"At one point in his show, he said the real divide in the country was not between rich and poor, Democratic or Republican, but between 'the insane' and 'the insufferable.'"

"The insane include the people who stormed the capitol. He calls them nuts, before adding: 'but fun.' Then he grew more animated describing the insufferable by their 'NPR tote-bag energy' and 'hall monitor' tendencies.... Minhaj... repositions him[self] less as a righteous political comic than a more self-questioning, personal comic, a move he had already begun to make; this scandal may have accelerated the shift...."

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Was a Scandal the Best Thing to Happen to Hasan Minhaj? At the Beacon, the comic took a different tack after posting a video rebutting a New Yorker article on fabrications in his work. The crowd went wild" (NYT).

Zinoman likes that Minaj isn't "playing the victim," like "seemingly everyone" these days, including Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. And Zinoman, in a sidetrack, praises the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, and gives a tip about a new movie I might want to see:

"When Justice Stevens wrote his opinion in Chevron, he meant to solve a knotty problem, but he did not mean to produce a major ruling, or even to make any change in the law."

"Justice Harry Blackmun’s private papers, which are now public, show that members of the Court found the case to be highly technical and difficult to decide.... Revealingly, Chevron had hardly any influence on the Supreme Court in its first years. Everything changed after Justice Scalia joined the Court in 1986 and became Chevron’s champion, urging that it inaugurated a new approach for courts to apply in reviewing the interpretations of administrative agencies. Justice Stevens repeatedly disagreed with him; he insisted that Chevron did not make any big change in the law, and that questions of law were for courts, not agencies. By the early 1990s, Scalia had prevailed: whenever an agency’s interpretation of a congressional enactment was at issue, Chevron was widely understood to give the administrative state a lot of room to maneuver. If you worked at a federal agency at the time, Chevron was your best friend." 

Writes Cass Sunstein in "Who Should Regulate? Cass R. Sunstein The question of whether federal agencies or the courts should have the right to interpret legislation may seem technical, but it significantly affects the power of the government" (NYRB)(reviewing "The Chevron Doctrine: Its Rise and Fall, and the Future of the Administrative State" by Thomas W. Merrill).

For those who are uninitiated and yet not utterly bored — a small group, I'm thinking — the Chevron case provides — in Sunstein's words — "that when the language of statutes enacted by Congress is ambiguous, federal agencies are entitled to interpret it as they see fit, as long as their interpretations are not unreasonable."

Don't miss this casual phrase: "Justice Harry Blackmun’s private papers, which are now public..."  Was that treacherous leakage? The leakage was by Blackmun, of course, but I'm still asking if making all those notes and drafts public was an example of "the gravest, most unforgivable sin." Shouldn't we have access to these materials to understand why these decisions come out the way we do? Why should we be controlled by the careful wordings and omissions of the final version?

And I see that Chief Justice Roberts referred to Blackmun's papers in the oral argument about overruling Roe last December!

Joan Biskupic wrote about it last December, right after the oral argument, in "Why John Roberts cited the private papers of the justice who wrote Roe v. Wade" (CNN):

"In the Hobbesian formula, the Leviathan relies upon fear to suppress pride. It is pride that makes men difficult to govern."

"It may be illuminating to view our Covid moment through this lens and consider how small moments of humiliation may be put in the service of a long-standing political project, or find their meaning and normative force in it. Specifically, to play one’s part in Covid theatre, as in security theatre at the airport, is to suffer the unique humiliation of a rational being who submits to moments of social control that he knows to be founded upon untruths. That these are expressed in the language of science is especially grating. We need to consider the good faith intellectual positions that greased the skids for our slide into an illiberal form of governance. For, in addition to the political opportunism surrounding Covid, there were also well-meaning efforts to control the pandemic by altering people’s behaviour. The question is: what were the means employed for doing this, and what was the view of human beings that made such means attractive? What we got, in the end, without anyone really intending it, may fairly be called a propaganda state that seeks to manipulate without persuading...."

"The new public health despotism/Draconian rules are suppressing our humanity" by Matthew B. Crawford. There's much more at the link, but let me give you a little more below the fold:

"Knowing the date of their death appealed to a little over a quarter of those surveyed, knowing whether their partners were cheating appealed to over half..."

"... knowing if there is life on other planets appealed to nearly three-quarters. There was also great variation in reported willingness to pay for that information, with median bids ranging from $1 for credit card late-fee disclosure to $200 to know if heaven exists."

From "Accused of Ruining Popcorn, Cass Sunstein Wants to Repent," a NYT book review, by Clay Shirky, of Sunstein's new book, "TOO MUCH INFORMATION/Understanding What You Don’t Want to Know."

"Among government reformers and progressive regulators (like Sunstein himself, a decade ago), increasing access to information has been regarded as an obvious goal since Watergate. The book doesn’t replace that generational certainty with a new one, but it does make it impossible to continue regarding information disclosure as an uncomplicated good."

"How Change Happens, Sunstein tells us, 'reflects decades of thinking.' This is another way of saying that it repeats decades of writing."

"To call it his 'new book' you’d have to accept that there is something meaningfully distinguishing it, beyond the physical barrier of its cover and binding, from his previous books—an assumption that in Sunstein’s case is easily disproven. Like an unstuck Mallarmé, Sunstein does not produce books so much as The Book, a single volume of ideas that’s recycled, with only minor variations, from title to title. Broaching a new Sunstein these days, you already know what you’re going to get: a section on the joys and uses of cost-benefit analysis, some dashed-off thoughts about utilitarianism and negative freedoms, three or four chapters on nudges and their importance to the design of seatbelt policy, the primacy of Daniel Kahneman–style 'slow thinking' over intuition and moral heuristics, some tut-tutting about social media, a Learned Hand quote or two, and a few weak anecdotes about Sunstein’s time as President Obama’s regulator-in-chief, all delivered through a prose that combines the dreariest elements of Anglo-American analytical style with the proto-numerate giddiness of a libertarian undergrad who’s just made first contact with the production possibility frontier.... How Change Happens conforms so comically to type that it repurposes several passages of text from Sunstein’s previous books, even his most recent ones. Hence he tells us that people typically think that more words, on any given page, will end with -ing than have n as the second-to-last letter—an anecdote you would have already encountered had you made it as far as page 30 of The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He explains the Asian disease problem and provides a number of choice-framing analogies also found in The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He retells the David Foster Wallace water parable spotted on page eleven of On Freedom, published in February of this year...."

From "The Sameness of Cass Sunstein/His books keep pushing the same technocratic fixes. But today’s most pressing questions cannot be depoliticized" by Aaron Timms (The New Republic), which as you can tell from the subtitle, goes on to find more substantive problems than chatty repetition.

What does "Like an unstuck Mallarmé" mean? I had to look it up. Here (from "Blocked/Why do writers stop writing?" (The New Yorker, 2004)):

After the English Romantics, the next group of writers known for not writing were the French Symbolists. Mallarmé, “the Hamlet of writing,” as Roland Barthes called him, published some sixty poems in thirty-six years. Rimbaud, notoriously, gave up poetry at the age of nineteen. In the next generation, Paul Valéry wrote some poetry and prose in his early twenties and then took twenty years off, to study his mental processes. Under prodding from friends, he finally returned to publishing verse and in six years produced the three thin volumes that secured his fame. Then he gave up again. These fastidious Frenchmen, when they described the difficulties of writing, did not talk, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, about a metaphysical problem, or even a psychological problem. To them, the problem was with language: how to get past its vague, cliché-crammed character and arrive at the actual nature of experience. They needed a scalpel, they felt, and they were given a mallet.

So you get what Timms is saying about Sunstein.

"How a Liberal Scholar of Conspiracy Theories Became the Subject of a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory."

A New Yorker article (by Andrew Marantz) about Cass Sunstein. It begins:

In 2010, Marc Estrin, a novelist and far-left activist from Vermont, found an online version of a paper by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and the most frequently cited legal scholar in the world. The paper, called “Conspiracy Theories,” was first published in 2008, in a small academic journal called the Journal of Political Philosophy. In it, Sunstein and his Harvard colleague Adrian Vermeule attempted to explain how conspiracy theories spread, especially online. At one point, they made a radical proposal: “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories.” The authors’ primary example of a conspiracy theory was the belief that 9/11 was an inside job; they defined “cognitive infiltration” as a program “whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups.”

ADDED: Sunstein became the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009. In 2010, Glenn Greenwald wrote, "The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned—rationally—to distrust government actions and statements. Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is."

AND: Word I looked for in the text that wasn't there: "dossier."

ALSO: My favorite sentence in the article is: "He grabbed three packets of Splenda, tore them all open at once, and stirred them into his coffee before tasting it." What kind of a man???

Despite the talk of the "deconstruction" of the administrative state....

... Trump's approach to regulatory reform is really quite reasonable and good, according to Cass Sunstein.

Cass Sunstein picks "The Best Films of 2016 (for Behavioral Economists)."

Sunstein likes "The Jungle Book" because it shows the concept of fairness...

"For the strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack.")

"Weiner" because you can think about the 2 kinds of thinking which are System 1 ("automatic and impulsive") and System 2 ("deliberative and calculative")....

Behavioral economists like to distinguish between two families of cognitive operations in the human mind: System 1, which is automatic and impulsive, and System 2, which is deliberative and calculative.... Beset by a sexting scandal, former congressman Anthony Weiner resigned and then decided to run for mayor -- only to be laid low by another sexting scandal (or two). Does he even have a System 2?

Ryan Gosling because of "norm theory"...

"La La Land" is full of... counterfactual thinking: dreams abandoned, dreams deferred and connections lost....

Isabelle Huppert because of the "control premium" ("many people will pay an extra amount to retain control over a situation... others actually want to give up control")....

Isabelle Huppert [in "Elle"] understands what it means to take control and to lose it.

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” because "as an empirical matter, most people display unrealistic optimism"....

Is our band of rebels unrealistically optimistic?... [W]hen all seems lost, they give themselves the greatest gift, which is the feeling of hope.

Would Cass Sunstein support law school admissions based solely on LSAT scores?

That's a question that occurred to me as I was reading his column "Job Interviews Are Useless":

Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should....

A lot of evidence suggests that... employers will stubbornly trust their intuitions -- and are badly mistaken to do so. Specific aptitude tests turn out to be highly predictive of performance in sales, and general intelligence tests are almost as good. Interviews are far less useful at telling you who will succeed.

What’s true for sales positions is also true more generally. Unstructured interviews have been found to have surprisingly little value in a variety of areas. For medical school interviews, for example, they appear to have no predictive power at all: in terms of academic or clinical performance, those accepted on the basis of interviews do no better than those who are rejected. In law schools, my own experience is that faculties emphasize how aspiring law professors do in one-on-one interviews -- which usually provide no information at all about how they will do as teachers or researchers....

In fact, some evidence suggests that interviews are far worse than wasteful: By drawing employers' attention to irrelevant information, they can produce inferior decisions. For example, people make better predictions about student performance if they are given access to objective background information, such as grades and test scores -- and prevented from conducting interviews entirely....

The headline way overstates the point in the text, which compares "unstructured interviews" with "specific aptitude tests." But Sunstein enthusiastically presents research that is skeptical of human intuition and sanguine about the objectivity of tests. And he doesn't give any sign of noticing any complexity in the idea of what it means to "succeed."



Where do we stand these days on the subject of "objective" tests? I've seen them disparaged over the years. Is liberal opinion turning in favor of these these tests? I remember, circa 1990, hearing a very famous law professor denounce the LSAT as evidence of absolutely nothing. I suggested that the LSAT was at least useful in giving those who'd squandered or botched their college education* a chance to show what they're capable of doing now, and she fiercely stood her ground. The LSAT has no value other than its negative value as a vector of discrimination.

But perhaps objective-test meritocracy is on the upswing. I wonder why. What's in the air these days? And can the air be objectively tested?


__________________________

* I was thinking of myself. I arrived at college in 1969 with a headful of ideas from Bob Dylan, the hippie movement, "The Way of Zen," and the Sermon on the Mount. I exited college with a BFA and a major in painting. But after 5 more years of youthful foolery, I had nailed a 99th percentile on the LSAT. Didn't that mean something? Or was I an inappropriate interloper? A third of a century later, I believe I was.

Things men did to Martha Nussbaum that she didn't react to in a conventionally feminist way.

Sorry but I've got one more New Yorker article to blog about "THE PHILOSOPHER OF FEELINGS/Martha Nussbaum’s far-reaching ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life—aging, inequality, and emotion," by Rachel Aviv. I just wanted to pull out 2 things:

1. From her experience in the graduate program in classics at Harvard, in 1969: "When her thesis adviser, G. E. L. Owen, invited her to his office, served sherry, spoke about life’s sadness, recited Auden, and reached over to touch her breasts, she says, she gently pushed him away, careful not to embarrass him. 'Just as I never accused my mother of being drunk, even though she was always drunk,' she wrote, 'so I managed to keep my control with Owen, and I never said a hostile word.' She didn’t experience the imbalance of power that makes sexual harassment so destructive, she said, because she felt 'much healthier and more powerful than he was.'"

2. From the 1990s, when she was in a relationship with Cass Sunstein: "In an influential essay, titled 'Objectification,' Nussbaum builds on a passage written by Sunstein, in which he suggests that some forms of sexual objectification can be both ineradicable and wonderful. Straying from the standard line of feminist thought, Nussbaum defends Sunstein’s idea, arguing that there are circumstances in which being treated as a sex object, a 'mysterious thinglike presence,' can be humanizing, rather than morally harmful. It allows us to achieve a state that her writing often elevates: the 'abnegation of self-containment and self-sufficiency.'"

Cass Sunstein purports to explain "How the Gun Lobby Rewrote the Second Amendment."

I know the author of a column probably doesn't write his own headline, but there's nothing in this column that explains how the gun lobby rewrote the Second Amendment. Sunstein explains how people in the law field long relied, without studying the question in depth, on an assumption about the meaning of the amendment. To do the deep study and to arrive at a different opinion of the meaning of a text is not to rewrite it.

Sunstein's column is loaded with filler that has nothing to do with how the gun lobby supposedly rewrote the amendment: the recent shootings in Oregon, a Ben Carson statement in support of gun rights, the recency of the Supreme Court's discovery of an individual right in the Second Amendment, an old statement in an interview by Chief Justice Warren Burger of his understanding that the Second Amendment contains no individual right to bear arms, old case law that failed to perceive an individual right.

In the 11th and 12th paragraphs of the 15-paragraph column, Sunstein presents the fact that the National Rifle Association spent money expressing its belief in the individual right, that expression "resonated with the public," and that public opinion is "used strategically by politicians seeking votes." Yes, we live in a culture, and we vote in a democracy, and voters respond to arguments they hear and feel persuaded by, but how does that mean that one set of voices rewrites a clause in the Constitution?

Here we are, then, it's Paragraph 13. I want the answer my question. What do we get? Sunstein admits that there is no rewriting!

An important qualification: The text of the Second Amendment is ambiguous, and it could indeed be read in favor of an individual right; historians continue to debate the question. And because the individual right to own guns has long been a central part of American culture, if not its jurisprudence, federal judges might well hesitate before entirely denying that right.

The introductory phrase "An important qualification" is a rhetorical trick to make us feel the author has already made the basic point and this is a minor concession for the sake of scrupulous accuracy. But the basic point has not been made and the concession is really all there is: It's a difficult question of interpretation, and when serious scholars did the hard work, many of them perceived a right, a right in the original text. These people were not "rewriting" the Second Amendment, and they certainly were not accepting a rewrite delivered by a political lobby.

Ironically, Sunstein, writing in a newspaper, attempting to influence public opinion, is more of a lobbyist than the scholars he'd diminish as manipulated by lobbyists. 

As for judges, of course they should hesitate before denying a constitutional right! Whatever is happening in the political arena, judges should always look carefully at claims of right, as I am sure Sunstein and fellow anti-gun rights law professors will say about non-Second Amendment rights.

Paragraph 13 is the shocking "never mind," and the column peters out in the final 2 paragraphs, ending with the assertion that gun rights "have a lot more to do with interest-group politics" than with what the Constitution really means, which is certainly a true statement about Sunstein's column.

Cass Sunstein says "Gone With the Wind should not be mistaken for a defense of slavery or even the Confederacy."

"[Margaret] Mitchell is interested in individuals rather than ideologies or apologetics. She parodies the idea of 'the Cause,' and she has no interest in 'States’ Rights.' She is elegiac not about politics, but about innocence, youth, memory, love (of all kinds), death, and loss (which helps make the book transcend the era it depicts). Irrevocably stuck in the past, and a bit of a ghost, Ashley Wilkes reminds Scarlett of 'the sad magic of old half-forgotten songs,' and 'the far-off yelping of possum dogs in the dark swamp under cool autumn moons and the smell of eggnog bowls, wreathed with holly at Christmas time,' and 'Stuart and Brent with their long legs and their red hair and their practical jokes,' and 'a whisper and a fragrance that was Ellen,' Scarlett’s mother, who died during the war. Mitchell draws a sharp distinction between those pathetic souls who keep hearing that sad magic, like Ashley, and those who want to move forward, like Scarlett and Rhett. Her own heart ultimately sides with the latter. But she also cherishes, and tries to capture, the magic, the yelping, the practical jokes, and a mother’s whisper.... [The Confederate flag] should be taken down. But even so, it would be a mistake to disparage the sad magic of half-forgotten songs. Americans have good reason to remember the sweetness, and the deaths, of the countless real-world Tartletons—and never to dishonor those who grieve for them."

From "Finding Humanity in Gone With the Wind/The classic novel shows that individual lives cannot be reduced to competing sets of political convictions."

Cass Sunstein on Friedrich Hayek on the effect of Harriet Taylor on John Stuart Mill.

An essay in The New York Review of Books. Excerpt:

[I]t is crucial to see that in contending that people may be restrained only to prevent “harm to others,” Mill was speaking of the effects of social norms and conventions, not merely of government. Much of his attack was on the oppressive quality of public opinion.... His particular case for liberty emphasized the immense importance of allowing “experiments of living.” In his view, “the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself.”

It was almost Old Testament God day on the blog, but doughnuts edged Him out.

It's strange the way the blog plays out sometimes. When the first 2 posts by chance have a common element, you think a theme is striking. Old Testament God appeared in Post #1 today, and then, damned if the Old Testament didn't rear its head in Post #2. But a tiny frog rode into town on a beetle, and things were never the same. Next thing you know, Scott Walker was walkin' here, and we were ass-deep in doughnuts. And so doughnuts it was. I spent my afternoon pulling doughnuts out of the hot fat that is my Kindle collection. So here's the Krispy Kreme of my Kindle:

David Foster Wallace, "Up, Simba" (an essay about following the 2000 John McCain campaign, in "Consider the Lobster"):

About two-thirds of the way down the aisle is a little area that has the bus’s refrigerator and the liquor cabinets... and the bathroom.... There’s also a little counter area piled with Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes, and a sink whose water nobody ever uses.... Krispy Kremes are sort of the Deep South equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts, ubiquitous and cheap and great in a sort of what-am-I-doing-eating-dessert-for-breakfast way, and are a cornerstone of what Jim C. calls the Campaign Diet.

Hunter S. Thompson, "The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital of the Hippies" (an essay in "The Great Shark Hunt"):

A 22-year-old student was recently sentenced to two years in prison for telling an undercover narcotics agent where to buy some marijuana. “Love” is the password in the Haight-Ashbury, but paranoia is the style. Nobody wants to go to jail.

At the same time, marijuana is everywhere. People smoke it on the sidewalks, in doughnut shops, sitting in parked cars or lounging on the grass in Golden Gate Park. Nearly everyone on the streets between 20 and 30 is a “head,” a user, either of marijuana, LSD, or both. To refuse a proffered “joint” is to risk being labeled a “nark”—narcotics agent— a threat and a menace to almost everybody. With a few loud exceptions, it is only the younger hippies who see themselves as a new breed. “A completely new thing in this world, man.” The ex-beatniks among them, many of whom are now making money off the new scene, incline to the view that hippies are, in fact, second-generation beatniks and that everything genuine in the Haight-Ashbury is about to be swallowed— like North Beach and the Village— in a wave of publicity and commercialism.

Mary Karr, "The Liars' Club: A Memoir":

The next day right after dawn, I pulled down my BB gun from the top bookshelf and went on a rampage that prefigured what Charles Whitman — the guy who shot and killed thirteen people from the tower at the University of Texas — would do a few years later. I stuck a can of hot tamales with a can opener in a paper bag and fixed myself a jelly jar of tea. While all the other kids were still sitting around in their pajamas eating their doughnuts with powdered sugar and watching cartoons, I was sneaking across the blackberry field behind our house . There was a lone chinaberry tree at the field’s center, and I shinnied up it, then pulled my BB gun after me to wait for the Carter kids. They’d planned to berrypick that morning so their mama could make a cobbler. I’d overheard talk about it.

Mary Roach, "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal":

To experience taste, the molecules of the tastant— the thing one is tasting— need to dissolve in liquid. Liquid flows into the microscopic canyons of the tongue’s papillae, coming into contact with the “buds” of taste receptor cells that cover them. That’s one reason to be grateful for saliva. Additionally, it explains the appeal of dunking one’s doughnuts.

 J. Maarten Troost, "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story":

I had always imagined your typical twelve-step meeting as occurring in some grim, darkened chamber full of cigarette smoke, bad coffee, and doughnuts, filled with fat, spiteful old men telling you to take the cotton out of your ears and stuff it into your mouth and listen for a change, why don’tcha, but these days, you’re more likely to find a meeting in a smoke-free hall serving herbal tea, filled with people discussing Bikram Yoga and their latest marathon time. This made sense to me, of course. Try as we might, the word moderation leaves many of us scratching our heads. Why run one mile when you can run ten? Why do half an hour of sun salutations when you can do ninety minutes of pretzel-like contortions in a 105 degree sauna? More is better. Always.

Mark Twain, "At the Appetite Cure":

"My system disguised—covert starvation.  Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud-cure—it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work— the real work is done by the surreptitious starvation. The patient accustomed to four meals and late hours—at both ends of the day—now consider what he has to do at a health resort. He gets up at 6 in the morning. Eats one egg. Tramps up and down a promenade two hours with the other fools. Eats a butterfly. Slowly drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard's breath. Promenades another two hours, but alone; if you speak to him he says anxiously, "My water!—I am walking off my water!—please don't interrupt," and goes stumping along again. Eats a candied roseleaf. Lies at rest in the silence and solitude of his room for hours; mustn't read, mustn't smoke. The doctor comes and feels of his heart, now, and his pulse, and thumps his breast and his back and his stomach, and listens for results through a penny flageolet; then orders the man's bath—half a degree, Reaumur, cooler than yesterday. After the bath another egg. A glass of sewage at three or four in the afternoon, and promenade solemnly with the other freaks. Dinner at 6—half a doughnut and a cup of tea. Walk again. Half-past 8, supper—more butterfly; at 9, to bed. Six weeks of this regime—think of it. It starves a man out and puts him in splendid condition. It would have the same effect in London, New York, Jericho—anywhere."

Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse Five":

“Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,” murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. “Go take a flying fuck at the moon.”

Lena Dunham, "Not That Kind of Girl":

Everything took on a hazy romance: having a pimple, eating a doughnut, being cold. Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke. I had waited a long time to be a woman, a long time to venture away from my parents, and now I had sex, once with two guys in a week, and bragged about it like a divorcée who was getting back in the game.

Thomas Sowell, "The Thomas Sowell Reader":

At the heart of the affirmative action approach is the notion that statistical disparities show discrimination. No dogma has taken a deeper hold with less evidence—or in the face of more massive evidence to the contrary.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal revealed that more than four-fifths of all the doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodians. That is about the same proportion as blacks among basketball stars. Clearly, neither of these disparities is due to discrimination against whites.

Robert M. Gates,  "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War":

When I walked in and saw coffee and doughnuts, I thought I would get along just fine with these folks. The traffic coming in from Midway Airport was awful, and Hillary Clinton was late. She had dispensed with a police escort complete with lights and sirens, clearly having an elected official’s sensitivity to ticking off everyone on the road. I did not have that sensitivity....

Andy Warhol, "The Andy Warhol Diaries":

I asked Reese how he started in crystals and he said that when he was little, “Mr. Morning” came to see him. When he was a baby. He saw “Mr. Morning,” but nobody else did. And then in the army he got interested in electricity and the body and all this stuff. Reese was talking about his trip where he went around sticking crystals all over the pyramids and the Wailing Wall. And he eats things like coffee and doughnuts. But he cures the coffee by passing the crystal over it ten times.... Reese is Episcopalian, so I feel better with him than with the Jewish crystal people, somehow, because knowing he believes in Christ I don’t have to worry that crystals might be somehow against Christ.

Tom Wolfe, "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers":

Sixty strong, sixty loud, sixty wild, they come swinging into the great plush gold-and-marble lobby of the San Francisco City Hall with their hot dogs, tacos, Whammies, Frostees, Fudgsicles, french fries, Eskimo Pies, Awful-Awfuls, Sugar-Daddies, Sugar-Mommies, Sugar-Babies, chocolate-covered frozen bananas, malted milks, Yoo-Hoos, berry pies, bubble gums, cotton candy, Space Food sticks, Frescas, Baskin-Robbins boysenberry-cheesecake ice-cream cones, Milky Ways, M&Ms, Tootsie Pops, Slurpees, Drumsticks, jelly doughnuts, taffy apples, buttered Karamel Korn, root-beer floats, Hi-C punches, large Cokes, 7UPs, 3 Musketeer bars, frozen Kool-Aids—with the Dashiki Chief in the vanguard....

The young guy from the Mayor’s office retreats... Much consternation and concern in the lobby of City Hall... the hurricane could get worse. The little devils could start screaming, wailing, ululating, belching, moaning, giggling, making spook-show sounds... filling the very air with a hurricane of malted milk, an orange blizzard of crushed ice from the Slurpees, with acid red horrors like the red from the taffy apples and the jelly from the jelly doughnuts, with globs of ice cream in purple sheets of root beer, with plastic straws and huge bilious waxed cups and punch cans and sprinkles of Winkles, with mustard from off the hot dogs and little lettuce shreds from off the tacos, with things that splash and things that plop and things that ooze and stick, that filthy sugar moss from off the cotton candy, and the Karamel Korn and the butterscotch daddy figures from off the Sugar-Daddies and the butterscotch babies from off the Sugar-Babies, sugar, water, goo, fried fat, droplets, driplets, shreds, bits, lumps, gums, gobs, smears, from the most itchy molecular Winkle to the most warm moist emetic mass of 3 Musketeers bar and every gradation of solubility and liquidity known to syrup—filling the air, choking it, getting trapped gurgling and spluttering in every glottis— 

And it was here that Bill Jackson proved himself to be a brilliant man and a true artist, a rare artist, of the mau-mau....

 Barack Obama, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance":

“We’re interested in the best possible outcome for the residents,” Ms. Broadnax shouted over her shoulder. We followed her into a large room where several gloomy officials were already seated around a conference table. Ms. Broadnax remarked on how cute the children were and offered everyone coffee and doughnuts.

“We don’t need doughnuts,” Linda said. “We need answers.”

John Steinbeck, "The Red Pony":

“There’s two doughnuts in the kitchen for you,” she said. Jody slid to the kitchen, and returned with half of one of the doughnuts already eaten and his mouth full. His mother asked him what he had learned in school that day, but she didn’t listen to his doughnut-muffled answer. She interrupted, “Jody, tonight see you fill the wood-box clear full. Last night you crossed the sticks and it wasn’t only about half full. Lay the sticks flat tonight. And Jody , some of the hens are hiding eggs, or else the dogs are eating them. Look about in the grass and see if you can find any nests.”

James Thurber, "Writings & Drawings":

I got back to New York in early June, 1926, with ten dollars, borrowed enough to hold on until July in a rented room on West 13th Street, and began sending short pieces to the New Yorker, eating in doughnut shops, occasionally pilfering canapés at cocktail parties (anchovies, in case you don’t know, are not good for breakfast). My pieces came back so fast I began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine.

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States":

At Boston University, a thousand students kept vigil for five days and nights in the chapel, supporting an eighteen-year-old deserter, Ray Kroll....

On a Sunday morning, federal agents showed up at the Boston University chapel, stomped their way through aisles clogged with students, smashed down doors, and took Kroll away. From the stockade, he wrote back to friends: “I ain’t gonna kill; it’s against my will. . . .” A friend he had made at the chapel brought him books, and he noted a saying he had found in one of them: “What we have done will not be lost to all Eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.”

The GI antiwar movement became more organized. Near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the first “GI coffeehouse” was set up, a place where soldiers could get coffee and doughnuts, find antiwar literature, and talk freely with others....

David Sedaris, "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls":

I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “fuck you”?

Cass Sunstein, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness":

Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time. At one extreme are what might be called investment goods, such as exercise, flossing, and dieting....

At the other extreme are what might be called sinful goods: smoking, alcohol, and jumbo chocolate doughnuts are in this category. We get the pleasure now and suffer the consequences later. Again we can use the New Year’s resolution test: how many people vow to smoke more cigarettes, drink more martinis, or have more chocolate donuts in the morning next year? Both investment goods and sinful goods are prime candidates for nudges. Most (nonanorexic) people do not need any special encouragement to eat another brownie, but they could use some help exercising more.

And then there's the choice of how to spell doughnut/donut. Isn’t the failure to pick one spelling and stick to it a way of saying "fuck you"? That question is me nudging Cass Sunstein. We'll see if he does better in the future.

And that's all the Krispy Kindle Kremes for now, so — as they say in the azure nest — Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

"Despite their superficial attachment to multiculturalism, our elites don’t really want to think of other cultures as, you know, thinking differently, for fear that it might somehow be racist to take that into account."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, commenting on an "American Interest" piece by Jakum Grygiel on the "folly" of the "modern Western penchant for trusting in the equal rationality of all."

Glenn's remark has an unexamined premise: that "our elites" think that the people in our culture think rationally. I don't accept that premise. Just speaking for myself — and as a law professor, I cop to elitism — I certainly believe that we have an emotional attachment to our belief that we are rational but that all our thinking is inextricably intertwined with emotion. We can only think within our nervous system — brain, etc. — and that's guided by twinges and intuitions of mystifying subtlety.

We love the idea that we are rational, but how are our thoughts deranged by this love? Why did Glenn go toward reacting to "elites" and the imputation of "fear" and racism? Whatever basis he has for that remark, his decision to go exactly there was not determined by facts and logic.

And look at how our elites behave toward us. Look at any political campaign — the "war or women," for example. I'm not seeing trust in the rationality of the people. It's emotion all the way down. I don't think the elites are afraid of looking racist if they portray people in other cultures as irrational. I think they consider their fellow Americans irrational. That's "What's the Matter with Kansas." That's why the elites believe they should rig economic incentives to "Improv[e our] Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

The mysterious twinges and intuitions within the elite nervous system create the feeling that none of us think straight. That's one kind of "equal rationality of all" — slim to none.

When Samantha Power asked "Why do you think my dad was the one who died?"

From the "In the Land of the Possible/Samantha Power has the President’s ear. To what end?" by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker:

Her mother, Vera Delaney... a nephrologist... married a Dublin piano player, raconteur, dentist, and drinker named Jim Power—“a fearsomely formidable pub debater,” as the Irish Independent once put it. “I was extremely close to my father, inseparable,” Power said. “Where we hung out most of the time was the pub.” Her father expounded on the day’s papers, while she read mysteries by the light of a slot machine in the basement. Her parents’ marriage didn’t last. “My mother, in effect, started leading her own life,” Power said. At the hospital, Delaney fell in love with her boss, Edmund Bourke. Divorce was illegal in Ireland, and they wanted more opportunities in medicine, so, when Samantha was nine and her brother was five, the family moved to Pittsburgh and, later, Atlanta. Jim Power remained in Ireland. She said, “We stayed in touch, and, then, the drink, I think.” She trailed off. He died when she was fourteen. [Power's husband Cass] Sunstein recalled that, decades later, on a trip to Ireland, Power took him to visit her father’s favorite pub, where they met a woman who had worked behind the bar and remembered her dad. Others seemed to drink just as much, and Power asked, “Why do you think my dad was the one who died?” The barwoman answered simply, “It’s because you left.” Power told me, “I knew he was drinking too much. But I had no idea he was sick—he was just forty-seven, and his death was devastating.”

The nudge and the prick.

Reading that last post out loud with Meade, we were talking about how the Democratic Party is trying to create anxiety by letting you know that the Party knows how much money they've gotten out of you this year.

It reminded me of that mailer I received a couple years ago from the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, showing my name and my home address and whether I'd voted in recent elections in a list with the same information about my close neighbors. That was really egregious guilt tripping, because neighbors were getting information about each other, so the organization was openly leveraging everyone's need to maintain esteem in the community.

But the new email from the Democratic Party relied on a similar psychological manipulation: My reputation is at stake. People whom I want to think well of me know that I'm not quite good enough, and they are showing me what I can do to fix that. I'd better vote this time so I don't look bad on the next mailer OR I can hit the $3/$10/$50 donate button.

Meade said this what they call "nudge." You know about the nudge. Cass Sunstein wrote a book on the subject "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

I said there needed to be a different word, because "nudge" seems to be a positive poke in the right direction, not the creation of anxiety around the thing that they don't want you to do.

That word is: PRICK.

"Prick" is the ideal word — quite aside from any indelicate intention to refer to male genitalia — because it means (OED): "To cause mental pain or discomfort to; to sting (esp. the conscience) with sorrow or remorse; to grieve, pain, torment" and "To poke at something as if to pierce it; to make a thrust or stab at." That is, "prick" is precisely the negative version of "nudge."

By the way, the "coarse slang" use of "prick" to mean the penis goes back to c1555:

c1555   Manifest Detection Diceplay sig. Biiiv,   To turne his pricke vpward, and cast a weauers knot on both his thumbs behind him....

The other "coarse slang" usage, which I particularly like in connection with my recommendation of a nudge/prick distinction is "A stupid, contemptible, or annoying person (esp. a man or boy)." That goes back to 1598:

1598   J. Florio Worlde of Wordes at Pinchino,   A pillicock, a primcock, a prick, a prettie lad, a gull, a noddie.

More recently:

1934   H. Miller Tropic of Cancer 110   Jesus, what I'd like is to find some rich cunt—like that cute little prick, Carl.

Miller doesn't mean he wants to find a "rich cunt" who resembles "that cute little prick, Carl." He means he wants to find "rich cunt" like the "rich cunt" found by "that cute little prick, Carl." Is Miller a sloppy writer or did he find that ambiguity amusing?

In any case, the word of the day is "prick." Don't let those manipulators of the masses say "nudge" when the word should be "prick." Observe the nudge/prick distinction.

ADDED: I just realized: If you like this blog post, you might want to consider doing your on-line shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

Cass Sunstein thinks the FDA's new requirement that food sellers post calorie counts "could turn out to be a game-changer."

So the argument that businesses should go through all this expense and trouble is that it just might work.

The motivating idea is that consumers should be free to make their own choices -- but that those choices should be informed ones. Most restaurants have little incentive to disclose calorie information on their own. The new FDA rule is meant to force such disclosure, and then to rely on the operation of the free market.

The FDA hopes that once consumers see calorie counts, they will make healthier choices, and there is evidence to support the agency’s optimism.... The evidence is far from unequivocal, however. Some studies find little or no effect....

But... [s]ometimes disclosure requirements affect providers more than consumers, prodding them to change their offerings. As a result of the FDA’s rule, many restaurants, cafeterias, convenience stores, movie theaters, vending machines and so on will offer healthier foods -- at least as long as their customers want to buy them.

I'm amazed that this kind of guesswork and casual hopefulness is all that supports such an expensive and troublesome new requirement.

It's a good thing the forebears forced forbearance.

Cass Sunstein has a New York Review of Books review of Justice Stevens's book plumping for amending the Constitution to reverse 6 doctrines he abhors. The book is titled "Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution," and the book review's spiffier title is  "The Refounding Father."

Words that don't appear in the text of Sunstein's review: "framer," "framers," "founder," "founders," "father," "fathers," "forefather," "forefathers." It's a marvel how Sunstein did that. He says "authors of the Constitution" once, and "the founding generation" twice. He never says "forebears" but he does say "forbearance" a lot, referring to the way Americans have refrained over the years from amending the Constitution (in part, because the framers made the Constitution so hard to amend).

Here's my favorite "forbearance" paragraph:

You might think that the Constitution would be better if one or more [amendments] were part of it, but you might agree that the general pattern of forbearance is also in the national interest. You might even think that the founding generation was wise to make forbearance more likely, if only because of the importance of constitutional stability and the risk of harmful or ill-considered amendments. There could well be strong national majorities in favor of some amendments that Justice Stevens and civil libertarians would deplore, while national majorities would be exceedingly difficult to muster for some of the amendments that he proposes — a point that might strengthen the case for forbearance. And if you approve of forbearance, you might be inclined to reject most or even all of Stevens’s proposals for constitutional change, even if you think that on most or even all of them, he is right as a matter of public policy.

Cass Sunstein picks the top 8 Supreme Court Justices of all time...

... and includes William Rehnquist.

When I was clerking at the court in the early 1980s, Rehnquist told me that the court was like a ship that had become badly tilted — and he made a gesture, signaling that the court had tilted left....

Reducing federal power and limiting the reach of numerous Warren court rulings, Rehnquist... succeeded in restoring what he considered to be the right constitutional balance.