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 characters of two sorts.

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 special pleading if a sort 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.

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(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.)

When I went for dinner, I encountered someone slipping into madness. He was polite and pleasant, but going mad.

He was fixated upon improving the world globally. I don't know whether he were going mad because he wanted somehow to improve the world globally, or were obsessively focussed upon improving the world globally because he was going mad; my guess would be that the aspiration and the madness were each feeding upon the other. In any case, he was writing and drawing chaotically with bright marker on loose sheets of paper, and trying to engage random people in his efforts to figure-out How to Save the World. I was a random person.

I sometimes talk to madmen. No less or more comes out of my conversations with them than those with most other people. In this case, I wasn't much occupied at the time with anything else but eating.

He found talking with me to be discouraging. It's not that I don't think that the world might be saved, or that I might do something towards that end. It's that I think that most people, mad or otherwise and including him, fundamentally misconceive the nature of the problem and the potential methods of solution. The Good isn't subject to arithmetic; concern for others is no guarantee against actions that produce horrific outcomes; the meek are capable of over-estimating what can typically be done and thence what they can do; and any attempt to call a convention of the best-and-brightest in each field would attract a different sort (or none at all).

He took his madness to a different table.

When a charismatic leader dies aburptly while still in power, his or her supporters quickly begin building a mythology of what would have been accomplished had he or she lived. That is why, for example, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was and largely is so highly regarded; in the minds of his admirers, he would have accomplished wonderful things in the last five years of a two-term Presidential Administration, regardless of what one otherwise makes of its first thousand days.

The mythological episode of such leadership is treated as having the same standing for purposes of comparison as does historical fact. When an opponent tries to construct an argument founded on logic and general fact against policies associated with that leader, supporters treat the mythology as if it is a disproof by counter-example. What's really happening then is that Faith is being mistaken for empirical data.

Even before the dire physical ailments of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías became apparent, his base of supporters had discernibly eroded as the consequences of substituting administration for markets became harder not to see in the specific experience of Venezuela and as, yet again, a socialist regime increasingly moved to forceably silence critics rather than to meet their criticism in open debate. But, if Chávez were to die, then those concerns would be played-down; and, no matter what happened in Venezuela after his death, a mythology would be constructed about how Chávez would, after all, have brought-about a Golden Age for Venezuela, for large parts of Latin America, perhaps for the Third World more generally. In effect, the Hugo Chávez Who Would Have Lived would be treated as-if an empirical disproof of any argument against sorts of socialism that would come to be associated with Chávez.

The world would be better-off without belief in that mythological Chávez. For the long-run sake of the world, I've been hoping that Chávez would bounce-back, retake the helm, and continue to run Venezuela into the ground. (I'd agree that having Venezuela run into the ground even once would be awful, but having it and other nations run into the ground repeatedly by a string of imitators seems worse. And, if Chávez were to die, one imagines that his successors would run Venezuela into the ground anyway.)

Well, it seems that Chávez is not going to bounce-back; perhaps he's going to die. But, if so, he's taking a rather long time about it. And, at least, pretty much anything short of suddenly dying undermines the effectiveness of mythologizing. That's not how it would work if this mythologizing were rational — the Leader Who Would Have Been would have moved across the stage every bit as heroically if not for senile dementia or if not for a crippling stroke as he or she would have if not for an assassin's bullet. But the matter is in the first place very much one of irrational fantasizing. Making matters worse for mythologizers of Chávez, his lieutenants, jockeying for as much power as they might have in any case, insist that Chávez is still calling the important shots; his departure would thus be less sharply defined.

Even if Chávez bounces-back rather completely, we'll still get some mythologizing — just as there will be a mythology of what President Obama Would Have Done had he had an deferential majority in Congress for eight years — but the world may be spared the sort of mythology that would have developed had Chávez died on the operating table on 11 December.

In 1980, I had two or three brief encounters with David Koch.

Yes, that David Koch — David Hamilton Koch, younger of the much maligned Koch brothers.

Koch was on the Libertarian Party ticket as the Vice-Presidential candidate. He was there because his candidacy precluded any statutory limit on how much he might donate to the campaign.[1]

One of these encounters was at a meet-and-greet sort of event for Candidate Koch, in Columbus, Ohio. The last was on the main campus of the Ohio State University, where he delivered a speech and then took questions from the audience. There might have been one other encounter that I've forgot. In any case, at the last encounter, he and his entourage got rather angry with me.

In 1980, the brothers Koch were not the bogey-men of the political left that they have become to-day. Their father, Fred C. Koch had been on the radar of those who lay awake at night in the '50s and in the '60s, fearful of what was then called the radical right. Fred Chase Koch, a founding member of the John Birch Society, was a wealthy and vociferous advocate of a view that United States policy, domestic and foreign, was largely driven by a Communist conspiracy, and he very much tended to reaction against change, rather than to seeing any of the social and political developments of the 20th Century as genuine advances. But Fred C. Koch, and people like him, were largely forgotten by 1980. Moreover, Charles and David had gone down a libertarian path, making them seem less threatening. Those in the libertarian movement were aware of the Kochs largely because they supplied much of the funding for the Cato Institute.[2] The business world was aware of the Kochs because the company that their father had founded was amongst the world's largest of those whose stock was not offered to the public. And that was about it.

At the meet-and-greet event, David Koch came across both as quite likable and, well, as a bit of a dork — somewhat socially awkwardly. And, no, I didn't get him angry by later calling him a dork. He and others got angry in response to a different assertion, framed as a question.

During the question-and-answer part of Mr Koch's appearance at Ohio State, someone asked him if he'd be up for another run in 1984. His reply was to the effect that he was really enjoying the present effort, and would be positively inclined to being on the ticket again. This response, which I took to be perfectly sincere, made me cringe. And so I raised my hand. I don't remember my exact words — it has, after all, been more than 32 years — but they were to this effect:

It was incredibly generous of you to agree to be on the ticket for this election, and to give as much of your money as you have; but don't you fear that, if you run again in 1984, you will be seen as having bought the party?

Koch, who gave some sort of dismissal (again, I don't remember exactly what), was visibly angry. There were grumblings from other parts of the room. Later, I was told that people (who never confronted me) had expressed their dismay at what I'd said, as if I'd insulted Koch. Which is, of course, not what I'd done. What I'd done was to warn him of how his efforts would be construed.

Well, David Koch didn't run again in 1984. Not because he took my warning to heart, but because the Libertarian Party Presidential campaign of 1980 was largely a waste of the money and effort that he and others had expended; it received far fewer votes than promised.[3] But he and Charles didn't stop contributing to political causes. And the claim has been made that they have bought those organizations and individuals to whom the Koch's have provided funding. The Kochs have been demonized, and the demonization has been used to depict those causes as villainous devices. Any rational calculation of the results of a contribution by the Kochs must account for this effect. And so, in spite of the fact that David Koch didn't run again in 1984, events have illustrated, in specific application to David Koch, the dynamic that underlay the point that I made in 1980.

Except for an episode of crusading against the prostitution of children, I withdrew from political activism in 1981. And, as an economist, I'd rather wrestle with abiding questions of fundamental theory than involve myself in the research of policy think-tanks. So I doubt that I'll ever meet Mr Koch again. And it's unlikely that, after more than 32 years, Mr Koch even remembers that moment. But, if I did talk with him again, I'd be tempted to say I told you so, … you dork!

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[1] Campaign finance laws run smack into First Amendment protections of freedom of expression. A right to freedom of expression is no more or less than a right to use one's resources without constraints in response to the expressive content (as such) of the use. Lawyerly distinctions have been drawn amongst the ways that one might use resources to convey the political ideas that one supports, but these are always going to be logically incoherent. And, in the case of the law in 1980 (as still to-day), the absurdity of claiming that there were no infringement in limiting spending of one's own money on one's own campaign was too palpable for such censorship to be imposed.

[2] The Cato Institute is often characterized as itself libertarian, but the word libertarian is best reserved for a more thorough-going (classical) liberalism than that practiced by the Institute.

[3] The mainstream media did what it could to under-mine that campaign, first attempting to displace the LP with Barry Commoner and then, when that didn't take, actively recruiting John Anderson to run as the third candidate. Those who managed the LP campaign had banked pretty much everything on the expectation that the only Presidential candidates on all state ballots would be President Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the Libertarian, Ed Clark. There was no planning for the inevitability that the rules would be waived in order to get Anderson on nearly all state ballots. And the Libertarian message had been muddled to make it more appealing to moderates, and stayed muddled even after Anderson was positioned to take those votes.

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.

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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.

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[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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

On 24 December, the Stratfor computer site was learned to be hacked; e.mail, e.mail addresses, and credit-card information were stolen. Initially, Anonymous couldn't agree within itself whether its members were responsible, but the deniers fell silent.

The credit-card information was used to make charitable donations, which subsequently had to be returned (at a net loss) by the charities. Those whose e.mail addresses were stolen had them publicly dumped (and thus made available to spammers), and were subjected to hoax mailings by Anonymous.

And we were told that the e.mail itself would be released, so that the world could see that Stratfor were really a malevolent force, which revelation would ostensibly justify the hacking.

After seven weeks, the e.mail that was supposed to expose the wickedness of Stratfor has not been released. There's more than one possible explanation. Perhaps the responsible members of Anonymous have obscure but compelling reasons to release the information all-at-once, and to organize it before doing so. Perhaps these members have been found and whisked-off to secret internment camps, along with anyone who might have reported their disappearances. Or perhaps the e.mail would reveal no more than that Stratfor communicates off-the-record with sources, some of whom could (reasonably or otherwise) be regarded as villains, and perhaps other members of Anonymous noted that almost any reporting and news-analysis service does the same thing, so that Anonymous would appear to subvert freedom of the press.

(I kinda favor that third explanation. Like many members of the Occupation Movement — who also like to claim the prerogatives but duck the responsibilities of association, and to wear Guy Fawkes masks and fantasize about being Vs — many members of Anonymous seem inclined to try to silence those whose views they find greatly disagreeable, but only so long as these members aren't made to recognize that they're engaged in censorship. [Up-Date (2012:02/27): It has now been announced that the e.mail is being released in coöperation with WikiLeaks.])

But, whatever may be the reason, the e.mail has not been released, and that failure or delay is itself a news story — which story you've not read in the Times (of London, of New York, or of Los Angeles) nor heard from the major broadcasters. Possibly that's because they're such lack-wits that it hasn't occurred to any of them that there's a story here. I rather suspect, however, that it's because they're scared. A group such as Anonymous could take-down pretty much any of these news services just as they did Stratfor.