Ungunned

I read a couple of articles today that took issue with the fact that people attending Vice President Pence's talk at the National Rifle Association's convention won't be allowed to bring firearms into the venue with them. There were some rather pointed comments about how, if more law-abiding citizens carrying guns made society safer, why didn't that apply to the Vice President.

For me, the issue with this is that there is a fundamental difference in understanding about the "good guy with a gun" argument. It's designed to work on the sorts of fear of crime that animates a lot of this discussion. An armed citizen on the scene of an attack can intervene much more quickly than a first responder who's not present. But that intervention still needs a trigger. And if the trigger for intervention is the first gunshot, an armed citizen would be unable to stop an assassination attempt.

And this is the issue with positing an armed citizenry as a means of preventing a shooting, rather than lowering the potential body count of that shooting to the first person shot.

Of course, there is also a certain level of motivation in this perception of hypocrisy. Slate's homepage teaser read "Parkland Survivors Noticed That the NRA Banned Guns for Pence's Convention Speech;" and the article says: "The NRA is blaming the Secret Service for the prohibition." I was unsurprised by this; Slate is a commentary site, and an openly partisan on these days, rather than a news site. (The Washington Post seemed to take a less openly partisan stance on the issue.) The rule that there will be no weapons (or potentially easily-improvised weapons) allowed in the presence of the Vice President IS a Secret Service rule, not the National Rifle Association's. After all, the Secret Service is responsible for the security of the President and Vice President, among others. It seems strange that they would suspend their standard operating procedures for protecting their clients in the name of some partisan understanding of intellectual consistency. And, to the best of my knowledge, the Secret Service has not, as an organization, taken up the idea that their jobs could be made redundant by arming more ordinary citizens. Likewise, the NRA has not, to the best of my knowledge, officially promoted the idea that citizens should actively carry weapons into places where they are legally barred from doing to, in anticipation of violence.

This is not to say that gun-rights advocates as a whole have settled on a single, internally (and externally) consistent message. I recently picked up a personal-defense magazine that strongly implied that the overall drop in violent crime that's been happening since the 1990s can be chalked up to greater personal ownership of weapons. But just because the editors of a particular magazine see guns everywhere as a prophylactic doesn't mean that anyone who claims to stand up for the Second Amendment is obligated to belief in armed audience as a viable anti-assassination measure.

But in the end, this issue is driven by one of the same factors that both drives and derails conversation and "debate" about guns in the United States: filter bubbles and ignorance. Slate's article, in particular, does nothing to educate readers on what the Secret Service's rules for venues that VIPs will be visiting are, and implies that the NRA is deflecting its own responsibility. Educating people on the actual rules the Secret Service wants followed, and then laying out what the NRA could have done within that framework would be much more helpful.

That, however, would have made the Parkland students who criticized the NRA appear uninformed. Which, to be honest, they likely are, if they think that the NRA had any direct control over security measures for the Vice President. But I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. Sometimes, the best incentive to learn is being shown to be ignorant.

Wor[l]d of Difference

"There is," according to the posting, "a whole, giant WORLD between thinking you 'deserve' and knowing you are 'worthy of.' Learn the fucking difference."

The righteous anger is almost palpable, and the judgement explicit. And it makes sense, even if, underneath it all, there is a hint of unintentional irony.

While I'm uncertain that this could be classified as a thoughtful posting, I did think about it, and it lead me to understand something. While there may be a world of difference between deserving and being worthy of, "having a right to" often includes both of those concepts. For instance, in the United States, education from Kindergarten through High School can be thought of as being deserved - it is provided free of charge (mostly, anyway) to the public. Likewise, when campaigners for universal access to health care speak of everyone having a right to adequate care, they often mean that in the sense of deserving. Health care is seen as an entitlement, and if people lack the means to obtain it for themselves, then it should be provided for them. Rights as being worthy of is a slightly different animal, but also present. When we talk about a right to dignity, it's mainly in the sense that every person is worthy of being treated with a level of the same, rather than a direct and enforceable entitlement to a specific standard of treatment that may be seen as "dignified."

To be sure, not everyone understands rights as encompassing both concepts. I, for my part, don't. In my understanding of the world, a right is limited to something "deserved" in the sense of a formalized entitlement granted by a body ready, willing and able to enforce it. So I don't recognize, for instance, that there is a right to health care in the United States. That may be the ideal, but currently, no such actual right exists.

And so when I first read Graeme Wood's assertion, in his (inapt, in my opinion) comparison between Alek Minassian, and the "Involuntary Celibate" subculture with which he is associated and the Islamic State, that: "To have a sex life of some sort seems to me a human right," it seemed utterly inane. Especially considering that Mr. Wood goes on to note that: "It’s claiming the right to another person’s sex, or retribution if it is denied, that crosses from an exercise of one’s own humanity to an infringement on someone else’s, in a form of slavery." After all, it if takes two to tango, how can one have a right to dance, if everyone can legitimately decide they won't be the partner?

But if you read the passage as: "To have a sex life of some sort seems to me something that all humans are worthy of. It’s claiming one deserves another person’s sex, or retribution if it is denied, that crosses from an exercise of one’s own humanity to an infringement on someone else’s, in a form of slavery," it makes much more sense (even if I am still a bit dubious about it). But in the original, in both instances, the word "right" is used. Both the exercise of one's own humanity and an infringement on the humanity of another are categorized as a "right." And so it comes down to what rights one does or does not have, rather than the fundamental difference between "knowing you 'are worthy of'" and "thinking you 'deserve'."

And while this example jumped out at me because it was fresh in my mind, and I was planning to write about it anyway when I saw the social media post that heads this essay, I have encountered this sort of thing before. Mr. Wood's conflation of two very different things under the heading of "rights" is not unique. Part of it is a basic problem with English vocabulary as it used in everyday speech and writing; a notable lack of precision. English has a wide range of synonyms and near synonyms. (One thing that I learned while working for Wizards of the Coast is that Magic: The Gathering cards that have different names in English will sometimes have the same name in other languages {Japanese being the specific example I recall} because those other languages lack enough synonymous terms to carry the same concept with all of the different wordings that English can manage.) And to the degree that language governs thought, the fact that "knowing you 'are worthy of'" and "thinking you 'deserve'" can, in certain contexts, be gathered together under the heading of "rights" blurs the distinction between them, often beyond recognition.

And so we are left with people who do not learn the difference, because, as they understand the language, there isn't one.

Blanket

I normally don't make this many photo posts in sequence, but it's been nice out recently, and I've always felt that I tend to write about things that annoy me, rather than positive things.

Surf's Up

Ad Infinitum

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

On the other end of this link is a story about prison rape, a form of assault endemic to the institution. But what interested me about the story were these two passages:

When John was 4 years old, his single mother decided that she couldn’t take care of him anymore, so she left him inside their apartment and set the building on fire.

and,

During his freshman year, John reconnected with his mother. She still took drugs and worked as a prostitute, and she convinced him to help her shoplift.

In a past life, when I world with children who had been taken out of their homes for abuse and/or neglect and placed in residential treatment, you came to recognize the parents like these; the ones for whom their children were only useful as resources. And it was quite easy, once you put two and two together.

The first two, as it were, was made up of the children's stories about their parent(s), or the background that you would get when a new child came into the facility. Despite what people might have you believe, parents do not always have an instinct to look after their children. Some parents enlisted their children as thieves, as "John's" had, others used their children a prostitutes. And some, well, it gets worse.

But there's more to it than that, and the second two came when it was time for family visits. There was a familiar pattern to "resourcers" (for lack of a better term), and it went like this: Firstly, they would never arrive on-time. This is common. Many parents (and usually the same ones every time) would be late, and some would simply never show at all. Secondly, they tended to limit their interaction with their children, preferring to attempt to wheedle things out of the staff members with shopworn hard-luck stories. Thirdly, they tended to leave once they'd had enough to eat. Lastly (although I could jest as easily have led with this), they only came to those events where there would be food. If you didn't promise a complete meal, they weren't interested. They tended to skip the before meal spend-time-with-your-children part of things, but tried to show up before the food was actually served, and once they were done eating, they were headed for the door.

And these two elements tended to go hand-in-hand. The parents whose children had been taken away from them because the parent(s) had been using them for their own ends tended to be the same parents who were always most concerned with showing up to be fed. One couple went so far as to ask if they could continue to receive invitations for family events once their children had moved on to other placements.

Of course, I would encounter people like this in other contexts. When I was a foster care caseworker, a few of the foster parents I worked with were perpetually angry that the state never paid them enough to make a profit. It seemed odd to me that people actually believed that the state would pay foster families enough to care for a child and leave a significant amount left over, but there they were, nevertheless.

In the beginning, it was easy to be angry with them. They were walking embodiments of Not Doing Things Right. But eventually, that anger burned itself out, and they just became another of the more annoying sorts of parent that I would deal with. But I only had to deal with them occasionally. Trying to figure out a way to prepare their children for life after institutions: that was the everyday job. And it demanded all of my attention, to the point that I had none to spare for the people who had created the mess that needed cleaning up.

The Long Tail

The arrest of two Black men who were waiting for a friend in a Starbucks in an upscale neighborhood of Philadelphia, and the reaction to said event, seems somewhat overblown all the way around. But it reminds me of something that I learned some time ago, and that I do my best to remember:

For any single interaction, the difference between a racist and an asshole is negligible.

And yeah, some people are just assholes. It's not that I think that any incident that we are tempted to attribute to racism should automatically be chalked up to being an asshole instead. But if we think that any instance where a White person behaves badly to a Black person is evidence that the United States hasn't shed its White supremacist past, then that past will never be shed, because there will always be assholes.

The most enduring legacy of racism and other prejudices is the expectation of racism and other prejudices because of the perfectly reasonable understanding that a truly harmonious and equal society isn't built in a day. And so if there was racism yesterday. it's likely that there is racism today. And the vigilance with which many people are taught to bring to the search for racism means that it will always be found, especially because any single negative interaction between people of different races can be chalked up to bias, and once that verdict is handed down, nothing else matters.

In other words, asking the question: "How many other people were thrown out of that Starbucks location?" is important. Not because it allows for the opportunity to exonerate the manager, but because it allows us to make a determination of a broader pattern, and to see the place of this one incident within it, and to genuinely understand if we're looking at a racist, or an asshole.

While Starbucks is garnering some praise, and some criticism, for closing every company-owned store for an afternoon for anti-bias training, if the manager in question was simply an asshole, a lot of people have been tarred. A good end may come from that tarring, but there are better ways to get there, than what is basically an act of public self-flagellation on the part of Starbucks.

Justifies the Means

CNN's Jake Tapper interviewed Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel about the Republican response to former CIA Director James Comey's new book. And one of the questions that Mr. Tapper asks is, effectively, "Are Republicans sure they should be throwing stones from a glass house?"

Which I understand. Given the fact that President Trump makes either completely unprovable or verifiably false statements on a regular basis, Republican complaining about Mr. Comey's alleged untruthfulness seems openly hypocritical.

But hypocrisy is beside the point. Political parties, even moreso than individuals, have interests, rather than values or principles. And to the degree that that many political parties see their policy goals as being in the bests interests of the nation as a whole, they are interested in outcomes, rather than process. They pay lip service to the idea that they must pursue their desired outcomes only through accepted processes, because this is a public piety, but in the end, winning is the only thing that matters.

And so while I appreciate the need that Mr. Tapper felt to ask Chairwoman McDaniel about values, principles and process, it produced nothing other than the predictable song-and-dance of Chairwoman McDaniel pretending that the Republican party actually cared about the means it pursued to its ends, and when that seemed untenable, deflecting the perceived criticism or otherwise seeking to change the subject.

It's reasonable to forgo a particular end, because it doesn't seem worth the means required to attain it. That can even be laudable. When it becomes a requirement, however, it tends to produce dishonesty about means, rather than a reconsideration of the ends. There is something to be said then, I think, for relaxing the requirement.

Spring Blossoms

Untruth on Demand

I was listening to RadioLab in my car on Sunday, and they were talking about the ability to make fake videos by combining a couple of different methods: The first being the ability to synthesize someone's voice if you have enough recorded audio of them, and the second being the ability to create convincing video of someone by effectively manipulating their digital image as if they were a puppet. Perhaps not by coincidence, The Atlantic also has a piece on the same technology.

What both stories have in common is an open concern about people's ability to discern truth from fiction, and the possible negative consequences of this. But something occurred to me when I was listening to the RadioLab story, and it came up in the piece from The Atlantic, as well.

As Ian Goodfellow, a scientist at Google, told MIT Technology Review, “It’s been a little bit of a fluke, historically, that we’re able to rely on videos as evidence that something really happened.”

Given that politics has existed for much longer than ubiquitous video, one suspect that people will survive the loss of the ability to believe anything they see. All it will take is a reliance on the skills that people relied on in the past. Both stories pointed out a basic problem - when people can't readily discern the difference between a forgery and a genuine article, an inconvenient reality can easily be denounced as a forgery. But this has always been true. The idea that technology could offer a form of telepresense, and in doing so, offer something between a reliable and ironclad understanding what transpired is, as Mr. Goodfellow pointed out, a fluke. Self-corroborating evidence of an event is a very recent innovation, if we can even claim to have it today. (And it's reasonable to say that we don't have it today, given that conspiracy theorists routinely challenge everything that pushes back against their understanding of the world as having been forged.)

Perhaps the real problem is our understanding of progress, and the role of technology in it. If we view the society and politics of all of history before "unimpeachable" video evidence of events as being necessarily broken, being forced to return to that would seem like a catastrophe. But maybe, as in a lot of things, our understanding of the present is an overly harsh judge of the past.

Unconstituted

Let's start with this:

[Bill] Maher said he didn’t agree with Ingraham’s stance on that or many other issues — and even called her a “deliberately terrible person” — but said it’s her First Amendment right to say what she wants.
Bill Maher doesn’t like Laura Ingraham. He hates the boycott of her show even more.

And then move to this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Given these two things, I'm not sure how one relates to the other. Mainly because the teapot tempest that Ms. Ingraham stirred up is not with the government. It's with David Hogg, the public and her advertisers. None of whom are a party to the First Amendment. And none of whom, properly speaking, are interfering with her right to say what she wants. If her show is cancelled because of a boycott, or even a capital strike, there is no violation of the First Amendment there, unless it can be shown that Congress, or the broader government orchestrated it. I'm somewhat surprised that Mr. Maher doesn't seem to understand this, given his role as a media personality.

Even when he took it on the chin (or, was the "victim" of a boycott, if you prefer) for his comments that lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away was more cowardly than riding a hijacked plane into its target, his troubles weren't a violation of the First Amendment, even if White House spokesman Ari Fleischer could be fingered as the trigger point.

The First Amendment of the Constitution does not demand that the Marketplace of Ideas make room for all comers. It simply states that the government may not force any particular concept or speaker out of the marketplace by the force of law.

In other words, it's one thing for a government to detail Bill Maher, or force HBO to remove his show from the air, due to the content of his comments. (Although it must be said that there are limits on that. We understand that if Mr. Maher were to, say, solicit the commission of some or another criminal activity on the air, that forcing HBO to pull the plug would be a legitimate act on the part of the government.) It would be another thing entirely for HBO to decide to dump him (as ABC once did), for the businesses that fund the show through their advertising purchases to withdraw that support or for some segment of the public to decline HBO subscriptions because they don't appreciate his particular brand of commentary.

It's tempting to see a betrayal of American values and/or Constitutional principles in the sudden downfall of people who say things that unexpectedly place them at odds with the public - or the people who control their access to large segments of the public. But that conflates the State with the people who constitute the State; and even in a government of the people, by the people and for the people, they are not the same.

Fearless

There are, I think, only two ways to be free of fear. You can understand that you have the power to change what frightens you, or you can understand that you have the power to deal with the consequences of not changing it.

I am not fearless. While I understand that my control of the world is limited, and thus I have very little by way of the power to change things, part of me is a control freak, who charts a path to acceptance of the world through being able to dictate to it. But the world does not owe me anything. It was here first, and so it need not listen to me. But its disobedience causes me a certain amount of anxiety, because I am not always confident of my ability to survive its adversities.

Which is something of a curious thing. I am after all, nearly 50 years old. I have dealt with, to quote a song, trials and tribulations, heartache and pain. Survived it all. Yet, there is still that nagging feeling that tomorrow, something so catastrophic that I won't be able to do anything with it may happen. I understand how fear can be a survival trait, but I also understand that most of the things that trigger my fear response simply raise my blood pressure to no good end.

I have come to understand how my attachment to things results in needless anxiety. But I have also come to understand just how difficult that selfsame attachment is to break. I don't know if I'll ever master it, but I'd like to. Because then, I will have become fearless. And it will be glorious.

Cluster of Blooms