Keeping Watch

For such large birds, Great Blue Herons can be somewhat difficult to find around here, to the point that it's easy to forget that the Puget Sound region is part of their year round range. But this particular bird had located a nice vantage point for itself, which, in turn, gave me a nice shot at it. The bird seems small in photograph, and so I considered cropping it down to make it seem larger, but I kind of like how unobtrusive the bird comes across as being at this angle.

Unwound

I was rummaging through some notes that I'd taken "back in the day," as it were, and found the following description of people serving time in prison.

They lose their humanity. They lose their full range of emotions. Their personality disappears. They (sic) eyes become blank. They seek deep, deep under what we know as depression. There is no enjoyment of even the smallest things because there are no small things to enjoy.

I wish that I'd thought to save more of the context of, and a link to, this statement, because it seems to be part of a much longer missive, and I'd like to read the rest of it. But, unfortunately, I didn't, and so this anonymous snippet will likely remain so, as a quick Google search of parts of it didn't reveal a source. But in that same series of notes, I also found the following argument for life in prison, as opposed to capital punishment.

We will avoid inflicting irreversible penalties.

This speaks to one of the strange contradictions of the criminal justice system as we think of it in the United States; the idea that the effects of being subjected to "dehumanizing" conditions, with all of the losses that the writer lists above, is reversible. Part of it it, I think, that we don't consider such mental and emotional damage, the loss of emotionality, personality and enjoyment, as being themselves part of the penalty that we exact from people when they are incarcerated. And if one of the arguments against sentencing people to death for crimes committed is that we don't want to be in a position of having done something irreversible for a crime that it turns out was not committed (at least not by the person convicted of it), that likely applies to a much wider range of sentences than might be initially evident.

The fact that death is forever is relative when compared to spending years behind bars. The only time I have ever heard anyone articulate that it's possible to somehow completely reverse the effect of a long period of imprisonment is in reference to the death penalty. Society can accept the fact the a person who spends a year in a combat zone can return and never be the same as they were when they left, but then determine that there is nothing "irreversible" about being in prison for a significant stretch of time?

This is the reason why I am dubious of the idea that there should be a financial benefit to doing away with capital punishment. The lengthy process of appeals and reviews that are mandated for sentencing someone to be executed should simply be applied to those sentenced to die behind bars. The idea that there is an absolutely reversible penalty, one that is somehow "safe" to apply to an innocent person is a fallacy.

There is an argument to made that being wrongly imprisoned for twenty years, and then put to death is no worse than being wrongly imprisoned for forty years, and then succumbing to old age. And no system is, or can be, perfect. False positives will occur, and they will condemn those who are innocent of the accusations leveled against them. While the late Justice Antonin Scalia (I believe) was excoriated for this stand, I believe that he was fundamentally correct when he effectively noted that there is no Constitutional right for the innocent to not be imprisoned. The standards deal with due process and reasonable doubt. Factual innocence is not part of the equation; if it could be reliably determined whether or not someone was genuinely guilty, a number of problems would have been resolved by now.

I don't know if there will ever be broad acceptance of the idea that there is no such thing as a reversible penalty. But time, once taken from a person, can never be returned to them. In that sense, it is like life itself.

Misattributed

The group More in Common has published the results of a new study that they've conducted, and it shows that, basically, Democrats and Republicans don't really understand what the "other side" thinks, in that they tend to ascribe a higher percentage of "extreme" views to the opposite party than polling bears out. For me, this is the rough equivalent of a study that informs us that water is wet. While I have a number of politically engaged friends and acquaintances, they don't really share their political viewpoints with me, outside of the occasional browbeating about which candidates they want me to vote for. And so where they stand on, for instance, whether most police officers are bad people or if properly controlled immigration will strengthen the nation are mysteries to me. Our conversations don't turn on such topics.

What I can usually put my finger on is the degree to which my friends trust corporate America. And the answer to that question is: not much. A surprising (to me, anyway) number of my friends have a deeply conspiratorial mindset when it comes to how businesses operate. And there is, to a degree, a similar conspiracy-minded view of politics, especially among some of the more politically engaged people I know. The idea that "the other side's" policies were designed to advance some hateful backroom scheme is fairly prevalent.

More in Common's research appears to bear this out. When asked to assess whether the other were "Brainwashed," "Hateful" or "Racist," large numbers of Democrats and Republicans alike were willing to lay these judgements. Republicans were slightly more charitable than Democrats, except when it came to assessing racism, where they were significantly less likely to call out Democrats than vice versa. Still, 71% of Republicans were willing to describe Democrats as racists, so that may not be as hopeful a sign as could be wished for.

David Brooks once pointed out that a lot of what is at work in the divide between liberal and conservative viewpoints in the United States, whether applied to domestic or international affairs, has simply to do with where and how people live, and thus what they understand is most useful for them. "Blue America" tends to live in areas of high population density, where the externalities of individual behavior are everyday things. "Red America," on the other hand, being less dense, has more concern with being able to do what they need to in order to look after themselves. To the degree what systems that work well for one group tend to make life difficult when applied to the other, there is a friction. And when people see that friction as intentional, anger develops. Understanding one another better would help bridge this gap, I believe, even though I understand that many people see half-measures and compromises as the same as inaction.

More in Common tends to somewhat disagree with my assumption that people understanding one another, and the problems that people are attempting to solve, would lead to a less-fractured polity:

That is because our analysis reveals a powerful polarization ecosystem that thrives off of outrage and division. Traditional media, social media platforms, friend networks, political candidates and consultants benefit from dividing Americans, exaggerating disagreements and inciting conflict. These forces of division must be held to account.

And this is where the whole exercise took a turn towards the ironic. As near as I can tell, the problem has never been that people don't want to be unified, it's that they believe that there are people who directly benefit from deliberately creating problems and blocking solutions. At the same time, people see themselves as above being taken in. The reason why 86% of Republicans are willing to describe Democrats as "Brainwashed," and 88% of Democrats are willing to return the favor isn't that they are unaware of "traditional media, social media platforms, friend networks, political candidates and consultants." It's that they're secure in their own objectivity and that of people who agree with them, and so it's only those who don't see the world properly who are being fooled. And this is perfectly reasonable; who would want to believe that their friends and the candidates they support for elective office are effectively colluding to make fools of them?

In this, More in Common's invocation of vague "forces of division" drives the very judgements of bad intention, poor character and limited discernment that they decry. According to More in Common's numbers, even though 86% percent of Republicans believe that Democrats are "Brainwashed," 31% of them also believe that Democrats are "Caring." As these numbers together add up to 117%, there must be some overlap. Even the less charitable opinions of Democrats about Republicans result in the numbers adding up to 107%. From this, we can guess that at least about one in six Republicans and at least about one in fourteen Democrats may believe that there are some number of their "opposites" that are caring people, brainwashed by "élites," because they don't understand that the people they receive their information from "benefit from dividing Americans, exaggerating disagreements and inciting conflict." In other words, they're blind to the conspiracy that manipulates them.

The message that "there are enemies; people just have to know who they really are," very often becomes "there are enemies; other people just have to know who they really are." In Yascha Mounk's column in The Atlantic that reports on the More in Common study, he notes:

What is corroding American politics is, specifically, negative partisanship: Although most liberals feel conflicted about the Democratic Party, they really hate the Republican Party. And even though most conservatives feel conflicted about the Republican Party, they really hate the Democratic Party.

And this makes perfect sense. If you understand a partisan apparatus of traditional media outlets, social media networks, groups of "friends," candidates chosen by powerful élites and consultants employed by the same exaggerating disagreements by portraying you as an extremist so as to divide the country and incite conflicts and, in the process turning people with the capacity to be honest, reasonable and caring into brainwashed, hateful racists, what's wrong with hating that? What's wrong with hating people who are deliberately sowing unnecessary dissension for their own benefit?

Once people understand that there are bad people in the world around them, they will look for them and they will likely find them. And not only in the places that one might want them to.

The Great Monster

One of the central conceits of H. P. Lovecraft's Mythos corpus is that there are these ancient and very powerful beings that exist out in the universe. They aren't hostile to humanity, they're just indifferent. But their power makes that indifference into a mortal threat.

While coming up to the door of my apartment a few days ago, I met a spider. As happens from time to time, he'd spun his web across the gap between the wall of the building and this post that runs between the balcony and the roof. Right in a space that I have to pass through in order to get to my door. So I come home, and find myself face to face with an arachnid, who that morning had likely marveled at its good fortune in finding such prime and unoccupied real estate.

Needless to say, that turned out to be a colossal error in judgment; and the end of one web, since I had no intention of winding up with it all over my face, hair and shirt.

And in that moment, I kind of understood how Mr. Lovecraft intended Cthulhu and company to interact with humanity. I had nothing against the spider. It simply had the misfortune to build a web in a spot that I needed to pass through. I wouldn't be surprised if it never even saw me clearly. From its point of view, there may have been somewhat of a strange, localized darkening of the sky, and then catastrophe struck. (The spider did survive. But if one can be traumatized, there's a spider therapist about to make a killing.)

I'd once read an interesting story about ants managing to communicate with humans and being able to ask favors; and how horribly wrong that could go. And that's a pretty good analog for how cultists might find their interactions with the Elder Gods. But the interaction with the spider speaks to what life in that world can suddenly be like for the rest of the inhabitants. The ones for whom life is normal until they find themselves face to face with a force so much greater than themselves that they can't even perceive it properly, that destroys their works and maybe even lives out of sheer indifference to their fates.

Painted Over

It's not uncommon to hear people refer to companies "greenwashing" or "wokewashing;" that is, using the language and/or imagery of environmental stewardship or social consciousness without really taking the necessary actions (or as much action as they'd like to appear to be) to further those ends. Part of this is a certain understandable (and sometimes, warranted) cynicism towards businesses, which, after all, at answerable to their shareholders and/or other owners to a much greater degree than they are to the public at large, let alone the specific subsets of people who consider themselves "green" or "woke." And there are others, like "redwashing," "pinkwashing," and "bluewashing" which I will admit were all new to me.

This is to be expected, I think. After all, environmental stewardship and social consciousness are, from the point of view of a business, brand assets, no less than a reputation for quality or perception of value. And these are also things that businesses (and governments), given half a chance, will fake if they can get away with it. Like the more garden-variety "whitewashing" (outside of the motion-picture industry, in which it has a different meaning), all of these are simply shortcuts to a better public image. Or, to perhaps use a term more favored in business, "efficiencies."

There is, as in many things, a perverse incentive at work. While a reputation for quality or for socially-conscious activism are brand assets, high-quality products and services or social consciousness can be expensive. And when the bottom line is important, that creates an incentive to attain the reputation, and the benefits thereof, with as little expenditure as can be managed. This can lead to companies looking for genuine efficiencies, finding ways to get the most bang for their buck, to reuse the cliché. But in a situation where genuine progress can be hard for a layperson to determine, there can be a temptation to stop at talking the talk. While security is a common area where this is seen; leading to the term "security theater," if it's not immediately evident when the walk is being walked, the fact that talk is cheap(er) will likely become something of a consideration.

Perverse incentives are built into the human experience from the outset. For any number of human activities, there is an "easy way" to an end, and as long as this is true, people will be attracted to them. Guarding against them takes what can be a remarkable amount of effort, and to the degree that we see that effort as detracting from more important activities, it's reasonable that people will skimp on it. Doing things the hard way, or even simply doing what was promised, is often a more difficult sell than we give it credit for, which is what makes it important.

This Way

There is a conviction, widely held among activists, that if you show everyone the One True Path that will lead to a better life for everyone involved, and they tell you to get lost, that this may be taken as incontrovertible evidence of the stupidity, thoughtlessness and or "brainwashing" of the audience.

In the ranks of pragmatists, however, it's just as likely that if the One True Path is so roundly rejected by the very people who are supposed to benefit from it, it was improperly presented, and/or it really isn't as great an idea as the activist thinks it is.

This is, of course, simply a variation on the idea that people rarely simply reject out of hand schemes that they genuinely understand will advance their interests. Although it is true that as partisans become more and more distrustful of one another, people more readily fall into the fallacy of rejecting a plan due to its source, rather than its substance. Still, suspicion is not the same as being unintelligent, thoughtless or brainwashed, and treating it as if it were doesn't really help heal the suspicion.

Peek-a-Boo

You Have the Right to Remain Unpublished

Social media, I think, should come with its own version of a Miranda warning: Anything you post can and will be used against you in the Court of Public Opinion.

The degree to which things that people post on the Internet will come back to haunt them is a random variable. While the currently trendy version is Offense Archaeology, about a decade ago, there was a steady, if light, stream of stories about some or another person losing their job because their employer had found a post they'd made of themselves doing something ill-considered, but otherwise legal (such as partying a bit too hard). While it's understood that the legal system can be very interested in what one posts online, many people come appear to be less aware that this or that social media or internet thing can suddenly become the one thing that they will be judged on, if they're ever in the fickle spotlight of public attention.

Now, the Court of Public Opinion is a pretty poor venue; it has poor standards of evidence, no protections against double jeopardy and doesn't care about allowing the accused to confront their accuser(s). Which is why I'm often surprised at the general level of incaution that people often have concerning it. Of course, many people are of the understanding that since they're "one of the good guys" they'll never have to worry about it. But did I mention that the Court of Public Opinion also lacks prohibitions against ex post facto prosecutions?

A Matter of Trust

At one point in our interview, [the Guardian senior technology reporter Julia] Wong told me she thinks the tech platforms are in some ways damned if they do and damned if they don’t regulate content. It’s tough because it’s a slippery slope. The shootings and the pedophilia, those are the easy calls. After that it starts to get really messy really fast, and then you’re talking about huge powerful companies with huge influence over literally what we see and read and think.

However, after I read this Buzzfeed story last month about the 14-year-old girl with a million followers who tells gay people and Muslims to kill themselves and promotes so-called red pill beliefs that women are inferior, and the story said YouTube gave her channel a “strike” (that meant she couldn’t upload for a whole entire week) I did feel like maybe I would appreciate a bias against that content.
Molly Wood. “Are YouTube’s excuses for terrible content finally wearing thin?”

If there's one thing that irks me about "dystopian" fiction, it's that the Evil Overlords™ are so often just that: Evil. Oppression of the innocent (and morally upright) masses is an end in itself, apparently simply so black-hearted government apparatchiks can enjoy living the high life to the sound of the public groaning under an unjust system. As I understand it, however, governments aren't bastards for the sake of being bastards; they're attempting to make a better world, and, as I've heard many people put it, some things are too important to worry about preserving people's rights. (After all, the dead have no use for them...) Of course, portraying oppressive regimes and being responsive to what some segment of the population wants from it paints the public as at least partially complicit in the whole enterprise, and so I can understand why it doesn't happen all that often. But in the real world, sometimes, it is some or another segment of the public that drives the dystopia.

I understand the impulse to allow "huge powerful companies" to wield "huge influence over literally what we see and read and think," if the result is that a reactionary teenager "who tells gay people and Muslims to kill themselves and promotes so-called red pill beliefs that women are inferior," and others like them, are kept out of the broader marketplace of ideas. But that presupposes a faith that this "huge influence" will always and only be deployed in ways that are likewise acceptable. A formal government program of censorship or corporate initiatives to keep the public (or advertisers and investors) happy will always be focused on the "terrible content." It's what makes something terrible that's going to be the stumbling block. The idea that hate speech and bigotry are self-evident can lead to an understanding that once the people with the red pens show themselves to be publicly-minded, they can then be trusted to do the public's work.

It can be said that it's the responsibility of each and every one of us, as individuals, to simply ignore the haters and go on about our business. But that is, effectively, an impossible request. And the consequences of people failing to live up to that assumed responsibility can be grievous. Someone spends a bit too much time taking "Soph's" videos to heart; and then there is violence. And for many people, the choice between shutting down Soph's access to abroad audience and recriminations over injuries or deaths is an easy one; pull the plug on her and be done with it. But the costs of freeing people from a responsibility that they're potentially unequipped to handle are giving power and relaxing accountability. Which is perfectly legitimate; it's simply risky. It's possible to remove power from a party that it's been given to, but it requires caution; and history tells us that people are often incautious in that regard.

Dust

To the degree that I register as a feature of the universe, I'm only a temporary one. In some currently unknown amount of time, whether that's twenty years, twenty thousand years or twenty million years, it will be impossible to find any trace that I was ever here. Much of existence is ephemeral that way; the changes we make to the universe around us, or even our immediate environs, do not last. As far as I'm concerned, this is okay, the universe does not need me to make enduring changes to it in order for it to keep "functioning." Star systems, galaxies, clusters and the like will continue to do their thing.

For some, this is indicative of despair. I understand the perspective, but I do not share it. I don't really buy into the idea that it makes sense to despair in the face of inevitability. It's misery that doesn't add anything. And responses to that potential misery are often counter-productive, in that the things that people do in order to feel significant can simply trade misery for misery.

I suspect that it's a matter of scale. Not in the sense that the Universe is vast and that individuals are small, but in the sense that as human populations grow and become more connected, any given individual can come to feel redundant. In a community of a couple hundred people, one that is small enough that it's reasonable for all of the members to know one another, a person can see their impacts on their community. The evidence of their contributions will be all around them. But in larger populations; cities with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants or nations with tends of millions, a person's influence is often limited to just their own households. And in work environments that seem geared to treat individuals as disposable cogs in a vast machine, a feeling of genuine significance can be difficult to come by.

The challenge of offering people a positive means of affirming their own significance is an imposing one; especially when we live in an environment that often treats good news as unworthy of attention. But it's one worth tackling. Not because I think that it will ever be completely solved, but because even the steps towards a solution will prove valuable.

Whose Life Is It, Anyway?

We want people to have autonomy and ease their suffering as much as possible. But that doesn’t mean we just allow people to kill themselves. Mental illness is difficult to combat, but giving up on a 17-year-old should never be normal or acceptable.
This teen’s death wasn’t euthanasia — but it was still deeply wrong

Given that the 17-year-old in question lived in the Netherlands, the question of just who Ms. Markowicz is referring to when she says "we" is an important one.While there is a generally-accepted right for people to refuse life-saving treatment in many jurisdictions in the United States, in practice, it's a very tenuous thing. As this case and commentary article from 2008 demonstrates, medial providers can come up with a number of rationales for overriding a patient's expressed wishes. The Netherlands, on the other hand, appears to be somewhat more firmly in the "patient autonomy" camp.

In the United States, it's unlikely that someone like Noa Pothoven would have been allowed to refuse all foods and fluids without being subjected to force-feeding. It's probable that someone would have sought out someone with the standing to legally challenge the decision to respect her wishes (presuming that they didn't have standing themselves) and gone to court to force action to keep her alive. So if by "we," Ms. Markowicz meant the United States, either its authorities or the public as a whole, the case could be made that "we" already don't "just allow people to kill themselves."

But if someone in the United States wants to include the authorities and/or the public of the Netherlands in "we," then it becomes a much broader net being cast, anywhere from advanced First/Second World nations to all of humanity. And that raises the question of what legitimate authority can demand that multiple nations adhere to a single standard in this regard, and back it up. The United Nations could certainly request that all member-states refuse to honor a person's wishes in a case like Ms. Pothoven's, but they have no viable enforcement mechanism. And while there are other nations that may take exception, as an official matter, to the Netherlands' stance on this, it's difficult to imagine troops being landed in the event that the Netherlands simply says: "That's nice."

Of course, I'm not really engaging with the logical considerations of making the determination that in the case of mentally ill/traumatized 17-year-olds, hope must be maintained by someone, and the youth in question must have their options limited only to those that reflect that hope. That is not only a difficult question, but a personal one, that touches on the determination of when, if ever, does a person acquire sufficient ownership of their life that they may choose to dispose of it.

Presuming that a person, for whatever reason, does not have sufficient ownership of their own life, determining where that ownership actually lies is more difficult than a blanket statement that "'giving up on' a 17-year-old should never be normal or acceptable." (And this statement is of dubious utility itself. It's one thing to allow someone to kill themselves because you, too, have given up. It's quite another to allow them to do so because theirs is the only choice that matters.) This question is important, mainly because once someone is given that level of authority over others, they tend to use that authority for their own ends, rather than those of the persons who they are intended to protect. And this is not necessarily out of malice or corrupt intent; it's not difficult for someone to see their interests as being those of the persons they are protecting.

Boot Up

So in my wanderings around the wilds of the World Wide Web, I came across the following:

It's dated, given that it was meant to be seen in advance of World Mental Health Day, 2015, but it was still being put forward. And I understand the intent. But I think the message is misplaced.

The difference between "I'm undergoing bereavement" or "I'm wallowing in self-pity today out of frustration with a life setback" and "I'm suffering from Dysthymic Disorder" or "I'm having a Major Depressive Episode" et cetera, is not obvious to someone who has no real background in human psychology. I have a degree in Psychology, and even for someone close to me, it wasn't until their mental health really took a turn for the worse did it occur to me that something was seriously wrong.

So maybe a guide to recognizing and differentiating mental illness would be helpful? Oh. Wait. We already have those - they're 800+ pages long, and really only useful if you have the education to use them properly - a couple of 100-level Psych courses when you were in college isn't going to cut it. Neither, for that matter, will a decades-old (and otherwise unused) Bachelor's degree.

Messages like this are well meaning. But the takeaway, which tends to be "Can't you see I'm sick?" Isn't always helpful. I don't know how you give genuinely useful advice on how to deal with a mentally ill friend or relation in 21 words. (Trust me, I would have liked to have had it.) But "don't do X" leaves 25 letters of the alphabet, and doesn't help someone sort through those remaining choices. In other words telling a layperson to accurately diagnose a mental illness is like telling someone who doesn't know the language being spoken to "listen harder."

When I was still a young man, I worked with children who had been taken out of their homes for abuse or neglect. There was heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story of a child needing to rely on a parent or other caregiver who simply couldn't hold it together and the need to "grow up early" because because that caregiver was simply too far gone. As I've grown old, I've realized that the stories are the same when adults need to rely on (or is having their life dismantled by) someone who suffers from a mental illness. If they aren't as heartbreaking, it's only because heartbreak is a finite resource.

Telling someone with a mental illness to snap out of it isn't a sign of malice or willful ignorance. It's a sign of helplessness, one that is easy to overlook or, yes, ignore. Helping mentally ill people often means putting time and effort into helping the healthy people around them understand what they can do (and sometimes, what they can't do). And that's hard. You can't just hand someone a DSM and say "Okay! There you go." It's a lot more work than that.

Condescendingly telling them that they're doing it wrong via a two-dozen word meme on the internet doesn't get us there. I don't know that the resources at this link will get us there, but I think they'll help.

http://www.takethis.org/mental-health-resources/

All In A Row

Unsympathized

"Social liberals were not less sympathetic to the poor white person than social conservatives," the researchers add. "Rather, social liberals expressed comparable levels of sympathy toward the white person as social conservatives, and significantly more sympathy for the poor black person."

The second study, featuring 650 people, was similarly structured, except that this time roughly half of the participants were placed in a "control" condition, in which they did not read about white privilege. The results replicated those of the first study, but added an important piece of information: The white-privilege lesson "did not seem to affect attitudes by increasing sensitivity to the challenges of poor black people; instead, it reduced sympathy for poor white people."
Talking About White Privilege Can Reduce Liberals' Sympathy for Poor White People

So... if I'm reading this correctly, the conclusion is that social liberals start from a position of having greater sympathy for poor people, White or Black, than social conservatives. Having social liberals read about White Privilege then brings social liberals' sympathy for poor Whites down to the level that social conservatives exhibit.

Interesting.

Now, not wanting to cough up 12 bucks (or go to a sketchy Russian site) to do so, I haven't actually read the studies themselves (and I've learned that studies are never as cut-and-dried as media accounts make them out to be), but this hints at the idea that a perception of agency lessens sympathy. So I would expect to find that people who believe that others are poor because they failed to take advantage of tools available to them, whether that be racial privilege or simple free-range opportunities, tend to be less sympathetic. This would obviate the need for any group to play the 'oppression Olympics' (or, as we used to call it, "misery poker") the researchers speculate about.

Perhaps liberals "implicitly play the 'oppression Olympics,'" the researchers write. "That is, they draw upon default hierarchies of groups in order to mentally rank who is worst off." If whites as a group are ranked on top, the struggles of an individual white person "may be more likely to be interpreted as stemming from internal rather than external factors"—i.e., personal laziness as opposed to a lack of opportunities.

But the implication that American social liberals have some sort of bias against Whites, as noted in the headline, is a surefire form of click-bait. It would likely be a safe wager to bet that aggrieved conservatives are linking to the article as confirmation of their understanding that liberal America is out to punish people for crimes of the distant past.

And, of course, the fact that the researchers themselves make the speculation simply adds fuel to the fire. But it also points to how perceptions of privilege are bound up in questions of identity, to the point that outsiders may see them as inseparable.