To Speak, or Not to Speak

I started listening to the Misinformation and the Three Languages of Politics (with Arnold Kling) episode of EconTalk. I made it about a third of the way through, and then gave up. Not because I had a problem with Professor Kling's notions that giving one entity the power to censor others is dangerous, or the idea that the antidote to bad speech is more speech, but because the discussion between Professor Kling and Professor Roberts seemed to go out of its way to avoid the real question that lies at the heart of things like "misinformation" and "censorship": Who is empowered to decide what is harmful?

It was already a given that some speech should be punishable, because it was harmful: Professor Roberts called out threats of violence early on. And in the wake of this, the idea that Holocaust denial, for instance, was effectively harmless was assumed, but never examined.

And while I understand the idea that thee is no harm done to anyone by the simple fact that someone claims that the killings of some six million Jewish people and another six million others didn't actually happen, there are nations in Europe that have decided otherwise. So rather than simply condemn them for being overly censorious in a misguided attempt to protect the hypersensitive, I think that a discussion of the various metrics have for determining whether, and when, people are harmed by speech was in order.

Because no matter which decision a government comes to, someone is going to be unhappy. Either someone feels that their free speech rights are being trampled (or they aren't being given a right that they should have) or someone's going to conclude that harms to them have been trivialized.

And the body that decides between these incompatible interests is not the censor, but whomever decides what it is the censor can sanction people for.

Replacement Holiday

A lot of the stories that I recall about Christopher Columbus from when I was child were Hero stories. The brave and intelligent Columbus making a perilous journey, and in so doing, demonstrating how wrong about the world the benighted and backwards other Europeans were. After all, most of them thought the world was flat. And if someone pointed out that the Greeks had be able to demonstrate the Earth was round, Renaissance Europe looked even worse; they'd somehow managed to forget what had already been established about the planet.

This story is, of course, false. The reason many people felt that the Columbus expedition wouldn't work was they they knew the Earth was spherical, and they knew roughly how large a sphere it was. If the whole distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of China had been open ocean, no-one would have heard from Columbus or his men ever again. But "Columbus lucked out that there happened to continental land masses within range of his ships" isn't as inspiring a story.

In any event, Columbus Day was basically instantiated as a celebration of Italian Americans. (Although now there is a theory that says that Columbus was a Spanish Jew.)

But that's changing now, with the push to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Which, of course, has a Hero story of it own. The brave and upstanding Native Americans, dealing with oppressive colonialists from across the ocean, and in so doing, demonstrating how morally bankrupt the benighted and backwards Europeans were (I'm sensing a theme here). Having been enabled by Christopher Columbus (who didn't "discover" anything, since people already lived here), they brought diseases, forced migrations and involuntary religious conversion to the Americas.

In any event, Indigenous Peoples Day is basically being instantiated as a celebration of Native Americans.

As I've noted before I'm somewhat cynical about the whole push for Indigenous Peoples Day. It throws Cristoforo Colombo under the bus but doesn't otherwise do anything... as some Native American activists have pointed out.

But in the end, holidays like Saint Patrick's Day, Juneteenth, Cinco de Mayo and Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day don't come across as celebrations of the various peoples that make up the United States. They're days to go shopping and/or to have a party, but other than that, who cares? I don't see any of this as creating a nation that celebrates the different people that make it up. But maybe that's too much to have ever expected.

Linked Together

Some years ago, it was evident that LinkedIn was changing. In part, because the system is flexible enough for people to approach it from a number of different directions.

The problem isn't that traditional LinkedIn also has to make room for Linktagram, FacedIn, SnapLink, WhatsIn and LinkTok. It's that these might not be equally valuable to everyone, but there's no way to focus on the experience one wants. For me, LinkedIn takes all of these different ways of interacting, puts them through a paint shaker and dumps them out on me as an undifferentiated mess. So I have to do the work to sort through my feed to find what might be of value to me, when some really simple features would make that much, much, easier.

As it is now, they compete. And as more people move to one mode or another, that mode can come to dominate people's feeds, even if it not that useful for them. I had been able to stem the tide somewhat with aggressive use of the Mute feature, but since that was deprecated, I've had to start unfollowing people to manage things. Which is an unsatisfactory solution.

The late, lamented, Google+ (well, I lament its passing) had, for a time, a nice functionality called Circles. Circles allowed user to group their contacts into buckets, and then send posts to those individual buckets. So I could create a Gaming circle, for instance, and my posts about Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games could be aimed to those people I knew would be interested. Here on LinkedIn, when I look at my Activity, it's broken down into Posts, Comments, Images and Reactions. While LinkedIn has created an algorithmic recommendation engine of posts it thinks I might light, I find it difficult to keep up with posts from my connections. Being able to see, for instance, just the posts of my first-level contacts from time to time would make the platform more useful in that regard

This won't solve everything. There are always going to be people who feel that they're doing me (and themselves) a favor by manipulating things to get something in front of me in spite of my active disinterest in it. But if LinkedIn can find a way to make it easier for people to experience the site on their own terms, they'll be on to something.

Counter Signed

 

With the elections being in less than a month, campaign yard signs are still common in the area, and that means that sign vandalism is also common. The general pattern is simple: When a Republican campaign worker is putting up signs (such as those in the background), they uproot any signs for democrats in the area, as has happened to these signs for Representative DelBene in the foreground.

Larger signs, that can't be easily pulled up or knocked over, are simply destroyed. It's gotten to the point where large campaign signs simply aren't put up anymore, given their expense and the certainty that they'll be cut to pieces. It's a tit-for-tat game where each side blames the other. But the small signs still abound; even if they spend about half their time lying on the ground.

Grinding

The current conflict between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas) turned one the other day, and currently shows signs that it has a long and healthy life ahead of it, with Hezbollah and Iran having joined in the fighting. This is, as always, bad news for the residents of the Palestinian Territories. Gaza has received the worst of it thus far, with more than half of the buildings in the territory damaged or destroyed, and just over 42,700 people killed since the fighting began.

And this is always the way of things. While it's led some people to speculate that Hamas cares more for attacking Israel than it does for protecting Gaza, I have a sinking feeling that the reality may be worse, and the dead and injured in Gaza are seen as literal martyrs to Israeli aggression, people whose suffering is tallied as proof of the enemy's evil.

Given that Gaza's population is somewhat greater than two million people, even the current level of casualties could be maintained for decades without depopulating the place. And if tens of thousands of deaths, plus many more injuries and displacements aren't enough to push the belligerents to make some sort of accord, one can see this dragging on and/or recurring again and again.

The restoration of the Mandate of Palestine is simply not an option for any sort of foreseeable future. Even a return to the 1967 borders seems to be a pipe dream at this point. The current population is Israel isn't going anywhere, and since Israel is more populous (by about a factor of three) than the whole of the Palestinian Territories and there are always more Palestinians killed or injured in the fighting than Israelis, Hamas' actions are never going to have the desired outcome. The Palestinians are always going to come out on the short end of a war of attrition.

But that's the thing about religiously-driven conflicts, I think. There is always an understanding that a power greater than military capability (or simple mathematics) will decide things. Even if a demonstrated track record of a divine thumb on the scale of conflict is lacking.

The whole thing feels like a large-scale feud, marked not by progress to a conclusion, but an interminable series of outrages and reprisals, as each side seeks to prove that it has the greater stomach for the conflict. Grudges can last a very long time; some have continued on for centuries, perhaps even stretching into a millennium. I suspect that this one will, in the end, be a viable candidate for that kind of longevity.