Eyes Front

I've gotten into the bad habit of looking back at the things that I've written over the past thirteen years, mainly because I'm either looking for something that I'd written about in the past, or checking to see that I'm not accidentally retreading old ground (I have, at least once, repeated a post after forgetting to update it out of "draft" status.)

I've come to regard reading my earlier writing as a bad habit because it always leaves me with the impression that I've failed at the primary point of starting this project in the first place: becoming a better writer. Despite the fact that I don't write this blog for a living, and nothing else particular important comes from it, I tend to see every mistake as an unforced error that should have been caught and corrected prior to publication.

Perhaps this doom me to always being an amateur author. I'm pretty sure that to make it as a professional, one needs the ability to, at some point, let go of the errors of the past. One chalks them up to learning experiences and proceeds onward. Which, to be sure, is how I tend to deal with my professional life. I've made errors at work before, and I suspect that I'm not done making them yet. But even though the stakes are higher, I find that I'm better about not stewing in them than I am when I'm doing something for my own personal enjoyment. I suspect that it's something of the serious teen that I once was reasserting himself. But I think that it's also the nature of work. On the job, we have managers and other people who will tell us how serious (or not) a specific error was. And for the most part, many of them aren't that serious, especially in the grand scheme of things; most businesses are robust enough that they can withstand someone having a bonehead moment now and again.

When I'm writing here, there's no-one to tell me that this error or that mistake is trivial. And so even though I understand that to be the case intellectually, there's always that little voice in my head that simply can't believe that I left out a word, or used a piece of punctuation wrong. And that points to the other reason I think that people can be harder on themselves in personal pursuits than in professional ones. For all that this weblog was intended to help me become a better writer, there's a part of me that stands firm in the belief that, as old as I am, I shouldn't need to improve. After all, pretty much every job that I've had as an adult has required me to convey information in writing to one degree or another. And I'm college educated at that. Why do I need to improve my writing, other than to do away with my own sloppiness?

In other words, I'm not at peace with the idea that what I'm doing can be legitimately difficult, even given that I'm an amateur. Which is strange, I think. I would have told you that of course I understood how difficult writing could be; after all, I started the project as a way to practice. But I think that what I didn't understand was the part of me that saw this as a means of confirming the "fact" that I was already a good writer. And the degree to which that part of me dislikes being contradicted.

Jingle-Bell Stop

It is now, finally, the Day After Christmas. And that means the End of Christmas Music until Black Friday of 2020. It seems more like a respite than the status quo, for some reason. But while attempting to guard my mental health against the constant onslaught of "Holly-Jolly Christmas" and "Silver Bells," it occurred to me that jingle bells, or perhaps more accurately, sleigh bells, have become entirely associated with Christmas, rather than winter more broadly.

As I understand it, the purpose of bells on a sleigh was not festivity, but safety. Horses may not be completely silent, but they don't make that much noise, even when in motion. And both hoofbeats and sleigh runners can be very quiet in deep snow. So while "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" presumes either murderous intent or negligence on the part of Santa Claus, a fast-moving sleigh will not stop quickly; an old woman who steps into the path of one that she didn't hear coming is likely to come to grief.

Returning to the point, the realization that there's nothing particularly "Christmas-y" about sleigh bells becomes a reminder that many of the songs that we associate with Christmas, such as the now-controversial "Baby, It's Cold Outside," are simply about Winter itself. And winter, here in the northern hemisphere, has just started. I admit to not being all that up on the modern music scene (I have a theory that holds that all of the music in a genre that you're not that into all sounds the same.), but it seems to me that Winter music is, effectively, a sub-genre of Christmas music, and thus locked into the same Black Friday to Christmas Day constraints that genuine carols inhabit.

So while Winter may be just beginning, songs about it are mainly an Autumn phenomenon.

Small Potatoes

So, I recently watched The Mandela Effect with some friends. Spoiler alert: the plot of the movie is basically as follows: Video game programmer Brendan must find a way to reboot the Universe in order to rebalance reality after the death, and subsequent non-death, of his young daughter.

The movie uses the Mandela Effect theory as a backdrop for a movie that seems intended to showcase the strength of parental love, although Brendan quickly starts to come across as a jerk who really only cares about two things, his daughter and himself, and this made it difficult for me to really care about the outcome. It also lent the movie a strange air of triviality. If a man could literally program the Universe to reboot itself from the moment of the Big Bang, changing the life outcome of only a single child seems like something of a waste.

The movie would have, I think, been much more engaging if the goal had been to radically remake the world. Had it been up to me, I would have aimed much higher, and likely delved into a bit more overt science-fiction. What would the world be like if, say, the Armenian Genocide had never happened? Or if the opening of North America to European settlement hadn't been such a disaster for the native people? Or if the Black Death had been contained? There are any number of large-scale historical catastrophes that one could imagine setting out to undo. Although I suppose that this is somewhat in line with the way people see the Mandela Effect operating in actual history; the name of a brand of peanut butter or of storybook bears aren't really pressing issues in our society. Even the date of Nelson Mandela's death, the namesake of the effect, doesn't have much historical heft, in the grand scheme of things. You would think that if the effect were actually caused by parallel universes or somesuch, that larger events would feature more prominently.

I presume that standard Hollywood sensibilities are at work here. I can see people being upset by the idea that some significant part of history is worthy of being erased, especially if that history were caused by direct human action at some point in the past. The Holocaust is an obvious exception, but it might be touchy to imply that it's not a universal reality. (Bringing the Mandela Effect and Holocaust denial together could quickly get out of hand, and spark a public relations disaster.) Which is kind of too bad. Applying The Mandela Effect's use of the Simulation Hypothesis to larger world events would allow people to explore a possible outcome of those events unfolding differently, or not at all. I'm not sure how well the concept would play in the box office, but it could be useful as something to discuss.

Mass Delusion

Beyond “media fatigue,” or what Soraya Chemaly, writing for CNN, called “profound societal misogyny,” or what the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino described as “the hardening of [her] own heart,” I detect something else at play in the underwhelmed response to Carroll’s allegation [that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her]. That something is at once more sinister and more jaded: We have stopped pretending, collectively, that we expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility.
Moira Donegan “E. Jean Carroll and the ‘Hideosity Bar’”

So this raises a question: If we understand that we don’t genuinely “expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility,” is there actually value in the pretense? Would E. Jean Carroll, Rose McGowan, Joan Tarshis, Chanel Miller or any of the other women who have alleged sexual assault on the part of men who have had tremendous power bestowed upon them, be any better off if society still pretended to have high expectations of those men?

But it seems to me that there is actually a broader collective pretending at work, one that’s been the standard for some time: That “value,” as applied to people, is an objective measure, and its universal equality is a matter of factual truth.

And even if one says that the value that is placed on human life and/or concepts of dignity are not subject to human choice, they are still subject to human perception. Accountability has costs. And if those costs are perceived to be greater than the benefits, then one can see why it isn’t pursued, even if there is legitimate disagreement over the accuracy of the calculus involved.

So while I take Ms. Donegan’s meaning, I suspect that the sinister piece wouldn’t be that “We have stopped pretending, collectively, that we expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility,” but rather that society originated and maintained the pretense for long enough that it often seems rational to behave as if it were true. (But this, is, of course, a cynical viewpoint. A more charitable one is simply that, collectively, the public has concluded that it does, in fact, expect that those who have had power bestowed upon them to behave responsibly and holds them accountable when they fail; and that there is no failure here. While a sizable and vocal minority may disagree with that understanding of the facts, it remains that the minority is incapable of swaying the collective determination, and so it stands.)

Ms. Donegan laments that “Laughter is, perhaps, also an appropriate response to the country that allows a man like Trump to maintain his status, his money, and the respect of his peers, a country that would allow a man like him to become president and still have the audacity to pretend that women are equals, in status or in law. In that sense, her story really is laughable.” But is there really audacity in telling oneself and others that one actually is the person, the nation or the society that one is expected to be, regardless of the reality? Is it really laughable that people will present themselves as the persons they are told they are supposed to be? Is it really unexpected that hiding the parts of oneself that are labelled as unacceptable is easier than changing them?

The difference between “there wasn’t a foul, so the referee didn’t blow the whistle” and “the referee didn’t blow the whistle, so there wasn’t a foul,” may seem clear when stated in as many words, but is often less so in practice. And I don’t believe that there is any question that part of the reason why so many people allow themselves to be convinced of the referee’s infallibility is that it makes it easy, and unaudacious, to believe that they live in a world where all people are equal, in status or in law, and that violations will be detected and punished.

But there is also another side the question of the expectations that we have of men, or people in general, “who have had tremendous power bestowed upon them.” It’s one thing to say that people have low expectations. It’s another to understand what their expectations actually are. Perhaps what social critics see as “more sinister and more jaded,” than misogyny or hard-heartedness is the fact that society’s expectations are more practical that moral. People expect celebrities to entertain them, political figures to advance their interests and businesspeople to provide worthwhile goods and services. And that may be the standard of accountability that is being applied, rather than an adherence to ethics or law.

Working For a Living

There was an Italian political philosopher, whose name I've long forgotten, who explained that his reasoning for preferring Fascism to Democracy was not that Fascism was a better form of government, but that he found it more honest. Democracy, in his view, required people to be educated not only in the functioning of government, but in the issues that government was expected to deal with. In any modern society, he reasoned, this body of knowledge was so vast as to be out of reach of anyone who could not devote themselves to it full time. Hence, there would be a political ruling class, as it were. And if that were going to be the case, one may as well be up front about it.

I am reminded of this whenever I find myself in a discussion of politics where the one point that everyone seems to agree on is that government is somewhere between incompetent and corrupt, yet at the same time, is not worth becoming directly involved in, or even knowledgeable about. People who can't manage to forge a consensus on what should be on a group pizza are nevertheless convinced that in a nation of 300+ million people, it is possible, even easy, to craft policies that everyone would find directly beneficial to them. People who become visibly incensed at the idea that some random person off the street could tell them how to better do their jobs think nothing of concluding that the only reason that government doesn't work in the way they think it should is rank corruption.

Perhaps the highlight of the discussion came when one participant confidently declared that any changes in taxation should only be made by a direct vote of the people, and that neither legislatures, executives or courts should have any greater say in the matter. When I then challenged them on why not simply make all laws subject to direct, rather than representative, democracy and simply do away with much of the rule-making apparatus of government, the answer was: "I'd like to have it done right, not to do it myself." There was a moment of silence. And then the laughter began.

For all that everyone found the sudden reversal of an old adage to be funny, that sentiment strikes me as common throughout the United States. Voting, whether it be for representatives or on citizen initiatives and the like, is the bare minimum amount of effort that participatory governance requests. Yet even that is beyond the desire of many people. For all that much has been made of what appear to be partisan efforts to suppress the vote by Republicans (or, much more rarely in my understanding, Democrats), many more people simply choose not to vote than have their path to the polls strewn with obstacles.

I have come to think that the biggest problem that self-government presents is that it's a job. And often, a full-time job at that. And for many people, two full-time jobs is simply too much to ask. Perhaps because of this, many people see themselves as the customers of government, rather than its managers. And so government tends to serve those people to do take the more active, managerial role, regardless of their goals and/or motivations. The function of representative government is, in large part, to lessen the burden of that managerial role. But it can't eliminate it. And as long as the management of government is uneven, the outcomes it produces will likely be the same.

Drving Clicks

How's this for a headline: "Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed To Sacrifice Pedestrians To Save The Driver"? Posted to Fast Company back in 2016, it was brought to my attention today after being the subject of a post. The article is subtitled: "Mercedes gets around the moral issues of self-driving cars by deciding that–of course–drivers are more important than anyone else." It goes downhill from there.

At issue is a quote that one Christoph von Hugo, an autonomous vehicle safety manager, gave Car and Driver: “If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car. If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that’s your first priority.” From this statement, Charlie Sorrel, the Fast Company columnist, presumes that Daimler-Benz is simply choosing to avoid hard moral questions to justify using pedestrians as airbags to protect the people who bought their cars.

But the moral calculus is actually more involved than it may appear. In effect, what Mr. von Hugo was saying is that the cars would be programmed to manage what they could actually control. Consider the following scenario: A driverless car has a blowout and suffers a partial loss of control at speed. Now, the car is going to hit a nearby wall, with a pedestrian standing in front of it; the car has control over how the impact occurs, but cannot prevent the impact. The car, in theory, knows enough about its own construction that it can determine what angles of impact would crush the passenger compartment and kill the driver. What the car can't know is what other external factors may contribute to the pedestrian being injured or killed. Say half the time, the car endeavors to save the driver and the other half of the time, the car attempts to spare the pedestrian. In situations where the car saves the driver, the driver survives, and the pedestrian is killed. In situations where the car acts to save the pedestrian, the driver is killed. But, and this is where things become interesting, because the car can't know the full set of external factors and variables, the pedestrian doesn't always survive. Because even though the car missed them when it struck the wall, there's no guarantee that something else doesn't happen that injures or kills the pedestrian that is a) a direct result of the accident but b) outside of the car's control.

And this leaves us with two scenarios: one where the car takes the sure thing, and another where it gambles. In situations where the car opts to save the driver, if things go as the car intends, there's always a 50% mortality rate. In situations where the care opts to save the pedestrian, the mortality rate will always be at least 50% but it may be higher, because there will be situations where the pedestrian is killed anyway. So the two situations are not equal. They may be close, but in the situation where the car gambles, and prioritizes the pedestrian, there is always a chance that both people will die. And if this is the logic that informed the programmers of the autonomous Mercedes, then one can see why they made the choice that they did.

A luxury carmaker makes for easy outrage mining. The headline is "shocking" enough that there are going to be some people who take it and run, without really digging any deeper. One day people will learn to be careful of clickbait on the internet, but it's going to take people being seriously burned for that to happen. Until then, class warfare will prove to be good, and easy to win.

Winter Rainbow

It was only part of a rainbow. It faded into invisibility not long after leaving the ground, which may be the reason that so few people seemed to take any notice of it. Or maybe people just thought that it was part of Barnes and Nobles' Christmas decorations.

Age of Truth

I will admit that I have tired of the phrase "post-truth." In part because I feel that it's become a jab at people's political opposition, but mainly because I think that it distorts, and hides, what is actually happening in modern society.

Depending on how one uses the words, there can be different varieties of "truth." Or, perhaps more precisely, there can be a difference between "truthful" and "factual." For example, one can (over)simplify Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative as stating that it is impermissible to treat other people as merely means to one's own ends. One can understand this to be true, but I submit that, like most philosophical positions, it does not follow from that the Categorical Imperative is factual, in the same way that hydrogen fusion produces helium is factual.

What has lead to what many like to call a "post-truth" society is, as I understand it, an attempt to link truthful and factual in contexts where the two may be better off remaining separate. To the degree that a person's subjective experience of the world is sincere, it may be regarded as truthful, although it would not be factual in the way the hard sciences are regarded as factual. Many people, however, understand their subjective experiences of the world to be the logical result of the objective state of the world, that is to say, based on the facts of the world around them. And this is fine. At least, until we call people on it. Then it becomes difficult, in part because there is an implied, if not explicit, challenge to the person's understanding of the world around them. And if facts are the currency that one must spend in order to be seen as comprehending, then people will do what they need to in order to find them. Releasing people from the need to justify their subjective experience of the world against objective reality, would reduce or remove the drive for them to find facts to buttress their feelings, and this would reduce the conflict with less emotionally-charged information.

While the idea of respecting personal truth is at odds with the idea that there is a single truth, this is because not all truth is itself amenable to a singular definition. Being at peace with that may allow people to be more at peace with one another.

Supposing I Gamble...

I've been doing some reading on Reddit recently and discovered r/Scams. It's an interesting forum, mainly populated, it seems, with people pointing out attempts (sometimes successful, usually not) to scam them or asking if some or another message or the like is a scam attempt.

There are, unsurprisingly, a wide array of different scams out there, making the rounds of the internet. While the ever-popular 419 scam is still alive and well, and run-of-the-mill phishing scams are common, human cleverness in seeking to defraud their fellow man is eternal, and this poses a problem for even the wary internet denizen. I am, I will admit, something of the suspicious sort. If something strikes me as being off about something, I simply delete or report it, and go about my business. But I realize, especially now that I've been exposed to some of the stories that r/Scams has to offer, that my willingness to always simply walk away is something of a luxury. In many cases, what the scammers are preying on is the poverty of their marks. For someone in need of a better paying job, an offer of an executive assistant role may seem like a stroke of good fortune. For someone low on funds, finding a virtual reality setup or a smartwatch at a significant markdown from MSRP appears to be a simple matter of finding a fortuitous sale.

But, having the sneaking suspicion that something isn't right, they turn to Reddit, and ask: "Am I being scammed?" Often, it's because they don't know how the scam would work. And if they can't understand how they would be cheated, they're more likely to hold out hope that they've stumbled onto something good. Triangulation scams, which I'd never heard of before, work on this model. A criminal offers an item for sale at a good price. When someone offers to purchase the item, the criminal buys it from an online vendor, using compromised credit card credentials, and stipulates the purchaser as the recipient. The purchaser receives the item they paid for, and it's not unless or until someone flags the payment to the vendor as fraudulent that anyone is any the wiser.

But the most interesting aspect of the "Am I being scammed?" posts is the number of them where it's fairly clear that they're hoping (against hope, as it turns out) that the community will tell them that whatever they've come across is, in this one case, legitimate. The number of posts that ask, at some point, "Should I risk it?" is somewhat surprising. To me, anyway. As I noted before, I'm not in a position where something that seems sketchy turning out to be on the level would be a significant benefit to me. It leaves me with the feeling that I should be doing more to ensure that more people can be in that position with me.

News of the Random

I was browsing through the BBC News wbesite, and came across this video story of a man stealing a woman's wheelchair. The woman is in the chair when the man approaches her, and he puts a fair amount of effort into dumping her out of it, before attempting to make off with it. Other passengers swarm out of the train after him, and reclaim the wheelchair for its owner.

My first thought was "Wow. Must have been a slow news day in Britain." But I'll admit it. I clicked on it. I think I was expecting something more substantial than some random guy attempting to steal some random wheelchair from some random person in a random part of the United States. After all, this is the BBC that we're talking about. Surely, there's enough important stuff going on in the United States and/or Canada that something this trivial wouldn't have made the newsworthiness bar. While there's a part of me that responds to that with "Silly me," I will admit to being somewhat disappointed. But I suppose that I shouldn't be. New of the weird is popular everywhere, now that I think about it.

And while odd stories like this are effectively harmless, I wonder what role they play in that fact that, as Pew Research Center puts it, "public perceptions about crime in the U.S. often don’t align with the data," something which seems to be a recurring phenomenon. I was recently reading an essay on the Web (one that I'd neglected to make note of) in which the author observed that her overall mood and opinion of humanity tracked negatively with her diligence in keeping up with the news. And it wouldn't surprise me if the culprit was, at least in part, this habit of holding up random crime stories as if they were somehow important.

But I guess this is a side effect of the fact that most of the public at large, the day-to-day news isn't anything that they can take action on. So while news is often billed as informative, I think that it's often more useful, if that's the right word to use, as a form of diversion and/or entertainment. And I suppose that the ability to "tsk, tsk, tsk," at events happening elsewhere counts.

Mythologizing

I'd been under the impression that the now-legendary "419" scam had always been something of a small-time operation. Sure, a particular scammer might have a dozen or so people that they were stringing along, but that was the extent of it. So color me surprised to learn that a lawyer in the Dominican Republic has managed to rack up nearly 30,000 "clients" in a scheme to lay hands on what is supposedly billions of dollars that is sitting in banks after an ancestor deposited gold some 150-plus years ago. The story, by Joe Nocera, is a fascinating read.

What I found to be most interesting about the whole thing is the power of the myth that lay at the bottom of it. And I don't mean "myth" in the often pejorative usage of a false narrative, but rather as a traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience. The belief that members of the Rosario family are heirs to an impressive fortune can be said the be the driving force in all of this; the current lawyer is not the only person to have formally looked into this, simply the only one to have told the family that they're correct, and that the money is waiting for them. They just have to pay some up-front expenses first...

Regarding the various Rosarios that have bought into this as stupid, greedy or naïve is easy. Perhaps too easy, since it does provide a convenient narrative for why they were taken in when so many other people have managed to see through this and similar ruses. Rather, I wonder what this says about the power of disappointment and disillusionment that people would go to what strikes me as such great lengths to avoid them. Maybe it's because I'm not desperately impoverished and wasn't raised with a narrative that says, in effect, "our current lot is not our genuine fate" but I find the tenacity with which the story of the gold, and the wealth that has since become, maintains its hold to be remarkable. I would have expected that everyone would have given up by now.

But I suppose that this is the reason why there is a reading of the Pandora myth that claims that Hope was just as much an evil as the other maladies that were in the wedding gift jar. I have a difficult time seeing how Hope isn't a curse for everyone except the lawyer.

Words

I think today, American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves―and if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.
United States Attorney General William Barr, 3 December 2019

So... What Did Barr Mean When He Said Ungrateful “Communities” Could “Find Themselves Without Police Protection?” Good question. Although I’m not sure that it’s a particularly relevant question. After all, it’s a safe bet that whether one reads it “as a not-so-thinly-veiled threat to communities” or as an oblique warning of the consequences of assigning low status to necessary services neatly (if not always exactly) tracks to a person's overall partisan affiliation.

And I wonder how much that partisanship impacted the speechwriting process. Not in the sense that Attorney General Barr set out to make a comment that Republicans would see as innocuous and Democrats would see as threatening, but in the sense that if the reactions to a speech are known beforehand, why bother being careful with one’s language? Peloton’s stock price dropped 9% due to criticism of a recent advertisement for its stationary exercise cycles. Maybe this is because it’s already at historic lows, but  currently, political stock simply doesn’t move in that way when something that can be taken badly is said. And personally, I think that it’s just as reasonable to claim that the Attorney General is treating policing as a “protection racket” as it is to consider the Peloton commercial “dystopian.”

It’s a safe bet that Attorney General Barr could have made the point that law enforcement is entitled to more respect and support than he feels that they’re currently receiving without having come across as threatening people. Then, if there were any discussion of the point at all, it could focus on whether or not one agreed with the premise that police officers are being disrespected and unsupported by the communities they serve and/or what their end of that bargain should be, outside of simply enforcing certain rules. (After all, being in law enforcement is a job. There are plenty of professions that one could make the point are necessary for healthy communities, but are constantly dumped on. Teachers come to mind.) But if the pump was already primed, with a belief that critics of the Trmp Administration and its members would find something critical to say regardless of the content of Attorney General Barr’s words, the effort that a different message would have required could be seen as wasted. And while it's possible to point fingers here, to say that the Administration’s critics are too strident, or the Administration is intentionally tone-deaf, at the end of the day, it’s the broader public that is going to have to be prepared to act. Political stock prices have to plunge when there are missteps (and then rise again when missteps are corrected) in order for people to feel the need to take more care.

Part of me wants to say that there is a problem with the Attorney General’s remarks, but the fact of the matter is that the problem is much bigger than that, and was well-entrenched long before Mr. Barr took to the podium. Good faith is going to be required to fix it. But as long as good faith is seen as a weakness to be avoided, it’s going to be in short supply.

BBS

I've been listening to several of my old CDs recently, revisiting music that I haven't listened to in some time. One thing that I've learned is that listening to songs for the music produces different results than when one listened to songs for the lyrics. I don't really know why I hadn't paid much attention to many of the lyrics to the music in my CD collection prior to this point. Maybe because I tended to use it more as background noise than anything else. But when I'm driving, I'm more in the market for something to actively listen to.

One thing that stood out for me is how many songs could be charitably described as "bitter breakup songs." I'm kind of surprised that they aren't considered a genre unto themselves, given how common they are. I was listening to one soundtrack album that appeared to have no less than four; which seemed excessive, given that the movie in question had nothing really to so with romantic relationships, let alone the breakup of one.

I'm perhaps fortunate in these songs not really speaking to me; I've never had an angry breakup with a former partner. But I wonder if the event is as common as music makes it out to be. After all, a common viewpoint is that there are so many bitter breakup songs because of the ubiquity of bitter breakups. Which would be something of a shame. Although I suppose that like anything else, songs about being okay with life wouldn't be very big sellers.

That's Entertainment

Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, is, like most Black people in the United States, a Democrat. Unlike most people in general, Black or White, he's also a billionaire. This may explain why The Washington Post decided that his views on the current state of the Democratic primary field were newsworthy. In a nutshell, Mr. Johnson believes that everyone in the current Democratic primary field is too far to the Left to beat President Trump, "despite what the polls say." His logic is simple enough: the President's inflammatory rhetoric fires up his base, while at the same time alarming Democrats. The President's supporters see this alarm as an attack on them, and rally even more closely around the President's flag. He also feels that most voters, especially Black voters, are centrists, and that the Democratic party has moved far enough to the Left that this broad middle feels left out.

For a counter-perspective, the Post pulled quotes from the co-founder of Black Voters Matter and the executive director of the BlackPAC. Their take on Mr. Johnson is that he's too rich to be able to speak for working class or Black voters. Note though, that they weren't responding to his comments to CNBC, since those were recent, and the critical quotes the Post used were from July.

So in the end, The Washington Post's story looks something like this: Mr. Johnson makes a comment to CNBC. The Post reports on that comment, and then fleshes out the story with criticisms of Mr. Johnson that were made prior to him speaking to CNBC. I get that it's become something of a fad to complain about the way "the media" handles stories, with Conservatives being generally quick to harp on anything they find to be critical of themselves, but sometimes, media outlets do seem to be doing a slapdash job of things. Surely there's a pollster or a political scientist somewhere that the Post could have called upon to critique Mr. Johnson's statement on the merits. Why go with statements that had been made about him previously, that come across as ad hominem criticisms of the person? Is Nate Silver not taking their calls?

That said, I suppose that there could be a story in there about the growing class divide in the broader Black population of the United States. For all that there is a tendency to see Black people as a monoculture, the fact remains that not all Black people think alike or see the world in the same way. There are class resentments between Black people the same as there are between White people. But even that could have been better covered.

In the end, though, I'm not sure that it makes a difference. Like much of the news the breathless coverage of Mr. Johnson's statements, isn't really actionable for most people. It's a factoid, perhaps more about entertainment than information. Something to talk about on a Black Friday other than shopping.

Finishing Touches

Now that it's after sundown on Black Friday, the lights should all be lit up. But when I swung by yesterday, while out for a walk, they were putting the last pieces in place.

Bleah...

I was reading an article on the BBC's website about the teapot tempest stirred up when United States Naval War College professor Tom Nichols said "Indian food is terrible and we pretend it isn't."

But this also caught my eye: "I'm honest enough to say that my mostly Irish taste buds can't handle whatever it is that is called 'Indian' in the US and UK." And while it was lost in the ensuing fracas, it raises an interesting point about foreign cuisines in the United States. An ex-girlfriend from China hated my taste in "Chinese" food, saying that my favorite local Chinese restaurant was "too American."

"Hello!" I replied. "American here." I understand that, as an American who has never been to China, I don't actually have any first-hand knowledge of what genuine Chinese food is like. I completely understand that most Chinese restaurants I've ever been to cater to primarily American palettes. They are, after all, in the United States. (One interesting side effect of this is that, at least for Chinese restaurants, the food varies regionally. Chinese food in Chicagoland is as different from Chinese food in the Seattle suburbs as the pizza is.)

But it's as inaccurate to say that there is one way that Americans like to eat as it is to say that there is only one style of "Chinese" food. Not all Americans like all "American" food. And so non-American cuisines often find themselves in something of a squeeze. It's widely understood that many Americans are not adventurous eaters, and so there is an "Americanizing" that happens. But many Americans are unaware enough of this that they don't realize that many of the dishes they eat would be unrecognizable to people in the countries they are supposedly from. And so, either way, the food is panned as terrible; authentic cuisines by the non-adventurous and the Americanized versions by those who find the habit of sweetening and calorie-bombing cheap foods to be distasteful.

I had, I believe, a few opportunities to eat authentic Japanese food when I was in Japan, and I quite liked it. Of course, not speaking, or reading, Japanese, when we were away from the tourist areas, I had no idea what it was I was eating, and so I can't now look for it here in the United States. But perhaps it's better that way.

Unsolved

One of the general difficulties with a regime of censorship as an alternative to discernment is that the censor has an incentive to restrict access to information in accordance where their own interests and goals, but there is no corresponding increase in people's skills of discernment. When people feel that what has been labeled a bad solution or misinformation is their best hope for solving the problem at hand, they are vulnerable to seeing their continued difficulties as in the interest of the censor. So in the end, rather than better solutions, restrictions on the flow of information tend to breed resentments.

Undelivered

Recently, I listened to Arrested Development's debut album, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of... It was the first time in at least a decade, if not two. I'd picked up the CD back when I was still a twentysomething living in Chicago, and other than Tennessee, didn't really remember much about it, other than overall, I'd somewhat liked the music and that one track could be seen as calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government. (That had always been my go-to when people would argue that the United States had a draconian approach to freedom of speech.)

Now that I'm fiftysomething, I find myself listening much more carefully to the lyrics of songs than I used to, and that's given me a different understanding of 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of... The general theme of many of the tracks is something of a polemic on the proper way to be Black. It strikes me as something that was going around at the time, but I will admit to not recalling it all that well, as I had a tendency to tune such messages out. Even today, I find it somewhat tiresome, even when set to otherwise good music.

3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of... sets forth a vision of being Black that is self-consciously different from what it understands being White to entail. But it also places itself at odds with the burgeoning "gangsta" ethos that had been gaining traction over the previous five or so years, especially in the track People Everyday, which draws a sharp distinction between "Niggers" who, in the song, behave in a stereotypically "gangsta" fashion, and "Africans," who are Arrested Development's preferred mode of being Black.

Most of this went right past me when I was listening to the CD back in the 1990s. I liked the music, especially the track U, which had a fast and upbeat tempo, but didn't really connect with the broader message that the band was attempting to convey. Apparently, I wasn't the only one. Arrested Development's particular brand of alternative hip hop never seemed to catch on, although I understand that the broader form survives in Southern hip hop, a form that I'm not particularly acquainted with, although I've heard most of the singles that have made the charts. Now that I'm older, and perhaps more attentive to such things, the message is more clear.

In the end, it's another reminder of the difficulties of trying to drive broad social changes as a musical artist. In the same way that Prince and Janet Jackson had their attempts at activism effectively drowned out by the accolades for their prowess as musicians, the same thing happened to Arrested Development. The music was lauded, but the message appeared to go mostly unheard.

One Of These Things is Not Like The Others

In case the Google News headlines are a little difficult to read at whatever size you can see them, here they are:

• Ukrainians 'came to understand what was required' to get a meeting with Trump, military assistance, State Dept. aide told Congress
• What would it mean if Trump lied to Mueller?
• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announces reversal of Obama-era stance on Israeli settlements
• House is investigating whether Trump lied to Mueller, its general counsel told a federal appeals court
• Press Watch: Why was Trump rushed to the hospital? Count on the media to swallow official lies
• Patrick Frazee guilty on all counts, sentenced to life in prison

Patrick who? Turns out that he's a Colorado rancher convicted of killing his fiancée. On the one hand, I can completely understand wanting a break from the media circus that seems to have become The Donald Trump Channel: All Trump, all the time. But this case of domestic murder seems to be completely out of left field, and of limited interest. Here in Washington State, Kelsey Berreth isn't exactly a household name. Looking at the "latest" headlines in Google news, at least the ones they showed me, does reveal something of a similar pattern, though; a bunch of headlines mainly dealing with President Trump, the impeachment hearings or this or that aspect of federal policy with the random local crime story thrown in. The big difference is that the long list of headlines has a number of international stories, like the latest from Bolivia and Hong Kong that the shortlist lacks.

I'll admit that I hadn't paid much attention to Google News prior to this, but when I checked I noticed the lack of a "Crime" section. For me, this is a good thing. Crime stories tend to increase people's perceptions of the amount of criminal activity that's going on around them. Given this, I'm a bit dubious about the decision to simply sprinkle random crime stories into the more general headline feed, especially when they're primarily local interest. A couple has been fatally shot in their Buffalo Grove apartment complex? Not all that interesting to me, considering that I haven't lived in Chicagoland for the past 20+ years. I'm not sure how that fits into the parade of foreign policy and impeachment stories that dominate the list.

Given how long Google/Alphabet have been at this, it seems unlikely that this is just some random bug or design quirk of the newsfeed algorithm. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that a shooting at an Oklahoma Walmart should appear in the same list as a story about President Trump's health and the continuing unrest in Hong Kong. I'm curious as to their thinking.

To Be A Friend

When I was a child, my father told me: "The trick to getting someone to like you is not to do something for them - it's to get them to do something for you." At first it seemed selfish; getting people to do things for you, and then calling them friends. But, as usual, as I grew older, it made more sense. If I like someone, and I want them to be happy, to have a good life, or whatever, then I am going to be inclined to do things for them. But rather than simply do these things, and then hope the other person reciprocated, my father's strategy was to get them to make the opening gambit and then immediately reciprocate. This struck me as asking the other person to take all of the risk, but then I realized, that was only if I presumed that this other person didn't know how I would respond to them doing something that I was attempting to get them to do.

It didn't occur to me that my father was, in the space if one somewhat repetitive sentence, laying out an entire framework for thinking about friendship. Maybe because that wasn't fully his intent. But I've been peeling back the layers of that onion for some time now, and it still continues to teach.

Current Affairs

Stopped by Barnes and Noble and wandered through the Current Affairs section. The number of books that appear to be geared solely towards reinforcing people's opinions that those they disagree with on matters of politics are corrupt, hateful and unpatriotic surprised me. Which, I suppose is simply proof that I haven't been paying attention.

Taking Pains

In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a would-be censor has taken to purposefully misfiling books that are critical of President Trump or contain topics concerning progressive politics, gun control, LGBT-related information, how the criminal justice system deals with minorities and women's suffrage. In a sense, this is unsurprising. Coeur d’Alene is, after all, there the Aryan Nations decided to set up shop. The public library was previously targeted back in the 1980’s after the city used money from a civic courage award to buy books on human rights. So far, so Coeur d’Alene. The place’s reputation is such that a friend told me that when the company his parents worked for opened an office there, they were unable to find any non-White employees willing to move there to staff it.

But the bit that I find most interesting about this entire situation was the note to the library director that concluded, “Your liberal angst gives me great pleasure.”

As the parties become more homogeneous and more alien to each other, “we are more capable of dehumanizing the other side or distancing ourselves from them on a moral basis,” Lilliana Mason, a political scientist and the author of Uncivil Agreement, told me. “So it becomes easier for us to say things like ‘People on the other side are not just wrong; they’re evil’ or ‘People on the other side, they should be treated like animals.’ ”
Civility Is Overrated

“I take pleasure in the thought that I am hurting you,” is simply a next step along that path. As the one thing that people of differing political persuasions have in common becomes the idea that the other actively enjoys acting in bad faith or to the detriment of the nation, we would expect to see more and more partisans expecting that thwarting the actions of those they dislike would cause them some pain. But from there, it’s a short distance to seeking to injure them out of the sense that such injury is not only pleasurable, but a laudable (self-)defense of what is right and just.

The alienation of partisans from one another makes both the sense that the other enjoys acts of “evil” and that there is righteousness in causing them pain more common. There is, at this point, an industry that had devoted itself to supplying the need for caricatures of “the enemy,” and one that tends to see itself as responsible for righteous anger, yet innocent of anything that proves embarrassing to the broader cause. And as taking pleasure in the supposed suffering, mental or physical of others become yet another arena in which partisans compete with one another to show their devotion, the risk rises that the whole situations starts to spin wildly out of control.

Choices

This means monitoring Instagram constantly, identifying those who are close to the edge and alerting the police and ambulance services. She admits to having sleepless nights. She knows that being so distracted by her phone can anger her family and friends, but she worries that without her vigilance, someone might die.

"It goes bad, because it has done before," she says.
The woman who tracks 'dark' Instagram accounts

Instagram, I must admit, lies outside of my expertise. I came late to the personal social media game, and left it when Google+ was closed to the public earlier this year. But I'm also much older than Ingebjørg Blindheim, the young woman the story opens with. The crowd that I connected with had worked through their issues some time back. And so the story, as told by the BBC was something that seemed reasonable, but was completely new to me.

As I read it, I wondered what the world would be like, if we were all as vigilant about other people as Ms. Blindheim is. I have difficulty imagining it, mainly because I can't work out how people would support themselves if they felt the need to spend their waking hours attempting to keep tabs on strangers. Of course, I suspect that I'm over-thinking it. Perhaps, were we all in the habit of looking out for the health and well being of those around us, we wouldn't need to put all that much time into it. Ms. Blindheim presents as having shouldered the burden of a lonely vigil. It would be lighter if it were more broadly shared. But, of course, this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of understanding that I'm just as capable of sharing that burden as anyone else. And so I have to answer the question, "What's it worth to me?"

I don't recall when I first had the thought, but one day it occurred to me that for all that people will argue that human life is priceless, in practice, a life, any life, is worth precisely what others are willing to pay to preserve it. Nothing more, nothing less. It's unromantic, and it sets aside the notion that there is some great purpose to existing, but it lines up with what we often see in the world around us.

So, I find myself asking, what is it about Ms. Blindheim that the lives she looks after are worth so much more to her than they are to me, or to other people? One can point to an empathy born of shared suffering, as Ms. Blindheim once suffered from an eating disorder herself, but that seems empty. After all, there are plenty of people who survived eating disorders and don't feel the same drive to protect others from the call to self-harm. There seems to be an element of choice involved.

And I think that when we ask why people make the choices that they make, we wind up reducing our understanding of their volition. We choose the things we choose because we choose them seems circular and unsatisfying, but it leaves room for people to make choices without needing to tie those choices to other factors. And it leaves room for us to be more free to choose.

Old Volumes

Back in the day, Slate Magazine had a feature called "The Book Club." A small group of notable writers would read a book, and then discuss it in a series of letters to the other members of the group. In 2005, Tyler Cowan and Alan Wolfe discussed Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. I was wandering around the Web, and stumbled across their correspondence. I'm pretty sure I'd read it before. Despite the elapsed time, some of it sounded familiar.

The basic premise behind Bait and Switch is the difficulty of finding white-collar work, and to make her point, Barbara Ehrenreich poses as a job-seeker. Mr. Cowan opens with what he sees as the primary problem with Ms. Ehrenreich's experiment; apart from a few people who have agreed to be bogus references for her, she has no network.

She had no church, no family, and no reliance on friends for financial or even moral aid. It is no wonder she found life so tough and capitalism so demoralizing.

Fourteen years on, however, I wonder if more people are in that situation than might have been the case back in the day. But that's somewhat beside the point. In the third installment of the back-and-forth, Mr. Cowan says the following:

It is unfair that a 56-year-old is now expected to compete in a world for which he was never prepared. But we ought to be realistic. These transitional costs are borne by a class that has been about the richest and freest human history has seen.
Tyler Cowen "Why It’s Harder for White-Collar Workers To Find Jobs"

The conflation between an unprepared 56-year-old worker, and the greater class of people to which he belongs has always been baffling to me. Were you to apply the same logic to the Camp Fire in California, like so: "It is unfair that the residents of Butte County had their homes and/or livelihoods wiped out in a wildfire. But we ought to be realistic. This disaster was borne by a state that has been about the richest and freest human history has seen," you'd be tarred and feathered in the streets for being a callous bastard. And as Mr. Wolfe points out: “Calling them members of a class that is 'the richest and freest human history has seen' does not help them deal with their anger, hopelessness, and dismal prospects for the future.”

The fact that many white-collar workers in this country are (arguably) not required to really compete for jobs is not a sufficient reason to treat those who are required to compete, but unable to do so, as unimportant. Being competent at a line of work, while necessary, is no longer sufficient to remain employed, and it's way past time that we stopped thinking that way. We're overdue for teaching a greater competitiveness in the overall job market (not just a single profession).

Obviously, for some people, this new mode of looking at the world will come too late. They're going to wind up largely unemployable, given the market and the other workers who compete with them for the same limited pool of suitable jobs. But I would submit that it's actually less callous to acknowledge that they're screwed, yet we aren't going to aid them, than to pretend that the affluence of their peers renders them above needing aid.

I suppose that one could say that capitalism is best played as a team sport. People's faith (or civic) communities, families and friends should be stepping up to be the backstop that prevents them from losing hope that modern capitalism will work out for them. But I'm not sure that's really an answer, as it simply presumes that the general public should be sharing their limited resources. It's true that much of the pain that the once-affluent (and now-unemployed) are feeling is actually a benefit to people around the world, who are now less poverty-stricken, because they have the opportunity for the work that was taken from their first/second world peers. Mr. Cowan was correct when he noted that "economic justice is being more widely spread, not eroded." But this, I think, is one of the problems that many people have with concepts of economic justice; poverty simply being more widely spread, rather than eroded. Of course, it may be better to be unemployed in the United States than in Niger, but without ready access to the subsistence forms of living that many third-world citizens have grown up with, the end state may be more severe. While it makes sense that it's more just to have an equal percentage of out-of-work people in the United States as it does in Niger, one wonders what Americans would see in this to recommend it, especially given that the difference in salaries between the two nations is likely to simply be taken as increased profit.

As an aside, Mr. Cowan also advocated "lowering the corporate income tax as a means of encouraging white-collar re-employment." It's a standard free-market solution, but he'd already acknowledged that: "[A]lthough the U.S. economic recovery appears robust, labor markets still show signs of slack. Larger-than-expected numbers of workers have stopped looking for work. Wages are flat even though measured unemployment is falling. Anecdotal evidence does not suggest a rush to hire labor. Something is plaguing labor markets, but we do not know what." Why would lower taxes trigger a rush to hire labor? If there isn't enough demand for goods and services that more labor is needed, lower taxes are simply going to go straight into the pockets of investors in one way or another. And why propose a solution of spending via the tax code, when one doesn't know what the problem is?

Aggregate gains are cold comfort to the person whose individual status is eroded or destroyed. But when individuals benefit without a corresponding decrease in someone else's standards of living, the aggregate benefits by definition. This points to a potential change in how to look at things.

P.S.: There are four letters total in the series, if you'd like to read it. One. Two. Three. Four.

Lowered

In The Atlantic, Megan Garber has an article on what she sees as the death of apologies from public figures. I'm not sure that I agree with her premises.

"There was a time" she notes, "In American public life when atonement was seen as a form of strength—a way not only to own up to one’s missteps, but also to do that classic work of crisis management: control the narrative." And it's worth noting that when Ms. Garber quotes Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and (George W.) Bush to back this up, all of them took or acknowledged responsibility. But none of them apologized, in the sense that their statements "clearly admitted wrongdoing." And this leaves aside the fact that the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra and Hurricane Katrina were not personal acts on the parts of the Presidents. Rather, the problem arose with failed government action. And this sets them apart from Louis C.K. and President Trump, whose actions, as noted in the article (Louis C.K.'s sexual misconduct and President Trump's mocking a supporter he'd mistaken for a critic), were personal. Taking responsibility for the poor performance and/or missteps of an organization that one is in charge of is not the same as apologizing for a personal act of wrongdoing. And so this leaves us without the apples-to-apples comparison that would allow us (at least within the context of the article) to evaluate whether those perceived as powerful had been more forthcoming with mea culpas in the past.

In any event, the reasoning is that many public figures today operate within a relatively recent paradigm one "in which the true sign of power is not responsibility but impunity." Personally, I would argue that impunity is always a true sign of power, or at least significant power, although it may be more accurate to say that it is impunity that grants power in the first place. This is another reason why I am dubious that there was a culture of apologies at the top in earlier years.

By way of explanation of what may have changed, Ms. Garber notes: "And when humility gets confused with humiliation, defiance becomes a point of pride." This strikes me as somewhat akin to saying: "When carmine is confused for scarlet." Humility and humiliation are not terribly different from one another. Both words, unsurprisingly, have their origins in the Latin humilis, or "low." The difference between humility and humiliation is not in the end state, but how it is arrived at: whether it is one's own choice or imposed from without. It's like another derivative of humilis, "humble." "To be humble" is a different thing than "to be humbled," although again, the end state is the same.

In this, the idea that apology and humility were once seen as forms of strength represents a certain contradiction, but an explanatory one. Offering to lower oneself is often seen as magnanimous, but that doesn't mean that people are actually taken up on it. If we presume that Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and Bush were offering genuine acts of contrition, then we must also note that it really went no further than the offer. While President Kennedy was assassinated, this didn't seem to be a direct reaction to the Bay of Pigs incident. President Reagan remained popular enough that George H. W. Bush was able to succeed him in the White House and President George W. Bush's tenure was marred by the "Great Recession" rather than the Hurricane Katrina response.

At one point, Mr. Garber quotes psychologist Harriet Lerner thusly: “For some men, the very act of apologizing, of simply saying ‘I was wrong, I made a mistake, I’m sorry,’ may feel unmanly, uncomfortable, if not intolerable.” And here I think is the important piece: The impunity that gives power also means that people who have it, generally men, don't have to lower themselves, nor suffer themselves to be lowered by others. And I think that it's worth noting that for many people, both humility and humiliation are undesirable in their leaders. Given this, it seems unlikely that the pattern that Ms. Garber sees will go away any time soon. There isn't enough benefit in being low that it's a universally rational choice.

Unwhite

One of the most glaring holes in the logic of current “authentic” black thought is that one is to revile the old one-drop rule as racist, and yet to tar as a self-hating elitist the person who is of only partially African genetic ancestry who declines to classify themselves as “black.”
John McWhorter

I’ve read this statement over and over, and I'm not sure that the logic is as flawed as Mr. McWhorter makes it out to be. From where I stand it’s simple; Whites are to consider those of mixed-race one of them, but those of mixed race are to reject them. Maybe in that sense, it’s as straightforward as demanding that everyone play a part in people wanting something they can’t have.

In this, perhaps, it’s designed to invert what Martin Heidegger called “the dictatorship of the They.” If “authentic” Black people resented aspiring to the social acceptance that came with “Whiteness” and constantly being denied by the exclusionary power of racism, perhaps they sought solace in the idea that they could take the affections of the mixed-race from Whites’ desiring grasp.

While to be “biologically” Black in America is to have visibly sub-Saharan African genetic ancestry, cultural Blackness, especially “authentic” cultural Blackness is a different kettle of fish. Whether that’s Paul Fussell’s “class sinking” as described by Thomas Chatterton Williams, or the observation of a Black youth in New York that “Your African identity has to be defined by ignorance,” “authentic” cultural Blackness has less to do with anything related to Africa, and more with opposition to perceived cultural Whiteness. And to some, the fact that this puts it at direct odds with the promoters of Respectability Politics is a feature, rather than a bug.

As Mr. Williams quotes Albert Murray, “Critics? Man, most critics feel that unless brownskin U.S. writers are pissing and moaning about injustice they have nothing to say. In any case it seems they find it much easier to praise such writers for being angry (which requires no talent, not to mention genius) than for being innovative or insightful.”And that anger is often the thing that people search for when determining “authenticity.”

But anger isn’t the same as the power to create change. Conflating street culture with broader Black culture, and invoking “the dictatorship of the They” for peer pressure to conform to it isn’t making things better. Not that I can honestly say that it can’t or won’t, but as long as it doesn’t, demanding that everyone live within that paradigm is unproductive. When people say that an individual mustn’t allow others to define them, that goes for all others. The motives and the impacts may be different, but a person can chafe under the demands of “their” people just as easily as they can others. “The dictatorship of the They” doesn’t care which “the They” sits on the throne.

The Phantom Meddler

With the Democrats in the House of Representatives having formalized their investigation into impeaching President Trump, well, nothing really changes. Democrats are still more or less convinced that the President is guilty, Republicans are still more or less convinced that he can do no wrong, and everyone else is still left to make their own way. The idea that the impeachment inquiry is leading to a hardening of partisan attitudes supposes that there was still some softness there, and I'm not sure that I buy into that line of reasoning.

I'm also not sure that I believe the criticism that the debate will invite more overseas meddling in the 2020 Presidential election. After all, why bother to meddle when the major political parties are busily undermining the perception of legitimacy in government on their own? Of course, this is based on the presumption that the purpose of meddling is not to suborn a sitting President into becoming some sort of foreign agent. While it's certainly true that a lot of people find President Trump to be a little to friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, it's still a long way from there to the idea that the Kremlin is calling the tunes that President Trump dances to. It makes more sense for the goal of meddling in American politics to be simply leaving people with the sense that there was something fraudulent about the election, and therefore, the winner is suspect. And as Democrats and Republicans move more and more from simple disagreement over means to actively believing in the other's bad faith, the idea that an outside party would actually need to do anything for the losing side to shout "foul!" seems more and more naïve. After a point, it kind of seems counter-productive. After all, actual meddling may leave evidence of itself. Simply having people believe that there was meddling (when there wasn't) leaves none. And since to true believers, that lack of evidence can become evidence that the investigators may be in on the plan, one can see how the belief in meddling can do more to undermine faith in the outcome than actual meddling would.

And with the two political parties becoming more and more convinced that the other is an active threat to the nation, many people already have all the evidence they need that something shady is going on.

Unknown Structures

All manner of commentators—from Turner’s friend, who chalked up the assault to “clouded judgement” on both [Chanel] Miller and [Brock] Turner’s part, to Malcolm Gladwell, who devoted a chapter in his most recent book to raising doubts about Turner’s culpability—stepped in to share their theories about Turner’s intent and Miller’s desires.
Christina Cauterucci "Why Not Go to the Police?"

I happen to have a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's "most recent book," otherwise known as Talking to Strangers, and, last night, I read the chapter "devoted [...] to raising doubts about Turner's culpability." It's Chapter Eight, "Case Study: The Fraternity Party." It's the last of three chapters that Mr. Gladwell devotes to the ways in which we think that we understand other people, and get it wrong, because we mistakenly think that people are more transparent than they actually are. Brock Turner's rape of Chanel Miller is the backdrop for a quick consideration of consent and then a much larger consideration of alcohol, two factors that, in Mr. Gladwell's telling, result in many of the countless encounters between people at parties going badly awry.

I'd read "Case Study: The Fraternity Party," prepared for the possibility of being disappointed with Mr. Gladwell's analysis. But in the end, it was Ms. Cauterucci's analysis that seemed lacking. There was nothing in the book that was particularly sympathetic to Brock Turner, other than perhaps the acknowledgement that expecting a drunken teenager to correctly read another human being is a bad idea. But what that does is cast Mr. Turner as something other than a deliberate predator, someone who set out to victimize someone that evening, with alcohol as an accomplice.

But when I considered the podcast that Ms. Cauterucci linked to, I saw the basis for her disdain.

By the end of the chapter, Gladwell is arguing that sexual assaults can be basically boiled down to a misunderstanding - a misreading of signals, often between two people too drunk to know what’s really going on.

While I understand the upset, I didn't read it this way. Rather, I felt that the point that he made at the beginning of the chapter was that a misreading of signals between two people too drunk to know what’s really going on often resulted in sexual assaults. The two statements are not equivalent.

The disconnect, however, speaks to differences in the way people see the world, and the differences between the law and the court of public opinion. As a matter of law, rape is sexual contact without consent. And the reasons for that lack of consent go beyond simple unwillingness. "Under California law," Talking to Strangers tells us, "Someone is incapable of giving consent to sexual activity if they are either unconscious or so intoxicated that they are 'prevented from resisting'." But our understanding of "assault" doesn't really concern itself with matters of consent. Lack of consent is taken as a given. It's the perpetrator, and how they behave, that is front and center when the word "assault" is used.

The who of the Brock Turner case was never in doubt. The what was determined by the jury. But that still leaves the why. How did an apparently harmless encounter on a dance floor end in a crime.

This is the question that Mr. Gladwell sets out to answer. For me, as the reader, and I suspect for Mr. Gladwell, as the author, "the why" has no bearing on Brock Turner's culpability. He was caught in the act of sexual activity with someone who was unconscious and so intoxicated they were prevented from resisting. Enough said.

But for the cast of The Waves podcast and to Ms. Cauterucci, "the why" is manifestly important. Because that's where the structural issues that are important to them lie. And casting Brock Turner as simply a sexually aggressive teenager who drank his way into a criminal act sets aside those structural issues. Likewise, when Mr. Gladwell accurately points out that there is no way to know what happened between Brock Turner and Emily Doe/Chanel Miller during their encounter at the Kappa Alpha party, he's likely also thinking of it as unimportant. After all, it has no bearing on whether there was consent to sexual activity later; Emily Doe/Chanel Miller was legally unable to consent, and that was that.

But if you view the crime as a matter of respect or of structural sexism, then what happens is important. But who should it be important to? If I determine that Brock Turner is culpable even though he suffered from self-inflicted, alcohol-induced "clouded judgement" at the time, what does Chanel Miller lose? For me, the understanding that if Brock Turner had been sober, he may not have done what he did does nothing to invalidate any of the criticisms that she made of him or any of the impacts that the assault had on her.

I understand that there is an argument that Chanel Miller does lose something, and that something is invalidated, but I can't access what it is, and so I can't adequately respond. Nor can I really adjust my thinking. I could simply parrot the lines I think are expected of me, but that would be parroting; repeating without genuine comprehension. And, oddly, that seems to be the point behind Talking to Strangers; that there are so many things about other people that we don't know, and maybe can't know, that we have to be wary of thinking that we know them.

Rally

I am an amateur Evolutionist. Not having cared about how this or that species came to be since I was a sophomore in high school, I have allowed my understanding of the current Theory of Evolution to grow old and dusty, and all sorts of layman's misperceptions and odd outlooks on things have crept in over the years, resulting in an odd hodgepodge of science, personal understanding and outright inanity. (Having read Darwin is of little help here; On the Origin of Species is quite dated at this point.) And, not being a scientist, I don't maintain any sort of rigor in my approach to such things - if it makes sense, I go with it, and let someone else sort it out for me later. And I am careful to make way when presented with evidence, one way or the other, and keep and open mind.

I am also an amateur Atheist. Being your average random American, I was raised Christian; Roman Catholic, to be precise. I was told that there is a God, and that he sent his only son down to Earth to die for our sins, and that there is a Devil, who makes people do bad things because he wants them to go to Hell; apparently, he gets off on torturing souls and God doesn't mind him having a hobby to keep him off the streets. Somewhere in there was always the faintly disturbing idea that Communion at Sunday mass was this magical form of cannibalism, with what you thought was red wine and cardboard-tasting wafers actually being the body and blood of Jesus. Anyway, I also quit caring about religion when I was in high-school; having come to the realization that my classmates weren't mean-spirited because "the Devil made them do it," but because they were simply bastards. There might be a God - there might not. I don't know, and frankly, I don't find the truth of it to important to my daily life. Being a bastard is being a bastard, come Heaven, Hell or basketball court; and therefore to be avoided.

But if there's one thing about a Roman Catholic education, it's that the church, having repented of hounding Galileo, doesn't bother to take issue with science, per se. Sure, they might not like this discovery, or that procedure, but they're cool with science overall. Father Phillip, my biology teacher, firmly believed in Evolution. He had a chart on his classroom door; at the top of the chart was God. Below that, were quarks. And it kept going until you arrived at mankind. For him, there was no conflict between Evolution and God. Sometimes, though, I'm convinced that he's in the minority.

Recently, I encountered an Evangelical critic of both evolution and atheism who offered me an "obvious reason" for "Darwin's lack of appeal," as he stated it. It's that, to their mind: "no one lives as if Darwinism is true." He went on to say, effectively, "If you really believe in evolution, you can do whatever you want to any living thing." The implicit sub-text here is clear: The only sources of an ethical/moral sense in humans are a divine power and/or a sincere belief in same. And that a belief in the Theory of Evolution directly precludes a belief in such a power, or even the acceptance of the possibility of its existence. Humans otherwise lack an intrinsic ability to internalize values and mores that are beneficial to anyone other than themselves as individuals, and possibly those they care about. Our conversation eventually reached this admonition: "Leave compassion and moral judgment only to those who believe human life is more than an accidental collection of amino acids." Explicit in this statement is that those who believe that humanity arose from the vastness of the Universe unbidden by the divine have no right to act in a manner that believers find compassionate or moral - they are commanded to abandon such behaviors. The critic denounces such actions by those who believe in Evolution as "irrational and contradictory," even though he still appears to appreciate the acts themselves. This is a common enough stance that I encounter it every two to three years in general conversation, and so it's unsurprising to hear it

For many Evangelicals, and those who hold similar beliefs, to be religious, and therefore, to be moral, good and/or just, is to subscribe to the idea that the Bible is a literal history of the events that it purports to chronicle. In the Christian Broadcasting Network's "Operation Supreme Court Freedom," one of the Prayer Points is to: "Pray that those who oppose biblical truth would retire from the Supreme Court and be replaced by those who honor God's law." It's pretty clear from this statement that as far as the CBN is concerned, you cannot honor God's law without accepting "biblical truth." And if you cannot honor God's law, you lose any claim to virtue.

The confluence of ideas that states that one must chose between God and Evolution, and that to chose Evolution is to reject the concepts of Good and Evil, is a faith-based one. As such, it can continue even in the face of a lack of proof. Which it does; its basis in reality is tenuous at best. While many people honestly believe that those who believe in Evolution leave themselves an "out" when it comes to ethics and morality, and may deliberately make such a choice precisely to obtain that "out," how many people can point, off the tops of their heads, to people who cite "survival of the fittest," "natural selection" or "evolutionary pressures" as a motive for the crimes they commit? Yes, there are a few high-profile mass murderers and hate-mongers, spouting corrupted Nietzsche as moral cover. But when was the last time you heard a mugger fall back on Darwin? Or a corporate executive, fresh off the "perp walk," quoting from On the Origin of Species for justification?

The religious left, even though they are, by all accounts, a clear majority of the Liberal movement, seems to sit and fret in silence. They are, evidently, hoping to avoid being thought of as "backwards religionists," unfit to wear the label of "rational human being." This should end. Anyone who can manage to hold in their heads the idea that humanity, could have evolved from less-advanced animals, and still manage to be ethical, caring, just and devout should feel free to speak up; long, loudly and often, and request their opponents prove them hostile to religion, to the divine, to kindness and/or to the well-being of their fellows. And the secular left errs when it attempts to demonstrate, however correctly, that the God-fearing are capable of the same hienous acts as those who acknowledge no divinities. More productive would be working to show that the Agnostic, Atheist and even the Anti-Theistic among them can be just as upstanding and forthright as the most pious clergyman. As the saying goes, "hope is not a strategy," and hoping that people will come around to the "right way" of looking at the world is a lost cause. If we accept the idea that hostility to Evolution is (at least in part) a reaction to the idea that Darwinism (directly or indirectly) equals Moral Anarchy, then everyone who understands that notion to be false would do well to marshal their evidence, stand up for the truth as they see it and place their opposition in the position of needing to discredit them.

I was taught that the process of Evolution was the hand of God shaping mankind; not out of clay, but from organic materials. And not in the first days of Creation, but billions of years after God sparked a tiny mote into the infinite vastness that stretches away from me in all directions, expanding ever farther with each passing moment. This was presented as a matter of faith. The hand of God faded with the final demise of my religious beliefs, but contrary to the charges of Evangelicals, a desire to keep others down didn't become Evolution's new bedfellow in its absence. When I donate money for disaster relief, or give twenty dollars to the single mother sitting by the expressway entrance, it's because I genuinely feel that what I'm doing is right, not because I'm insane, or taken leave of my senses. It is my job to demonstrate that, and when required defend it, and force others to prove me wrong, or to acknowledge the falseness of denying my ethics.

Another Autumn

The start of a clear, cool morning in Autumn. Autumn in the Puget Sound area is strange. Many of the trees are from elsewhere, it seems, and so respond to differnt signals for them to turn and lose their leaves. So some trees are bare, while others are bright with colors and yet others are still green. And, then, of course, there are the evergreens, which are indifferent to the turning of the seasons.

The Right Tool

From time to time I read Seth Godin's blog. Which is unsurprising, I suppose, given that I link to it from here. In any event, I popped over today and read his post on tools, "All or nothing." The basic point, that it's better to buy the right tool for the job, and complete the job, than to buy the wrong tool, and leave the job unfinished, out of being penny wise but pound foolish, is sound. But while it may be better to spend more than one initially expected to obtain the correct tool, what most people are on the lookout for is spending more than they need to.

And I think where most people run into problems is in attempting to gauge how much they need to spend to get the job done. Because while it's correct that the results of tool use are not linear, that works both ways. While spending too little to obtain any result at all is a waste of time and money, spending the money to buy a tool that is significantly better than what's needed can also be a waste of money; once the job is done, all of it, there's nothing more to do. So a tool that can produce results that go above and beyond the call of duty is only useful if there is value in going above and beyond. Which creates a more complex calibration problem than simply making sure that the slope from undone to done is successfully surmounted.

And I think that the problem that most people have is that the extra expenditure that goes into purchasing a tool that's more right for the job than it needs to be becomes an expense, rather than an investment. And so it's better for them to use a tool that just gets the task done than, and skip the cost of the better tool.

There are, of course, multiple solutions to the problem (to the degree that it is a problem). Being expert at making the calibration is one solution; having a plan to increase the level of job tackled in the future is another. And I'm sure that there are others; these are just the two that immediately occur to me. And I think that it's these skills that people need. Most people who use tools understand the risks of leaving the job undone. But they also understand the risks of overpaying to complete the job. Mitigating the second also mitigates the first.

Scrubbing Bubbles

On my list of words that I would like to remove from everyday English is "brainwashed." Mainly because, at least in my experience, it's become a moral distinction, rather than a simple description. While no-one likes to be deceived, it's generally possible to describe someone as having been fooled by a person or a circumstance without really calling them out as being morally lacking. But the term "brainwashed" carried no such forbearance, being loaded with not only the idea that the person doing the persuasion is malevolent, but clearly so; being brainwashed by someone is usually a mark of a level of credulity that's outside the norm (even when the supposed brainwashing is said to have happened to large numbers of people).

Not that the term doesn't have its legitimate uses, but I often encounter it as a term of derision for those that the speaker has decided are too stupid (another term that's more a moral differentiator than description) to remain right-thinking in the face of obvious falsehood. And it's this lack of compassion or understanding for other people that rankles me. Yes, I realize that expecting compassion or understanding from people is my first mistake. But still, given their potential to improve the world we live in, removing some of the barriers to them, especially linguistic ones, would be nice.

Shadows

Former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has made waves with speculation that the Russians were up to more dirty tricks for the 2020 presidential election.

"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate," Clinton said, speaking on a podcast with former Obama adviser David Plouffe. "She's the favorite of the Russians."

While Secretary Clinton didn't name names, it's been assumed that she was referring to Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who, according to CNN "has been accused of being cozy with Russia in the past." Representative Gabbard and her campaign are among those making the assumption, with the candidate taking to Twitter to fire back.

Secretary Clinton seeing malfeasance in the air is nothing new; "vast right-wing conspiracy," anyone? And the Russians have been convenient targets of Democratic suspicion since the 2016 election. So in that sense, there's nothing to see here.

What makes this interesting is the presumption that Secretary Clinton is accusing Representative Gabbard of cooperating in an attempt to split the Democratic vote come next November. After all, even if one did presume that there would be a high level of unity within the party around supporting the eventual nominee (and that's far from a sure thing, in my opinion), the Russians wouldn't need the permission of a candidate to mobilize sock-puppets or bots on their behalf. And it seems unlikely that they would care about angering whichever politicians they chose to "assist."

Besides, the Russians don't actually have to do much of anything at this rate. I have no idea where Secretary Clinton is receiving her information, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be suspect. An outside party doesn't need to actually do anything in a situation like this. The belief that they're up to no good is all that it takes.

Plan F

While a lot has been made of President Trump's decision to withdraw American soldiers from Syria, and the resulting offensive that Turkey has mounted against the Kurds living in the area, what's been lacking from the discussion thus far is what a better plan would have looked like.

And this has always been the problem with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the victory condition was either undefined or unrealistic, and so almost two decades after the fighting started, despite having crushed the Iraqi and Taliban forces remarkably quickly, United States soldiers are still in the area. The plan appears to be to remain until not a single person who harbors anti-American sentiment remains; or at least is willing to speak up. The actual plan is certainly much different, but from the point of view of the general public, it's simply opaque.

Whether or not citizen Donald Trump supported the wars at the time, he's certainly not a fan now. According to Newsweek:

Days after the White House announced a U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria, Trump tweeted Wednesday that "GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY!" He also argued that the U.S. "has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East."

Presumably the all caps were in the original.

I don't know how much money has been appropriated for the various missions in the Middle East and Central Asia that spun out of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September of 2001, but let's presume that the President has accurately ballparked it at about eight trillion dollars. Is continuing to spend massive amounts of money going to make anything better than it is right now?

Part of the problem that the Trump Administration has had with all of this is that they haven't laid out their priorities. So the withdrawal from Syria comes across as the President simply being random again, rather than making an executive decision that ending United States involvement in the conflict in Syria is worth the costs that are going to come from that choice. On the one hand, it's fairly clear that President Trump likely didn't weigh the pros and cons and then come to a considered decision. But on the other hand, if the current involvement in the fighting in the area is going to come to an end, it's likely going to be because someone decided that ending that involvement is worth doing. That's likely going to mean no longer worrying about how other nations see a withdrawal. I don't think that President Trump is there yet, given his sudden spiking of a purported deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

For right now, though, the President has shaken up the status quo, even while he insists that he can preserve it. Whether it counts as progress, or random flailing, is another matter. But if he continues in this vein, he may not make a lot of people happy, but he'll have chosen a priority and acted on it, rather than simply throwing money at the desire to do a number of different things all at once.