Social Media Incantations

This is what bullshit looks like

You’ve probably seen these posts. The ones that claim that if you copy and paste them, it will change what the Facebook algorithm feeds you (it won’t). The one that claims that everything on Facebook becomes public tomorrow (it won’t). The second one never actually specifies what day “tomorrow” refers to, but that only heightens the urgency, right? Unless you’ve seen it multiple times over an extended period and tomorrow never comes.

Some of them sound legal. There’s one the cites the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) and the Rome Statute, both of which sound really serious. The only problem is, as lawyers are happy to point out,

the UCC is a model code and is not law. Where the UCC has been adopted, it only applies to commercial transactions, not intellectual property.[1]

The stuff you’ve posted on Facebook: pictures, comments, and such are all intellectual property. Some of it might even be yours. That meme you copied? Not your intellectual property. There is a piece of text that floats around the Internet which inaccurately implies that stuff found on the Internet is public domain, while the stuff the person who posted the notice also posted is most definitely not public domain. Posting something on the Internet doesn’t alter its copyright status.

The Rome Statute part is even more interesting.[2] It’s the international statute (to which the United States is not signatory) which sets up the International Criminal Court. I really wanted the ICC to be the court that dealt with dashing jewel thieves who smuggle diamonds from Paris to New York while impeccably dressed. No such luck. The ICC is the court that deals with war crimes, genocide, and things like that. No matter how badly you think of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, you probably don’t think them guilty of genocide.

If your lawyer really told you do to this, find a better lawyer.

So what’s it doing in a much-shared post? It makes it sound legal. Same thing the reference to the UCC does. Or the posts that begin “under the advice of legal counsel” and go on to proclaim that the poster is a “free citizen of the world.” The concept of sovereign citizens has some pretty ugly roots in white supremacy. The people who coined the term felt that the only “free citizens” were free white citizens. Ouch.

Why is these things so attractive to people, given that they have no actual legal standing and that there are some associations that at best seem to be conspiracy theorists? I have a thought on that.

I am not a lawyer (IANAL) but I do have some training in Medieval Studies (IAAM).[3] I have seen legal mumbo-jumbo before. These posts aren’t intended to be legal. They’re incantations.

The Internet has become a scary place, in part due to Facebook.[4] The online world probably would be scary without hoaxes, fake news, reports of Russian manipulation, fake accounts, and so on. Then there are the moral panics, where someone is happy to report that social media will degrade your intellect and made you a worse person (typically without any data to support such a thesis), which fall in nicely with previous moral panics such as novels[5] or reading newspapers.[6]

What can you do about it? How do you deal with the terrors of the Internet.

You can recite an incantation. Because if these don’t have legal force, but they have emotional force (and why else would people share them?) they’re in the category of the superstitions people do to ward off harm (which is exactly what they hope these posts will do). Are they effective at warding off harm? Probably as effective as throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder. Also saying “bless you” after someone sneezes has no clinical efficacy in preventing colds. Or warding off evil. But you do it, don’t you?

These social media posts, with their meaningless language, are our contemporary version of some medieval charm. They sound good, although they have no actual power to ward off malign influences. If you’re bitten by a snake, you need modern medical attention, not the poultice of herbs in the Nine Herbs Charm (which tells you to recite the charm three times over each ingredient, and then in four places on the victim).

Medieval charms were chanted repeatedly, just like a social media post that gets shared again and again. Like a medieval charm, they don’t actually become more powerful by repetition. They never had any power at all.

The next time you see that a friend has posted something that tells you to copy it to your own timeline in order to ward off some dreadful aspect of social media (Facebook billing you, or showing you only twenty-six friends[7], or taking possession of your photos[8]), cross your fingers, knock on wood, close your umbrella before you go inside, but don’t copy that post. Please. Even if someone said that someone else’s lawyer said that you should.[9]

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1. Protecting Your Legal Rights on Facebook, retrieved 5 February 2019. If that’s not enough, here’s a post by a lawyer whose work is on copyright, trademark, publicity right, and media law.
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2. Well, at least to me.
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3. I Am A Medievalist.
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4. Yeah, thanks a lot, Facebook.
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5. The novel was guaranteed to be injurious to the mind, particularly the minds of young women. Clearly your high school English teacher did not have your best interests at heart, but we are talking about someone whose brain had been disturbed by years of reading novels.
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6. The death of conversation.
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7. We don’t know the specifics of the Facebook algorithm, but we know it rates posts as to how sticky you’ll find them. If you interact with a lot of memes and wonder why you never see the posts where friends tell what going on in their lives, it’s because Facebook can tell that you like and share memes and scroll past your friends. It’s watching you, which kinda does make you want to ward off evil.
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8. A violation of copyright, though if Facebook tried to monetize your work (instead of just you), you’d probably have a hard time getting damages.  ↩
9. I mean, free legal advice from a lawyer who didn’t put their name to it?  ↩

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How Did Italian Food Conquer the World?

Doesn't that just make you think of Bavaria?

I’m not disputing the title of John F. Mariani’s How Italian Food Conquered the World, since like Mariani, I’ve seen Italian restaurants all over the world, with some particular hot spots. In a recent trip to Kolkata, India, I noticed there were several Italian restaurants. Even though some were recommended by the locals, I did not eat in them.[1]

Nor did I eat in Italian restaurants in Japan. Japanese restaurants typically display photos or models of the food. In a land where there’s a cuisine built around the artful arrangement of food (kaiseki), Italian food gets presented as something you might refuse to eat on a dare. Even the worst red sauce joint might look at it and say, “did you just hurl it on the plate?”[2]

Then there was the trip to a town in Germany where it seemed that Italian restaurants outnumbered the German ones (and if you got tired of wurst and sauerkraut, well, there was Italian), including one where Germans sang Italian songs while waiters served Italian dishes. Many of these Italian restaurants are staffed by Italians. To make it clear: I am not disputing Mariani’s contention, just wondering if he’s made his case.

A small error of geography.

His book gets off to a shaky start, since on pages 7 and 10, I found two errors of fact. First tells us that vomitoria were rooms were Romans would force themselves to vomit so they could go back to eating; these tales of bulimia in antiquity are fantasies based on a fourth-century word for “stadium exit.”

Nor is it the case that Vasco da Gama visited Calcutta (or Kolkata, founded 1690) in 1498. How could he? He sailed to Calikat (modern Kozhikokde). Kolkata is Northwest India, Kozhikode in Southwest India, and they’re only separated by about a thousand miles, so just a small sloppy mistake, likes those plates of pasta in Japan.

Another of Mariani’s problems is that as a food and travel writer for Esquire, his real expertise is in destination restaurants, not food history. Does he make the case that Italian fine dining is how Italian food conquered the world? No. Does he know a lot about Italian fine dining. Yes. Does he name drop like a status-hungry socialite? Absolutlely.

Take these two sentences from the end of a paragraph:

Living above the restaurant until she died at the age of 97, Bice was known for her egalitarian approach to her guests, rich or not, famous or from nowhere, and she got along with everyone. Once when Sophia Loren entered the room, everyone applauded.

Can we assume that those who were neither wealthy nor famous (like humble and obscure Sophia Loren) were applauded when they walked into Bice? The next paragraph tells that restaurant was always packed when the designers showed off their collections in Milan. On this one page, Mariani finds room to reference Gina Lollabrigida, Ingrid Berman, Franco Zeffirelli, Gianni Versace, before he gets to Sophia Loren, and the fashion houses Burberry and Gucci.

Was it through Italian food nudging French food aside as fashionable dining that Italian food conquered the world? Given that those restaurants in Japan and India and some in Germany were the more humble sort (red sauce joints, really), it’s tough to say that the success of the Bice Group (from that one restaurant in Milan to locations around the world) was conquest for anything other than one company specializing in upscale dining.

Not wholly trustworthy.

It’s not long after this that in his discussion of upscale dining that Mariani simply asserts that by this point Italian food had conquered the world, without any evidence of this sudden capitulation. When did that happen and how?

Although it’s a bit of a non-sequitur in his telling (though undoubtably important in how Italian food conquered the world), Mariani has a good chapter early in the book on the rise of the Mafia-themed pizza parlor, part of a broader context of Italian food wrapped in ethnic stereotypes and slurs, with sniggering suggestions that Italian-Americans can’t really master English and they all have connections to organized crime. Long after Italian immigrants stopped serving up low-grade Italian-American food, it’s been adopted by corporate restaurant concepts.

In a way, it’s not far from the upscale dining, often just a different sort of restaurant packaging. Mariani doesn’t cover how Italian restaurants on every level aren’t family trattorias, but packaged by corporations (from Bice and Il Fornaio with roots in Italy to Buca da Beppo founded in the Midwest and owned by Planet Hollywood). That Italian food can be readily marketed on a global scale is part of this story. (The only type of food more relentlessly churned out by corporate America is, of course, the burger joint, though that’s only one segment of dining, while Italian restaurants can be found in several.[3] The number Dunkin’ Donuts locations in Germany indicate that the next level down is open for conquest.[4])

In Mariani’s telling, Italian food had yet to conquer the world when any supermarket in the United States already had extensive quantities of Italian food in their aisles. Again, this is Mariani focusing on the sort of dining he writes about in Esquire and completely failing to look supermarket shelves which have been home to Italian foods for decades. Ragú, now owned by a Japanese company, was founded in New York in 1937. I grew up with ads that told Massachusetts residents that “Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day.”[5] Mariani doesn’t mention how the Italian food on supermarket shelves is increasingly the product of global food conglomerates. Maximizing the profits of companies with no connection to Italy or people of Italian descent is part of that story. When someone in the Midwest pours a jar of sauce from a company headquartered in Japan on pasta from a company headquartered in Spain and tells themself that they’re eating Italian, Italian food has conquered the world (without any actual involvement by Italians).

At turns inaccurate, gossipy, and too focused on Mariani’s experience going to nice restaurants for Esquire, How Italian Food Conquered the World never actually answers how. Yet, Italian food really did conquer the world. Great title. The book, not so.

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1. I ate Indian food in India, mostly Bengali food, since I was in West Bengal. I didn’t actually trust the Bengali cooks to turn out Italian food I wanted to eat. Besides, there was so much good, authentic Indian food to have.  ↩
2. Again, why eat ugly, poorly-made Italian when there was so much good local food to eat? Eating in Japan was an experience of almost no two restaurants alike (I had sushi more than once), since there’s such specialization in Japanese food. There was no overlap between the place the served only eel, the place served only crab, and the place that served only fugu. That’s a different blog post.  ↩
3. Throwing this in a footnote. Burger and pizza: fast food. Pasta places are typically family dining. Things slide from there to casual dining to fine dining. These are best typified by the beverage choices: no wine, house red or house Chianti (glasses and carafes only), a wine list, an expensive wine list.  ↩
4. As much as I like their Bavarian cream donuts, I just don’t see myself having one in Bavaria.  ↩
5. Founded on Prince St. in Boston in 1912 (just blocks from the site of the 1919 molasses flood). It is now owned by the US subsidiary of a Spanish corporation.  ↩

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My First Encounter with Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison has died after a life of many contributions to literature. If there is an afterlife, he’s probably threatening to sue God. Or mailing off dead weasels to angels.

I met Ellison only twice, both times at World Science Fiction conventions. The first time, if memory serves, was in 1986 at Confederation in Atalanta, Georgia. It was my first Worldcon and I was still amazed that I was sharing the same air as the names that graced the books that I had been reading for years.

Ellison was chatting with a group of fans. He was easy to pick out, since he was the only one in the group who was under 5’10”. I plucked up my courage, walked over, and hung at the edge of group, unnoticed.

There was a break, and I said, “excuse me, Mr. Ellison.” He looked back and upward a bit, to that space whence the voices of fans typically came. Then he did a double-take as he realized his interlocutor was at his own height, if not a little shorter even. (Okay, okay, yes, a little shorter.)

I told him what a pleasure it was to meet him and how I had enjoyed his work. He thanked me, briefly turned back to the other people, and then back to me again. “Do you get the short shit too?”
“All the time.”

“This is what you do,” he said putting an arm over my shoulder. “You say, ‘my height is genetic; it is completely beyond my control. You could do something about being an asshole.’”

Sadly, I only met Harlan Ellison one other time after that. Still, when people make comment on my height (yeah, that happens), I think about what Harlan Ellison said.

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Who the Fuck Says “Hebrews” in 2018?

Who the fuck says "Hebrews"?
Tip: Don't.

There’s a meme going around Facebook which attempts to promote a viewpoint about Israel. I won’t share it here, because memes take complex issues and reduce them to their most stupid and reductive elements. Although I don’t think anyone should be sharing it,[1] I do think it should be unpacked.

The meme shows a Native American man, dressed in traditional garb while riding a horse. The text says, “So you’re telling me…” and continues “You believe Hebrews are entitled to the land of Israel because their ancestors once lived there?”

It’s simple. It’s clear. It’s also wrong.

Let’s start with the guy on the horse. The image reduces the Native American to a caricature. He’s the Noble Savage fighting against the cowboys in the Western Expansion. Specifically, he’s the actor Rodney Grant in a scene from Dances with Wolves. In the image, he’s in character as a Sioux during the Civil War. He’s not indicative of the lives of modern Native Americans. When Mr. Grant is not acting the role of a nineteenth-century Native American, he doesn’t dress like that. There are plenty of pictures of him in a tux or in t-shirt and jeans, and even a picture of him wearing a shirt patterned with images of Elvis.

On the other hand, a Native American dressed up for a job in biotech or computer programming might not have quite the same impact on its intended audience of white liberals who might be convinced to be unsympathetic to Israel.[2]

Then there’s the text. “Hebrews?” Who the fuck says “Hebrews” today? It used to be a commonly used term, but those days have passed. The Union for Reform Judaism was named the Union of American Hebrew Congregations from is founding in 1873 to 2006. According to Google Ngram Viewer, the term “Hebrews” had its biggest use between 1910 and 1930, while “Hebrew” had its biggest use between about 1935 and 1945. Both terms are used far less than “Jews” for any period. So then why use it?

It mucks things up if you call them, not Hebrews, not Jews, but Israelis. After all, many Jews no intention of taking up residence in Israel.[3] So it becomes the standard question: does Israel have a right to exist. Well, no more (or less) than any other nation. But we never seem to question it about France. Or England. Should the Welsh be agitating to take back their island?[4]

If we’re not giving the throne of Britain to a descendent of Owain Glyndŵr, then why would we ignore all the history of Israel that doesn’t fit tidily into that meme? Unlike Britain or the United States, Israel didn’t come about through the conquest an indigenous population by foreign invaders.

I don’t want to deny that people were violently displaced from their homes. That happened. On both sides. This becomes part of the complex history that can only be dumbed down in a meme.[5] Maybe, just maybe, Israel’s legitimacy comes from decades of treaties and international resolutions, and not only because in the wake what is likely the largest genocide in history[6] it seemed appropriate to establish a Jewish homeland, something the Zionist movement had been trying since about 1896. But that’s hard to put into a meme.

When I posed the question with which I’ve titled this post, a friend of a friend (who had posted the meme) had an answer. I can’t verify her answer, but it is tempting. Who the fuck says “Hebrews” in 2018? Anti-Semites.

Update:
Instead of looking at memes on Facebook, read this. It’s a balanced look at the issues on both sides.

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1. Although some of my friends and relatives have.  ↩


2. Which is to say, if you’re white and posting this, you might want to check if you property was once in lands claimed by a Native American tribe. I’ll wait until you figure out your back payments.  ↩


3. Wht? Nd hv t lrn Hbrw? Ths ppl r n nd f vwls.  ↩


4. It’s only been about 1,570 years.  ↩


5. Memes are cancer. Memes make you stupid. Memes are the irritating inspirational poster in the office of that asshole boss you hated. “Work smarter, not harder,” reminding you that you just cancelled your plans because you have to work late and clean up a mess of your boss’s making.  ↩


6. The Holomodor in Ukraine may have killed more Ukrainians than Jews died in the Holocaust, though the total death toll of the Holocaust is larger.  ↩

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Going for Gougères

My gougères

I run the risk of this being one of those precious bits of food writing when I say that I first had gougères while doing wine tasting in Bordeaux. I’ll take the risk. It might sound less hoity-toity if I mention that we signed up for the tour at the tourist office and that we travelled about by minivan. (And given the cost of the tour, those were some terribly expensive glasses of wine.)

At one of the chateaux, the woman who showed us around the property (which was lovely) and led the wine tasting, said, “oh, look, the chef has made gougères for us.” The words were meant to indicate surprise and delight, though the way she said them made it clear that she said them about eight times a day. They smelled good, though. Instead of getting to the gougères and the wine, we got a tour first.

The French ones. Nicely piped,
but a little flat.

We had them between our first and last tasting. Yeah, they were yummy, but I was already analyzing them. They were cold, since they were already there when we arrived and we walked about for about a half hour before we even drank any wine. They were a little tough. One was slightly deflated. Everyone was enthusiastic about them. I munched on mine and thought, “someone makes these better.”

As we walked back to the minivan, my husband expressed surprise about them. “Oh, you can have those any time you want,” I said. “They’re just choux pastry with cheese.” Yup, gougères are cheezy choux pastry, and pâte à choux is easy.

I learned how to make it years ago. We took a cooking course and the dessert was profiteroles filled with vanilla ice cream. Profiteroles are easy. I prefer the term “cream puff,” since instead of ice cream, I fill mine with pastry cream (which is also easy). While I’ve been aware that you can fill profiteroles with all sorts of things, I’ve stuck to filling them with pastry cream and dipping them into chocolate.[1]

Recently, I was making a French-themed meal and decided that gougères were showing up in the menu. I checked a few recipes for choux pastry, two from Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Way to Cook), one from Françoise Bernard (La Cuisine) and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. Both Child and Bernard noted that gougères were made by adding cheese, though in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Child adds pepper and nutmeg. That allowed me to get my basic recipe:

Gougères

1 cup water
6 Tbs butter (¾ of a stick), cut into pieces
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp pepper
dash of nutmeg
1 cup flour
4 eggs
about 5 oz. shredded cheese, preferably Gruyere or similar[2]

Preheat the oven to 425°
Put the water, butter, salt, pepper, and nutmeg into a saucepan. Bring the ingredients to a boil. Once it is at a boil, turn off the heat, and pour in all the flour and stir vigorously with a wooden or plastic spoon until everything is combined. Continue until it is a thick paste that pulls away from the sides of the pan (this should take a couple of minutes).

Put the pan back on heat. Cook, stirring, until a film appears on the pan. (This takes another couple of minutes.)

Let cool for (you guessed it) a couple minutes then beat in the eggs, one at a time, incorporating each one before you add the next. (This can be done by hand, or you can use a mixer.)[3]

[At this point, other than the pepper and nutmeg, you have pâte à choux, which you could fill with something sweet or savory.]

Add the cheese. It will not incorporate into a smooth batter, but will be somewhat lumpy.

Using a pair of tablespoons, form the batter into balls on a baking sheet or parchment. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Let cool (but not too much, these things are heavenly hot from the oven).

Just a note, in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child says these will cook in fifteen minutes. I took her at her word and my gougères deflated on cooling. People ate them anyway, but I gave the next batch another five minutes and they retained their shape as they cooled. And people ate them just as avidly.

These can be piped out (the ones in France clearly were), but that starts to transfer this from a quick and easy recipe to one that has you scrubbing cheese off a piping bag. I own piping bags but I’m happy not to use them.

These are going to become a standard at my house.

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1. I’ve read that as a savory appetizer, you can fill them with chicken liver paste, that is mousse de foie de volaille. That’s easy too, but I haven’t thought they’d go over well at parties.  ↩


2. I’ve seen variation on this from 4 oz. to 6 oz. How cheesy do you want them?  ↩


3. You can double this. Then you’ll really want to use a mixer.  ↩

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News Flash: The Primaries Weren’t Rigged

Friendly tip: some stuff that looks like news is propaganda.

My whole point here is how you might distinguish news from propaganda, since we (unfortunately) live in an era when the propagandists are making able use of the internet to try to con people. And so I find myself having to look at the (thoroughly debunked) claim that the Democratic primaries were rigged.

Am I really writing this in August 2017? The final primary was June 17, 2016, at which point Senator Sanders had an unwinnable position with regard to the pledged delegates (that is, he got fewer votes than Secretary Clinton and in fewer states) and so he started chasing after the superdelegates, despite months of saying that the superdelegates were unfair and that the Democratic Party ought not have them.

So superdelegates were really, really bad until it was clear that only with the help of the superdelegates could Senator Sanders get the nomination, even if it meant going against the popular vote. The will of the people is really important until it looks like it’s the will of the people that you shouldn’t be the candidate. Sanders did not withdraw until July 26. Four years earlier, Clinton had withdrawn after the last of the 2008 primaries, when it was clear that she did not have sufficient delegates to become the Democratic presidential nominee.

Those are the facts. If you want to dispute them, do some research. There is absolutely no evidence that the Democrats rigged the elections, because they didn’t do it. It’s pretty much impossible to rig a nationwide election in the United States, since our elections are all decentralized. It’s not like one of these countries in which the national government runs the election and the Glorious Leader gets 103% of the vote.

Civics Lesson 1. There’s a hierarchy in voting procedures that never hits the federal government. My votes aren’t even tabulated at a state level, but rather at a county level. Those are then reported up. It’s efficient that way. A quick search shows that in 2004 (close enough) there were 174,252 precincts, but only 113,754 voting places. Clearly some states are allowing precincts to share voting location (then have precincts), while California law provides that a voting precinct may contain no more than 1,000 registered voters and that each precinct must have at least one polling place. This is actually typical, as Wikipedia notes that

A 2004 survey by the United States Election Assistance Commission reported an average precinct size in the United States of approximately 1,100 registered voters.

If you want to rig an election in the United States, you have to target not just a few places, but hundreds of local election boards. There’s a line from Ben Franklin that “three may keep a secret if two of them is dead,”[1] but those think that a grand conspiracy of the DNC rigged election have to believe that several thousand people (some of whom would be opposed to anything the DNC wanted) can keep a secret. If you want to claim that the 2016 primaries were rigged, you need to go beyond strident claims and start producing some hard evidence.[2]

In the fever dreams of Sanders supporters, there is no way that Hillary Clinton could possibly have beaten Bernie Sanders in a fair election (despite that 538.com pointed out that the primary election results were completely predictable).

Into this mix comes an article from the Observer (more on the source later) that screams in its headline that “Court Admits DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schulz Rigged Primaries Against Sanders.”[3] This is a lie. The second paragraph makes it clear that

On August 25, 2017, Federal Judge William Zloch, dismissed the lawsuit

Civics Lesson 2. There’s no findings of fact in a dismissed lawsuit. Zip. Nobody produces any evidence. The court could not have admitted anything about the factual nature of the case, because there were no claims tested by the fact-finding procedures of a court of law.

So what really happened? Sainato cites a section of the order of dismissal, to which he helpfully provides a link, but he takes it out of context. This is what he quotes, running together material in separate paragraphs from page 9 of the order:

The Court thus assumes that the DNC and Wasserman Schultz preferred Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president over Bernie Sanders or any other Democratic candidate. It assumes that they stockpiled information useful to the Clinton campaign. It assumes that they devoted their resources to assist Clinton in securing the party’s nomination and opposing other Democratic candidates. And it assumes that they engaged in these surreptitious acts while publically proclaiming they were completely neutral, fair, and impartial. This Order therefore concerns only technical matters of pleading and subject-matter jurisdiction.

This is quoted accurately, right to the misspelling of “publicly.” The final sentence comes from the subsequent paragraph, but let’s look at the third word, “thus.” The word indicates that the conclusion is a consequence of something. But of what? Mr. Sainato does not tell us. Oh, but we do have the court order.

At this stage, the Court is required to construe the First Amended Complaint (DE 8) in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs and accept its well-pled allegations as true. (page 8)

This is in the same paragraph as the quote material and immediately precedes it. The court has to accept it as true, despite there being no finding of fact, until that finding of fact happens. It’s akin to “innocent until proven guilty.” Plaintiffs are assumed to be telling the truth until the defense proves otherwise. The judge doesn’t get to say, “I don’t buy your allegations, and so I’m not giving you a chance to prove them.”

The judge makes it quite clear that the plaintiffs have failed to establish standing:

As to the fraud-type claims Counts I, II, III and IV, Plaintiffs fail to allege any causal connection between their injuries and Defendants’ statements. The Plaintiffs asserting each of these causes of action specifically allege that they donated to the DNC or to Bernie Sanders’s campaign. See DE 8, ¶¶ 2–109. But not one of them alleges that they ever read the DNC’s charter or heard the statements they now claim are false before making their donations. And not one of them alleges that they took action in reliance on the DNC’s charter or the statements identified in the First Amended Complaint (DE 8). Absent such allegations, these Plaintiffs lack standing. (Page 13)

Further, the judge notes later on that page (and continuing on page 14) that

To be sure, two paragraphs of the First Amended Complaint (DE 8) assert generally that the “DNC Donor Class Plaintiffs, the Sanders Donor Class Plaintiffs, and members of the DNC Donor Class and the Sanders Donor Class, relied on Defendants’ false statements and omissions to their injury.” DE 8, ¶¶ 188 & 195.3 But this boilerplate recitation, absent factual content to support it, does not permit the Court to “determine that at least one named class representative has Article III standing to raise each class claim.”

Key words “absent factual content.” The plaintiffs provided allegations (which is all they need to file), but no factual content (because that comes later). There have been no hard facts offered to support claims that the DNC rigged the primaries and the preponderance of evidence is that they did not.

But now let us consider the source. In reading it’s always important to consider the source. Is it a respected media outlet, known for its commitment to fact checking (like the New York Times) or is it the random blog of some loud individual with a keyboard (this).[4] This story was promoted by the Observer. Okay, what’s that?

The Observer is the internet remnant of the former New York Observer, a newspaper that was purchased by Jared Kusher. This is a source that goes directly to the President’s family. Yeah, just not any Jared Kushner, but the one who is Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

There is insufficient separation between the Observer and the Trump administration to consider the Observer anything but the propaganda arm of the Trump administration. Some liberals have accused Fox News of being the propaganda arm of the Republican Party (and Fox News is good at making themselves seem to be the propaganda arm of the Republican Party), but even there the RNC chair doesn’t own Fox News. If you’re getting your news about the 2016 Democratic primaries from Jared Kushner, you really need to consider the source.

While the Observer hasn’t shown that the DNC rigged the election,[5] this story is a good lesson on how to read.

1. Consider the facts. Is there a factual basis to the article? In the case of the Observer piece, a careful reading says no.


2. Look at the sources. Does the source support the article’s claim? In this case, no. One thing to watch for are one-sided pieces, such as articles on the harms of same-sex marriage where only opponents of same-sex marriage get cited.


3. Consider the source. Is this a likely biased source. Hint: “published by the President’s son-in-law” is not an assurance of objectivity, just the opposite.

If the Observer’s unsupported claim that the DNC rigged the election fills your heart with righteous joy, please read more carefully. They’re lying to you.

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1. Often quoted as “two may…” but Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations gives the cite. It’s from Poor Richard’s Almanac of July 1735.
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2. And if you have no hard evidence, then we have to assume that nothing happened. That’s when you shut the fuck up.
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3. I know I usually link to news articles, but since this article my Micheal Sainato, published on August 26, 2017 is a lie, I see no reason to do so.
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4. This is an invitation to rigorously fact-check me. Have at it. I love more and better facts. Still, if you have hard evidence that the DNC rigged the primaries (and not just that Sanders won smaller, whiter states) then don’t tell me, tell the New York Times.
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5. Because there is no evidence to support this idea and a lot that undermines it.  ↩

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Nay to Née

Né? Not for me!

I tend to be fairly conservative in language, preferring the tried-and-true to the innovative, but there is one point where I have to draw the line. There may have been an era in which the use of the French word née didn’t come off as affected or pretentious. We are no longer in that era.

Worse yet, the only times I ever see it, it’s been misused. There are multiple forms. In French there are times in which you would write not only né and née, but also •nés* and nées. It’s just the French word for “born” (that is, the past participle of the verb naître). As a convention in English, it’s acquired the meaning of “born under the name of,” and it’s typically used to indicate that some man is performing under a name other than that with which he was born.

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!