Booga, Booga, Booga

Sometimes, the scariest thing about Halloween is that it comes along just prior to Election Day. Oh, well. It's my punishment for being a consistent voter...

I See, Therefore I Know

I was first introduced to the concept of Correspondent Inference Theory in Max Abrahm's paper Why Terrorism Does Not Work. Why Terrorism Does Not Work stayed with me (I have two previous posts that reference it), and so when I saw that Professor Abrahms had written an article for The Atlantic, A Psychological Theory Explains the Mail Bomber Reaction I was all over it.

Correspondent Inference Theory says, simply, that people tend to presume the motives of an action from the observable consequences of that action. And this, according to Professor Abrahms, is why terrorism doesn't work. Because no matter what political goals a terrorist might have, when a bomb goes off and people die, the destruction and the body count are inferred to be the goal, and whatever geopolitical concessions a terrorist may have demanded are forgotten.

Having not really had any experience with the broader theory, my own thinking on the topic was confined to terrorism, until I was mulling over the rush to ascribe motive to recent mail-bombing attempts and the weekend's synagogue shooting. While doing this I happened to have a conversation with a co-worker who was complaining about Facebook's supposed censorship of Right-leaning voices and it struck me. The Professor could have titled his paper "Why Everything Does Not Work."

Given a) the lack of an intuited link between the visible consequences of an action and the actor's desired intent and b) a high level of emotional resonance of either the action or the consequences, people will tend to fall into the correspondent inference fallacy. (And it does strike me as a straightforward logical fallacy.) And the visible consequences don't have to be material to have an impact. Take Colin Kaepernick for instance. The number of people who claimed that they felt disrespected by Mr. Kaepernick's choice to kneel, rather than stand, during the National Anthem lead any number of people to infer, incorrectly, that this feeling of disrespect was Mr. Kaepernick's intent, when his stated goal was to draw attention to police violence against Black people in the United States. just like the terrorists that Professor Abrahms discussed in Why Terrorism Does Not Work, Mr. Kaepernick's intent was drowned by the perceived effects of his protest.

And just about every form of activism that people typically engage in has this problem. The Me Too movement is plagued by suspicions that it's actually a cover for a broad score-settling with men, rather than a call for accountability. Of course, this one of those things that once you see, you can find everywhere, and so it's important to be careful. The fact that Correspondent Inference Theory can lead people to a logical fallacy doesn't mean that every time someone guesses at someone's motive, they're wrong; it's possible to come to the correct answer even with incomplete information. And people can come to conclusions with more information than one thinks they have; amusingly, it's possible that a charge of falling into the correspondent inference fallacy can result from one falling into the correspondent inference fallacy oneself.

But understanding the phenomenon grants a different perspective on events, and the reactions to those events.

And it's made me ask myself a simple question, one that I've often overlooked: Why do I believe the people I believe? Why do I believe that terrorists have political goals, or that Conservative activists are genuinely spooked by social justice culture? Why do I avoid attributing motives in line with the observable consequences in those cases where they strike me as incorrect?

Part of it, I think, is that I have a bias towards complexity, and the Correspondent Inference Theory seems to lead people to more simplistic answers for questions of "Why?" than I find workable. Maybe it's that, given that I have a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, I'm not a "naïve psychologist," as Fritz Heider described many people, and my marginally greater degree of sophistication (at the expense of being naïve in other areas) serves me in this regard. In the end, I don't really know. But understanding Correspondent Inference Theory and its predictions of human behavior make a lot of peices appear to fall into place. And that is, in the end, a useful thing.

Danger Zone

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he believes the reaction to the allegations of sexual assault and other misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh makes it "a very scary time for young men in America."

"It is a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of," Trump said. "This is a very, very -- this is a very difficult time. What's happening here has much more to do than even the appointment of a Supreme Court justice."
Jeremy Diamond. "Trump says it's 'a very scary time for young men in America'" Tuesday, 2nd October, 2018.

More recently, "The USC chapter of Young Americans for Freedom set up a table on Trousdale Parkway Wednesday, displaying a poster that read, 'It’s a Dangerous Time for Men — Change My Mind'." So much for profiles in courage.

These comments have sparked heated discussions about what "dangerous" means or what should count as "scary." Or what is a person justifiably afraid of. But perhaps all of this misses the forest for the crooked, frightening shadows of trees.

President Trump and the University of Southern California's Young Americans for Freedom are basically saying that the current culture that demands greater accountability for sexual assault and misconduct makes it dangerous to be a young man (although the cynic in me questions the degree to which the President and USC YAF are referring to all men) and as a result, men have legitimate reason to be afraid for themselves.

Being a Black man (although no longer a young one) myself, I am acquainted with this concern. But I'm also well aware of the difficulties in quantifying this concern. Between 1980 and the mid 1990s, the rape conviction rate per 1,000 male population doubled, from about .1 to about .2. Now, I haven't been able to find any more recent numbers than that (although I'm sure they're out there and my Google-fu is simply weak), but let's suppose that in the intervening 20+ years, the renewed focus on sexual assault and misconduct has lead to that rate doubling again, to .4 men out of every 1,000. That's about 1 in every 2,500 men. Of course, this is an annual number, so it doesn't give us lifetime statistics. And it's both a snapshot in time and a wild-ass guess, so it's not particular useful to long-term estimates. But it's the number that I was able to come up with, so I'll work with it.

Wikipedia tells us that "In 1994, African Americans accounted for between 45 percent and 50 percent of crimes for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault." Of course, this is likely inaccurate, since I doubt that the clearance rate for crimes in 1994 was a) 100% and b) completely accurate. In other words, there's no way of knowing these percentages for actual crimes - you can only work with arrests and convictions, or other items that are statistically counted. But since convictions are basically what we're after, this will work with our back-of-the-text-file calculations. As Black people are about 13% of the population, a rate between 45 and 50% represents being over-represented by a factor of somewhat over three and a half. So our .4 per 1,000 rate jumps to about 1.46 per 1,000 or about 1 person in every 684. Given an overall exoneration rate of about 11.6% or a little under one in eight, and my chances of going to jail in any given year these days for a sexual assault that I didn't commit, is somewhere in the area of .17 out of one thousand. That becomes 1.7 out of one hundred, or about 1.7%. Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that Black people are also over-represented in exonerations, but this is wonky and inaccurate enough as it is.

Now, the point of that exercise was to attempt to put an actual number on my chances of being incorrectly convicted of sexual assault. It's not a simple task, as you can see, but it comes up with a fairly low number, that's still likely on the high side. Of course, that 1.7% annual chance, compounded over time, becomes fairly substantial, but not likely enough to keep me up at night.

But what if it was? What if my chances of being convicted of a rape that I didn't commit were high enough that it felt like a clear and compelling risk? Well, there wouldn't be much that I, as an individual, could do about it. (Which is part of the reason there's no really point in losing sleep over it.) But if there was, the most effective path would likely be to understand what lead to that elevated chance and address it.

Dealing with the uncertainties of criminal prosecutions would be one way to approach the topic. Are police and prosecutors doing everything readily available to them to weed out potentially innocent parties when choosing who they are going to arrest and prosecute? Are they incentivized to do these things? If not, why not?

And that's where we get to a deeper part of the problem. President Trump and the University of Southern California's Young Americans for Freedom are attempting to push back against the current social drive to do more to hold people accountable for sexual misconduct by pointing to the fears of being wrongfully accused, rather than addressing the fears of being subjected to sexual misconduct. In other words, they're focused on their own fears of someone else's fear response. But if women were less afraid of being assaulted...

Of course, that's a tall order. Changing someone else's emotional response to the world around them is difficult. Once a woman has come to understand that any given man may be ready, willing and able to attack her sexually, it may be too late to substantially alter that perception. And, as so many other things, safety is a perception. I had it drilled into me from a young age that I was not safe from accusations of sexual misconduct. And even having an understanding of how one would go about calculating the numbers (even though I don't have accurate statistics at hand) doesn't completely remove the concern. And I will admit that my day-to-day behavior reflects those concerns.

And that's in part because no-one cares about them, which doesn't leave me room to ignore the causes of those concerns. People being afraid of me is bad for me, and so I have learned to take steps to mitigate those fears. But this isn't a new thing for me. USC's Young Americans for Freedom, on the other hand, may be coming face-to-face with this for the first time. And they're young people. Learning to understand why other people may be afraid of them, rather than afraid for them in the way they they're afraid for themselves takes time. And a willingness to take responsibility for people's fears of them, in the absence of personal fault for those fears take longer. (And the President isn't helping.)

Proven

I've been pondering that perhaps the idiom "jumping to conclusions," is somewhat misleading. I think that perhaps "bridging to confirmations" is a more accurate understanding of the phenomenon. Information that appears provide evidence of what people already think is true is treated as definitive evidence and then provides a ready path between reality and that particular truth.

It's been said that the best way to get someone to believe something is to start with something that they already want to believe, and perhaps the willingness with which people can latch on to perceived proofs demonstrates this. But, of course, there is vindication is being correct, and so maybe this is just to be expected.

The Meaning of “Consensus”

This article and its research were based on a false premise. There is no consensus about what “political correctness” means.

A solid research study would have asked Americans simple questions like, “Do you think all people should be treated the same?” or “Do you think all people deserve to be treated with respect?”
Kate Permut
Letters: “The Term ‘Political Correctness’ Primes People to Respond Negatively”

Of course, that presumes that there is a consensus about "treating all people the same" or "treating all people with respect" means. And I would submit that the bickering over PC culture is a direct result of the fact that there is no such consensus. And that leaves out any debates that terms like "should" and "deserve" inject into the picture.

Ms. Permut goes on to say that for her: "[Political correctness] means 'Treat everyone with the same respect'." But what does that mean, in practice? Treating everyone the same, treating everyone with respect and treating everyone as they wish to be treated are not necessarily the same things. And they can each mean different things to people on different sides of an interaction.

Reading through the letters, it was interesting how people often laid out simple, or even simplistic, definitions of “political correctness.” Such as: “just being polite,” or “fostering politeness and respect.”

This is, I think something we often see when people are dealing with something they understand to be self-evident. It's simple enough that no shading or nuance is needed. Of course all people shouldn't be treated the same. There are any number of reasons to treat two people differently under the same circumstances. But, for instance, not allowing a handicapped person to park closer to doors is not what Ms. Permut had in mind when she wrote her statement. Likewise, what treating someone with respect means differs. I suspect that the respect given to someone who has just done a service and someone who has just committed a crime might be quite different from one another. And she likely expects people to understand that. But the problem with simply expecting people to assume things is that they don't know where their assumptions should begin and end.

Therefore, there is something incomplete in pointing out the lack of consensus around the term political correctness, but failing to understand the lack of consensus in other terms, especially those that we consider "simple." Expecting the boundaries of assumption to be bright enough that they don't need to be clearly drawn is a minefield.

Pay Up

There is an article in The Guardian that found its way into my social media feed: The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers. The piece is subtitled: “The habits of the wealthiest mirror the supposed ‘pathologies’ of the poor. But while those in poverty are called lazy, the rich are dubbed bon vivants.” It’s not a very long read, and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin, a lamentation of the double standard that the author, Copenhagen Business School Professor of Economic Sociology Brooke Harrington, sees in the way we view “bad behavior” on the part of the wealthy versus the impoverished. The point is driven forcefully home in the conclusion of the piece, which a reader had copied into their social media post as the “money quote.”

It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.

For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from others’ expectations – like buying ice cream or soft drinks with food stamps – results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy, and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty, brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of “personal responsibility” – the poor deserve to die because of their moral failings.

So while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense. Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a public scolding.

It’s a point well taken. But it is also a point narrowly made. And like most discussions of rights, it leaves out something that many of us don’t often think about. The statement “everything has a price” is a cliché, one that we expect to hear from the obnoxiously materialistic character in a movie who is seeking to crassly trade mere money for something priceless out of an inability to see true worth. But it is, when viewed another way, a simple fact of life. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be that “everything has a cost” in that everything requires some input of energy and or resources to continue. All life in our Solar System is powered, directly or indirectly, by sunlight. Were the Sun to somehow suddenly pack its bags and head off for parts unknown, the end would come for everythng. There are some places were the heat of the Earth could keep things going for a time, but it would only be a matter of time before the cold and dark did everything in.

The “right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit,” like the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” require some expenditure of resources. And the simple declaration of these things as rights does not alter that. Instead, they become commitments, created or aspired to, to lift those costs from the shoulders of individuals and spread them among everyone, such that the requisite price is paid, regardless of the wealth or poverty of any given person. But for all that the authors of the Declaration of Independence believed that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” said Creator was nowhere to be found when the bill came due. And so it was either left to others to pony up, or the debt went unpaid; and settling it often took the form of those rights being repossessed.

Accurately or not, most societies feel that the wealthy, or even the modestly well off, pay for their vices from their own pockets. Were I to walk into a grocery store and stagger out under the weight of an unhealthy amount of soft drinks and ice cream, there would likely be little in the way of public scorn. Not because of my sneaking out under cover of darkness, but because if I pay with cash or card, the money for those purchases is assumed to be mine. Likewise if, after consuming all of that fat, sugar and artificial flavoring, I wound up in the hospital, as long as I paid the bill, I could expect to left alone by most. But if there were an idea that I was spending the public's money, and not my own, that acceptance would rapidly evaporate.

Whether the very wealthy are truly spending their own resources on their extravagances and leisure is an open question, and one that I am flatly unqualified to answer. But I would presume that the public understands that they are spending their own money, even if some of that money was only available for them to spend due to tax fraud. And I would also presume that many people believe that the world is a just enough place that very wealthy people are deserving, however they might understand that, of being very wealthy. And in that sense, the bad behavior of the wealthy doesn’t feel like a taking in the way that the behavior of the dependent poor does.

It’s also worth noting that accountability imposes costs as well. And one of the reasons why the poor tend to feel the lash more frequently is the perception that punishing them is less expensive than punishing the better-off. If Judge Kavanaugh is deemed worth more than the rest of us because of the high level of investment that has been made in him, and holding him accountable for his actions in high-school risks that investment, it makes some sense why, in the end, it didn’t happen. The same could be said for any number of people. This, of course, creates yet another bitter pill for the poor; the overall lack of investment in them gives them nothing to trade for forbearance, while the wealthy often purchase forgiveness with the resources that we showered on them.

In order to understand human rights as things that are the birthright of all people, simply by virtue of their birth, there has to also be an understanding that the resources to pay for those things are readily available to the point where they won’t be missed. I don’t understand most of any given society, let alone humanity to be at that point. I’m not sure that any sizable number of people will ever get there.

Mutliplying by Pie

The court case around Harvard University's use of race as a factor in admissions is being billed as a trial for the future of affirmative action. And that's fair enough. But I tend to think of it as a verdict over a different aspect of American culture, one which it's perhaps guilty of, even though (or perhaps because) it never really makes it into the limelight.

The whole reason why there is a lawsuit over Harvard's admissions policy is that being admitted to Harvard, or any number of other high-powered schools, is a thing of value. And the number of seats available hasn't kept up with the demand. And maybe that's what we should be looking into.

Part of the things that makes certain schools desirable is the difficulty in getting into them. I fell into that trap back when I was in high-school. I went to a nice college-prep school that not just anyone could attend. You had to pass a placement test to get in. I made it, and in my mind, this was proof that I was smarter than my junior-high classmates that didn't make it. But it was likely a certain amount of simple luck, in the end. I'm pretty sure that there were more people who made the cutoff than there were slots available, and so some number of people who would have thrived there went to other schools instead. And it's likely that some of them wound up in less-selective schools, simply because there weren't enough spaces for them to get into the places they'd applied to, since selective high-schools were kind of thin on the ground where I grew up. And, perhaps more importantly, they couldn't easily scale to demand over the short term.

And being a Black student at a college-prep high school, some of my fellow students has no qualms about saying that I was there due to affirmative action. Which was really simply a semi-oblique way of saying that I wasn't actually smarter than some of the people who didn't make it. And that I wasn't actually smart enough to be in the same school as themselves. Unfortunately, I spent a good part of that four years looking in vain for something that would shut them up.

I suspect that a lot of people go through this sort of thing, if for no other reason than as the eligible pool of applicants grows larger, the supply of seats doesn't scale to it. And this means that when some new demographic group is granted eligibility, the incumbents have less. It may not be a completely zero-sum game, but it's close enough that it may as well be, at least in the minds of participants in the game.

This, I think, is where we failed. When the United States made a social commitment to open the doors to valuable institutions to people who had been previously locked out of them, there wasn't a corresponding commitment to increase the capacity of those institutions to accommodate the greater numbers. And so without more slices of the pie, people who had previously been able to count on a slice found that others were being granted them instead. And the Harvard case is, to a degree, about getting those slices back.

To the degree that Affirmative Action is broken, this is why. It sought to even out the distribution of opportunity, but it also, at the same time, sought to even out the distribution of privation. This was, in large part, I suspect, due to the fact that while rules, regulations and guidelines can impact how college seats are apportioned, they are much less effective as increasing the number of seats, and the numbers of pipelines to those seats. And that is what we're still feeling the lack of.

All Quiet

One of the knocks on Google+ was that it was a "ghost town," with no-one around. I'd never found this to be true, personally, mainly because in the early days, the Circles functionality made sweeping in lots of new people quick and painless. Sure, people drifted away from the platform, and so I started to see the same voices on a regular basis, but it never felt as empty as the tech press often made it out to be, although the absence of many major businesses was conspicuous.

About six months ago, however, Google removed the Next Blog feature from Blogger. It had been a fun pastime, now and again, pressing the button, and seeing what other blogs Google felt belonged in the same neighborhood as Nobody In Particular. And as much as I tended to feel that the choices it made were strange, Blogger feels somewhat lonely and isolated without it.

I don't know why the feature was removed, but I can come up with reasons that make sense to me. It had become more and more difficult to find blogs that were still being actively maintained via the Next Blog feature, and so, as time went on, it started to feel more and more like a tour of a dying neighborhood, where more and more of the homes were dark every time you came back. But still, there were fun little spaces tucked away in there, and interesting snippets of people's lives.

Nobody In Particular is a personal project, something I do almost for its own sake. I don't really advertise it, and I don't really have a soapbox for it, so it has never picked up that big of a following. And I expected as much. But still, I wonder if anyone ever stumbled upon it via the Next Blog button, and was curious about what they saw.

Wise

What does it mean to be wise?

People will often use "wise" as a compliment, and therefore it makes sense that people like to be called wise, and will pursue that, but what does it actually mean, in one's day-to-day life, to be wise?

As much as I know that I shouldn't, I worry about being a fool. But it occurred to me today that I didn't know what it meant to be a fool, either, outside of being called one. And I keep trying to train myself to not worry about the labels that other people chose for me, because, in the end, I have no control over them. If someone wishes to call me a fool, then they will, and if other people wish to agree with that assessment, that choice is theirs, not mine.

But, of course, detaching one's emotions from the world around one is easier said than done, and there is a reason for that. The process of human evolution is not infallible, but natural selection advances those traits that result in people living longer, and presumably better, lives. The flash of anxiety that I receive when I feel that I have to defend my worth as a person in some way or another exists, because, for the most part, nothing demonstrably better has come along. At least, nothing that our genetic code has seen fit to pick up on.

And so I often find myself wondering: Is it really better to try and work my way past it? Is it really better to attempt to free myself from the worry about things that I understand that I can't control? Or is this the path that has simply lead everyone who has taken it before me to destruction.

To Err

A middle-aged White woman is standing at the register in a New York deli. A young Black man passes behind her. The woman turns, startled. Then she appears to call the police to report that she'd been sexually assaulted.

According to the deli's surveillance camera footage, the young man's backpack had brushed the woman as he passed. According to the police department, there was no 911 call from the deli. The woman, facing a phalanx of reporters and angry local residents, apologizes to the boy for her error.

Welcome to the intersection of a newfound awareness of how often women deal with sexual harassment in public, and a newfound awareness of how often the police are called when White people become suspicious of the Black people in their vicinity. Question: which issue has the right-of-way?

In part the problem with the highly negative response to the woman's apparent call to the authorities was that her presumption that the boy had touched her intentionally as he passed was in error. The expectation of infallibility is simply too high a bar to meet. If we are going to encourage women to report situations in which they feel that men have acted inappropriately towards them, a certain number of false positives are to be expected. Another part of the problem is the assumption of racism (which, as I've noted before, is likely the most enduring legacy of past racism). It can be difficult to discern a jackass from a racist on the strength of one encounter; usually a racist is simply someone who is selective about whom they're a jackass to. But here, to even call the woman a jackass takes us back to the expectation of infallibility; sometimes, a supposed "bigot" is merely someone who misjudges someone who is not like them.

The article I read doesn't give us any details about the young man involved, other than to refer to him as a boy who is Black and had a blue backpack. (To be sure, the article's main thrust seems to be bandwagonning on the naming and shaming of the woman, which is why I'm not linking to it.) So we don't know how old he was, which may offer some insight into whether or not a charge of groping a woman would seem reasonable. (But I'm guessing he was fairly young.) But here again, we have a quandary. If we're going to encourage women to speak out, and encourage others to believe them, sometimes we're going to faced with accusations that, at first glance, seem unreasonable. The whole point of calling upon society to believe women when they claim that they've been harassed or assaulted is to free them of having to make that reasonability judgment for themselves, and by themselves. That becomes a pointless exercise if we're going to expect an error rate of zero.

As for living while Black, here again, we run into an expectation of infallibility that's likely unreasonable. While most of the incidents of Black people having the police called out on them strike us a patently ludicrous, it's likely that the truly ambiguous and edge cases don't make the news. And so again, a certain number of false positives are to be expected, and, perhaps just as importantly, forgiven. (Especially if, as studies note, White Americans are more prone to anxiety disorders.) Would the woman have been so quick to complain had it been a White child? Or would she have been more likely to assume good intent; or, in this case, a wayward backpack, from the start? There's no good way to know the answer to that question. But in the absence of that knowledge, assumption is a poor substitute. And I don't know if assuming that people who make such allegations are always knowingly wrong is any better than when it was assumed they were always right.

In the end, this strikes me as a fairly mild incident, although the woman who claimed she'd been assaulted is in for a hard time until the Internet turns its fickle attentions elsewhere. But in a way, even this is progress. In living memory, people have died for less.

Injustice for All

The Atlantic staff writer Jemele Hill penned an interesting piece on Black men who, essentially feel that Judge Brett Kavanaugh is getting a raw deal. Ms. Hill notes that she "expected to hear frustration that the sexual-assault allegations against him had failed to derail his Supreme Court appointment." Instead, she relates, she encountered sympathy for him. Expecting that the most left-leaning audience of The Atlantic might find this odd, she notes: "The caping for Kavanaugh does make a twisted kind of sense."

The bulk of the article concerns itself with the case of one Brian Banks, an aspiring football player whose goal of playing in the National Football League were pretty much totally derailed by an accusation of a high-school classmate that he had sexually assaulted her. Ms. Hill, while saying that she understands the parallels between Judge Kavanaugh's case and Mr. Banks', says that "it’s impossible to look at [the Banks case] closely without arriving at a very different set of conclusions" than "identifying" with Kavanaugh. The difference, according to Ms. Hill, is that Judge Kavanaugh was privileged and Mr. Banks was not.

As a Black man myself, I find this beside the point. I'm very clear on the fact that if someone from my high school or college years were to come forward today with an accusation that I'd sexually assaulted them, I too would have: "no legions of well-connected friends to vouch for [me], no army of partisan defenders, no politicians rallying to [my] defense." It would be me against the credibility of my accuser. And I am under no illusions as to who would have more credibility if someone like Dr. Ford were to point an accusing finger in my direction.

Being accused of a crime that you believe yourself (rightly or wrongly) to be innocent of sucks. And, even without firsthand knowledge of it, I believe that it sucks enough that I wouldn't wish it on anyone, regardless of how much unearned privileges I felt they'd been given. And while it may be very true that what can happen to someone like me may not ever happen to someone like Judge Kavanaugh. But if it happens to him, it most certainly can happen to me. And insisting that what happens to people like me must also happen to people like him is unlikely to change that. And so I understand that while effective due process protections for people like Judge Kavanaugh might not protect me, I have no chance at them if he doesn't.

But even beyond that, justice spreads much more easily via generosity than it does via hostage-taking. While both approaches may fail, standing up for the due process rights of others strikes me as more effective way to secure them for myself than wishing on them the same sorry fate that people might expect (or even wish) would befall me. For Black men to be frustrated that Dr. Ford's allegations didn't do Judge Cavanaugh's nomination in isn't to wish for a better world. It's to wish for a worse one, out of a sense that if we can't have something, no-one should. Who does that serve?

Let the Wookiee Win

So anyway, I read the following on the blog of someone I "know" online, who, it's safe to say, is something of a conservative. I've snipped it a bit, but not by much, as I'd like to coney the full point. And I'm not linking to it, although I know this robs it of some credibility, because I don't mean to call the author out, as I find him to be a genuinely thoughtful person, even if I don't always agree with him.

[... I]f we assume Kavanaugh is a rapist based on the evidence at hand, this is the message, I as a man, will receive:

How you behave doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you've accomplished or how you've treated women. If one woman comes forward and makes an accusation against you, no matter how vague or difficult to corroborate, we will believe her, and assume you are a rapist, assaulter, or abuser. There is no amount of goodwill you can bank that will protect you from this.

Maybe it's worth it. Maybe this is better or a just comeuppance for the fear women have had to live with.

But it is a real cost. And not all men will respond to this by being super-careful. We are removing an incentive to behave well. If I'm going to be considered a rapist anyway, why not? [...]

Now, I understand the logic here, and it makes sense. You could boil it down to "If I'm going to do the time, why not do the crime?" But where it doesn't work for me is in the fact that isn't generally how society looks at things. Imagine the following:

If we assume Black people are criminals based on popular prejudices, this is the message, I as a Black person, will receive:

How you behave doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you've accomplished or how you've treated other people. If a White person comes forward and makes an accusation against you, no matter how vague or difficult to corroborate, we will believe them, and assume you are a rapist, murderer or drug dealer. There is no amount of goodwill you can bank that will protect you from this.

Maybe it's worth it. Maybe this is better or a just comeuppance for our failure to constantly police one another.

But it is a real cost. And not all Black people will respond to this by being super-careful. We are removing an incentive to behave well. If I'm going to be considered a criminal anyway, why not?
While I dislike saying "you know how this would turn out," because that serves to hold people accountable for what I think they would think or do, rather than what they have done, when was the last time you heard someone say, "You know, maybe the criminality that we complain about in minority communities is triggered by the soft bigotry of our own low expectations, and if we stopped treating whole groups of people like criminals, they'd rise to our expectations"?

As much as I understand that there are a lot of factors that go into whether or not someone chooses to break the law in serious ways, the single largest factor tends to be choice. But even given that, societies do a lot to attempt to influence the cost-benefit analysis of breaking the rules. And the imperfections of the justice system often mean that while there's substantial overlap between the people who commit crimes and the people who are held accountable for them, the mapping isn't perfect. And it's generally understood that Black Americans are more likely to be treated as though they've committed a crime when they haven't than White people.

And if the logic is, in fact, sound, then why shouldn't this sort of thing be a general call to presume innocence until proven guilty?

Han Solo: Let him have it. It’s not wise to upset a Wookiee.
C-3PO: But sir. Nobody worries about upsetting a droid.
Han Solo: That’s 'cause a droid don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets when they lose. Wookiees are known to do that.
C-3PO: I see your point, sir. I suggest a new strategy, R2. Let the Wookiee win.

Although to be sure, Black people are often considered big and scary. It's just that firearms trump the ability to pull arms out of sockets. But the Star Wars quote does sort of touch on what I think part of the problem is. "If I'm going to be considered a rapist anyway, why not?" can be viewed as a low-level threat. And White men can make these sorts of veiled threats without threatening the mainstream of the established social order, because they're not threatening one another, and they are the mainstream of the social order. And the mainstream of the social order is always the Wookiee in the room, able to pull arms from sockets because there's no one bigger to stop them.

Chants of "no justice, no peace," come across as extortionate, because they are. But they're also aimed at the mainstream of the established social order from outside of it, and the social order, when it mobilizes to defend itself, pulls people's arms out of their sockets. And so the only notion of fairness, or sportsmanship, that it must take into account is its own. And so the withholding of innocent until proven guilty can be viewed as a theft, something that perpetrators risk being punished for by people who can decide that if they've already paid the invoice, they may as well have something to show for it. No one risks upsetting the droids, because the droids aren't the strongest people in the room.

Force, as it always does, dictates terms. The whole reason why the reckoning between Dr. Ford and now-Justice Kavanaugh has been so long in coming, the reason why the evidence is vague and difficult to corroborate is that back in the early eighties, when Dr. Ford was in high school (and I was too, for that matter), she was the droid. And whether or not the powers that be would have pulled her arms from their sockets, it was decided that the risk wasn't worth it. So she let the Wookiee win. Perhaps we would all have been better off if she'd stood her ground and risked dismemberment.

Maybe the backlash is worth it. Maybe all of the acrimony that surrounded this process is better than the alternative or a just comeuppance for what was arguably an act of cowardice. Maybe never seeking justice provides men on the margin of mistreating women with an incentive to behave.

Or maybe it just allows us to avoid reckoning with the reality of the world that we've created, one where the mainstream can be sore losers. Or maybe I'm simply a fool for playing by the rules; after all, it not like people don't already treat me like a criminal.

Lifeboats Away

The impending shutdown of Google+ is proving to be interesting. There has been a lot of trying out new social media sites and reporting back on the pros and cons of each. The founder of one popular alternative, MeWe, has shown up on Google+ "in person," as it were, to make a pitch for his service. To the best of my knowledge, he's the only direct representative of a company to actively recruit new users.

While Google+ going away may seem that it would be a boon to Facebook, it wouldn't be a direct one. People who came to Google+ and stayed throughout the place being called a "ghost town" over and over again (mainly, I suspect, due to a lack of a major presence of popular businesses on the site) are unlikely to want to migrate to Facebook. So it's likely not worth Facebook's time to even detail an intern to look into enticing people to the Zuck side.

But there is a fairly simple way that Facebook can benefit from this event. If:

• The migration becomes fairly chaotic,
• Former Google + user groups to fragment and disintegrate and/or
• Rumors of colonization by spammers and political extremists gain traction,

This will benefit Facebook. Mainly, I suspect, because the "Google failure beat" of the technology media will be watching. The more painful the transition away from Google+ is, the more it buttresses the idea that moving away from Facebook, while maintaining the digital life one spent so much time and energy building, will be difficult and risky. It's Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that Facebook doesn't have to have their fingerprints on.

If Facebook is the Major Leagues, Google+ was largely considered an abject failure because it was never able to rise above farm-club or college team status. But even if you consider that generous, and would compare Google+ to a high-school team, other social media platforms have avoided the stigma of failure, because even though they're only Little League (or even T-ball), no one expects them to be any better. It's believed that they're always going to be marginal players. I'd never even heard of MeWe prior to the announcement that Google+ would be shuttered - it doesn't even show up in Wikipedia.

Which raises a question of its own. Facebook is not in the social media business. It's in the information business. While it's commonly said that Facebook users are the company's product, it's likely more accurate to say that they're suppliers, wholesalers if you prefer; the information and attention they bring is being sold to other business customers as Facebook's product. This, it seems to me, is part of why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had so much difficulty answering Senator Lindsey Graham when asked: "Is there an alternative to Facebook in the private sector?" A straight and honest answer would have required admitting to the true customer base. (Of course, another reason could easily be that Mr. Zuckerberg understood that if he claimed another company could actually compete with them, that upset users might immediately switch to the other service.) Alphabet could afford to be in the social media business, they have a ton of money; they didn't need Google+ to be a profit center. In the end, this didn't stop them from under-resourcing Google+, and rather than remedy that, they decided to simply nix the whole enterprise.

Although that leaves aside the question of whether Google+ was genuinely in the social media business, it does raise an important question: Can anyone actually survive with "social media" as their product, rather than as payment for something more valuable? On the face if it, that answer appears to be "no." Social media users expect to be able to access a service without needing to pay money. And if all they're going to bring to the table is attention and information, then social media providers will have to find a way to parley that into a means of keeping the lights on and the servers running.


The lack of a single clear alternative to Facebook (or, perhaps, Google+ being that alternative) already works in Facebook's favor. It might not be a literal monopoly, but it's close enough. The five-year head start that Facebook had over Google turned out, in the end, to be completely insurmountable, even with Facebook making one misstep after another. But I suspect that people will be watching, to see how easy it is for the orphaned Google+ user base to build new digital homes for themselves. If it goes off without a hitch, others could be enticed to make the leap. But if it goes badly, Facebook's boosters will be waiting.

Bait and Switch

So a bar in Seattle kicked out a group of Republicans (who may or may not have been provocateurs), and this started a debate on the merits of ideologically-based discrimination, as opposed to other sorts.

When defenders of the "Free Market" spoke up, the following was offered: "Every time the 'free market' approach is argued I have to point out that we have existing proofs in this country within the last century that it does not work." This triggered two sequential responses, one from a self-described Libertarian and one from a self-described Anarchist.

The Libertarian offered that, essentially, that discrimination against Black Americans was not a side-effect of the functioning of the free market, but of its subversion. He said of the Jim Crow South: "The businesses were told by the government that they not only could oppress, but should oppress, [Black Americans]."

The Anarchist, on the other hand, basically said that remedy of government intervention is worse than the disease: "It may 'work,' sort of, while you're able to lock up your opponents fast enough, but (a) that is the wrong thing to do, it just is, and (b) violence, including politically motivated violence, destabilizes society pretty rapidly […]"

This is what I mean when I use the term "Institutional 'hypocrisy'," and it illustrates one of the main problems with many political arguments; namely, that people can support the same policy for completely different reasons. And those differing reasons give the uninitiated pause.

To the degree that people don't (can't or won't is tangential) understand the differing points of view that support the free market, the differing arguments of the Libertarian and the Anarchist seem like a bait-and-switch: The Free Market is touted as a solution to systemic discrimination, but its supporters know that it actually offers no remedies, and in fact, proscribes them in the name of "freedom."

Libertarian: Government intervention caused discrimination, so non-intervention will give non-discrimination. (The {perceived} bait.)
Anarchist: Government intervention itself is evil, so we shouldn't be doing it regardless, even if non-intervention would directly bring about discrimination. (The {perceived} switch.)

The difference between the Libertarian and the Anarchist, being invisible or unknown to a supporter of government regulation and/or intervention, feels like two people working in concert to deceive or have it both ways, since they understand (incorrectly) that Conservatives hold to a single monolithic belief set. In a culture in which the presumption of good intent is considered to be foolish, the assumption often is that the Anarchist's belief that government intervention is the wrong thing to do is motivated by the knowledge that it would prevent discrimination.

This is not meant to be a knock on their separate arguments, but rather an illustration of how political discourse is complicated when you have multiple people arguing for the same things. Since people can support policies for their own reasons, the differences between those reasons often strikes people as intentionally disingenuous, rather than simply uncoordinated.

Going Courting

One of the things that the fight over confirming Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States had brought home for me is that for many people, the job of the Court is not to determine what the Constitution allows or does not allow. Instead, the job of a Court Justice is to ensure that the determinations reached by the political party that put them there are affirmed. And an ideological majority results in the Court having that same job.

And in this sense, the Supreme Court is a political body. Which is what one would expect of it. There is nothing about being a judge that renders one above the ideological divide that the rest of the nation endures. The public views their interests through their ideology, and votes for legislators and executives that will advance those interests. The President seeks to appoint justices that their voters approve of, and legislators vet them for adherence to ideological orthodoxy.

This strikes me as perhaps unfortunate, but not unexpected. And it not a failure of Democracy, as mediating enduring ideological disputes is not the purpose of Democratic governance.

Reflections

A picture I took about 13 years ago, that I never did anything with. I've decided that it should live here for a while.

Attention

So the test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System took place late this morning, and, as you likely know if you're reading this in the United States, it was titled "Presidential Alert."

Which seems to be an odd name for something that has nothing to do, really, with the President. The NWEAS isn't intended to be a bullhorn, or a bully pulpit for the current inhabitant of the Oval Office. According to FEMA: "You would not have a situation where the president would just wake up one morning, and attempt to send a personal message." But it seems that referring to the message as a "Presidential Alert" gave a lot of people the idea that this is just what could happen. And it's not like a term such as "National Alert" is trademarked or anything.

So... why do it?

I don't know. And frankly, I don't feel that I could speculate with anything approaching any accuracy, so I won't. But it does seem like an odd choice, given how polarizing a figure the President is.