Some Longreads - Dinner Table Digest № 53
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
When I started out the Dinner Table Digest I intended to focus primarily on longreads, something that has slipped over the course of the past while. So I thought I’d focus on some longreads, including a piece of fiction, that have been jumbling around in my brain over the last while.
Sections:
Equal Opportunities or Equal Outcomes? / The SolarWinds Hack / Prayer in Schools / What is Remembered
Is Equal Opportunity Enough - Christine Sypnowich - Boston Review
This Boston Review Forum is centered around a primary essay which argues that equality of outcomes is preferable to equality of opportunity. The essay is accompanied with a ten responses, all coming from different angles, capped off with a final response from Sypnowich. I have not yet read all the responses, nor have I read the final essay, but I found the primary essay to be really interesting. In one section, arguing against liberal conceptions of ‘equality of opportunity’ and in favour of a more communitarian/socialist conception of ‘equality of outcomes,’ which she describes as Flourishing, Synopwich suggests that opportunity-based egalitarianism (often referred to as ‘luck egalitarianism’) makes too many assumptions about the ability of citizens to actively pursue ‘The Good Life.’ She says,
[Another] reason to reject opportunity talk is that it too easily concludes, in the face of unequal flourishing, that everyone has an equal opportunity to live a good life. It is difficult to truly attend to hindrances to flourishing simply by making choices available. If people fail to take up an opportunity and end up living unflourishing lives, the egalitarian attitude cannot be simply to acquiesce—to rationalize that the community did what it could, but people for their own reasons did not avail themselves of opportunities to flourish.
Rather, the egalitarian community will want to be proactive: to equip people to take opportunities through incentives and other social institutions, and thereby to encourage people to see the value of one choice over another, to appreciate why an opportunity is worthwhile. This may mean we need to introduce young people to pursuits that they are not inclined to take up, so that they are more likely to choose them. This does not mean forcing people to do anything, but it does mean taking unequal outcomes as a form of unjust inequality and seeking to intervene to enable people to make the most of their potential.
Often we need to do things in order to be able to do them. As Nussbaum notes, there are cases when “the absence of a function is really a sign that the capability itself has been surrendered.” To ensure that opportunities will indeed be taken, we must engage in a substantive discussion about the value of various enterprises and eschew mere “cultural marketplace” conceptions of how people acquaint themselves with valuable options.
Now, this can all be turned into opportunity talk: that what is at issue is simply giving people genuine opportunities to flourish. But the flourishing view commits us to rather more effort than is historically associated with views that emphasize mere opportunity. And the enterprise is inherently outcome-oriented, insofar as it refuses to take people’s choices—whether explicit or revealed—at face value and regards unequal outcomes as signaling the need for remedy. This means rejecting the neutralist paradigm in order to promote what is genuinely of value, to correct cultures of fatalism, low expectations, self-abnegation, or limited horizons. We should not be squeamish about an outcomes approach that takes a stand on how people should live.
Some responses to Synopwich, which I have not yet read, include ‘History shows the political risks of a focus on outcomes,’ ‘There must be room for choice,’ and ‘Choice talk distracts from structural injustices.’
The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack Ever - Kim Zetter - WIRED Magazine
If you, like me, are fascinated by the world of cyber-espionage, then this story is for you. The SolarWinds hack hasn’t received a lot of attention in the mainstream media, partly, I would imagine, because it’s really embarrassing when the American Lettered Agencies that were supposed to be on the lookout for state-actor hacking campaigns themselves get hacked. And by the Russians, no less.
In fact, the Justice Department and Volexity had stumbled onto one of the most sophisticated cyberespionage campaigns of the decade. The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers. Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet. Even Microsoft and Mandiant were on the victims list.
After the Justice Department incident, the operation remained undiscovered for another six months. When investigators finally cracked it, they were blown away by the hack’s complexity and extreme premeditation. Two years on, however, the picture they’ve assembled—or at least what they’ve shared publicly—is still incomplete. A full accounting of the campaign’s impact on federal systems and what was stolen has never been provided to the public or to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. According to the former government source and others, many of the federal agencies that were affected didn’t maintain adequate network logs, and hence may not even know what all was taken. Worse: Some experts believe that SolarWinds was not the only vector—that other software makers were, or might still be, spreading malware. What follows is an account of the investigation that finally exposed the espionage operation—how it happened, and what we know. So far.
The NPR has also published a really good piece about the SolarWinds hack.
Inside the Christian Legal Campaign to Return Prayer to Public Schools - Linda K. Wertheimer - Hechinger Report
This deep dive looks specifically at the case of public schools in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, where folks who are not evangelical Christians are expected to either endure or otherwise actively participate in religious invocations sponsored and conducted directly by teachers, as well as school and board administrators. In some cases, students who are not evangelicals are told by their peers that they will go to hell if they don’t believe in Jesus, something that is deeply traumatic for children of all kinds. In other cases, students as young as Kindergarten are required to memorize The Lord’s Prayer as a school assignment.
The Christian conservatives advocating for more religion in the schools are doing so in the name of religious freedom. The way they define that freedom could lead to prayer becoming commonplace at public schools all over the country. Over time, advocates of the separation of church and state fear, long-standing protections for young atheists, people who belong to no religion and religious minorities will be eroded — until, perhaps, these protections disappear altogether. As Christianity is held up as the only acceptable way to believe and to live, non-Christian children, who may already feel different, could find themselves all the more sidelined, ostracized or bullied. “This isn’t a legal fight to some of these people,” Jeb Baugh, one of the Bossier parents who sued, told me. “This is a religious war. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the country.”
What is Remembered - Alice Munro - The New Yorker
Canadian short story legend Alice Munro in The New Yorker from 2001
What had happened in their lives surprised them, and they would joke about it. Jonas was the one whose choice of profession had seemed so reassuring to his parents, and had roused a muted envy in Pierre’s parents, yet it was Pierre who had married and got a teaching job and taken on ordinary responsibilities, while Jonas, after university, had never settled down with a girl or a job. He was always on some sort of probation that did not end up in a firm attachment to any company, and the girls—at least to hear him tell it—were always on some sort of probation with him. His last engineering job was in the northern part of the province, and he stayed on there after either quitting or getting fired. Employment terminated by mutual consent, he wrote to Pierre, adding that he was living at the hotel, where all the high-class people lived, and might get a job on a logging crew. He was also learning to fly a plane, and thinking of becoming a bush pilot. He promised to visit when present financial complications were worked out.
Meriel had hoped that wouldn’t happen. Jonas slept on the living-room couch and in the morning threw the covers on the floor for her to pick up. He kept Pierre awake half the night, talking about things that had happened when they were teen-agers, or even younger. His name for Pierre was “Piss-hair,” a nickname from those years, and he referred to other old friends as Stinkpool and Doc and Buster, never by the names Meriel had always heard—Stan and Don and Rick. He recalled with a gruff pedantry the details of incidents that Meriel did not think so remarkable or funny (the bag of dog shit set on fire on the teacher’s front steps, the badgering of the old man who offered boys a nickel to pull down their pants) and grew irritated if the conversation turned to the present.
When she had to tell Pierre that Jonas was dead she was apologetic, shaken. Apologetic because she hadn’t liked him and shaken because he was the first person they knew well, in their own age group, to have died. But Pierre did not seem to be surprised or particularly stricken.
“Suicide,” he said.
She said no, an accident. He was riding a motorcycle, after dark, on gravel, and he went off the road. Somebody found him, or was with him, help was at hand, but he died within an hour. His injuries were mortal.
That was what his mother had said, on the phone. She had sounded so quickly resigned, so unsurprised. As Pierre had when he said “Suicide.”
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