Change of Pace

The most difficult thing about Nobody In Particular recently has been pushing back against my tendency to use the news of the day as my primary inspiration for topics. That was a more or less workable strategy for most of the past 18 years, but now that the news tends to be a breathless recitation of the things that the Trump Administration has done in the past 30 minutes, it's all become rather one-note.

But I think that I'm the odd person out in all of this. News media is a business, after all, and businesses are set up to cater to the desires of their customers. Not that for most news outlets, their audiences are the customers; that title belongs to the advertisers, but the overall effect is the same, everything becoming all Trump, all the time brings in attention, and that attention can hopefully be diverted towards purchasing some or another product (like those weird "Bunby" toys I keep seeing advertised with the generative automation created video loops). For all that it's called "doomscrolling," I think that more people actively like it than are willing to admit to it.

I suspect that part of it is the feeling (if not always the reality) of being informed. And I think that's what's starting to wear at me; I no longer feel that I'm informed. Sure the Trump Administration is doing all kinds of stuff that's going to have repercussions for years, if  not decades to come, but there's not really a whole lot to be done about it, and much of it comes down to small details of how the President is attempting to push the world into something that looks a lot more like what he wants it to look like; basically (as I see it) a slightly updated version of the 1950s, with substantially more of the United States openly forcing other nations to heel than was taking place at the time. While he's doing a bang-up job of shaking up a status quo that a lot of people felt wasn't working for them, and, frankly, was never going to work for them, I suspect that his random way of going about things isn't going to create the rising tide that he (sometimes) claims that it will. But this is the great thing about scapegoats, they mean never having to say that one has screwed up. And besides, the public has a short memory... the trash fire that was Donald Trump's first term was pretty much forgotten by this time last year; Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were doomed by their own aggressively lackluster term in office, where they seemed to decide that doing nothing of importance to the public at large passed for a strategy.

In any event, I'm just going to have to find other things to pay attention to... and it's not like they aren't out there. It's just going to need a bit of looking. Because even though the Trump Administration dominates the domestic news market doesn't mean that they're the only game on Earth. But it may entail dialing back my news consumption for the time being, to focus on other things of interest.

Spring Blossoms

It's springtime, and I'm staying away from the news for a bit, so this evening, you get a flower picture.

Killer Argument

I'd never actually understood the logic to work that way...

I've heard "I doesn't make sense to kill people to show people that killing is wrong," often enough that it's just another cliché, and I don't think much about it. In large part because I'd always found the logic of the slogan to be weird. The purpose of punishments isn't demonstration, but deterrence.

In any event, I'm not sure that the logic works even if one takes it at face value; because courts routinely hand down penalties that would be crimes if anyone else were to impose them themselves, sometimes for the same sorts of behavior. Let's take the obvious one: Were I to forcibly bring someone to my home, find them guilty of some infraction or another, and lock them in a spare bedroom for some amount of time, I would, when caught... go to jail/prison. The state would, basically, imprison me for imprisoning someone to show that imprisoning people is wrong. But I've never heard someone argue that logic as a reason that prisons should be abolished. Of course, the world is a big place, and I'm sure that the argument is out there somewhere, but I haven't encountered it yet. The closest I've come is the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, but it more or less argues against any after-the-fact punishments that require the use of force, since it only sanctions force to stop rights abuses.

There are other arguments against the death penalty that take into account the unique (or somewhat unique) characteristics of the practice, but in this particular case, the argument being made seems like a special pleading.

The Dislike Engine

Affective polarization, the effect where opposing partisans have an active dislike for the other party, and its voters, leads to inanity like the National Security Advisor adding a journalist to a sensitive chat being conducted on a non-secure (at least by government standards) platform, and then making lame excuses for it.

Michael Waltz should have been shown the door, and the whole lot of people on the chat, including Vice President Vance, should really be feeling the heat. This sort of sloppiness has no viable justification. But the Trump Administration is circling the wagons, and attacking Mr. Goldberg, and eventually this will all blow over. Because who are the voters who are supporting President Trump going to look to for accountability here? The Democrats?

Because what affective polarization does is make the other side worse. No matter what happens. In large part because it shifts the locus of attention from what was done to who did it. And when actions are judged by the actor, rather than on their own merits, the verdicts tend to turn on people's perceptions of what kinds of people they're dealing with. And in a nation where "our side" and "their side" are often taken as signifying "good" and "evil," those perceptions can be very black-and-white.

The other down side of this mode of thinking is that there's never any benefit in doing something that doesn't play to one's own supporters. If the Trump Administration did admit that proper protocols weren't followed, meted out discipline and took concrete steps to improve, this wouldn't earn them anything... Democratic lawmakers and their voter bases wouldn't have any real incentive to give them credit for taking the right steps... the incentives of affective polarization are to move the parties father away from one another, and isolate them. And in that environment, accountability is a weapon, and little else.

But this is the path the United States is on, and so there's little to be done but make the best of it. Even if the best won't be very good.

Mixed Message