I’ve always found newspaper rundowns of police activities strange because they mention who had been arrested. In a country that prides itself on the fact that people are “innocent until proven guilty,” such public shaming seemed anathema. Everyone assumes that people who are arrested are guilty of something. So printing arrestees’ names in the paper is a form of punishment without due process. I seem to be alone in thinking this. But the issue seems ever bigger as it changes from one name printed among many in a local newspaper to one name delivered globally to anyone who plugs it into a search engine.

This is just the very edge of a larger issue of criminal background checks for employment, housing, and even more trivial things. Gilad Edelman wrote an excellent article about the subject in the new issue of Washington Monthly, Second Chance, My Ass. It is nominally a review of the book, The Eternal Criminal Record. But it serves as a good primer about the issues that people with criminal records face in our hyper-connected country. It’s really disturbing. In 1996, only 50% of all companies did background checks on some new hires. Today, 75% of all companies do background checks on all applicants — and 90% do background checks on at least some.

Looking at these numbers, you might wonder how companies got along before. And remember: 1996 is far into the computer revolution. So if we go back to 1960, we are probably talking virtually no one but the CIA doing background checks. And I think this is the critical issue: background checks do not result in companies having better workers. Companies do background checks because they can. They are used as yet another tool to weed out candidates. And when you consider 12% of all Americans have felonies — not to mention those who simply have misdemeanors or simply arrests — it works really well!

I’ll tell you when companies did not do criminal background checks: during the dot-com bubble in Silicon Valley. Companies were so desperate for any people who could do the work that they didn’t care. That was a heady time. All other times in my working life, I’ve been struck with the fact that employers were not terribly interested in getting work done. Interviews were more about fitting in and being the kind of person who wouldn’t upset anything — ever. I discussed this in, Unstable Weirdos and Business Success. The point is that the modern American corporation seems more like a social club than a business.

This is why the use of criminal background checks and similar “weeding out” strategies are so pernicious. They really have nothing to do with business. They are just ways of keeping the poor down — maintaining existing social barriers. I mentioned that 12% of Americans have felony records: 25% of African Americans have felony convictions. As Michelle Alexander discussed at length in The New Jim Crow, this is the modern way to keep a whole race down.

In Europe, things are different. There are laws to protect individuals’ rights to privacy. But according to Edelman, the Supreme Court has found that in order to have transparent government, criminal records must be available to all. Think about that for a moment. According to the Supreme Court, we don’t need to know the people who can spend unlimited amounts of money on political candidates, but we do have to know every arrest and conviction of every individual in the country. But I have a hunch that this is not just a matter of legality. In my experience, employers from Europe and Asia are simply far more focused on getting the job done than they are on the misty-eyed nonsense that Americans focus on.

There is some good news, however. More and more places are making it illegal to ask job applicants if they have a conviction until after the job interview. This is a big deal. It is generally illegal to not hire someone on the basis of a criminal conviction. So what most employers do is simply never interview people who say they have conviction. If an ex-con lies, the employer declines to hire not based upon the conviction but rather because the applicant lied. So this is a good change. But, of course, we could and should do so much more.

Because of television and movies, most people have a highly unrealistic idea of the criminal justice system. They think that people go off to prison and so pay their “debt to society.” That could not be more untrue. The fact is that the society expects the convict to go on paying that debt for the rest of her life. And it is all in the name of making society itself worse. Edelman quoted some work from our friends at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (I assume she’s referring to this: Ex‐offenders and the Labor Market.) who find that keeping ex-cons out of the labor market costs the economy roughly $60 billion in output per year. But maybe that’s a small price to pay for this extra tool that allows managers to only ever have to manage workers who went to the same strata of colleges they did.

This is a picture of soldiers represented in an almost a Homeric vision of bravery — a wounded man being carried to safety as he fires at the enemy. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is an artistic construction made with toys. But it became a very big deal last week when a Facebook user posted it along with the caption, “As I see post after post about Bruce Jenner’s transition to a woman, and I hear words like, bravery, heroism, and courage, just thought I’d remind all of us what real American courage, heroism, and bravery looks like!” Ah yes, the fetishization of the military strikes again.

Let’s start with the fact that this is a totally cliched and limited idea of bravery. I don’t doubt that it takes great bravery to fight in a war. But for the people who fight the war, the alternative is prison and in some cases death. In many ways, standing up against the simple choice of going along and instead resisting a draft is more brave. But forget wars. There are lots of ways to be brave, and they usually involve going against the default behavior. It usually isn’t a question of doing what people will reward you for.

On the issue of Caitlyn Jenner, however, I don’t think we are talking about bravery. She is a public figure who is pimping a reality show. She has all the support that money and fame can buy. What she is doing is good for society and for the transgender community. But brave? I’m not convinced. For non-famous, non-rich people, coming out as transgender is incredibly brave. For Caitlyn Jenner — it’s at best less so.

But okay, people in the military do at times display amazing examples of bravery. But why of all the images that the poster could have picked, did he selected this one? After the post got nearly a million shares, he looked into the source of the photo. He found that it came from the documentary Marwencol. It is about Mark Hogancamp, a cross-dressing man who was beaten outside a bar — almost to death. Afterward, he got into building a model of a Belgian town during World War II. The fact that the poster had picked the work of a member of the transgender community made him rethink the whole thing. Now he thinks it was God working in mysterious ways to teach him about the importance of inclusion and love. Good for him!

But I don’t think that’s why he picked the photo. I think he picked it because it is a highly romanticize image of reality. When people talk about things like heroism, they are dealing with abstractions. What “real American courage, heroism, and bravery looks like” is dolls designed by a wounded outcast. In other words, what makes real America “real” is that it isn’t real.

This is something I’ve written about a lot in other contexts. The conservative image of “real America” is a place that never existed. And this, I think, explains why modern American conservatism is so nutty. It presents a false choice. The real choice is always between competing imperfect Americas. But in the conservative mind, it is between these imperfect choices and their idealized, perfect choice. It is no wonder that they are against compromise.

But it fills me with hope that the Facebook poster changed from slighting Jenner and defining “real” American heroism to writing, “Hate helps nothing. Love wounds no one.” It bothers me that all those people who shared the original sentiment will not land where the original poster did. But we take baby steps. And that’s good.

If you were a decent politician — one who cared about your constituents — you would plan ahead. If there was a tsunami coming, you would evacuate the coast and get clean-up crews ready for the resulting damage. But it seems that on the right in American politics, such basic actions don’t make sense. I think this is all part of the Republican Party exchanging competence for ideology. Because there are Republican governments all over the nation that are facing a major — and largely predictable — catastrophe: the ending of federal subsidies for people buying health insurance on the federal exchanges. And these governments are doing nothing to prepare.

The issue at hand is the case King v Burwell in front of the Supreme Court. If it finds for the defendants, then nothing happens. But if it finds for the plaintiffs, it’s going to be really bad — not just for the individuals who will lose their insurance, but also for the insurance companies and for the healthcare providers. So a group of healthcare researchers led by David K Jones decided to look at what is going on in five of the states that will be effected by the ruling: Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Utah. And it looks pretty bad, What Are The States Doing To Prepare For King v Burwell?

This article is just the first of three. But it provides the overall conclusions. And there are three of them. First, none of the states have a clear plan as to what they are going to do if the Supreme Court finds for the plaintiffs. Second, the governors seem to be open to some kind of a deal, but the legislators are not. And third, the timing is bad; only Michigan will have a legislature still in session after the ruling comes. Of course, even if that weren’t the case, there still wouldn’t be time to set up a state exchange for next year.

These observations are all annoying in their own way. The fact that the states have no plan is not surprising. If the worst comes to pass, they probably figure they might do something. But as long as they don’t have to do anything — they won’t. They are, in other words, hypocrites. I’m sure that the vast majority of these Republican legislators and governors are secretly hoping that the Supreme Court finds for the defendants. And they are thinking this privately even while publicly saying it is a great and just cause.

The Republican Party is out of control. It isn’t so much that Republican politicians can’t tell the truth to their base. Rather, it is that Republican politicians know that if they act reasonably about this (or pretty much anything else), another Republican politicians will come in and demagogue the issue. They know others will do this to them because they know they would do the same thing to others if they needed to. Forget the Eleventh Commandment, the Republican Party is now at the point of snake eating its own tail. They just can’t stop themselves from destroying themselves.

Clearly, the best thing for everyone is for the Supreme Court to find for the defendants in King v Burwell. But clearly, if that doesn’t happen, the problem is the Republicans’. And that’s another thing that was found in the Jones et al analysis. The Republicans believe they are going to be blamed for this. Yet even then, they can’t manage to do anything. If they use their power for the common good, they will likely lose that power at the next election. If they don’t use their power for the common good, what is the purpose of having that kind of “power”? The choice they will make is clear.

Last weekend, I wrote, Public Shaming and the Power of Employers. In it, I argued that public shaming did great harm primarily because it leads to job loss. The issue is not so much that people are just awful to each other, but rather that workers in modern America have little control of their work lives. In the example that I used from So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a white man ended up with very little harm done because he immediately got another job. The black woman, however, was still unemployed years after her public shaming. As usual, our society refuses to engage with the injustice of the economic system itself.

A couple of days ago, a guy writing under the pseudonym Edward Schlosser wrote an article at Vox, I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me. The article quickly became a big deal. Jonathan Chait was right on top of it with yet another of this articles, “See, I was right!” And conservatives everywhere just love this because they want to claim that the real intolerant ones are not people who want to deny rights to others, but rather liberals who informally police speech. To be honest, I find the whole thing exhausting.

Let’s start with the fact that young people yelling at old people is a rite of passage. For my entire life there have been college students making grand statements about how their college professors are offensive and just don’t get it. Even Jonathan Chait admits that the political correctness that he talks about is just a “wave.” The exact same complaints date back at least to the 1960s, but apparently Chait doesn’t know anything before his time. As far as I can tell, there have been student rebellions for as long as there have been colleges. I don’t see any reason to think this “wave” is any worse or even different from earlier “waves.”

Amanda Taub wrote a great response to Professor Schlosser’s article, I Was a Liberal Adjunct Professor. My Liberal Students Didn’t Scare Me at All. She gets at what I was talking about regarding shame. The issue isn’t that the students are particularly horrible. And it most certainly isn’t that the students have more power. It is that the professors have far less power than they used to — relative to the administration. She quoted an amazing statistic from the American Association of University Professors: only 24% of professors are tenure or tenure track. The rest are adjuncts, which are generally temporary positions that pay poorly and have no benefits — the minimum wage job of the PhD crowd. And that means that tenured professors are afraid because “there’s a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place.”

Taub summed up the issue well:

She then went on to discuss the way the whole issue gets distorted. It strikes me as very American. People in most nations look at the world very much in terms of class. But we have a bias against that. We want to see everything as individual against individual — or at least one group against another group with roughly equal power. As a result, we have ended up with the ridiculous system we have where those with actual power are never held to account or, as in this case, even blamed.

Students are as they ever were. After the power elite spent decades attacking teachers at all levels, it isn’t surprising that teachers at all levels would find they have greatly reduced power. What is outrageous, however, is that people like Jonathan Chait and Edward Schlosser would focus on an irrelevance and ignore the real power that is hurting professors and academic freedom.