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?

Defection

 

Crosstalk

One of the things that gets me about American politics is it's tendency towards "let's you and him fight." Especially when social media enters the picture. The following was posted to LinkedIn, but I'm sure that it's popped up in any number of other corners of the Internet:

For the record, I don't have much faith that either of these men are being quoted accurately here.

According to the picture, Dave Ramsey believes that poverty comes from poor choices, whole Jon Stewart sees the cause as predatory financial policies. Fair enough (maybe). But my first question was: How are these men defining "poverty?"

The Federal guidelines for poverty are listed in terms of annual income: $15,960 for a single adult and $33,000 for a family of four, for instance. Nothing in what Messrs. Ramsey or Stewart say have any bearing on people's actual incomes; expenses, including frivolous ones and housing costs, don't reduce a person's income as paid to them by their job(s). So whatever understandings of "poverty" the two of them are referring to, it's not the Federal poverty level.

And since there isn't any other context, there's no indication that whatever other definitions they using align with one another. Or, for that matter, that one of them is responding to comments by the other. It's just Dave Ramsey going the "personal responsibility" route, while Jon Stewart is leaning more into the "systemic factors" side of things. I suspect that their placements on the right and left side of the image is not a coincidence.

This is the sort of social media post that's designed to produce an emotional reaction where one person is cast as a sinner, and the other a saint, based on the reader's own political (or maybe simply politicized) viewpoint. And I don't really see the utility in that.