Fight ... for your right ... to FAAAAACE-BOOK!

Ho-hum, another nitwit posts something on Facebook that ticks off her boss, gets fired, what a -- hey waitaminute:

In what labor officials and lawyers view as a ground-breaking case involving workers and social media, the National Labor Relations Board has accused a company of illegally firing an employee after she criticized her supervisor on her Facebook page.

This is the first case in which the labor board has stepped in to argue that workers’ criticisms of their bosses or companies on a social networking site is generally a protected activity and that employers would be violating the law by punishing workers for such statements. * * *

Lafe Solomon, the board’s acting general counsel, said, “This is a fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act — whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that.”

That act gives workers a federally protected right to form unions, and it prohibits employers from punishing workers — whether union or nonunion — for discussing working conditions or unionization. The labor board said the company’s Facebook rule was “overly broad” and improperly limited employees’ rights to discuss working conditions among themselves.

What will the courts do with it? The ALJ hearing is set for January, so this will take a while. Meantime however employment-law firms are already warning their clients to tread lightly.

(Post title must be sung to Beastie Boys tune.)

Tolkien, Arts & Crafts, and Bletchley Park (oh, and zeppelins)

I got nothin', but anyone looking to divert a few minutes could do much worse than this Making Light thread.

Desperate circumstances

Finally, the point of considering hypothetical situations, perhaps very improbable ones, seems to be to elicit from yourself or someone else a hypothetical decision to do something of a bad kind. I don't doubt this has the effect of predisposing people--who will never get into the situations for which they have made hypothetical choices-‑to consent to similar bad actions, or to praise and flatter those who do them, so long as their crowd does so too, when the desperate circumstances imagined don't hold at all.

-- G.E.M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy."

... The relevance to the "ticking bomb" rationalization for torture is evident.

"The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich"

Apropos of some dumbass Limbaugh rant, Jon Chait turns to an early supporter of progressive taxation:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

-- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book 5, ch. 2.

I really do need to read The Wealth of Nations one of these days.

... And in comments to the Chait post, we're cited to this:

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation beneath a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

-- Jefferson to Madison, 1785.

Obama's lack of a political instinct

Mark Lilla ponders the 2010 election:

What’s particularly frustrating for someone who’s been watching the Tea Party lately is the inability of Democrats, and especially our president, to capitalize on issues where they actually have an advantage over Republicans, especially economic fairness. Many key words of our political vocabulary have been copyrighted by Republicans over the past thirty years, notably “freedom,” which was the major leitmotif of Ronald Reagan’s administrations and the label he stuck on all his foreign and domestic policies. The symbolically loaded terms that mobilized voters for the Democrats in the sixties and seventies--”equality” and “justice”--now drive them away; unfortunate but true.

But there is still one powerful symbol the Democrats could capture because today’s Republicans explicitly reject it: fairness. “Life isn’t fair” is a refrain you hear constantly from the right. Yet there is a strong sense in the nation today that things are rigged, especially at the top of the economic ladder, and this has only intensified since the bailouts of early 2009. The unwillingness of the Obama administration to engage in economic populism in this intensely populist age, when skepticism of “Wall Street” just keeps rising, is utterly baffling to me. This is the one area where they could get a toehold, if not with the Tea Party hardcore then with the vast numbers of independents who sympathize with it and have floated back to the Republican Party because of it.

I see in Wednesday’s New York Times a survey of election-day voters that touches on this and doesn’t surprise me in the least. Most responses show just how divided the nation is, except on one question: Wall Street. When asked whom they most blame for our economic troubles, 41 percent of Republicans blamed Obama, 55 percent of Democrats blamed Bush. But 32 percent of Democrats also listed Wall Street, as did--find a seat, quick--37 percent of Republican voters. At the crucial moment last year when AIG was bailed out and bonuses were paid, President Obama let pass a golden opportunity to seize the issue of economic fairness and steal some of the right’s populist thunder. Whatever political instinct it is that tells a politician he’s got an opening, that a potent political symbol is lying there waiting to be picked up, our president lacks it. As for progressive pundits and Democratic Party leaders, they need to get out of their limousines and talk to some of those people with the misspelled signs. They’ll discover some potential allies among them.

Lilla is right to distinguish the TP core from the majority of those favorable to it. When people who blame bankers for our recession are voting Republican, the messaging has been completely botched.

Obama presumably is too highminded to stoop to "class warfare," as the GOP calls it when anyone resists the upper class.

Shipwrecked, middle-aged men

There was another capacity in Russell, however, that was antithetical to Wittgenstein's character -- namely, his sublime ability to ignore certain unpleasant areas of his life.

This was not a mere difference in temperament; it was also a function of their difference in age. Unlike Wittgenstein, Russell had attained the age at which men are adept at psychically treading water, treading for days and sometimes weeks on end. Emotionally, he might be lost in the middle of the North Atlantic, but it wasn't so bad. Cozily bobbing along as a wave hits ... pfffftttt -- gasping. Then another wave. And another.

At times it was hardly a dog paddle, barely keeping his head above water. And lately Russell was so busy swimming along that he hadn't noticed this new current that was slowly sweeping him out to sea. Besides, it was this fear, this heroic struggling in the foam of experience -- this was the fatal discharge whereof life is created. This was what he lived for. And, blast it, the point was, he was swimnming. Yes, in a pinch all Noah's critters swim, but none tread water better than shipwrecked, middle-aged men.

-- Bruce Duffy, The World as I Found It, p. 82.

Memoirs of the immemorial

LGM makes this catch, from a forthcoming interview plugging Dubya's memoir:

MATT LAUER: You say you told Laura at the time it was the worst moment of your presidency?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes. My record was strong, I felt, when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And it was a disgusting moment.

That worst moment being when Kanye West's saying that Bush didn't care about black people.

No, really.

As Kaufmann writes, "According to the man himself, then, Bush placed more importance on whether people perceived him to be racist than what happened to actual black people in the city of New Orleans." Q.E.D., motherfucker.

What may be most revealing about this is that 9/11 wasn't the answer. Very likely, Bush has warm memories of 9/11. It was exciting and presidential! People liked him! He was a wartime leader!

Also in the memoirs, Bush confesses to war crimes, which of course will lead to his being ... praised in the usual quarters.

The former president defends his handling of some of the most intense controversies of his presidency, acknowledging at one point that he personally approved the waterboarding, or simulated drowning, of alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a practice that the CIA has since forsworn and both President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. have described as torture barred by international law.

"Damn right," Bush said he told the CIA when they sought his permission.

Ooh. He tough. Because it takes a tough guy to order someone strapped to a board and treated like a victim of the NKVD. On this scale, Stalin was the greatest leader ever.