Palin to a heckler yesterday: “Bless your heart sir, my son is in Iraq fighting for your right to protest.”

Ooh, zinger! Except… what?  I mean, I realize the military “defend our freedoms” and all, but this makes astonishingly little sense if you think about it for five seconds. It made a certain sort of sense during the Cold War, but I’d be curious—in a morbid sort of way—to hear Palin make the link between the success of the Iraq occupation and the preservation of the right to political speech at home. Glad as I am to learn of this administration’s deep commitment to domestic civil liberties, I can think of less circuitous ways to have expressed it than invading Iraq.

I’ve got a long double review up at Ars of two of privacy scholar Dan Solove’s recent books, one a more abstract and theoretical examination of the concept of privacy in American law, the second more of a case study of how the Internet and social media are making it harder to control our identities and reputations.  The short version is that Solove is a brilliant diagnostician, but his prescriptions—which involve courts striking complex balances that seem certain to leave private actors uncertain how to avoid liability—are a good dealmore dubious.  Check it out.

No, no, no.  This is really sort of insane.  What we saw tonight was a tolerably effective Palin as a function of being well-prepped—a Palin who did well, at least relative to expectations, by sticking to her prefab talking points instead of getting lured into attempting to respond to the questions. She pulled it off because she ignored all the “helpful advice” from the “let Sarah be Sarah” crowd and memorized her lines well.  But please, nobody watching her shuddering, heel-tapping, moose-in-headlights act for the first hour, or her transparent reliance on notes throughout, can contend with a straight face that we got a moment of spontaneity from Palin in there. She did what she needed to do—avoided a meltdown—but it was the opposite of “authenticity.”

Update: Speaking of which: data point 7,532 in support of the theory that Andy McCarthy is completely fucking nuts.  Don’t say Ifill did a decent job! We can’t play the refs if you say that! Gaaaaaaa!

I cant believe I just saw this.

Since this old post still seems to get a fair amount of inbound linkage, I figured I’d help to clarify the origin of the common expression “in the tank”—as in “the media sure are in the tank for Obama/McCain this year!”

The original “tank” here is a water tank, which also used to be a slangy term for a swimming pool. From there we go to old sporting slang, where a boxer who “takes a dive” in a fixed fight might be described as “going in the tank” or “tanking”—deliberately hitting the mat as though he were diving into a swimming pool. And from there, the transition to the current usage should be pretty obvious: The media are supposed to be neutral and skeptical, but the claim that they’re “in the tank” is to suggest that they’re participating in a rigged contest.

And there you have it.

About a year back, I floated the idea of things that are “exactly good enough to suck.” Things that fall into this category—writing, music, art, whatever—are just barely of sufficient quality to get judged by the appropriate “serious” standard (professional journalism, a “real” band), by which standard they fail miserably. If they were only slightly worse, they’d be judged by the more forgiving standards applicable to talented amateurs, and come off quite well.

Well, a commenter on a post below mentions the Dunning-Kruger effect, which I suspect may at least in part be related to a kind of corollary idea. The Dunning-Kruger effect, as my commenter summarizes it, refers to the phenomenon the eponymous social scientists discovered whereby

people who were incompetent (falling into the bottom quartile) on humor, grammar and reasoning vastly overestimated their competence (mean assessment of competence level was 62nd percentile), but also did not recognize skill in others and revise their view of their own competence.

Here’s one story about why this might be the case—I’d have to look a little more closely at the distribution of self-assessment to know whether it’s true. Just anecdotally, genuinely smart and competent people tend not to be enormously impressed with their own intelligence or competence, not because they’re intrinsically humble, but because they end up surrounded by other equally (or, at any rate, variously and complementarily) smart, competent people, who provide the relevant yardstick. As Robert Nozick once put it, very few of us think: “Yeah, I’m pretty good for a primate; I can use tools and have mastered a natural language.”

Folks at the high end of mediocrity—the big fish in the shallow pond—look around and conclude they’re incredibly special.  Probably the same obtains down the scale. It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if you think you’re the smartest person you know (and not a Nobel Laureate), you’re probably just not quite sharp enough to have brighter friends. In other words: just short of good-enough-to-suck. Of course, we can tell an equally plausible story that works the other way around: The lower you are in your relevant peer-group ladder, the more uncomfortable an accurate self-assessment is, whereas the second- or third-best along some dimension can be realistic about not being the absolute tops without feeling too bad about it.

In all its incarnations, the good-enough-to-suck effect depends on their being at least moderately sharp boundaries between the relevant domains. Sometimes these exist just as a function of what it means to have a reasonably cohesive professional or social group. Sometimes it’s because certain domains of knowledge or associated standards of quality exert their own sort of gravitational effect once they’ve first “clicked.” (Try not to see these strings of letters as words.) Whatever the reason, it’s hard not regard this phenomenon as sort of perverse—this roller coaster self-image is forced to ride

We can find the same principle at work on the consumption side of “good enough to suck” as well—which may figure into the inability to assess competence in others. Consider, for example, the consumer of music or movies who’s forever harping on how the majority of (top-40 radio hits) / (major studio blockbusters) are garbage. This is not wrong, certainly, but to obsess over it is to declare that your taste is not quite good enough for you to have long ago stopped noticing either category. Sure, TRL plays a lot of pap, but in 2008, given the glut of other options, why is anybody over the age of twelve who cares about music even aware of what’s being played on TRL?

Of course, as you round that corner, you’re hit with the uncomfortable realization that, in fact, you don’t know all that much about really good art/music/movies/whatever after all. Your taste has just become exactly good enough to suck, relative to the new domain. At which point it may occur to you, still more uncomfortably, that for precisely this reason you can’t be sure how many more such corners you’ve yet to round. Certainly I’ve had this experience: I considered myself something of a rock nerd, until I dated a real rock nerd and realized I didn’t have the first idea about 90 percent of the most interesting stuff done in the past couple decades. A slightly disconcerting experience, to be sure, but well worth it in the long run.

I figure my blog readers, even the ones not normally super enamored of the techy stuff, might be interested in this story at Ars about a fascinating case that doesn’t seem to have gotten a whole lot of coverage.  It involves Echostar, the parent company of DISH Network, suing a firm that manufactures “free to air” satellite receivers that can be easily hacked to let users get premium satellite programming without paying.

The case is still in its early phase, and depending on the facts that come out, it’s totally possible that Echostar could prove to be in the right here.  Even so, the case highlights a couple of troubling features of litigation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

First, Echostar was seeking the disclosure of retailer records to reveal the identity and contact information for every one of the hundreds of thousands of people who had bought one of the defendant’s products in the past five years. The court ultimately blocked the effort, but it was a close call and turned on some specifics of the case that might not obtain in other cases, or even later phases of this litigation. And the main reason they were able to plausibly attempt to subpoena the information is that the DMCA makes a manufacturer potentially liable for making a device that has few comercially significant uses beyond piracy, regardless of whether that was the manufacturer’s (provable) intent—which makes liability contingent on the evolving usage patterns of thousands or millions of customers.

Second, it’s clear that just bringing the suit, which doesn’t even go to trial until next year, has absolutely devestated the defendant company’s business. They’ve lost 90 percent of their distributors and 95 percent of their sales since the suit was brought. And again, depending on the facts that come out at trial, it’s totally possible that Echostar will be shown to be in the right here—they’re claiming the company actively colluded with pirates to get illicit codes out for their boxes, and if that’s true, I’ll have no sympathy if they get the book thrown at them. But it should probably give us pause that the 800-pound-gorilla here is well on their way to wiping out a small competitor without having proven any of that in court yet, because distributors and (to a lesser extent) end users are reasonably chary of getting drawn into a lot of thorny litigation and having their records subject to discovery. Remember, even without the collusion claim, a company can be targeted for making an open device that users can later hack for circumvention purposes, at least if such modification becomes sufficiently prevalent.

Anyway, read, as they say, the whole thing.

Julian Elson’s $0.02 on the Palin post below are worth reading.

In the wake of the disastrous Couric interview with Sarah Palin, even the hacks are voicing concerns about their rising star–cum–shooting star.  But since removing her from the ticket, even by the transparent expedient of having her “voluntarily” withdraw to “spend more time with the family,” would be at least as disatrous as keeping her on, many are still casting about for ways to defend the nation’s most prominent hockey mom. One emerging narrative—in the proud tradition of lamentations that “if only the king knew what his wicked advisors were up to…”—is that the McCain campaign needs to “Free Sarah Palin” from the malign influence of handlers who are squelching her precious “authenticity.” Voters love Palin when she can just be herself, the theory goes, and her cringe-inducing performance in interviews is the result of over-coaching that has prompted her to fall back on half-memorized talking points. The “real” Sarah, you see, would have handled herself with articulate aplomb.

It’s a nice enough theory, but where exactly is the evidence for it?  Sure, we can look back and find instances where she’s handled herself more competently, but her gaffes have not been, as some of her apologists seem to want to imply, a matter of getting flustered by her failure to recall the name of the Brazilian finance minister.  Her problem is not mastery of the details: It’s fundamental cluelessness about how the economy works, and a demonstrable inability to conceive of foreign policy in anything but the crudest terms.

Put it this way, one thing I learned from college debate is that a reasonably bright person can generally manage to sound at least competent talking about issues they don’t really understand. I recall one case my partner and I debated where the other team argued against dollarizing the Ecuadorian sucre. We didn’t know a damn thing about the economic or political situation in Ecuador, or a whole lot about monetary policy. I doubt I could have told you the name of Ecuador’s president, let alone the finance minister. But we had some basic econ and game theory down, and I knew a bit about the Mexican peso crisis of the mid-90s, and so we were able to bluff our way through and win the round.  The kind of mess we’ve seen in Palin’s interviews, then, can’t really be ascribed to an ignorance of details that could be remedied with a few more flash-card sessions. As Jeff Goldberg puts it, the problem isn’t so much that she doesn’t have the right answers, it’s that she doesn’t seem to have enough of a grasp on the questions to bluff her way through with something vague but halfway cogent sounding. This suggests that she’s either profoundly ignorant on economic and foreign policy questions, in a deep and architectonic way unlikely to be remedied by a few briefings geared toward filling in the lacunae, or that she’s just not terribly bright.

Sure, Palin is probably personable and appealing when she can just ad-lib to her fans, provided the subject is her disdain for coastal latte-sippers or her fictional rejection of government largesse.  The truly strange thing about this whole narrative, though, is that the high point of Palin-love, the moment the hacks are all wistfully recalling now, is the governor’s appalling alpha-Heather schtick from the RNC. In other words, the time we saw her at her most scripted, and with a script penned by one of those very Bush holdovers who are purportedly keeping True Sarah under wraps.

The simplest inference from the available data points, it would seem, is exactly the opposite of the theory behind the calls to “Free Sarah”: At the end of the day, Palin is still basically a local TV news personality. Give her a prompter loaded with punchy zingers, and she’ll deliver it smoothly and with verve. It’s when she’s forced to get interactive that she runs into trouble.

This is, of course, more or less the line conservative have long been pushing about Obama: He’s great with a prepared text, much more uneven in debates. Obama’s problem in that context, though, seems to be a lingering professorial tendency to want to think through his answer in realtime, covering all the angles as though the exchange were some sort of Socratic inquiry, when a well-packaged talking point would better fit the bill. This, to put it as mildly and kindly as possible, would not appear to be Palin’s problem.

Update: Jesus, the bar keeps getting lower, doesn’t it? From one of K-Lo’s little pen pals at The Corner:

She is over kicking her coverage (in football phrasing) in trying to earnestly answer questions about Senator McCain’s history of reform in Congress (she is not a Congressional historian) or trying to recall past Supreme Court decisions besides Roe v. Wade (she is not a legal scholar).

The “legal scholar” is the one that really kills me.  As though a passing familiarity with important Supreme Court decisions were the exclusive province of academic specialists, rather than, you know, the most minimal sort of prerequisite for considering yourself an educated citizen. But of course, as we’re sure to be reminded, lots of ordinary Americans probably couldn’t name another important Supreme Court case, just as lots of Americans (we were admonished) don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is. I keep waiting for the tongue-clucking op-ed observing that fully half of Americans are of below-average intelligence.

Of course, the vast majority of Americans aren’t remotely qualified to be Vice President either. But it’s apparently embedded in our cultural DNA now that anyone can follow their dreams, achieve any goal… more or less by wishing, regardless of personal merit. Palin is the logical upshot of The Secret, reality TV, and a million goofy Hollywood comedies, all conspiring to tell us that utterly unremarkable folks can wake up to find themselves rich, famous, and successful more or less at random.

You can get away with calling  Harvard golden boy Barack Obama underqualified, because that plays to the politics of ressentiment: “See, he’s not such a hotshot after all.”  But say the same of Sarah—or at any rate, so this rhetorical strategy assumes—and you risk cutting a little too close to home. In my cynical moods, I find myself suspecting that’s precisely why she was chosen.