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Blaspheming Against Orwell

Geoffrey Pullum continues his assault on George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language”:

Orwell may have thought that phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption should be shunned because they needlessly and redundantly use double negation, but if so, he was wrong. Dropping the two negators from a not unjustifiable assumption yields a justifiable assumption; but that does not have anything like the same meaning. Calling an assumption justifiable suggests one can readily justify it; using “not unjustifiable” is much weaker, and merely suggests that you cannot rule out the possibility of its being justified.

In the same way, Jane is intelligent speaks positively of Jane’s intellect, placing her perhaps in the top quartile of the intelligence range. Jane is not unintelligent, by contrast, is faint praise indeed. It says she does not fall in the range picked out by unintelligent (say, roughly the bottom quartile), but it doesn’t say much more than that.

I take Pullum’s point, but there is a kind of weak ambivalence about the double-negative construction. Why not write that Jane is moderately intelligent. You can get nuance without the clumsiness of very English under-statement. He takes issue with this sentence in particular:

One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

Let me explain what is so astonishingly dishonest about that footnote. The adjective-negating prefix un- is fairly productive, but by no means universally so. For example, it doesn’t occur with the most basic adjectives of approbation and disapprobation (*ungood, *unbad, *unright, *unwrong). And relevantly here, it never occurs with color adjectives (*unred, *unorange, *unyellow, *ungreen, *unblue, *unindigo, *unviolet), and it never occurs with size adjectives (*unbig, *unlarge, *unhuge, *unvast, *unlittle, *unsmall, *untiny). What this means is that Orwell’s example has nothing to do with the not un- construction that he is supposed to be addressing.

It’s also obviously a little joke. But, hey, blaspheming is something Orwell believed in. So have at him.

The President’s Perspective

Fertilizer Plant Explosion In West, Texas

He gave a very balanced statement and emphasized two core things: that we still do not know the precise motives of the Tsarnaev brothers and should strenuously resist any inferences from shards of information that could cast aspersions on any groups of people. He insisted, as he often does, on portraying the cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of America as a real strength rather than in any way a weakness.

I agree. At the same time, understanding the motives for such an act and their potential connection to religious fanaticism is important – and no one should apologize for noticing Jihadist sentiments in some aspects of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Internet trail. But it should be weighed alongside possible personal and psychological struggles, which may explain more. We should, in other words, close off nothing. But I certainly don’t get the sense from the authorities as of now that this could be part of some wider and serious terror plot. We’ll see, of course. But the relief on the official faces in Boston tonight seemed genuine to me.

The second point the president made was about West, Texas. And it was an extremely important point to make.

The devastation in that little town is hard to describe – the trauma still reverberating. The death toll is more than double Boston’s. Both matter, and purposeful, criminal murder is not to be taken in any way lightly. But terrorism is not the only form of tragedy; and retaining some perspective is essential to facing terrorism down and defeating its psychic leverage over us.

In the end, after the lockdown of an entire city, a massive, mechanized robot and helicopter army came face to face with a bleeding nineteen-year-old hiding in a shrink-wrapped boat. That almost Freudian disparity is worth keeping in mind in the days ahead. So is the pain in Texas, where an entire community was almost just wiped off the map.

(Photo: Residents attend a candelight vigil and prayer honoring the victims of West Fertilizer Company explosion at St. Mary’s Assumption Catholic Church April 18, 2013 in West, Texas. A fiery explosion that damaged or destroyed buildings within a half-mile radius ripped through the facility Wednesday night, injuring more than 160 people and killing an unknown number of others. By Kevork Djansezian/Getty.)

Never Shoot A Shooting

Lt. Col. Robert Bateman warns against ever trying to film a gunfight with your smartphone, as some residents of Watertown did last night:

In the real world, even when a bullet does hit something, unless it is at nearly a right angle, THAT BULLET CAN STILL KILL YOU. It is called a ricochet. Ever played pool? Same idea. Remember that. Even the bullets not aimed at, or anywhere near you, can ruin your whole day. …

[Also, if] the other guy is firing anything with greater hitting power than, say, a .32 (Google .32 caliber, .45 caliber, 5.56mm and 7.62mm…I can’t do it ALL for you) it will go through things. Metals, woods, sheet-rock? No problem. Your front door will not protect you, at all. Nor will the walls of a normal suburban house, nor the three Sheet-rock walls beyond that. In a car, the only thing that really stops most bullets would be the engine block itself. All the rest of the body of a car, well, basically tin-foil. All those cop movies you remember from the 70s, when they hid behind the opened door of their patrol car and shot at the bad guy? Yea, no. Do not think that works.

His advice? Get into your basement or as far away from the firing as you possibly can.

Covering A Manhunt

https://twitter.com/vogeCST/status/325277239170179073

Brian Stelter describes [NYT] the difficulties involved:

The authorities simultaneously thanked members of the news media for spreading the word that Bostonians should take shelter and remain alert — and cautioned them against repeating secondhand or thinly sourced information. The Massachusetts State Police asked local and national television networks to refrain from showing any live video of police movements, and for a time the Federal Aviation Administration restricted news helicopters from hovering above the area where one of the suspects in the bombing of the marathon Monday was believed to be hiding.

Madrigal highlights Reddit’s erroneous identification of Sunil Tripathi:

A few things are for sure: the scanner chatter never mentioned the two false suspects together. The scanner chatter never mentioned them as suspects, either. The scanner chatter recordings contain no record of any mention. And no one has been able to produce any recording of the scanner mentioning Tripathi.

[M]aybe people heard Tripathi’s name, even though police never said it. Many of the people who thought they heard Tripathi’s name already knew about the Reddit-centered suspicions about the student. Police had also said another name earlier in the evening and spelled it out. Perhaps they were primed to hear the name and among the static and unreliable connections to these scanners, they heard what they wanted to hear.

Maybe that’s what I want to believe. Because otherwise, I just don’t understand what happened last night. A piece of evidence that fit a narrative some people really wanted to believe was conjured into existence and there was no stopping its spread.

Previous Dish on the media coverage of today’s events here and here.

The Shutting Down Of Boston, Ctd

Tomasky wonders if it was necessary:

If the argument is that it’s for people’s safety, well…okay, but how many people could this guy really kill? On the day that he set out to kill dozens, he fell well short of that. And what are the odds that any particular individual would cross paths with this guy? When did telling people to use caution and venture only where necessary stop being enough?

And how long is this going to go on? Through the weekend? Seriously? What if the guy is long gone? What if he killed himself somewhere and his body isn’t found for days?

Paul Campos adds:

While I appreciate that police work is made easier by completely immobilizing the population of a major metropolitan area, this sort of massive over-reaction to the failure to apprehend one 19-year-old amateur terrorist (I doubt Al Qaeda types and the like would consider knocking off a 7-11, shooting a security guard, and carjacking an SUV to be the smart play a few hours after having their faces spread all over the internet) is what gives the performers of what are essentially bloody publicity stunts ever-more motivation to engage in their crimes.

Update from a reader:

I know this sounds like hearsay, but my brother is a Boston Cop and there is more going on than is being reported. BPD is worried about bombs planted all over the city. They could be false threats, but they’re taking them seriously and worried these guys have confederates.

Brad Plumer calculates what the Boston shutdown will cost:

We can do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy metropolitan area had a GDP of some $326 billion in 2011. That’s an economy bigger than Ireland’s or Finland’s or Greece’s or Portugal’s.

So a complete shutdown would cost nearly $1 billion per day, though analysts tell Yuval Rosenberg at the Fiscal Times that the actual effects will likely be smaller, and similar to that of a major blizzard. Some economic activity will simply get pushed to a later date. And salaried workers will still get paid. Hourly wage workers, however could take a hit — particularly low-wage workers.

Will Immigration Reform Take A Hit?

Kevin Drum fears so:

A few days ago, someone asked: Who are you secretly hoping the bombers turn out to be? My answer was, whatever kind of person is least likely to have any effect whatsoever on public policy. Chechnyans with a grudge of some kind actually fit this bill fairly well, and since the immigration debate is focused mostly on Mexico it might not even have too much impact there. Still, it will have some effect. I don’t know if today’s news will kill immigration reform, but a bill that was on a knife edge already doesn’t need any further setbacks. This is going to hurt its chances.

Matt Steinglass nods:

[R]ationally or not, terrorism involving foreigners in America has always been linked to immigration politics.

The first push to restrict immigration in the 20th century got started after anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley; he wasn’t even an immigrant himself, his parents were, but it was enough to prompt Teddy Roosevelt to ask congress to bar “the coming to this country of anarchists or persons professing principles hostile to all government”. The resulting Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, and the Immigration Act of 1918 which expanded its authority, didn’t end up actually kicking out more than a few dozen people. And the 1924 Immigration Act, which really did lead to a drastic cutback in immigration, was based on quotas by race and country of origin rather than ideology.

But the political discourse supporting immigration restrictions has always leaned heavily on supposed threats of violence, both criminal and ideological. A couple of immigrant ideological terrorists, running around Massachusetts killing people—the last time the media got hold of a story like this, Sacco and Vanzetti … were sentenced to death, and four years later immigration to America was cut to a trickle.

Earlier Dish on the subject here.

Where Did The Brothers Get Their Weapons?

Christopher Dickey, Eli Lake and Daniel Klaidman review what we know. On possible ties to al Qaeda, given their firepower:

The trail of the Tsarnaevs seems, for the moment, to remain one of lone wolves. But counterterror operatives see details that suggest a wider organization may yet be discovered. Most telling: the sheer firepower the Tsarnaevs were able to bring to bear in their shootout with police. They appeared to have several unused bombs. And because terrorists learn from each other’s actions, some counterterror analysts are speculating that they may have planned a bigger operation at the marathon, or perhaps to come. One possible example is the bloody Mumbai attack in 2008, carried out by a handful of men, which killed 164 people.

“These are ‘wise guys,’” said one veteran counterterror official. “These are intelligent individuals who thought they could outsmart everybody and get away with it. They didn’t want to die. But they prepared a lot of stuff.”

Why these types of individuals are so hard to stop:

These sorts of lone wolves—whether inspired by al Qaeda or a domestic agenda—are in many ways the toughest cases for law enforcement. “Mobile homegrown types are difficult to stop and to find,” says Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “There is not a conspiracy ring to penetrate. It’s very difficult to stop them and find them.”

“The toughest risk to address is the motivated individual with no known connection to groups, who takes it upon himself to do something,” says Roger Cressey, who worked on counterterrorism in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “The best example of that is Eric Rudolph.”

The Austerity Typo? Ctd

Reinhart and Rogoff provide a detailed response in WSJ, acknowledging the Excel mistake but downplaying the other criticisms. Justin Fox identifies a deeper problem with macroeconomics in general:

This is watching the sausage of macroeconomics being made. It’s not appetizing. Seemingly small choices in how to handle the data deliver dramatically different results. And it’s not hard to see why: The Reinhart-Rogoff data set, according to Herndon-Ash-Pollin’s analysis, contained just 110 “country-years” of debt/GDP over 90%, and 63 of those come from just three countries: Belgium, Greece, and the UK.

This is a problem inherent to macroeconomics. It’s not like an experiment that one can run multiple times, or observations that can be compared across millions of individuals or even hundreds of corporations. In the words attributed to economist Paul Samuelson, “We have but one sample of history.” And it’s just not a very big sample.

Free Exchange weighs in:

The latest dust-up does nothing to answer the question of causation. Slower GDP growth could be the cause of a rising debt load rather than the result. Ms Reinhart and Mr Rogoff acknowledge in their academic work that this conundrum “has not been fully resolved”, but have sometimes been less careful in media articles. This is perhaps their biggest mistake. The relationship between debt and growth is a politically charged issue. It is in these areas that economists must keep the most rigorous standards.

On that point, Yglesias unpacks Arindrajit Dube’s analysis, which argues that low growth causes debt more than debt causes low growth. Previous Dish on the R&R paper here and here.

Cashing In On Integration

Alyssa Rosenberg and Travis Waldron discuss 42, the new film about Jackie Robinson. Both were disappointed by the movie, but Alyssa praises the film for spotlighting “the economics of bringing Jackie Robinson to the major leagues”:

Rickey (Harrison Ford, overacting so dramatically I’m amazed he isn’t sponsored by the ham council) tells his assistant Harold at the beginning of the movie. “Dollars aren’t black and white. They’re green.”

When a gas station attendant refuses Robinson access to the toilet when his Negro League team is on the Deep South, Robinson blackmails him into desegregating it by suggesting the team can buy its gas elsewhere. “Jack, is this about politics?” a white reporter asks him at his first spring training. “It’s about getting paid,” Jackie (Chadwick Boseman, who might have had a star turn with a better script) tells him. “I’m in the baseball business,” Rickey tells Robinson at a later point. “With you and the other black players I hope to bring up next year, I can build a team that can win the World Series. And a World Series means money.”

Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (a fantastic Christopher Meloni) lectures his players, some of whom oppose the idea of playing with Robinson, “I’ll play an elephant if it’ll help us win…We’re playing for money, here. Winning is the only thing that matters.” Durocher himself is suspended from baseball when the Catholic Youth Organization threatens to boycott the league over his affair with a married actress. Even the racist manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman (a very strong Alan Tudyk) recognizes the economic imperatives, taunting Robinson at the plate “You’re here to get the nigger dollars for Rickey at the gate.”

That economic imperative story is interesting, and it’s important—and it’s a critical reminder that the decision to desegregate baseball wasn’t simply done out of the goodness of Branch Rickey’s heart.

The Meaning Of Silence

The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in Salinas v. Texas this week, in which Genovevo Salinas’ refusal to answer a question during interrogation was used as evidence of his guilt during trial. Dominic Perella explains the ramifications:

The jury convicted Salinas, and the question now is whether the prosecution went too far. The answer turns on what the Fifth Amendment means. That amendment–the basis for the famous Miranda warnings–says that “[n]o person… shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” But what does it mean to be “compelled”? … [P]rosecutors can’t tell the jury that it suggests guilt when a defendant decides not to testify at trial. That would be “compelling” the defendant to give evidence against himself, the court has explained, because the defendant is being punished for remaining silent.

That is the basis for Salinas’ appeal. This case is no different from silence at trial, his lawyers say, because Salinas was punished for exercising his right not to incriminate himself, and that kind of punishment compels defendants to talk. And, his lawyers have pointed out in court filings, a ruling against Salinas could change police practices nationwide. If what the police did in Salinas’ case is constitutional, they wrote, then police in all investigations “will have an incentive” to convince suspects to talk by telling them “that any silence could be used against them at trial.”

Lyle Denniston tries to read the tea leaves:

If the sentiment that seems to run high in a Supreme Court hearing dictated how a case would come out, the Justices might well be on their way to declaring that the Constitution forbids prosecutors from telling juries that a suspect’s silence when talking to police in any criminal investigation means he is guilty.  The argument Wednesday in Salinas v. Texas (12-246) showed the appeal of treating silence in response to police questions as too ambiguous to be allowed as proof of guilt.

But some hesitancy set in here and there, because several of the Justices were puzzled about how to write a new Fifth Amendment opinion that actually would work to protect the right against self-incrimination when a suspect meets with police, without being arrested or further detained and before “Miranda warnings” are required or given.

Robin Hagan Cain worries that upholding Salinas’ conviction will make interrogations more difficult:

If a majority finds a suspect’s pre-arrest silence can be offered against him, wouldn’t the ruling ultimately backfire on law enforcement officers? Wouldn’t people hauled before the police refuse to answer all questions, rather than refusing to answer only certain questions? Granted, there would be more convictions initially as news of the ruling trickled through the Interwebs, but suspects would start to catch on after a few seasons of Law & Order perps parroting “Am I under arrest? Am I free to go?”