Slipping the Net

Feeling It

"The transition from democracy to personality cult begins with a leader who is willing to lie all the time, in order to discredit the truth as such. The transition is complete when people can no longer distinguish between truth and feeling."
Timothy Snyder "The Cowardly Face of Authoritarianism"

But people have always been poor at this, in part because people expect their feelings to inform them of truth. "Go with your gut," "listen to your instincts," "do what feels right" and similar sayings are all designed to convey the message that the things that people feel are an accurate enough reflection of reality that they can (or even should) be safely acted upon. And this is evolutionary. Bears are frightening, because they're capable of killing a person. Children are cute, because they can't care for themselves and the nurturing impulses that juvenile traits activate help to keep them alive. But these are both experienced as feelings. They're designed to allow for immediate action specifically because we don't have to ponder them and arrive at some sort of objective truth about the situation.

Objective truth is not an end in itself. It's a tool that we use to understand the world, just as feeling is. Fear and anxiety, and the impulse to alleviate them, have always been the basis of politics. The relative securities; food security, safety from wild animal attacks, reliable shelter from the elements et cetera that many (but not all) people in the industrialized world have today are anomalous in human history. The need for communities to coordinate and plan and (most importantly) choose courses of action to assure their survival, to alleviate the fear and anxiety of everyday life; to avoid extinction; has always been there. And because the "best" choices, or even the effective choices, are non-obvious, the search for ways to evaluate them in an environment of limited information is neverending. And so personal credibility is important. "Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Africa" or "Donald Trump is a racist who refused to rent apartments to Black people" are not about replacing thinking with emoting; they're about winnowing down the choices that people are confronted with by taking those offered by untrustworthy people off the table. It's logically fallacious, and not the best way of going about it, but it gives good enough results and only needs a low level of investment. And so undermining the credibility of opponents; getting other people to distrust the people that the actor distrusts, whether that be by spreading active falsehoods or irrelevant truths has always been foundational in politics.

And given that the amount of information needed to make genuinely informed policy decisions these days is prohibitive for just about anyone who has a full-time job other than policy wonk, shortcuts are pretty much a necessity. And so expecting people to reliably distinguish between truth and feeling, even when there isn't a "personality cult" that one dislikes afoot, is perhaps unreasonable.

Standing Apart

"Russia’s Secret Weapon? America’s Idiocracy" on The Daily Beast is not a bad article, but it's hobbled by a nasty headline designed to project to readers that their supposed ability to see, and to see through, alleged Russian disinformation makes them smarter than the knuckle-dragging rubes who fell for it. No one who proclaims an idiocracy believes themselves to be a part of it, and that sneering attitude is likely to mean that this piece receives less attention that it might.

While the piece ends with some insightful commentary, the article gets off to a weak start, mainly because Michael Weiss is busy being critical. For example, the invocation of "pathology" is likely misplaced. Where Mr. Weiss notes that: "What the Russian security services have deftly done, and will continue to do, is tap into pre-existing pathologies in our society and encourage them, as an enabler might do to a drug addict or alcoholic," I would have substituted in "grievances," and left off the "enabler" bit, which I thing, again, allows the reader to elevate themselves above the nameless Americans that Mr. Weiss comes across as talking down about. Just as drug addiction or alcoholism are seen as character flaws, this wording allows the reader to view those "fooled by that bull[…]" as flawed, and thus susceptible in a way that the reader themselves (being smart, discerning and knowledgeable, of course) is not.

Likewise describing our overall society as "disunified" rather than "falling apart" would likely have been more constructive. A nation of 300+ million people spread over the width of an entire continent (and them some) will have a panoply of different interests, and some of those interests will be at cross-purposes to others. It's always been this way, and to say that the nation is now "falling apart" implies a greater level of unity in the past, which strikes me as something of a fantasy.

The problem that we have now is not one of stupidity, but that Representative Democracy (like any form of government) doesn't live up to the hype. For people to support it, it has to meet their needs as they understand them. "[A]n unemployed coal miner in Lackawanna" becomes "wary of immigrants and the 'mainstream media'" because they feel that these are groups that work against the former miner's legitimate interests, and the miner distrusts government to the degree that they perceive it as siding with immigrants and the “mainstream media” to his direct harm.

The fact that some number of people understand "Democracy" (however they define it) as being the objectively best form of government doesn't mean that such an understanding IS objective. Nor does it grant Democracy some special right to exist. Like any innovation, it has to serve the needs of some percentage of the population, or become obsolete. Noting external meddling in the process isn't a substitute for actually dealing with it.

The New Wave

In The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World, John McWhorter critiques the culture of shaming that underpins the modern social justice movement; what he calls "third-wave antiracism." He's mostly critical of it, which I understand, as I tend to be critical of it myself. I take some exception to passages that, when taken together, make it appear as if he's attempting to have things both ways, but I do have some sympathy for the overall assessment that it's a dead end. (But just some.)

Mr. McWhorter identifies three ways in which, for him, "third-wave antiracism is a less convincing project than the first and second waves."

Second, and more important, is it even necessary to force a revolution in thought? Certainly a people cannot succeed as slaves, or under a system that condemns them to officially segregated and second-class status. However, human history hardly shows that an oppressed group needs the wholehearted love and acceptance of its overlords. Are black hands truly tied because whites are more likely to associate black faces with negative concepts in implicit-association tests, especially when evidence suggests that the results do not correlate meaningfully with behavior? Or because whites aren’t deeply informed about the injustices blacks have suffered throughout history? Precisely why must whites transform themselves to so extreme a degree for racial disparities to close?

I wasn't completely satisfied with the way that Mr. McWhorter handled this topic. He makes a big deal of the fact that "so many Caribbean and African immigrants" to the United States, do much better than Black people born in the United States. The Atlantic has dealt with this topic. Ta-Nehisi Coates addressed it nearly a decade ago and much more recently, the topic was raised on Radio Atlantic. The general gist is that White Americans can perceive the difference between Black people from the Caribbean or Africa and Black people who were born and raised after several generations in the United States. My point isn't to make excuses for American-born Black people. But the omission stood out for me.

But what I came across that struck me as the most interesting was actually in another article. In The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women, Peter Beinart explores how right-wing heads of state and thought leaders around the world are attacking the political and social progress that women have made. Except in Scandinavia. Mr. Beinart points out that women's political power is much more the norm there than it is in the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, Poland or the United States.

This doesn’t mean a Nordic Orbán or Bolsonaro is impossible: Northern Europe has its own far-right parties. But it’s harder for those parties to use gender to delegitimize the existing political order, because women’s political empowerment no longer appears illegitimate.

On reading this, third-wave antiracism made a lot more sense.

If the reason "to force a revolution in thought" is to normalize the political gains and social equality of minority population in the United States, then it stands to reason that one of the benefits of this would be that revanchist elements in society lose the power that Blacks and other have gained as a proof of the illegitimacy of a government that they participate in.

I am under the impression that a lot of what drove Birtherism was simple partisanship. But there was also a subtext to all of it, namely that a Black person couldn't have attained the highest office in the nation without some form of illegitimate outside assistance. And that assistance could only have come at a cost. It's not that far off from the anti-Catholic sentiment that used to be a force in American politics.

Whether some sort of White transformation is needed to do away with anti-Black prejudice in the same way that the nation has mostly done away with anti-Catholic sentiment (at least as far as politics is concerned) is a mystery to me. And as for the current social-justice movement, I'm dubious of its tactics. But from listening to A Hidden History of America at War, it occurs to me that we you to simply watch the American Civil War unfold without the benefit of knowing how it ends, it's fairly easy to come to the conclusion that the Union was doomed to fail; until it wasn't. The activists themselves are fairly convinced that it will work, which is why they're doing it. I suspect that the best way to inspire them to change tactics is to present them with better tactics. I'm not sure that I know of any.

Uncruel

There is a video on The Atlantic, titled: Trump and His Supporters Thrive on Cruelty. The quick description says that: “The president and his backers revel in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” The video itself is a quick accounting of supposed cruelties by the President and the reactions of his ardent followers to them, with hints that they may come to repent their support in the future. But I feel that it does the topic a disservice in that it takes an overly partisan tone towards its subject.

While The Atlantic writer Adam Serwer notes that an enjoyment of cruelty is not unique to supporters of the President, he casts it as an outgrowth of a childish impulse to delineate in-group versus out-group by bullying. But I would submit that it is part of a much broader human impulse and one often seen as laudable. If I hate you because you've engaged in what I understand to be deliberate wrongdoing, and/or I fear you because I expect you do so in the future, why should I see your suffering as anything less that something you've earned for being a bad person? In other words, why shouldn't I see whatever pain that may befall you as justice? We understand that locking a person into a cell for long stretches of time is damaging to them. But when that person had committed some or another crime, incarceration is often seen as just. And many times, whether or not something is cruel depends on or interpretation of the crime for which it is a consequence. Life in prison is considered cruel for a first-time shoplifter, while many people consider it appropriate, if an undeserved mercy, for a multiple murderer. And three-strikes laws often dictated that even non-violent criminals could spend the rest of their lives in prison for what may have otherwise been considered minor crimes. Their "refusal" to be rehabilitated, however, allowed people to see send them to prison for life as appropriate.

Likewise, it is commonplace for people to see the doing of justice as an occasion worth celebrating. And this is not simply because they actively find enjoyment in the idea that another human being is going to suffer, but because they find validation in the idea that they are correct in their understanding that a wrong has been done to them and they are worthy of recompense. But yes, people do take satisfaction in the idea that the pain and suffering that has been unfairly visited upon the innocent (themselves or others) will also be visited upon the perpetrators. And eye for an eye is also an occasion worth celebrating.

And so the problem here is not that President Trump and his supporters are being unnecessarily cruel, or invested in cruelty, in a way that other people are not. It's that people who don't support the President are unlikely to see the President's targets as having earned the fates that have befallen them. If the guilt of a criminal is under dispute, it should be expected that there will be disagreement about the appropriateness of the punishment.

And so, when Mr. Serwer notes in the video: “Trump’s fiercest backers enjoy his cruelty towards people they have decided deserve it. For them, the cruelty is the point,” he is putting them, incorrectly, I suspect, into a position similar to his own. One where the targets of the President's ire are known innocents, rather than people who are deserving of having some measure of justice meted out to them by virtue of their willful ignorance, gullibility or criminality. The emphasis on "perceived enemies" hints at the idea that it's all in the President's head, but as this is preaching to the choir of a left-leaning audience, there is no follow up or evidence given for that insinuation. But then again, all wrongs are perceived. If I believe that an item has been stolen, I could be expected to lobby for the finding and punishing of a thief, even if, in fact, the item had simply been carelessly mislaid. My belief that a crime had been committed would engage a push for justice, which my find a mark, even though objectively, it should lack a target.

I would submit that Trump's America would find themselves as repulsed by open cruelty as anyone else. But "cruelty" is not an objective term, and one person's tragedy is another person's just deserts; the wrongs of those they perceive as enemies make what they are doing right in their eyes. Understanding their sense of justice, even if we find it warped, is more useful than simply labeling them as cruel.

Revisited

Today is the twelfth anniversary of my initial posts on Nobody In Particular. My first real post, The Police States of America? was about the weekly anti-war protests that take place in Lake Forest Park, a suburb of Seattle not far from here. It's been a while since I've been down to check on them, so I decided to see if they were still at it.

It turns out, they are. For sixteen years as of last week. Things don't start as early as they used to. Their normal spot was empty when I arrived at 11, their normal kick-off time. And since they still wrap up at about noon, the protest is a bit shorter than it had been in the past. And the "support the troops" demonstration that used to hold down the 10 to 11 timeslot has moved on.

There were only about half-a-dozen people there today. But a couple of them recognized me from my infrequent appearances and welcomed me back. Soon we were chatting like old friends. They still wave signs from the roadside, and people still honk as they drive by, but the activists are fewer and the honks more infrequent. But the most interesting thing about it is the mellowing that's come with time. When I first showed up there, looking for a picture that I could submit to a photography contest that the BBC was holding, there was a palpable tension in the air, a fear that they were transgressing on something to the point of risking their freedom.

But now, it's just a thing. No-one bothers them anymore. The local merchants and the police department alike hardly pay any attention. But while there's no concern about "the Man" coming after them, "it's also easier for people to ignore," as one activist told me. (Now, Black Lives Matter protests were the ones that scared the authorities and, to a lesser degree, the public, as far as they were concerned.) They've become a group of aging "hippies," gathering once a week to protest wars that for many people are out of sight and out of mind.

And that's the thing that's striking about it. There were no young people there. I doubt that anyone was younger than 50 at an absolute minimum. Because of this, the protest's days are numbered. One of the activists had speculated that the reason the "support the troops" sorts had stopped coming was that they had all simply become too old for it. And they knew that their time was coming.

There was a sense of pride in what they had done. In keeping their tiny movement alive for more than a decade and a half. For having made peace with the local government. For having stood up for what they believed in. I wonder if they'll be able to find someone to pass that pride along to.

Unbiased

The original comic resides here: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bias

I like this comic, but I wonder if the obvious caricature of a faux-open-minded person allows us project this attitude onto other people, yet not see it in ourselves. I understand that I have to be careful of falling into the trap of protecting the things that I believe by demanding higher standards of evidence for contrary opinions. But I also understand that there's very little benefit in being open about that, because the difference between asking for slightly more evidence than one otherwise would and asking for mountains of impossible to obtain data tends to be academic to a person who sees both requests as equally motivated by bias and/or bad faith.

Of course, for many people, they're simply decided not to be so open-minded that their brains fall out, as the saying goes, and there is a certain amount of wisdom in the axiom that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

And so the trick, as I understand it, is not so much to never be closed, but to understand why one is closed. Were someone to come up to me tomorrow and claim the Earth is hollow, a simple photograph might not do the trick, whereas I might believe a simple photograph that purported to show that an animal had escaped from the zoo at some point, and was now wandering around wild, depending on the animal in question. It might take more than one photo to convince me that an elephant could be on the lam in the greater Seattle area, for instance. But I'm not really sure why I care more about being right about the Earth being solid than I do about whether a zoo animal of some description may be wandering around Wallingford. After all, the simple fact that I though one thing yesterday and another today rarely has any real impact on my life. There is no action to be taken on most of it.

Credibility is like respect, we give it to some, and withhold it from others as it suits us. Yet as reasonable as that might sound, it's considered biased. There is vulnerability in belief, and so it makes sense that we wouldn't grant credibility lightly. Admitting that we are wrong, or even simply ignorant of certain topics, is more dangerous than we give it credit for, and perhaps what makes reality difficult to discern from caricature is that while we may recognize that someone fears being wrong more than the think they should, the difference between being slightly and extremely more afraid than may be warranted is mostly academic.

Being biased, like being wrong, is often treated as a moral failing, rather than a simple error of knowledge or logic. And maybe that judgement carries more weight that it should, and in so doing, cements the very thing that we say we want to do away with by encouraging us to hide it within ourselves.

The New Thing

But many Americans are bereft of people to lean on. The demise of tight-knit communities has had a profound effect on us. We’re increasingly living our lives on the Internet, alone amid vast digital crowds. Social media have replaced socializing. We’re all guilty of staring too often at our phones. We curl up at night with the latest Chrome browser.

The loneliness is killing us.
Soaring suicides are another sign of our toxic social disconnect (By the way, I'm not sure I recommend following this link. Some of the ads this site serves up a pretty sketchy.)

But this individual, isolated experience of church is the poorer one for those of us who are able to go. (Live-streaming services are of course important for the homebound.)  In an era when everything from dates to grocery delivery can be scheduled and near instant, church attendance shouldn’t be one more thing to get from an app. We can be members of a body best when we are all together — we can mourn when we observe and wipe away tears, just as we can rejoice when we can share smiles and have face-to-face conversations. Studies show that regular attendance at religious services correlates with better sleep, lower blood pressure in older adults and a reduced risk of suicide. I doubt these same phenomena occur when online church is substituted for the real thing, because the truth is that community is good for us. We need one another.
Internet Church Isn’t Really Church

I admit to being an old man. After all, I'm a Gen Xer, and the last of us rolled off the assembly line when Jimmy Carter was still President of the United States (depending on how you slice your age cohorts, anyway). But hopefully, I'll never grow so old that I can't appreciate the fact that things can be done in a whole new way, and that can still be the right way.

Technology allows change. The tight-knit communities and in-person-only church services of the past didn't suit everyone's needs. And the technology of social media and streaming events allows people to get something they want without having to pay at least some of the price that those older structures demanded. People don't invent new ways of doing things simply because they have nothing better to do with themselves. They do it in order to solve problems. And those problems don't have to be relevant, or even visible, to everyone else.

Making friends remotely via social media or meeting spiritual needs via streaming webcast allow people to have a different experience than the one I grew up with, where meeting new people required encountering them in person, and most community churches had no way of granting access to more people than could fit in the pews at one time. And I can understand how someone whose life had only ever included direct interactions with the people they called friends
or going to a specific building to worship their deity of choice would understand these as lesser options.

But when I was a child, I didn't go hunting around the neighborhood for new children to meet because I'd done some sort of cost-benefit analysis version a dozen other options. It was simply the only way I knew to go about it. Logging onto a social media site and "following" someone who seemed interesting simply wasn't a thing when I was high-school student in the 1980s. And so I made that work, and I spent years honing the efficiencies of it, until I'd gotten to the point where it was a well-oiled machine. And so is it easier for me to socialize in person than via social media? Sure. But I'm pretty sure that the more or less 30 years of practice that I'd had before Facebook and company came along have something to do with that.

We are not the end of history. Just like our grandparents weren't. The world will continue to change and grow, and people will create new ways of doing things that other people believe have already been perfected, up until the day that they pass from the world. There was a time when the only way to see a movie was to go to the theater. And before then, the only way to see the performance of a story was to see it enacted live on stage. You can make the point that for each transition, something was lost. And yeah, I like to go to the show with friends, and when I watch movies on my couch, it's not quite the same. But the moviegoing experience of my childhood is different, rather than better.

Technology doesn't mean that we have to be lonely, or cut off from vibrant faith communities. The epidemic of suicide can be solved, and people can attain better sleep with the new tools at their disposal. People will create the means to obtain the benefits that they want in their lives.

The New York Post article concludes with "Let’s be the people who step in when someone is hurting or in trouble. Let’s put down our phones and laptops and make connections on our blocks and in our neighborhoods."

I have a better idea. Let's find ways to allow us to have the same connections, via phone and laptop, with someone a nation away just as easily as we can make a connection across the street or around the corner. Being there for someone doesn't have to mean being there with someone. Let's support the ways in which new technologies can create the richness and depth that we understood that our old ways of doing things did.

Numbers Game

Seattle has a fairly sizable homeless population. While a lot of people blame this on the presence of Amazon in the city (although I've never understood why them, specifically) the large homeless population here stood out for me when I first arrived at the end of 1996, long before Amazon was hiring large numbers of people for high salaries.

This has been making waves again because of a new count, which places the number of homeless people in Seattle at somewhere north of 12,000 individuals. What I heard about this, more than once on my drive home this evening, is that means that Seattle ranks 3rd in the nation in terms of its homeless population. This article by Zillow from a year ago breaks out the numbers, estimating that Seattle had 12,763 homeless citizens. But the number two slot went to Los Angeles with 61,398, nearly a factor of four. And it would take every homeless person in Seattle moving to L.A. for that city to catch up with New York, with its estimate of 76,341.

What strikes me as strange about the emphasis is that it seems to call attention to the problem, but not really help put it in perspective. Using per-capita numbers, which give (based on 2017 figures for homelessness and population) approximately 1 in 113 people in New York as homeless, 1 in 65 in Los Angeles and 1 in 57 in Seattle paints a much more useful picture, but makes the city come off worse in comparison, with a higher percentage of homeless people. (It's worth keeping in mind that homelessness is concentrated in urban areas. Between them, Seattle, New York and Los Angeles had nearly a third of the nation's estimated homeless population in 2017. Add in San Diego, the other metropolitan area with a homeless population above 10,000 individuals, and you're pretty much there.)

I suspect that the reason for the framing is that this is how the information was presented. I was able to find a few different news stories scattered around the nation at the top of a Google search, and they all ranked the cities in terms of the overall numbers. It's likely that this was simply repeated, because it makes for a good headline.

How Seattle sets out to tackle the problem will be interesting, given that, housing affordability and housing as an investment are at odds, at least as long as we're talking about the same home. (It's possible, as was pointed out in the comments, to get around this, as long as someone tears down the older homes and builds more units in the same general footprint; in other words, subsequent generations receive less for their money.) Given that a lot of the run-up in home prices that has been driving homelessness is a result of regulations that many Seattle-area residents are wedded to (because it drives up home values) it's going to be a difficult mountain to move.

The Parent Paradox

So I was reading "It's Almost Impossible to Be a Mom in Television News" in The Atlantic. At first blush, "Yawn." It's yet another in a never-ending series of stories that bemoan the fact that women suffer career consequences of some or another sort when they become mothers. This one, dealing specifically with television news, may be more narrowly-focused than others, but it's the same old song.

I had more or less despaired of finding anything new and interesting the piece when I came across this: "Moms need people at the highest leadership levels of TV news who can help promote a culture in which working moms are not expected to work as if they don’t have children." This caught my attention, because many of these articles, concerned as they are with an overall culture of perceived sexism, tend to cast the conflict almost entirely as being one of men versus women. Just prior to the quote above, Ms. Goldman points out that:
Many of the TV-news moms I spoke with said that when men broach child-care issues, management celebrates their fatherly duties and usually bends over backwards to accommodate them. One reason may be an assumption that a man’s caretaking responsibilities will be temporary, while a mom will always ask for special accommodations. “It’s still considered so unusual for a man to be an equal or primary caretaker that there can be brownie points associated with that,” said Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at NYU who studies gender dynamics in the workplace.
This common assumption (and in this case it is an assumption, given the use of words like "may" and "can"), which has been around for some time, makes for a tidy narrative of male chauvinism and privilege, but it may hide a deeper understanding.

Ms. Goldman quoted Fox Business Network anchor Trish Regan as saying: “The pressure [to come back before my leave was up] was certainly self-inflicted in that I’m driven and ambitious and wanted to succeed. But at the same time, I was very aware that if I was gone for that amount of time, I was perhaps replaceable with either a man who could do the job or a woman who wasn’t having a baby. These were very real concerns of mine, and there was no one in my environment at either of those networks [who] was encouraging me to think otherwise.” (Emphasis mine.) As an aside, again, there is an assumption here, embodied in "perhaps." Assumptions are pernicious because we act on them as if they were true, but the inability to substantiate them means that they're easily denied. Fox Business Network can say that they had no intent to replace Ms. Regan has she taken her full leave, and so the topic becomes a matter of whose story fits in with one's emotional worldview.

If we cast the story as mothers vesus the childless, it become a different discussion. "Anti-mom bias" is a different beast than sexism, with different battle lines, and perhaps, different solutions.

The idea that "Moms need people at the highest leadership levels of TV news who can help promote a culture in which working moms are not expected to work as if they don’t have children." begs a particular question: Should women without children be expected to work harder, be more committed or "live the job" more than mothers? It's pretty clear to me that the idea believes the answer is "yes." But because it never addresses the question, it can't tell us why.

As a non-parent, I am often considered both fool and freeloader. I have cut myself off from the joy, fulfillment and meaning of raising children, while cynically mooching off of the indispensable benefits that parents bring to the society in which I live. Both of these are considered failings, but parents are unable to do anything about my being a fool. They can, however, lobby against my being allowed to be a freeloader. As children have been pushed by the definition of "childhood" and child labor laws from being an economic benefit (or even necessity) for families, they've been re-cast as an expensive luxury good. But they're also become viewed as social benefits, or possibly, necessities. I've been told on more than one occasion that by being childless, I am taking advantage of other people by availing myself of the goods and services that their children provide, despite the fact that all of these things come at a direct and tangible cost to me, whether that's paying taxes or simply paying the tab.

So the question becomes this: Does the very existence of children create a benefit to society that must be paid for? It's understood, more or less, that having children is a benefit to parents. They may be unable to put their children to work, or monopolize their services in their old age, and thus reap exclusive economic benefits, but we consider that crass. But, as I noted, I've been considered a fool (when people haven't simply questioned my humanity outright) for deciding that I'd rather be doing other things. People extol the happiness and pride that their children bring them as turning points in their lives, and the childless-by-choice are deemed pitiable as often as they are deemed irresponsible. But if parents have managed to make children into a luxury good for their own benefit, does that obviate any entitlement to social supports that non-parents are not offered? Is flexibility in working arrangements without a career cost a privilege atop a benefit or deserved compensation to mitigate what would otherwise be a sacrifice? And if it's both, which carries more weight? Should the economic pressure to be parents be reinstated in a different form? Should transfers from the childless be costly and constant enough that the perception of freeloading is erased?

I understand these to be important questions because they aren't limited to child-rearing. I find the same thing comes up in regards to entrepreneurship. Being a successful entrepreneur brings clear benefits, yet there is still an argument that it should bring more, and at public expense, because a) entrepreneurs bring benefits to society and deserve to be compensated for them and b) it's better to be an entrepreneur than not, and the better the lives of entrepreneurs are, the more entrepreneurship. And there is some logic to this. Loving one's work is wonderful, but it doesn't pay the bills, and so we don't see the lack of a "fulfillment discount" in many areas of life as inappropriately double-dipping.

And so "Who are children for?" needn't be an "either/or" answer. But it does need an answer. The expectation that employers will tax their childless employees with greater demands of effort, lack of flexibility and commitment to deliver those to the parents on the payroll will likely work out better if there is at least some buy-in from everyone involved. It's true, however, that many parents didn't agree to a standard that refused to exempt parenting from the list of choices that needed to be balanced against career. But simply demanding that the shoe be moved to the other foot isn't necessarily progress.

Winter Mountains

Free To

I was talking with Christian that I'd encountered while standing in a line, and I made the mistake of letting them know that I didn't believe in deities, spirits et cetera. This started the usual questions. Eventually, we wound up on the subject of Free Will, and this gave me a chance to ask a question that I'd been looking for an answer to. From the Christian perspective, I asked, what was Free Will for? What purpose does it serve? Disappointingly, it turned into a stumper, with my interlocutor unable to articulate any real answer other than, "God wanted it that way."

Now, to be sure, I don't know if I actually believe in Free Will. I tend more towards a belief in a deterministic universe, where things only appear to be random. Instead they simply governed by rules that are too complicated to work out in real time, and so while we can often simulate things (albeit sometimes at a slower pace than the real thing), we can't look at the world and understand from that how things are going to unfold. There are simply too many factors to be taken into consideration.

But I've come to find the concept of Free Will in Judeo/Christian/Moslem thought interesting. Because it doesn't seem to serve anyone's purposes. There's never a time when disobedience to divine will is shown to be the correct course of action. It only leads to suffering. So why have it in the first place? And with an omnipotent and omniscient deity, there's no need for anything else to have the power to make decisions. What possible choice can a person make that it wouldn't occur to the Abrahamic god to implement? There's no need to "crowdsource" decision-making. And in this sense, Free Will seems like a trap; any use of it ends poorly.

I suspect that sooner or later, I'll meet someone who can give me a perspective that I hadn't considered that will demonstrate a logic to it. I'm curious to see what that perspective is.

Forever Seeking

According to Andrew Sullivan, I have a religion.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

I have to admit that I find this interesting. After all, I don't really understand what it means for life to have "meaning," unless we're talking about the entry for "life" in the dictionary.

In the very beginning of his piece, Mr. Sullivan says: "It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being." Later, he notes "We are a meaning-seeking species."

Perhaps, if I sat down with Mr. Sullivan, which is unlikely ever to happen, we would come to a shared understanding, some sort of accommodation that would reveal his understanding that I am seeking meaning, and my understanding that I am not, to be merely a difference in how we define certain activities. But there are other possibilities. One is that I am seeking meaning in the way that he defines it, and thus, I would fit his definition of religious. The other is that I am not, and I would then fall into his definition of non-religious. (I suspect what would actually happen is that I would find that he has simply decreed that everyone is seeking meaning by defining something basic, such as the very state of being a living human being, into meaning-seeking; rendering it a tautology. And that he, on the other hand, would decide that I desperately want to find meaning, but am in denial.)

But if I did fall into his understanding of not seeking meaning, would I then cease, in his eyes, to be human? Does the fact that we are a meaning-seeking species, to use his formulation mean that each of us must necessarily and recognizably seek meaning?

Because how does an infant seek meaning? How does a person who has other, more pressing day-to-day concerns that the alleged meaning of life seek that meaning?

I am always dubious of people stating that "to be human is to do [X]," because it seems unwise to assert that one knows the minds for billions of other people. And it leads to a point where one is trapped into either insisting that other people don't know themselves or seeking to deny their humanity. Now, Mr. Sullivan gets around this somewhat by positing that this "search for meaning" is encoded into our genome.

Which is not unreasonable. But in order for that to hold, it would have to be encoded into something that makes life itself viable. They would have to be attached in a very deep biological level. Otherwise, a simple mutation could remove it. And unless that mutation triggered something so catastrophic that it rendered the person sterile (or effectively so) it would be passed on to their offspring. You could make the point that a person who carried the gene to search for meaning would be more successful in one of Darwin's three conflicts (intraspecies, interspecies and versus environment) than not. And some people would say that the rise of religious observance and its high rate of uptake proves that it does. But you could also make the point that it's an artifact of culture; I, of course, suspect the latter, but I'm not a geneticist.

In the end, Mr. Sullivan's point seems to be that Christianity Good, Lacking Christianity Bad. I can understand the idea that what the Cult of Trump and Social Justice Warriors have in common is a lack of the "wisdom and culture and restraint" that Mr. Sullivan finds in Christianity. (But surely not only Christianity exhibits these traits?) There is the common refrain that to not have religion, to not have a "place of refuge, no spiritual safe space from which to gain perspective, no God to turn to" in a time of crisis is to be adrift in a crisis, "coasting along on materialism." I call B.S. Human beings can be strong without recourse to an invisible, and often disapproving deity. They prove it every day.

Part-Time Monster

Typically, if I'm out walking, and I find myself walking behind a lone woman, I slow down, so that she starts to pull away from me, and I maintain that pace until a path presents itself that allows me to return to my normal cadence without overtaking her.

But this morning, I was in a hurry. And the woman walking in front of me was busily doing something with her cell phone. So I glued myself to the far side of the sidewalk, focused straight ahead, and walked. For a moment I thought that I was going to make it, and that I'd be able to simply stride past her without incident. No such luck. Her spider-sense went off when I was about five feet behind her, and she whirled around in obvious alarm.

Rather than acknowledge her, I simply pushed on to my destination.

I was suddenly tired. And annoyed.

I understand that I'm not the one who suddenly had a looming dark shape appear not much more than arm's length away. I understand that if I don't like dealing with people's fear responses, then I have to take the responsibility to do things that don't trigger that response. I understand that being reminded of why I often try to avoid suddenly coming up on people like that is miles better than suddenly realizing that a potential threat is just off your flank.

But sometimes, all of the energy that goes into trying to seem non-threatening just seems to be wasted. I don't get anything out of it but delays and frustration. And it never ends. For any of us.

Whatfishing?

So, there's the phenomenon of "catfishing," which is when someone creates a false identity online for the purpose of luring someone into an online romantic relationship. I don't really understand the purpose of it, but hey, to each their own.

Then there is my personal favorite, "hatfishing," in which guys wear hats in their dating profile pictures, so that the women they hope to meet won't realize that they're balding. I don't have an online dating profile, but I am balding, and do like to wear a hat in the cooler months of the year. So this tends to get my vote for best word ever. But, hey guys, just in case you haven't figured it out, you have to take the hat off sometime. Sooner or later the woman of your dreams, or just Miss Right Now, whichever she turns out to be, is going to realize you're losing your hair. You're better off just rolling with that.

And today, I was introduced to the concept of "blackfishing." This is a criticism leveled at people for allegedly pretending to be Black or mixed-race online when they're "really" White. I have to admit that I treat the idea as being a joke. But it really isn't particularly funny. It's fairly sad, honestly. Now, I've written before about how I think that other people wanting to access Blackness isn't the end of the world. After all, it was only a couple of generations back when that would likely have been considered a sign of serious mental illness. The advantages of being seen as White were so clear and present that expending effort to be seen as Black (outside of show business blackface) would have simply been unfathomable.

[Dara Thurmond, a nurse from New York] says women accused of blackfishing are being "unfair" to black women who are trying to make it as influencers and get product endorsements of their own.

"You take away from them," Dara says.

This, for me anyway, gets to the heart of what fears of "blackfishing" and cultural appropriation are about. The sinking feeling that we're expendable. Who needs real Black people if they can have fake "Black" people instead? They get all of the all of the lips, braids and big booties that they can handle (not to mention Hip-Hop and "gangsta" fashion), and don't have to deal with people whose ancestors lived in sub-Saharan Africa up until the year 1500 or so.

Well, I kind of hate to break it to "us," but Black people are expendable. If every "genuinely" Black person on Earth were to drop dead tonight, there'd be a heck of a clean-up job in the coming few weeks, but the Sun would still rise in the morning, the trains would still run and the Internet would still be stuffed to the rafters with cat videos. There'd be a heck of a scientific puzzle to figure out, and American major-league sports (outside of hockey and soccer) would suck for a few years, but the world would go on as if "we" were never here. Black people don't bring anything inherently indispensable to the table. There's nothing particularly valuable or important that comes along simply with having dark skin and hair that can double as a scrub brush.

If Black people want to be seen as valuable to other people, then "we" have to offer them something that they can't otherwise get. Something other than wearing braids in Instagram photos. And if "we" want to be seen as valuable to ourselves as a community, well that's "our" problem, not that of some lady looks Black enough to pass, but happens to be Polish.

If Black women in business can't wear an afro, braids or locks, because it's seen as unclean, untidy or unprofessional, then the Black community needs more companies run by Black people who can then set the tone for what's appropriate.

Beggars can't be choosers, and if "we're" always approaching people, especially White people, as demanding supplicants, then yeah, their attitude is likely to be "get lost." I have no time for people coming to me with demands of what I'm going to do for them when they have nothing to offer in return. Other people might be more accepting of that, and bravo for them, but I certainly don't hold a negative response against them.

If "we" as Black people continue to abdicate power over "our" feelings of worth to people who aren't themselves Black, there is every chance that feelings of worthlessness will result. Because everyone else has their own problems to worry about. White people don't "need" Black people. That's just the way the world works.

No Rush

Last Friday, on his way out, one of the Business Program Managers stopped by my desk and told me to not stay too late into the evening. I chuckled. I don't work late as often as I used to, I've become somewhat protective of my "free" time.

But I'm a single guy. I don't have a significant other, children or pets to demand my time. And so I don't need to be anywhere in my evenings. Sure, I like to make it home before too late in the day; after all, I have this blog to post to, and other hobbies, but I don't have any obligations that require me to leave by a certain time. And so it doesn't really matter what time I arrive home in the evening. The main benefit of this, is that I can carefully segment my work and personal time. I can stay in the office as late as I need to, and then be done with it. And so when I leave, work stays at the office. I think it works better that way.

The Nostalgia Trap

Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse. When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.

That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment. Needless to say, black Americans and other minority groups aren’t as keen on returning to the past.
Adam Harris. "America Is Divided by Education" The Atlantic. Wednesday, 7 November, 2018.

There is a question here, and it's one that I'm surprised isn't really spoken of. Was the lack of civil rights, racist violence and racial resentment that characterized the the time around 1950 a cause of this supposed golden age for less-educated Whites, or was it merely an unfortunate side effect of an overall lower level of enlightenment?

Or, perhaps more simply, can you have one without the other? I suspect that many non-White people in America believe that the two go hand in hand. There were many well-paying low or unskilled labor positions for White Americans because other people were locked out of them; and the resulting labor shortage, artificial though it may have been allowed White workers to command higher wages. And the truly dirty, low-paying jobs fell to the people who were locked out of the more lucrative sectors of the economy. While people who evince the nostalgia Mr. Harris chronicles, on the other hand, tend to be convinced that the new version of the past will lack all of the bad features of the original, and that there will be more than enough blue-collar jobs to go around, so that everyone who wants to work will be able to find a family-wage job will nothing more than a high-school education. Or at least the ones that I have spoken to seem to think so.

To a certain degree, it's an academic debate. The chances of the American economy going back to the state it was in 70 years ago in within, well, the next 70 years, seems slim. The world is a different, and smaller, place now. While it's possible that the poorer nations of the world who have been using newfound positions in global supply chains to better their standard of living could be forced back into abject poverty while their first and second-world counterparts reclaim those jobs (and pay higher price for goods and services in the bargain), it's unlikely that they would go without a fight. And it's equally unlikely that the rest of the developed world would decide that paying the higher wages of American workers for goods that they could buy more cheaply from poorer nations would be a good idea, blunting the impact of American economic isolationism and protecting the markets of poorer nations.

At the same time, closer to home, it's unlikely that without some sort of concrete evidence that a return to the economy of the pre-civil rights era wouldn't bring Jim Crow employment policies back with it, that many Americans would go along with the scheme. People would be unlikely to simply take it on faith that they'd be allowed a greater share of the prosperity in a scheme that strikes many as a reaction to the idea that they're now doing better than they were before.

To make the point that the economy of 1950 is a better choice for all and sundry than that of 2020 requires an understanding that everyone is worse off now than they were then, regardless of race, creed or ethnicity. And while that may seem self-evidently true to a "White working-class" that thinks back on a time when a high-school education meant a solidly middle-class life with a house, a family, a dog and a white picket fence, for many other people what happened was, at worst, a transfer of wealth and income to a broader swath of the public than had been allowed to hold it before.

The world of 1950 is before my time. Even my parents would only have been young children. But my father used to deploy tales of his childhood in the decade that followed as cautionary tales for me; stories of hardship and deprivation to illustrate what might await me if I didn't do well in school. He wouldn't have been convinced that he, and people like him, would have been better off returning to that time. I don't think that many other people would be any easier to sway.

Benevolent Dictation

The separation of powers, which ensures that no single part of the government can ever achieve unified control of the policymaking process, has been a blessing and a curse. It prevents tyranny but creates veto points for politicians who, for whatever reason, wish to stop federal solutions to long-term challenges.
Julian E. Zelizer "Why the U.S. Can’t Solve Big Problems"

Everyone loves "democracy." Until they can't wrangle the votes to prevail. Mr. Zelizer strikes me as yet another in a long line of people who are complaining about the fact that representative government was not designed to make the world safe for partisan (in this case Progressive) ideals of enlightenment; but to allow various stakeholder groups to have some say in the decisions that are going to determine the course of their lives.

I am of the understanding that Mr. Zelizer's "politicians who, for whatever reason, wish to stop federal solutions to long-term challenges" are a figment of the imagination. Instead what we have are politicians who have been duly elected (even if the electoral system is less than perfectly representative) to speak for the interests of people who have a different understanding of the long-term challenges that need solutions. People can, and will, argue over whether those different understandings are good-faith or fraudulent. That argument, however, often creates problems of its own, as people decide that their positions are so self-evidently correct that principled opposition to them is a contradiction in terms.

Regardless of someone's confidence in "the right answer," no matter how much of a consensus there is among particular groups, that answer does not have a right to either be or influence policy. The purpose of representative government is not to align policy with scientific or philosophical truth. It's to align policy with what people understand is good for them. In this sense, the anti-intellectualism that Mr. Zelizer complains about is also a feature, not a bug, as an expert class that imposes on the public what they feel is best for everyone involved is functionally little different from well-meaning royals and aristocrats doing them same.

And in this "grassroots activism" is not a solution to some sort of particular problem with the United States government. Rather it's way things were intended to work. Citizens should be talking to each other and making the point, "This is why this is good for you; and I will see to it that it is," rather than simply demanding asymmetrical sacrifice or indulging in revanchism. For all that people complain that Liberal disdain was the reason why Donald Trump was elected, I stand by the understanding that during the Obama Administration, Democrats, convinced that what's right need not explain itself, failed to say to their more Conservative friends and neighbors: "Look, I know that you're concerned about this, but I will take it upon myself to ensure that Washington makes this work for you." And Republican voters now, convinced that Truth is finally prevailing are ignoring the concerns of their more Liberal acquaintances in the same way. If "grassroots activism" is allowed to simply become a description of getting the choir to go to the polls, it's going to exacerbate the problem rather than mitigate it. Instead, the grass roots need to be speaking to people who are not always like them, and looking to ensure that the policies they are pursuing help those people in a way that those people understand they need help. This isn't always going to be simply doing as they are told, but in finding solutions to the underlying problems.

To take one of Mr. Zelizer's examples, slavery, I'm uncertain that the South was simply so enamored of slavekeeping that it had become an end in itself. Rather, it was a means, and while historical counterfactuals are never anything more than speculation, one can imagine that a solution that both freed the slaves and maintained the South's economic standing would have allowed the United States to have the cake of abolition and eat it in peace.

Of course, such a deal would have required a level of trust, and that's usually the missing link. I speak fairly often with a Conservative high-school classmate of mine, and he is convinced that American Liberalism has, as an end, stealing from the rich to allow the poor to get high and play video games. Our discussions are often slogs, not because of acrimony, but because he suspects that any position to the left of his own of bad faith, and I spend a lot of my time carefully laying out the logic that underpins my positions to counter the talking points he falls back on. This is not to say that he's a bad person, or "brainwashed," but that he expects dishonesty to go hand-in-hand with disagreement, and it's only the fact that we've known each other since we were in the fifth grade, and I show genuine concern for him, that he gives me the time of day. And genuine trust across party lines takes that level of connection, and that level of work. Pat accusations of bad faith undermine that.

Another Slice, Please

Oren Cass penned a column for The Atlantic, titled Economic Piety Is a Crisis for Workers. It's an interesting piece although it quickly becomes predictable; the title seems geared at obscuring the point long enough for people to begin to read. Change "Economic Piety" to "The Welfare State," and you'll have a pretty good idea of where the article goes.

There are at least three possible outcomes when a society has a number of people who are unemployed due to a level of productivity that renders their labor redundant. They are not mutually exclusive, and so any or all of them can exist at once over a large enough group of people.

One is Privation. In effect, those people who are unemployed or severely underemployed simply suffer the effects of being unable to earn enough income to meet their physical needs, whether that homelessness, malnutrition, poor health due to lack of treatment and/or whatever else may be visited upon them. Another is Transfers. This can be government transfers, in the form of welfare, but it may also be private charity or dependence of friends or family who have the resources to support them; with or without requesting or requiring some form of work to support the household in return. The other outcome that occurs to me is Inefficiency. In this case, the society comes up with a way of doing less with more, or at least producing less, per capita, than they otherwise could, but still paying people sufficient wages to support themselves.

Inefficiency strikes me as the least visible of these outcomes. People may not realize that there is, in effect, a bunch of busy work going on. Mr. Cass' "productive pluralism" is effectively a form of inefficiency. It asks that society structure itself such that excess labor is limited, if not eliminated.

An emphasis on labor-market health also changes the analysis of trade and immigration policy. In consumer-welfare terms, unconstrained trade and immigration appear to be unmitigated goods. Not so from the worker’s perspective. How society draws borders around its labor market matters a great deal, and imbalances take a serious toll. A high level of trade can be beneficial, but a large trade deficit is a problem: It represents a dramatic expansion of labor supply with no accompanying expansion of demand. A high level of unskilled immigration, likewise, is unwise amidst concern about the limited opportunities available to the existing unskilled workforce.

This seemed to be the primary point of the article; a call to limit trade (imports mainly) and immigration in the service of forcing American society to need people to do work who are, at current levels of productivity and trade, surplus. It's redistribution, in the same way that government taxation to find transfer payments is redistribution. The difference is in this case, the public is made to pay higher prices for good and services so that domestic workers will have enough demand to make employing them profitable. There's also call for economic autarky (self-sufficiency) in the sense that the United States should not specialize in some things, while allowing other nations to specialize in others. Instead, the nation should have productive capacity in everything, and seek to maintain competitiveness in all sectors.

It's an interesting perspective. And it's not unique. My impression of Japan is that there is a lot of inefficiency in the system. There were a number of people I encountered whose jobs seemed to be little more than providing them something to do. I like to tell the story of "The Wall Of Shoelaces," from my experience in a Japanese department store. When a broken shoelace means that four people spring into action, you really see what a culture devoted to top-notch service is all about. But it seemed pretty clear to me that a number of jobs were there as a means of keeping people "off the streets," as we put it in the United States.

But the reason that we don't have this sort of society here isn't that we have the wrong government policies for it. It's that the people who own businesses understand that having someone assist me with finding the right shoelaces for my shoes costs more than making me do the heavy lifting myself. And since business owners and shareholders are generally unwilling to accept less in dividends and the public is unwilling to accept paying higher prices, there is a push to cut costs. And having four people on hand to help me find the right color, style and length of shoelaces for my shoes (not to mention changing out the laces for me) costs significantly more than having me figure it out and change my own shoelaces.

And this, for me, is where the analysis wanders back into standard faith-based economic territory. Part of the problem might be that Mr. Cass is basically promoting his new book, The Once and Future Worker. Explaining how one deals with the incentives to reduce the workforce to the lowest level that can produce goods and services for paying customers and allowing someone else to pick up the costs for the unemployed isn't covered in the column. And while I understand that perhaps the hope is that people will read the book to find out, I'm not interested in reading the entire volume just to see if he gets around to it.

I also wonder what is supposed to happen to all of the people, especially the unskilled workers, who currently make their livings doing the work that Mr. Cass would see onshored again, and that migrants would be blocked from accessing. It's one thing to argue that we made an error in importing poverty in order to raise the standards of living of those who remained employed. It's quite another to propose exporting that poverty back to the nations from which it came. Given the protectionist tactics that it will take to revive things like the textile industry, it's hard to understand why other nations would want to trade with us. Not to mention that in order to compete with China, working conditions and wages would likely have to look something like China's. We might be able to force Americans to buy products made in the United States at wage and benefit levels that remove the need for subsidization of the workers with government transfers, but it's less clear why people in other countries wouldn't decide to pay less for the made-in-China model.

And I guess in the end, this is the thing that I'm suspicious of. I understand as well as anyone else that our current model of funding consumption through transfer payments and onshoring poverty is unsustainable in the long (or even perhaps medium) run. But changing the incentives for the system we have is going to require more than simply looking for ways to force domestic capital to give higher returns to domestic labor. Mr. Cass presents "Economic piety" as the habit of funding a destructive idleness among people who need to be laboring in order to be happy and healthy. But the focus on the economic pie (See what he has done there?) is perhaps more accurately viewed as being about funding corporate profitability, with the idea that if corporations do well, that they will hire more people to do work.

Changing that conception of society is going to be difficult in a world that's set up to see efficiency as the end-all and be-all. Changing economic policy is unlikely to be up to the task.

Digging Deep

There have been any number of claims that the Trump Administration attempted to "bury" a report on climate change by releasing it on Black Friday. As if this would somehow stop government watchers, on the lookout for just such a thing from finding it and shouting about it from the rooftops.

While I understand that the Trump Administration would want to avoid drawing attention to the report, attempting to somehow sneak it out seems like a pointless endeavor because the Trump Administration has no intention of making policy changes based on a) the report itself or b) critics talking about the report. And this is because President Trump draws quite a bit of his support from people who would find their livelihoods severely damaged by a wholesale shift to alternative energy sources. And while one could make the case that this refers to legacy energy company investors and executives, it's mainly coal miners and oil workers who one is likely to find at the President's rallies. And they are the people who depend most keenly on the health of the industry.

Given this, it's almost surprising that the report wasn't released with more fanfare; as this would have allowed the President to make a bigger deal of ignoring it and its conclusions.

Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Alexandra Petri, columnist and blogger at The Washington Post: Well, I feel like there's always this undefinable thingness that any particular woman who happens to be in power is always lacking. And so people will say, well, in general, it's sort of like the generic candidate versus the actual president candidate, where you say, man, any generic Democrat would do gangbusters' business. But, then, the second you have a specific person, suddenly, they're fraught with problems.

But, with women, it's especially - the kind of line that you're asked to walk is incredibly difficult. It's something out of a fairy tale, almost. It's like you must be walking down the road, not walking but not riding and not naked but not clothed and, like, not in the road and not out of it. And, at a certain point, you have to say, huh, am I really as eager to welcome a women to lead as I've been saying I was all this time?
Barbershop: Some Democrats Oppose Pelosi's House Speaker Bid

This comment stood out for me, because it reminded me of a conversation that had taken place at work, where one of the resident Conservatives had taken issue with the commitment of Liberals to women candidates; because they hadn't bothered to stipulate a preference for Liberal women candidates, as opposed to simply any woman candidate.

But while it might seem obvious to someone that partisans might consider a commitment to their ideals and policy priorities more important than simple gender diversity in a situation where it's clearly and either/or situation, it's worth keeping in mind that the logic can also apply to a situation like the one that House Minority Leader Pelosi finds herself in today. After all, the Democratic Party is not completely defined by a narrow Progressive agenda that everyone follows. While conservative Democrats have been pretty much purged from the party's ranks, there is a still a centrist/left divide at work, and it's understandable that any given Democrat would find a certain level of agreement with them on which side of the party should be in charge to be of more immediate importance than any given woman leader.

And this is where Ms. Petri's comment puts people into an uncomfortable box, with the implication there is no valid reason, other than gender, to oppose Minority Leader Pelosi becoming Speaker of the House again. If the only choices are Speaker Pelosi or misogyny, that's something of a problem. And it's a problem that plagues a number of organizations, even while it's an advantage for people who find themselves in Representative Pelosi's situation. They're the only "acceptable" choice. If there were more women running for the speakership, that would give room for people to pursue both their policy and diversity priorities. It would also deny the Minority Leader the ability to blame opposition on sexism. Now, of course, this isn't to say that there isn't a certain amount of discomfort with the idea of women leaders to outright misogyny in play here. But with a polarizing figure like Minority Leader Pelosi as the subject, it's hard to separate the two.

Cup Overflowing

Misty Morning Cold

The Dictatorship of Hope

"How could I know - how could anybody know - that her death wish was not a sign of her psychiatric disease? The fact that one can rationalise about it, does not mean it's not a sign of the disease," says psychiatrist Dr Frank Koerselman, one of Holland's most outspoken critics of euthanasia in cases of mental illness.

He argues psychiatrists should never collude with clients who claim they want to die.

"It is possible not to be contaminated by their lack of hope. These patients lost hope, but you can stay beside them and give them hope. And you can let them know that you will never give up on them," he says.
The troubled 29-year-old helped to die by Dutch doctors

While the idea that every life is precious is laudable, I do think that it's worth asking, "Why?" at times. Aurelia Brouwers decided, after some 17 years of severe mental illness and distress, that there was no end in sight (or over the horizon), and that she wanted to end the pain herself, by taking her own life. Dr. Koerselman believes that this was the wrong choice. Which I don't have a problem with, but I'm curious about his reasoning. If the presence of mental illness renders others unable to truly understand the patient's interior life, why decide that they don't actually want what they say they want?

What I find interesting was his statement that "It is possible not to be contaminated by their lack of hope." This casts hopelessness as being a pathology itself, and perhaps that explains a lot. If you view hopelessness as a disease, then of course a wish to die becomes a symptom. When I first heard the story of Pandora, Hope was characterized as the one good thing in her jar of evils. But as I grew older, I encountered different versions of the story, in which Hope was the last of the evils.

"Like people with diabetes, psychiatric patients are also treated for years, but this is not an argument to stop treatment.

"It's very well known that after the age of 40 things might go much better for people with Borderline Personality Disorder - their symptoms might become much milder."

Aurelia Brouwers was 29 when she died, after suffering from mental illness for 17 years. Doctor Koerselman felt that she should have held on for another 11. Not because he could actually assure her that he, or anyone else, could do something for her, but out of hope.

The problem that I have with positing hope as a requirement is that it's one-sided. That hope may never be borne out - and it's the very real possibility that nothing will come of it that makes it hope in the first place. Therefore, to treat hopelessness as a disease or a contaminant is akin to saying that there is pathology in refusing to invest when there is no visible path to any sort of return.

There is, I think, a certain amount of irony in positing life as too precious to belong to the person who has to live it, because there is a risk that if one person is allowed to say that they don't want it anymore, that this will become the new default position. Because one wonders who life is precious to, if not the person who has it.

Of Course They Did

[Black Democratic former congressman and U.S. agriculture secretary Mike Espy’s] campaign got a jolt of adrenaline when a video surfaced a week ago showing [Republican incumbent Senator Cindy] Hyde-Smith, 59, praising a supporter by saying: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”
In Mississippi U.S. Senate race, a 'hanging' remark spurs Democrats

I honestly can’t even find these sorts if things cringeworthy anymore, otherwise I’d be locked into a rictus of perma-cringing. But more to the point, it doesn't seem to make sense to expect any better. Republican in the deep South, making a comment that could be construed as supporting lynchings? That may as well be a checkbox on their application for party membership. And not because I suspect that all White Republicans are secret Klan members, waiting for the South to rise again. It’s just because this sort of tone deafness is par for the course.

I would be unsurprised to find that it isn’t entirely accidental. This isn’t to say that I expect that Senator Hyde-Smith practices comments meant to rile up Black people. But rather that the sort of disregard for “political correctness” that many Republicans are expected to cultivate means that actually taking the time to think about how a remark is going to be taken once it gets away from them isn't seen as worthwhile. Of course, it not like the only people who suddenly come down with a self-inflicted case of foot-in-mouth disease are Republicans. President Obama and Hillary Clinton are likely never going to live down “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and “basket of deplorables.” It’s never good to make critical comments about potential future constituents.

But there is an apparent... antipathy (that seems like a good word) in Republican circles to the idea that the reactions of people to words is born of something other than a deliberate brittleness and hypersensitivity. I think that part of it is the idea that someone took racism out back and shot to death 50 years ago, and no matter what happens, it’s going to stay dead. Republican voters may sometimes evince nostalgia for a time that Black Americans never want to return to, but they understand it differently. The racism, bigotry and violence that characterized the pre-civil-rights era United States is seen as an unfortunate side effect of scattered mean people, and so there is an understanding that only “the good parts” of the past can be resurrected. But I think that for many Black people, that time is lurking just out of sight, and the systematic marginalization and mistreatment were not only part and parcel of the prosperity that White people felt during that time, but a requirement for it. And so a nostalgia for stronger Labor and more robust families must also mean a desire to reinstate Jim Crow along with it.

I don’t have a problem with Republicans saying to themselves: “The idea that the use of these sorts of old, folksy, sayings means that we want a return to a time of open inequality is utterly ridiculous.” The miss, I believe, is when they convince themselves that because it’s self-evidently ridiculous, only a motivated critic would see it otherwise.

But 50 years isn’t that long ago. The surviving members of the generation before me in my family all have first-hand memories of that long ago, and further. And they know that other people do, too.

Elizabeth Eckford, front, and Hazel Massery, shouting from behind.

After all, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Massery are still alive. They have reconciled since the events of 1957 (even if Oprah Winfrey was skeptical), but that doesn't mean that everyone has. That doesn’t mean that everyone now the belief that the society that took so much blood and tears to change was wrong is universal. To be sure, I think that the number of people who believe that the Republican Party would actively campaign on rolling back the clock is small. But in 2013, Republican Nevada Assemblyman Jim Wheeler said that he’d hold his nose, and there would need to be a gun to his head, but if his constituents wanted it, he’d vote for slavery to be re-instituted, “if that’s what the constituency wants that elected me.”

There is a view of Republicans as cynical political operators, subtly feeding bigots in exchange for votes. And it’s a view that many Republicans reject. But it’s one that's fed by comments like “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” because there are people who have the uncomfortable feeling that they’d be invited to that public hanging, too. Republicans don’t have buy into that, and they don’t have to take responsibility for it. But I think that it would benefit them to see recognizing and considering it as something other than weakness.

Not All Superheroes

The various media that make up pop culture can be useful places to explore current events and aspects of current society. Not all media however are suitable for this, and Marvel Comics' misleadingly titled What If? Magik Became Sorcerer Supreme is, perhaps, a cautionary tale.

(Overanalysis Mode: Engaged. And, by the way, if you're not familiar with the character of Magik, who is soon to be introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I'll give a brief rundown at the end of this post.)

One of the themes that What If? Magik Became Sorcerer Supreme attempts to tackle is abuse. This makes sense, given this history of the Magik character, as she was transitioning from minor incidental character to superheroine. But given that the book is a one-shot and only has a total of 28 pages (including several given over to full-page advertising) to tell a story, the shortcuts that needed to be taken seemed to undermine the entire enterprise.

The biggest difficulty that I had with the book was with Doctor Strange, and how he interacted with the character of Magik. The book opens with an adolescent Magik hitchhiking away from Westchester, New York, where the X-Men are headquartered. Resigning herself to the need to project some sex appeal to get a lift, she takes off her hood to allow her hair to be visible. This results in her being picked up by a man who, predictably, turns out to want sex in return. Doctor Strange enters the picture at this point, as Magik first flees the man, then starts beating the tar out of him with a broom when he corners her in an alley. Believing her to be some sort of sorcerous monster, Doctor Strange swoops in with a comically oversized battle-ax, saying:

"I'll admit this one probably had it coming, but your redneck reign of terror still ends tonight, creature."

While it's understandable that Doctor Strange believes that he's just rescued a man from being severely injured or killed by something masquerading as a "malnourished child," the fact of the matter is that the man was attempting to rape that same child. The "probably" seems misplaced.

And where the comic falls down is that Doctor Strange never seems to get any better about his treatment of Magik as the book quickly moves on. Despite being told more than once that he's doing the very things that other people have done to her with nefarious intent, Doctor Strange seems intent on restraining Magik until she gives in; which she does with remarkable speed, given how Doctor Strange is behaving.

Of course, being a comic book, things all turn out for the best, with Magik accepting Doctor Strange's tutelage, and embarking on a course that promises to turn her into a magical powerhouse (to go along with her mutant power), but it's unclear to me if the whole thing is really subversive or really tone-deaf, because Doctor Strange, in effect, forces himself on a young woman who has been running from years of abuse. The odd part of it all, is that the book seems to understand how bad Doctor Strange's choices are, even if Doctor Strange seems incapable of doing so. And even though Doctor Strange is setting off Magik's "abuser" sirens like a five-alarm fire.

And this, to me, is where the story seems broken. (Apologies for the long set-up.) In the end, Magik bears the responsibility for understanding that Doctor Strange is one of the Good Guys. Despite the fact that he seems incapable of behaving any differently from men who have set out to abuse her in the past, the story requires that she trust him and allow him to teach her, so she does. The book is so invested in its portrayal of Doctor Strange as arrogant, self-centered and out-of-touch that it makes Magik bend to that. And in doing do, takes on a strange feeling of "Not all men."

Not all men who abduct you are abusers. Not all men who pursue you in the face of "no" are bad. Not all men who attack your self-esteem are toxic. Not all men who see you as an end to their own goals have contempt for you.

And maybe these aren't the worst lessons in the world; even if I find them a bit suspect in a medium that's typically aimed at boys and young men. But I would submit that to really do them justice, and place them in a broader context where they don't seem like abuse apology, requires more than twenty or so pages of a one-shot comic book.

(Overanalysis Mode: Dis-engaged.)

Backstory: The character of Magik started out simply as Illyana Nikolievna Rasputina, the much younger sister of the X-man Colossus. She first appears as a small child when the international X-Men team was introduced in the mid-1970s, and would occasionally show up as a plot element. Eventually, she was abducted and taken to Limbo (one of Marvel Comic's versions of Hell) by a sorcerer/demon, where she learned some limited magic. Since time passes in Limbo much faster than on Earth, she also effectively aged several years over less than a day. Once returned to Earth, she became a member of the X-men's "junior" team, The New Mutants, as she also manifested the mutant power of creating disks of energy that allowed her to teleport. The What If? scenario posed by What If? Magik Became Sorcerer Supreme posits that Illyana instead ran away from Professor Xavier's school, and after apparently fighting off a number of sorcerers and mundanes alike who had designs on her, is brought to the attention of Doctor Strange.

The Cult of Parenthood

Given that Google+ is set to shut down in less than a year, I've been paging through some of the things I've posted there, and thinking about bringing them over. Here's one post from a while back, edited somewhat for the different medium.

I was reading a post on Google+ that described the movement among certain conservatives to promote marriage as a ladder out of poverty as "a destructive cargo cult." It's a verbose piece for a social media post, even by my standards (it's basically the "highlights" as a were, of a blog posting, and quotes from it liberally), so I'll give you the QND (quick and dirty): Financially well-off (or maybe even financially surviving) couples are not doing well because they are married. They are married because they are doing well. Because of growing socioeconomic inequality and the more visible signs thereof, not only are good mates more scarce, but it's easier to figure out who the bad mates are. (Hint: poor people are, in this scheme, the bad mates. Not just because they are poor, but because their families are likely to be poor, and between low earnings potential and the likelihood that the family one married into will wind up in financial distress and need bailing out, the best bet is run away.) So the "socioeconomic elites" all marry one another, effectively leaving no money for poor people to marry into and take back to their destitute families. (1)

But my real quibble with the G+ post comes near the end.

As a society, we should commit ourselves to creating circumstances in which the fundamentally human experience of parenthood is available to all, not barred from those we’ve left behind on our way to good schools and walkable neighborhoods. Women unlikely to marry who wish to have children by all means should.

Now, in the source posting, this is preceded by the following:

That is to say, should we tell women who have been segregated into the bad marriage market, who on average have lowish incomes and unruly neighbors and live near bad schools, that motherhood is just not for them, probably ever?

Well... yes, actually. I don't see why not. But then the author goes on to say:

We could bring back norms of shame surrounding single motherhood, or create other kinds of incentives to reduce the nonadoption birth rate of people statistically likely to raise difficult kids. It is possible.

Good heavens. Why on Earth would you conclude that people intend something so mean-spirited? Early in the Interfluidity post, the author links to a Slate column by Matthew Yglesias: "The Phantom Marriage Cure." One of the points that Mr. Yglesias makes is that there is broad distrust between marriage enthusiasts and marriage skeptics, and he noted the following:

So I think that this is where the standoff comes from. Marriage enthusiasts are enthusiastic about marriage because not only is it great to fall in love and get married, but the initiatives that help promote marriage seem so obviously broadly beneficial that it's perverse to see liberals throwing cold water on them. Marriage skeptics look at this through the other lens of the telescope. The things that seem to promote marriage are things that are broadly beneficial—basically programs that promote job opportunity and earnings potential for working class people (and especially men). So the suspicion is that when people say "marriage" what they mean is "tax cuts for the rich and meaningless pabulum for the poor."

One of the disheartening things about the United States is the ease with which people apparently presume that political differences are due to others being stupid, credulous or unethical. And I think that's what's at work here. Marriage skeptics suspect that marriage enthusiasts are promoting marriage as a means of victim-blaming. Single women who have children outside of marriage are being willfully irrational, stubborn or licentious and thus deserve lives of poverty, and to the degree that reducing the impact on their children makes it easier for them to sustain their intentionally perverse lifestyle, it must be avoided for the good of society. This is something of a misreading. Not that there aren't people who see it this way - conservatism is a fairly broad movement, and as such is too large to be free of jackasses.

There are a lot of links in, and following, the Interfluidity post, but none to anyone who actually calls for shaming single mothers or disincentivizing births among "people statistically likely to raise difficult kids." (In this respect, the argument does seem like a straw man.) Possibly because while a search for "shaming single mothers" on Google does turn up some mean-spirited jackasses, these are people that you've likely never heard of before, using their blogs as desperately laughable pleas for a wholesale return to 1850.

(1) I'm being somewhat very snide at this point. I'm somewhat impressed that the progressive buzzwords of "socioeconomic elites" coexist so easily beside the seemingly regressive idea that the main driver of marriage is the aggregate wealth of the prospective partner's family. I doubt that many people in the married couples I know were really as aware of (or interested in) their future in-laws bank balances and insurance status when the question was popped as the article seemed to presume.

Dystopianism

Perhaps you felt, like I did, that something you’d previously felt safe taking for granted—that a man credibly accused of sexual assault might not be elevated to a position of profound power over women—was no longer something to trust.
Sophie Gilbert "The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia"

When I first read this statement, it struck me as remarkably naïve, for lack of a better word. This simply isn't the way that politics works. It's never been the way that politics worked. As I read through Ms. Gilbert's article, the voice that it took on for me reminded me of some of my coworkers, back when I worked with children half a lifetime ago.

There was a fundamental question that all of us had to answer, and I think the easiest way to understand how each of us understood that question was to observe how we set about teaching the children we worked with avoid using violence. For some of the staff, the reason was one of empathy and building a better world. "You shouldn't hit people," the reasoning went, "because you don't like it when people hit you, and just as you feel bad when someone hit you, other people feel bad when you hit them." For others on staff, it was more a question of the harshness of the world outside of the treatment center. "You shouldn't hit people," the reasoning went, "because it's a bad habit to get into. And once you leave here, if you hit people or frighten them or make them angry, they'll hit you. And they'll want to hit very, very, hard."

That difference, between wanting to teach the children to live in the world we wanted them to live in, versus the world as we understood that it existed, was at the center of a lot of sometimes heated disputes between staff when it came to the philosophy of preparing the children for their inevitable ageing out of care.

And reading Ms. Gilbert's article, I felt that it was the very thing that I had once attempted to prevent. Having a child go out into the world with the idea that it was a better place than it genuinely was. Or could be. And there's a certain degree to which I view dystopian fiction, feminist or otherwise, as a reflection of that encountering the world as it actually is, rather than the rosy place that adult sheltering can make it out to be. But not understanding why it's that way.

Ms. Gilbert describes Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as: "a speculative vision of a repressive theocratic state in America enabled by mass infertility and nuclear fallout."

But the thing that would turn the United States into Gilead isn't a drop in childbirths and atomic weaponry. It's the choices that people make. Ms. Gilbert notes, in talking about some of the dark futures (for women, anyway) that writers had called into being in Ms. Atwood's wake, that "The prospective end of humanity is calamitous enough to imagine drastic ends being justified." But what makes the works dystopian isn't the drastic means enacted. It's that they're only drastic for some people. The prospective end of humanity, rather than being a catalyst for shared sacrifice, becomes a rationale for the imposition of costs on one segment of society. But this is the way the world has always been. Because genuine sacrifice, by its very nature, is painful, and when they can, people shift that pain to others.

I understand that the novelists who write dystopian fiction likely have a good deal of genuine insight into the human condition. But the way that the public speaks of the genre often strikes me as driven by a desire for a world that never could have been.