Linked List: August 16, 2023

Wednesday, 16 August 2023

Clark Neily, writing for Cato:

America has seen its fair share of lying politicians, but Donald Trump is in a class of his own. He appears to view literally any interaction with another human being as an opportunity to be exploited and a game to be won. In Trump’s world, rules are for chumps, norms are for losers, and the truth is whatever you can get another person to believe — nothing more. And of course, history makes clear that this approach has been quite effective at advancing Trump’s interests in certain settings — preening on the set of a game show, for example, or spinning up a fawning, frothing crowd at a campaign event.

But not only will those antics not work in a courtroom, they will backfire. Given the nature of the allegations against him, Trump will have to take the stand even though he has a right not to, and given his nature, he will lie to the jury just like he has lied to everyone else his entire life.

Nothing new in that description, of course, but as Josh Marshall notes, it’s a “tight and concise run-through”. Marshall adds:

I note this because Trump’s press conference seems to presage a new and insipid public debate about what Donald Trump really believes. We’d be remiss if we didn’t note that it’s actually irrelevant what Trump believes. Believing the bank owes you money isn’t a defense for robbing the bank. But that’s not the core point. Trump’s current antics are like a liar’s version of a fake insanity defense in which the defendant makes a spectacle of bizarre behavior to prove his case. Surely, we’re supposed be thinking, or rather doubting, he wouldn’t go back to the well, provide yet more evidence for the prosecution, unless he somehow truly believe this stuff.

But Trump doesn’t think of truth or lies the way you or I do. Most imperfect people, which is to say all of us, exist in a tension between what we believe is true and what is good for or pleasing to us. If we have strong character we hew closely to the former, both in what we say to others and what we say to ourselves. The key to understanding Trump is that it’s not that he hews toward the latter. It’s that the tension doesn’t exist. What he says is simply what works for him.

25th Anniversary of the iMac ★

Steven Levy, in a 1998 profile for Newsweek that holds up startlingly well:

“Look at that!” says Steve Jobs as he pulls his Mercedes into a parking space. He’s pointing at a new Volkswagen Beetle, and as soon as he parks, he dashes over, circling the shiny black Bug, taking the measure of a well-publicized update of once great product design. “They got it right,” he concludes.

Last Wednesday Jobs himself received a more thunderous thumbs-up at the announcement of Apple Computer’s successor to its own hall-of-fame classic, the original Macintosh: a machine designed for consumers dubbed the iMac (only Apple would dare to lowercase the “I” in Internet). The crowd in Cupertino, Calif.’s Flint Center — site of the historic Mac launch 14 years ago — largely consisted of Apple employees. But due to an industrial-strength cone of silence shrouding the new product, few had been aware of its existence. So after a morale-boosting slide show documenting the company’s new profits, and a demonstration of the speed of its sleek new laptops, the crowd went bonkers when interim CEO Jobs, in a rare appearance in a business suit, literally unveiled a piece of hardware that blends sci-fi shimmer with the kitsch whimsy of a cocktail umbrella. As distinctively curvy as the Beetle, dressed in retro-geeky, translucent plastic, the iMac (due to ship in August) is not only the coolest-looking computer introduced in years, but a chest-thumping statement that Silicon Valley’s original dream company is no longer somnambulant.

That first iMac shipped 25 years ago this week. No amount of praise heaped upon it is sufficient. It reestablished the Mac platform, and paved the way for everything the entire company has since accomplished. (The Macintosh platform was younger then (14) than the iPhone is today (16), an observation that I find rather upsetting.)

This line from Larry Ellison, then an Apple board member, at the invitation of Jobs, defines Apple as much as it does Jobs personally:

Yes, his demeanor can be alarmingly frank — he can sometimes glance at an employee’s hard-won accomplishment and sneer, “This is a ‘D’.” But critics who focus on the brutality of his assessments miss the point: Jobs’s verbal boot camp can catalyze previously untapped greatness. “There’s too much emphasis on this style issue,” says Larry Ellison. “Steve is obsessed with quality, and that can make him uncompromising, but he gets results.”

As Jobs himself would soon say, “Design is how it works.” The original iMac exemplifies that. Yes, everyone noticed first what it looked like. But it was an insanely great computer.

‘Pinned’ Links in Apple Messages ★

Last week I noticed a feature for the first time: the contextual menu for a link or image sent in Messages has a “Pin” command. This is a different form of pinning than pinning an entire thread — it’s just for individual messages, and only messages that are links ~~or images~~. I couldn’t figure out what this did until I found this write-up at AppleInsider, which explains the point. When you pin a link, you can refer back to it in the profile details for the contact(s) in that thread. That’s the popover you get by:

Tapping the user avatar in the center of the top navigation bar on iOS.
Clicking the “i”-in-circle Info button on MacOS.

Scroll down in that popover and there’s a section for pins, right above the section showing all photos in the conversation.

Kind of a weirdly obscure feature. I can see using it, maybe, now that I know it’s there. But I never would have guessed it was there, and couldn’t even figure out what “Pin” meant in this context until I searched the web for an answer.

Update 1: The AppleInsider article I’m linking to claims the feature works for images in addition to links, and I originally just took them at their word for that, but it turns out it only works for links. We regret the error. But it just further confirms how unintuitive the feature is.

Update 2: These pinned links also show up in Safari, in Safari’s “Shared With You” list. In iOS Safari, you get to “Shared With You” by tapping in the URL location field — they appear under your Favorites. On the Mac, “Shared With You” is in Safari’s sidebar, at the bottom, under your tab groups. Pinned links, as you’d guess, stay at the top of the “Shared With You” list. But you can’t unpin them in Safari on either iOS or MacOS, nor you can you pin other items in Shared With You from within Safari. And even within Messages, the only place where you can unpin a link is in its original location within the message thread. So if you pin a link in a busy thread, and want to unpin it after some time as passed, you need to scroll all the way back to when it originally appeared. You can’t unpin links from the contact popover where they’re listed. And if you “delete” a pinned link in the contact popover in Messages, it deletes the original message, not merely removes its pin. The more I figure out about this feature, the more half-baked it seems.

Dahlia Lithwick: ‘Trump’s Last Two Indictments Complement Each Other Perfectly’ ★

Dahlia Lithwick, writing for Slate:

The two most recent indictments filed against Donald J. Trump are mirror images in many ways. Jack Smith’s federal document filed in Washington was spare almost to the point of being an inky line drawing, whereas Fani Willis’ Georgia filing is rich and detailed and pointillist. Smith targeted one defendant only, whereas Willis went after 19 defendants on 41 counts. Smith mentions a handful of co-conspirators; Willis notes 30 unindicted co-conspirators. As Norm Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland point out, Smith’s case will likely be blacked out for television and audio audiences, whereas Willis’ suit will most likely become must-see TV for weeks on end. Jennifer Rubin argues that the D.C. trial will happen quickly, while the Georgia case may face months of wrangling, flipping, bargaining with conspirators, and lengthy pretrial shenanigans. Claire Potter points out that Willis can seize Trump’s assets under Georgia’s RICO law. And Rick Hasen observes that Fani Willis has centered race and racialized vote suppression in a fashion that is far more explicit than the federal analogue.

Jack Smith as a literary character is tight-lipped and spare; Willis has been more voluble and open.