Phule For Thought

Richard Jewell, who died at the young age of 44 yesterday of complications from diabetes, was one of the very rare people who won an appeal from the World Court of Public Opinion.  The hero of the Atlanta 1996 bombing, he was quickly sidelined as a weird, mutant freak — and probably the bomber himself.  Why?

 Richard did not fit the Hollywood Last Action Hero mold.  A good old Georgia redneck who still lived at home with mom at the age of 33, he was more likely the candidate to be played by John Malkovich’s least favored understudy in the made-for-TV-inspired-by-a-true-story piece of cinematic pap.  Jaq truly believes this is why the media turned on him.  Jaq can’t blame the FBI for investigating Jewell for the reasons it did — but can blame them most wholeheartedly for firing the spark that inflamed the media into frenzied, heavy-handed innuendo and flat out accusation.

Jaq further blames the media for being so incredulously gullible.

From there, it entered a gross feedback loop.  Media blames Jewell.  Public cries out, demands more action.  Gummint, quacking like the duck you expect them to be, heats up public displays of accusation.  Ad continuum.

Amazingly enough, Richard was not only vindicated, but was done so not only within his brief lifetime but even quickly, with full (cash) apologies from the media.  Most of the media anyway.  The AJC to this day continues insist they did nothing wrong.  Richard even got an apology from Janet Reno while still in office.  This is unprecedented.  This is like the pope apologizing to Galileo, without waiting 400 years first.  Jaq knows of no other such unvarnished apologies from anyone in government for anything in the field of justice, can anyone else comment?

Today’s fallacies include “argumentum ad populo”, and the fallacy of Reverse Accident.  It works for Richard like this:

Assassins and psychopaths are most often loner weirdos with less-than-metrosexual outlooks on life.  Therefore weirdos like this are likely to be assassins and psychopaths.  This is False Cause, or inspecting the a small and unusual population (assassins and psychopaths) to find attributes (freaky weirdness), and concluding that anyone bearing these attributes (freaky weirdness) must belong to the population (of assassins and psychopaths).  This confuses what the definition of the group really is, and looks at minor, nonessential character traits rather than the core idea that assassins and homicidal maniacs are people who kill people.  Follow the evidence to find who done the killing, and you’ve found your maniac.

Richard’s problems, caused by this logical fallacy, were then magnified by the ethical fallacy, “argumentum ad populo,” or “I read it on the Internet, it must be true!”  This is an ethical argument.  Is Jaq saying that the media who attempted to character-assassinate Richard Jewell were dishonest as well as shtupid?  Yes, this is exactly what Jaq is saying.

This kind of behavior is often created by District or Federal Attorneys.  Witness the farce at the Duke Lacrosse trial.  Janet Reno did a truly amazing thing by apologizing.  Nifong, who was originally hoping for fame and fortune to fulfill his federal fancies, instead found failure in fallout, apologized mainly because it was his last, desparate hope for clemency.  May the World Peanut Gallery Court have more pity on him than it did for the Duke Lacrosse team.

Sometimes the trial is never resolved until the end of the poor guy’s life.  The increasingly bizarre case of John Demjanjuk, which Jaq has been following with interest since the mid-1980s, exemplifies this.  John seems to have lied on his I-94 or whatever the hell equivalent thing they had in 1951 about his involvement in WW II.  Jaq is increasingly convinced that this is his only possible crime, and the attempts to name him as a growing array of the worst possible Nazi monsters.  The idea that he is one of these people appeals to a sense of drama among the survivors.  What is offered, and has been accepted as proof in court nowadays is exceedingly similar to the “proof”, validated by “expert testimony”, offered back in the ’80s when John was supposed to be the Nazi monster Ivan the Terrible.  Jaq has vivid memories of the Plain Dealer showing pictures of John in 198x next to Ivan in 194x, saying “SEE?  Its the SAME GUY!!!”  Jaq didn’t see it then, and can’t quite believe it now.

Yes, he possibly lied on his paperwork.  John came to America in search of a new start.  Everyone has skeletons in their closet that they’re not too proud of.  Jaq can’t quite blame him for trying to forget the past.  Is “crime against paperwork” confused with “crime against humanity?”  Can’t say for sure, but to the bureaucrat who is out of touch with reality, people look only like paperwork.

If John did indeed work for the Nazis, only John knows for sure.  Worked, doing what, no one can prove,  and in the latest turn of the case it no longer seems that they’re even trying to prove any specific criminal act.

Oskar Schindler was ineligible to enter the US for his Nazi ties.  And Schindler is the very exception which proves the rule.  What rule?  The Fallacy of Division.  What is true of the whole must be true of the parts, says the fallacymaker (and the butcher and the baker).  Nazis were nasty, brutish, and killed Jews.  Therefore, so must have Oskar Schindler.  Or John Demjanjuk.

But in any case, congratulations to Richard Jewell for being fully exonerated in the 2005 conviction of Eric Rudolph — yes, another social misfit, who gives the rest of them a bad name.  And goodbye, Richard, your heroism and calm leadership in the face of panic will be remembered.

Jaq has strong, personal feelings about Georgia’s HOPE scholarship, and will therefore recuse themselves from making any judgements on the program itself in this forum.

For the confused, the HOPE scholarship is a program available to seniors who graduate from public Georgia high schools with a 3.0+ GPA, and proceed to attend a public Georgia collegiate-type institution. The student’s tuition, fees, and even some of books are fully paid for, so long as the student maintains GPA and attendance requirements. The scholarship is fully funded by the Georgia lottery. For those not so confused, Jaq apologizes for the lack of a good footnote facility within wordpress.

On the other hand, it’s open season on this rather rediculous puff piece from Creative Loafing.  The implication is left open in the article that changes in the inner workings of the HOPE scholarship are racist, and indeed were done to foment a racial agenda.

The article commits some rather standard fallacies, like “Biased Sample”, when talking about an inner city high school’s performance:

At Crim, a school that’s 99 percent African-American, a mere 47 seniors were eligible two years ago for the HOPE scholarship, which requires that students graduate with a 3.0 grade-point average. This year … the number of scholarship-worthy Crim seniors sank to three.

Why did such a thing happen?  The article asserts that it was caused by an administrative change to the operation of the HOPE scholarship, which reduced the overall number of eligible graduating seniors, in order to save costs in a dwindling revenue base.  The sample’s bias is revealed in one of the article comments, a clarification by the author:

Booker T. Washington High School sunk from 163 HOPE scholars in 2005 to 80 in 2007; Carver Comprehensive High School from 21 to 10; Douglass from 221 to 94; Benjamin E. Mays from 218 to 81; North Atlanta from 192 to 87; South Atlanta from 73 to 30; Southside from 82 to 42; and D.M. Therrell from 75 to 28. … Grady High School managed to hold onto most of its HOPE scholars.  

Okay, so things are bad, but nowhere near the 94% drop as reported by Crim.  Okay, so the author ‘fessed up.  Is all forgiven?  One other commenter disagrees:

you should have also been able to determine that Crim was in fact closed as a traditional high school two years ago (the year that 47 students qualified) and was repurposed by APS as an alternative campus high school for adult students seeking their diploma or GED. These are not exactly “Outstanding” pupils, or necessarily seeking to move on to college.

Here’s another fallacy revealed in the original article, called “Questionable Cause”.  Crim’s HOPE enrollee counts dropped, but could that have something to do with other circumstances?  HOPE scholarship is not available to folks too far removed from high school… The author threw these figures in for shock value. Article comments by the author indicate that this was done with full intention. Negative points for style! This is a failure to establish *ethos*, or the character implicit in the writing. Clearly the author has pathos for the subject, but folks, this ain’t enough. Errors in ethos … journalistic ethics, anyone?

Logos has got some major problems too, specifically in the area of economics.

To start with, the article’s tagline is “Now more than ever, the HOPE scholarship is taxing low-income minorities to pay for middle-class education“.  Taxing?

A tax is a forcible, involuntary confiscation of money.  The state of Georgia is not forcing anyone to buy lottery tickets to fund educations for whitey, either directly, nor by being a “tax on breathing” like gasoline taxes, or sales taxes on food.  (If you really want to help families with low incomes, eliminate these ugly regressive things!)  Be careful with your definitions.

If “lower class” folk are more likely to buy lotto tickets, is that such a bad thing?  If it is, then the implication is to take away what is condescendingly known as a “tax on people bad at math.”  Talk about an elitist attitude!  Some folk see the remote possibility of a lottery win as even a glimmer of hope, a way out of a bad situation that only costs a couple of bucks per week.  Take away the “tax”, and you take away that hope.  Nice.

The worst thing wrong with the article is the unstated conclusion: roll back the HOPE administrative changes.

Why is this a problem?  After all, the scholarship isn’t as out of money as they had originally thought.

Because the rest of the unstated conclusion is that if HOPE runs into fiscal problems again, the scholarship should be restructured to account for race, or income level, or something else.

Ack.  This arouses Jaq’s ire faster than a 3 AM cockroach.

While the scholarship didn’t start that way, for years it was run in a purely merit-based fashion.  If you change it to be race based, what is the emotional blowback?  “I got this scholarship … was it because I know my shit, or because I’m black?” is one possible reaction.  “Did I miss that scholarship because I wasn’t good enough, or because I’m not black enough?” is another.  No, this doesn’t cause any strain in race relations at all!

Race-based quotas are out of vogue, so another way to cut it is by income level.  This adds more complexity, because on one hand, everyone will know that “income level” means the same thing as “race-based quota” even if officially everyone will tiptoe around that particular elephant.  On another hand … “I got this scholarship … was it because I know my shit, or because I’m an object of pity for my family’s low income?”, and “Did I miss that scholarship because I wasn’t good enough, or because I’m too rich?  Well, I guess I had better rely on daddy’s money for the remainder of my days.”  Yay, equal distribution of inferiority complexes.

The HOPE scholarship is the only hope for higher education for many children of low-income families.  Did no one ever think that that, for children of rich parents, that the HOPE scholarship is their only hope to escape the tyranny of daddy’s money?

If HOPE funding is cut, and Georgia has to reduce the number of eligible students, unless you resort to one of the above measures you can’t help but cut unequally.  It doesn’t help anything in this situation to treat people like labels.  One inner-city high school managed not to lose as deeply as others; this says something about the rest of the story that the article does not discuss, like: what the hell is wrong with the teachers and administrators of these other schools?  They knew the changes were coming, why didn’t they straighten up?  Grady HS did.  Moreover, what the hell is wrong with the students, individually?  It’s not too terribly hard to beat a 3.0 GPA in a Georgia high school.

In the long run, this big problem is endemic to the idea of the HOPE scholarship in general.  Jaq likes the fact that no cash is forcibly taken from anyone in the redistribution scheme, but it is an economic fact that when something is subsidized, you get more of it.  Per the law of supply and demand, costs will rise and quality will fall as more people want it.  Economic factors change; because a subsidized program is run on political factors rather than economic, you end up with necessary cuts, and people on all sides of the equation get hurt by the reversal of expectations.  Somewhat like what has happened in health care, too.  It’s kinda funny, in a sad sort of way, when even “conservative” types who crab about “entitlement mentality” somehow think that they are different, that they’re entitled to that free education which is supposedly a right.

What happens when demand far exceeds supply?  When conditions become such that lotto sales drop, standards are lowered, or tuition prices rise to meet demand faster than lotto sales?  Then it really hits the fan.  Fortunately, the state of Georgia cannot resort directly to inflation, but however could try to broach the issue on a federal level, so as not to piss off the voters who can no longer expect the existing system to pay for what they want for free.  The feds can inflate.  They can pay for anything!  Financial cannibalism on a grand scale.  It would even be ironic; paying for the education for the future of America by sabotaging the currency necessary for the success of the future of America.

Forcible wealth redistribution breeds contempt among classes when all classes expect to be recipients.  So much for the classless society.

This has been a bit more ramble-y than usual.  There was a point coming originally, which totally got lost.  Tomorrow shall strive for greater coherency.