Remembrance

A pair of firefighters cleaning up the remnants of a van fire, down in Kent last Sunday. I would say that it's unusual events like this that prompt me to carry a camera with me pretty much whenever I leave the house, but in looking at this picture to evaluate whether I was going to post it, I noticed the fact that the firefighter's names are on the bottoms of their coats, which had completely gotten by me when I was actually at the scene.

And that brings me to another of the reasons that I carry a camera; I'm not as observant as I would like to be. Perhaps, if I hadn't been viewing the world through the small screen on the back of the camera body, I would have noticed the names, but I wouldn't place any money on that. And I'd forgotten about the Starbucks across the street until I looked at the photographs again.

I wonder how much of the world around me has slipped through my fingers, due to inattention or a memory that, sometimes, seems barely worthy of the name. And in that sense, the camera is a net, that backstops my fallible senses.

Ticced Off

The fallout from John Davidson shouting "nigger," at this year's British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards continues. I'd like to say that I understand, but I don't. Jamie Foxx can claim all he wants that Mr. Davidson meant what he said, but the random shouting of obscenities (otherwise known as "coprolalia") is what Tourette's Syndrome is all about for many people, despite it not being a consistent feature of the disorder. (Not that Mr. Davidson himself hasn't joined in the pile-on, questioning why the BBC would chose to seat him near a live microphone.)

The word doesn't have intent grafted on to it. Its history is not an integral part of it. Yes, it had a lot of baggage. But there's no need to be saddled with that baggage, regardless of the circumstances. The word is a word. Nothing more, nothing less. And in this circumstance, it wasn't an expression of bigotry or anger; it was simply a vocal tic, of a sort that's been been known about for 200 years.

Beating up on the BBC is not going to make "nigger" go away. Just like accusing Mr. Davidson on bad faith can't suddenly rid him of his disease. And treating him as if he is just using it as cover for racial animus is to give into the generalized distrust that the Black community (especially here in the United States) seems to have for the rest of the world.

I'm still of the opinion that treating this as anything more than an unfortunate side effect of mental disease or defect grants "nigger" the very power that people seem so afraid that it has. Treating it much like any other six-letter word would go much farther towards defanging it than outrage and recrimination every time it appears on-air. 

Talking the Talk

The State of the Union address was yesterday, and today there were multiple fundraising e-mails in my inbox, laying out the partisan talking points that people would only hear if they coughed up some money, apparently. It makes sense that I would see a spike in fundraising appeals, since the address captures so much media attention, but it all left me with a question.

Just who, exactly, is the State of the Union address (and the opposition response, for that matter) for?

I get that for the President, it's basically a chance for self-promotion that the media will carry and talk about, and for the opposition, it's the opportunity to get someone in front of the camera who might not otherwise have such a large stage, but who would miss the State of the Union were it to go on hiatus and simply never resume? For whom is the address actually important?

Sure, a lot of different actors have turned it to their own advantage. As I noted the President was able to get up and tell the story the nation that he wanted voters to share. The Democrats were able show themselves protesting during the address, and spotlight Abigail Spanberger as a spokesperson. The media was able to show loyalty to their audiences by highlighting either their uncritical acceptance of the President's speech or their often-ignored fact-checking of same, and fundraisers were able to cherry pick the parts that seemed the most likely to prompt partisans to open their wallets.

But just about any speech by a sitting President can accomplish these goals. There's nothing genuinely informative about the State of the Union; it's generally a recitation of White House talking points that everyone already knows. So why bother with it?

It seems like a relic that exists now because it existed then, and no-one wants to be the person who asks what purpose it serves. 

Bugging

I set out, every year, to have my taxes completed well in advance of April 15th. And this year, I thought that I'd gotten quite the jump on it. It had been a week or so since I'd received the last of the forms I needed, and I sat down to get everything squared away. Only to run into an obstacle at the last moment.

Namely, that there was a bug in the H&R Block software that I was using for tax preparation, and it was convinced that I'd left a field blank, even while it showed me the value that it had calculated for the field. I went back to that section of the data entry process, and tried it all again, only to encounter the same error. And the error prevented me from e-filing the documents. Which wasn't, in and of itself, a huge problem. After all, I could just as easily have printed everything out, and dropped it into a mailbox.

What bothered me about it was that this was a fairly serious problem, that prevented the use of one of the primary features of the software, and is was present in the production release. And it pertained to a situation that was not new... people could just as easily have encountered this problem in previous years, so this was a failure in a system that had worked previously.

One of the problems that people have with modern capitalism, at least as they often encounter it, is that there always seems to be a drive to cut as many corners as possible, in the constant quest for marginally better shareholder value. Almost to the point where poor quality becomes an end in itself, something that investors affirmatively look for, as a guide to where they should place their assets.

I think the problem that institutions have in the United States, whether it's capitalism, or something like the press, is the the people who run them don't see their long-term health as enough of a benefit to themselves (or anyone else, for that matter) to look after it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that when people come to the conclusion that capitalism runs primarily on rent-seeking and exploitation, that they're no longer going to support it. But if the time horizon is always the next quarter, and no farther, the idea that in ten years, or even five years, people are going to turn on this system becomes a problem for later. So why not continue to squeeze the orange has hard as one can?

In the story of the goose that laid golden eggs, the moral is often taken to be that the greedy killers should have been happy with what they were getting, rather than hoping for a single massive payday. But as I understand the tale, their problem was that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the goose. And I think that this is what's happening now. Investors fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the society that they rely upon for their investments to be worth anything. And so they're going to be surprised when it can't, or won't, support them any longer.

Countdown

It's taken as a given that economic trade produces "winners and losers." But in a nation like the United States, where social trust is low and individualism is high, this seems like a recipe for long-term instability, as populism rises on both the Left and the Right.

While the desire of economic winners to keep their gains is understandable, what's less clear is why they expect the losers to simply accept that they're going to be left behind. I suspect that part of it is that low social trust tends to manifest itself as a belief that others are incompetent. Why worry about the impacts on other people, when one is convinced that those other people are easily distracted away from problems or not brave enough to start a conflict?

But I'd be willing to bet that a commitment to the Just World Hypothesis is also at work. People tend to be unwilling to see their own benefits as having been gained by past injustices, and there is also a tendency to believe that other people also understand the current situation as just, and accusations of prior bad acts to be made in bad faith. And I think that this worldview, which supposes that people know that they deserve to be in the place they are in, pushes back against ideas that a more equitable balancing of economic forces should be considered.

Given how much people view the current wave of automation as being disrespectful of them, it remains to be seen if it will create tangible benefits that mollify the public before a general anger boils over into a reaction that sets the technology back, at least here in the United States. These competing clocks are invisible, at least to me, and so I have no real sense of which one may be ticking faster than the other.