Many of the insurrectionists who sacked the Capitol on January 6 are claiming, in their defense, that the president told them to do what they did. Fine. If Donald Trump does not pardon himself (and probably even if he does), he should be indicted as the fomenter of the insurrection against the United States of America and should be arrested at Mar-a-Lago at the earliest opportunity.
Perhaps U.S. Marshals should be waiting at Mar-a-Lago for the former president when he arrives on Wednesday.
The latest addition to the politically correct lexicon is the use of the phrase enslaved person for the more succinct slave. Supposedly, this practice is intended to emphasize that those held in bondage are, first and foremost, human beings.
Slavery, in antebellum America in any case, sought to eradicate the personhood of the enslaved as much as possible. To Southern planters, slaves were not people at all; they were property that, ideally, behaved as automatons. (I know, domestic slaves became, in a limited sense, part of the owning family. But most slaves were field hands who were simply interchangeable parts of the plantation machinery.) Slave personhood was rather a nuisance. Instead of celebrating their personhood, calling slaves enslaved persons minimizes the dehumanizing and cruel conditions under which they labored. It substitutes for the terse, harsh, one-syllable locution, a milder-sounding four-syllable phrase that softens the horrors of the peculiar institution.
It is true that no one is properly characterized only by one’s occupation. We all understand this. To say that someone is a manager, for example, does not suggest that he or she is not fully a human being, a citizen, perhaps a spouse and parent, a lover of food, etc. There is no need to speak of such a person as a person who manages. Likewise, we speak of a baseball player without feeling any need to speak of a person who plays basketball. Friends would think it strange were we to refer to a politician as a person who engages in politics, though, admittedly, it is sometimes difficult to discern the humanity of such a person. Yet, we have converted homeless people into people who are experiencing homelessness.
Substituting phrases reputed to emphasize the personhood of actors of one sort of another merely serves unnecessarily to increase the word count of our writing and utterances. No one needs to be reminded that a politician, or even a slave, is actually a person. Neologisms such as enslaved person are simply silly and should be avoided.
With another election behind us, I have been planning to write one or more essays promoting and analyzing ranked choice voting. I have long been an advocate of this method of conducting elections—see The People’s Choice (Round Two), originally written November 11, 2000—and there seems to be increased interest in it of late. By no means does the essay below start at the beginning, but I start here in response to an interview heard recently on NPR.
WAMU’s public affairs show1A presented a program titled “The Future and Feasibility of Ranked-Choice Voting.” Readers who have never heard of ranked-choice voting (RCV) should first read my essay mentioned above. More comprehensive information about RCV can be found on the FairVote Web site. (Fair Vote offers a concise description of RCV here.)
What most interested me on the 1A episode was the criticisms made of RCV by one of the guests, Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University. Professor McDaniel’s role seemed to be that of naysayer invited to balance the opinions of RCV advocates. His fundamental criticism of RCV is that ballots are complex—more complex than the usual ballots, at any rate—which leads to two basic problems. First, some people are discouraged from voting because they do not understand the system. McDaniel claims to have empirical evidence of lower turnout due to ballot complexity, though he admits that the effect—if it exists at all—is small. Second, McDaniel asserts that RCV produces more ballot errors.
I believe that the benefits of RCV are substantial and remain so even in light of McDaniel’s criticisms. I do not intend to argue for those benefits here but merely to address McDaniel’s objections.
It is undoubtedly true that the ballots for RCV are more complicated than those of conventional American elections. Rather than marking a vote for one’s favorite candidate, it is possible, though not necessary, to indicate candidate preferences in order: first choice, second choice, etc. RCV ballots may be structured in various ways, and some may be more confusing than others. Typically, however, ballots include clear instructions as to how to cast one’s vote. And the changeover to RCV voting needs to be publicized and explained to the voting public. Will some people still misunderstand how to fill out a ballot? Surely, but people ruin ballots using conventional, “simpler” voting schemes—they mark their vote for two opposing candidates, they skip races by mistake, and they fail to follow instructions for mail-in ballots.
The instructions on an RCV ballot should make it clear that one can vote for a single candidate, i.e., treat the ballot as for a conventional election. If we believe even this is too confusing for some folks, we can offer alternative ballots, one that allows voting only for a single candidate in each race, and one that allows for ranking voter preferences. Let the default ballot be the conventional one, and let people confident in the use of the RCV ballot request such a ballot. The conventional ballots are then treated as if they were RCV ballots with only the most preferred candidate chosen.
As I mentioned, voters already have ways of spoiling their ballots. RCV provides more ways to cast an incorrect vote, but many errors can be “cured” by applying some straightforward rules:
On September 16, 2001, I wrote an essay titled “What’s in a Name.” That essay considered the meaning of the events of September 11, 2001. But it also raised the question of how we would refer to those events in the future. As it happens, none of the names I suggested stuck. We will instead forever speak of “9/11.”
We now must consider how we will refer to the events of January 6, 2021, when, encouraged by President Donald Trump and others, an angry mob sacked the United States Capitol. It is to be hoped that this barbarism will have less historical significance than 9/11, but that remains to be seen. It is nevertheless an experience we will need to talk about, and we need to give it a name.
My first thought is that the name we use for the recent events should somehow reference Trump or Trumpism, but this may not be necessary. Here are some possibilities:
Where should I start? Today held much promise. It seemed likely that two Democrats had won senatorial elections in Georgia, thereby giving Democrats control of the Senate. And Congress was supposed to officially count the Electoral College votes that would definitively make Joe Biden the next president. Republican lawmakers were expected to object to some of the votes, but those objections could only delay the inevitable, not change the outcome in any way.
Earlier in the day, however, President Donald Trump, addressing the crowds he had encouraged to come to Washington for this momentous day, sent an angry mob off the Capitol to use force to, if not change the result of the election, at least dramatize their displeasure. To the surprise of many—and apparently to D.C. law enforcement—the Trump-enraged mob stormed the Capitol. As I watched the television coverage, I was distressed as the angry Trumpists mounted the steps of the Capitol. Surely, they won’t be allowed to enter the building, I thought. But soon enough, they were in the building, breaking windows, breaching the Senate chamber, and invading the offices of lawmakers.
I had always thought that this sort of thing never happened in the United States. We are not a banana republic subject to periodic coups. But it was happening. In a sense, I felt personally violated; the Capitol is the people’s house as much as is the White House. Those animals who had broken in claiming it was their house, thereby relinquished their right to claim it,
Throughout the day, the president ignored pleas to call off his insurrectionists. Only late in the day did he advise them to “go home with love & peace.” But he did so while still asserting that victory had been “so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away” from him and his partisans.
As I write this, the Congress apparently intends to reconvene in a few minutes to complete the task that was interrupted earlier this afternoon. Police and national guard troops have cleared the Capitol and are creating a widening perimeter around the Capitol complex. A six o’clock curfew is in effect. It isn’t clear if the insurrection is over. Apparently, only one person was killed.
I will need time to process the events of the day. For now, all I can do is ask questions:
I listened to an NPR report this morning about the difficulty of providing COVID-19 vaccines. Of course, different localities are encountering different problems. An underlying fact, however, is that vaccinating against the current pandemic is more complex than providing the annual flu vaccine. Because the vaccine(s) are scarce and valuable, it is important that mass vaccinations proceed as efficiently as possible.
The NPR story suggested that it may take half an hour to vaccinate a single patient. First, there are a number of intake questions to be answered, and the recipient may have additional personal questions. Although the actual injection is quick, the patient must be kept under observation for 15 minutes to assure that he or she has no immediate adverse reaction. Vaccine shortages aside, it is easy to see why the vaccination process often proceeds slowly.
Another problem, of course, is building the queue of patients awaiting treatment. Television news reports are showing hundreds of people standing in line outdoors or lined up in their cars, so this problem is being handled differently from place to place and is often not being handled well. There likely is not any universally ideal recruiting scheme, but, clearly, we need to collect vaccine recipients without creating an undue burden on them or, heaven forbid, exposing them to possible contagion by virtue of their proximity.
Recruiting is likely not much of a problem in nursing homes or hospitals. We need to think harder about how to recruit from the population at large. Having people call in for appointments is frustrating them with busy signals. There needs to be a better way. Probably, recruiting in urban areas will need to be handled differently from how it is in rural ones.
On the other hand, delivering the vaccine efficiently can be done expeditiously with a little planning. My model for this is the typical blood drive. Like the vaccination process, giving blood necessarily includes intake questions and a brief stay after donation to assure no ill effects on the donor. In this case, the main process takes a good deal of time. Therefore, there are multiple tables on which the actual blood draw takes place. Ideally, when someone has completed the intake form, a table will be available. Although the actual donation is time-consuming, the system is designed for acceptable throughput.
Applied to mass vaccinations, the procedure looks like this: Only one person need be performing the vaccinations, although the person will need to be relieved from time to time. Intake, on the other hand, is slow and needs to be performed by multiple questioners to assure that, as soon as one injection is given, another person is ready to the next one. One or more other workers can monitor the group of patients awaiting the all-clear after vaccination.
This system requires perhaps four or five workers not involved in an actual medical procedure. Crowd control might need other people. These people need not be medical personnel, although some training may be in order. I suggest that recruiting such people would not be difficult. Simply offer them their own vaccination in compensation. Perhaps they should be paid as well, but this may not be necessary.
The procedure outlined above is, I suggest, the “obvious” way of handling mass vaccinations. Why is it not being used?
Today is the first day of a new year—2021. The greeting “Happy New Year” carries more meaning now than in most years. We leave behind what was decidedly an unhappy old year. We anticipate not simply a new beginning—realizing, of course, that the transition from one year to the next is arbitrary—but also a justifiable hope for a better quality of life in 2021.
We can expect a new, more competent, and more humane administration in Washington. Its advent is less than three weeks away. Equally significant, we await widespread vaccination to protect against COVID-19, and the eventual, though not immediate, return to community life at least somewhat as we once knew it.
There are clouds on the horizon. If the Senate continues to be controlled by Republicans, the Biden administration will find it difficult to achieve many of its objectives. But much of the work of undoing the depredations of Donald Trump and his minions can be effected through executive action, so the righting of the ship of state can proceed even with Mitch McConnell continuing in the role of Senate majority leader.
One can even hope that, with Trump out of the White House, his malign influence on many of our citizens will be diminished. An administration with very different policies, inclinations, and normal procedures may cause some of Trump’s followers to reconsider their wants, loyalties, and misconceptions. Racism, resentment, and hostility are not easily overcome, however, especially in the face of social media that facilitate their intensity. But it is not a vain hope that benign administration will have at least some positive effect.
Another cloud over 2021 is the irrational fear, even hostility, toward vaccination. To the degree that vaccination protects individuals, the refusal to accept it is an act of self-abuse. Unfortunately, it also harms the community, as protection against the continuing spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus requires widespread immunity conferred by the various vaccines available or becoming so. As vaccination becomes more universal, perhaps the aversion to it will decrease sufficiently to allow so-called herd immunity to develop.
As we slowly emerge from the twin distractions of the pandemic and the Trump maladministration, we will, I think, be changed. One can hope that that change will largely be for the better. We should recognize that our civilization has vulnerabilities and that we have an opportunity to ameliorate them. More people will continue to work from home, thereby reducing energy consumption and air pollution. Other changes, some disruptive though necessary, will also be required. We should have learned what government can accomplish and what happens when we refuse to employ it. Finally, it is to be hoped that we, at long last, will change our bizarre and dangerous method of electing our president and vice president.
Two thousand twenty-one will surely be happier than its predecessor. May it truly be a happy new year for you and yours and for the United States of America!
This is the time when pundits review the year that is about to end, offer lessons learned, and opine about what is to come. There are many lessons we can learn from the experience of 2020, so I thought it worthwhile to offer my own list of such lessons. I don’t claim that my list is comprehensive, and I admit a certain bias colors my perspective: I am a Christian informed by the Enlightenment and a believer in democracy.
Feel free to copy my list or to argue with my conclusions. Here is the list:
Last week, a visitor found a set of keys on the driveway as she was leaving. The keyring held two keys—one was assuredly a house key—and a dark leather strap about four inches long. It also held a key fob for a vehicle. Of course, I had no idea whose keys had just been found.
I quickly determined that the keys belonged to no one who had recently visited; no one had lost keys. It had recently snowed, however, and, rather by accident, I had seen a man engaged in clearing the sidewalk of snow. The keys might be his. Since he was hired by the condo association, I didn’t know who he might have been, but I made a mental note to investigate this person if no owner of the keys was found.
The found object offered some clues as to its owner. First, there was the vehicle key fob. It was probably possible, with the coöperation of the vehicle manufacturer, to match it to its owner. Suprisingly, however, the fob did not carry a manufacturer’s name. It did include various numbers that might have led a determined detective to the owner, but I wanted to look for more obvious clues first.
Information on the leather strap looked promising. It showed a signature on one side and a set of coördinates on the other. With difficulty, I could read the coördinates, but the signature was, as many signatures are, difficult to decode. I could make out the first letter of the last name and also the last two letters. This sent me to the local telephone directory. Since I don’t live in a big city, I could check for all the listings consistent with what I read on the strap. But, as we all know, fewer and fewer people have landlines these days, and there was a good chance the target of my search was not in the directory. That proved to be the case.
That left the coördinates to check out. These were hard to read, but they were clearer than the signature, and I was certain I had read them properly. My thinking was that they would lead me to the home of the keychain owner. It took me a couple of tries to enter the information into Google Maps, but I finally identified the specified location. That’s the good news. The bad news was that that location was within a nearby cemetery. It seemed unlikely that anyone lived there.
My next idea was to post a notice of what I had found, but where? The newspaper was a possibility, as was Facebook, but the former seemed a longshot, and I didn’t know of a sufficiently local Facebook page likely to be seen by the intended reader. Surely, the owner had set foot on the driveway where the keys were found, so it seemed likely that the person would try retracing his or her steps in search of the keys. With this thought in mind, I placed a sign on the garage door. It said, in large letters, “LOST KEYS?” and pointed the reader to the front door.
The next day, the doorbell rang. There was a postal truck on the street and a postman at the door. He explained that a fellow worker who delivered mail in the area had lost his keys and had been searching for them. We agreed that I probably had the searched-for keys. To be sure, I kept the keys, and the postman pledged to speak to his co-worker.
On the following day, that co-worker showed up at my door. He easily described his property, and I mentioned how I had tried to track him down. As it happened, he had lost a son, and the coördinates were those of his son’s grave. I had not considered such a possibility. Checking out the cemetery would have given me another clue, though not a conclusive one.
Anyway, I was glad to have found the owner of the keys. Would it have been better simply to have left the keys where they were? Perhaps. Though they might have been covered by another snowfall, been run over by a car, or picked up by someone less likely to know what to do with them. In the end, it all worked out.
Violence in America based on political belief has gotten out of hand. Demonstrators of whatever philosophical stripe should not be risking their lives by participating in constitutionally protected demonstrations. Public officials should not have to fear violence against themselves or their families because of their expressed views or their official actions. Doctors performing legal medical procedures should not live in fear for their lives, and houses of worship should be inviolable sanctuaries. Schools should be secure halls of learning. None of these “normal” situations can, any longer, be taken for granted. Twenty-first-century America sometimes seems to be the Wild West redux.The authorities in Washington, D.C., said on Sunday that they had arrested a man in connection with the stabbing of four people on Saturday night as supporters and opponents of President Trump clashed blocks from the White House.
– The New York Times, December 13, 2020
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. The election was not close, and there is no evidence that the contest was other than perfectly fair. It was, in a word, normal. Politicians have been losing elections since the earliest days of the Republic. This is how the system works.
Never in our history, however, has a presidential candidate been psychologically incapable of accepting an electoral loss. Never has such a candidate been unable to believe that the citizenry could reject his bid for reëlection. Never has such a candidate believed that he has a right to be declared the winner, irrespective of rules that afford him no such right. Never has such a candidate enlisted large numbers of his political party in support of his psychosis and his rejection of the rule of law. Never have so many lawmakers been so sycophantic, so enabling of madness, and so wrong.
As of this morning, President Trump was still tweeting “WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!!” His notion of “fighting” can only become even more bizarre. Will this nonsense even extend beyond January 20? I hope not, but I am not counting on it.
Thanksgiving is in two days. In an ordinary year, millions of Americans would be traveling to attend family gatherings. This year, with coronavirus infections, hospitalizations, and deaths reaching new peaks, health officials have been telling people to stay home. But airline travel has seen surges not seen in months. Airports are filled with holiday travelers, often without masks, and seldom distant from one another.
Why are so many people ignoring what is clearly wise advice? Admittedly, I have not gone to the airport to interview airline partons, but I can offer a theory. (I’m staying home and keeping away from others, of course, so I’m not going to the airport.)
The most obvious explanation is that people are idiots. Either they are fed up with restrictions or they have considered the pandemic overhyped all along. Let me offer a less gloomy explanation.
Most people crowding the airports have likely heard the pleas to stay at home. Their logic for getting on an airplane may have gone something like this: Because medical experts are telling people to stay home, few people will be traveling. That means that airports and airplanes will not be crowded, and travel will be relatively safe. Unfortunately, if lots of people reason this way, their logic becomes self-defeating.
This phenomenon is akin to bank runs. If there is concern that a bank is unsound, an individual, protecting his or her assets, will go to the bank and withdraw whatever funds are on deposit. If one person does this, the action is innocuous. If hundreds or thousands of people do this, the situation becomes a crisis.
Alas, we have become a country in which many people are concerned only with themselves, ignoring the common good and whether their actions may have unintended consequences.
I created the graphic below for posting on Facebook. I was disappointed that it didn’t seem to get much attention. Perhaps it isn’t as clever as I thought it was, but I still think it deserves more exposure. Therefore, I am making this post on my blog.
The text in the graphic, of course, has a double meaning. Obviously, the Republican Party is, in general, the party that opposes the Democratic Party (the “Democrat” Party to GOP partisans these days). Being aligned against the Democrats, it is anti-Democratic.
Increasingly, the party that likes to think of itself as the “party of Lincoln,” is a party that seeks power at all costs to benefit the wealthy and well-connected. (Lincoln would not be pleased.) The GOP is the party of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the party of outrageous claims and frivolous lawsuits. It may be the party of even more outrageous attempts to steal the election from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In that sense, the Republican Party is deeply anti-democratic. It cares about obtaining and wielding power and cares not a fig about the abstract idea that is democracy.
Feel free to copy this graphic for use elsewhere.
My last post expressed concern about how Donald Trump will behave after he has definitively lost his re-election bid and before his term expires on January 20. My concern has increased after seeing Trump’s unhinged briefing last night. The president lied so much and so outrageously that networks that usually broadcast his briefings in full cut away from the president and explained how what he was saying was untrue.
Last night’s briefing may have been a preview of the next few months. What will happen if Trump’s post-election actions appear to be those of a madman whose ego has been fatally threatened by failure? I will suggest a possible scenario.
If Trump’s actions become totally outrageous, a turn to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment becomes a reasonable step to rescue the country from chaos. This would require the co-operation of Republican leaders, of course, but one can hope that even Republican politicians can recognize that their party’s titular leader is ruining their brand. If Trump can be sidelined, allowing Mike Pence to assume presidential duties until January 20, the country will have a chance to achieve a normal and peaceful transfer of power without further damaging the Republic.
Am I putting too much faith in Mike Pence? I think not. Pence has been Trump’s lackey for the sake of his own career, but he is not stupid. If Trump loses, the vice president has little incentive to follow the president’s descent into madness. If Pence is accepting of the will of the people and actively assists in the transition to a Biden administration, he will earn the thanks of the nation and may even have a political future.
I need to apologize to a few people who left comments on this blog but who never saw their comments approved. Somewhere along the line, a change that Google made to Blogger meant that I was no longer being informed of comments requiring moderation. I have now fixed that (I think), so that moderation should no longer take forever.
I will not offer an apology to those who left comments that seemed oblivious to the content of the post on which they were leaving a comment and whose content was intended to promote some commercial Web site. My blog is not a billboard for posting ads.
I also deleted comments in several other categories. If the comment was totally incomprehensible, I deleted it. Readers would be no more enlightened than I by reading such a comment. I also deleted anonymous comments, which I have explicitly disallowed. I was sad about doing this in a few cases where the content was genuinely responsive to what I wrote. If you want to leave a comment but do not want to tell me who you are, make up an alias and use it whenever you leave a comment. That way, people will be able to identify comments from the same person, even if they do not know who the writer is.
Expect comment moderation to be timely in the future.
Sixteen years ago, I wrote a post titled “Is ‘Both’ Really Necessary?” It was written in response to this sentence heard on NPR: “Both of the planes disappeared within a few minutes of each other.” I commonly hear “both” used this way, implying that each of two entities possesses a property that necessarily involves both of them. (If the problem with this location is unclear, read my earlier essay.)
Today, I encountered another use of a redundant word in a similar context. On the 11:00 am EDT NPR newscast, Korva Coleman reported:
Game three of the World Series is tonight. The Los Angeles Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays are tied in the World Series. They have each won one game apiece.
One might ask if “in the World Series” is really necessary in the second sentence, but this is only a matter of style. Perhaps it is even helpful to the listener who is not paying close attention.
My concern is actually with the word “apiece.” The word, in the sentence in question, is not only unnecessary but is also nonsensical. The sentence is essentially saying
The Los Angeles Dodgers have won one game apiece.andThe Tampa Bay Rays have won one game apiece.
Neither of these sentences makes sense. Just as the property “disappeared within a few minutes of each other” is a property necessarily involving more than a single entity, “apiece” necessarily involves more than one entity. Either of the following sentences would have been grammatically and logically acceptable alternatives to the original formulation:
They have each won one game.orThey have won one game apiece.
The first sentence attributes having won one game to each team. The second sentence attributes having won the same number of games to both teams. Unlike the original, both sentences are grammatical and logical.
Amy Coney Barrett, in the hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, defined originalism, a system of legal interpretation to which she is committed:
I interpret the Constitution as a law, that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. That meaning doesn’t change over time, and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.
She also explained textualism, to which she is also committed:
… textualism, which is the way that I approach statutes and their interpretation. And similarly to what I just said about originalism, for textualism, the judge approaches the text as it was written with the meaning it had at the time; it doesn’t infuse your own meaning into it.
It is helpful that Judge Barrett supplied us with these explanations.
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| Judge Amy Cony Barrett |
I believe that Judge Barrett’s embrace of originalism is, ipso facto, reason enough to reject her nomination to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court. I say this because I think this approach to law is indefensible and persists only because mainstream thinkers have been reluctant to criticize adherents such as the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
One of the fundamental notions of information theory is that words do not, by themselves, encapsulate meaning. Meaning is conveyed through the interaction of syntax—think grammar—semantics—the referents of individual words or other grammatical units—and pragmatics—roughly speaking, context. As I once wrote: “There is no eternal expression of an eternal truth.” The meaning of the words and, more importantly, the context of a text change over time. That context comprises the entire environment of the text: what the world is like and how it is view by its author. Both the world and the worldview of the Founding Fathers differs substantially from that of 2020 Americans. Hence, I offer my own definition of originalism:
Originalism means governing the country by what we imagine the Constitution used to mean.
The fundamental question regarding constitutional interpretation is whether the Constitution is a living document. Is the meaning of the Constitution forever fixed or should it be interpreted (or re-interpreted) in the contemporary context? I believe that, since our understanding of the world changes over time—and sometimes changes quite rapidly—it is easier and more sensible to consider the meaning of the Constitution in today’s terms, rather than in the time of its enactment. This means that, rather than constantly revising the Constitution—something that was certainly not anticipated, since it is so hard to do—it is sometimes appropriate for the courts to use the text of the Constitution but not its original meaning to change the law of the land.
For example, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was clearly not intended to protect homosexuals from discriminatory laws. When it was enacted, it was thought to be for the benefit of those formerly held in slavery. Yet the Supreme Court has outlawed statutes against homosexuality and has even sanctioned same-sex marriage. It should not have been necessary to amend the Constitution to make these changes that reflected widespread changes in the American context. A similar argument can be made about invalidating miscegenation laws. None of these decisions could have been made under the jurisprudence of a Justice Any Coney Barrett.
Under a Justice Amy Coney Barrett, our laws will be straight jackets that hinder human progress and—this is my greatest fear—actually undo human progress. The Senate should reject her nomination to the high court.
Responding to a Facebook post, a person can indicate a “reaction” by clicking on one of a collection of icons tagged LIKE, LOVE, CARE, HAHA, WOW, SAD, and ANGRY. (For clarity, I will refer to these and proposed options in caps.) There are times when selecting one of these options seems both appropriate and adequate. If someone posts a funny joke, for example, I am totally comfortable clicking on HAHA. But I am not always satisfied with having to choose from the available options. Let me explain why.I should begin by expressing some discomfort with the inhomogeneity of the response list that Facebook offers. I can say that I like a post or love a post, but I cannot say that I angry a post. The lack of parallelism is irritating, but, if one is limited to single words—Facebook could hardly offer essays here—perhaps perfect parallelism has to be sacrificed. Let’s move on to my main concerns.
The proffered options do not capture all possible emotions a post might elicit. Whereas it is too much to ask that every conceivable human emotion be represented by an icon, some obviously useful options are unavailable. For instance, I can dislike a post without its making me angry (or its presence making me angry). Why is there not a DISLIKE option? Why is there not a HATE option, which could be distinguished both from DISLIKE and ANGRY? One could make a case also for INDIFFERENT and UNFUNNY. Possibly even for JOYFUL. There are probably other emotions I haven’t even thought of that might be appropriate in particular circumstances.
At times, no single response, even were the option list expanded, seems adequate. I might want to select both WOW and SAD or LIKE and HAHA. Facebook demands that I only indicate one emotion. Why can’t I select more than one?
There is often ambiguity about what one’s reaction is actually responding to. A person can post a news story, op-ed, or editorial and introduce it with original commentary. I do this all the time and am sometimes perplexed when someone posts a link to external material without comment. Why is this person bringing the material to my attention? Assuming that the poster does offer an introduction, when one selects a response, is it intended as a reaction to the poster’s commentary or to the material being commented upon? This ambiguity can result in people known to share similar views to select LIKE, on one hand, and ANGRY on another. For example, I can post an op-ed with which I strongly disagree and introduce it with an explanation of why I find it so horrible. Does someone in complete agreement with me select LIKE (or even LOVE), or do they select SAD or ANGRY? I suspect that users are inconsistent in what they do. This makes it difficult to discern what others are trying to say.
I suggest that Facebook should allow us to post separate reactions to external material and to the introductory commentary on that material. In the above example, a person should be able to select ANGRY concerning the op-ed and LIKE concerning my own commentary (or some other combination of reactions). This would actually be easier for Facebook to implement than allowing multiple reactions to the same material. In posts involving external material and an introduction to it, Facebook could simply add another thumbs-up icon at the end of the introduction. This would amount to treating the poster’s commentary as a post in its own right, separate from the material that is the subject of that commentary. If a user only selects a response beneath the post, that response can be assumed to be a reaction to the whole package.
I don’t know if Facebook will adopt any of these ideas. The operation of Facebook seems constantly to be changing, often to no particular purpose. Maybe Facebook could give my suggestions a try. I hope, in any case, that, in the future, users will be able to react to posts in more precise and useful ways.
