American Vandal

I have just watched the first season* of “American Vandal”—another proof that it is possible to do something original and worth watching even today, and that there is no need to just dust of every old franchise**, hoping that the “brand value” outweighs the lack of quality and originality.

*Whether this terminology reflects reality remains to be seen. From the closed character, I suspect that the series will remain at one season, and considering its shortness, it might be better labeled as a “mini-series”.

**Something I have spoken negatively of in the past, e.g. in [1].

It is not the best made series ever—not even close. However, it does bring something new to the table, and it does so while giving food for thought. This most notably in the area of due process, but also concerning privacy, the benefits and dangers of social media, press ethics, and organizations sweeping their problems under the rug—all areas where I have considerable concerns about current developments. (Cf. a number of older posts.) Some of these areas are discussed below.

!!!Here be spoilers!!!

A particular disturbing part, obviously, is how one character, Dylan, was originally expelled from school based on scant* evidence, by an entity that served as judge, jury, and prosecutor in one, and how his “conviction” was almost a foregone conclusion based on his previous behavior**. While this example is fictional, it does reflect common practices in the U.S., where there, for instance, have been cases of colleges expelling people under similar circumstances, often in word-against-word situations, using “preponderance of evidence” (or another too weak standard). Considering the effects of a college*** expulsion and the damage than can accrue through e.g. social media and reputation damage in today’s world, the consequences are potentially horrifying—often far worse than the alleged crime or even “crime”. When it comes to actual crimes****, it is vital that proceedings follow a level of due process, rights of the accused, whatnot, that is comparable to that of a real criminal trial—better yet, leave this to the actual justice system, and then make decisions, e.g. regarding expulsions, based on what the results of the justice system were. Even when no crime is present (e.g. with a pure behavioral matter), it is vital that the (real or virtual) roles of judge, jury, and prosecutor are sufficiently separated from each other, and that the “accused” is given sufficient opportunity to defend himself.

*The only evidence against him that was not, at best, circumstantial was a testimony by a witness, which was offset by conflicting testimony by an alibi giver. Neither witness had any obviously superior credibility.

**Dylan was a highly problematic student, and I do not rule out that his past behavior might have been enough for an expulsion. However, he was, as eventually transpired, innocent of the vandalism for which he actually was expelled.

***However, note that the series deals with a high-school expulsion. This is bad enough, but less disastrous both because there are more opportunities to gain back ground and (usually far, far) less money invested at the particular school. To boot, people who are expelled from high-school are rarely among those likely to do well in college, implying that the career effect is considerably smaller: We are still typically talking unemployment and/or low-wage, dead-end jobs, considering the low value of a modern high-school diploma.

****As was the case here, specifically the spray painting of 27 cars with stylized penises.

A somewhat tricky question in the series is that of false accusations—paralleling the considerable problems in the real world with especially, rape, child-abuse, and domestic-violence accusations: While Dylan was originally expelled and facing (real) criminal and/or civil charges*, the “witness for the prosecution”**, who seemed*** to have lied outright, did not face such repercussions—his sole fear being a beating from Dylan. It is possible that any attempt at action against him would eventually have failed due to problems of proving intent; however, it appears that an attempt was not even made. Similarly, in the real world, women who make false rape accusations are often let go with a slap on the wrist, while their victims could have faced many years in jail—and often see their lives ruined even when acquitted. Under such circumstances, there is a severe risk that the system is abused e.g. to maliciously hurt personal enemies who have not committed a crime.

*He was proved innocent by video evidence before the real trial in the real justice system started.

**Whether he should be considered the accuser or just a witness can be disputed, but from the details of the show, the difference is likely uninteresting for the current discussion. (However, in most other cases, witness and accuser are quite different things.)

***At least for some time: A later hypothesis involved a suspect with some similarity in looks, and assuming, as was claimed, that the perpetrator wore a hood, an honest mistake is conceivable. However, this hypothesis only arose some time after the “acquittal”, was not necessarily presented to the school, and certainly remained a hypothesis. To boot, the witness had originally spoken with considerable certainty. (I do not recall the exact formulations used, but it was on the level of “I saw Dylan do it”—not e.g. “I saw who did it; he looked like Dylan”.

As a counter-point, we have the question of witness pressure: The “witness for the prosecution” later spoke of having been under a lot of pressure to say the right things. If that was the case, and if he modified his statements to comply with the pressure, someone of his age should be seen in a more forgiving light. However, we then have to condemn the proceedings even more: Witnesses are unreliable enough as it is and when they additionally face pressure to give the “right” answers, testimony is worth very little. It is vital that witnesses are induced to say what they actually remember—not directly or indirectly moved to say what the prosecution wants to hear. Here we again see the importance of dividing the roles of the “court” appropriately, so that the prosecution is neither judge nor jury. Further, where there is a prosecutor to exert pressure on witnesses, there must be a defender to press back. In this specific case, we had the additional complication that the witness was another student, and therefore in a dependent role visa vi the school staff making the decisions, implying that thoughts like “I must keep Mrs. X happy, or she might give me a poor grade!” could have crossed his mind. Such problems could have been alleviated by hiring external specialists to handle the investigation and decision. Consider as comparison a real trial where a witness is employed as a house-keeper by the DA handling the case…

The problem of organizations sweeping their problems under the rug, has probably not featured in my previous writings to any notable degree. A few words on the topic*: There are many types of problems that can arise when there is too little distance, objectivity, self-criticism, whatnot, present in how an organization deals with complaints and internal problems. The most obvious is that it might be so keen on preserving its imagine towards the outside world that it deliberately does not address problems in the appropriate manner. However, we also have to consider constellations like a superior receiving a complaint about an employee with whom he has developed a friendship, an investigative board containing people with personal ties, a biased treatment due to the feeling that that the target of a complaint is “one of us” and the complainer is “one of them”, the target of the complaint being able to influence the proceedings through inside connections (e.g. through giving someone false verbal information that the complainer never even knows of, let alone has an opportunity to refute), etc.

*Since I am filling a deficit, I will remain mostly abstract. If we look at events in the series, I can point to e.g. the illegal failure to upload certain complaint acts to a public server, an attempt to shut-down an independent investigation/documentary, when it threatened to put the school and/or some staff members in a poor light, suspensions (detentions?) being handed out for potentially (depending on interpretation) having critized the principal, …

A particular disastrous example from my personal experiences, where problems were almost guaranteed and remedies highly unlikely due to a massive conflict of interest: Being faced with a blatant breach of contract, I simultaneously sent a bill to the perpetrator and contacted its trade association with a complaint and a request for intervention. In a horribly misguided system, this trade association on the one hand provided arbitration, certifications of quality, and similar, on the other legal service to its members. The result was that the perpetrator took the bill, sent it to the legal branch of the trade association, which immediately gave the opinion that the bill was void and all related claims baseless*—and thereby tied the hands of the rest of the organization with regard to my complaint and any chance of intervention—if another branch had given support to my complaint, it could have caused severe credibility problems for the legal branch, had I taken legal action to receive payment.

*Beware that such “opinions”, by their very nature, have no actual legal value, give little information on the true estimation of the involved lawyers, and cannot, seeing that the lawyers at this juncture only know a fraction of the information, be a complete legal evaluation. To act in his client’s best interest, a lawyer will have to officially side with said client in a near blanket manner, even when the facts at hand, relevant law, and his actual opinion would go in the other direction. There are cases where the situation is so clear, that he is forced to chose another first official stance than a (real or metaphorical) “not guilty”; however, this is rare. The result is that irrespective of how well or poorly founded the complaining party’s claims are, the legal branch would have started with a blanket rejection, and the hands of the trade association would be tied. The complaining party is, almost by necessity, wasting time by approaching such a trade association.

Correspondingly, any organization who wants its complaint management to be taken seriously, must take steps to minimize such problems (a complete prevention is likely not possible). This could include e.g. making sure that there is a special complaints branch, that supervisors/investigators/whatnot with too strong ties to the target of the complaint recuse themselves, that external helpers are brought in (especially when larger amounts of money are concerned, the heads of the organization are involved, or the matter is otherwise unusually important), … While the presumption of innocence must be preserved in terms of treatment and consequences, the potential guilt must also be kept very clearly in mind during any investigation.

(A more specialized post on the misbehavior of German governmental institutions and their blanket rejection of any type of criticism might follow, especially with an eye on the IRS, the incompetence of which is currently again costing me a load of time. It appears to be a universal law that the more incompetent an organization is, the less willing it is to accept criticism.)

A few words on the final scenes of the series:
After his acquittal, Dylan goes through a brief high and then faces repeated disappointments, including that a very hostile* teacher, who had pushed heavily against him, and even (very incorrectly) attributed the crime as directed mainly against her, personally, failed to give the type of apology that he had pictured. He now misguidedly does commit an act of vandalism against her, by painting a penis on her drive-way.

*Her hostility is not unreasonable, considering their previous history.

It follows a brief sequence on how the expectations of others, the roles we have been pushed into, and similar, can lead to poor decisions, even deliberate attempts to fulfill negative expectations—Dylan thought that others saw him as a villain and correspondingly behaved like a villain. While this is likely only partially true, there are at least two thought-worthy aspects to this issue. Firstly, that we should be careful with our expectations of others and the effects they can, at least sometimes, have. Secondly, that we should beware of potential influence from others through expectations, that we should deliberately counter such expectations (at least when negative), and that we ultimately must take responsibility for our own actions, even if they arose under such influence.

In a disturbing parallel to a recently discussed real case, it is claimed that the police brought him away in handcuffs in the middle of the night, over something as trivial* as a this. Now, I do not know whether this could have happened in the real world; however, I re-iterate how important it is that law enforcement act in proportion to the crime. Not only could this easily have waited until the following morning, it might even have been prudent to just ask him to come to the station at a given time. While I do not agree with the practice of some law enforcements** of letting all crimes below a certain level just slide, this is one case where the main issue might even be considered a civil matter between the two: He pays damages, apologizes, promises to never do it again, and we call it a day.

*To be contrasted with the original vandalism, were a figure of a hundred thousand dollars of damages was mentioned. In the act he actually committed, the cost of cleaning or repairing the drive-way is unlikely to exceed a few hundred dollars, possibly being far smaller.

**Including, in my impression, the German police.

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A few observations around an open fly

This Saturday, I spent close to an hour walking around Wuppertal with my fly accidentally open. A few observations:

1. This is a good example of how much of what we do in daily life is run on autopilot: This would normally never happen, because I have an ingrained, unconscious, unthinking routine that takes care of the steps involved in putting on a pair of trousers. That day, however, I had just switched to a pair of newly washed and dried trousers, which implied several extra steps to fill my pockets with keys and whatnots, and to put on my belt. This brought me out of my routine, and I must unwittingly have skipped the important step of zipping the fly.

   Another good example is making coffee: My normal (ingrained, unconscious, unthinking) routine is to put water into the machine, add the coffee grounds, start the machine.* On very rare occasions, I put the grounds in first—and almost invariably forget to put in the water at all before starting the machine. The ingrained sequence is that the start follows the grounds, and this appears to take precedence over even a conscious thought or decision from twenty seconds earlier.

   *For simplicity, a number of detail steps, like “open the lid”, “find a filter”, are left out.

   There is a famous experiment or experiment family with insects, where an insect is fooled into again and again performing the same set of steps by the researcher’s repeated restoration of an initial condition—even when this restoration did not necessitate a repetition by the insect. Humans are possibly not that different: They, unlike the insect, would be able to discover that they were being strung along after one or two iterations, but, given the right constellation, most of us might be fooled into at least one unnecessary repetition of such an “autopilot task”.*

   *Generally, I suspect that many examples of “stupid” animal behavior give too much credit to humans, at least if the abstraction level is increased a little. For instance, documentaries about bees sometimes point out that bee “security” is only active at the entrances to a hive, and that hostiles/strangers/… that have already entered the hive are usually left alone (and “ha, ha, stupid bees”)—but how does that differ from security in most office buildings? Or take an intelligence test to differ between bright and dumb dogs: Will the dog keep standing next to a steak (or whatnot) with a pesky fence between the two—or will it run away from the steak, through the gate twenty feet away, and back to the steak on the other side of the fence? Few humans would fail this test with a literal fence, but how about a more metaphorical one? What if the best way to solve a problem is to retreat from one promising-but-ultimately-futile road and try something else? What if the best way to make a certain career advancement is to leave the current employer? Etc.

2. There was a surprising lack of reaction: Except a few odd looks that only carried significance after I had learned of my faux-pas, there was no indication that something was amiss until about an hour into my walk, when a passer-by made a brief, barely audible comment: No friendly caution, no pointing and laughing children, no old lady who tried to beat me up with her cane, …

   This lack of reaction included a teenage girl who struck up a short, apparently random conversation—and who failed to even hint at something being wrong.

3. Women are weird: Here we have a teenage girl striking up a random conversation with a man old enough to be her father, who is severely behind on his shaving, who is sweating from the hot weather and brisk tempo—and who has his fly open.

   Why?!?*

   *Even someone very outgoing and friendly, who would normally engage strangers in conversation for no actual reason (in it self a strange behavior to me), really should think twice about such an approach. I would certainly have advised my (hypothetical) teenage daughter against it. It is obviously possible that she started the conversation because she wanted to bring the problem to my attention, and that she then found it too embarrassing. On the other hand, through her not mentioning it, she ran the risk of coming across like a complete weirdo/pervert/freak/… to her near-by friends—which seems much more embarrassing to me.

   Even in my forties, I sometimes find the behavior of women incomprehensible. For instance, during another walk a few weeks ago, a woman asked me the German equivalent of “Can you call?”—not “Can you call X for me?”, not “Can you call me to check whether my phone is working?”, not “Do you have reception?”, not “Why haven’t you called me yet?”*, or any other somewhat reasonable question. When I asked what she meant, the answer amounted to something along the lines of “Like, you know, call?”—both times with a too “native” pronunciation to allow “German as a second language” as an explanation, both times with not the slightest hint of e.g. being drunk. (Because I had no phone on me, making her intents academic, I did not inquire further.)

   *Assuming a mistaken identity: I have no recollection of ever even meeting her before.

4. Thank God for underwear…

Abuse of “they” as a generic singular

Preamble:
I had gathered ideas and individual paragraphs for this post for a few weeks without actually getting to the point of writing it. In order to finally get it done today, I have pushed quite a lot of what should or could have been parts of the integrated text into detached excursions at the end of the text and made some other compromises in terms of structure and contents.

One of the greatest annoyances in current English is the growing* tendency to abuse “they” as a generic third-person singular (including secondary forms, notably “their”). Below I will discuss some of the reasons why this abuse is a bad idea and give alternatives for those who (misguided, naive of the history of English, and/or unable to understand the abstractness of a language) oppose to use of “he” in the same role. An older article on “gender-neutral language” covers some other aspects, usually on a more abstract level (and some of the same ground; however, I have tried not to be too duplicative). Some other articles, including one on language change, etc., might also be of interest in context.

*While this has a fairly long history, I regularly saw people being corrected for committing this error even some five or ten years ago. To boot, cf. below, there are strong reasons to suspect that the main motivation has changed from simple ignorance or sloppiness to a deliberate abuse for PC reasons.

Below, I will largely discuss practical aspects. Before I do so, I am going to make a stand and call this abuse (when done for PC reasons) outright offensive.* It offends me, and it should offend anyone who cares about language and anyone who opposes political manipulation through newspeak. More: This is not just a question of good language or newspeak. The abuse of “they” is also a direct insult towards significant parts of the population, who are implicitly told that they are that easy to manipulate, that they and their own opinions matter so little that they deserve such manipulation, and that they need to be protected from the imaginary evils of “gendered language”. Moreover, this abuse is** often dehumanizing and deinvidualizing, in a manner disturbingly similar to what took place in the dystopian novella “Anthem”.

*I am normally very careful when it comes to words like “offensive”—unlike the PC crowd I actually understand the aspects of subjectiveness involved and how misguided such argumentation usually is. However, since “offensiveness” is used by them in such a systematic and, mostly, irrational and unjustifiable manner, I will not hold back in this case.

**At least if we were to apply PC “logic” in reverse, which, again, is something that I would likely not do, had the PC crowd not gone to their extreme excesses.

Now, discounting the evils of PC abuse, per se, the worst thing about abusing “they” is the risk of entirely unnecessary confusion and misunderstandings*: In a very high proportion of the cases I encounter, additional context or even guesswork is needed to connect “they” with the right entity/-ies; often this choice is contrary to what would be grammatically expected; occasionally there is so much ambiguity that it is impossible to be certain what was meant. Consider something like “My friend went with Jack and Jill to see their parents”: Unless they are all siblings (or went to see multiple sets of parents), this really must mean that they went to see the parents of Jack and Jill; however, in a modern PC text, it could just as easily be the friend’s parents. Or take something like “Monopoly is played by two to six players, one of which is the bank. They [the `bank’] handle most of the money.”: Without already knowing the rules, the second sentence is impossible to understand when “they” is abused (and stating something untrue when it is used correctly).

*There are situations where ambiguities can arise even when using correct grammar, especially with a sloppy author/speaker; however, the proportion is considerably lower, the probability that the ambiguities are resolved through context is higher, and the added confusion caused by the uncertainty whether a given author/speaker abuses “they” is absent. (Note that the argument that “if everyone spoke PC this would not be a problem” is flawed through failing to consider the great number of existing texts as well as the necessarily different adoption rates in different countries and generations.)

A few days ago, I encountered a particularly weird example, in the form of an error message, when I was trying to clean-up unnecessary groups and users* on my computer:

*In Unix-like systems, “users” (accounts) can be assigned “groups”. With extremely few exceptions, every user should correspond to at most one physical user. (Some users are purely technical and do not have any physical user at all.) A group, however, can be assigned to arbitrarily many users and, by implication, arbitrarily many physical users. As a special case, it is common for every user to be a member, often the sole member, of a group with the same name as the user name. Below, this is the case for the user “gnats”.

/usr/sbin/delgroup: `gnats’ still has `gnats’ as their primary group!

Here it is impossible to delete the group “gnats”, because the user “gnats” belongs to this group; however, this fact is obscured through the incompetent error message that uses “their”, giving the impression that the group is meant… In many cases, say with the user “gnats” and the group “audio”, this would not have been the end of the world, but when the names coincide, it is a horror, and interpretation requires more knowledge about the internals of the system than most modern users will have. This example is the more idiotic, because the pronoun is entirely unnecessary: “[…] as primary group!” would have done just fine. Even given that a pronoun was wanted, “its” would be the obvious first choice to someone even semi-literate, seeing that the user “gnats” is an obvious it*—regardless of whether the physical** user behind it is a he or a she.

*Similarly, a bank account remains an “it”, regardless of the sex of the account owner.

**As case has it, “gnats” is one of the users that do not have a physical user at all (cf. above footnote), making “it” the more indisputable.

The use of “their” instead of “its” is just one example of the many perverted abuses that occur. A very similar case is using “they” instead of “it” for an animal*. Mixing “one” and “they” is yet another (e.g. “one should always do their duty”, which would only be correct if “their” refers to some people other than the “one” ). A particular extreme perversion is using “they” when the sex of the person involved is actually known (or a necessity from context), as e.g. in “my friend liked the movie; they want to see it again”.**

*Whether “it” is more logical than “he”/“she” for an animal can be disputed, but it is the established rule. Going with “they” over “it” gives only disadvantages. (Even the pseudo-advantage of “gender neutrality” does not apply, because “it” already had that covered.)

**As aside, there might be some PC-extremists that actually deliberately use such formulations, because they see every sign of sex (race, nationality, religion, …) as not only irrelevant in any context, but as outright harmful, because “it could strengthen stereotypes”, or similar. Not only would this be a fanaticism that goes beyond anything defensible, it also severely damages communications: Such information is important in very many contexts, because these characteristics do have an effect in these contexts. (And it is certainly not for one party do selectively decide which of these contexts are relevant and which not.) For instance, if someone cries, the typical implications for a male and a female (or a child and an adult) are very different. Ditto, if a catholic and a protestant marriage is terminated. Etc.

Assuming that someone absolutely does not want to use “he”, there is still no need to abuse “they”. Alternatives include:*

*What alternatives are usable when can depend on the specifics of the individual case. I can, however, not recall one single abuse that could not be resolved better in at least one way. Note that I have not included variations like “he or she” or “(s)he” in the below. While these are better than “they”, and can certainly be used, they are also fairly clumsy and the below works without such clumsiness. (I have no sympathies at all for solutions like using “he” in odd-numbered chapters and “she” in even-numbered ones. They bring little value; do not solve the underlying problem, be it real or imagined; and, frankly, strike me as childish.)

1. Use a strict plural through-out, e.g. by replacing “everyone who wants to come should bring their own beverages” with “those who want to come should bring their own beverages”.
2. Using “one” (but, cf. above, doing it properly!), e.g. by replacing “everyone should be true to themself” with “one should be true to oneself”.
3. Similarly, rarely* using “you”, e.g. by having “you should be true to yourself” as the replacement in the previous item.

   *Cf. another older article why “you” is usually best avoided (for completely different reasons).

4. Using “who” or another relative pronoun, e.g. by replacing “My friend is nice. They came to help me.” with “my friend, who came to help me, is nice”.*

   *But in this specific example, the sex is known and it would be better yet to use “he” or “she” as appropriate. This applies equally in any other examples where the sex is known.

5. Avoiding the pronoun altogether, e.g. by replacing “every student should bring their chosen book” with “every student should bring a chosen book”, or “someone asked me to describe the painting to them” with “someone asked me to describe the painting”.
6. Using the passive, e.g. by replacing “they* brought the horses back to the stable” with “the horses were brought back to the stable”. (If there is fear of information loss, we could append a suitable “by X” at the end of the replacement, just making sure that “X” is not “them”.)

   *Assuming that this is intended as a singular. If “they” is actually used for a plural, it is perfectly fine.

7. In many cases, it is possible to use either “he” or “she” as a semi-generic singular from context. For instance, when generalizing based or semi-based on a man/woman, “he”/“she” can often be used accordingly without losing much genericness and without upsetting any but the most extremist of the PC crowd. For instance, “If a beginner like you cannot succeed, they should still try.” would be better as (male counter-part) “[…], he […]” resp. (female counter-part) “[…], she […]”.

   (Of course, when all of those we generalize to belong to a single sex, the appropriate of “he” and “she” should be used, analogously to the Thalidomide example below.)

Excursion on “it” vs. “they”:
Using “it” rather than “they” (as a replacement for “he”) would have made much more sense, seeing that it actually is a singular and that it actually is in the neutral gender*. Many of the arguments against “they” would still apply, but if someone really, really wanted to use an existing word as a replacement, “it” really is the obvious choice. I could have had some understanding and sympathy for “it”, but “they” is not just idiotic—it is obviously idiotic.

*“They” has some (all?) characteristics of a neutral gender in English, but whether it actually is one is partly depending on perspective. In English, it might be better to consider it a mix-gender form; in other languages, there might be different words for a third-person plural depending on the grammatical genders of the group members; whatnot.

The somewhat similar (but off-topic) question of whether to use “it” or “they” for e.g. a team, a company, or a band is less clear-cut. I would weakly recommend “it” as the usually more logical alternative, as well as the alternative less likely to cause confusion; however, in some cases “they” can be better, and I probably use “they” more often in my own practical use.

Excursion on “everyone”, etc.:
Errors that originate in ignorance or sloppiness are far more tolerable than those that originate from PC abuse. The most common (relating to “they”) is probably to take “everyone” to be a grammatical plural (logically, it often is; grammatically, never), resulting in sentences like “everyone were happy with their choices”, which is almost OK and unlikely to cause confusion considerably more often than a strictly correct sentence. In contrast, a PC abuse would result in “everyone was happy with their choice”, which is ripe with possibility for misunderstanding.

Excursion on PC language in general:
It is not uncommon that other attempts to “be PC” or “gender-neutral” in language cause easily avoidable problems. For instance, parallel to writing this post I skimmed the Wikipedia article on Thalidomide, which among other claims contained “Thalidomide should not be used by people who are breast feeding or pregnant, trying to conceive a child, or cannot or will not follow the risk management program to prevent pregnancies.”—leaving me severely confused. Obviously, if we look at “breast feeding or pregnant”, this still necessarily* refers only to women**—but what about the rest of the sentence? If a man tries to conceive a child with his wife, does he too have to stay clear of Thalidomide?*** If the author of the sentence had left political correctness (and/or sloppiness) at home and spoken of “women” instead of “people” where only women were concerned, and then of “people” where both sexes were concerned, there would have been no problem present. This is the more serious, as such pages will inevitably be used for medical consultation from time to time—no matter how much their unsuitability for such purposes is stressed.

*There are rare cases of men lactating, but I have never even heard of this being used for breast feeding. If it has happened, it is too extraordinarily rare to warrant consideration here.

**Implying that speaking of “people” would be at best misguided and unnecessary, even for this first part. However, since no actual confusion or miscommunication is likely to result, this alone would be forgivable.

***Later parts of the page make clear, very contrary to my expectations, that men are included, “as the drug can be transmitted in sperm”. (I still suspect, however, that the risks are smaller for men than women, due to the smaller exposure from the fetus point of view.)

Excursion on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia, which used to be exemplary in its use of language (and strong in other “encyclopedic” characteristics) has degenerated severely over the years, with abuse of “they” being near ubiquitous. Unfortunately, other language problems are quite common; unfortunately other PC problems are quite common, including that an entirely disproportionate number of articles have a section of feminism, the feminist take on the topic, the topic’s relation to feminism, whatnot, somewhere—even when there is no particular relevance to or of feminism. (Including e.g. many articles on films with a section on how the film is interpreted using “feminist” film analysis.)

Excursion on duty to correctness:
Human acquisition and development of language is to a large part imitative. When people around us use incorrect language, there is a considerable risk, especially with young people, that the errors will be infective. For this reason, it could possibly be argued that we have duty to be as correct as possible (within the borders of our own abilities). When it comes to e.g. teachers, TV, news papers, … I would speak of a definite such duty: They have the opportunity to affect and, possibly, infect so many people that it is absurd to be sloppy, especially seeing that many of them have the resources to use professional checkers, e.g. copy editors. (Of course, sadly, these also have other duties like proper research, “fairness in reporting”, and whatnot, that are neglected disturbingly often.)

Excursion on logic of language:
Much of language is illogical or arbitrary, or seems to be so, because of remnants of long-forgotten and no longer used rules; however, much of it is also quite logical and a great shame today is that so many people are so unable to see patterns, rules, consequences, whatnot, that should be obvious.* Failing to keep numbers consistent is one example. Others include absurdities like “fast speed”, “I could care less”, “in the same … with …”, “try and”. That someone slips up on occasion is nothing to be ashamed of—I do too**. However, there are very many whose language is riddled with such errors, and there appear to be a very strong correlations between such errors and low intelligence, poor education, and simply not giving a damn.

*Not to be confused with the many language errors that arise from e.g. not remembering the spelling of a certain word, having misunderstood what a word means, not knowing the right grammatical rule, … These are usually easier to forgive, being signals of lack of knowledge rather than inability to think. Other classes of errors not included are simple slips of the pen/keyboard and deliberate violations, say the inexcusable practice of abusing full stops to keep the nominal length of a sentence down, even at the cost of both hacking the sentence to pieces that cannot stand alone and making it harder to understand.

**I have a particular weak spot for words that sound similar, e.g. “to”, “too”, and (occasionally) “two”: Even being perfectly aware of which is the correct in a given context, I sometimes pick the wrong one through some weird automatism. The difference between a plural and a possessive “s”-suffix is another frequent obstacle.

Judging old civilizations

In my impression, ancient civilizations*, cultures, and whatnots, are to a large degree judged positively by the masses because of an ability to work and move stones and/or erect large buildings, monuments, or similar, be it the ancient Egyptians, Olmecs, Toltecs, or any number of others.

*I will go with “civilization” as a catch-all below, even at the risk of being imprecise, and even when implying something normally considered pre-civilization. (I originally went with “culture” as the catch-all, but since I still found myself again and again using “civilization”, I revised the decision.)

However, the ability to merely move large stones has been shown so often in human history and pre-history, even by comparatively primitive groups, that it borders on uselessness as a criterion: Building Stonehenge was no small accomplishment, but it was more a matter of brute force than engineering. The “walking” moai on Easter Island used a very clever trick, but also relied more on brute force than engineering—and the trick might have required as little as one very clever guy with a bright idea.

Similarly, cutting stones, working stones, etc., requires* surprisingly little in terms of technology, and can be accomplished with hard work, primitive tools, and a few tricks.

*To do at all, even at a relatively large scale; however, better technology can obviously speed up the process enormously.

To boot, we have to keep in mind that many of these civilizations either were neolithic (“late stone-age”) or had a greater ability to draw on neolithic skills and knowledge than later civilizations, implying that they had a head-start relative, say, a random 21st-century engineer in the area of stone work. Specific new skills, techniques, whatnot developed by these civilizations are definitely laudable, but not very surprising: Spend a few hundred years building walls, temples, pyramids and relevant innovation is virtually unavoidable—the inborn faculties of humans were at least approximately the same as today even a few thousand years ago.

Stone-work, monumental or otherwise, alone proves very little. In many ways, it boils down to the observation that the 19th-century French could have built the worlds largest pyramid, had they really wanted to—but that the ancient Egyptians could never have built the Eiffel Tower. The level of engineering, materials science, precision of manufacture, …, necessary for the latter is on a very different level from the former. (Similarly, the 19th-century French could never have built the computer I am writing on right now.) Indeed, even building a tower of the Eiffel Tower’s height is only half the feat—the other half is doing it with so little material and so fast. More generally, I would view it as a greater sign of progress to be able to do more* with less** than to simply do more, and it is often more impressive to be able to do smaller things than larger: A modern micro-chip is a far greater accomplishment than either of the Eiffel Tower and Egypt’s pyramids. Similarly, doing things with a high precision and detail can be more impressive than doing them at a large scale. Compare a moai with a Greek (or even Egyptian) statue, a wind-mill with a mechanical watch, or a mechanical watch with (again) a micro-chip.

*A taller building, a more voluminous ship, a computer with more FLOPS, …

**Less material, man-power, time, money, …

Similarly, looking just at accomplishments in a narrow range of areas tells us comparatively little: Some degree of astronomical (or astrological…) observation and calculation is not that impressive, considering the importance of stars in the past. Broaden this to include a wide variety of mathematical calculations and results, an understanding of physics and cosmology, …, and I am far more impressed. Specifically artistic accomplishment is a tricky area: On the one hand, even comparatively primitive civilizations have produced works that can produce a “Wow!” effect in a modern viewer (and the Romans and ancient Greeks were superior to possibly even the late medieval Europe). On the other, their works are often in a very uniform tradition*, often show more craft skills than artistic skills, and specifically the “Wow!”-works often appear to have been outstanding in their own day: They were not everyday accomplishments but made for the king or another extreme VIP, by the best of the best, possibly over the course of several years. Arts could, by the previous paragraph, be a better measure of advancement than “building big”, at least up to a certain point, but, taken on its own, it is rarely a good measure.

*Not only implying accomplishment in a very narrow area, which is relatively easy, but also a lack of innovation and development in terms of style.

Correspondingly, I would see it as important to take a much more holistic view* and look at accomplishments in a greater number of areas—were they good at A, B, and C or where they good at A–Z?** Ditto, to look at how they accomplished what they accomplished: Did they use refined tools and engineering or brute force? A machine or dozens of rope-pulling workers? Etc.

*But beware that this can be hard to do without extensive preserved writings.

**Note that the fields to consider are not restricted to variations like “were they good at stones” vs. “were they good at stones and wood”, but also include scientific accomplishments, technology, literature, philosophy, medicine, road network, level of plumbing, … Being good at everything is not a prerequisite; however, neither a civilization of brilliant stone artists with no other skills, nor a civilization of mathematicians living as otherwise primitive hunter/gatherers, can be considered advanced. Within specific fields, questions arise like “did they build boats?”, “did they build boats that could survive the open sea?”, and “did they also have the navigational skills to reliably travel on the open sea?”.

This, obviously, is not necessarily to say that this-or-that civilization was not worthy of praise*—just that we should be careful what measures we apply, and that we are praise them for the right reasons and to the appropriate degree. Building a civilization is comparatively easy to do; building an advanced civilization, that is a very different matter.**

*For one thing, many of them did have more to offer than big stones and a little astrology; for another, in many contexts the main criterion for praiseworthiness is not how advanced a civilization actually was—but how much it advanced beyond its neighbors and predecessors.

**I lack the depth of knowledge to be specific about where all the discussed (let alone unmentioned) civilizations should be classified; using a vague “advanced” would be bound to cause disagreement based on different definitions; it is unlikely that a binary classification would make sense in the first place; and it would often be necessary to include a time frame (“ancient Egypt”, e.g., covers thousands of years and several highs and low). Correspondingly, I do not attempt to make such a classification here. However, as a rough guide-line, a reasonable and reasonably detailed classification would need to put e.g. the 19th-century French, the Roman Empire, pyramid-era Egypt, and the moai-sculptors of Easter Island in different classes, descending in that order, quite possibly with additional, intervening, classes.

Excursion on rate of progress:
Some of the above can be better understood when we consider that progress in any given area can be quite fast when enough resources are dedicated. For instance, sixty years before the first moon landing, airplanes were taking their baby steps. Similarly, compare the world of IT today with the world sixty years ago. Similarly, note how the standards for sky-scrapers has exploded over a few decades when rich East-Asians or Arabs wanted to set their marks (and how it did the same thing for a few decades last century with rich New Yorkers). Similarly, note how individual art movements have reached their heights in just decades or even years. Etc. That a more primitive civilization, even with a considerably smaller population, would manage to reach a relatively high level of accomplishment in one or several areas, if it focused sufficiently strongly on those areas, is entirely unremarkable. Accomplishment over a wide range of areas is far more impressive.

Excursion on alien visitors:
Speculation along the lines of “aliens built the pyramids” have occurred in the past, as has speculation that this-or-that culture only arose through the influence of a contemporary culture from another part of the word (e.g. that Chinese colonists had it made it to pre-Columbian Latin-America). From my point of view, in accordance with the above, I consider such influence entirely unnecessary to explain the archaeological record—even discounting the low probability of such contacts. (Notwithstanding that more geographically close civilizations have influenced each other, often strongly.)

Unfortunate U.S. copyright developments

Copyright laws that extend too far into the future have long annoyed me, although I have written relatively little on the topic. However, as a part of a (much older) discussion of patents, I made several recommendations that are grossly violated by a suggested U.S. law*, close too passing. This included a strong focus on the author** (and the life of the author) of the work in question, limitations if the rights were sold to another party, and that the period that a copyright is valid, by law, cannot be extended.

*I draw more on a German article for my discussion, however.

**I will mostly remain with the generic term “author” below; however, in most of the relevant cases, it amounts to “recording artist”, “song writer”, “lyricist”, “composer”, or similar. I refer strictly to the author in the literal sense and not to the legal fiction implied by formulations like “for purposes of copyright law, the author of this work is XYZ”.

This suggested law could retroactively extend copyright* for some musical works to 144 (!) years, long after most of the original authors can be assumed dead**, and with no regard for transfer of rights.

*The law appears to focus strongly on “digital performance” and/or “transmission”; however, this would already cover, or could be interpreted to cover, a clear majority of all modern and copyright-relevant uses—and the proportion will grow over time. The effective difference between “digital performance” and “copyright” (in general) will likely be correspondingly small. In as far as a difference is present, virtually all of the below discussion remains valid after trivial modifications.

**Cf. calculations below; use common sense; or note that a very significant portion, possibly the majority, are dead even now—with almost fifty years to go.

The ostensible reason for this law could be seen as positive: Musical works created before 1972 have a weaker protection than works created later, based on previous changes to U.S. copyright law.

Practically speaking, this law comes too late to effectively provide the benefits it claims to provide in the majority of the cases; the time limits involved are out of proportion to newer works; and I would be very surprised if the true purpose was not to benefit the music industry, not the authors, in a highly questionable manner:

1. Works created in the span 1923–1972 will, in a blanket manner, be protected until 2067 (!), effectively implying that almost all the original authors will be dead: Even someone as young as 15 when he wrote something in 1972 would have to live to an age of 110*, in order to use up the entire time of protection. Someone who wrote a work at age 15 in 1923 would have to be 110 right now, in order to enjoy even a day’s worth of additional protection. Even our friend from 1972, if still alive, would be 61 at the time of writing—better late than never, but… Of course, the overwhelming majority of authors were not 15 and the numbers look even worse when adjusting for a more realistic age.

   *With some reservations for the exact reference point of each of the involved years.

   If the law was actually geared at protecting the authors’ interests, it should have been shaped very differently—and passed a lot earlier. (Especially seeing that the interest in a given piece of music typically diminishes rapidly over time—the author’s death being one of the very few events that can cause a major new interest… Not only will the typical sales be less counted in items, e.g. CDs, but the price per item will also typically decline.)

2. The years involved are likely based on the already hyperextended and disproportionate 95 years used for newer works: 1923 is 2018 – 95; 2067 is 1972 + 95. Now, using a number based on current rules might have been a reasonable idea, if it had been applied sensibly. A sensible application would have been to let the copyright expire in the year of the creation + 95. In other words, a works from 1972 would indeed be protected until 2067, but a work from 1923 only until 2018, a work from 1950 only until 2045, etc. The actually suggested implementation gives the owners of older works an unwarranted advantage over those of younger works.
3. The law amounts to a change after the fact. I note in particular that there is no guarantee whatsoever that 2067 will remain the upper limit. Further, that counting from 1923 implies that almost all recordings ever made will be under copyright for the foreseeable future, possibly, eventually, forever. (To boot, those recordings that were made before 1923 will be of very poor quality by today’s standards, be it through differences in recording technology or through decay over time—if they have not been lost entirely…) Continuing the age calculations, chances are that both I and half of the readers will already be dead by 2067: I, e.g., would turn 92 in that year.

   All in all, this looks suspiciously like an attempt to ensure that music without a copyright is permanently limited to a minimum.

4. The music industry is possibly the least worthy of protection of all the copyright related: The actual authors of the music are very often detached from the rights to it, and the music industry is infamous for taking unfair advantage of its musicians. Cf. e.g. [1] and the linked-to article by Courtney Love. The implication is that this law, even timing aside, would do comparatively little for the authors and a hell of a lot of for the music industry.

As an aside, I strongly suspect that the point of long copyright terms is not primarily to get royalties on older works—but to diminish the competition for newer and more lucrative ones: A rational consumer will think twice about paying top-dollars for the latest works when there are many, many quality works of old that are available for free or at a nominal cost. For instance, my own purchases of books* have diminished considerably over the years, in favour of Wikisource, Project Gutenberg, and other repositories of free readings. Note that the music industry is extremely driven by new material, new hits, new sounds, …, that rarely have what it takes to be of note even ten years later; and that it is likely the copyright industry with the most to lose from competition from older materials.

*Books, unfortunately, is one of the few areas where a sufficient quantity of copyright-free works exist, with e.g. movies and musical recordings being limited in time for technological reasons. The same principle would apply, however.)

A few more thoughts on lies under oath

A recent post ([1]) of mine contained a brief discussion of lies under oath and similar circumstances*, especially with the claim that the accused** should be given some leeway to lie, not just to refuse a statement. Having run this through my head a few times since then, especially while writing [2], a few additional points:

*There are plenty of cases in various jurisdictions where telling a lie is punishable even with no oath present. For the sake of simplicity, I will speak just of “oath” below; however, most of what is said will apply with no, or very little, change to such other situations. Similarly, I will focus on criminal trials below, but at least some of the contents will generalize to other contexts. Notably, if someone is sued for civil damages over a killing (as e.g. OJ Simpson), he must have sufficiently similar rights, lest the civil case forces an incrimination that makes his rights during a criminal trial moot. (However, a more general right to lie during a civil suit should not be inferred: The clear majority of civil suits will give no defensible reason for a lie.)

**I stress that this is not extended to the accuser, be he a claimed victim or a prosecutor, who is in a very different position. Further, that an extension, if any, to witnesses would be restricted to the protection of the accused and others (including the witness, himself) who might be quasi-accused through a truthful statement, with very considerable other restrictions applying. For instance, a mere “he is my friend and I want him to go free” would not be enough motivation to justify a lie; in contrast, the “Jewish friend” example from [1] would. An example like “I did not do it; Y did” shows why I do not give even the accused free reign, just “some leeway”. (But I have not thought this area through sufficiently to give a suggestion for an explicit set of rules. A particular complication is that such rules would likely involve the “justness” of laws involved; with the secondary complications that this area is somewhat subjective and that the justice system will typically consider all laws just or to-be-obeyed-irrespective-of-justness in a blanket manner—even when it comes to e.g. violations of international norms or commonly accepted human rights.)

It is tempting to take the view that if lying is not allowed, trials become that much easier: Confront the defendant with a point-blank question and he will now either confess and we are three-quarters done, or he will reject the accusation and, should he have lied, face harder punishment than if he had told the truth. With sufficiently harder punishment, the guilty will have a strong incentive to tell the truth. There are several problems with this, however, including:

1. That a confession is not necessarily truthful. For one thing, we have situations like Sture Bergwall (cf. [2]); for another, we replicate the problems around U.S. plea bargains*, if the additional punishment for lying under oath is severe enough (and if it is not, the system will not work anyway): Some, possibly many, innocents will proclaim themselves guilty in order to reduce the potential punishment, especially when they know that the risk of conviction is large**.

   *These come quite close to the above situation, the main difference being that a “rebate” is offered to those who confess, rather than a punishment extended to those who do not.

   **Note that this can be the case even for the innocent, be it through misleading evidence, a prejudiced jury, or some other circumstance.

2. That a question could be (deliberately or accidentally) constructed to remove the possibility of expressing mitigating circumstances, be misunderstood by the accused through an imperfect understanding of legal terminology or the laws involved, or otherwise be causing a misleading answer. Consider e.g. the question “Did you in cold blood put the gun against the victim’s head and press the trigger? Yes or no!”: If that is what happened, the answer must be “yes”; however, central points of the longer answer “yes—but he told me that the gun was not loaded” are lost. Even if someone deliberately tried to construct a fair question, or even set of questions, chances are that he would fail.*

   *I am beginning to suspect that similar complications have contributed to the plea system: We start with an abstract plea of “innocent”/“guilty”/whatnot and use the trial to elaborate on the defense’s view (as well as the prosecution’s, etc.), because it is not normally realistic to present this view as the response to a single question. (In my first draft, I listed an “almost invalidation of the plea system” as one of the items speaking against the type of “point-blank question” discussed here, the two being similar in general principle but potentially very different in details and implications. However, by now I suspect that if the “point-blank question” was tried, it would actually, over time, evolve into some variation of a claim of “innocent”/“guilty” with an ensuing interactive elaboration, which basically brings us back to a plea system or something very similar.)

3. This would severely reduce the possibility for citizens to cope with unjust laws and unjustly large punishments, say regarding a ban of certain political opinions.
4. The question of who determines the truth grows even larger than it is today, with ample room for abuse, be it through incompetence or malice. View the courtroom scenes from “Pleasantville” for a good example of the potential problems.
5. Not every faulty claim is actually a lie, and a rule like this could lead to punishment for accidental errors: If the matter seemed too unimportant at the time (e.g. because it did not occur to the perpetrator that his actions could be illegal), if too much time has passed, if the original situation was too stressful, or similar, it is quite possible that someone would be honestly unaware of, or have honestly misunderstood the implications of, an act that he actually committed.

On the other hand, we could have a possible credibility* issue: The point of taking an oath to tell the truth is the implied greater credibility, ideally to the point that whatever is said can be taken to be truth. Allowing lies would obviously reduce this credibility, doing more harm than good to the actually innocent. However, outside of times where people honestly feared divine punishment for violating oaths*, the actual gain in credibility is likely quite low as it is. To boot, it is well-known that memory imperfections and influenceability make most people poor witnesses—even when they do try to tell the truth: No oath can make up for a flawed memory. As a juror, I would almost certainly give less weight to oaths than to the consistency and plausibility of the claims themselves. Possibly, also to perceived credibility, impartiality, whatnot of the witness. (My reservations arising from the knowledge that it is very easy to misjudge people, especially when having no individual base-line for comparison, and the relatively weak correlation between apparent confidence and e.g. being truthful or being factually right, between apparent and actual friendliness, etc.)

*Indeed, in my impression, the taking of oaths is a legacy from a time where trials needed to be settled mostly through the credibility of the involved parties and their witnesses, due to factors like a complete absence of forensic science, the need to wait for months until a traveling court came by, whatnot. (As an aside, with the growing means of manipulating evidence and the near uselessness of digital evidence, we might eventually move back in this direction.)

A way to partially resolve these issues, without allowing lying, is to strictly forbid a certain type of question (e.g. “Did you shoot him?”), and, going by TV, this might actually partially be the case in the U.S. However, I am skeptical as to whether this would allow the same degree of protection.

As an aside, some of the above discussions and [2] also point to why I strongly believe in statutes of limitation*, even for e.g. murder, and that the common trend to increase or abolish them is a sign of barbarism, not civilization: To, say, put someone in court for a murder that took place fifty years earlier more-or-less guarantees that memories will have been distorted or lost—for instance, what accused can say what he did at a certain day fifty years earlier, let alone at what time. Outside of the main topic, it also severely increases the risk of physical proof being destroyed or contaminated, alibis and other witnesses dying, etc.—usually in a manner that one-sidedly favors the prosecution, which could document evidence and testimony shortly after the murder, while the innocently** accused might not even have heard of the event until said fifty years later and might now have to drum up a defense out of nothing. For sufficiently young perpetrators (who are guilty) relative the time passed, we might also have to consider factors like changes as a person over the intervening time—is it really right that a ninety-something is dragged into court because he served in a Nazi extermination camp when he was twenty? At such extremes, it seems less like justice to me and more like vengeance—or even abuse of the justice system for political gains.

*Exactly what limits for what crimes is a too big question for this post, with the need to carefully judge the severity of the crime, the options for the investigation, chance of new evidence, whatnot, vs. fairness towards the suspect. For murder, I could imagine that we land somewhere between five and twenty years, but where in that wide interval would be pure guesswork. (A deeper analysis would also need to consider the possibility of waiting periods and extensions, and possibly other exceptions to a plain limit.)

**Obviously, laws around statutes of limitations must accommodate the presumption of innocence. The common blanket reasoning that there should be no statutes of limitations, to ensure that no guilty party will go unpunished, is not compatible with this principle. Generally, many of the problems with debates around law enforcement and the justice system, including e.g. surveillance, go back to a too great focus on “getting the bad guy” and too little regard for the danger of getting the innocent instead. (As is likely clear from my recent posts, I am very aware of that danger.)

Follow-up: The danger of neglecting civil rights / absurd events in Canada

In a positive development of the events discussed in a previous post, it appears that the charges have been dropped. (Cf. e.g. [1], [2].)

On the negative side, it seems that 11 other downloaders might have been similarly harassed (and similarly without justification).

Ditto that the confiscated computers absurdly have not been returned—and might not be so for quite some time. Confiscating computers is an extremely dubious practice in almost all cases; not immediately returning them after charges have been dropped is simply inexcusable. (That I use “inexcusable” again and again with regard to this case is not a sign of lacking vocabulary—but of how gross the mishandling of this case has been.) This mainly because of the added, now entirely unjustifiable, disadvantage for the victims of the confiscation, but also because it opens opportunities for abuse. Consider e.g. a scenario where someone is suspected of some real and serious crime where there is too little evidence to get a warrant: Create or distort a scenario* which pseudo-justifies a temporary confiscation, quickly back-pedal with something along the lines of “honest mistake”, “we were given false information”, “seemed like a crime; turned out not to be”, whatnot, but keep the computers for another two weeks to unofficially search for evidence concerning the original crime**, to plant spyware or back doors, or even to plant evidence outright.***

*Such scenarios are obviously possible, seeing the immense reaction to the absolute non-crime discussed in my original post. Generally, there seems to be a strong law-enforcement opinion that a bad enough crime warrants a drop of due process and citizen’s rights—I have myself been the victim of a late night, warrantless, police search of an old apartment, based on lies by a third-party, and my several written complaints were basically ignored. See also an excursion on due process at the end.

**Many jurisdictions have rules that forbid the use of illegally obtained evidence. However, not only is it not a given that these would apply here (especially, should the investigators later claim to have discovered the evidence when the charge was still present), but even illegally obtained knowledge can be used to further investigations in other regards. To boot, such laws, when at all present, will do precious little to protect against the other problems mentioned.

***In fact, if this ever happened to me, I would likely do a full system re-install after I got the computers back, trying to manually inspect and secure relevant changes since my last backup. I might even go as far as sending the computers to recycling, depending on the risk of hardware manipulation and other circumstances. Obviously, none of the involved effort and cost would be remunerated; obviously, this relies on backups being available. (And, no, I would not see this as paranoid: Firstly, someone in this position knows that the police has been gunning for him, only leaving the question of whether it still is—this is a very different situation from the stereotypical homeless wearer of a tin-foil hat. Secondly, in Germany, law enforcement is very keen on the grossly unethical “Bundestrojaner”-malware, and an attempt to smuggle it on board a suspect’s computer is not the least far fetched. (In both cases, bear in mind that someones officially becoming a non-suspect does not necessarily mean that he is of no interest to the investigation or that he will never become an official suspect of the investigation again.)

Excursion on due process and size of the crime:
Due process, etc., must not be made contingent on the crime being sufficiently small*. Consider e.g. that

*Measured by e.g. the maximal punishment or the degree of typical societal condemnation. Words like “worse” are used in the same manner, and do not necessarily reflect my personal opinion of any specific crime.

1. The worse the crime is, the more negative the consequences of being convicted, often even accused—implying that due process is more important when the crime is worse.

   Note that the negative effects of an accusation are not limited to the scope of the investigation, having to pay a higher bail, whatnot—it also includes a greater mental anguish, a greater risk of social stigmatization, etc. Men wrongfully accused of rape and child molestation have seen their entire lives ruined, being fired from their jobs, their wives/girl-friends leaving, having to move to avoid aggression, … Being declared innocent months after the damage does precious little to undo that damage.

2. One of the largest reasons for due process is to protect the citizens from (deliberately) false accusations by others (potentially including a hostile government), and when these others merely have to replace the lesser accusation with a greater one, this protection is severely reduced in value.
3. Police incompetence, juror prejudice, whatnot does not magically grow immensely smaller because the crime is greater. A truly absurd example is Sture Bergwall, who was convicted of eight (!) individual murders in individual trials, only to later be declared innocent. (It is true that this was only possibly through his own false confessions; however, the case has been reviewed extensively in Sweden and it appears that any reasonable investigation would have found too many flaws in his stories and/or the overall evidence for a single conviction to take place. Notably, neither his extensive history of mental problems, nor his thin and partially far-fetched* stories appear to have diminished his credibility.

   *He confessed to more than thirty murders in total, starting at age fourteen, several that he could not geographically have committed, and at least one in which the “victims” were still alive. In a partial defense of the justice system, some problems only grew obvious over time.

4. In some cases, notably with the U.S. system of elected DAs, the risk of wrong-doing against someone accused of a greater crime can be greater than for a smaller. Sending someone, even be it someone innocent, to jail for a murder that made the front pages can make a career; sending someone to community service for stealing a candy bar will not. Again, the need for due process is larger with the worse crime.

XDG, lack of respect for users, and bad design

Normally and historically, using Linux has been much more pleasant than using MS-Windows, at least for those who stay away from KDE, Gnome, et co. Unfortunately, there has long been a negative trend towards worse usability, greater disregard for the user’s right to control his own computer, etc. (See e.g. [1] or [2] for similar discussions.)

Today, after doing some experiments with various X* and WM setups, I found something utterly inexcusable, a truly Microsoftian disregard for the user’s interests:

*By which I refer to the window system named “X”—unlike many other instances where I have used it as a placeholder.

Somehow, a tool xdg-user-dir had been activated for the first time during my experiments (whether this tools was installed per default or has snuck its way in during my experiments, I do not know)—and promptly created a slew of directories in one of my user accounts. There was no inquiry whether I wanted them created, they were just silently created. To boot, they were exactly the type of directories that I do not want and that I have always deliberately deleted when they were present on installation: Random directories like “Desktop”, “Pictures”, “Music” bring me no value* whatsoever and do not in any way, shape, or form match my computer use—starting with the fact that I use different user accounts for different tasks and order my files and whatnot according to entirely different criteria**. They clutter my file system—nothing more, nothing less.

*Note that, unlike with MS Windows, these are not necessary for the OS not to throw a fit. (Although it is conceivable that one of the worse desktop environments would—but then I do not use these!)

**The exact criteria vary, but the most common is “by topic”, rather than “by type”. For instance, a video and an eBook on the same topic would land in the same directory; two eBooks on different topics would land in different directories.

Having a look at the documentation, the functioning of this tool appears to be fundamentally flawed, even apart from its presumptuousness: In my reading, the directories would simply have been created again, and again, and again, had I just deleted them. This too is inexcusable—a manually deleted directory should stay deleted unless there are very strong reasons speaking to the contrary*/**. Now, I have the computer knowledge and sufficient drive that I actually could research and solve this issue, through finding out what idiotic program had added the directories and make sure that a repetition did not take place (and do so before my other user accounts were similarly molested)—but this is still a chunk of my time that I lost for absolutely no good reason, just because some idiot somewhere decided that he knew better than I did what directories I should want. For many others, this would not have been an option—they would have deleted the directories, seen them recreated a while later, deleted them again, …, until they either gave up with a polluted user account or screamed in frustration.

*Such reasons would typically involve a directory or file that is needed for practical operations while not being intrusive to the user (almost always implying a “dot” or “hidden” file). Even here, however, querying the user for permission will often be the right thing to do. To boot, it is rarely the case that an application actually needs to create anything in the user account, when not explicitly told to do so (e.g. through a “save” action by the user). Off the top of my head, I can only think of history files. For instance, creating a config file is only needed when the user actually changes something from the default config (and if he wants his config persistent, he should expect a file creation); before that it might be a convenience for the application, but nothing more. Temporary files should be created in the temp-directory, which is in a central place (e.g. /tmp) per default (and should the user have changed it, there is an obvious implicit consent to creation). Caching is a nice-to-have and would also often take place in a central location. Indeed, caching is an area where I would call for great caution and user consent both because of the potential privacy issues involved and because caching can take up quite a bit of storage space that the user might not be aware of. Finally, should the user wish to save something, it is up to him where to save it—he must not be restricted to an application specific directory. All-in-all, most cases where an application “needs” a directory or file will be pseudo-needs and signs of poor design.

**Looking specifically at the directories from above, I note that they are not hidden—on the contrary, they are extremely visible. Further, that they almost certainly are intended for one or both of two purposes: Firstly, to prescribe the user where he should put his this-and-that, something which is entirely unacceptable and amateurish—this is, remains, and must be the user’s own decision. Secondly, to ensure that various applications can rely on these directories being present, which is also entirely unacceptable and amateurish: Applications should not make such assumptions and should be capable of doing their job irrespective of the presence of such directories. On the outside, they can inquire whether a missing directory should be created—and if the offer is turned down, the applications still need to work. If they, unwisely, rely on the existence of, say, a picture directory at all, it should also be something configurable. They must not assume that it is called “Pictures”, because the user might prefer to use “Images” and already have other tools using that directory; similarly, they must not assume that the directory, irrespective of name, is in a given position in the file system, because the user might prefer e.g. “~/Media/Pictures” over “~/Pictures”; he might even have put all his pictures on a USB-drive or a server, potentially resulting in entirely different paths.

Looking up XDG on the web gives a negative impression. For instance, the Wikipedia page has a list of hosted packages/projects, some of which are among my least favorite, because they are e.g. redundant, do more harm than good, or replace superior solutions, including D-Bus, PulseAudio, systemd, and Poppler*. To boot, they often violate the design principles that used to make Unix and its derivatives great. Some others leave me ambivalent, notably Wayland: Even assuming that X needs replacement or improvement**, Wayland seems to be the wrong way to go through reducing both flexibility and separation of concerns.***

*At least with regard to how it has screwed up xpdf.

**It quite probably does, about three decades (!) after the last major specification release. However, in my own use, I cannot think of anything major that bothers me.

***With the reservation that I have not read anything on Wayland in years and am not aware of the latest state: Because I am not a Ubuntu user, I have not been forced to a practical exposure.

Looking at the “Stated aims” further down the page, most are good or neutral (with some reservations for interpretation); however, “Promote X desktops and X desktop standards to application authors, both commercial and volunteer;” is horribly wrong: Promoting such standards to desktop authors is OK, but not to application authors. Doing the latter leads to unnecessary dependencies, creates negative side-effects (like the unwanted directories above), and risks us landing in a situation where the system might need a desktop to function—not just a window manager or just a terminal.

For instance, I have now tried to uninstall everything with “xdg” in its name. This has left me with “xdg-utils” irremovable: If I do uninstall it, a number of other packages will go with it, including various TeX and LaTeX tools that have nothing to do with a desktop. In fact, there is a fair chance that they are all strictly command-line tools…

I have also searched for instances of “freedesktop” (a newer name, cf. Wikipedia). Trying to uninstall “hicolor-icon-theme” (admittedly not something likely to be a source of problems) leads to a request to also uninstall several dozen packages, many (all?) of which should reasonably still work without an external icon theme. By all means, if icons can be re-used between applications, try to do so; however, there must be sufficient basic “iconity” present for a good program to work anyway—or the programs must work sufficiently well without icons to begin with. Indeed, several of these are either command-line tools (that should not rely on icons in the first place) or make no or only minimal use of icons (e.g. pqiv and uzbl).

Worse, chances are that a considerable portion of these tools only have an indirect dependency: They do not necessarily need “hicolor-icon-theme” (or “xdg-utils”). Instead they rely on something else, e.g. a library that has this dependency. Here we can clearly see the danger of having too many dependencies (and writing too large libraries)—tools that do not need a certain functionality, library, whatnot, still need to have it installed in order to function. This leads to system bloat, greater security risks, and quite possibly diminished performance. Unfortunately, for every year that goes by, this problem appears to grow worse and worse.

Forcing XDG functionality and whatnot into applications that do not actually need them is a bad thing.

(Similarly, a great deal of my skepticism against D-Bus arises from the fact that it is “needed” by every second application, but is rarely actually used for something sensible. In the vast majority of cases, the application would have been just as good without D-Bus, but it still has a dependency and it still presumes to start an unwanted D-Bus at will—which it typically does not clean up afterwards…)

A higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

I have recently read James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership”—and unlike my last excursion into “Trump literature”, I find this book worth the reader’s time.

Above all, it provides a very important message on leadership, in particular in the “Author’s note”*, including the value of ethics, humility, the willingness to be open to input from others, …—and how such characteristics are all too often missing. Indeed, their weaknesses in such areas strongly contributed to my own feeling that the choice between Hillary and Trump was between two of the worst (realistically electable) candidates on record. (Cf. e.g. [1].)

*For those who do not want to read the book as a whole, do go by a bookstore and just read this part.

As a whole, the book is engaging with many interesting discussions of stations of his life. Unfortunately, parts are poorly written* and/or formulaic, as seen e.g. by how again and again a short paragraph is spent on describing someone and then spending just a few paragraphs on interactions with that someone, leading to situations where the description is too short to bring any value to the text and making it self redundant—these should either have been left out or expanded to such a point that they would have brought something to the context. This type of description does not appear aimed at actually bringing information to the text, but rather at “human interest” or similar cheap entertainment. To boot, they are potentially dangerous by giving his abbreviated view of someone else.

*Possibly ghost written: Apart from the high proportion of ghost-written works, the text often seems too polished (but not in a good way) and (again) formulaic for this to be the work of someone who is not simultaneously a professional writer, lacking in artistic drive, and not having a true connection to the material.

For the below items on and around the book, I will largely assume that the text is true or close to true. However, I stress that, as with any such text, warnings have to be raised with regard to its accuracy and fairness, e.g. due to memory lapses, subjective estimates, misunderstandings, and other human weaknesses. Worse, a text of this type and by an author coming from such hot weather could easily be an apologia or an attempt to position the author for a political career (see excursion at the end). To the degree that the text is not true, the items can need corresponding adjustment.

1. A particular disturbing aspect is the great influence of politics (be it public or interpersonal/office politics) on his work and the maneuvering and compromises that were needed. This theme recurs through-out the book, including e.g. how to handle matters like the investigations of Martha Stewart and Hillary Clinton, or how to handle pressure from people in the White House (this not restricted to Trump, specifically, or to members of his team).

   I have already contemplated that some parts of law enforcement might need its own branch or to become a part of the judicial branch, rather than the executive. His problems point further in that direction.

2. I found his discussions of the mafia and various interactions with its members highly interesting, through depicting a very different world and a very different sense of ethics than I have myself encountered. Even so there are at least some areas of overlap in attitude with e.g. politicians. (With a high degree of likelihood, Comey has deliberately written these parts as pieces of a greater puzzle and in a deliberate attempt to show such similarities.)
3. Loyalty (as might be suspected from the title…) is another important theme, with the implicit question of what someone should be loyal towards. Comey seems to focus on higher ideals in the general area of truth, justice, and whatnot (which I consider highly appropriate for someone in his shoes); Trump wanted personal loyalty towards himself; others wanted loyalty towards some cause (e.g. national security in the wake of 9-11); others might have* wanted loyalty towards a particular institution or his subordinates; …

   *I do not recall whether this appears in the book; however, it is a quite common phenomenon.

   Loyalty is something that we do well to think hard on: What should we be loyal towards and why? A good example is national loyalty, where people who have sided against their countries have historically been among the worst condemned and/or punished—but why? Should we not rather side with those who share our ideals, plans, visions, … than with our country when they conflict? (This especially since the “country” often amounts to nothing more than the opinion of the country’s current leaders.) Similarly, should we not, in an argument, side with those in the right over those in our family? Etc.

   An oddity is his discussion with Trump, where he consents to give “honest loyalty”: In the context, Comey might have meant “loyal honesty” or “loyalty to truth”, but that is not what he actually, by his own depiction, agreed to. He seems to believe that he dodged a bullet and managed to avoid promising loyalty without upsetting Trump. However, the only reasonable reading of the text is that he did explicitly promise loyalty, the most reasonable involves loyalty towards Trump (as per Trump’s request), and it would be highly surprising if that is not the message Trump took home. Many less egocentric people than Trump would have been upset when this loyalty failed to materialize. The right thing to do would have been to turn Trump down without any possibility of a misunderstanding, or, on the outside, find a way to dodge giving an answer entirely, e.g. by a change of topic. (However, I stress that I have great understanding for someone who does not think sufficiently fast on his feet in a stressful situation.)

4. Some parts of the book appear a little too self-congratulatory or conceited, especially with regard to his relationships with his subordinates, their feelings towards him, his effect on them.

   Judging such things correctly is extremely hard, and that a boss thinks that he is a beloved source of inspiration does not automatically make him so. Even should he be correct in his assessment (by no means impossible), it would be better to play it down.

5. An interesting topic is lying under oath, during an investigation, whatnot, which is a recurring theme of the book, albeit always with a simplistic “it’s wrong” as the message:

   Many jurisdictions, including the U.S.*, contain some provisions to limit the requirement to testify, e.g. when self-incrimination is involved or when incrimination of family members could occur. Outside these narrow exceptions there is usually a blanket obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Over the years, I have grown increasingly skeptical whether this is sensible from a “Rechtsstaat” point of view, and I consider it better that anyone acting in a private** capacity would have the right to refuse a statement at will, irrespective of e.g. self-incrimination. Further, there must even be some*** room for legally allowed lying when the witness is also the accused/suspect, especially in those circumstance where refusing the answer could be seen as admitting guilt. Consider, as an extreme example, the question “Did you kill the victim?”, the reply “I refuse to answer!”, and the impression left on the jury.

   *In the following, I discuss the topic in general. I have not studied the exact rules in the U.S., specifically, and I do not rule out that parts of what I say has been implemented.

   **As opposed to e.g. in the capacity of an elected official, a CEO, whatnot, possibly even as a regular employee.

   ***Exactly how much, I leave unstated. A blanket allowance is likely overkill. Lying on behalf of someone else is not included; however, there might be situations when even this might be sufficiently reasonable to warrant a legal exception. (Consider e.g. the question “Is your best friend since Kindergarten a Jew?” posed in Nazi-Germany: “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” would hardly have been believed.)

   The difference between lying or refusing a statement on behalf of one self and on behalf of another party should not be understated. Failing to make this differentiation taints some of Comey’s comparisons.

6. His assessment of Trump as e.g. an incompetent leader is true from one perspective, but not necessarily from all. If we look at the situation from the view point of the led, he does not appear to do well; by implication, he is a poor leader. If we look at the situation from Trump’s perspective, things might be very different*: What are his goals and how well does he reach them? Considering his success at gaining power, he is certainly not incompetent** (but still poor) as a leader. I strongly suspect that Trump is merely continuing practices that have worked well for him in the past—even bringing him the presidency…

   *Looking e.g. at his interactions with Comey, as described by Comey, it is clear that he is attempting something that would weaken the separation of powers within the executive branch as well as the integrity of the FBI. However, he is also doing something that might have been good for himself. Notably, very many would have been swayed to do the wrong thing in Comey’s shoes, being (or appearing to be) implicitly offered the keys to the kingdom.

   **With some reservations for what baseline is used in the comparison. For instance, the average Bundesliga player is extremely competent at soccer by any mortal measure—but that does not mean that he is World Cup material. Similarly, of those who do go to the World Cup, only a fraction make the honorary all-star team.

   In addition, we have to consider that aspects of leadership like e.g. humility and integrity are means to an end, not the end it self. They are needed because it is almost impossible to be and remain a good leader without them. However, they do not automatically make someone a good leader, because this also requires making the right decisions and being able to enforce these decisions. It is also not a perfect certainty that someone without them will be a poor leader—just an overwhelming probability. Now, I very seriously doubt that Trump will get an A+ through such aspects when his presidency is eventually summarized; however, as for now I still remain with my thumb angled slightly upwards when looking at actual policy until now*. More importantly, when judging whether someone is a good or poor leader, in general, it is dangerous to look just at humility et co.—the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

   *With reservations for the results of his tax reform: A tax reform was needed, but I have serious doubts as to the one that took place, and it could turn out to be Trump’s biggest screw-up, just like ObamaCare turned out to be Obama’s.

7. A few areas where Comey loses credibility include diversity*/PC nonsense, including abuse of “they”** as a generic singular, and his disregard for citizens’ rights with regard to surveillance and the like.

   *While some degree of diversity can be good in the FBI, in order to facilitate its work with e.g. immigrants, Comey seems to belong to the more naive brigade that sees diversity (in the racial, cultural, whatnot sense) as a good in its own or even as a fairness issue. Down that road lies affirmative action and other destructive measures: Pick the best person for the job, irrespective of sex, color, and creed, and no-one has a legitimate cause to complain.

   **I have a post in planning on this type of abuse, where I discuss why this is a bad thing and some alternatives. In this specific context, I note that a person of his level of education and accomplishment should know the rules of grammar better, implying that, almost certainly, this has been done deliberately in the highly offensive PC manner.

   To expand on the latter: While he claims to try to see various sides of the issue, he is clearly very set on the advantages that surveillance, lack of encryption, whatnot can bring to law enforcement. He does not appear to understand the technical risks involved and how opening doors for the government also opens doors for criminals; he fails to consider that we must always have regulations based on the assumption of an evil government, because a good government today does not imply a good government tomorrow; that e.g. anti-encryption regulation will hit “small timers” much worse than “big timers”, who have the resources to work around such regulations. Cf. e.g. my previous post.

   Other related issues already discussed on this blog include the uselessness of digital evidence, the danger of tools like the “Bundestrojaner” eventually being used to plant evidence, the risk of legally gathered data (accidentally or through intrusions, cf. my previous post) moving outside the control of the government, …

   An interesting point is his claim that the surveillance of many big timers only became hard in the wake of the Snowden revelations (quite contrary to my expectations). This, however, is not a sign e.g. that Apple should not give end users means of encryption—just a sign that these big timers used to be highly naive about their vulnerability to surveillance when not taking counter-measures: They are not doing things post-Snowden that they could not have done pre-Snowden. It is not even that strong an argument for e.g. encryption backdoors in standard software, because these would simply lead to competing, possible illegal or black-market, products without backdoors that big timers would use—while the small timers, again, are the ones left vulnerable…

Excursion on Comey as President:
On several occasions through the book, I considered the outside possibility that it was intended as a maneuver towards a presidential (or other high position) candidacy of Comey’s own. I note in particular the combination of stress on ethical leadership and other characteristics with how he portrays himself to have them and Trump to not have them.* From another perspective, consider how satisfying it might be for him, should he win an election over the same President that fired him…

*He is probably mostly correct about Trump; whether he is correct about himself, that I cannot judge.

Would Comey be a good choice? This depends to a large part on how serious he is about what he says on leadership and how well his self-portrayal matches reality. If he scores highly in these regards, then he could be a very interesting candidate. Unfortunately, I some fears on matters of policy (cf. the last item above), and I also have some doubts about his suitability in terms of experience: Being head of the FBI or the Deputy Attorney General are not bad qualifications; however, a few terms as e.g. governor would have been much better. (But they could be very valuable for some other position.) Either which way, he would be bound to be better than either of Hillary and Trump.

The danger of neglecting civil rights / absurd events in Canada

I have seen a recent slew of news articles in Germany dealing with various restrictions of citizens’ rights and/or removal of protective restrictions on police (and whatnot) work, notably in Bavaria; and recently heard of a very similar negative development in Austria. I had planned to write a post on these (see also a few older discussions, e.g. [1], [2]), but yesterday I encountered a Canadian case so grotesque and Kafkaesque that I will refocus on it.

It appears* that a government server made a few thousand documents accessible to the public. In most cases, these documents were actually intended for public consumption; in a few hundred, due to gross negligence, they contained data that should have been kept secret**. A teenage boy went to this public server, having no idea (and no even semi-reasonable reason to assume) that there was sensitive information present, and automatically downloaded the complete set of documents, using the observation that their names were based on a trivial numbering scheme.*** The subsequent events included e.g. a 15-officer raid on his home, the seizure of several computers (only one of which belonged to him), and unacceptable actions towards his younger siblings by the police.

*I draw on a CBC article and several links in that article.

**Specifically, personal information relating to individual citizens.

***This type of automatic download is something that I have done repeatedly myself, be it either to allow my self off-line access or to circumvent a poor user interface. There is nothing remarkable about someone with the right knowledge doing something like that, it is a perfectly legitimate technique, and (unlike the apparent characterizations by the police in this case) it does not constitute any type of security breach/circumvention.

There are several troubling aspects involved, including:

1. A massive overreaction, even had something illegal taken place, with a complete disregard of the interests of the “criminal” and his family. I note in particular that the act of seizing computers is almost never acceptable (although often legal and commonly used), cf. [1]. The size of the operation and the treatment of the individuals, including several teenagers, the lack of access to lawyers, etc., speak for themselves.

   A particular issue is the (lack of) illegality of the downloads per se: There is nothing here that could have been deemed illegal by any reasonable third-party (barring the possibility of utterly absurd Canadian laws)—and this must have been obvious even at the beginning of the investigation.

   Another issue is the “mens rea”: There are no even semi-reasonable grounds to assume its presence and no reasonable possibility to prove it*—and this, too, must have been obvious even at the beginning of the investigation, meaning that even if the act had been criminal, this was the wrong way to retaliate.

   *There are cases when a “mens rea” is an almost given; there are cases where it might or might not have been present; and there are cases where it more-or-less can be ruled out in advance. This is one of the latter. A reasonable analogy would be if someone went to a public information stand, picked up one of each of the present brochures, and one of the brochures turned out to contain classified information that should never have been put there in the first place.

   At best, the events are proof of truly massive incompetence and lack of judgment on behalf of the police and other involved government agencies; at worst, it is a deliberate abuse of power. Someone or some group needs to be fired, possibly even prosecuted, over these events.

2. Even the fact that it was possible to track the events back to the individual are potentially troubling (depending on circumstances that are not described in the accounts I have seen). Most likely they involve a storage of IP addresses that would have been illegal in Germany, as well as a back-tracking of IP addresses in a manner that should be reserved for bigger crimes.

   Of course, if this “crime” had been perpetrated by a competent malicious entity, such back-tracking would not have been possible, or only possible with considerably more effort, seeing that such an entity would have used some type of anonymization, e.g. through multiple VPNs or Tor. Often, this entity would not even have been in a jurisdiction where it could have been touched. Regular local teenagers can be caught this manner; professional crackers working for the Russian government or a criminal organization can not. This is one of many examples of rules, regulation, technical counter-measures, …, that affect the innocent, the naive, the small-time criminal, whatnot, heavily—while leaving the big-timers merely inconvenienced. (Cf. e.g. a post on DRM.)

3. The original download of secret data was only possible due to gross negligence and/or incompetence on behalf of the government—again, the type where a firing, possibly even a criminal prosecution, is the correct measure: Personal, secret information was put on a public server without any type of protection, no password, no encryption, …

   Either the decision makers and/or developers* realized that this type of download was possible, were grossly negligent in not improving the setup, and need to be fired; or they failed to reach this absolutely obvious realization, implying such a lack of competence and judgment that they need to be fired. Take your pick: Either way, they need to be fired.

   *I am too far away from the issue to be more specific. For instance, if the decision maker(s) were told of the problem by a junior developer, and instructed the junior to ignore it, the junior might be forgiven. For instance, if a senior developer saw the problem and failed both to correct the matter and to discuss it with the decision maker(s), the decision maker(s) might be free from blame.

   In fact, the situation is so embarrassingly bad, that I am surprised that whoever is in charge did not prefer to hush it up… Then again, the understanding of how embarrassingly bad it was might have also been missing, considering the demonstrated incompetence…

   (The articles that I have read have been weak on technical details, but from context I would speculate that there was a scheme in place, where inquiries by the public were answered by uploading a file, giving the inquirer the URL to the file, and then relying on no-one else knowing the relevant URL for secrecy. This would be an inexcusably incompetent application of “security through obscurity”: Security through obscurity is not acceptable as more than an additional measure on top of the real security to begin with. Here, however, it was doomed to complete failure from the start because of the naming scheme used—there was no real “obscurity” present either, meaning that even the pseudo-security it could have given was absent.)

A highly disturbing part of these developments in general is that countries normally considered “highly civilized” (“progressive”, “democratic”, “modern”, whatnot; often ranking highly on e.g. the Human Development Index and the Where-to-be-born-Index) are surprisingly great offenders: The problems are not limited to dictatorships or countries lacking a “democratic tradition”. In at least some areas, the likes of Canada, Australia, and my native Sweden, are actually among the worst offenders, especially when it comes to issues of morality, orthodox thought, sexual behaviors, … (Possibly, due to a larger influence of PC groups. Canada, e.g., has repeatedly caused controversy in areas like human rights and free speech.)

I suspect that this is due to a mixture of two factors: Firstly, many of these countries have grown used to strong governments and massive government interference in daily life. Secondly, these countries are often far away from a period of massive “evil”* government and have forgotten that laws and regulation concerning the government and its agencies, especially law enforcement, must be written under the assumption of an “evil” government, in order to protect the rights of the citizens and to protect the core democratic values**. (I considered adding a factor of “politicians are convinced that they know best” or similar, cf. several older posts; however, I very much doubt that this is specific to this type of country.) My adopted Germany, sadly, provides a partial counter-example to this: Yes, I can see how people would be short-sighted and historically ignorant enough to overlook the relevance of the events in Nazi-Germany, with only a small fraction of the current population having a part of their adult lives in that period; however, the collapse of the GDR is only three decades back.

*There are many cases, including most dictatorships, where the government has been more-or-less an evil throughout. However, even in the absence of such “great evil”, there are countless “small evils” in basically any state, be it through self-serving and vote-fishing politicians, incompetent or lazy civil servants, corrupt judges, laws that are not sufficiently well thought-through or violate the constitution, … The core of civil rights is and must be protection against the government, not only to make it harder for a “great evil” to arise, but also to protect us against the daily “small evils”. Unfortunately, depressingly large parts of the population (let alone government…) seem to believe that the government is good through-out and will remains so ad eternam.

**I note that I consider such values to be more important that democracy it self, with democracy being merely a “least evil”. Cf. e.g. Democracy Lost.