Benevolent Dictation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Slice, Please

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digging Deep

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

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

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

Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

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

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

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

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

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

Cup Overflowing

Misty Morning Cold

The Dictatorship of Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Course They Did

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not All Superheroes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Overanalysis Mode: Dis-engaged.)

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

The Cult of Parenthood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dystopianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the Same

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's home turned out to be in the path of the Woolsey fire in southern California, and it was saved, at least in part, by a private firefighting crew hired by their insurance company. Presumably because sending people out to make sure that the house didn't burn to the ground was less expensive than paying to have it rebuilt and replacing a bunch of the stuff that's in it.

But, there has been a fair amount of controversy about this. The Atlantic takes some time to speak to the hullabaloo, while also laying out a brief history of firefighting in America. The story concludes as follows:

“Are the present examples (Kanye West et al.) the thin end of a wedge that will lead to the wealthy buying better services in all these realms: education, policing, healthcare, firefighting?” [University of Kansas historian Victor] Bailey wondered. “Or are we already a long way down this path?”

Well, to answer Mr. Bailey's question, we're already a long way down the path. After all, the wealthy can pay for private schools for their children, private security for their property and persons, pay the prices that physicians charge for whatever procedures they wish and a host of other things. And they already can have access to better firefighting, through the simple expedient of moving to a location where a number of other wealthy people live and paying the requisite taxes. In fact, they can do that for everything on Mr. Bailey's list. What Zip code one lives in goes a long way towards determining the baseline quality of public education, police departments, local medical services and the fire departments. We know this already, right?

The aspect brought up by the Woolsey fire is that merely being in proximity to wealth doesn't allow one to avail themselves of the supposedly superior private services that the wealthy can buy for themselves. Being able to get into the right Zip code may grant access to the "better" public schools that the 1% can send their children to. But if they hire private tutors for their children, their less well-off neighbors are still shut out. But that logic falters somewhat in this case. While firefighting is a publicly-funded service in many places, this is less often the case for homeowners insurance, except in the case of certain lines, like flood insurance, that private insurers are less interested in taking on. And it's hard to make the case that the homes of the wealthy should be allowed to burn simply to keep them on a par with their neighbors, when it's understood that this will result in a claim that will need to be paid - the money that the insurance company saved by protecting the home, rather than rebuilding it, can go to other people. This is not to say that preventing the destruction of the home is a benefit to others. But the extra money spent is deadweight loss, and that does no-one any good.

At some point, we're going to have to answer the question of what is money for. If, through a myriad of individual choices, people decide to make some fraction of the populace wealthy, what are they allowed to do with that wealth? If the only permissible expenditures are useless frivolities, is that genuinely going to address the perceived disparities? I'm not sure that it will, but perhaps we'll find out.

What You Don't Know

There has been an interesting debate going on at work over the merits of the Non-Aggression and Voluntarism Principles. Our resident Anarchist has been arguing that they're enough to base a workable and complete system of morality on, because everyone of sound mind and good will basically agrees on things like "what constitutes aggression" and whatnot.

He and I have been slipping into the same debate off and on for something about a year now, mainly because he is of the understanding that people have an innate moral sense, and that when taken together, this moral sense closely approximates an objective morality, and the disagreement is simply in the details and margins. I, on the other hand, being a moral anti-realist, believe that when left to their own devices, people come up with moral standards that are all over the map, and can easily be at cross purposes with one another.

When the Anarchist asked me for an example of how two people could have diametrically opposed understandings of what is permissible under the Non-Aggression Principle, I offered the following Alice and Bob scenario:

Alice: Abortion is a form of aggression against human beings who happen to not have been born yet.

Bob: Restrictions on abortion are a form of aggression against women who do not wish to be mothers, simply because they have become pregnant.

In this case, "aggression" is basically defined as violence, when employed for a reason other than preventing the violation of another's rights, which was accepted by the assembly. When he asked how I though that this conflict would play out in practice, I laid out scenarios under which Alice and Bob would come into conflict with other people, and each other, while each sincerely believing that they were acting in accordance with the Non-Aggression Principle, which allows violence for the protection of rights, either one's own, or someone else's. So Alice could use violence to prevent abortions, which she sees as aggression against the unborn, and Bob could use violence to prevent women being forced to carry to term, which he sees as aggression against the woman, and each would be within their sincere understanding of the principle.

And this is where the discussion took an unexpected, and illuminating, turn. The Anarchist replied:

Like I said, this is a grey area. Grey areas are dangerous, I admit that. But I do not believe anyone would be killing doctors who are about to perform an abortion.

He was, of course, immediately deluged with examples of just that happening. But that's beside the point. For me, the interesting piece of this is how the abortion debate in the United States, and the violence that has gone along with it, had somehow managed to get by a resident of the United States. Had he been living in a nation where the matter had been settled, because one side or the other simply dominated the public discourse, I could have understood it. I don't follow politics in, say, Italy. There could be the same sort of long-running social conflict there that I would have no idea about.

But his general premise of "everyone effectively has the same moral understanding" suddenly made a lot more sense. If he was literally unaware of a case like the abortion debate, in which, due to a fundamental difference in when a new "person" comes into existence, the opposing sides can come to blows which each honestly believing it is defending others against unwarranted aggression, it made sense that he had difficulty understanding something that's been clear to me for years: that people can see themselves as morally upright and virtuous regardless of their individual behavior, and how that maps to others.

It is, of course, a given that people can only incorporate information that they are aware of into their worldviews. But what I guess I hadn't realized before today was how variable that information awareness can be. It would never have occurred to me that a person could be unaware of the abortion debate in the United States if they had regular contact with other Americans. There is a case to be made that it was all an act, I suppose. I choose to be more charitable than that (especially in the face of his evident horror that this was actually a thing), but I accept that people may decide that he "must" have known.

In any event, it's a testament to the power of what one doesn't know. If information shapes worldview, then worldviews depend just as much on what someone is unaware of as it does on what they are intimately familiar with. And there's no way of knowing, in advance, what that might be.

The Rules of the Game

One of the more common statements one hears about President Trump is that he violates norms. This is considered praise by some and criticism by others, which may explain why its such a common refrain.

A very important lesson in President Trump's apparent War on Norms, however, is this: The Rules are not the Game.

And this is true of all of the games that come immediately to mind for me. The rules define the proper, and often the expected, way to play the game, but they are not the game itself. The score is determined by how well the players meet the game's goals, not how assiduously they observe the rules. And this is even more true in games where many of the rules are informal, and/or there isn't a referee to assess penalties.

The flap over then-candidate Trump refusing to release his tax returns is a primary example of this. While such releases had become expected, Mr. Trump had no desire to do so, and as he racked up more and more primacy wins, he felt less and less pressure to. After all, whatever votes he lost for not doing so weren't enough to derail his march to the nomination. He scored enough delegates to win, and that was all that mattered. The fact that he's flouted a norm didn't change the final score.

While there has been a lot of hand-wringing over this disregard for the rules, the understanding that the rules are not the game is perhaps overdue, even if there are better ways of demonstrating it.

Awful Things

In the wake of the recent shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, a co-worker observed that: "Mental health is an awful thing, and worse when you have a gun."

I offered instead that a culture that views violence as a viable response to problems (personal, sociopolitical or public order) is an awful thing and worse when mental health issues are added to the mix. (I've seen enough of what people can do with machetes to understand that guns are not needed.)

When violence against "the enemy" is seen as strong and heroic while refraining from violence is often seen as weakness, people are going to turn to violence and be motivated to see their targets (even their neighbors) as deserving of what happens to them. And when people are only motivated to see the perpetrators of violence as people a) whose politics they disagree with or b) can be written off as "crazy," it undermines the collective will to advance the social mores that would reduce violence, because everyone can tell themselves that since they're neither evil, stupid or crazy, they're not part of the problem.

And perhaps this is the root of the problem; it's too easy for any given individual to believe that they don't have a direct one-on-one role to play. Advocating for new legislation or regulations is easy. Opposing them is perhaps even easier. But being a part of a deliberate social change is hard, especially when the stakes are high.

Encountered

Came across a protest I wasn't expecting on my way home this evening.

Story Time

It occurs to me that I have never met a person who was mislead by a secondhand account of events or people of which they had firsthand knowledge. And so while it is easy to blame the media for misleading people as to the ideas and motivations of others, the fact of the matter is that if people did a better job of telling their own stories to others, there would be less room for misinformation to spread.

The reasons why people don't communicate with one another are many and varied. Some are understandable, and others seem less so. But the fact remains that the best way to ensure that someone has a particular piece of information is to take the responsibility of sharing it with them, and finding a way to make it worth remembering. Not to say that it isn't difficult. Sharing the one's truth of oneself with another person while not threatening that person's truth of themselves is often difficult, especially when questions of worldview are involved. Clearing up someone's misconceptions often pushes them to feel like dupes or idiots, and that ego-dystonia can quickly shut down lines of communications.

But one thing that I've learned is that other people have little reason or incentive to accurately tell my story for me, and so, if I want it done right, I have to do it myself.

Picture This

One of the many people I've encountered in my time on Google+ is an Israeli gamer, author and all-around funny guy. But one of his recent posts took a serious turn as he took "liberals" to task for claiming "that the American Left is my dear, dear friend while the American Right is one step away from nuking Israel and sending Jews to death camps..."It can be said to be a rant against "liberalsplaining," and it's likely a justifiable one.

But what struck me as the most interesting thing about it was the picture that came with it. Divided into four panels, it showed President Trump shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and three pictures of former President Obama, shaking hands with Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan. Each of the pictures with President Obama in them was captioned with some anti-Israel or antisemitic remark attributed to whomever was in the photo with him.

The interesting bit about the content of the post was the reminder that for many Israeli Jews, apparently, supporting Jewish people and supporting the policies of the state of Israel are very similar, if not the same thing. But they really aren't the same in the United States for many people. To paint in broad strokes, the American Left tends to view Jewish people as yet another minority subject to the systematic oppression that has plagued many groups in the United States, while the American Right tends to view Israel as a necessary part of the (strangely, perhaps) hoped-for end of the world.

(As an aside, I found one Israeli Rabbi's take on end-times enthusiasm to be entertaining. When asked what he thought of the fact that for many Americans, supporting Israel was intended to lead to an outcome that would be bad for the Jews, not to mention the rest of the world's non-Christians, he basically pointed out that he didn't care. After all, since Christian prophecy was false anyway, Armageddon was never coming to pass, regardless.)

The interesting aspect of the picture was twofold. Firstly, there is a noticeable amount of antisemitism in the Black community in the United States. I don't know why that is, and I'm not really prepared to speculate on it. It was noticeable to me when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, but I never really asked about the causes. I simply assumed there was some sort of grudge there that I didn't understand, and went on about my business. But a lot of people who have been considered "leaders" in the Black American community have had to deal with the fallout of making statements considered hostile to Judaism, Israel or both. And it doesn't seem to be just something that the older generation carries. Younger campaigners for racial justice often point to the Palestinians as having gotten a really terrible, and ongoing, raw deal, which has lead to some friction between them as pro-Israel elements here and abroad.

And this brings me to the second thing that I found interesting about the pictures. In contrasting Presidents Trump and Obama as stand-ins for Right and Left in American politics, it also takes visible (if unintentional) aim at White and Black. White racists are often quick to point out what they understand as antisemitism in the Black community, both as a form of whataboutism and as a delegitimization tactic. While the point was that President Trump, despite whatever he may have done in the past, was being a friend to Jews and Israel at the moment, the picture did seem to evidence a selective memory for the past, conveniently forgetting both times when President Obama voiced support for Israel and when President Trump appeared to cozy up to antisemitic elements in the United States in order to garner votes.

So I wonder whether it would play into the current tensions between Black people and Jews here in the United States. I can see many Black people viewing things like this as proof that whatever grudge they have with Jews as being accurate, even if many others simply shrug their shoulders and move on. I also find using people like Messrs. Wright, Sharpton and Farrakhan as stand-ins for the American Left to be interesting. While, sure, I find it difficult to see them voting Republican, they're not so much Leftist activists as they are Black activists. I don't see any of them defining themselves by some position to the political Left of center. And while it may make sense for an Israeli to not really follow the divisions between, say, Leftist politics and Black nationalism, illustrating what are called out as faults on the Left with exclusively Black faces is the sort of thing that has lead to charges of racism in the past.

Maybe that's what it all comes down to. When in attack mode, people are rarely as careful in their selection of targets as others might wish. And so conflicts thrive, as more and more people, after becoming collateral damage, pile into the fray.

Weakness

The cruel always believe the kind are weak.
David Frum "The Real Lesson of My Debate With Steve Bannon"

But, I would submit, even the worst torturers never believe themselves to be deliberately cruel in the sense that they derive pleasure of satisfaction from the simple ability to cause suffering. People tend to equate Cruelty with Evil, and no-one (outside of perhaps the insane) understands  themselves to be Evil. I think that the cruel believe that they have mastered that part of themselves that argues against Doing What Must Be Done, and they see the kind as weak, because they see kindness not as the best means to a desired end, but as giving in to personal qualms against hard choices, difficult things or the toughening power of suffering.

The very fact that weakness is considered a personal flaw is perhaps the real problem that needs a solution.Once a certain kind of strength becomes a necessity to be considered a worthwhile person, and people compete to display it, denigrating others becomes worthwhile. And in a world where there is no worse insult that to be lesser, making weakness lesser encourages people to find ways of seeing it in one another.