Distressed Investments

Michel Martin: Talk a little bit more, if you would, about why you think this is a significant issue beyond the - how can I put this? - the sort of personal distress of of individuals who find it very stressful for this particular period in their lives. I mean, why do you think that there's an issue that, in your view, should command everybody's attention?

Katha Pollit: Well, not having child care means that women can't go to work who want to go to work and whose families need that income. And that means a lot of women end up with kind of jerry-built arrangements and they fall apart. And then those women can be fired, which is completely legal. I mean, workers have very little protection in this country. Lack of stable, affordable child care is one of the reasons that women's work force participation has stalled even though women's education has increased.

So you've got a lot of women who are unhappily at home, which is something we don't hear that much about. And what that all means is that when women do go back to work, they don't get back to where they were. They have lost Social Security. They've lost a lot of the good things that come when you are working and earning a steady income.
A Democratic Case For Universal Child Care

What struck me at first about this exchange was the feeling that Ms. Pollit had appeared to effectively ignore the question. And as someone who was genuinely interested in why universal child care should command my attention, that was something of an annoyance. My personal understanding of the world is that the best way to have people support a policy is to articulate what's in it for them. But, upon reflection, it occurred to me that perhaps Ms. Pollit had actually answered the question. Or, perhaps more accurately, Ms. Martin had answered it; the personal distress of the women and families who feel the lack of available child care is the reason why this should command everyone's attention. It's the stereotypical "bleeding-heart liberal," the person who is motivated by other people's suffering to the degree that alleviating that suffering is not only an end in itself, but believes that everyone should be motivated by it as well.

Which is all fine and good, but the fact of the matter is that not everyone is motivated by the personal distress of others, especially when that distress strikes them as minor and/or overblown. There are any number of people who have managed to get by with jerry-built child care arrangements, with varying degrees of success. And Ms. Pollit's statements didn't come across to me as the sort of argument that would be compelling to everyone.

This is part of the reason why many people are poor political salespeople; understanding what motivates people unlike themselves is difficult for them. Call me hard-hearted, but if someone were to ask me for something, and I asked them why their cause should command my attention, an answer like Ms. Pollits would likely result in no deal. And, of course, that's likely to be exactly what would happen; the spurned activist would call me hard-hearted. But one of the (oddly) defining characteristics of the United States is people's tendency to see themselves as impoverished. And therefore, while they're not always tight-fisted, they are interested in the return to themselves on the investment that they're being asked to make. Sometimes, that return is simply the warm, fuzzy feeling that they may receive for having done something for their fellow human. It may, however, at times be something more concrete, especially when the big picture is concerned.

There's nothing wrong with funding people's needs when they're in dire straits for one reason or another. But if that funding goes into those needs and nothing comes back out, it's simply a drain. And that means that there is less for the next set of needs. And this is why I think that "What's the ROI?" is a more important question that we often give it credit for. If funding the child care for poor families makes things better for everyone, that investment returns something to the pot to be shared out again. And so while we might understand that for some people, a certain level of selfishness is at work, perhaps that shouldn't be the default assumption.

Problem Statements

Trump equating the failure of the Chavista state in Venezuela with the European-style reforms proposed by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and others is dishonest. There’s room to criticize proposals like Medicare for all and free college tuition as unrealistic or unwise without hyperbole. Trump and his allies have also offered exaggerated, inaccurate descriptions of the Green New Deal.
David A. Graham, "Trump's New Red Scare"

But this is unsurprising in a political environment where casting fear, uncertainty and doubt on alternatives is considered to be the most effective argument in favor of one's own position.

The fact of the matter is, and it pretty much always is, that there will be winners and losers. I'm not sure that there is anything to be done about that in any society that hasn't managed to convincingly conquer scarcity. And it may be a simple truism of politics that the easiest way to appeal to the winners (and aspiring winners) is to tell them what they suspected to be true all along, that they're doing it right, and the people who are offering different ways of doing things are poisoning the easily-addled minds of the weak. Weak enough to be losers, and perhaps worse still, weak enough to not realize that, solely due to their own faults, they will always be losers.

“Socialism promises prosperity, but it delivers poverty,” Trump said. “Socialism promises unity, but it delivers hatred and it delivers division. Socialism promises a better future, but it always returns to the darkest chapters of the past. That never fails. It always happens. Socialism is a sad and discredited ideology rooted in the total ignorance of history and human nature, which is why socialism, eventually, must always give rise to tyranny, which it does.”

None of this is proof that capitalism, either genuine free-market or the "business over all" sort that tends to hold sway in the United States, is any better. After all, the United States has poverty, division and, to some people, tyranny, in abundance. Otherwise, there would be little interest in socialism as an alternative.

Positive messages, affirmative statements of what a particular system will bring to people are hard. They create expectations, and with those expectations comes the chance for disappointment if they are not met. True believers may be willing to declare whatever happens the target, but those people whose support is based on the promise of tangible benefits will be expecting those benefits to materialize.

Hyperbolic threats of disaster, on the hand, are, easier promises to deliver on. As long as the nation doesn't descend into poverty, hatred, division and tyranny (at least no farther than is usual) then the defenders of capitalism can claim victory by simple virtue of the fact that they've maintained the very status quo that has given rise to an interest in socialism to begin with.

Socialism was conceived as a response to a problem. True, if you're winning at what we in the United States gamely insist on referring to as "capitalism," the existence of socialism might be a problem, itself; but it was designed to solve a problem that the economic status quo of the time was unready, unwilling and/or unable to solve.

And while President Trump slanders, in Mr. Graham's opinion, the Green New Deal, Medicare for all and free college tuition, what's important is the omission of any other solutions to the problems that these policies are designed, however imperfectly to solve. While President Trump tells his base of support that they are the forgotten people, he doesn't offer that no-one will be forgotten. His base appears to want that other people are sent to the oubliette, at least, that's a large part of what he's offering. And that is what will lead, if it goes on long enough, to the very outcome he inveighs against, one way or another. Either some or another election will place into office enough supporters of whichever brand of Socialism to move policy forward, or a majority will move to prevent such an election from coming about giving rise to tyranny, even if the backers of said tyranny would be unlikely to describe it as such.

And this is the problem with scares; the deployment of fear, uncertainty and doubt becomes an alternative to actually understanding, and remediating the problems that lead to the initiative that one is scared of.

Boys Will Be

The amount the family is seeking in damages, $250 million, is the amount Amazon CEO and frequent Donald Trump target Jeff Bezos paid for the Post when he bought it in 2013. Sandmann’s lawyers claim the suit is not brought with a political agenda.
Covington Catholic student’s family hits the Washington Post with $250 million lawsuit

Of course not. That number makes perfect sense.

In any event, this has been generating a lot of heat, if barely any light. There seem to be a million online arguments about it. Mainly adults shouting at each other. I've read people claiming that they'd kick their kid's butt if they behaved as Nick Sandmann had, and then (and this is where sides are drawn up) proclaiming whether they'd sue or just walk away. All of which is really about the adults themselves.

I was a Catholic High School student once. I'd say that there were about two dozen of the guy that this kid was presumed to be (and may actually be) in my class. I don't know how you get around it. Religion makes jerks of people sometimes, and kids that age are really good at being jerks. They don't need whatever help religion may give. Or any other, for that matter. And I think that this may be what gave the story legs so easily. When I first heard of this, I just rolled my eyes, because what else is new? There's a big hullabaloo about the fact that this particular kid may not be the giant jerk the Washington Post made him out to be, but that kind of slides by the fact that a lot of kids are that jerk, or worse.

For all this "I'd kick my kid's butt" posturing, the fact of the matter is that unless it happened to be caught on tape or something, most parents would likely never find out about it. I wasn't all that good at keeping my parents in the dark, but I still managed to do things that I wouldn't confess to my mother to this day. But here's really what it comes down to; if you catch your kid behaving like that, step one should be to look in the mirror. While some apples do fall far from trees, that's not a safe bet to make. I didn't know all of the parents of the kids I considered jerks in my class, but from those I did know, it made perfect sense. Not in the sense that they actively approved of the jerk things that wend down, but in the fact that they were often jerks themselves. More mature and less ostentatious jerks, but jerks. And for most of them, it wasn't their kid's behaviors they were worried about; it was the embarrassment of their son being caught doing something that made them, as parents, look incompetent at parenting. And that's when butt-kickings happened.

One thing I learned from working with kids is how easily parents convince themselves that children reflect only the best of what's around them. But children aren't stupid and they're not imperceptive simply because they're children. They are more than capable of understanding power relationships, and they learn what's acceptable by watching their parents behave. Sure, some kids are influenced enough by their peer groups that they decide that it's worthwhile to do things that would otherwise never fly when they're around their friends. But the habit that many parents develop of blaming anyone but themselves is misplaced. Other people, of course, are more than willing to lay blame at the feet of parents.

And Nick Sandmann wandered face-first (quite literally, it seems) into a culture war over which side has worse people in it. Because cataloging other people's sins is a more enjoyable pastime that just dealing with the fact that any group of people large enough to have entered the public consciousness is too small to have any jerks in it - including any that we happen to be a part of. And pointing out other people's children behaving badly is just another way of making oneself out be a saint without actually needing to behave all the time.

And I do feel badly for him, because he's learning a hard lesson on what it means to be judged on the funhouse reflection of the world that people see when they look at someone, as opposed to what that person may have actually done. The father's lawsuit is a stunt, to be sure. Hopefully it won't need to be a salve for the weight of a millstone that was dropped around his son's neck.

Hella Noms

It has become an increasingly common story: A dollar store opens up in an economically depressed area with scarce healthy and affordable food options, sometimes with the help of local tax incentives. It advertises hard-to-beat low prices but it offers little in terms of fresh produce and nutritious items—further trapping residents in a cycle of poverty and ill-health.
The Dollar Store Backlash Has Begun

Thus opens another story that takes a symptom of poverty, and casts it as a cause, in the name of everything that is not the solution is a part of the problem.

This strikes me as dubious, because I don't understand how the presence of dollar stores makes "healthy and affordable (where 'affordable' is simply a synonym for 'cheap') food options" any more scarce in low-income neighborhoods than they were at the start. And part of the reason why the food tend to be prepackaged and of dubious nutritional quality are the aforementioned "hard-to-beat low prices," which rarely attach themselves to perishable or high-quality items.

In this respect, the problem isn't the dollar store industry. It's simply offering people an illusory standard of living, cobbled together out of low-end merchandise that's inexpensive to purchase, but doesn't last in proportion to its price. Part of what makes poverty so expensive (relatively speaking) is the fact that a hypothetical low-end good may be a quarter of the price of a higher-quality equivalent, but only have a fifth of the lifespan, and that lost twentieth adds up quickly. Returning to food, the ability to buy lots of something at one time is helpful. The article says that: "When economists compared the price of goods like flour and raisins of the same weight, they noticed that dollar store products were higher cost than those at the nearby Walmart or Costco." But the link is important, because it makes clear that the packages are not the same weight. Dollar stores sell flour at $1 for a two-pound package. Walmart and Costco charge less than $2.50 for a five-pound package. But this is a common phenomenon, and one that you don't need to compare stores in order to see. My local grocery store charges $5.99 a pound for a regular-sized pack of chicken. But if you're willing and able to buy the four-plus pound value pack, the price drops to $3.99 a pound. A car and a reasonably spacious freezer can make grocery shopping less expensive. But the large package sizes that big-box stores can manage often mean that the middle-income can stock up more cheaply. Equating this to "privilege" may be overstating it, but the economic benefits are clear.

But none of this is the fault of the businesses that sell inexpensive goods. Especially when they've opened in places where other options are rare. "Healthy and affordable food options" may be fairly common, but that's different than saying that they're ubiquitous. And both the words "healthy" and "affordable" are relative. While the food that I can pick up from my local grocery store or the cafeteria at work may fit the bill as far as this article is concerned, I'm pretty sure that there are health-conscious people who would consider my typical; purchases to be nightmares and I'm well aware of the fact that there are people for whom my food budget is more or less entirely out of reach. Given this, the idea that dollar stores are complicit in the problems of America's poor due to their failure to serve foods the health-conscious would approve of at prices the destitute can routinely manage seems to be wishful thinking. Likewise, one can fault the main grocery chains for following their customers away from declining neighborhoods or for responding to people who have more options by making their stores nicer and the merchandise better. But given that this is the way business works, it seems unproductive, at best.

What would need to change to eliminate food deserts is perhaps another revolution in agriculture; one that made what would now be considered high-end, healthful food common enough that the overall price drops far enough that selling it in low-income neighborhoods would be the only way to prevent waste. Dollar stores could sell high-quality food, and there would be enough choice that low-quality groceries would become non-viable. But that seems unlikely. Restricting where dollar stores can set up shop seems like a viable option, but it's really simply forcing certain suboptimal choices (paying more for food) at the expense of others (a less healthy diet).

Poverty can be defined as having one's choices constrained to the point of being straited by a lack of resources. What makes people poor is that they're faced with food that either costs more than they can pay and still have enough money left over for other priorities or leaves them more exposed to health risks than is optimal when considering what they need to do to care for themselves. And this is the thing about dollar stores. Doing away with them does not remove that constraint. It may force people's hands towards the sub-optimal choice that advocates prefer, but it's no less a bad choice for being marginally more acceptable to the alternative.

Here He Goes Again

The editor and publisher of a local paper in Alabama is under fire for penning an editorial calling for mass lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
Alabama newspaper editor calls on KKK to lynch Democrats

This is one of those stories that you just can't make up, because no-one would believe a word of it. It's so bang-on to the stereotypes that one wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was ham-handed attempt at parody.

But I find that it raises an interesting chicken-or-egg question. Did Goodloe Sutton publish "Klan needs to ride again" because he felt that the community and environs of Linden, Alabama would be receptive to the message or because he felt that he needed to push the area in that direction?

Or, for better or worse, was it because of a simple desire to sell newspapers? Mr. Sutton comes across as someone who believes what he wrote, but that doesn't change the fact that it's garnered him international attention, even if it does come across as a train wreck. And if train wrecks sell newspapers, might be worth it to take a backhoe to the tracks now and again. Because it very well could be that every copy of the newspaper that incredulous people could get their hands on was sold. The Democrat-Reporter doesn't publish online, and so the only way to get one's hands on the geniune article is to have purchased one. (I'm now curious if anyone's selling them on E-bay... just not enough to actually look and find out.) So it's possible that Mr. Sutton made a bit of money on this whole episode, although people who know him are saying: “Goodloe is just being Goodloe as far as I’m concerned.”

And that lack of surprise is something of a double-edged sword. It makes perfect sense for people in the area to have cultivated enough of a familiarity with Mr. Sutton that they no longer bat an eyelash. But at the same time, that very indifference can also be seen as tolerance, and proof that racism is so common that it's normal.

It's not as if Mr. Sutton doesn't know what year it is, or what modern-day attitudes concerning the Klan (and White supremacy more broadly) are. And he's not backing away from his statements. The people in the area who have to live with this guy on a day-to-day basis likely can't afford the emotional energy to constantly be outraged. And so they simply shrug their shoulders and go on. It's easy for people in other places to become worked up about it, but they can put on a show, and then go back to whatever it was they were doing.

And that's the thing about outrage culture. It relies on people like Goodloe Sutton only popping up now and again, doing their shtick and disappearing again. A lack of outrage may be indicative of a lack of attention, but attention is not an infinite resource. And sometimes, it's better spent elsewhere.

The Conspiracy Conspiracy

I read an article on the BBC's website that purported to explain "Why so many people believe conspiracy theories," and I listened to the accompanying radio piece that they'd done on it. It was interesting, but I felt that it failed to really delve into the heart of the matter.

Did Hillary Clinton mastermind a global child-trafficking ring from a Washington pizzeria? No.

Did George W Bush orchestrate a plot to bring down the Twin Towers and kill thousands of people in 2001? Also no.

So, why do some people believe they did? And what do conspiracy theories tell us about the way we see the world?

As an examination of how conspiracy theories help bolster in-group and out-group identification, reinforce notions of self as "one of the good guys" and provide a certain level of salve in situations where things aren't going someone's way, the examination of conspiracy theories is useful and interesting.

But it never actually delves into what it means to genuinely know, for instance, that Hillary Clinton did not mastermind a global child-trafficking ring. Or that people have, in fact, landed on the moon. That is to say, it never touches on the epistemology of the situations at hand.

Following are three different statements:

• There was no international trafficking of children through the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria under the direction of Hillary Clinton.
• There is no available evidence of international trafficking of children through the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria under the direction of Hillary Clinton.
• I have no evidence of international trafficking of children through the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria under the direction of Hillary Clinton.

And those statements are, to a certain degree, independent of one another, as I have written them here. (Of course, this presumes that I can have something, yet it not be otherwise "available.") And this is important, because much of the discussion of conspiracy theories works under the assumption that either the first statement is unambiguously true, or that the truth of the second statement is de facto proof of the accuracy of the first.

Conspiracies happen. Here in Washington state, they are against the law.

RCW 9A.28.040
Criminal conspiracy.
(1) A person is guilty of criminal conspiracy when, with intent that conduct constituting a crime be performed, he or she agrees with one or more persons to engage in or cause the performance of such conduct, and any one of them takes a substantial step in pursuance of such agreement.
(2) It shall not be a defense to criminal conspiracy that the person or persons with whom the accused is alleged to have conspired:
     (a) Has not been prosecuted or convicted; or
     (b) Has been convicted of a different offense; or
     (c) Is not amenable to justice; or
     (d) Has been acquitted; or
     (e) Lacked the capacity to commit an offense; or
     (f) Is a law enforcement officer or other government agent who did not intend that a crime be committed.
(3) Criminal conspiracy is a:
     (a) Class A felony when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is murder in the first degree;
     (b) Class B felony when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is a class A felony other than murder in the first degree;
     (c) Class C felony when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is a class B felony;
     (d) Gross misdemeanor when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is a class C felony;
     (e) Misdemeanor when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is a gross misdemeanor or misdemeanor.

Clearly, if conspiracies were entirely figments of the imagination, it would make little sense to legislate against them.

And so the question becomes what makes one conspiracy (say, Watergate) worth believing in and another (the Brexit vote was rigged) indicative of flawed thinking. Because again, to use the Brexit vote, elections can be rigged and, supposedly, have been rigged in the past.

And this is where the epistemology piece comes into play. Whenever a person is dealing with a choice to believe or disbelieve information about something that they have no firsthand knowledge of, it effectively becomes a question of faith. And in this sense, what makes any flavor of spirituality any more rational than the idea of reptilian humanoids? But if one were to ask, "Wait. People actually believe in this stuff?" in regards to hagiography, they'd pretty much be kissing any chance of running for elected office in the United States goodbye. But when one looks at some of the more incredible acts attributed to saints, or other manifestations of divine intervention, is there any more proof of them than there is for reptile doppelgängers secretly running the world?

And I think this is why discussion of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories rarely really get anywhere... they tend to simply come down to "this faith is flawed, because it doesn't line up with the faith the rest of us hold." In this, it may be seen as a corollary to the idea that "people aren't crazy because they hear voices, they're crazy because the rest of us don't." This winds up lending the entire enterprise an air of pushing conformity. It's fine to say that one's views on the world should line up with the world, but conventional wisdom has been wrong about the world before.

Of course, this isn't to say that all belief is equally valid under all circumstances. But merely arguing that someone is wrong about the way they view the world, especially when it's simply chalked up to sour grapes politics, doesn't do anything to move the needle. The fact that a person cannot, on command, come up with the evidence needed to obviate their faith is not universally regarded as proof that their faith is erroneous. To the degree that the discussion of conspiracies presumes that it does, it itself may be in error.

Sorted Out

Our refurbished buildings at work have few rooms set aside for R&R. The cynical explanation for this is that by allowing people to take a break without having to leave the premises, the company gets more work out of people per day. And while that may have been the reasoning, it's still a nice amenity. One of the rooms in a building near mine is a building toys room. It has these neat little chutes and such (that stick to the whiteboard with magnets) that one can build marble runs with, a bunch of Lincoln Logs and, of course, Lego bricks. A significant number of Lego bricks.

What's interesting about it is that not all of the materials were supplied by the company. Judging from the notes left around the room about three-quarters of the stuff are donations from employees. And across campus, one building has a music room with enough instruments for a decent-sized band. And pretty much everything in that room is on loan from other employees.

Which is nice. It gives people a place to bring things that they are no longer using, and it allows other people a chance to use them without needing to buy or rent the items for themselves. It's a win-win.

It occurred to me, however, that many of us make enough money that we can afford to buy or rent these things if we wanted to use them. And that most of the people around who don't make that kind of money aren't really welcome to avail themselves, mainly because they're contractors and they're on the clock. The cleaning staff doesn't really have time to take a half-hour or forty-five minutes out to run marbles or practice their guitar licks.

And our company as a whole isn't set up in the way that people may imagine that many large enterprises worked in the past, with people of varying backgrounds, educations and skills all coming into contact at work. Pretty much everyone I know by name is a professional, like myself. The support staff, like the receptionists or the iconic mail-room personnel are all contractors. They tend to be nice and conscientious people, but unless their jobs pay them enough to complete college, I'm unlikely to ever see them become fellow full-time employees. And the job that I used as a stepping stone to the technology industry, software test engineer, has pretty much gone the way of the dodo. The handwriting was on the wall for it more than a decade ago; a lot of the work that I used to do has been automated out of existence. (I once had a job testing that very automation to make sure it functioned properly.)

The result of all this is that to the degree that we've set up something like a sharing economy at work, it has become a number of relatively affluent people sharing with one another, in the same way that assortative matching has resulted in people selecting partners from their own social classes. The fading of mixing between social groups in people's lives tends to lock benefits into the groups in which they reside. The number of ways in which this is true is greater than I had imagined.

Unequal Access

So I was reading this article on the BBC's website, and I was thinking about how one would go about creating the sort of system that author Anand Giridharadas envisions, one where the winners take less. And it occurred to me that the reason why the "winners take all" as Mr. Giridharadas might put it is that they are the ones who have access to moderate and low-risk ways of increasing their wealth. For all that the lottery is considered a tax on people who have poor math skills, as this Reddit thread from 2014 points out, for many people who play, their chances of landing a big payday from a lottery ticket is greater than their chances of working their way into substantial wealth.

But for the already wealthy, there are plenty of ways of making their next few million dollars that don't come with substantial risks of losing their initial stake. And I'd be willing to bet that if you took a number of people, with $5, $50, $500, $5,000, $50,000 and so on, in savings, that each person would be able to double that amount of money in a given period of time at a lower rate of risk than the person just below them on the ladder. And if you presume that the lower down a person is, the lower their risk tolerance is, you also have the problem that while 100 people with $5 each might be able to match the rate of return of the person with $500, they would have a greater anxiety over loosing their stake, which would make them less likely to look for the same investment vehicles. (Which may, paradoxically, make them even more precarious, as their need for "sure deals" renders them vulnerable to scammers.)

Of course, simply having money isn't the end-all and be-all. Someone who suddenly comes into $5,000,000 or $50,000,000 is quite likely to end up with nothing in an alarmingly short time. Horror stories of what happens to lottery winners abound. Financial literacy, and likely something of an untrusting nature, are also important factors. Which adds another wrinkle to the whole situation. People like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Donald Trump didn't come up hobnobbing with people for whom pulling together $5 or $50 dollars to invest would have been at all difficult. The very idea of only having that much to work with would have been alien to them. And so those people, the ones who most need the ability to grow wealth through investment, are saddled with coming late to the party, after the high returns have already been doled out, and having to work through intermediaries, who are using those aggregate investments are low-risk vehicles for themselves; passing the risk along, but taking a share of whatever earnings are generated.

So maybe finding a way to invert the risk curve is what is required to change the situation in which we find ourselves.

Invulnerable

"So what is 'empathy'?" Dr. Brené Brown asks, in "The Power of Vulnerability," a talk she gave in 2013 to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce , "And why is it very different than 'sympathy'?"

An excerpt of this talk has been made into an animated short, The Power of Empathy, that seeks to provide images to go with Dr. Brown's words. It's been making the rounds at work in an extended discussion following a team presenting it at their offsite. The Power of Empathy, taken on its own, presents a Goofus and Gallant portrayal of Sympathy and Empathy. In the animation, there are three characters: a fox, who is enduring a difficult time in her life (as evidenced by the dark raincloud above her head), a bear who plays the role of Gallant Empathy and an antelope (I think) portraying Goofus Sympathy. While The Power of Empathy is, at its heart, simply part of a longer lecture, the animation makes it into a narrative of the different actions that Goofus and Gallant undertake to help the fox through her difficult time.

And while it's an entertaining narrative, I don't find it to be an accurate one. Dr. Brown preaches the virtue and connectedness of intentional vulnerability; the correct choice is always to be vulnerable. "Empathy is a choice," she says, "and it is a vulnerable choice, because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling." Sympathy, however, is undefined. Within the context of the video short, the audience is left to infer the definition of sympathy from the (unhelpful) actions of Goofus the antelope. But the inference that it appears that we are meant to draw is that to sympathize with someone is to avoid vulnerability, and thus, as Dr. Brown says, drive disconnection.

Being something of a contrarian (and having faced this sort of situation before), I was unwilling to cede the definition of "sympathy" to Dr. Brown, and so I turned to my trusty dictionary. One definition of "sympathy" that it offered was: "a sharing in the emotions of others, esp. the sharing of grief, pain etc." (The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, p 1002) Sharing the grief or pain of another person does not strike me as avoiding vulnerability, or driving disconnection from that person.

Perhaps the disconnect comes in the difference between empathizing with a person and sympathizing with them. In the talk, Dr. Brown puts forth meaningless platitudes as examples of sympathy. "At least you know you can get pregnant," is the answer to "I've had a miscarriage." But if, as the dictionary tells us, to "sympathize" is "to feel or communicate sympathy," or "(esp. with 'with') to feel or express compassion for the sufferings, sorrows, etc. of others," then it stands to reason that one can sympathize dishonestly and/or, perhaps more importantly, simply poorly. And, as anyone who has received a store-bought card pre-printed with a maudlin sentiment in it, the stale flatness of platitudes is rarely comforting. Because platitudes may be considered a form of euphemism; they serve to obscure our actual thinking by presenting a pleasant face and, like euphemism more broadly, are usually more comforting to the person speaking them than to the audience; one can describe them in the same way that Dr. Brown has described blame: the discharging of discomfort and pain.

And here's where the exercise took a turn for the ironic in my mind. Dr. Brown points out that reserving judgment can be difficult, especially "when you enjoy it as much as most of us do." And the Goofus and Gallant formulation of The Power of Empathy is an implicit invitation to judge. The audience laughs (apparently enjoying their judgment) when she voices the sentiments that the antelope is animated to deliver. But the antelope is in just as much need of the audience's compassion, or empathy, as the fox. A lot of the time, the problem isn't with people's ability to be empathetic or properly sympathetic. The problem is the perception of empathy, sympathy and compassion as either limited resources or carriers of  moral hazard. Either way, they are best rationed; being too generous with them carries risks. The fox, with the obvious misery of a dark cloud raining on her is a safe recipient for empathy. The antelope, presented as self-centered and unempathetic, is not. But if one assumes good intent on the part of the antelope, she can be seen as just as overwhelmed as the fox. Sometimes, the best friend we can be isn't a very good friend; they're simply not capable of meeting the challenge set before them. The impulse to respond, to try to make things better, may be the wrong thing for someone seeking empathy, but it not necessarily indicative of a choice to lean away from vulnerability and connection. Sometimes, it's the best that we know to do, or the way that we've always been taught to do such things.

As I see it, the difficulty with obvious Goofus and Gallant scenarios is that they tend to push audiences to see the Gallant in themselves. People can listen to Dr. Brown speak, and nod along, confident that they'd never respond to a friend's lament that "I thnk my marriage is falling apart," with "At least you had a marriage." There may be a Goofus, but that's someone else, someone who isn't as intelligent and sensitive as themselves. But sometimes, the difference between Goofus and Gallant isn't intelligence, sensitivity or caring, but knowledge. At some point, everyone's new. At some point, everyone doesn't know how to handle a situation. It's only a question of whether they have the time to learn before they're called upon to perform. Those who don't are just as worthy of empathy as those who are more visibly lost.

Imperfect

One of the lessons that my father taught me when I was young was: "Everyone has a scheme for getting rich that will not work." One of the things that I've learned as I grow older is that you can slightly modify that into "Everyone has a scheme for remaking society that will not work."

An aspect of political discussions that I've seen time and again is that someone will say, with the utmost confidence, that this or that political or economic system will fix everything. Someone else will point out that it's been tried before, and never worked, and the riposte will be that it's never actually been done correctly. Whether due to incompetence, unpreparedness or ill intent, whoever claims to have enacted communism, free market capitalism, democracy, you name it, have all done such a poor job of it that whatever hash they made of it cannot possibly be indicative of what the correct implementation would look like.

Except those are the correct implementations. At least as correct as actual people are ever going to be able to put in place. What makes a system workable is not how well its platonic archetype works on paper, but how well the actual implementation deals with the panoply of perverse incentives that are interwoven into the human experience. Because no system is immune to them, since no human institution can be proof against, well, humanity. In this, the foibles and failures that have gone before are likely to be blueprints of the systems of the future, rather than cast-offs. Attempting to ignore them, or hope that somehow humanity will transcend human nature will simply result in another piece on the pile of failed schemes.

Soots Me Just Fine

The basic point behind ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface is a simple one: the Mary Poppins movies, past and present, don’t do enough to distance themselves from the racial attitudes of the 1930s and 40s, when the Mary Poppins books were written and set and when early Disney movies and animated shorts openly played on the tropes minstrel shows.

Unless we learn something radically different about quantum mechanics and/or relativity at some point, the past is the past, and it will always be as it was. The only thing that we can do about it now is either recall, forget or misremember it, and it’s pretty much a given that any one of us must do some combination of those three. But pretty much anything else we chose to do with the past is optional; such as constantly worry that it's due to make a comeback.

While ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface purports to be a brief lesson in the history of the novels that birthed the movies and the media company that created them, it reads as a sort of ghost story, conjuring up supposedly frightening images from the distant past to indict a movie of the present, not for trafficking in those images, but for not making a clean enough break with them.

By the end of the piece, I wondered what I was intended to get out of it. Unlike activists who loudly decry things that they see as harmful, there was no statement that there was anything really wrong with it. Even the idea that the bad old days may make a return was only lightly touched upon; the final sentence references “Nothing’s gone forever, only out of place,” and leaves it at that. Which left the whole piece seeming bland and watered down.Which perhaps is what drove the impression that it was meant the be a takedown of Mary Poppins Returns.

But it wasn’t really even strong enough for that. If there were any real, substantive themes that ran through the piece, they were that Mary Poppins author P. L. Travers never recanted, only buried, the racism present in the books and that the Walt Disney Company had no qualms about presenting the biases of the day as entertainment. Which is fine as far as it goes. But Ms. Travers has been dead for the past two decades, and there are few, if any, indications that the Walt Disney Company has been working to poison the minds of America’s youth with imagery older than their grandparents.

And so the whole thing comes across as yet another exercise in the idea that in order to transcend the past, it must not be forgotten but expunged through active denunciations. That words like “pickaninny” and “Hottentot” must never be allowed to slip from the collective memory, lest they somehow become fashionable again. (As an aside, I’m somewhat fascinated with the apparent idea that there is some secretive cabal of people who are waiting for the racially-charged terms of the past to fade from society’s memory, simply so that they can be recycled into slurs that allow the bigoted to communicate in public without being caught at it.)

The only way that much of the past can ever live up to the standard of the present is via forgetfulness or forgiveness. Neither of which some people seem particularly inclined to give. But remembering and holding a grudge does what, exactly? The dead don’t care what we think of them, and can’t bring themselves into line with our ideals, even if they do. And while there may be virtue in vigilance, it comes at a cost; few look forward to never being able to rest.

Despite the fact that the World Wide Web is vast to the border of infinity, ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface seems like a waste. There is nothing in it to act upon and the facts it conveys don't leave one enriched for having learned them. The notoriety it garnered its author is unlikely to last as long as the images it claims are only out of place.

I've Got This

So the way it was explained to me, the interaction when something like this:

Uber driver: “Where do you work?”
Passenger: “[Technology Company*].”
U: “You work for [Technology Company]? I have a question.”
P: [winces and braces for impact]
U: “I’m messaging someone on Facebook. How can I get their physical location?”
P: “They have to give you permission.”
U: “No but without their permission.”
P: “Uh... I suppose you could craft a link... whhhy though?”
U: “I’m talking with this girl and...”
P: “You can let me out here.”

From there, the conversation turned to just how creepy was that driver, anyway, and what should be done in terms of reporting him to the service.

But a little while later, a question occurred to me: Who does this guy think he is? What gives him the impression that, given that women are often hyper-vigilant about their personal safety and responsive to anything that may be construed as threatening or even overly persistent, he is going to be someone who would be welcomed when he shows up on the doorstep of a person who has deliberately not shared with him how to find her? I'm pretty sure that not even Rico Suave could pull this off without winding up on the sharp end of a restraining order, and so it seems strange that some random Uber driver could get away with it.

And this strikes me as something that we often hear about when it comes to high-profile people accused of sexual misconduct, like Harvey Weinstein, but seems likely to be much more widespread: an inflated opinion of one's own desirability. Of course, that's not all of it. What is now understood to be creepy stalking was, once upon a time, considered romantic. Where by "once upon a time," I mean the mid-1970s. Granted, that was a while ago, but in the grand scheme of things, it's fairly rapid social change. And because of that, the overall idea that this is the sort of thing that endears one to another human being likely has yet to be extinguished.

And I wonder if this is wrapped up in the idea of being "special." Does that sense of being different from other people, or, at least, different and special to someone, give people the sense that things that would simply become a dumpster-fire-flavored train wreck when other people do them are going to work better when they do them? Or is it a confidence in the idea that when other people screw things up, it's because of some flaw in those other people that the would-be Romeo/Juliet is free of?

I don't get it. One of my mantas in life is "Learn from the mistakes of others; you won't live long enough to make them all yourself." And I've been burned before when I've forgotten that. And so I'm always curious when people decide that they've figured it all out, and that they have the secret. And maybe that's the explanation that I've been looking for: The idea that there's a secret, and that once you understand the secret it's all taken care of. Or maybe hope simply blinds people to what would otherwise be clear and obvious dangers. Which would explain why it was in that jar, wouldn't it?

*A company that shall remain nameless, but is not Facebook.

It's Everywhere

Back in the early days of Facebook, I had pretty much zero interest in it. In 2006, I was in my late thirties, and Facebook seemed like something that twentysomethings were into - I demographic that I hadn't really been all that fond of when I was an active member, and I didn't have any friends or relations in the cohort that I felt a need to keep up with. So I passed. This has given me some distance on the various flavors of controversy that have popped up around the platform as people realize that a) Facebook is a business and b) its users are not its customers.

Last week's edition of TIME magazine is about Facebook, and the cover reads as follows:

It owns your data.
It knows your friends.
It has your credit cards.
It hears your conversations.
It follows you everywhere.
And you can't go a day without it.

Two through five, I concede, may very well be true. I've been given to understand that Facebook creates profiles on the people who aren't on the platform, but are mentioned by people who are. And while I still don't know any twentysomethings who are on the platform (not more than in passing, anyway), I've been told that my mother, sister and niece all have Facebook accounts. And so, as concerns the first bullet, I presume that Facebook has worked up a file on me, and is patiently waiting for me to sign up for an account, so that they can link it to me, and add my personal information to the pile of data that they're busily selling off to the various businesses and other organizations that are their actual customers. But with the looming deprecation of Google Plus being about two months out, I suspect that we'll find that the last statement is decidedly false.

While people have been piling into the lifeboats and setting out for a new social-media ship to board, I've decided that I'm going allow myself to slip (mostly) back beneath the waves again. I was fine without an active personal (as opposed to professional) social media presence before a friend invited me to Google Plus, and I am comfortable in the idea that I'll be fine once it goes away.

Part of it is the old man in me. I was perfectly capable of finding ways to stay in touch with people prior to the advent of social media, and while I'm not going to say that the hodgepodge of methods that I've developed over the years is as efficient as Facebook, it serves my needs well enough. And as with a host of other technologies, I have decided against learning a new way of doing something simply to do it in a new way.

Part of it is a certain dubiousness concerning Facebook. It's one thing to decide that Facebook is untrustworthy after having sunk hundreds or thousands of hours into making it a central hub of one's life. It's quite another to come to that determination prior to coming to the platform.

But a lot of it is understanding people. Facebook is in the position that it's in today because protecting oneself from whatever negative influence once perceives that it has means not only standing up to Facebook, but to everyone else on Facebook that one is connected with and doesn't share the same viewpoint.

In order for Facebook, or any other business, for that matter, to really have its customer's interests at heart, those customers have to be able to punish the business for doing otherwise. And in the case of Facebook, the people who have spent so much time creating and curating their pages, they aren't even the customers. Suppliers might be a more apt description. But that does bring a certain amount of power with it, so long as enough people choose to exercise it.

I'm curious to see how this all turns out. I suspect that the regulatory route won't work as well as people hope; regulators don't have a good track record with these things. Perhaps it will take people learning that they can go a day without it, instead.