Apply Palm to Face

Wouter Zwart: Speaking of threat, at one point you mentioned in a debate that there are no-go zones in the Netherlands and that cars and politicians are being set on fire.

Ambassador Hoekstra: I didn't say that. That is actually an incorrect statement. Yeah, we would call it fake news.

Zwart: Is that fake news? Because that's what you really said.

Ambassador Hoekstra: No, it's not what I said.

Mr Hoekstra (on archive video): The Islamic movement has now got to the point where they have put Europe into chaos. Chaos in the Netherlands, there are cars being burned, there are politicians that are being burned. And yes, there are no-go zones in the Netherlands.

Zwart: You called it fake news, obviously... (is interrupted)

Ambassador Hoekstra: I didn't call that fake news, I didn't use the words today.

Zwart: No?

Ambassador Hoekstra: No. I don't think I did.
Trump's ambassador to Netherlands in 'fake news' blunder

This, I think, gets to the heart of a lot of issues between the citizens of the United States and their government: the idea that politicians (especially politicians that a given individual didn't vote for) are reflexive liars, with an aversion to the truth that rivals the fear of anaphylaxis.

I'm not sure if I'm impressed or appalled that Ambassador Hoekstra went into this interview so clearly unprepared to be called out on something that he'd said, and that no-one at the State Department warned him about this. Of course, 2015 was a long time ago, and politicians have famously poor memories when put on the spot. But this speaks to an inability to realize that he'd said something that might come back to bite him, especially given that he'd said it in a televised and recorded forum. Not to mention a certain carelessness about what he was saying in the moment.

And this issue with this, as far as partisanship goes, is then the reflexive reaction to this, which is to defend the politician as being a target of unscrupulous media types, rather than to say, "You know what? Ambassador, you're a great guy, but you're in over your head. Come home before you do some real damage."

There's also a critique of the American media establishment in this. Mr. Zwart had his ducks in a row before he walked into that interview and was prepared to back up what he was saying, where as outlets like NPR tend to allow the statement to pass, and then "fact check" it afterwards. This may be part of the reason that the Ambassador was tripped up - he simply wasn't expecting Mr. Zwart to be as ready for him as he turned out to be.

Hello, Winter

You Forgot a Bit

I came across a copy of Chris Hayes A Colony In a Nation and read it. It's a quick read, I was able to finish it during the gaps in my workday, and about a half-hour before going to bed. As the title implies, it's a take on the idea of colonialism, with the central premise being that poor Black and Latino (although the book mostly focuses on Black) communities are treated like colonies, and the analogy is made to the original 13 Colonies that made up the early United States. In this, is draws some interesting parallels between the way that modern America jurisdictions of various levels and the administration of King George III treated their colonial subjects.

It is, not surprisingly, a Left-leaning critique of things, although there are some practices that I was surprised that we don't hear more right-leaning commentators talking about. (It kind of reinforces the cynical "freedom for me, and none for thee" charge that is leveled against them.)

The one big miss that popped up for me is the very end of the book. In the conclusion, Mr. Hayes asks the reader to imagine a button that, when pushed, delivers a benefit to the person who pushed it, at the expense of someone else. He goes through a couple of ideas of what that benefit might be, and what it might cost the someone else, but the basic idea is the same. And, on page 216, he says of this:

And if the person sitting by the button is poor and desperate, I doubt we'd judge her if she pushed the button to feed her kids or get money toward much-needed medicine. But overall it's not okay, as a general principle, to impose random harm on someone else so that you can reap a reward. That's our moral commitment.

But as far as I'm concerned, it is okay. That's why people do it so often. Regardless of how unethical or immoral one might claim it to be, the fact remains that reaping rewards by imposing random (or quite specific) harms on someone else is a mainstay of cultures around the world and throughout history (and prehistory, for that matter).

So, is Mr. Hayes wrong about this?

Not entirely. I think, however, that he left out one tiny bit.

But overall it's not okay, as a general principle, to impose random harm on someone undeserving of it so that you can reap a reward.

There, as all the cool kids would say these days, I fixed it for you.

And I think that it's an important distinction; one that explains much of the way in which people actually behave. And the issue becomes that it's never particularly difficult to come up with a reason why someone else is deserving of the harm that is required to reap a reward. They're of the wrong social class, they're from a different place, they've broken this or that rule, they didn't defend us from some harm that someone else did to us, they don't follow the correct faith, their ancestors harmed our ancestors, they're simply inferior. Et cetera. The list is as long as the human imagination. And as varied as human deprivation.

Mr. Hayes notes that we'd refrain from blaming the poor or desperate. (I suspect that judgement would be very quick if the harm befell someone the judge cared about, however.) And that's the other side of the coin. People are quick to see themselves, as poor and desperate. Not as often as they're willing to see the person harmed as deserving of harm, perhaps, but more often than one might think is reasonable.

And this ties in to the overall theme of the book. After all, Mr. Hayes attributes King George's heavy-handed tariff enforcement in colonial America as a way of replenishing the depleted royal treasury after the Seven Year's War, rather than (as it often seems we're taught in grade school) any sort of personal malice. (Although it's likely that he saw the colonies, with their smuggling and other tariff-dodging, as wretched hives of scum and villainy.)

Mr. Hayes idea, that we consider victimizing one another as wrong across the board, is an ideal. And in that, lip service may be paid to it, but it's not often the reality. Understanding the pieces that bring it into line with the world as we experience it, makes it easier to understand how it's actually lived, and perhaps why it's lived that way.

Laboring

"So, there was something about growing up black in the United States and then bearing a child that was associated with lower birth weight," says [University of Illinois at Chicago neonatologist Richard] David.

What is different about growing up black in America is discrimination, says David.
How Racism May Cause Black Mothers To Suffer The Death Of Their Infants

But is that the only thing that is different? While I understand that between questions about housing, income, health habits and discrimination, that the understanding of discrimination may be the best predictor of very low birth weights for newborn babies, correlation doesn't always prove causality.

Racism and discrimination have become our "Get Out of Blame Free" cards, when perhaps what we need to do is be less willing to shoulder blame in the first place. We often feel a need to be on guard, or take responsibility for what comes next, and maybe that's unhealthy for us.

The point of the NPR article is that the stress caused by racial discrimination may be causing the high rate at which Black women in the United States lose their infants. But that begs this question: Is racial discrimination the ONLY cause of stress in the lives of Black people that other people don't have to deal with? Technically, the NPR article gets around this by not openly stating a causal relationship. But the lines are wide enough to read between. And that's kind of a shame, because given that a causal relationship is not established, there could be other factors at work.

One very important issue when it comes to racial discrimination is that it may or may not be possible to determine discrimination when it happens. There was a study, which I can't seem to find online for love or money that noted that when Black people went to a business (I believe that auto dealerships were the subject in this particular case) that even though they believed they were being treated perfectly fairly, they didn't receive the same level of service as White people coming to the same dealership.

And this idea, that one can't always detect when one is the subject of racism, may contribute to the stress, because it drives a constant uncertainty. Sure, this person that you're dealing with seems perfectly nice and cordial. But maybe they'll just fooling you, and actually dislike you, or won't give you a fair deal. There may be wisdom in second-guessing every interaction that you have with someone, but let me tell you, it can be tiring to never be able to feel comfortable around people who are not like you.

And one of my experiences of growing up Black was the constant warnings that one should never be too comfortable around White people.

My parents were fairly conservative, so they never talked about sex with me. Even when my lack of a dating life led them to worry that I might be gay, they simply asked me outright "Are you gay?" rather than ask potential uncomfortable questions about my sex life. So I remember the only piece of dating advice that my father ever gave me. "Stay away from White girls," he said. I figured I knew where this was going. One didn't have to be particularly astute around 1990 to understand that hostility to interracial relationships came from all corners. But, as usual, my father threw me a curve ball when he informed me that the reason was that White people, effectively, universally hated Black people. "And a woman who will sleep with someone she hates," my father warned me, "will sleep around on you in a heartbeat."

And this idea, that White people (or White Americans, at least) were universally racist was pervasive in my extended family. Sure you had to deal with them, but you could never, ever, really trust them. And that feeling that no matter where you went, there were people out to get you, drives an anxiety all it's own. I drove up to northern Minnesota once, and was so nervous about stopping at a McDonald's to eat that I positioned myself near a large window, with my car just outside and chair within arm's reach, ready to make a break for it at the slightest sign of trouble.

[Samantha] Pierce remembers her mother warning her early on in her childhood that she would have to "work twice as hard to get half as much" as her white counterparts, she says.

My mother had a variation on this phrase. And and it was something that I found quite stressful; the idea that I would have to work four times as hard as everyone else, just to keep up. Eventually, I had to say to her, "Mom, do you understand how demotivating that is?" She didn't and I don't think that anyone else in my family did. It was just reality as it occurred to them. But it's a reality that leaves no room for trust or safety.

I'm not surprised that Black people find life in the United States stressful. But I wonder how much of that stress originates within us.

Taken

One of the projects that my father had on his plate when he died was a foolproof system to prevent hacking of online transactions and financial data. Now, while my father had been a systems analyst going way back to Assembly language, he wasn't a computer security researcher. And this lead to some speculation that the lawyers he was paying to help him prepare his patent of the holy grail of online finance were fleecing him. And while I'm sure my father had thrown that money away, I'm less sure that he was being intentionally conned. After all, the lawyers by father was working with likely knew a lot less about computers than my father did. They were lawyers, after all, and my father was the computer expert with the impressive résumé. It's highly unlikely that they could have found the flaws in my father's plans for this. I'd been working in technology for more than a decade and a half when my father explained it to me, and my objections were based more on the understanding that my father claimed to have single-handedly solved a problem that thousands, if not millions, of people the world over had yet to crack, than being able to tell him specifically where the scheme fell down.

Science Says

In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.
CDC gets list of forbidden words: Fetus, transgender, diversity

Now, to be sure, I'm not certain that this story is everything it's cracked up to be. The information comes from a "CDC analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly." Of course, one wonders why "hey people, don't use these words in budget documents" would effectively be classified (after all, unless the documents in question are classified, people would start noticing the omissions), but we live in a world where any group of people larger than two has apparently world-shattering secrets. But for whatever reason, we have an anonymouse scurrying to the press to reveal supposed inner workings of the Trump Administration.

I'm fairly certain when I see this story in my social media feeds, it's going to effectively be marked with "this is something that aligns with my prejudices." And what makes it interesting is that you can align it to Liberal and Conservative sensibilities. On the Liberal side, there will be shoutrage; how dare the Trump Administration attempt to muzzle scientists for political purposes! The word "censorship" is already being thrown around, although there aren't any legal, or even administrative, punishments threatened in the piece for analysts who don't comply. On the Conservative side, there is also likely to be some shouting. The Washington Post article is fairly clearing disapproving, and Red America will likely response with "what's wrong with the standards and wishes of the community?" In this, it becomes a two-fer. The Trump administration shows that it cares for what communities (of Trump voters) want and it shows the "Mainstream Media" as biased yet again. So one could make the case that the leaker could be on either side.

The most interesting bit of this is the: “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” part. Because it speaks to (and fits into people's prejudices about) the relationship between conservative communities, especially religiously conservative communities, and scientific institutions. For many religious conservatives, the Bible is more than a book of scriptures, it's a history of the world and a basis for all understanding of right and wrong (the parts of it that comport with what they actually want to do, anyway). Which isn't a problem in itself. It's when those two things become linked, as in "if the Bible isn't an accurate historical document, then its teachings of right and wrong are irrelevant," that the problem begins. While one can decide that the story of Adam, Eve and their sons is suspect in places (So... if Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve's two children, how did Cain find a wife and where did enough people to build a city in the land of Nod come from?) for many people the broader point is that the Judeo/Christian/Moslem God created the first people as separate from all the animals. Evolution, which argues against the specific creation of individual species, including humans, undermines, this. In some quarters, this is taken to mean that the scientific community has fallen for a ruse set by a supernatural adversary to lead people away from God. In others it's taken as proof that the scientific community is in on the deception.

The linking of science to the Culture Wars is unsurprising. The scientific method and academic studies often come to conclusions that undermine traditional understandings of the world at large, and to the degree that long-standing policy was based on a given traditional understanding, proponents of change (especially those who saw change as progress) looked to science as a "value neutral" means of demonstrating that theirs was the proper understanding of the world, and that policy needed to be changed, the current standards and/or wishes of the community involved be hanged. As science more and more came to be seen as having taken the "liberal" side of the culture war debate, a certain conservative distrust for scientists began to develop. This supposed Trump Administration edict, which supposes to prevent liberals using the scientific community to push "agendas" on unwilling communities by simply saying, "What you want doesn't matter, because science," can be viewed as the Trump Administration stepping in to protect the desires of people who don't like to consider things settled until their buy-in has been obtained.

The thing about culture war victories like this, however, is that they are fleeting. After all, the Trump Administration won't be office forever, and do the degree that it mollifies supporters and causes crises in opponents, it sows the seeds of a Democratic successor, who would simply rescind whatever ban was in place. And so the fight will go on, regardless of the outcome of this alleged skirmish.

Women and Men

I was reading Peter Beinart's The Growing Partisan Divide Over Feminism at The Atlantic, and something stood out for me. A quarter, or maybe a third, of the way into the column, Mr. Beinart makes the following observation: "But what’s driving the polarization is less gender identity—do you identify as a man or a woman—than gender attitudes: Do you believe that women and men should be more equal. Democrats aren’t becoming the party of women. They’re becoming the party of feminists."

While this is a common formulation, it misses something important - a definition of "equal." And that omission is important, because equal doesn't mean the same thing to all people, as I often find when I discuss Steven Pinker's social trilemma; that a society cannot be simultaneously "fair," "free" and "equal." Oftentimes, people are adamant that a society can be simultaneously "fair," "free" and "equal." And they can demonstrate that this is true - they just have to use different definitions of "fair," "free" and/or "equal" than Mr. Pinker himself does.

One of the things that I find separates the stereotypical Liberal from the stereotypical Conservative understanding of equality is the degree to which it is correlated with identicalness. The stereotypical Liberal position tends to posit a very high degree of correlation between the two. For instance, despite the common wisdom on the gender wage gap, many detailed analyses tend to place the overall difference at a few pennies, once you start controlling for certain factors. And in many cases, even that remaining difference comes down to flexibility in work - that is that people who require flexibility in their working hours tend to earn slightly less than people who have their schedules dictated to them, even when doing the same work. While it's relatively easy to see how this might be a workable trade-off, for some people, pay is equal only when paychecks are identical. If that means robbing people of some flexibility or making others effectively pay for flexibility they don't need, then so be it.

While the stereotypical Conservative idea that men and women are different, yet complementary and equally important parts of a greater whole is seen in some sectors as simply a cover for entrenched sexism, it makes perfect sense to them, likely because many things in the world work this way. Generally speaking, we understand that two things can be equal, without always being identical. A simple example would be two cars. We can understand that two cars can have the same feature sets, gas mileage and price, yet be easily distinguishable from one another.

To be sure, an article on whether partisanship has an impact on views of gender equality may not be the best place to hash out what has been a contentious argument on exactly what makes two people "equal." But it's still worthwhile to recognize the idea that not everyone defines equality identically. Simply writing off the Republican understanding of what it means to be "equal," in favor of the Democratic one doesn't make the argument any stronger. It simply shows a substantial portion of the population that they aren't being listened to.

Darker Than Shade

France will do whatever it needs to do for its own sake, and when those coincide with ours, 'tant mieux' [even better] as the French people say. But our main responsibility as leaders, as citizens, is what we need to do to grow our own countries.

We can no longer continue to make policy for ourselves — in our country, in our region, in our continent — on the basis of whatever support that the Western world or France or the European Union can give us. It has not worked, and it will not work.
Nana Akufo-Addo, President of Ghana

This, according to NPR, is the Ghanaian President "throwing shade" at foreign aid. I'm not sure I agree. After all, shade, in this context, according to Merriam-Webster "is a subtle, sneering expression of contempt for or disgust with someone—sometimes verbal, and sometimes not." I don't know that I see anything approaching contempt for, or disgust with, the concept of foreign aid. That description, I think, it better reserved for some of the social media crowing about President Akufo-Addo's statement. NPR goes on to say:

Instead, [President Akufo-Addo] encouraged African leaders to focus on good governance, accountability and diversity to promote trade. With its wealth of natural resources, the continent should be a donor, not a recipient, he said.

I think that part of the reason why so many Africans saw President Akufo-Addo's statement as a way of sticking it to France is that sub-Saharan Africa has a worldwide reputation as a horror show; dirt-poor on a good day, and crammed to the rafters with strongman dictators who busy themselves with looting their nations and scheming to stay in power so they can loot some more. Even Amnesty International's recent report on abuses of migrants bound for Europe excoriates the EU, but doesn't bother castigating the African governments of the nations that the migrants are do desperate to get out of. It reminds me of President Bush's invocation of "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Of course Africa needs all the foreign aid it can get - and while we're at it, Europe should take all the migrants who come, because no-one would and to stay in such a hellhole. And, of course, Africa can't be expected to stop being a hellhole.

But, on its face, President Akufo-Addo's statement doesn't seem to be one of accusing France, or other nations, of deliberately fostering African dependency. You can easily read his statement as "Dude. It's been 60 freaking years. Why are we still beggars after all this time?" If that's throwing shade on anyone, it's governments in Africa, Ghana included.

NPR's mischaracterization of President Akufo-Addo's statement is simply playing into another stereotype of Africa - the bitter person who understands that they dependent on others, but too proud to take that with good grace. It's no better than any of the other stereotypes.

The Bad Child

I don't recall when I first heard this; it was sometime in the past few years. An economist made the observation that, in the United States, children had gone from an economic necessity to a luxury good, in the sense that modern children for most American families cost much more than they will every return, economically speaking.

I was listening to a series of interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates by some editors of The Atlantic, and at one point, he made a point that I'd also come to; injustice (in this particular case, White Supremacy) tends to exist when it is in the interests if the broader society for it to exist. In other words, injustice exists because it brings advantages.

And in this, you can understand a means of combating injustice that is analogous to the reduction in family sizes.

When injustice effective represents a direct increase in the standards of living across a society (and not just for the people who behave unjustly) you can imagine that it would be quite widespread, in much the same way that in places where children are effectively a form of working farm animal, large families tend to be the norm. As the relative price of injustice goes up, it will eventually become a luxury good, and people will cut back. Family sizes have dropped in part because the greater "investment" that people are expected to make in their children has raised their price, but social changes in gender roles have also raised the opportunity costs of childbearing (something that many people understand to be a form of discrimination against women), and this has also resulted in fewer children being born - there are more economically advantageous uses for the time and resources. (And it is in this sense that children become a luxury good. They're no longer broadly useful as either semi-autonomous home or farm equipment or as a buffer against old age and infirmity.) And one can understand that in a lot of ways discrimination is a modern-day status marker. Prejudices aside, the willingness to write off large swaths of the overall population means missing out on the things that those people could bring. This means that injustice tends to be the province of people who can afford it, rather than the broad populace at large.

But at the same time, it gives us a reason to understand that most forms of injustice will always be with us, no matter what. After all, people who decide to have (or to risk having) children when they cannot afford the expense of it are fairly thick on the ground. Not to say that "everyone does it," but it's common enough that stories are easy to find. And so even once both the direct and opportunity costs of injustice are high, there will still be people to whom it is important enough that they'll indulge themselves when they can.

Like many analogies, this one is imperfect. But I think that it's useful as a way of organizing thoughts around what my need to happen going forward, if things are to change.

Starting Line

Um... Frank? We're supposed to be going that way...

They Said, They Said

“This is a spiritual battle we’re fighting,” they say.
“As Christians, we believe in second chances,” they say.
There’s Biblical precedent, they say—just look at Mary and Joseph!
'You Need to Think About It Like a War'

[Mark Ford,] The head of the county Republican Party called the election “a spiritual battle we’re fighting.”
“Even if the allegations are true, as Christians we believe in second chances,” said Pat Hartline, who lives in neighboring Cherokee County and was also in attendance.
‘This is a Spiritual Battle We’re Fighting’

“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus,” Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler told The Washington Examiner.
Alabama state official defends Roy Moore, citing Joseph and Mary: ‘They became parents of Jesus’

"They" is typically taken to be a plural. It when you have some combination of hes, shes and/or its. It is sometimes used a singular, generally in referring to someone where the person's gender is unknown or unimportant - "it" usually being reserved for inanimate objects at at least non-human ones. You might get away with calling a dog "it." Calling a person "it" will typically get one into trouble.

The problem that often arises with "they" is that it's a convenient weasel word. The sort of thing that's used to say something, when a certain amount of ambiguity is desired, even when ambiguity isn't called for. In 'You Need to Think About It Like a War,' McKay Coppins opens with the idea that the "God-fearing supporters" of Roy Moore have thrown their commitment to personal morality out of the window, with things that "they" say in Mr. Moore's defense. But he links to the sources of what "they" say, and in each case "they" turns out be a single, specific, individual.

Of course, this is secondary to the point. Mr. Coppins is right about the fact that the "Christian right" has decided that someone who shares their politics is a better fit as their representative than someone who doesn't, and maintaining a standard of personal moral purity isn't worth losing a valuable legislative seat. But that's not a very good reason to imply that individual voices are a chorus. because it's unnecessary. Attributing each speaker's words to the individual who said them would have still backed up Mr. Coppins' point that in the service of putting someone whose politics matched their own into the United States Senate, Roy Moore's supporters are willing to look the other way at his behavior. He simply would have had to speak of those individuals, rather than generalizing their words.

The whole article uses "conservative values voters" and "they" interchangeably, dealing in broad generalizations, when really the only people who count are the ones who actively decide to vote for someone they would otherwise find to be reprehensible. And in a nation where turning out to vote isn't a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination, an active minority can carry the day. It's a safe bet that whomever wins the Alabama Senate race, they're going to carry the day with a minority of registered voters. It's possible that Mr. Moore could win with a minority of conservative values voters making it to the polls. After all, he doesn't need all them to show up - only a statistically significant number more than the number of people who are motivated enough to vote for Doug Jones. Whether that constitutes a majority, I have no idea. But it's entirely possible that there are still large numbers of conservative values voters who have no intention of backing Roy Moore. It's just that the group of them, in total, votes rarely enough that politically, they don't exist. And so the media pays no attention to them, either.

Institutional hypocrisy, my name for the linking of two people who share a characteristic and calling them out for not sharing enough groupthink, is a pointless exercise. Conservative Christians don't have to think about personal purity and political office any more than two people from Rhode Island or any two Latinas have to. Generalizations in support of it don't do anything useful, either.

Untaxing

Today's "Daily Dispatch" from The Economist makes the following point about Congressional Republicans' efforts at tax reform: "The tax bill passed by the Senate on Saturday morning makes a mockery of Republican claims to want to balance budgets. The only objective seems to have been to cut taxes."

With all due respect to The Economist: Well, duh.

No form of government is perfect, and one of the imperfections of a representative government is that there is always the temptation for voters to elect people who will promise benefits at the expense of people who cannot (or do not) vote. Back in the day, the enfranchised class could vote for representatives who would deliver benefits that women, or the Black population of the country would have to pay for. But near-universal enfranchisement has changed that. And so the the current group that's been elected to shoulder the burden of today's benefits are tomorrow's adults, who are now either too young to vote or politically disengaged.

Part of what drives this is that despite the fact that Republicans are primarily focused on lowering taxes, public peity demands that they make some sort of noises about "fiscal responsibility." It's another case of the public effectively asking elected officials to lie to them, because partisan support for spending through the tax code rarely erodes simply because it will increase the size of public debt.

It's a popular trope on "the Right" (to the degree that such a large group of people are unified in any one specific issue) that Democrats often "buy" votes by promising the (undeserving, by many Conservative standards) urban and suburban poor "free stuff," and in doing so, freeing them from having to work for a living. It's a popular trope, in large part because it grows neatly out of a particular conservative worldview that tends to break the world down into Makers and Takers (which are more moralistic than economic distinctions, the way they are typically deployed).

Cutting tax rates, and "letting people keep more of their hard-earned money," is often floated as a way of restoring a measure of fairness to the world, depriving the lazy and unindustrious Takers of the fruits of the hardworking Makers' incomes. But all in all, direct cash welfare via transfer payments is a fairly small amount of the overall federal budget. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, are, by themselves, about half of all government spending at this point, even when the net interest on the current debt is included. And these are programs that are popular all across the political spectrum. Reducing government revenues is not going to make these programs go away or immediately reduce their benefits. And in this, the Republican drive to reduce taxes, given the dubious chances that they will spark enough growth to fully offset their costs, is effectively, well, buying votes by giving their constituents "free stuff." It's just that the "stuff" comes in the form of retirement income and medical care.

While Senator Mitch McConnel can say that for the Republican tax plan to pay for itself only requires a boost of 0.4% to current growth rates, that's not as simple an issue as he makes it sound. While 0.4% is a very small amount, what that means in practice is boosting the current growth rate from around 3.17% to 3.47%. That's a jump of a little over 12.5%; or adding an extra dollar of economic growth for every 8 dollars of current growth. Not impossible, but a non-trivial feat.

I find it interesting that there doesn't seem to be a push to recreate the conditions that lead to the technology and internet boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Were it up to me, I'd be diligently attempting to understand how to create a sustainable version of that. And one doesn't have to sustain it forever. Just doing so long enough to allow for a substantial dent in public debt would be more than worthwhile. Had that rapid economic expansion been the direct result of lowering taxes, one would think that the Republicans would be shouting it from the rooftops, so that doesn't seem to be the Republican intent. The cynic in me has a suspicion as to why there isn't a move to spark another technological revolution, but since my cynical impulses are also uncharitable, I'll keep them to myself.

In the end, I hope that the Republican tax plans do drive enough economic growth to be revenue-neutral in the end. I doubt it will happen, if for no other reason than there will be heavy political pressure to not allow the individual tax rate reductions to sunset, but I have no desire to cheer the downfall of my own interests, regardless of whether I believe that they're honestly being looked after. But I do suspect that economic growth wasn't really the intent. It's well and good for the Republicans to cast doubt on each and every analysis that says that the growth won't make up for the shortfalls, but part of me thinks that it's simply to avoid admitting that they're buying votes, and since they won't be paying the price, the unit cost doesn't matter.

Simon Says

Alright, if you make another mistake, there is a very severe possibility you are both going to get shot, do you understand?

Eventually, according to Atlantic columnist Conor Friedersdorf, Daniel Shaver made one too many mistakes, and a Mesa, Arizona police officer shot him to death.

This is the part that kills me:

At approximately sixteen minutes and forty seconds on the recording Sgt. Langley shouted at Shaver, “If you do that again, we are shooting you. Do you understand?”

Sixteen minutes and forty seconds. The shooting of Tamir Rice is often looked upon as unjustified because the police officer opened fire within seconds of arriving on the scene. This shooting seems unjustified in part because of the amount of time during which Mr. Shaver was under duress. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out how long during the overall eighteen minutes of video Mr. Shaver was trapped in the fatal game of Simon Says with the officers, but in any event, it was long enough for him to lose. And so I wonder why was the situation so drawn out, especially if officers were so concerned that Mr. Shaver may have had something dangerous concealed on his person. If every second that a person is effectively not under the complete control of the responding officers is a second in which a tragedy might unfold, keeping that number of second to a bare minimum seems like it would be a priority.

When you read the excepts of testimony in the case, it seems clear that the officers on the scene had come to the conclusion that Mr. Shaver was a criminal. He was guilty of something, even if they had no idea what, and therefore they had no responsibility to ensure a relatively positive outcome to this situation. So if the orders to do this and not do that went on forever, that wasn't their problem. Mr. Shaver had brought it upon himself by whatever unknown bad acts he'd committed.

When I've debated this sort of thing with people online, they are often at pains to say that in a situation like this, they would make sure to follow each and every one of an officer's instructions. What this case illustrates is that it's easy to say that when you don't know how long you're going to have to maintain the performance. There's an idea, perhaps born of watching too many police procedurals, that police will take complete control of a situation quickly and efficiently. Maybe a minute or three into an encounter, everything's handled, and if one complies with the three or four things they are told to do during that time, nobody is hurt and the task of working things out can begin.

But that's not the way this turned out. And despite my wonderment at how long this all appeared to take, I'm not of the opinion that officers intentionally dragged the whole scenario out for their own purposes. They were following a playbook of some or another sort, and that playbook called for a number of complicated and time-consuming moves, that, in the eyes of the officers, left no room for error.

[Mesa Officer Christopher Doane] also said he remembers Shaver crying. Still, he said, he didn't believe Shaver's tears were genuine because it appeared he was faking it in order to get some sort of advantage against the officers.

This I also find interesting. This whole episode is about a man who is unexpectedly confronted with a squad of heavily-armed police officers, and has been told on more than one occasion that if he does not do everything he is told, exactly as he is told to do it, he will be shot. But one of the officers on the scene testifies in open court to the effect, that he didn't believe the person on the business end of the weapons would be stressed out enough by this to cry. But he was shot specifically because, even though the officers outnumbered Mr. Shaver six-to-one, Officer Philip Brailsford felt threatened enough to use deadly force. When did we enter this world were stone-cold killers can pop up literally anywhere? After all, it wasn't like Mr. Shaver was wanted for a crime or anything. He'd simply been showing his pellet gun to a pair of fellow working-class people he'd met in a hotel.

While many police processes and procedures when dealing with potentially armed citizens (remember, Mr. Shaver wasn't a suspect in anything) are specifically designed to make sure that the officers have the upper hand, the officers themselves seem to be increasingly unaware of this, and of the opinion that at any moment, someone can whip out a weapon, and shoot his way to freedom against people already pointing guns at them.

But here's a simple question that I'm dying for an answer for: Why didn't the officers take the time for a visual inspection of Mr. Shaver when he came out of the hotel room? After all, a gun may be tucked into a waistband, but that doesn't make it two-dimensional; one would think that it would be possible to be reasonable sure one way or other other. Again, I presume that they has a reason. But without understanding what that reason was, it seems like an important oversight, especially in light of the fact that Mr. Shaver was shot to death because Officer Brailsford was convinced he was reaching for a hidden firearm.

One last thing: Mr. Friedersdorf makes the point that: “The case hasn’t attracted the higher degree of attention from the press, the public, or policing reform activists, partly because body-cam footage of the killing has been withheld from the media and partly because the cop and the dead man were both white, rendering the killing less controversial than one possibly animated by racism. But it warrants more attention than it has received.” But I also think that there is another aspect to this. “Brailsford is now on trial for second-degree murder.” The system working as it should, even in the aftermath of a horrendous act, rarely makes the news. Granted, it's nearly two years after Mr. Shaver was killed. I don't know how long it took for the decision to charge the officer to be made. Maybe there was an inexecusable delay. But maybe, as slowly as the wheels of justice grind, they are grinding in the way that people think the should.

I understand that I'm ignoring the main thrust of Mr. Friedersdorf's column, that shootings like that of Daniel Shaver should be publicized, because in order for the majority of Americans to be convinced that there is a problem, they have to be convinced it could happen to them. My White neighbors are more likely to write off people like Michael Brown as hardened criminals than they are people like Daniel Shaver, and so the more Daniel Shavers are brought to light, the more likely action is to be taken. I'm ignoring it because that much I know. The fact that people are the most interested in the rights of others like themselves is common knowledge, I suspect.