Showing posts with label Murphy's Law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Murphy's Law. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

The Banality of Evil--Soviet Style

 Just finished David Remnick's"Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Union."  

It concludes with the trial of the survivors of the plotters of the coup which tried to oust Gorbachev and which was thwarted by Yeltsin and the Moscow people. The trial, plus the access to the archives which the prosecutors had, showed the plotters to be rather banal.  

I suspect this is often the case in history.  If you were the fly on the wall getting a real time read on the deliberations and decision making you'd be amazed at how haphazard and ordinary the proceedings were. This conviction of mine is related to my belief in "Murphy's Law". 

Monday, January 29, 2018

I'm Not Sane--per K. Williamson

Kevin Williamson has a column on institutions and the FBI, writing:
"And no sane person believes for a nanosecond that those “lost” communications represent anything other than willful obstruction of justice." 
Personally, I'd be willing to bet that the reasons the emails were "lost" can be traced to a long lasting gap in bureaucratic cultures.  Specifically, the records management people have always focused on paper preservation, and rarely have ranked high in the pecking in bureaucracies.  It's taken 20 years for NARA to start to accommodate electronic records, and I suspect they've yet to achieve full integration.  

The IT folks, on the other hand, have a culture focused on the future and a bit on the present, but rarely on the past.  C.P. Snow in the 1950's had a book entitled "Two Cultures", arguing that science and the  humanities didn't talk to each other, and they should.  Today's divide between archives and IT is worse.

In the middle of all this are the people who have to implement IT rules and archive requirements--the users.  These are the people who leave their passwords at the default, or use admin1234. 

Toss in Murphy's Law, and I'll bet there was no willful obstruction of justice.