The Color Purple

Identifying the Problem

I was in the car, listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I do this rarely, mainly because I'm not enough of a Lefty to find the show all that interesting. David Remnick may have been an excellent staff writer and he might now be a standout editor, but he seems to have the understanding that Liberal politics is self-evidently correct, and thus have difficulty with the idea that a worldview may be both rational and at odds with liberal orthodoxy. An interview that they recently re-aired with Mark Lilla drove this point home for me. Mr. Lilla made what I think is a very good point:

There’s a difference between speaking truth to power and seizing power to defend the truth. And those require very different things, right?

Mr. Remnick seemed very reluctant to say, "Right," and then proceed from there. Instead, he seemed to be surprised that anyone felt that dialing back the focus on specific group identity was even helpful, let alone necessary.

In my own understanding, the issue that often comes up with identity politics is that it demands that people who do not share a given identity understand their obligations to the people who do. And when those perceived obligations are not fulfilled, they are simply repeated, louder and more stridently. As I took his points, Mr. Lilla was saying that if you're going to ask (let alone demand) that someone do something for you that they're disinclined to do, you're better off approaching them with "Here is what's in it for you, as well as us," rather than "You owe this to us." This strikes me as perfectly logical; after all, had people been inclined to act on such an obligation, they'd have done so once it had been pointed out to them. If they are instead recalcitrant, shouting louder will not change that.

To be sure, Mr. Lilla missed some opportunities to really make his case. At one point, Mr. Remnick asked:

But [the legalization of same-sex marriage] also happened because you had people in the streets shouting, “We’re here. We’re queer.” Which is something that, in the book, you say will only get you a pat on the head. Didn’t that help get power, too? Didn’t Stonewall help get power, the civil-rights movement help get power?

Mr. Lilla pointed out how these things were focused on a particular group. Fair enough. But I think that I would have liked to seen him really engage with the question and ask: "Whose mind was changed by "people in the streets shouting, 'We're here. We're queer'?" That is to say: Who saw people marching in the streets, and because they'd seen those people marching, changed their voting patterns? A related question could be: Is it then true, that without, specifically, the public protests and marches of the Civil-Rights era and the LGBT movement, that power could not have been attained? Personally, I felt that Mr. Remnick missed some of what Mr. Lilla was attempting to convey. There is footage from the Civil-Rights movement that, as near as I can tell, moved people to say: This should not be happening to Americans; rather than: This should not be happening to Black people.

And I believe that Mr. Lilla's point was that this broader focus is what drives success. Now, to be sure, that's a debatable point. But it can't be debated until it's understood.

Whispers

Back when I was in junior high school, there was a class assignment to create a news program, modeled after the local network news. The class was divided into small groups and each group determined what would be in their program. This being the early 1980s, editorials at the end of the program were still a thing, and so our program ended with one. I was manning the editorial desk, and I spent a few minutes pontificating on how insulting it was that adults worried about the effects that cartoon violence would have on us. While there were some cartoons that had more or less realistic portrayals of people in them, Bugs Bunny and The Flintstones were still regular fare at this time. And it really did seem to be dismissive of our faculties for reasoning to think that we couldn't be trusted to understand that real people wouldn't just get up an walk away from the sorts of things that happened to Tom and Jerry or Rocky and Bullwinkle.

But, in the nearly four decades between then and now, I've come to understand that there's a form of virtue signalling that operates by casting others as foolish or unintelligent and then proclaiming that the world needs to be altered to protect them from themselves. The graphic below being one such:

In fairness, it's true that one can say that "School shooting victim rejected shooter and embarrassed him in class" implies that if Shana Fisher had "played nice" and given Dimitrios Pagourtzis what he wanted, he wouldn't have shot her. But it's just as true that one can say that the same headline makes Pagourtzis out to be a complete, and blameworthy, loser - especially in the absence of any headlines that point to him having deliberately spared any of his female classmates who had responded to his advances.

Where I find this to be suspect is in the idea that changes in the wording of headlines is what buoys sexism in this country, rather than much more open apologism of violent acting out. "School shooter shot victim 'because she rejected him'," would be a much more direct statement. And a headline like that would typically be followed by someone (likely a relative or close friend of the shooter) directly making the point that the shooter had acted out of hurt or shame, in an attempt to make the shooter seem less evil, or to otherwise excuse their behavior.

And if we take "School shooting victim rejected shooter and embarrassed him in class" to have sexist implications, it's more likely that it's a symptom of a sexist society, rather than a driver, and the people who seek to victim blame subtly through their headlines are likely being much more open about it in other contexts - and that is where young people would learn it from. And it would be young people; the middle-aged, like myself, are far too set in our ways, and world-views, to have the needle moved by weak insinuations in online headlines.

It's also worth understanding that there can be something else at work here, too. And that is the common understanding that in the end, the world is fair. In other words, it doesn't take sexism to come to the conclusion that Shana Fisher had done something to contribute to her own demise. The idea that "bad things don't happen to good people" will do perfectly.

Sexism is like any other "ism." Once one is convinced that it's pervasive and seductive, it will appear to be everywhere and have a way of worming into anyone's mind. It is perhaps worth thinking of people as being smarter than that. If for no other reason than one's own comfort with the world, and the other people they share it with. There are enough people obviously spreading discord that there's no need to look under rocks for it.

Brother, Can You Spare A Thought?

There is a genre of story in The Atlantic (and in other publications, I would guess) that strikes me as: "Won't somebody think of the impoverished?" The general pattern of the stories is as follows: Some beneficial activity, X, is easier to successfully pursue under set of circumstances Y. Because set of circumstances Y is more accessible to people with money, poor people are locked out of activity X, and isn't that terrible?

Caroline Kitchener's piece on women having children (especially their first) after the age of 40 is an example of the type. The advantages of having children after the age of 40 are established: "For both affluent and low-income women, it seems to help to circumvent the gender-wage gap." The idea that it's easier for people of means is put out there: "'It is a privilege to be able to wait—to have more economic advantages when you have kids,' Feinberg said. But for the vast majority of mothers, that’s not an option." And finally, we're told why this is terrible: "If only the most affluent mothers are able to reap the rewards that come with older motherhood, Shreffler told me, 'that might perpetuate the inequality that we already see in children born to women with and without a college degree:' lifting up the fruits of the fortysomethings, leaving behind the kids of the moms who couldn’t afford to wait."

By the end of the article, I could almost feel Ms. Kitchener leaning over me, looking to see if I was wringing my hands properly. But it seems to me that these articles, focused as they are on reminding us yet again of the unfairness of the fact that people without money aren't as well-off as people with money, don't then take the discussion to the next level - fixing things.

This article is an advocacy piece, and it strikes me that the goal is for readers to go out and press policymakers for fertility and maternity care that's more readily available and of lower cost. Which is fair enough. There is nothing wrong with either of those goals. But it strikes me that it may be easier, not to mention far less expensive, to see what can be done to make the advantages of becoming a parent at 40+ available to people who become parents in their twenties, when they don't have as much need for expensive medical interventions to become pregnant, deliver a healthy child and come out of the experience in good health themselves. Likewise, encouraging more people to take time away from work, for whatever reason, when they are young would go a ways towards remedying the wage gap that maternity leave tends to open without asking the currently childless to subsidize their coworkers' childbearing choices and timing.

And, to be sure, the options put forth are not necessarily bad choices. They may, in fact, be the best available options, in which case, go for it. But the formulaic nature of stories lamenting the inability of the less well off to behave in the same way as their wealthier peers seems to blind people to the idea that there is more than one road that leads to Rome.

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This started popping up in comments that were made to social media posts by news organizations, under a few different names, and so I dropped in on their profiles to see what their deal was. And it was the same thing, over and over. Post after post, going back months, all with the same text. Many of them contained random links to other content on the Web; anything from food blogs to racist screeds by open White supremacists. And a number of articles about the Illuminati; either purporting to explain some aspect of their ritualism, lists of their members in specific nations, supposed exposés of their worldwide leadership and, strangely, articles debunking the whole thing.

Every time I see a scam like this, I wonder who the intended mark is. Who sees an offer of membership from what is supposed to be the most secretive group in the world (how it maintains this status given that everyone seems to know about it is beyond me), promising instant wealth, and says to themselves: "Yeah, my ship has finally come in. I'll just send an e-mail to this random gmail account and the all-powerful rulers of the world will set me up for life. As soon as I give them my financial information.

I understand the whole point behind making these 419 scams so outlandish that anyone who genuinely pursues one will stick with it to the bitter end (and the complete draining of their finances), but it's difficult for me to fathom that anyone could be both that gullible and able to retain enough money to be worth fleecing. There can't be that many completely unintelligent lottery winners in the world.

But if this is coming from some benighted 3rd world backwater somewhere, perhaps $20 here or $50 is enough to keep them afloat (and pay for internet time) long enough that they can desperately fish for their next mark. Maybe they should just advertise the low, low cost of living, instead.

Innovation and its Discontentents

One thing that I tell people is if you're going be, if you're going to do anything new or innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood. If you cannot afford to be misunderstood, then for goodness' sake, don't do anything new or innovative.
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos reveals what it's like to build an empire and become the richest man in the world — and why he's willing to spend $1 billion a year to fund the most important mission of his life

There are, of course, people who genuinely cannot afford to be misunderstood. But the number is likely smaller than we suspect. More often, it's a matter of the price of misunderstanding being higher than seems reasonable under the circumstances. If we define "innovation" as "doing things differently than has commonly come to be expected," then there are a lot of people who spend their time innovating, in an attempt to improve their condition in life. But many Black people in the United States have become wary of innovating themselves because they perceive both the likelihood and the costs of misunderstanding to be high. (Of course, many people perceive the likelihood and costs of being misunderstood to be high even when they are acting well within the status quo.)

In a culture that values doing new things and innovation as much as modern America does, it can be easy to forget that innovating has costs beyond that of the labor and materials that go into it. And so Mr. Bezos' quote can be a helpful reminder of the fact that social innovation also has costs. And those costs can be high. The lack of generalized, directed innovation results in the status quo remaining in effect, and so the period of invention and experimentation is prolonged. And while piecemeal innovation has lower collective social costs than a coordinated group shift, those costs must still be paid, and so the fall on the innovative individuals.

Innovations create opportunities, and opportunities tend to come at a cost. And, as Mr. Bezos points out, incumbents who are currently benefiting from the status quo are quick to understand their potential to need to bear those costs, and will mobilize criticism in attempt to head them off by derailing the new innovation. But criticism of innovation can also be a means of justifying a reaction to an innovation that would otherwise be seen as unwarranted. As these factors that raise the cost of innovation, the impulse to outsource the task to people better able to bear the costs (or for whom there are lower costs) is understandable. But people who innovate on behalf of others do so commonly out of a profit motive, rather than solely the betterment of their clients. And so it's worth asking if the final cost is even higher.

Criticism

Usefully Toxic

Some random guy on the internet, that you've likely never heard of, has been accused of sexual harassment. Said guy was a moderator in an online community, and so there were calls to have him removed from that position. Within short order, he'd stepped down. But the criticism of the community didn't stop with that, and it seemed that a few people had joined the community specifically to complain about the moderator who was no longer a moderator and/or complain about the treatment of people who had complained before themselves.

I doubt that I saw all of the complaints - I only check social media in the evenings between dinner and before bed on weeknights, and at random intervals on weekends, so there was a lot of time for things to get past me. But there was one thing that the complaints I did see had in common. They were really obnoxious. It didn't take long for them to seem more or less like mid-level trolling; the kind of stuff that people do to a) let their targets know that they don't really care about any damage they might do and b) show off to others in their tribe that they're doing it. In other words, it struck me as a variation on the sort of behavior in which a man might go up to a woman in public and deliberately position himself as a potential threat in order to both intimidate and belittle her, and to perform this in front of his buddies. That is to say, toxic.

My first thought was that this is to be expected. The social justice movement is large enough that it's entered the social consciousness, and like any group that's large enough to have done that, it's too large to not have any assholes in it. That's just the nature of groups: put enough people together in one place, and some non-zero number of them will be assholes. But thinking about it a bit more, it occurred to me that one of the primary drivers of rudeness can be the understanding that manners are a form of weakness, and that politeness is simply a, well, polite form of grovelling. After all, I suspect that I have met my share, if not more, of people who seem to think that the ability to be openly disrespectful of others is a prerequisite for respecting themselves.

About three years ago, I found myself in a me-against-the-world online argument with a number of self-professed Social Justice Warriors, and one of them made the following point. "Telling other people what to do and 'talking down to them' creates environments in which people are threatened with shame for not [complying]. It's dirty, but it gets the job done." Behavior that we understand to be "toxic" therefore, may be dirty, but it's too effective a tool to forgo. And there's a fairly direct danger in that:

He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

What makes it so easy, I think, to become a monster is that monsters don't see themselves as such, when they look in the mirror, whether we recognize that or not. And I realized that most of the monsters that people march out to war against saw themselves, once upon a time, as monster fighters. Everyone is, after all, the hero of their own story. Sometimes, they had society's blessing in this; other times, they didn't. But this doesn't change the fact that if we understand that the only way to fight monsters is to create and nurture monsters, we will always have monsters, even if we think that we can control them.

Whole Lot of Pink

The Color of Freedom

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of  Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
"I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye" Ta-Nehisi Coates

If "White Freedom" is the ability to be an individual, to be one's own person and to be able to live one's life without having to move in lockstep with 40+ million other people, no wonder Kanye West wants it. I want it. And this despite the fact that Mr. Coates portrays White Freedom as a bad thing, the genesis of oppression and theories of racial supremacy.

I think that it's worth understanding this in a way that removes the moralizing from having already taken a side. Rather than White freedom and Black freedom, this strikes me as examining a difference between Individual freedom and Collective freedom. And this is one of the major ideological axes of American politics, as the American Right tends to value Individual, and the Left the Collective. The difference being that the political division is portrayed more as one of broader concerns for human welfare, as opposed to a Black and White issue.

I'm somewhat disappointed with the way Mr. Coates frames this issue, placing reprehensible images of "White freedom" alongside esteemed images of "Black freedom," as a way of saying "One of these is better than the other." While partisans will, of course, disagree, in my understanding of the world, there is no determining which of Individual freedom and Collective freedom is better than they other. They are simply different from one another, and each has its own set of assumptions, costs and benefits. And depending on which of those aligns more closely with the way one views the world, one may seem more appealing than the other. Better For You or Better For Me is not the same as simply Better.

One could make the argument that Mr. Coates is simply arguing that Black/Collective freedom is better for Black people in the United States. But in this, I think, he (sadly) falls into one of the traps that our lives have laid for us.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.

There is an assumption here. An assumption that we cannot look out on the world around us and make our own ways. And so Michael Jackson must be criticized, rather than understood, for his struggles with creating a version of himself that he could live with. Because, since it resembled a White man more than a Black one, the rest of us were reduced in our capacity to understand how to be okay with who we are. If White freedom is Individual freedom, and Black freedom is Collective freedom, then Black people are better off with a Collective Black freedom because we are poor at being individuals and still working together towards common ends. But in my own experience, this is due to a dislike of the individual, a dislike that is brought on by attributing Whiteness to the individual; thus seeing them as providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

My freshman year of college, at a Historically Black College/University was a fight from one end to the other, as other students seemed to resent the fact that I spoke in the same way as a suburban White person, and shared many of their interests as well. It was seen as an affectation, and a deliberate rejection of my Blackness, rather than a side effect of living in an overwhelmingly White suburb from the time I was in kindergarten. I was seen as having intentionally severed my connection to the greater community, rather than having simply grown up apart from it.

The irony of the situation was that my father had sent me to Hampton University, allying himself with my general indifference to where I went to college, as a means of reestablishing that very connection, realizing himself that I had been unable to maintain it after so many years of being connected only for a few hours here or a day there.

But the cost that was demanded for connection was the denial of self, and I had spent too many years fighting with my grade school, junior high and high school classmates to define and defend that self to surrender it to a bunch of hostile strangers on the mere basis that we shared a skin tone, and they were brittle. And so I warred with them, and when my father came out in bitter disapproval of my decision to return to school closer to home, I warred with him, too. If was condemned for being too White to satisfy them, then so be it. I'd spent years being isolated for being different. I could handle that remaining the case.

If the Black people that I encountered that one year at Hampton suffered, due to a superficial connection, so be it. Their understanding that I was not only destroying my own psyche, but endorsing the destruction of theirs, did not reach me. Not that it would have made a difference if it had. I had no use for them, or their psyches. I answered rejection with rejection.

Mr. Coates ends with this:

And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of “I,” but a black freedom that called him back—back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home.

But to find yourself back into connection, that connection must be in a place where it can be legitimately found. In my own life, it never was, just as one never "finds" a valuable item on a store shelf. Instead there was a demand that I purchase it. Looking back on it, I realize that the issue was that the people who wanted me to buy back my Blackness and connection to the broader Black community, didn't realize how high a price that they had set on it, just as I think that Mr. Coates doesn't realize how high a price he expects that Michael Jackson should have paid.

Moving between the worlds of Individual and Collective freedom, or White and Black freedom has costs. Costs that are invisible to those who never leave the paradigm in which they were raised. When I encountered Black freedom, it did not call to me. It demanded my presence, and my obedience, and it cared not what I needed to sacrifice in order to meet its demands. But more importantly, it didn't fathom the uncertainty it created. It required that I throw my lot in with people who saw me as deliberately unlike them, and as such allied with a hostile power. But it didn't guarantee a welcome for me when I had done so.

And I think that Mr. Coates does the same. He sees Kanye West as willfully rejecting connection and calling upon him to return to the Collective, but for the good of the collective, and to who-knows-what for Mr. West. There is no admonition to the Collective to open its arms wide and take him in without judgement.

During childhood and adolescence, I'd learned what struck me as the nature and the danger of peer pressure when it came to outsiders. Peer pressure offered a transaction: obedience to the norms of the group, in return for acceptance. But it didn't offer a contract, and the group always demanded the obedience come first; so there was always the risk that one would be left holding the bag. People dislike being asked to pay for something that they understand that they are due, and the Collective is no different. And so the only way that "Home" can truly call to someone who is not there is to be okay with the call never being answered. "Home" has to understand that it is asking for something that does not belong to it.

When I clashed with my fellow students at Hampton University, some 31 years ago, now, they felt that they were admonishing me for what I had done. I felt that they were coming after me for who I was. But to them, who I was, who I really was, was someone just like them, and only a deliberate action had made me different. They too, I think, felt that they were calling me back, rather than demanding that I go to a place that I had never before been. My anger with them has subsided. I'm older now, and I think I understand more. Just as I think that I'll also understand if Mr. West finds himself angry with Mr. Coates. I hope that Mr. Coates will understand, too, but I don't think he will.

For Sex or Money

So I read the blog post by Professor Robin Hanson that started the whole "redistribute sex" hullabaloo, and I think I agree with his point (way down at the end) that most of what people are reacting to is their reflexive disgust at the "incel" movement.

And I suspect that this is something that people should tune into a bit more. The ire that Professor Hanson has brought down upon his head is mostly, I suspect, driven by the idea that "If a person cannot find a partner who is willing to sleep with them, then they should become used to the idea of celibacy." And people who find that unpalatable are "stupid rude obnoxious arrogant clueless smelly people" of little "moral or personal worth." Okay fair enough. But, and this is what the Professor is asking, why is "If a person cannot find an employer who is willing to pay them well for their labor, then they should become used to the idea of poverty," considered heartless by so many?

If it's legitimate for those of us who are satisfied with the amount of sex we have in our lives to be completely unsympathetic to the plight of those who don't, why should there be anything wrong with those who are satisfied with the amount of money they possess being similarly unsympathetic to the poor?

I'm going to hazard a guess that a lot of it has to do with general public attitudes towards sex, and the relative ease of obtaining it. People understand that one can be effectively locked out of the world of a well-paying job through no fault of one's own, but if one is effective locked out of romantic love and sex, it must be through a direct personal flaw, and one that's easily correctable at that. An acceptable sex life then, is infinitely easier to obtain than an acceptable financial life.

And as I understand it, Professor Hanson's point is that this distinction is fundamentally arbitrary. It's a social convention that most of us never give any thought to. People understand how capricious societal standards of attractiveness can be; there are even people who see the shunning that not living up to those standards can produce as harmful. But our sympathies end when someone goes from being desperately lonely to violently angry, even if we tolerate violent anger in other contexts. This isn't something that we have any real need to change. It is, however, worth understanding.

The Misery Trade

(With this post, I'm doing some thinking "out loud," as it were. I'm likely going to have to revisit this topic to write something more coherent, but I'd like to put this out as an initial stab at it.)

Back in a past life, I worked with children in a residential treatment center. It was pretty much what it says on the tin - a therapeutic setting for children who had been taken out of their parents' (or other caregivers') homes for abuse or neglect that was also their full-time residence. Because of this, the facility needed to be staffed around the clock, every day.

When I started, one of the rules of scheduling was that no-one had a "regular" weekend. That is, it was not permissible to schedule someone so that they had both Saturday and Sunday off. After I'd been there a couple of years, there was talk of changing that policy. And one of the objections that was raised was that it wasn't going to be determined solely by seniority. Unit managers could chose which, if any, staff members would have normal weekends off. One of the senior staff who I happened to work with put it this way: "People shouldn't be able to have weekends off until they've paid their dues, just as we have."

I am reminded of this because I was hanging out with friends yesterday, and the subject of student loan forgiveness came up. And the objection that this penalizes people who did what it took to pay their loans off was noted.

This is a common thing in society. I had been thinking of a similar situation just the other day. That time, it had concerned job training and employment assistance for ex-convicts, and the similar objection: What about those people who played by the rules and didn't commit crimes? (Although this usually means "weren't caught at something that includes jail time" in practice.) Why should they be punished in favor of criminals?

American society has a problem in that the stereotypical American is neither poor enough to simply be happy that someone has attained something at a relatively low cost, nor wealthy enough to be dismissive of the costs that they themselves have paid. In other words, our stereotypical American has enough to be able to pay costs for things, while at the same time lacking enough that they are sensitive to those costs. And that, I think, lends itself to the creation a society that values punishments for "wrongdoing" as a means of balancing out the perceived costs of virtue.

The United States is a wealthy nation that is filled with people who are acutely aware of their own personal poverty. Or perhaps I should say misery, instead, since "misery loves company," and many Americans, it seems (and no, I am NOT referring simply to "Trump Voters"), resent it when other people suffer less misery than they themselves do. And this leads to a form of "misery hot potato," where the goal is to not wind up holding the misery ball when the music stops, rather than reducing the amount of misery to a point where no one has to deal much of it.

And this strikes me as a fundamental issue with the way in which the United States deals with capitalism. Capitalism, it is said, is the best way of dealing with the issue of allocating scarce resources. Which is fine and good, but what happens when a given resource is no longer scarce? In my opinion, American capitalism looks for a way to make it scarce again, rather than ceding that resource to another means of managing it. And resource scarcity breeds misery, as people are willing to suffer for access to things that they find to be more valuable than a certain amount of comfort. But not too willing. They feel that suffering acutely, and thus feel like chumps when someone else isn't required to suffer for that same level of access. This, I think, is going to be difficult to expunge from anyone, Americans or not. Even monkeys have been shown to actively dislike being taken for chumps, even when a calmer response is to their direct benefit.

And so now we come to what seems to be a heavier lift than it really should be. Lowering the costs of things people actually want. And I think, paradoxically, the trick here may lie in helping people to feel that the costs are already lower. To the degree that Americans are price sensitive, it's often because they are worried that they don't have enough resources. Addressing that worry would, I believe, make them less sensitive to taxes and other forms of funding the projects that would allow other people to be better off. But this tends to run afoul of political and ideological incentives, which often use stoking the fear of being a chump to fish for votes.

And perhaps in the end, this is the issue. The general public doesn't follow politics. And because they're not engaged, they only way their interests are really going to be looked after is if political figures place the public's interests first. But because the public is disengaged, political figures tend to place their own interests first, because there is little accountability. And because the system tends to be opaque, it's difficult to understand if policies that are described as being in the public's best interests genuinely are (although it sometimes less difficult to ascertain if a given policy makes logical sense, given its stated goals). The general disunity of the American public (the lack of homogeneity or shared goals) creates rifts between sizable groups within the populace that allow politicians to run for office on a platform of directly harming other segments of the electorate. And while those harms tend to come in form of raising costs for disfavored groups, the favored groups rarely see a direct benefit. Rather its the people who provide services that reap the excess costs, because even though voters may be hoping that service providers will cheat the disfavored and pass the benefits along to them, what tends to happen is that the disfavored are cheated and enough of the excess is kept that eventually, the resource imbalance allows for the wealthy to be able to walk away from deals that don't benefit them as much as they would like, and so other people are left to use their tolerance for risk as a bargaining chip. And once one in the business of trading a defined benefit for the chance to gamble, they are unlikely to be able to keep up.

And the only way to really combat this, is through unity. Partisans realize this, but, being partisans, they tend to demand unity on their terms. And so the divisions remain. And misery grows.

Booking Cancellation

Despite personal reservations about Facebook’s interwoven privacy, data, and advertising practices, the vast majority of people find that they can’t (and don’t want to) quit. Facebook has rewired people’s lives, routing them through its servers, and to disentangle would require major sacrifice.
Even Amid Scandal, Facebook Is Unstoppable

One of the things that gives Facebook the "power" that it does is the idea that people are helpless to do anything about the company's practices. But Facebook is just like anything else. Right now, some two-thirds of Americans are on the service. It took the company years to amass that user base, and there is no reason to expect that it wouldn't take just as long to unwind it. But yes, disentangling people's lives from Facebook would require work, and the company counts on people being averse to that level of work to maintain them as customers. But it's not as if Facebook itself did the work to entangle those people - they did it for themselves. And while leaving Facebook would require walking away from some amount of that work, there is nothing stopping people from working over time, until they'd built a new online life for themselves.

The constant litany of stories about how Facebook has become indispensable all rely, as I read them, on the assumption that the only way to leave Facebook is a quick and painless exit. One that allows, with the stroke of a keyboard, people to take all of the benefits of a social-media connected life with them and decamp to a platform that can maintain the massive footprint needed to maintain vast human networks without the need to actually pay any bills for the capability. While we're being completely unrealistic, I'd like to file my request for a space-superiority fighter craft.

The Power To Choose

“When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years? That sounds like a choice. Like, you was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? It’s like we’re mentally in prison.”
Kanye West

This statement, made to TMZ by the entertainer has started yet another teapot tempest, as one expected it would, but maybe the discussion that it sparked should be redirected. Many people are angry at Mr. West because of a narrative that tends to use the understanding of people having a choice as a way of criticizing them for making the wrong choice. Mr. West's statement that Black slaves were "mentally in prison," speaks to this. While what he's referring to is nothing more than a variation on the phenomenon we now call Stockholm Syndrome, there is a degree to which it is considered a deliberate choice on the part of the prisoners; the enslaved, the hostage, what have you.

And when people argue with Mr. West over his characterization of slavery, and its effects on the Black psyche, the argument leaves out a very important point. Namely that there is a difference between lacking an easy and available choice, and lacking a choice. It's worth keeping in mind that the relative merits of choices do not map to their absolute merits; when the available choices are ranked against one another, the best of them may still be a crushingly crappy choice, compared to what one would want in that situation.

The ability to choose between multiple bad outcomes does not negate being victimized at the hands of someone who has closed off the other options. Or in other words, simply having a choice does not saddle one with moral culpability for the outcome. But it's unsurprising that people may have difficulty with this. The moral logic of the terrorist, which claims that the murder of a hostage is the fault of the person who refuses their demands, had also become the moral logic of the police official, which states that the shooting of a suspect is that person's fault for failure to follow commands. In both cases, there is a forgetting that the fatal act was in the hands of someone who had to make choices of their own. And while the expectations of them may have been constrained, their actions were still of their own doing. And in the same way that the terrorist or the police spokesperson use the actions of others as a shield against culpability, so do the defenders of the South of old. If culpability must be shared, then there is less for the slave holding generations (and their modern descendants) to bear.

Later, in an attempt at damage control, Mr. West took to Twitter, and said: “Of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will. My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved.”

And in this, he tapped into another part of our thinking about choices, a concept that many people in the Black community want an exemption from, but seldom challenge; the tendency to fetishize resistance to the death, considering it a corollary to "Quitters never win, and winners never quit." But many people fear death, and understand it to be the absolute worst outcome of a situation, one that people should do anything to avoid. The debate over physician-assisted suicide speaks to this; there is a train of thought that holds that no matter how painful, hopeless or deprived a life is, the very living of that life is infinitely better than being dead, and so that life must be preserved.

And against that backdop, being, or remaining, enslaved can be seen as a rational choice. But perhaps it is not so surprising that Mr. West may feel otherwise. After all, he wholeheartedly backs President Trump, who landed himself in hot water when he derided Senator John McCain's status as a war hero on the basis of his capture and imprisonment by the enemy. They are perhaps united in the sense that submission to a perceived superior force should be considered a form of complicity, if not collaboration.

There is another concept I think is in play here: A belief in the power of Virtue to overcome the power of brute force. But, at least as I see the world, being a good person, or an honorable one, does not lend one the power to defeat all odds, except in fairy tales. And so we can understand that enslaved Africans and their descendants had a choice to rise up, or remain docile, but that neither one of these may have had good ends. While Mr. West may view the likely outcome of a mass slave revolt as the self-motivated slaves quickly winning their freedom from their outnumbered White owners, it's just as possible that it would have ended in the mass slaughter of millions of people. Again, we can make the point that there was an available choice. And that it was impossible at the time, to understand precisely how it would have worked out. But perhaps the hand had written enough on the wall to make an educated guess.

If we say, though, that Mr. West refuses to understand that the choice of being a slave may have been the most sensible choice among bad options, criticizing him for saying there was a choice reinforces that lack of understanding. And this may be seen as corrosive, because the idea that having only bad choices is equivalent to not being able to choose contributes to a sense of helplessness in the face of adversity, when agency is needed most. The person who has only good options, or a clear and easy choice between good and bad outcomes does not need to be particularly active in pursuit of their own self-interest and betterment to the degree that someone tasked with choosing the least bad of several uncertain and undesirable outcomes has to be.

Lastly, I would make this point about how choices are viewed that could perhaps do with a rethink. It may be possible to understand the Black community in the United States over time as being an entity, but it shouldn't be thought of as being an individual. It's individual members are not neurons that contribute to a collective consciousness, personality and, perhaps most importantly for this context, decision engine. For the whole of the 400 years that Mr. West references, each and every individual slave (or even free Black person) had choices to make as to how to conduct their lives, and they had to make them for themselves. Not that they couldn't collaborate, but they were no more able to completely outsource their decision making than I am.

It's worth noting that some number of them chose to take some pretty intense risks to obtain their freedom. And it's also worth noting that for some of them, those risks did not pay off. And while I suspect that people know this, this may be another part of history that suffers from being taught primarily in grade school. It's unlikely that the horrors of being a recaptured slave would be taught to even junior-high school children. I can imagine traumatized children and angry parents without much effort. And while a collective uprising may have insulated many from the direct costs of failure, attempting an escape alone, or only with family members meant understanding what could very well happen.

Because the Kanye West controversy touches on so many aspects of what it means to be Black in the United States, American history and the modern politics of race, it's unlikely to result in a reexamination of how many people think about what it means to have choice. And that's unfortunate, because there is a benefit there.

Get My Good Side

There is something that I really enjoy about taking pictures of people who are taking pictures of people. Perhaps it's the meta-ness of it all.