Another tech company plays with its users

First it was Facebook. Now it's OKCupid that has confessed to conducting secret experiments on its users.

One experiment linked users up with people who were deemed a bad match — a 30 percent compatibility rate based on OKCupid’s algorithm. OKCupid labeled these bad matches as being 90 percent compatible to see if people could “like” each other even if they had nothing in common.

Again, a tech company changed how it selected its deliverables. Again, the public is pissed.

OKCupid showed even less concern for its users than Facebook. Facebook filtered out some of the information it ordinarily would have shared, but it didn't provide false information. OKCupid subverted its core functionality: it gave outright false results.

OKCupid asked a valid question, but it pursued an ethically indefensible strategy to find the answer. There are protocols to follow when you experiment on human subjects. Reputable scientists know about these protocols. Are there any reputable scientists at OKCupid? It doesn't seem so.

The obvious followup question: is OKCupid a trustworthy company?

Well, it came clean: give it credit for that. But its post-facto confession doesn't excuse its deceit. The confession doesn't make up for whatever fallout resulted from its tampering.

What OKCupid traffics in isn't maintaining old relationships, but creating new ones, one of the most deeply personal areas of anyone's life. Sure, the end user ultimately decides whether a relationship is viable. However, just because you're ultimately responsible for spitting poison out before you ingest it, doesn't mean you want food companies to disguise garbage as edible food. That's what OKCupid did.

Is The Daily Show becoming dispensable?

Tonight I saw a Daily Show correspondent's report that I could easily have done without. It wasn't just uneven: that's a common failing of the pieces. No, Jordan Klepper's piece skewering Gawker was irritating.

Part of the problem was that the subject was boring. We already knew Gawker and its ilk were bottom-feeders: the report didn't say anything new. Worse, though, the report wasn't funny, either. Whoever wrote the piece went for obvious, easy and flat jokes. The innocent bystanders (especially the eminent cancer researcher) were just that, innocent, and didn't deserve the ridicule they faced merely for allowing themselves to appear on camera.

Jon Stewart's commentary segments are still sharp and funny, but the correspondents and interviews are no longer compelling. I wonder if we're seeing the start of the show's decline.

We have to walk the walk

I didn't have an opinion on the refugee crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border. I didn't know enough. Were these kids fleeing impossible violence in their homelands, or were they merely pawns in somebody else's grand scheme to beat the U.S.'s immigration laws?

By now, though, I've concluded the conditions in a few Central American countries, including Honduras and Guatemala, are horrible enough for kids that the majority of the kids showing up at the border should be considered refugees.

Here's where we have to consult the mirror.

For decades the U.S. has entreated countries bordering war zones to take in refugees. We know it's a burden, we say, but come on, please, help out: it's a humanitarian crisis.

Now it's our turn. Here's a humanitarian crisis. Are we going to step up, or not?

Most of these kids aren't doing a number on us. Anyway, due process is supposed to ferret out any that are. This is a crisis, yes, but it's not such a crisis that we're in danger of lsoing our nation over. We can absorb them, at least in the short term.

So: after decades of talking the talk to much poorer nations like Jordan, are we going to walk the walk, or not?

Joseph Rudolph Wood and suffering

We can't judge for ourselves whether or not convicted murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood III suffered during his execution at the hands of the state of Arizona last night. Only the requisite staff and the witnesses admitted by the state know what happened. Relatives of the victims say he didn't (see the embedded video), but they also said that if he did suffer, what he felt couldn't compare to what his victims suffered at his hands.

I can't help feeling, though, that the question of the executed man's suffering misses the point.

As columnist E.J. Montini noted in the Arizona Central column to which I linked above:

The hand wringing that has followed is not for Wood.

It's for us.

We pretend to have concern for the murderer, that we want our state-sponsored killing to be humane, to be civilized – as if such a thing is possible.

But we don't want such things for the murderer. We want them for ourselves. We want the killing to be swift and "peaceful" so that killing a person doesn't upset us.

State-sanctioned executions are a way for society to express its support for the loved ones of the victims. We can all understand the desire for vengeance: "an eye for an eye" was one of the earliest moral codes. We also want the execution to serve as a warning to others who might be contemplating similar crimes.

All that aside, we don't particularly want to get our hands dirty.

Lethal injections allowed us to sustain the delicate fiction that our executions were "humane". Now that the tried and tested drug cocktails are no longer available and their replacements seem to produce public relations nightmares for state officials, though, we have to find an alternative.

Other methods of execution were abandoned because too many of us started thinking they were too brutal. The victim's loved ones might not be bothered by the condemned's convulsions or blood, but the rest of us are. The Eighth Amendment was a handy fig leaf to mask our queasiness as humane concern. (Methods like the gas chamber and electrocution also seem to be genuinely cruel, not to mention unreliable.)

So either we need to get past our squeamishness and consider those abandoned alternate methods of executing people, or ...

We could bypass all the questions of suffering and cruelty by adopting an alternative to the death penalty itself.

I've laid out my objections to the death penalty. Twice. The suffering of the condemned as he's being executed isn't one of those objections, but if that's what brings you to the anti-death penalty camp, great.

Cruz the braying jackass

Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the reasons Texas' Congressional delegation resembles the children's table at a particularly unruly party (only less civilized than actual children), called the FAA's temporary travel ban of U.S. flights to Israel "an economic boycott".

"The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands," Cruz said in a statement, arguing that the flight ban would have a negative impact on Israel's tourism industry.

"The facts"? Here are the facts: (1) a Hamas rocket "landed about a mile away from the airport on Tuesday" (per the TPM piece), and (2) Malaysia Airlines has taken a lot of heat for allowing MH-17 to fly over the area in eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian separatists are fighting the government. (Malaysia Airlines was just doing what other airlines were doing, but fat lot of good it has done them to point that out.) Given the facts, it was prudent for the FAA to initiate a ban, at least until it was able to clarify the extent of the risk posed by the fighting. That the ban inconveniences people is unfortunate, but weigh that against being shot down.

And "an economic boycott"? Did the FAA ban the Internet, electronic funds transfers, and shipping, too? Way to overreach, Ted.

I guarantee you that, in the aftermath of MH-17's shoot-down, if a U.S. carrier's plane were to be hit by a Hamas rocket, Cruz would be leading the charge for a Senate hearing to grill the FAA on why no flight ban was in place. Now that the ban has been lifted, Cruz may get his chance. The New York Times piece notes that the European Aviation Safety Agency continues to recommend that airlines continue to avoid Tel Aviv — not a good sign that the facts on the ground have changed. I really hope the FAA didn't buckle under political pressure.

As for Cruz, his jibe at the Obama administration is part of a long line of knavish remarks designed to rouse his ill-informed constituents' base passions. Some who knew him before his entry into politics swear he's s smart, savvy man. I don't know: he's a pretty convincing moron. If his friends are right, though, he's a despicable fire-starter who claims to believe things he knows are abjectly false. "Smart" doesn't imply "honest".

Idiot or panderer? Either way, Cruz is as big a jackass as Marco Rubio.

Rubio the braying jackass

Per the AP:

Americans who oppose same-sex marriage often face "intolerance" from those who support it, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said Wednesday in a speech about values that appeared aimed at wooing social conservatives.

This would be ludicrous if so many people didn't share his idiotic opinion.

Rubio also likes to mischaracterize those who disagree with him.

"Even before this speech is over, I will be attacked as someone who is a hater or a bigot or someone who is anti-gay," Rubio said.

No, you're not a bigot, though you might be anti-gay. (I say nothing about whether you're a hater.) What you unquestionably are is a stinking, self-pitying moron. Unless, of course, you're just a despicable opportunist who's playing to stinking, self-pitying morons.

For decades — no, centuries — no, millennia — non-heterosexuals have suffered cruelly at the hands of Christians and Muslims. (I don't know whether Jews have mistreated them too.) Non-heterosexuals have been tortured and murdered simply for being who they are. In parts of the world, they still are. Hell, anti-gay violence is still alive and well (so to speak) in the U.S., even if it is less acceptable in polite company than it used to be.

What's the "intolerance" same-sex marriage foes face? Hard words.

Oh, my. How will the poor souls stand it?

Marco, you make me sick. Shut the fuck up.

You and your ilk are not victims.

More on the absurdity of the Hobby Lobby decision

Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times wrote a sensible piece back on 2 July 2014 about the then-latest fallout from the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision.

The day after handing down the Hobby Lobby decision on Monday, the court issued orders pertaining to six pending cases in which employers claimed religious objections to all contraceptive services required under the Affordable Care Act. The court either ordered appeals courts to reconsider their rejection of the employers' claims in light of the Hobby Lobby decision, or let stand lower courts' endorsement of those claims.

Hiltzik touched on the question of a petitioner's sincerity of belief, asking, "... how do we limit the exemption only to those with religious scruples?" He noted that in a recent case, Judge Janice Rogers of the Washington, D.C., circuit appeals court declined to probe the sincerity of the petitioners' beliefs in ruling for them and against the contraceptives mandate of the PPACA. Yet the Hobby Lobby decision can only be seen as "fair" if the irresistible weapon of religious objection can be limited to those who are sincere in their beliefs.

Allowing exemptions to a federal law based on "unchallenged" and "unchallengeable" claims of subjective belief is the antithesis of secular law. That may be why religious exemptions have been handed out very carefully, until now.

In short, the only way to keep Hobby Lobby from being the easy excuse to undo laws at will is for the courts to interrogate sincerity of belief.

Congratulations, right-wing Justices: you've turned the federal judiciary into the Great Pumpkin.