Remember, Remember

I first started tinkering with this way back when, and have been monkeying with it since. I posted a version of it to Google+, back when that was still a thing; but I came across it again recently, and thought that I'd drop it here... as another, futile, form of protest of the constant march of the Christmas shopping (and advertising) season.

Remember, remember, this Fifth of November,
The Christmas promotions and plot.
Stores see no reason why gift-buying season
Should ever be forgot.

We're no longer living in time of Thanksgiving,
There's less than two months left to shop!
Execs face the onus of no year-end bonus,
Should retailer's registers stop.

As a child they once told me, that Christmas was holy,
That it marked the salvation of all.
But now, ain't it funny, it's the feast of Saint Money,
And we've all come to worship the Mall.

The crowds have stampeded, when they've been impeded
From snagging their holiday deals,
In a mad dash for loot, their IQs get the boot,
And they've trampled folks under their heels.

We're told if we stop it, the stores won't have profit
The commandment is "Go forth and buy!"
So we troop to the forefront of each retail storefront
I'm not sure we understand why.

So let us remember, on Fifth of November,
The Christmas promotions and plot.
Stores know the reason why gift-buying season
Must never be forgot.

Next Phase

I'm curious as to what lessons the Republican Party will take away from their carpet-bombing at the hands of nationwide Democrats last night. As I understand American politics, the likely answer is "None." They, after all, realize that Democrat candidates will have made any number of promises that they're not in a position to keep on their own (candidates for Congress fall into this trap all the time). As long as Republican members of  Congress feel that the "Make American Great Again" activist class will still punish them for any apparent disloyalty to the President and the Trumpist project, the Legislative Branch will be a graveyard for any bill that promises major change, and voters have historically had very little patience for the realities of legislating (or governing more broadly, for that matter).

And so the likely outcome is that Congressional Republicans will obstruct where they can, and rely on the President to Veto things where they can't. Because they still have a base of voters for whom the Democrats aren't simply the Opposition; they're Evil. And while they don't want the country to fail, they also can't see how the Democrats can succeed without the country failing. And as far of those voters are concerned, the problem is with everyone else. (Take Representative Greg Steube {R-Florida}, who claimed that: "Instead of standing firm on our principles, you have governed out of fear, continually knelt to the moderates in our conference (who all got crushed last night anyway), and discarded conservatives like me who warned of last night’s results." I'd like to know what "moderates" he was referring to, given how thoroughly the Republican party managed to purge anyone who refused to salute anything that President Trump hoisted up the flagpole.)

Thus, the cycle will continue.Because the Democrats aren't going to be in the business of selling the difficult choices that will be needed for long-term improvement any more than the Republicans were. And so the promised quick fixes will fail to materialize. The Democrats won't be willing to alienate their core voters in a futile attempt to reach out to people who don't support them any more than the Republicans did. And so expect them to hope that situations that benefit their base, but bother the public at large, will just go away (regardless of how poorly this strategy has worked in the past). Which means that the Democrats will manage to alienate many of the people who voted for them, perhaps for the first time, before the next Presidential election.

Back in 2012, the Republican party created a post-mortem after Mitt Romney's fail bid to unseat President Obama. By 2016, it was being ignored, and the victory of Donald Trump seemed to vindicate that decision. Losing in 2020 didn't change any outlooks, and again 2024 appeared to back that play. But now the standard midterm change in the political tide seems worse than usual, so maybe people will take a second look at what may have gone wrong. But, given the history of such things, I doubt it. Politics seems to be more attached to what's familiar than it is to what might work, because a good number of voters are, too.

Uncentered

The quote from Elie Wiesel, "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented," snipped from his Nobel Prize acceptance has metastasized in the meantime. It was recent related to me as "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." This latter formulation, attributed to Paulo Freire is a bit more strident than Mr. Wiesel's and somewhat more black-and-white: a conflict between oppressor and victim, or tormentor and tormented has become one between the powerful and the powerless.

The snarky side of my personality wants to ask: If someone is comforting the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable, and I decline to become involved, who aim I supposedly aiding? But the more serious side of me is curious as to where the endpoint of this: "If you're not with them, you're against them" mentality lies.

Because I noted, when looking at the two quotes, the shift that had taken place. When Mr. Wiesel notes that "We must always take sides," he's implicitly presuming a certain level of opposition to the oppressor/tormentor. Silence encourages the tormentor presupposes that any speaking out would be directed against them. In other words, for Mr. Wiesel, neutrality is the suppression of a tendency to come to the aid of the oppressed and tormented; were it otherwise, then silence would be to the benefit of the tormented.

On the other hand, Mr. Freire's formulation, while outwardly similar, seems to put people in the position of needing to prove that they've taken the correct side... the assumption of the listener's sympathies is not as clearly made. And he presumes that a side is always being taken; there is no such thing as neutrality.

I'm curious if people like Mr. Freire felt that Mr. Wiesel had not gone far enough in his exhortation to people to take sides in the conflicts that they saw around them. If the general sympathy that Mr. Wiesel attributed to people, when not acted upon, became a weapon against those it should otherwise have benefited.

And so I wonder what the next step is (or perhaps was) for those who don't see Mr. Freire as strident enough. If declining to become involved in a conflict between other people is to side against whomever feels the most powerless, is everyone a party to such conflicts? If so, what does that mean in practice? When does a call to moral courage become a threat of sanctions?

People's power is not something of their own making, and no-one, I think, awakens one morning with the ambition to be an oppressor or tormentor. These are labels that come from the conflict, rather than being the attributes of people that push them to start a conflict. Mr. Wiesel's original wording understands that better than what came later, I think.

Grist

Nobody in Particular started in late December of 2006. Which means that I'm about a couple of months away from having been at this for 20 years. What started out as an attempt to make myself a better writer has become something of a compulsion in the meantime, with an early goal of averaging 13 posts per month turning into a minimum of 13 and an average a bit north of 15. Although not all of those are text posts... I do post photographs I've taken while out an about on an irregular basis.

But I have been thinking of winding things down by the end of the year. In part because I don't know that all of the time that I've spent in front of my keyboard has, in fact, made me a better writer, but also because I'm starting to feel that Alphabet, which owns Blogger, is simply helping itself to everything I post here and dumping it onto the massive pile to training data for the latest version of Gemini, having granted themselves a limitless license via their terms of service.

To be sure, that doesn't bother me, in and of itself. If the text I've posted here is useful, then it's useful. But it's also a reminder of one of the contradictions of generative automation. The companies that produce and sell it hold it out as something that can bring massive benefits to everyone, not just the wealthy investor and executive classes. But if the technology is that amazing, and will produce so much value that it will make literally everyone wealthier, why couldn't OpenAI, Anthropic and so on have borrowed the money to pay people for training data? Why resort of casting the whole of the open Internet as "fair use" and engaging in piracy of books if the technology was going to create enough to make everyone whole?

While it's fashionable to just presume that everyone over a certain net worth is greedy and grasping, and then call it a day, I do find it useful to pay attention to what the people whose job it is to make money on investing consider to be good investments. And if generative automation is only a good investment because the most important inputs are free, then it's worth being suspicious of the claims of enough returns to give some to everyone in the end.

Sorcery

Except in this case, the party out of power says: “Don’t worry, I can solve all your problems. I can lower prices by just” — name a different scapegoat — “the billionaires! We’re going to punish the billionaires, and that is going to make your health care cheaper,” or what have you.
Catherine Rampell, “There Are Solutions to This Crazy Economy. Voters Will Hate Them.”

One of the side effects of this sort of "magical thinking," as Ms. Rampell termed it, is that it can license (and I suspect it does quite often) a belief in political Evil. After all, if there's something quick and straightforward that one's preferred political party can do that will result in an immediate fix to people's problems, then it stands to reason that those problems only persisted because the quick and straightforward thing was not done. And if it's quick, straightforward and simply wasn't done, then it stands to reason that the party in power didn't do it because they're deliberately perverse.

Sure, it's in overly simplistic answer to a complicated situation. But isn't magical thinking always like that?