Motivation

A commonly-stated goal of social protest is, in effect, to afflict the comfortable in the service of having them realize that there are afflicted among them that need comforting. This is something of a controversial tactic. Which makes sense, as it tends to fall into the same trap that Max Abrams recognized when he wrote that terrorism doesn't work. As people come to infer that afflicting them is an ends, not a means or a side effect, they can come to feel that they have to stand up to the protestors. Rather predictable, really.

In the case of the Black community in the United States, and their protests, this dynamic somewhat at work. The recent Republican National Convention could be cited as an example. What would need to change is that the discomfort that "mainstream America" feels needs to be triggered by the police violence and other injustice that is currently driving the protests. Since people are often motivated to alleviate discomfort, if the source of the discomfort is perceived to be a lack of justice and equality, that will be what people work together to change.

How To Social Media

And no matter where you go on the internet, stuff like this will be there with you.

Don't Ask

Given that the United States is primarily Christian, when people speak of a conflict between science and religion, they typically mean between science and Christianity (often Evangelical or otherwise Fundamentalist Christianity). Understanding that other religious traditions may see things differently, the Pew Research Center of Religion and Public Life asked a small group of Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists to speak with them about their understanding of the intersection (or lack thereof) between science than their individual religion.

It's a long-form read, and fairly in-depth. But, of course, it doesn't go into detail about every topic that it raises, and an area in which it left me wanting more was this:

A few interviewees thought one other topic should be off limits to scientific exploration: research aimed at core beliefs such as the existence of God, the heavens or holy scripture.

I admit that I find this curious; it wouldn't have occurred to me that this would be the case, and I wonder why it is. Frustratingly, the article doesn't say which religions the people who noted this belonged to. Personally, I'm guessing that the Moslems were in the group, but guess is all that I can do.

I find this to be something of an interesting divergence from stereotypical Christianity, at least as practiced in the "Western World," where the idea that "Science says" is used as something of a trump card in arguments, and so a scientific case for the truth of religious teaching concerning God, scripture, miracles et cetera is seen as a checkmate to non-believers. (In this sense, the conflict between science and Christianity is perhaps better viewed as a conflict between Christianity and the idea that certain scriptures and/or dogma are not based in objective facts.) The idea that scientific inquiry is off-limits strikes me as something that a lot of people would find odd.

I'd like to have a conversation for myself with someone who understands the world this way, in order to learn their thinking.

Unexpected

So we can now ad Kenosha, Wisconsin to the list of places that is seeing unrest severe enough to call out the National Guard after a shooting of an unarmed Black man. One of the questions that comes up in all of this is "Why does this keep happening?" Although, all things considered, it doesn't happen that often. And maybe that's the problem. These events are rare enough that they always come across as unexpected.

But when the response to two women arguing in the street is to send armed police officers, why are we not expecting that someone is liable to be shot? If there is a general sense among police officers that they're in constant danger and their firearms are their best means of defense, why are we not expecting that they'll shoot at the hint of the threat? If there is an entire group of people who feel that the only way that anyone pays attention to their problems is when violence erupts, why are we not expecting street violence?

Sometimes, I get the feeling that there is an expectation that people will ignore all of the incentives that drive these sorts of events, specifically because they are rare. Because most times, placing people in situations that have the potential to end very badly doesn't blow up in society's face, there is a feeling that the problem is the specific people involved, and not the overall incentive structure. But maybe if there was a greater expectation that things that can end badly will end badly, there would be a greater push to avoid setting things up to fail. And to a certain degree, that means lowering expectations. Yes, the expectation is that when armed officers arrive on a scene that doesn't call for the use of lethal force, they won't use it. But use of lethal force happens often enough that banking on that expectation seems like a bad idea.

It's reasonable to set expectations in line with the most common outcomes. But when there are unacceptable outcomes, perhaps it makes sense to set expectations in line with the worst case, and then start changing the underlying incentives to alter that worst case.

Watering Hole

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have.
George Packer "We Are Living in a Failed State"

The subtitle to Mr. Packer's article is: "The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken." This prompted me to ask a couple of questions:

One: When was it not broken?

Two: What do you mean, "revealed?"

I don't think that I've ever considered the United States to have a unified population at any point since I gained a reasonably adult understanding of the concept. I mean, there are people who still want to relitigate the Civil War, and it not as if there hasn't been anything else for large segments of the public to disagree with each other about since then.

Bland counterfactuals such as the idea that a different President may have been able to unify the country to address the SARS-2 coronavirus are easy to dream up. Actually understanding who this mystery person who should be in the White House might be is a completely different matter. Were Hillary Clinton the current President of the United States, one might reasonably expect that she would have handled the situation differently, and more competently. But the idea that she could have brought Red and Blue America together in a shared enterprise free of name-calling and vitriol strikes me as a pipe dream. Or it would, anyway. I'm not sure I can think of anything strong enough to cause hallucinations that severe that would actually fit into a pipe at the dose needed.

I've never been a fan of what strikes me as a Cult of Leadership, mainly because there seems to be an idea that once The Right Leadership is in place, that everyone else no longer matters. The motivations, perceptions and grievances of every other member of whatever organization, institution or jurisdiction being in question simply evaporate. But I've never seen it work that way.

Donald Trump was never going to be a unity President. The very people who put him into office, the sixty-three million (give or take) voters who marked "Donald J Trump" on their ballots in November 2016, for the most part, weren't interested in unity. It's hard to make the case that President Trump ran on a platform of bridging the rift between the partisan camps, only to walk away from that the day after his inauguration.

The idea that the public is composed mainly of followers who will blindly do whatever the right leader tells them to strikes me mainly as a means of shifting the blame. If the population of the United States wanted unity badly enough to work for it, I suspect that we'd be seeing much more active outreach efforts, and candidates for any number of public office who were running on their unity credentials. But overall, unity simply isn't important. There aren't enough people who see their interests advanced by national cohesion to pay the price that it will demand.

And yes, one could make the point that it's the role of a leader to make that case and show people the way. But is that leading the horse to water? Or is it, as I suspect, making it drink?

Kayak Conference

 

Hopeless

The idea that police officers are deserving of deference from the general public is the subject of some debate, but not completely beyond the pale. Personally, I think that it discounts to heavily the idea that police officers are people too (and completely ignores the fact that officers don't require any formal legal education), but I understand the appeal.

Where I take exception is when people seek to elevate officers into a special class of people for whom the law doesn't apply, even in situations where such exceptions are not required for the job. A conservative group posted the following photograph on LinkedIn.

One of the supportive responses to the posting went as follows: "The individuals on the right deserve More respect. I hope they don't hit the person on the left with a club."

Now, I will admit to never having been a police officer. But it seems unreasonable to think that something as simple as flipping someone the bird should ever be a call for violence. And in our society, it is unreasonable. No matter how bad a day one has had, no matter how difficult the people one has to deal with, responding to a rude gesture with an assault will, as a legal matter, land one in jail. And we all have this expectation. The ability of some people in society to respond to disrespect physical violence is regarded as a particularly egregious form of privilege.

The implication that we should "hope" that people who signed up to enforce the law on others would agree to follow it themselves, even in the face of provocation casts police officers as being unacceptably thin-skinned. After all, a person with a record for beating people in response to rude words or gestures would likely be considered ineligible for a police academy as an active liability. If the training that governments give to police officers isn't enough to allow them to deal with the stressors of the job, that's a problem in and of itself, and one that needs to be dealt with. But the idea that the solution is a universally compliant and deferential public seems off.

Discomfited

There is a lot of talk about discomfort. We hear about how it's uncomfortable to talk about race, to help people find new jobs or to be helped in finding a new job. The list goes on. The statements that people make about how things are, or even should be, uncomfortable tend to track back to the idea that "the truth hurts." And that's fair enough.

But there is a need to avoid falling into the trap of making discomfort the point. The truth might hurt, but that's different than saying that all things that hurt are true, or that the more uncomfortable a conversation makes someone, the more authentic or helpful it is.

But discomfort is neither a means nor and an end. It's merely a place that is passed through. That place may be necessary, but it's not the destination.

Long Way Down

Stopped by the local waterfall to take some pictures. I'll have to go back and see what I can do about getting some better exposures; the top is overexposed. It might be a fool's errand to get good photographs early in the day; perhaps the afternoon would be better.

Misquoted

 

So I've seen this on LinkedIn a few times, and I started wondering: "Did Elon Musk really say this?" So I did a bit of digging. I wasn't able to find a definitive attribution (and certainly nothing linking it to Mr. Musk), but I did find a tweet from a few years back that a number of people seemed to believe was the origin of the text in the picture, sent out by someone who came across as just a regular person. Not a celebrity or a business mogul, but just one of the many everyday people who inhabit Twitter.

Helping friends with their startup businesses is a really good idea; and the analogy to a baby shower is a solid one. So why slap Elon Musk on it? What does he bring to the idea that it doesn't already have? Would someone who didn't think it was otherwise worthwhile really be swayed by the thought that Mr. Musk was doing it?

I wonder if the idea that success means emulating the successful plays into this, and so attaching a concept to a celebrity gives it a greater chance of adoption. Or maybe the culprit is a perception that great ideas come from great people. In either case, if ideas gain more traction for who people associate them with, than for their content, does that prevent society from seeing the wisdom that's all around in the everyday world, articulated by everyday people?

Admixture

According to FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon, Jr.:

[Kamala] Harris is the first Asian American and the first Black woman in American history to be a general election candidate for president or vice president for either of the two major political parties.

I find his description of her interesting because this is the first time I've ever heard someone being described as both Black and something else, at the same time. President Obama, for instance, was mixed, and I'd only ever seen him described as Black, never as European American. Later, Mr. Bacon says: "I don’t want to downplay Harris’s Indian American roots." Normally, in cases of mixed race individuals, the non-Black part of their ancestry isn't downplayed; it's completely ignored, so it will be worth watching to see if this is something that catches on.

Unrequired

"You Don’t Need to Meet Every Qualification to Apply for a Job." Well, taken literally, that's a given. One doesn't need to meet any of the qualifications to fill out an online form and click "submit" or to send an e-mail with a résumé attached. So most people don't need to know that they needn't meet all of the qualifications in order to apply. What I think that a lot of people really want to know is how to judge when applying in the absence of some or another listed qualification will be fruitful, and when it will be disqualifying; especially if there's a limit to the number of times one can apply. And no online article that notes "Well, my son managed it," is going to give people that information, because it varies by company.

For many people, the actual problem they're dealing with isn't imposter syndrome or a fixed mindset. It's that they don't know A) how much flexibility is built into the requirements list, and B) what the rest of the candidate pool looks like. Sourcing this information requires networking, but of different sorts. Knowing whether the "sticker price" for a job is fixed, or if there's an "or best offer" in there at the end requires having people inside the company who can relay that information, because it relies on a number of variables. And while not all of them will be specific to the company, many of them will be. And knowing what other people are ready, willing and able to bid for the role requires having an understanding of what skills are out there, and in what combinations they're likely to be found. While I wouldn't be surprised to find an article on applying without all of the qualifications that addresses these topics, I haven't run into one yet.

I'm not an expert in this subject, so take what I'm about to say with a grain (or maybe a mine) of salt. But I would suspect that understanding how flexible the requirements for a job are is the sort of thing that varies from role to role. What the hiring manager wants, and what they actually expect that they can get, is useful knowledge, as well as an understanding of how well the person who actually wrote the job description knows what skills are available. (There have been enough stories of companies asking for five years of experience in two-year old programming languages that this can be a valid concern.) Also the company plays a role, and here it helps to understand how the process of creating and publicizing job posting is conducted. What all this means is that applying for roles after they've been posted, but with no other insight, is going to be difficult. A network that can reach close enough to team(s) doing the hiring is likely going to be a must. And that's going to be a matter of having conversations and asking that people help connect the job seeker to the next person in the chain.

Understanding the labor market, and what skills are available in it, is also a matter of networking, but the network is going to be a broad peer-to-peer web. It's also going to require some industry knowledge. A programmer who doesn't know how long a language they're using has been available is not going to know if an employer is asking for an impossibly long tenure with it. But the network might also be able to take care of this. But knowing people who have enough visibility into the overall market to be able to assess if there is a sizable community of people who can meet all of the requirements will likely be important. All of this will take time. There's a degree with which effective job seeking outside of having a network of advocates starts to look like embarking on a career as an industry and labor market analyst. Which may be why networking is often viewed as so important.

Applying for a job via an online job portal or by answering ads with e-mails can be a remarkably low-information process. Even candidates who make to interviews might find that they receive no feedback on why they weren't selected. (They might not ever formally hear that they weren't chosen, for that matter.) That tends to undermine people's ability to use a failed attempt as a useful data point, and this can feed a general sense of futility. Especially in a job market that's fallen off the proverbial cliff. Even when it seems that no-one is actually hiring, job postings can be thick on the ground, and if people are expected to customize their résumés and create individualized cover letters for each one, it's not surprising that people would rather direct that effort to where they will have the best chance of success. And for many people that means limiting their efforts to roles where they feel they can clearly show that they tick all the boxes (and maybe then some) and then going all out for those roles. Does that leave them with the risk that they land in a role that doesn't challenge them, or has limited prospects for advancement, even if they “hit the ground running?” Yes. But for many people the perceived alternative isn't some better job where they're working to grow and learn. It's unemployment.

To be fair, this piece was written more than a year ago. The ravages of SARS-CoV-2 weren't on anyone's radar at that point. But there was still an unemployment rate, which meant that there were people who were looking for roles who were unable to find them. The systems that we have in place don't do a very good job of clearing the labor market even in good times. Some extraordinary circumstances can manage it, but they're less common than might be hoped. And absent those circumstances, knowing how to realize when requirements really aren't can be tricky.

The Unwatched Watchman

Andrew Sullivan notes the illiberalism of a plan Ibram X. Kendi puts forth to eradicate racism, and links (through an earlier piece of his) to Mr. Kendi's idea for an "Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment," as follows:

To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

I admit that I find it somewhat strange. "[F]ormally trained experts on racism and no political appointees?" Okay, but who is going to determine which of the many such experts would be allowed into the Department? And how is politics going to be kept out of that process?

Mr. Sullivan notes that while Mr. Kendi writes within a Liberal order that would not criminalize his work, that he calls for "an unelected tribunal to police anyone and any institution from perpetuating what he regards as white supremacy." I think that Mr. Sullivan overstates things somewhat. As noted above, the Department of Anti-racism would concern itself with matters of policy, rather than individual thought on the part of the public. It's not quite an Orwellian Ministry of Equality, even though if allowing "racist ideas" to be published falls into the category of either public or private racist policy, one can understand how it could easily be perceived as such, even if it never manages to get there.

But this is the thing about a dictatorship of the just. Since the just are in charge, it can't really go wrong. It's effectively a more humanocentric version of the Kingdom of God. While many Christians, especially Catholics like Mr. Sullivan, don't see the Kingdom of God as being the divine equivalent of a literal temporal monarchy, the general idea is that God would be in charge, and everything would be good. People would have better or even perfect lives, because the bad parts of people would be neutralized. And because God is, in Christianity (and Judaism and Islam, et cetera), the ultimate Good, there would be no need for oversight. And I think that this idea appeals to a lot of people. The idea of being watched over and protected by someone who one doesn't need to watch in turn. A good shepherd who doesn't wear wool or eat mutton; or act on behalf of people that do.

Mr. Sullivan says that in this form of critical theory, "there is the permanent reality of the oppressors and the oppressed." But I think that what's really being noted is the permanent reality of unequal power. And power can be used for good or evil, oppression or equality. The "Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment" presumes that power can be harnessed in such a way that it can be given to good people to do enduring good, and protected from capture while not needing to be accountable to anyone. Divine kingdoms make this presumption, too. When people try to sell me on the Kingdom of God, one of the things that they're pitching is the understanding that the imbalance of power will always on the side of right, even if there's no-one checking up on it. The Department of Anti-racism is different mainly in the idea that it has a much more limited portfolio.

The thing about Liberalism, and I suspect that this is what many people object to about it, is that it presumes that however long it takes to get to the goal, that's okay, even if "however long it takes" is forever. Believers in liberalism often oversell its promise. It can't guarantee a specific desired outcome, especially within an arbitrarily defined timeframe. It can give people leave to investigate what one finds good, but it can never compel them to adopt it. But a dictatorship, especially one of the just, can. And while some people are content for that dictatorship to come in the next life, others have shorter time horizons.

Figuratively

[Joe Biden is] going to do things that nobody would ever think possible because he’s following the radical left agenda. Take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment. No religion. No anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy.
President Donald Trump. Burke Lakefront Airport. Cleveland, Ohio. 6 August, 2020.

This strikes me as a prime example of the sort of statement that people point to when they say that President Trump should be taken "seriously, but not literally." The idea that a Biden Administration could decide, on its own to repeal, or even simply ignore, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is ludicrous on its face. And what could a Biden Administration possibly do to "hurt the Bible?"

Taken literally, the President's remarks make no sense. Taken as "Joe Biden is a radical leftist who will threaten the things that are important to you," however, and they're rational. It's the same argument that candidates for President always make. The number of dangerous radicals who have managed to land in governors' mansions, state legislatures and Congress is off the charts, according to the people who have run against these supposed enemies of all that's good and right in the world. The fact that none of the winners were able to destroy the nation has gone unnoticed by the political class thus far. Of course, a significant portion of the voting public also appears to have not gotten the memo that the Republic is unlikely to the done in quickly, and so they're still susceptible to scare tactics on the part of their chosen politicians. Because while the audience for President Trump's comments might understand that a President Biden wouldn't be able to simply outlaw religion out of the blue, they do believe that he'd be able to implement policies that would injure them to advance "the radical left agenda," even if exactly how he might do that is currently a matter of imagination.

Sign Language

So I've been seeing these anonymous signs popping up around the local area. I live in the suburbs of Seattle, where the Republican party is sort of out in the wilderness. And that fact lends these signs a certain air of desperation. What makes the signs interesting are the clear double meanings. US being "us" and "U.S." and "right" being Republican, or politically Right, but also meaning "correctly."

The signs have all of the hallmarks of being amateur, beyond just the lack of attribution. There is quite a bit of white space, that should be used to make the text larger; the signs are difficult to read at typical roadway speeds, and the underlining of the "R" is nearly invisible from a moving vehicle. I'm curious as to who placed the signs, whether it's a lone Republican voter looking to push back against the relentless Democratic-ness of the near-Seattle suburbs or a group looking to soften the image of the party. Either way, such participation is useful in representative government. We'll see if it inspires anyone else to follow suit.

Mistaken Mischief

For Graham Ivan Clark, the online mischief-making started early.

By the age of 10, he was playing the video game Minecraft, in part to escape what he told friends was an unhappy home life. In Minecraft, he became known as an adept scammer with an explosive temper who cheated people out of their money, several friends said.
From Minecraft Tricks to Twitter Hack: A Florida Teen’s Troubled Online Path

But offering to sell a digital artifact to someone for $50 dollars and then disappearing with the money without delivering isn't "mischief" or "a trick." It's fraud.

And this article gets at a lot of what I think started the original push for Black Lives Matter. It's something that's been lost in the current environment of protests and clashes with authority, but it's important nonetheless.

There are a lot of differences between wealthy people and poorer people that aren't immediately obvious. One of them is the way they commit crimes. Now, it's not for me to say that Mr. Clark actually carried out the frauds that he is accused of in the article. For all we know, someone just wanted to get their name into The New York Times by showing themselves to tagnentially related to someone who made the news. After all, it wouldn't be the first time. But let's presume for a moment that he is guilty as accused. This is the sort of thing that simply goes without investigation. It's not hard to find people complaining about being scammed in this way, and asking if they should notify the police, and the answer is almost invariably: "Go ahead, but nothing will be done." It's taken for granted that any given police department lacks the time, manpower and/or expertise to investigate such things.

Robbing a convenience store or a gas station, however is another matter, even though it's pretty well known that the sums that the thieves make off with are often barely higher than what Mr. Clark is accused of stealing from one person. There's a certain conventional wisdom that holds that these sorts of hold-ups are ludicrously ill-advised, because they come with risks completely out of proportion to the amount likely to be gained.

But a kid whose family is unable to afford a computer that can run Minecraft doesn't have the wherewithal to steal money from fellow players. A lot of "white-collar" sorts of crimes are unavailable to them. And so they become the ones that the police are investigating, arresting and booking into jails. And the resources devoted to them are, in a lot of ways, a decent part of the reason why more affluent youth can cheat people out of the price of a digital cape without fear of being investigated. And because they have to commit their crimes in person, they're much more likely to be clearly (if not always accurately) identified, and this has the side effect of making their cases easier for prosecutors to win.

Before Mr. Clark found himself in jail in connection with a bitcoin fraud backed by gain access to Twitter's customer service tools, he'd been accused of involvement in multiple schemes, from false offers of desirable Minecraft usernames, to the heist of more than three-quarters of a million dollars in Bitcoin. But there were no consequences. Even when effectively caught with 100 stolen Bitcoins, there was no arrest, no charges filed. There's no way that a person could participate in the theft of more than eight hundred thousand dollars of physical commodities and be let go without further engagement from law enforcement, minor or not.

The story on Mr. Clark in The New York Times reads as a recounting of a person who has done bad things, rather than the story of a bad person. Contrast that with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton's "superpredator" comments from 1996:

We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel.

Now, granted, 1996 may as well be ancient history, so I don't quote Secretary Clinton as a means of making a direct current comparison. But the general thrust of Secretary Clinton's remark, that these are bad people, and controlling them is a more pressing need than understanding how they arrived at where they have, is still pertinent, because, generally speaking, people who commit crimes that are broadly considered frightening are held to be worse people than those who don't.

And that takes us back to Black Lives Matter. Because of the wealth gap between Black and White people in the United States, Black youth are more likely to be poor. And this means that they are more likely to commit poor person crimes. And although not all poor person crimes involve the face-to-face threat of violence (419 scams, for instance, are also poor-person crimes) those that the public is most attentive to do. And while Secretary Clinton had called for superpredators to be brought to heel, there is little remorse if they happen to be killed in the process. But since more affluent youth are less likely to be considered dangerous, violence is not considered necessary to deal with them.

For being involved in a federal crime, Mr. Clark was not arrested. He considered this a "second chance," one that he apparently went on to squander. But had he been involved in street level drug dealing or robbing gas stations, being caught would have been more more likely to lead to charges, closing off most of the second chances that he and people like him are often granted.

Working the Refs

While looking for new podcasts to listen to, I came across FiveThirtyEight, a site that I'd managed to forget about, despite Nate Silver popping up in various places from time to time. In fact, I'm not actually sure what prompted me to remember the site, and look there for podcasts, but, in any event, it's given me a new source of both reading and listening material. One of the features present on FiveThirtyEight are their chat transcripts, from the site's Slack page. A couple of days ago, a new chat went up, titled: "Trump Can’t Postpone The Election, But He Can Delegitimize The Results."

What made this an interesting read was that there wasn't a formal definition of "delegitimize" given at any point; the four interlocutors defined it for themselves. The definition they appeared to be working with was effectively: "convince people that the election results had been deliberately falsified." And in that sense, the headline is correct, President Trump can convince people that the election results are illegitimate.

But convincing people of something is not like making a table or driving a car. The person being convinced has something of a say in the matter, and what I was disappointed to find missing from the discussion was mention of the audience that the President would be attempting to reach with complaints about the conduct of the election, and why that matters. After all, there were people who understood the election of George W. Bush in 2000 to be illegitimate. The public, even when they strongly believe in a particular politician, are not puppets to be controlled by that person. They're going to decide for themselves whether to believe accusations of fraud, and how to respond to them. And so, in the end, whether President Trump claims that an electoral loss is illegitimate is beside the point. Understanding the likely responses to that on the part of the public is where it's at.