Me and Ms. Barker

This morning my Facebook feed fed me a story that was meant to be about a heartwarming event, but ended up being about grammar.

The headline read, “5th grade students thought these two teachers were dating—but watch how one addresses the rumor.”

And the blurb was a quote from one of the two teachers in the story: “Raise your hand if you have heard a rumor about Ms. Barker and I.”

Not surprisingly, the comment that floated to the top of the feed was one calling attention to the teacher’s grammar, pointing out that the correct form would have been “about Ms. Barker and me.”

And the reason the comment rose so high, was that people flooded in to tell the commenter that she was wrong—the correct form, many people insisted, is “about Ms. Barker and I.”

There were those who merely observed something along the lines of, “He was speaking, not writing, and it was an emotional situation. It’s pretty normal, in the course of speech, to say something ungrammatical.”

Fair enough.

Some people objected, “But he’s a math teacher! Don’t knock him for getting grammar wrong.”

First, I would hope that all teachers would have a good command of English, regardless of their particular subject matter. I’ll come back to that with the question of prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar.

Second, the logic behind the correct form feels almost mathematical to me, so it’s hardly a strong defense of the speaker to say, “He’s a mathematician.” I’ll come back to this as well.

The most striking thing in the comment thread was how many people piled in to say the teacher was right.

There was the simple snark, telling the commenter to go ask her English teacher for a refund.

Some correctors of the corrector were quite emphatic:

This is an issue that needs to be addressed by Departments of Education - it just proves that people do not know how to use grammar correctly, when people are correcting those who ARE GRAMMATICALLY correct. "Mrs Baker and I" is absolutely correct.

Or, “It’s The King and I, not The King and Me”

Ad infinitum.

What’s at play here is presumably the classic over-correction. As a kid, someone said, “Me and Joey were at the park,” and a parent or teacher said, “No, the proper form is, ‘Joey and I were at the park’.”

The correctee just remembered the form “___ and I,” without ever understanding that they were being corrected on two issues simultaneously, one of etiquette (putting others first) and one of grammar (subject vs. object pronouns).

And this is where I see the parallel to math.

Bad journalism

I just wrote to NPR over their coverage of Trump's NRA speech:

I was listening to the news podcast around noon EDT today (May 5th), and there was coverage of Donald Trump's speech at the NRA convention.

They played tape of his remark how he read about a London hospital with blood all over the floors from stab wounds. That presumably is an assertion that can be checked. Are there any reports of that, and if so, where are those reports? Are they credible?

Trump has a long history of claiming he saw things for which there's absolutely no evidence, such as his line about the Muslims in New Jersey dancing for joy on 9/11.

When someone has a history like that, you need to check whether his statements are grounded in fact. He long ago forfeited any benefit of the doubt.

Blind justice

Can you go into debt for something you logically can’t owe?

It sounds like a neat trick, but the Czech justice system is Just That Good.

Prague’s public transit system is an honor system with inspections.

You are required to have a valid ticket in order to ride, but they don’t check you on your way onto the bus with a farebox, or on your way into the subway with a turnstyle.

But they carry out random inspections, and if they ask you for a ticket and you don’t have one, you pay a substantial fine—currently 800 Kč (about $40) if you pay the inspector right there, or 1,500 Kč if you simply take the ticket and pay later.

People who are blind are entitled to free travel on public transportation. The transit system issues you an ID card explaining your condition, and you show that when the inspectors come around asking to see people’s tickets.

In other words, it is logically impossible for you to be riding without a ticket.

Vladimir Patera lost his sight in childhood and has the appropriate travel card from Prague Public Transit, so he was surprised when he started getting debt collection notices relating to incidents of riding without a ticket between 1998 and 2003.

(Details of Patera’s case are from “Úspěch Vladimira Patery [Vladimir Patera’s success]”, Respekt, April 23-29, 2018, pp. 27-8.)

Maybe someone had misused the birth certificate he’d lost while moving house? He’d show his transit ID and the mistake would be recognized.

But two levels of courts said that Patera should have defended himself what is known as the “discovery process,” and that once a debt-collection proceeding has been started, it’s too late to deal with the factual substance of the case.

Patera said he had never received notice of the discovery process, but that didn’t help him.

The debt collectors garnished his wages and ended up collecting 200,000 Kč from him.

The gun-lover's Catch-22

It’s never the gun.

Whenever something happens that looks like it might, there’s a need to show that there’s some other reason this horrible thing happened that, just coincidentally, involved a gun being fired and killing people.

One popular approach is to claim that the thing never really happened, but was instead staged as an excuse to come and take everyone’s guns.

So those people claiming to be Florida high-school students who had survived a shooting were actually “crisis actors” playing the role of apparently not-sufficiently-traumatized teenagers.

And of course the murder of 20 children and 6 teachers in Newtown, CT, was all a hoax, and the “grieving” parents were actors who hadn’t actually lost children.

I haven’t yet seen anyone claim a flat-out hoax in this case, but maybe they’re being discouraged from that by seeing Alex Jones get sued for defamation over his Newtown “hoax” stories.

But there’s still the trustworthy “FBI screwed up” story line.

People used it after Parkland, and it’s now been trotted out again in the Waffle House shooting near Nashville.

The starting point for the claim is the FBI’s statement that they investigated the murderer last summer, combined with the fact that they nonetheless didn’t stop the murders.

Here’s the FBI’s statement, in a rush transcript from CNN:

In July of 2017, the FBI's Springfield, Illinois Field Office received information regarding Travis Reinking from the U.S. Social Service [presumably “Secret” Service]. In coordination with the Secret Service and state and local law enforcement, the FBI took investigative steps to include database reviews and interviews. Coordinate action was taken with the Illinois State Police to revoke Mr. Reinking's prior arm owner's identification card and the Tazeville, County Sheriff's Office to then remove firearms from his possession. 

After conducting all appropriate investigation, the FBI closed this assessment on Mr. Reinking in October of 2017. I feel confident the FBI took the appropriate steps and did everything within our federal jurisdiction that we could at the time. So thank you for your time.

It may seem pretty straightforward to you or me, but if you go to the news site Grabien News, you can find it framed as, “FBI admits being warned about Waffle House killer, defends not taking further action.” (I don’t feel like putting up the link; if you use that headline plus Grabien, you should be able to find it.)

The Nikulin file

Amidst the insanity that is closing in around Donald Trump, a seemingly bit player is a Russian named Yevgeniy Nikulin. But while he’s peripheral to the events in the U.S., he’s been a prominent part of the political narrative here, and the growing tug-of-war over whether the country will continue the alignment with the U.S. and Western Europe that it’s built since 1989, or will instead revert to its post-World-War-II position in Russia’s orbit.

As the Guardian reported all the way back in January, 2017, Nikulin was arrested in Prague the previous October (i.e., of 2016) “on an Interpol arrest warrant issued by US authorities.”

The U.S. requested his extradited in connection with various alleged pieces of hacking, including on the site Formspring, used by Anthony Weiner for his public-self-immolation-via-sexting.

But once he was arrested, it turned out that the Russian government wanted him extradited to their country, on allegations from 2009 that he hacked into a bank account and stole 110,000 rubles.

“He was never formally accused at that time. I think the reason is that he was recruited [by the Russian security services],” said Ondrej Kundra, political editor with the Czech weekly magazine Respekt, which has reported that the Russian services offer alleged offenders immunity from prosecution in exchange for collaboration.

At the time of that Guardian article, the expectation was that the Czech Ministry of Justice would make a determination by the end of February—of 2017! That obviously didn’t happen, because last fall there was an article in Respekt about him still being held in Czech prison, and under somewhat unusual conditions. I don’t have the article at hand, but if memory serves, his detention was accompanied by special security measures, not because he was especially dangerous or a flight risk, but because of the sense that somebody might try to do him in while in prison.

(If I can dig up that article, I’ll come back and amend this.)

As it turns out, Nikulin was finally extradited to the U.S. just at the end of last month and has entered a plea of “not guilty” in San Francisco.

We’ll see where his case goes from here and whether and how it ends up being linked with Russian interference in the 2016 election. According to the Guardian last year, “One theory is Nikulin – even if not personally involved in the election hacking – may know other hackers who were.”

But it was also something of a flashpoint here in the Czech Republic.

A market for democracy

When the Women’s March was being organized for the day after Trump’s inauguration, I was happy to see a statement of opposition to the new regime, and I was glad to see my wife joining some friends in going to D.C. to add their voices to that statement, but I didn’t expect anything larger to come from it. I’d seen demonstrations come and go without having any noticeable effect.

I’m glad I was wrong.

The women organizing the march had no intention of letting it be an end in itself, some sort of cathartic yawp after which everyone would go home self-satisfied.

The organizers, and the participants, and the supporters from a distance have all succeeded in making the March an energizing beginning, not an end. And you can see the results in voter registration, voter turnout in special elections, and record numbers of candidates, particularly women candidates.

A week later, when Trump announced his first attempt at a travel ban, I was heartened to see the rapid and vociferous response at airports around the country.

The march and the airport protests were visible signs of a public that had been roused from a political torpor.

But it’s the registering, and voting, and running for office that matters in the long run.

And the question is, how do we keep people energized for those activities over time?

Protesting at airports is necessary when the government is undermining the Constitution, but in the long run it’s not viable to spend your whole life preventing damage to society by running out into the street every week, or even every few months.

The point of a democratic republic is to choose people to run public affairs competently and more or less in line with the will of the majority, within the limits of the constitution.

There’s a tricky paradox here, related to some basic insights of economics.

Know your audience

Yesterday evening I got an invite in my email.

It was from Josef Seják, an environmental economist here in Prague, and a man who played a crucial role in enabling my stay here seven years ago after taking an interest in an article I’d written.

The invitation was to a recital by his daughter, Barbora K. Sejáková, a well-regarded pianist in Czech chamber and solo music.

The recital was in a gothic former church, a small piece of medieval Prague lurking behind a garden wall in the Malá strana district, just below Petřín Gardens.