One Day

I was listening to the radio during a very short drive yesterday, and heard a snippet of a story about serious problems that some military families were having with their housing. It was a fairly bog-standard "government-corporate complex" piece, with accusations of corporate negligence and government opacity in the face of "shameful" treatment of the families of active-duty military. On the one hand, it was unsurprising that the story ran on Memorial Day. But the story felt serious enough that it could have run at any time, and so it did seem sort of surprising that it ran that particular day; it didn't seem like something that one would hold on to.

There are a few holidays during the year that are military themed, and many news outlets tend to devote a greater percentage of their airtime to stories about the military during those times. Which lends them an air of being the appointed time to think about the military. Just as there's a day to think about one's mother, a day to remember the founding ideals of the nation et cetera. And these then seem to become topics that the public doesn't put much thought into for the remainder of the year. And in this way, holidays become a sort of scaffolding that the populace as a whole can use to organize thoughts and remembrances.

It's understandable that people might need that. The modern world is full of things that demand attention; I wonder if people would have the bandwidth to place these things top-of-mind if these various holidays didn't come along to remind them.

All In

Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, posted on Twitter last year: "The solution to our winners-take-all economy is an economy in which the winners take less." Which is a nice sentiment, but I suspect that it's about as likely to happen as an economy in which the broad masses of people put less into the pot for the winners to scoop up.

For Mr. Giridharadas, the solution is "vigorous reform of law and policy," but I'm dubious about that as the answer. Legislating social good is rarely viable. Especially in situations where many high-ranking corporate executives earn modest cash wages, but large equity stakes in their businesses. But more to the point for me, it lets the rest of us off the hook.

As much as its fashionable on the American Left to complain about corporations "reaping unfair profits," instances in which businesses pad their bottom lines with openly dubious practices are about as rare as they are newsworthy. (And many of those are side effects of intellectual property law, which many people I've spoken to about the subject are in favor of, despite the ease with which government-enforce monopoly power tends to break things.) A lot of corporate profitability comes down to sheer volume of sales. When a business moves enough merchandise, they don't need to make a high margin on the individual items to make a killing. And large businesses consolidate, their volume grows. And this is in no small part due to the fact that people understand economies of scale to be good for them. While, like a lot of recent business success stories (or would-be success stories), Amazon was able to manage some of their cost savings over their brick-and-mortar competition by flouting sales tax laws (I'm always impressed at the degree to which people view tax evasion as no different from any other discount or promotional price), online retailing simply doesn't come with the same level of overhead that in-person selling does. And people's willingness to go to a physical store, where they can handle the merchandise and ask questions, to shop for goods, and then turn around and buy online also drives the problem.

It's in many people's interests to pay $9.50 for an item online, rather than $10.00 at a local store, and then demand that the shareholders and executives of the online store share their profits. But being willing to spend more to spread money around would get us neatly past at least some of the problems of winner-take-all. Smaller pots, more evenly distributed, would likely result in fewer super-wealthy and super-poor people, which, in turn, would reduce the need to request charity.

But an efficient society with a sophisticated division of labor is always going to have some reliance on charity. Spending that extra 50¢ to shop locally is, basically, a charitable action. So the case can be made that it doesn't much matter where, precisely, the charity occurs. In the end, a lot of this comes down to: "If you want something done right..." for that reason. Still, I do think that if we want a more equitable society, directly funding it is worthwhile.

Patriotism in Miniature

Chronicles of Banality

Nobody in Particular is banal. I, as its author, understand this. I'm not a particularly insightful or artistic person, and so there's not much here for the person who's really looking for a different take on the world. And in that sense, I wonder if it will ever really be useful beyond the exercise in writing and/or discipline that it provides me.

I don't know that it will be, but I would like to think that it will have some use to someone at some point in the future. History is made by great people, art is made by creative people and so on, but perhaps the day-to-day understandings (or misunderstandings) history and artistry will provide a context for people to make sense of them.

For nearly all of the events of the present, and every event of the past, I only have second-hand knowledge. I was not present to see them myself. (For instance, I didn't go out for lunch today, and so missed the abortion-rights protest that was taking place across the street from the building I was in.) The only way I can know anything about these events is to receive information from some other party. Who may or may not actually have been present themselves. And so much of what I know about the world is due to someone deciding that it is important enough to tell me. But the important things that happen when I am present for them are few and far between.

And so I write about things that are everyday and humdrum, and I'm likely an everyday and humdrum writer. Hopefully, that is okay.

Drumming For Peace

I stopped by Lake Forest Park today, and checked in on the weekly protest. It's still going, but the members are ageing. I was somewhat disappointed that their numbers aren't being filled out with younger people. Not that I believe that younger people aren't invested in the cause of ending the conflicts that the United States is currently engaged in. But they have their own protests.

This is always the way of things. Merely having the same goals doesn't necessarily make people allies.

Behind the Times

In 2012, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer was interviewing a young native woman about a sexual assault she had reported. In short, the officer was basically fishing for some sort of evidence that the young woman had been at least somewhat cooperative with the man she said assaulted her, asking if there were "at all turned on" or subconsciously "responsive to his advances."

Cue the outrage machine. Which is all fine and good. But I'm not sure that it's newsworthy as presented. Sure of the officer's line of questioning, and his clear suspicions that the young woman was making a false report, belong more in 1912 than 2012. But what are people to do with the fact that an unnamed RCMP officer was being a Neanderthal seven years ago?

More useful, I think, would have been a broader examination of what was done with the case at the time, and if the RCMP a different institution now than it was then. As it is, the readers can rest assured of their moral superiority over the single officer, but not really much else.

As it stands, it's a click-bait link. And while those have value from the point of view of engagement metrics and click-through rates, they're less valuable as actual sources of useful information. But I suppose that useful information is a secondary concern for most news organizations. After all, if people will click through as long as the headline promises something to be upset about, news may not be worth the time.

Trade You

On Monday, Trump tweeted: "There is no reason for the U.S. Consumer to pay the Tariffs," and that they can be "completely avoided if you buy from a non-Tariffed Country, or you buy the product inside the USA (the best idea). That's Zero Tariffs."
Fact-checking Trump's Buy America strategy of avoiding tariffs

This is what having a certain level of political support buys an office-holder. The ability to note, however obliquely or even painfully, a certain truth. It may very well be true, as CNN points out, that there is no easy or painless way for the American public to dodge the tariffs. But it's also true that making China the producer-of-choice, while it may have been easy, was itself painful. People and businesses in the United States voted, with their wallets to send a portion of United States manufacturing to China, and to other nations, because they would rather pay for a combination of lower wages and higher corporate profitability than they would higher wages for fellow Americans. But putting all of those people out of work itself came with a cost. American businesses moving their operations into a nation that offered lower manufacturing costs, but restricted access to its own markets may have been a profitable decision, but it also came at a cost. And to a certain degree, the public, businesses and government alike dodged some of those costs. President Trump's imposition of tariffs on goods from China makes at least some of those costs inescapable.

And this is something that the President can only get away with because he has a core of people behind him who believe that President's tactics on this will, in the end, be to their (and by extension, the nation's) benefit. And in this, the President deserves a modicum of credit. A lot of the reaction to this is political, more than anything else. And it's part of a common political narrative that always wants to push back against pain. But for the first time in decades, people in the United States are actually reckoning with the costs of choices that were made, and are still being made. Of course, the President is, at the same time, ducking other important questions. But hey... one thing at a time.

Sacred Lots

O-mikuji fortune slips, tied to the branches of a tree at a local Shinto shrine.

All Alone

I was reading an article on Slate that noted something that's been kicking around for about the past decade: That because of a general stigma against men being emotionally open, they tend to have few, if any, friends that they can really talk to about their feelings. The Slate article is effectively a follow-up to an article in Harper's Bazaar that says that many men have effectively become "emotional gold diggers," their investment in a toxic form of masculinity cutting them off from emotional supportive relationships other than their romantic partners, who eventually burn out from the emotion work that they're asked to do.

Stories on how modern (American) ideas of masculinity cut people off from emotionally supportive relationships with people in general and other men in particular are rife. And stories about the dire consequences are common. One story from Medium is pretty blunt about it:

Boys feel fierce love for their best friends → Add homophobia, the Man Box, etc. → Boys disassociate from loving best friends → Boys and men become emotionally isolated → Men enter the epidemic of loneliness → Men die.

And one thing that I noticed about the stories that I've read is that they tend to mention "research." But they tend to link to books on the topic, written by this or that author, rather than any scholarly research papers. Perhaps this is because itr's more or less assumed that the narrative is correct. I'd always presumed that there were just certain things that you didn't tell anyone other than a committed partner or spouse, and the idea that many heterosexual men are afraid to appear weak and/or homosexual is pretty much assumed in the culture.

But when I decided to perform a few Google searches looking for formal, peer-reviewed research on the topic, I didn't find anything. Now, this isn't to say that it's not out there. I'm not a particularly good web researcher, and it's entirely possible that the information I'm after is basically buried out there somewhere. But I was kind of surprised that there didn't seem to be anything that pointed to any formal studies on the topic, especially given the public health implications that many people have noted. Anecdotal evidence is all fine and good, but given that this topic has been around for several years, I'd expected more, especially given that the scientific community hasn't exactly shied away from studies that have effectively simply confirmed that water is wet.

It could be that this is a hard thing to study. I don't know, off the top of my head, how you'd structure something to demonstrate the destruction of love between male friends over time, and the lasting effects on their lives. Had I gone into Psychology as a profession, this would be the perfect time to invoke "If I want something done right, I should do it myself." I suspect that it would be fascinating.

The ASPEN Principle

I recently remembered that I have a Reddit account, and so I spent some time surfing the site over a few evenings. There are some interesting subreddits; I wasn't expecting to find so many interesting niche communities. But the two subreddits I enjoy reading the most are Personal Finance and Scams. Mainly because they remind me of when I was just starting out in the adult world, and clueless as to much of how it worked.

It's helpful, as I've gotten older, to remember that At Some Point, Everybody's New. There's always the first time that someone encounters something. It's an exercise in compassion that I want to make sure that I continue with.

Where'd They Go?

Facebook, according to the BBC, is banning several people that it has labelled as "dangerous individuals." Ho hum. The names on the list to be banned belong to people that those outside of their follower communities tend to have little respect or use for. In this, Facebook is simply kicking out of the service a number of people that most Facebook users don't appear to want to be bothered with anyway.

But I did find this statement in the piece to be interesting:

However, Facebook has been criticized for giving forewarning of the bans, giving those affected a chance to redirect their followers to other services.

Part of this is a nod to the perceived power and reach of Facebook; an assumption that if the banned individuals were to simply go dark without warning, their audiences would have difficulty tracking them down. And hopefully, at least some of them would grow discouraged and give up the search, perhaps to return to the rest of the world. For my part, I'm dubious that abruptly banning people would do anything but cement the idea that Facebook is capricious in people's minds. After all, it's not like people don't know how to search for any of these people online. And it seems that it would be difficult to police all of the blog postings, internet memes and chat-room discussions that could point someone to their idols' new homes.

Also lurking in that criticism of Facebook, however, is the idea that the company has some role to play in making it difficult for people to find the content that they wish to partake of, if that content is deemed harmful. And one can presume that there is a strain of thought that says that other companies have a similar responsibility. Again this seems to be a nod to the idea that these companies effectively control what people see, and therefore what information they can have legitimate access to.

Which is, of course, a double-edged sword. Because someone who can disappear information that one doesn't want others to have can disappear the information that one does want them to...

I Wouldn't Do That...

I have decided that the War on Terror is an abject failure, and has been for some time now; especially on the home front. A friend of mine and I were on our way to the theater to see a movie. We were walking past the drugstore, and there, next to a wooden parkbench-style seat, was a box. The kind of box that you'd get from an office supply store. Fellows makes them, I believe. They're lockable with a key, and designed to keep your swag intact after your house or office burns down - you wade into the wreckage and retrieve your box, unlock it, and voila! your precious loot is undamaged. This particular box was mostly tan, but colorfully decorated with flowers and big bright letters - it fairly shouted that it was the secret swag box of some adolescent girl - the place were she kept all the stuff that she didn't want her oh-so-uncool parents and/or siblings to find out about. The diary, the pictures of boys, condoms, the small stash of pot, Ecstacy and/or meth - you get the idea.

Anyway, this colorful box was sitting forgotten next to this wooden bench outside of the drugstore as we're walking by. My first thought was "hmm... that's unexpected," then I the decorations sank in, and I realized that someone'd had an airhead moment, and forgotten the thing. On the off chance that the owner was in, or an employee of, the drugstore, I went in, and told the first checker I encountered about the box.

She came outside with me, and it was pretty clear that her first impression was: "Suspicious Box™." So, to see whether or not it was a bomb, she picked it up, and put her ear to it, as if she was listening for a timer. I would have laughed, but was too immediately surprised by so odd an action. (I am reminded of the time in college, when I was standing, dumbfounded, watching one of my classmates earnestly get within moments of shooting herself. In PE class. With a bow and arrow.) First off, the girly decorations aside, I was fairly convinced that there wasn't a bomb in the lockbox. After all, like I said, this was the sort of box that's designed to withstand a house fire, and it wasn't very large. You could injure someone fairly seriously by packing the thing with explosives, but anyone who could get their hands on enough C4 to make the thing really dangerous is going to have enough brains to pick something that won't itself dampen the blast. Secondly, you'd be hard pressed to get me to put something that I thought had a realistic chance of detonating up to my ear. Although I suppose that if I really didn't want to risk simply being maimed for life, it's a reasonable way to go. Lastly (of my immediate thoughts, anyway) was "Who still uses alarm clocks for bomb timers anymore?" The idea of some nutcase searching Value Village for a castoff 60's vintage clock to wire into his detonator crept into my head. Or maybe this woman just didn't realize that digital timers only make "tick-tock" noises as sound effects.

In the end, she decided that she'd take it back into the store with her, and call 911. (I had a twinge of sympathy for the poor dispatcher who was going to wind up taking this call, if this woman insisted on having the Bomb Squad called out.)

But the idea here isn't to have everyone laugh at the reactions of the drugstore clerk (even though I nearly did). I'm going to assume, and I'd guess that you have too, that if this were still the spring of 2001, the idea that the box could have possibly contained a bomb would have seemed like sheer lunacy to everyone involved. But now that we're engaged in a conflict between cultures that has seen some of the worst atrocities that most Americans will ever witness, we're all supposed to be on our guard. Fair enough. But shouldn't there have been some high-profile public education as to what you do if you DO think that you may have found something? If that box DID turn out to have had a bomb in it (although I'd have been less surprised to have been suddenly struck by a meteorite at just that moment), and it had been set to go off then the box was disturbed, the clerk, and likely my friend and me along with her would have been killed or seriously injured by the ensuing blast.

While I'm not old enough to have been around for the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other highlights of the Cold War, I've seen enough old-school (literally in some cases) film footage to realize that back in the day, they went crazy with telling the public things they could do to protect themselves. Now, we all know that all that Duck and Cover would really have done is left behind charcoal briquettes in some odd fetal position, but it was an attempt. When was the last time you saw a television spot from the Feds concerning public safety in the War on Terror? "In case of a possible bomb, call 911 from a safe distance; preferably another Area Code. -- This public service announcement brought to you by the Department of Homeland Security."

I don't doubt that there are legitimate fears of sparking a panic and, of course, such a message would have undermines successive administrations' characterization of Iraq as a sort of jihadist Roach Motel. But telling people simply to be on their guard just doesn't seem like it's going to do much good, if they don't have any idea of what they can do after that.

How Will You Know?

I was reading a story on exorcism the other day. Now as someone who doesn't believe in spirits of any sort, possession isn't real for me, but I understand the people do believe and that possession is real for them. Which one of us is right, in the grand scheme of things, is a somewhat interesting question, I suppose. But what I'd much rather know is: How could you tell?

This, of course, is the $64,000 question with any sort of supernatural phenomenon, from hauntings to magic. If it doesn't have some sort of obvious physical impact on the material world, how can one tell that it's genuine? Of course, given that I can't actually prove that I'm not a brain in a jar, there's the bigger problem of how does one prove that anything is genuine, but going deep on epistemology makes my brain hurt.

In the end, this is what faith is all about, but it does raise an interesting question: Is the phenomenon of possession agnostic? That is to say, does one need to have a preexisting belief in possessing demons in order to be possessed? As near as I can determine, possession is a culture-bound syndrome; that is to say, it only manifests itself in specific cultures. This creates the ironic circumstance that people in cultures that don't believe in the supernatural have, in effect, an absolute protection against possession. In Christianity, you can come up with something of a rationale for this; the possession of non-believers would be a for of proof of the supernatural, and obviate the need for faith. A bit wonky for my tastes, but semi-logical enough. But in Buddhism, is there the same understanding of the necessity of faith? If not, it seems strange that māra will or can only possess Buddhists, and not other random people.

I'm not sure that it actually matters what the answer is. People believe in both possession and exorcism, and pointing out that it seems odd that these would be limited to believers will not deter them from that. And, of course, proving anything one way or the other would be difficult. But it's an interesting question.