Cold Turkey

One of the enjoyable things about found object photography is just the variety of random items one comes across.

Clad in Motley

It occurs to me that Greta Thunberg is being deployed in a manner similar to the idea of a court jester or fool of old: someone who can tell "the powerful" things that they don't want to hear and are immune from punishment for doing so. I'm not sure of the honesty of doing so, however; President Trump and other people who are invested in current levels of fossil fuel use have shown themselves unwilling to give Miss Thunberg a pass, for either her age or her autism, and I suspect that this was part of the plan all along: she was held up as a punching bag that couldn't be legitimately punched specifically so that when she was punched, there could be the requisite outrage about it. (To be sure, however, I'm not entirely certain that things were quite as cynical as all that. But I am fairly confident that there were people who positioned themselves to take advantage of how they knew the situation was going to turn out.)

I'm not sure that there's much value in the idea of someone who can tell the Emperor that they have no clothes simply for the sake of having the Emperor look weak or unwise. To the degree that rulers did (if they ever did) have people on the payroll who were exempted from losing their heads if they said something that displeased the monarch, it's presumably because someone realized that there needed to be someone who would level with the ruler. Sycophants come into being when flattery becomes a profession; having someone around with a different line of work can be valuable.

But if one of the knocks on President Trump is that he doesn't value unflattering information being delivered to him, then he would have no use for a jester. But it's also worth noting that this characteristic isn't unique to the President. There are a lot of people, at all walks of life, who prefer to simply be told how good they are at life. And once battle lines have been drawn, they often have little patience for the news that maybe they're fighting the wrong war.

No Fair

And when [Greta] Thunberg talks about this, especially in private, she sounds a lot like … a teenager. “We are not the ones who are responsible for this, but we are the ones who have to live with these consequences, and that is so incredibly unfair,” she said at one point.
Robinson Meyer “Why Greta Makes Adults Uncomfortable” The Atlantic. Monday, 23 September, 2019

I remember when I viewed the world this way. It's part of the power of being a child; for many young people, fairness is simply an entitlement and you can be huffy about life not being fair because the compromises and trade-offs that fairness require are a combination of invisible and not their problem. Unfairness has no rights, and so if it's unfair that someone has something, then they should simply give that thing up... and problem solved. But fairness is not real; it has no existence outside of our own perceptions.

When I worked with children, in a past life, the unfairness of life was a daily concern. The children in my care had been taken out of their families' homes for abuse and/or neglect, and so they lived in a large brick building in the suburbs in one of five Units of about a dozen children apiece. They realized that this fate had befallen them, and that it hadn't befallen other children they knew, and they saw this as unfair. And it was. The children had done nothing to deserve the events that had put them on this path. One could say that their difficulties in holding it together well enough to be in foster care, rather than residential treatment, could be ascribed to them, but even that seems somewhat uncharitable. And they were in the same position that Miss Thunberg finds herself in; a situation that someone else was responsible for, but that they had to live with the consequences of.

My initial responses to their complaints was that "Life isn't fair." It's what had been drilled into me when I was a child, and I duly dispensed it in turn. But one day, it occurred to me that this aphorism wasn't useful, and so I agreed with them, instead. I confirmed for them that it wasn't fair that some people had parents that loved and wanted and could care for them, while they had to make due with a rotating group of random adults. They'd been dealt bad hands in a poker game that they hadn't signed up for.

But in the end, it didn't change anything. They were still stuck in a system of residential treatment, with no clear way out of it, other than running away and either living on the streets or finding someone to take them in. But there's no running away from climate change. But I don't know that anything will change, either.

Governments have difficulty being beholden to both their constituencies and other people's understandings of virtue simultaneously. While the costly changes that would be required to forestall serious alterations to the future climate may be within the reach of current legislatures, undoing them is within reach of the legislatures that follow them. And the people who understand themselves as having to pay the costs see the situation in much the same terms that Miss Thunberg does; they're not responsible it, but they will have to live with the consequences, and it's unfair.

Nothing will change as long as people are concerned with fairness. That's why we're were we are now. Having to bite the bullet is also unfair, even when it's the only way to change things.

I Hear You

Overdrawn

While they aren't exactly similar, an analogy can be made between climate concerns and finance. One can think of the greenhouse gasses that are being released into the atmosphere as a sort of "climate debt" that, at some point, is going to need to be paid off. And if that debt is not properly managed, it's possible to imagine a "climate default," a scenario in which the changes to the climate create enough upheaval that it's no longer possible to continue to borrow against the climate.

And I do think that it's possible to make the case that currently, world economic activity borrows against the climate, mainly because of scale. For a certain population size, all manner of wasteful, polluting practices are sustainable, because the local environment replenishes itself faster than it can be used up. One could conceptualize this as being similar to the tax revenue of a nation-state, where that revenue is consistently greater than expenditures. While the level of services it supports may be extravagant, it can go on forever. But as population rises relative to tax receipts, it comes to pass that to maintain that level of services requires more money than current income, and the state resorts to borrowing to make up the shortfall. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with borrowing. But if one is borrowing to fund consumption, there may eventually be a problem, as that consumption usually doesn't create the extra resources required to service the debt incurred.

And so to return to our climate analogy, a case can be made that the current world economy is consuming, rather than investing, the resources borrowed from the biosphere, and so the duration over which this can be sustained is finite. And at the end of that duration, as with a point at which a nation my no longer borrow, things are going to have to change.

I make this analogy because it occurred to me that many climate activists have set their sights on Congressional action as a means of heading off the metaphorical "climate default." But the United States Congress is a body that doesn't seem to understand that "kick the can down the road" isn't a viable solution to dealing with the currently mounting fiscal debt that the nation is incurring. So why expect that they'd treat "climate debt" any differently?

After all, the same set of incentives are in place. Just as with fiscal expenditures, climate expenditures have constituencies that rely on them, and therefore lobby for them to be maintained. And as a general rule, "fiscal restraint" isn't put forward as: "I'm willing to forgo this, that or the other in order to lessen the need to borrow." It's more commonly phrased as: "Those people over there should have this, that or the other benefit removed in order to reserve capacity for me." The climate discussion often isn't any different.

Whether it's simply doing without what is otherwise perceived as a necessary good or service, or making expensive (and perhaps risky) investments where the payoff is far in the future, the current set of incentives is not conducive to either fiscal or climate management. And that likely needs to change before policy will.

City Tree

On Second Thought

I was wondering if anyone would get around to bringing up the idea of simply revoking Britain's Article 50, the one that kicked off the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. If as many people in the UK oppose the idea of leaving as many people (especially Members of Parliament who oppose leaving themselves) seem to think, then there should be a fairly decent amount of support for the proposition.

But it's going to be trouble, one way or another. Even if there is another "People's Vote," as many of Britain's Liberal Democrats have been calling for, the idea that it would lay the issue to rest is overly optimistic. One thing that I've noticed about voter referenda and ballot initiatives here in Washington State is that if things don't work out the way they were sold to the public, backers are often quick to lay the blame at the feet of the state Legislature. They note, correctly, that the Legislature can intentionally botch implementation of policies that they oppose. Whether or not the Legislature does deliberately screw things up is a different matter, but the possibility is always there. And I suspect that there will be those Leave campaigners in Britain who accuse Remain parliamentarians of blocking progress on an agreement with the European Union specifically to make backing out of leaving seem like a good idea. It's a no-win situation, as someone is going to be unhappy. (I can also see turnout for another referendum being low. If there are simply going to be do-overs until the "right" answer comes out of the vote, why bother?)

It's worth noting that the basic reason why people voted to leave the E.U. in the first place, the idea that the cost-benefit analysis did not work in the U.K.'s favor, hasn't actually been resolved. And it's unlikely to. I don't really see the E.U. being willing to make concessions on the items that some number of Britons had been dissatisfied with. I can, on the other hand, see other E.U. member states deciding that making an example of the U.K. being a good way of preventing further talk of defection in the future.

But, if I were a betting man, I'd be willing to put a few dollars (or even Pounds) on Article 50 being revoked, and the can being kicked down the road. Politics is not really a place for decisiveness in decision making or problem solving. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been a referendum in the first place.

Shameful

According to Mirriam-Webster Online, part of the definition of "shame" is: "a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety." Dr. Brené Brown, who has made a name for herself addressing shame, goes a bit further, defining "shame" as: "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection." And I'm sure that there is room enough for a million other shadings between the clinical-sounding dictionary definition and Dr. Brown's more intimate one.

Both of the above, however, can offer insight into why and how people use shame as a tool or weapon against others: leveraging pain as means of altering the cost-benefit analyses of behavior that meets with personal or social disapproval. Personally, I agree with Dr. Brown's assessment that shaming is, generally speaking, ineffective as a tool for behavior change, at least in the modern world. (I would submit that it was likely much more effective when the consequences of being ostracized were more severe. Human mobility means that it's easier to leave a community behind without needing to be entirely self-sufficient.) But this, of course, doesn't stop that many people from using it. As a result, the general debate that we have about shame and shaming is centered more on who is eligible for, or deserving of, being shamed, and who is not.

As I see it, the calculus is as follows: Shame is considered appropriate in cases of willful misbehavior. "Misbehavior" here is something of a nebulous concept; like beauty, or pornography, it is in the eye of the beholder, known upon being seen. As a result, much of the public debate about shame is, in part, a debate over what should be counted as willful misbehavior. When James Cordon took Bill Maher to task over comments to the effect that being overweight (and the health issues that stem from that) is the result of poor individual choices, Slate Magazine's Matthew Dessem cheered the pushback against "fat shaming." This is part of a broader movement to discourage the idea that being overweight is the result of shortcoming, impropriety or something that people have done or failed to do. On the other hand, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, currently in the United States to urge action on climate change, sailed across the Atlantic, rather than flying. This is in keeping with the flygskam, or "flight shame" movement in Sweden, which "suggests that people should feel embarrassed or ashamed to take planes because of the negative impact they have on the environment." Ms. Thunberg is something of a heroine in environmental circles, being seen as stereotypically "speaking truth to power."

But from outside of either issue, is there any more willful misbehavior in one than the other? Is traveling by airplane more within the control of an individual than their weight? I'm not sure. And this is where I tend to have a problem with habits of shaming; in the end, they tend to morph into variations on "you're different, and that's bad." And the assignment of moral significance to observed differences between people a) has never ended well and b) is unlikely to start ending well anytime soon.

But the impulse to shame, and the impulse to seek relief from shame in changing behavior exist for a reason. Small bands of hunter-gatherers likely needed an instinctive means of enforcing certain behavior norms within the group that didn't entail resorting to violence. And shame appears to be tailor-made for this purpose. And one can understand both Bill Maher's "fat-shaming" and Greta Thunberg's embrace of flygskam to simply be attempts to enforce particular norms on larger groups, but for the same basic reasons that hunter-gatherers did: behaviors that make sense for the individual at a given point can be bad for the group as a whole. While people tend to see the United States as being better able to fund health care than the world as a whole will be at dealing with the impacts of changes to the Earth's climate, in the end, the arguments are fundamentally the same. And in both cases, perhaps the real problem with shaming is that there are more effective means to the same ends. They're just also more expensive. And in this, we see perhaps the fundamental allure of shaming, it's a cheap way of combating cost-shifting. So it's unlikely to ever really go out of style.

Oh, Grow Up

Recently, I've seen Unicorn Store and Dave Made A Maze. They're interesting movies with a theme of completing the maturation process. Kit and Dave, respectively, are middle-class White Millennials, with supportive families and, apparently, the sort of carefree childhoods that make the responsibilities of adult life burdensome. Interestingly the love interests of both protagonists are non-White; these characters bring the audience into the protagonist's world. Both movies also have a magical element to them that, while central to the plot, undermines the story to some degree or another. In Unicorn Store, belief in the actual existence of the creatures is very rare; Kit and the unicorn salesmen are the only characters at the start of the movie who believe and it's not 100% clear to the audience (and some of the other characters) that Kit isn't undergoing a psychotic break, which is somewhat at odds with the theme of the movie overall. Likewise in Dave Made A Maze, Dave has nearly created a cardboard TARDIS; it even has artificial life inside. But the fact that the other characters aren't supposed to appreciate the creation at first forces them to come across as somewhat less impressed with this feat than one would expect. Of the two, I think that Unicorn Store is a better movie. Kit's coming to understand how to allow human beings to love her, rather than wishing for a Unicorn to fill that role, comes across as more natural and authentic-seeming than Dave managing to bring the world around him to his way of thinking, which has more of a deus (or perhaps Minotaur) ex machina feeling to it.

But the different endpoints of the characters make for an interesting contrast, given the gender differences between them, and it makes their processes feel gendered, as well. Kit's unicorn represents not only unconditional love, but a love that has no choice but to see one as one wishes to be seen. And once the audience understands this ideal, of a love that doesn't ask anything in return, there is a certain poignancy in Kit eventually learning to make peace with the idea that the adult world, the real world, doesn't work this way. Dave's maze represents the feeling of mastery and competence; Dave Made A Maze has Dave be quite explicit about this. And only when Dave is able to convince his friends to back him in his quest to follow the maze trope to its conclusion (a process that itself was quite unconvincing) can Dave be okay with who he is. Dave Made A Maze is also hampered by its need to obscure the price that the people around him may be paying. When a number of friends and strangers alike, lead by Dave's stereotypically long-suffering girlfriend Annie (the only non-White member of the cast), enter the maze on a rescue mission, the booby traps that Dave had built into the place result in several apparent deaths. While the audience is shown that the maze is capable of drawing (and apparently consuming) blood, streamers and construction paper fill in. The result makes the apparent deaths less openly horrific, but have the effect of allowing Dave to be unclear on whether or not they're genuine. The closing credits imply that everyone survived none the worse for wear, but that struck me as both dubious and cheapening.

In any event, when compared to one another, the tropes that women's maturation requires that they change themselves, while men's maturation requires that the world change to accommodate the conditions that men place on the willingness to change come across clearly. It would be interesting to see gender-swapped, but otherwise exact, remakes of these movies. I would like to see what the audience response to them would be. although it is worth noting that the themes of each movie don't come across as so strongly gender-linked when viewed independently. (Perhaps this is one of the problems with the movie industry more broadly, in the minds of activists, it sees itself as fragmented and a group of independent voices, while outsiders often see a single, monolithic entity.)

In any event, both movies struck me as interesting. As a non-White Gen Xer who has little to no real nostalgia for my childhood, it's an interesting glimpse into a particular vision of the Millennial process of growing up. I don't know that I would have been interested if I'd know what the themes were going in, but having seen them, I find myself with a broader interest in this cinema niche. Perhaps that's worthy of being seen as a measure of success.

Puff

Recently, there have been a number of severe respiratory illnesses that have been linked to e-cigarette use; some 450 cases thus far with 6 reported deaths. On the heels of this, even the President is acting, having announced a planned nationwide ban on the devices. When i first heard of the illnesses, I was curious. Vaping isn't new; the devices have been around for a decade and a half now, and it seems odd that if the practice itself were that dangerous, that we'd just now be seeing serious health impacts.

When I was listening to the radio yesterday, the story came up; the question being if Washington should follow Michigan's lead in instituting it's own ban on flavored e-cigarettes. (Of course, the nationwide ban proposed by the Food and Drug Administration would preempt this.) During the story, vitamin E acetate and THC additives were brought up; according to Washington Department of Health office Kathy Lofy, "only a small minority of these patients have reported using nicotine-only products" and that this "suggests that the THC products may be causing this illness." "But," she continued, "I think it's really too early to draw any conclusive, to make any conclusive statements."

USA Today makes a similar point, noting "Some state health department and news reports suggest many of the cases of lung problems involve tetrahydrocannabinol, known as THC, the chemical in marijuana that causes psychological effects." They then go on to state that "Boston University public health professor Michael Siegel said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being 'unnecessarily vague' about describing the injuries as simply vaping-related when many people might have been injured by vaping THC oil." Indeed the title of the article is "People are vaping THC. Lung injuries being reported nationwide. Why is the CDC staying quiet?"

I don't smoke or use e-cigarettes myself, so I don't really have a dog in this fight, but it does seem to me that the general disagreement with e-cigarette use in the overall public-health community is at work here. It strikes me as unusual that the CDC would make a broad statement, when the evidence appears to point to a narrower cause. I think I understand, however. I suspect that if certain people in the public-health field had their way, nicotine would simply be banned outright, and the overall problems with maintaining these sorts of prohibitions be damned. And a ban would at least be more honest and straightforward than the maze of regulations and restrictions that governments seem fond of erecting to drive people away from the practice of smoking.

To the degree that implying that e-cigarette use broadly is dangerous comes across is deceptive, it weakens people's trust in these sorts of institutions. Granted, state health officer Lofy was fairly straightforward about the THC link when asked about it. But this sort of paternalism in the public-health community generally creates suspicions like those that my father expressed to me when I was younger; that the truth can't be allowed to stand in the way of a useful call to action. Now, as then, I believe that part of the problem is with the public, which is has proven disinclined to mobilize against e-cigarettes in the way they have against conventional tobacco smoking. But is that really a problem? I'm not sure that it is, and if it isn't, attempting to convince the public that there's a crisis afoot may not be called for, and public health officials risk their credibility when perhaps they shouldn't.

Affirmations

I Rage, Therefore I Am

The thing about having about a million news and commentary sites on the Internet is that they can become fairly niche. And once they've connected with their chosen audiences, there can be a habit of directly catering to that audience, and thus they can become fairly one-note. In light of this, every so often, I try to branch out my reading habits to sites and people that I don't normally look at and/or have lost track of. This is in part because the same messages over and over become old after a while and in part because I understand that there are more voices in the world than the ones I normally read.

Generally speaking, I tend to read Center-Left, even though they tends to be to my left, politically. I do this mainly because I tend to find the tone of such sources to be agreeable, even if I find the actual messages to be annoying. Being unfamiliar with the general landscape of Center-Right media, I tend to have difficulty with finding sources in that area that I can read for any length of time.

Mainly because I don't really care about What Makes People Angry or What People Do Not Like in general. (I routinely find myself removing "Everything Wrong With..." videos on YouTube for this same reason.) And if there's one thing that I've noticed about the Conservative media that I've come across it's that is seems to be primarily concerned with what it doesn't like. (Of course, there is a lot of Liberal media that does the same. I don't read them, either.) Which is fine, for what it is. After all, a lot of these people are attempting to connect with an audience that fears that some of what their ancestors have done unto others is soon to be done unto them, and they're somewhere between unhappy and enraged about that fact. And reflecting a person's worldview and emotional outlook back to them is a good way to connect with them. As evidenced by its continued success in getting people into the White House.

I'm sure that there are Right-leaning news and commentary sites out there that don't traffic in anger over capitalism becoming "woke," fears of élite conspiracies to enact "socialism" or simple bitterness over social change. I'm just terrible at finding them, mainly because I don't have enough conservatives in my social circles to point me at them and I'm not invested enough to do the work of separating the wheat from the chaff. Which means that anything I find will come down to luck. Not impossible, but it will take a little longer.

End Of Summer

And then, the rains came...

On Three

The Vermont senator told a TV debate that women "in poor countries" should have access to birth control.

Conservatives said the remark meant the self-described democratic socialist's climate change policy was for fewer "brown babies".

Because of course they did. It's the nature of politics in the United States. Republican politicians have to take any opportunity that they may be afforded to trash a Democrat. Taking words out of context to create an attack vector simply provides for a bonus.

And it is, basically, all pointless. The Democratic primaries are far enough away that no-one will remember what Senator Sanders said by the time they roll around, and the Republicans will have moved on to other things. But more importantly, anyone who was going to take Senator Cruz, Representative Scalise, Liz Wheeler or Ben Shapiro seriously enough to be "outraged" at Senator Sanders' comment has pretty much zero chance of being a Democratic voter in the first place. And while it's possible that Republican voters may attempt to swing the Democratic primaries towards a candidate that they may feel would be weak against President Trump (more than) a year from now, it's unlikely that anyone who managed to make the President look good in the eyes of Democrats and independent voters would have any chance of winning in any event.

I suppose that the common description of something like this would be "style over substance," but that presumes that there's even any style to any of this. Instead, it's simply reflexive partisanship, divorced perhaps even from ideology. Presumably, politicians behave this way because they honestly feel that their policy ideas would be genuinely good for the country, and since they need to be in office to enact those policies, they are often willing to go out on a limb to preserve their (and their party's) electoral chances. That reasoning, however, feels more and more like a stretch every passing day.

And this, perhaps, is the worst thing about the current state of American politics. The constant drive to increase cynicism and the disengagement that goes with it; the attempt to narrow down the subset of the public who actually vote to the smallest possible number of people, and then hope that of the people who are left, the people who would come out to vote come Godzilla or high water, the largest slice votes for the person who puts the most effort into badmouthing their opposition.

I, like many supposedly non-partisan voters, have a decidedly partisan bent to my actual voting behavior. In my case, it's because every time I hear of the Republicans doing something or other, it strikes me as something stupidly partisan, to the point of blind thoughtlessness. Not that there aren't any Republican officeholders that I vote for, but that's such a small group that they seem non-existent most of the time.

It's possible that this is a screening mechanism, like the laughably bad scams that pervade the Internet these days. Since attracting people bright enough to eventually suspect that something's amiss is a waste of time in the end, the pitch is designed to drive away everyone who won't swallow it whole from the get-go. I don't know. I suspect I'm better off that way.

Choice of Interests

I was listening to a podcast about the situation at the United States-Mexico border and, I have to admit, I found it long and tedious. Mainly because the format was an interview with someone who was effectively an immigration activist, and her constant repetition of her favored talking points was tiresome. It touched on all of the things that one would expect a conversation with an advocate to touch on: how wretched the people were, how deplorable their treatment had been, how shabby the behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was et cetera.

But, to be sure, this wasn't really intended as news. The podcast was the work of an opinion magazine and the whole episode was really one long human-interest piece; it was about holding up persons that the interviewee was advocating for as objects of pity and sympathy, and no-one said any differently at any point. And what struck me about it was how similar it seemed to other stories about the border that I'd heard and read. And some of those were from outlets that considered themselves news.

And I wonder if this is the reason why people have come to feel that news sources are more biased. Sure, some significant part of that perception could be due to people feeling that the only objective outlooks on the world are ones that agree with them. But the thing about human-interest stories is that to the degree that they're about someone's experiences, their objectivity is measured by fidelity to those experiences, emotions and all, and not in terms of accurately describing the broader situation and circumstances. And one would expect that some significant portion of the reason why people in positions of advocacy make themselves available to the media is to advocate for their causes and/or constituents.

To be sure, I don't believe that there is some cynical plot afoot to mislead people by presenting them with a steady diet of stories about people, rather than facts. But I do think that presenting human-interest, rather than hard-fact, stories is that it enables news outlets to better position stories in ways that their audience approves of, while staying within the lines of objectivity. Which I'm not sure helps people's overall understandings of the situations at hand, but then again, that's not really what people are asking for, is it?