of thinking in debates about what Marx really meant. And I've seen basically the same thing in discussions about what Ayn Rand really meant. These three (and various others) are unacknowledgedly being treated as prophets. As far as I'm concerned, in such cases discussion has run off the rails.

Now, there are those who would insist that Marx, by way of dialectical reasoning, or Rand, by way of thorough-going objectivist epistemology, could apprehend things so very clearly that we should just take for granted that, indeed, whatever they said must be right. But those propositions each would strike me as highly dubious even if I didn't already possess what I regard as counter-proofs. (Certainly there would seem to be a claim of personal infallibility or a fallible claim on the part of whomever were testifying to the infallibility of Marx or of Rand.) And I've not encountered even that much of an argument for treating Keynes as if he were a prophet. (I have seen his economic intuïtion championed by reference to his having made a fortune investing in stocks, but I wasn't much persuaded by this argument even before I learned that, earlier, he had faced financial ruin through such investments, and been rescued by his father.)

[This entry may be superfluous, in that people who fall for any of the fallacies discussed are unlikely to read the entry, people who employ one of the fallacies are unlikely to reform if they do read the entry, and people who recognize that fallacies are involved may not see much use to analyzing them.]

I often encounter an argument, whose form is

P does A₁;
A₂ is better than A₁;
therefore it would be acceptable/desirable for P to do A₂.

It's easy to find P, A₁, and A₂ such that the intuïtion recoils from the conclusion that

it would be acceptable/desirable for P to do A₂.

and, in the face of such intuïtions, most people will acknowledge the non sequitur (acknowledged or otherwise) in the argument. We could even add a further premise, that

P ought to be persistently active (if not necessarily in their present manner).

and still find P, A₁, and A₂ such that the intuïtion recoils from that conclusion. (Consider that non-profit institutions do facilitate child abuse, and that child abuse is worse than many other things that are still themselves unacceptable.)

Yet one encounters this argument frequently with P as the state, A₂ is something that somebody wants done (such as space exploration) and A₁ is something disturbing that the state is doing or has done recently.

A variation on this can be found with form

P₁ approves when P₂ does A₁;
A₂ is better than A₁;
therefore P₃ should not object to P₂ doing A₂.

A non sequitur is evident in cases where P₃ is plainly no subset of P₁; but this argument is often presented in a manner so as to obscure a distinction, as when an everyone or a no one is used as-if loosely (which is to say inaccurately) in the first premise, but P₃ is some person or group of persons who aren't actually in the set labelled everyone or actually are in a non-empty set labelled no one.

However, this argument is fallacious even when P₃ simply is P₁. There may in fact be an incoherency in approving of A₁ while objecting to A₂, but that inconsistency could be resolved by changing one's position on A₁. For example, if forcing people to pay for birth control is better than forcing them to pay for war with Iraq, then perhaps someone who objects to the former should cease approving of the latter, rather than embracing the former.

(And resistance from P₁ to coherence wouldn't itself license A₂ when A₂ victimizes yet some additional party P₄. One doesn't force atheists to distribute copies of Al Qu'ran on the grounds that neoconservatives would object to such distribution even while supporting worse things.)

Sometimes one even sees an argument of the form

P₁ does not object when P₂ does A₁;
A₂ is better than A₁;
therefore P₃ should not object to P₂ doing A₂.

Variations of this even go so far as to replace objection with more active opposition.

P₁ does not actively oppose P₂ doing A₁;
A₂ is better than A₁;
therefore P₃ should not actively oppose P₂ doing A₂.

The appeal for those who present these arguments is that, if they were accepted, then almost no A₂ could be practicably challenged, as the objector could be dismissed for not having tackled each and every greater evil.

Of course, if this argument held, then it could virtually always be turned around against the claimant. For every P₂ and A₂, there is a P'₂, A'₁, and A'₂ such that A'₂ is the supposed ill addressed by A₂, P'₂ effects A'₂, and A'₁ is some greater ill effected by P'₂. In other words, even if A₂ were good, it would itself almost never address the greatest evil, so that there would always be something else that one would be required to do before ever getting to A₂.

On Sunday, 27 May, I received a pair of e.mail messages announcing formal acceptance for publication of my paper on indecision, and I ceased being braced for rejection. From 15 June, Elsevier had a version for sale on-line (first the uncorrected proof, then the corrected proof, now the version found in the journal). The issue itself (J Math Econ v48 #4) was made available on-line on 3 August. (I assume that the print copies will be received by subscribers soon.)

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Reader may recall that, not very long ago, I was reading A Budget of Paradoxes by Augustus de Morgan, and that when de Morgan used the term paradox he did not use in in the sense of an apparent truth which seems to fly in the face of reason, but in the older sense of a tenet opposed to received opinion. De Morgan was especially concerned with cases of heterodoxy to which no credibility would be ascribed by the established mainstream.

Some paradoxes would later move from heterodoxy to orthodoxy, as when the Earth came to be viewed as closely approximated by a sphere, and with no particular claim to being the center of the universe. But most paradoxes are unreasonable, and have little chance of ever becoming orthodoxy.

I began reading de Morgan's Budget largely because I have at least a passing interest in cranky ideas. But reading it at the time that I did was not conducive to my mental health.

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Under ideal circumstances, one would not use a weight of opinion — whether the opinion were popular or that of experts — to approximate most sorts of truth. But circumstances are seldom ideal, and social norms are often less than optimal whatever the circumstances. When confronted with work that is heterodox about foundational matters, the vast majority of people judge work to be crackpot if it is not treated with respect by some ostensibly relevant population.

In cases where respect is used as the measure of authority, there can be a problem of whose respect is itself taken to have some authority; often a layering obtains. The topology of that layering can be conceptualized in at least three ways, but the point is that the layers run from those considered to have little authority beyond that to declare who has more authority, to those who are considered to actually do the most respected research, with respected popularizers usually in one of the layers in-between. In such structures, absurdities can obtain, such as presumptions that popularizers have themselves done important research, or that the more famous authorities are the better authorities.

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As I was reading de Morgan's book, my paper was waiting for a response from the seventh journal to which it had been offered. The first rejection had been preëmptory; no reason was given for it, though there was some assurance that this need not be taken as indicating that the paper were incompetent or unimportant. The next three rejections (2nd, 3rd, 4th) were less worrisome, as they seemed to be about the paper being too specialized, and two of them made a point of suggesting what the editor or reviewer thought to be more suitable journals. But then came the awful experience of my paper being held by Theory and Decision for more than a year-and-a half, with editor Mohammed Abdellaoui refusing to communicate with me about what the Hell were happening. And this was followed by a perverse rejection at the next journal from a reviewer with a conflict of interest. Six rejections[1] might not seem like a lot, but there really aren't that many academically respected journals which might have published my paper (especially as I vowed never again to submit anything to a Springer journal); I was running-out of possibilities.

I didn't produce my work with my reputation in mind, and I wouldn't see damage to my reputation as the worst consequence of my work being rejected; but de Morgan's book drew my attention to the grim fact that my work, which is heterodox and foundational, was in danger of being classified as crackpot, and I along with it.

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Crackpots, finding their work dismissed, often vent about the injustice of that rejection. That venting is taken by some as confirmation that the crackpots are crackpots. It's not; it's a natural reäction to a rejection that is perceived to be unjust, whether the perception is correct or not. The psychological effect can be profoundly injurious; crackpots may collapse or snap, but so may people who were perfectly reasonable in their heterodoxy. (Society will be inclined to see a collapse or break as confirmation that the person were a crackpot, until and unless the ostensible authorities reverse themselves, at which point the person may be seen as a martyr.)

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As things went from bad to worse for my paper, I dealt with how I felt by compartmentalization and dissociation. When the paper was first given conditional acceptance, my reäction was not one of happiness nor of relief; rather, with some greater prospect that the paper would be published, the structure of compartmentalization came largely undone, and I felt traumatized.

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Meanwhile, some other things in my life were going or just-plain went wrong, at least one of which I'll note in some later entry. In any case, the recent quietude of this 'blog hasn't been because I'd lost interest in it, but because properly to continue the 'blog this entry was needed, and I've not been in a good frame-of-mind to write it.

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[1] Actually five rejections joined with the behavior of Abdellaoui, which was something far worse than a rejection.

I'm engaged in a fight with a corporation[1] in which I note its agents practice two, somewhat intertangled behaviors which are common to large or corporate enterprises, but which should be opposed whenever encountered.

The first of these is for the agent of the enterprise to confuse his or her rôle. For example: I gave agents of this corporation the same information repeatedly in the course of one phone call. In a later phone call, I told another agent that I'd given that information to you repeatedly, to which the agent replied, as if I were delusional, that she had never spoken with me before. This might be read as deliberate or incompetent misunderstanding of the word you (which of course must serve as a plural as well as a singular[2]), but it fits another pattern, in which the agent speaks as representative when it suits his or her immediate purpose, but instead as just an individual when that immediate purpose changes, and in which the agent doesn't announce changes in the entity for whom he or she speaks. I immediately told the agent in this case that, since she was representing the corporation in the conversation, you are the corporation, and that since I'd repeatedly given the information to the corporation, I had repeatedly given it to you.

The second behavior is to confuse endogenous policy with necessity, to represent the association as unable to do something simply because they have made a deliberate habit of not doing it. Actually, one sees people in general, in or out of a corporate frame-work, doing attempting this confusion. But the misrepresentation is more likely to be effective in the context of a formal, multi-personal institution, and the word policy is more likely to be invoked as if it represents something endogenous and fixed. (Does one often hear a neighbor insist that keeping his dog out of one's garden would be against policy?) And the misrepresentation is even more effective when the agent of the institution confuses the issue of whether he or she is speaking for the corporation or for his- or herself. Speaking for myself, I don't let an individual or association pretend that its chosen policy is not a choice, and I don't let the agents of an association off the hook of being its representatives when they try to claim that something cannot be done because it is against policy.

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[1] Sprint Nextel Corporation.

[2] In standard English. And I'm not about to adopt y'all or youse or even you guys to humor a corporate agent.