Unknown Structures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Autumn

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

The Right Tool

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

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

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

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

Scrubbing Bubbles

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

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

Shadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plan F

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

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

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

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

Presumably the all caps were in the original.

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

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

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

Unforgotten

"The league has certainly not covered itself in glory in its handling of the blowback over the Morey tweet and, in the process, reminded fans across the U.S. that the NBA is, at its core, still a profit-seeking international organization serving multiple constituencies of which the most important one is money."
Elliot Hannon. LeBron James Sounds Like Chinese Propaganda in Critique of “Misinformed” Pro-Democracy Tweet

Do people really need to be "reminded" that the National Basketball Association is a for-profit enterprise? Sure, one may presume that there is some risk that people may believe that the NBA is, like the National Football League used to be, an unincorporated nonprofit association under section 501(c)(6) of the tax code, but it seems unlikely that members of the public are unaware of the fact that the NBA is principally intended to make money for itself and the various teams that constitute it.

And making money is a different mission that promoting the values or social/governmental structures that we in the United States often claim to prize. Many nations (if not all of them) want to have their butts kissed by foreign entities that do business within their borders. Now, the exact form that this brown-nosing may take can vary from country to country, but it's not an uncommon requirement. In China's case, part of the cost of doing business is never publicly siding with those that the government has concluded are engaged in wrong thought or wrong action.

And here's the thing about kissing butts; generally speaking, one is not supposed to ever let on that the person or organization whose butt is being kissed has demanded said kissing. Since demanding that one's butt be kissed is considered arrogant at the very least, a certain level of plausible deniability must be maintained. Hence LeBron James taking Daryl Morey to task for the risk of harming people "not only financially but physically, emotionally, spiritually," rather than coming out and saying "Hey man, you know the Chinese government becomes pissed off whenever someone appears to side against it." In the end, it's the same thing, but one appeals less overtly to the idea that a nation of more than a billion people can't handle the fact that there are people in the world who feel that their government is wonky, and that those of them who would rather have a different system may have a point. Of course, the United States has it's share of thin-skinned individuals, too. But the United States isn't as good at moving in lockstep as some other nations.

When dealing with someone who can effectively stop one from obtaining what they want, that party sets the rules of engagement. And what the NBA wants is as much of the disposable income of the Chinese middle and upper classes as they can manage to get away with. The United States is a mature market at this point, and basketball isn't nearly as popular in most of the rest of the world. And so they're looking to China for sales and profits (and shareholder value). The ability of the Chinese Communist Party to conflate itself, and the government it leads, with the Chinese people as a whole complicates matters, as the government is then able to influence public opinion in a way that the government of the United States is generally unable to. Given that the government of China is able to use its influence to make perceived criticism of the government into disrespect of the people of China, foreign companies need to tread carefully, since they understand that their bottom lines need China more than China needs them.

None of this is news. People in the United States may be irritated that profit-oriented corporations and other businesses aren't more in the business if being ambassadors for "Western Values," but I doubt that they're unaware of the facts on the ground, or the business pressures that those facts dictate. They don't need random public-relations breakdowns to remind them of that.

Free Sight

I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only atheist in my general extended family. While I haven't had a working faith in a deity for as long as I can remember, and have never been particularly coy about that fact, I've also never been particularly vocal about it, either. Once I was out of high school, there was no real expectation that I'd attend church services with my parents and sibling, and so, over time, people would simply lapse back into the assumption that I was a believer.

But every so often, the topic will come up in conversation, and I'll wind up telling, or reminding, someone that I don't believe in deities. Which in an extended family that is quite strongly Baptist/Evangelical, tends to wind up being the primary topic of conversation for some time afterwards. What tends to take whomever I'm talking to off-guard, though, is the fact that I'm reasonably conversant in the Bible, mainly as a result of having taken four years of Theology when I was still in school.

One of the things that I've come to understand from many of these conversations is that while a number of family members have read this or another part of the Bible, they don't appear to have formed their own interpretations of it. This may be due to the use of the Bible as an explanatory document; in this sense, many of the stories are formally myths. But there are passages that, when you read them from a more neutral standpoint, are easily open to other interpretations than the standard.

Adam and Eve's fall is one of these. Commonly, when discussion this story with a family member, they'll inform me that it's basically the answer to the Question of Evil; Eve, and then Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, and humanity was punished for this willfulness by having to lead lives that are well removed from an idyllic stay in paradise. The question that I sometimes ask of a relative is: "If the fruit of the tree represents the knowledge of good and evil, how could Adam and Eve know that they shouldn't have eaten from the tree without having first eaten from the tree?"

The question occurred to me some time ago, and it eventually lead me to this question: "Is the root of such topics as morality and ethics really perception, rather than will?" Now, I'm not a philosopher, so I'm not prepared to make an attempt at proving out that theory, but it does occur to me that even in a lot of secular philosophy what's being argued is the way things are, with the presumption that the moral/ethical action to take in a given situation stems from the facts of the case, and therefore, many, if not all, bad actions can really be linked to issues of how a person sees the world around them as much, if not more, than their choices of how to interact with it. (I understand that many Christians attempt to get around this with the idea that divine law is effectively hardwired into the human intellect, but there are a lot of stories in the Bible that don't support that view very well.)

In any event, it makes what would otherwise be a tiresome discussion of why I don't believe into a much more interesting examination of the links between people's perceptions of the world, and their motivations. And for me, it provides a basis for speculating about why other people do (or have done) the things they do. Unfortunately, it can only be speculation, since I don't have the ability to perceive the world as others do, and perhaps that's why it doesn't seem to have caught on.

Portrait

The trails in the downtown area are popular places for portrait photography. For the past couple of weekends, there have been multiple groups working down there.

Blessed Silence

The woman had been standing in the August sun, partially shaded by the uneven shade of a small tree, near the southern entrance/exit to the parking lot for Target/Eddie Bauer; the driveway closest to the rest of the retail spaces. There was no sidewalk there, so she was hemmed in between the landscaping and the curb. She was young, perhaps a little on the short side and of average build, dressed in a blue shirt and a darker blue skirt. They had patterns on them, but I didn't really attend to them. Her hair was long and black. Her skin was too dark to be White. Perhaps she was from Latin America. She held a cardboard sign, her plight written on the white side in uneven black marker. The message was a touch long for the space, and so the letters seemed uncomfortably crammed together. She had lost her job, it read. And she had children to take care of, it continued. The second part, I had gathered. A small child, a girl, I think, slept through the afternoon heat in a stroller. A little girl, four, perhaps five years old, sat silently on the ground nearby.

When we were driving, my ex-girlfriend tended to insist that we stop for female panhandlers. It was, she reasoned, very hard for a woman to decide that her best option was to ask for charity from passing strangers and so their situations must be very dire indeed. I didn't know if I agreed with her on that. But it did seem to be a difficult situation for a child. This was the third time in as many days that I had encountered mothers panhandling with their children. Even being a more suspicious sort than my ex, it felt unjustified to simply walk away. Even if this was becoming an expensive habit.

The woman's eyes met mine as I approached. Then she smiled, slightly, and looked down. It made her seem even younger.

"Hello, sir," she said, in accented English. I couldn't place the accent. She then proceeded to tell me, quietly, that she'd lost her job and had children to care for.

I held a twenty-dollar bill out to her.


"Thank you, sir. God bless you. Thank you. God bless you," she said, earnestly, taking the bill from my hand.

"You're welcome."

"Thank you. God bless you." she repeated, as I began to walk away. The little girl didn't move. She simply watched me, her affect flat. Maybe it was simply the time spent in the heat, but she seemed detached from everything happening around her. I decided to believe it was the heat.

Thanks and blessings followed me as I moved away. I simply nodded.

I never know what to say to "Bless you." Because how do you return a blessing to its sender? After all, I was doing okay for myself. The money that I had just given this woman was, judging by her reaction, a windfall for her - but for me, it almost wasn't enough to warrant actively keeping up with. Bills of that size flow through my hands like water - I could never remember just where or when I'd spent the one I was sure I still had with me. Faced with someone in a bad spot (or even pretending to be in one) I've always felt that if a person's deity is handing out blessings for the asking, a person who is asking me for charity is in greater need of a blessing than I am. But, still, it seems ungracious to actually say such a thing to someone. Or even to ask someone if it is, in fact, ungracious. And so I say nothing. The discomfort seems appropriate, a reminder that I am not generous, and shouldn't think myself so.

When I passed that way again, some twenty or so minutes later, the woman and her children were gone. On the way home, I tried to sort out if I thought anything about that.

Off the Cuff

While it's been years since I first noticed the phenomenon, I'm always kind of surprised at the level of Spontaneous Dickery that's endemic to the Internet. If you're lucky, you don't know the type: the comment on a post that's tangential or even completely off-topic that seems to have no reason for existence than allowing someone to let random stranger know just how much some other random person hurt their feelings.

So someone will share a post like: "Hey, check out the new super-cute puppy I bought!"

And in the stream of comments will be something like: "I had a gerbil once. But it was run over by a car. Must have been a (insert name of political, religious or professional group here) behind the wheel, because they all suck."

My first reaction is always: "WTF? Where the Crack did that come from?" Then, I start reading carefully. Half the time, there's no real clue as to what could possibly link the post to the comment. Sometimes, you can see how, with some serious effort, you could make a logical connection between the original post and the comment. But there's a sizable minority of times there will be a line in the original post or some other comment that if you squint just right and angle the monitor a certain way, you could possibly take as some weird sort of provocation. Something like (to continue my example): "Have you checked out my buddy Jack's Puppy Page? He's really good with animals. He's also a (insert name of political, religious or professional group here) activist, rock climber, bass guitarist, brain surgeon and all-around great guy!"

I'd say that it's something about the Internet that brings out the Vitriolic in people, but I suspect that there have always been random bitter people who plan their lives around plotting petty acts of pseudo-revenge for some slight that was dealt them back in the lunch line in second grade. The internet, and social media in particular, allow them to think that they're striking back against the world (or at least those people in it with the temerity to not be like them) from the safety of their kitchen table.

Later!

President Trump's decision to allow Turkey to invade Syria, and in so doing, effectively throw the Kurds to the wolves, is simply another instance of the axiom that nation-states don't have allies, they have interests. Now, it can be argued that this is not 100% true in the case of the United States; Israel is effectively an ally in a way that other nations are not. (The case could be made that Washington policymakers are more concerned with Israel's well-being than they are with Puerto Rico's, as odd as that may seem.) In any event, President Trump's stated rationale for no longer protecting the Kurds speaks to this: In effect, there was once mutual interest, now there isn't. The Kurds were working with the United States not out of goodwill towards the US and it's people, but because the Islamic State was a threat to them.

But the problem with the no allies, only interests calculus at present is that with President Trump, it's really hard to understand what our interests actually are from one week to the next. It has been interesting watching the world attempting to respond to that.

'Sup?

A North American River Otter, wondering what the thing I'm pointing at it is.

Once Upon a Time

With November approaching, I'd been toying with the idea of participating in National Novel Writing Month. Not that I'm sure where I'd find the time. It's hard enough, sometimes, to make sure that I keep this blog updated on the schedule that I'd like. Adding in another 1,700 words a day to fill out a novel over the course of a month likely wouldn't work out all that well. That said, like just about everybody, I suppose, I do have an idea for a novel kicking around inside my head.

The general plotline comes from a discussion I was having with a roommate of mine, some 25 years ago. We'd been watching some or another movie, and the villain's overall goal was to destroy the world. Because they were the villain apparently; there was nothing in the movie that gave any hint as to why destroying the world was a reasonable thing for this character to do. That random act of nihilism rubbed me the wrong way, and I said so. My roommate then challenged me to come up with the sort of character I would like to see.

This started a continuing, if occasional, project to detail out a belief system that would make ending the world understandable, if not exactly rational. It became a religion that believed that the world was an Imperfect place, but that if it were destroyed, it, and everyone on it, would be remade into a Perfect form. As of this point, the document is about 8,000 words. Not terribly long, but it does a pretty decent job of explaining the belief system. Sure, it's a fairly bog-standard "Doomsday Cult" at the end of the day, but I like to think that I've fleshed this one out a bit more completely than is often the case.

In any event, I've been considering taking up the rest of my former roommate's challenge, and writing up an entire story around the idea. When I first came up with the idea, I'd envisioned a story that works somewhat in the reverse of the way such fiction usually does. Rather than the villain putting some dastardly plot in motion, and the heroes attempting to stop them, in this case, the end of the world was already on track to happen, and the heroes were setting out to stop it; so it would be the villain in the reactive role, attempting to preserve the status quo.

The big problem that I would have with such an undertaking is that I lack endurance as a writer. The idea of banging out 50,000 words makes me tired just thinking about it. Of course, I've likely managed more than that with this blog, but it's coming up on thirteen years this December. But then again, 1,700 words a day isn't really that much. Maybe one of these days, I'll get it into my head to space it out over the course of a year; a day or two of writing a week could be manageable.

In the mean time, I'll stick to quietly envying those people who can actually come up with a whole book during NaNoWriMo.

Land of the Blind

I will admit that I find the case of former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger to be interesting. Ms. Guyger was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for the murder of Botham Jean, who lived in the same apartment complex as Officer Guyger. Part of me is curious as to why Ms. Guyger was convicted of murder, rather than manslaughter, given that it's pretty much understood that the incident was triggered by Ms. Guyger not realizing that she was on the wrong floor, and thus, not in her own apartment.

And now a new controversy has appeared; one that wouldn't otherwise have occurred to me. At the end of the trial, Brandt Jean, Botham Jean's younger brother, offered Mr. Guyger a hug, which she accepted. The presiding judge, Tammy Kemp, also gave Ms. Guyger a hug. She also gave Ms. Guyger a Bible and took some time to pray with her before she was taken away. This prompted internet commentors to opine on the nature, and the appropriateness, of Black compassion and forgiveness. And the BBC article showcased a few of the likely many Twitter responses to the situation.

This one in particular stood out for me:

The problem is less Amber Guyger's tears than the fact that similar tears from black mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters count for so little. Comforting white pain is a reflex. Rationalizing black pain is too. Until the latter stops the former will deserve condemnation.

If you've been reading Nobody In Particular for any length of time, you likely already know where I'm going with this, so I'll cut to the chase: What good does responding to the comforting of White people with condemnation do? If anything deserves condemnation (and I'm unsure that anything actually does here), I would think that it's the rationalization of Black pain. Is scolding the younger Mr. Jean or Judge Kemp, both of whom are Black, really going to make White people any less likely to rationalize in the future?

True, one can view Mr. Jean as reflexively succumbing to the American cultural norm of condemning overt displays of anger in Black people. And a case can be made that Judge Kemp's actions reflect on a criminal justice system that has been noticeably more lenient on Whites who kill Black people than the reverse. But what will leaning on either of them do to alter those factors? Would withholding hugs from Ms.Guyger make it any more likely that the United States would find "angry Black people" any less threatening, or hold Black people convicted of crimes to the same level of accountability as Whites? I'm dubious about that.

So I don't really see the point of attempting to lever people into a "compassion strike" by smacking them down for the crime of taking "the moral high ground." Although I suppose that it's more likely to be successful than attempting to get everyone else up onto the high ground with them. Which, in the end, may be the problem. The executive director of the Howard Law Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, Justin Hansford, notes that White America doesn't grant the Black community the right to be angry with them for past or current injustices, real and perceived. It's difficult to see why this will change anytime soon, given that accepting Black anger as justified, rather than as acts of aggression, doesn't earn them anything. Casting Black compassion as equally unjustified won't change that calculus.

On the Hook

Mike Pesca has an interesting article in Slate about the outrage-baiting that was prompted by a MarketWatch article that portrayed a hypothetical family of four as struggling on a pre-tax income of $350,000.

Personally, to describe the situation as outrage-baiting seems too tame. "Hate-baiting" would perhaps be a more apt description.

At the conclusion of the piece, Mr. Pesca notes: "Our (manipulated) outrage is unempathetic, adding to the anger in the world while doing nothing to achieve a solution."

Adding to the anger in the world, though, is what generates click-through rates. Empathy doesn't raise advertising revenue.

But perhaps where things go wrong is when giving people the opportunity to add to the anger in the world not only allows themselves to express themselves (and virtue signal), but also to feel as if they're doing something constructive. I know a number of people who feel that the first step in solving a problem is to become emotional about it, and if the emotion needed is a burning class resentment, then so be it.

In my experience, though, our resentments are less effective at inspiring people to solve problems than they are at stoking further resentments. People come to resent what they perceive to be unfair resentment, and it starts to become a vicious cycle.

But the most interesting thing about this is that it isn't new. Sam Dogen, who put together the budget that had people so up in arms, had done the same thing back in 2015 or thereabouts (judging from dates on the comments). At that time, the income being looked at was $200,000 dollars and a lot of the same outrage was generated (it popped up on Google+, which was still active at the time). I recall being a but dubious about the idea that the family in question was "just getting by." After all, from where I sat, they seemed to be doing pretty well for themselves, considering. But I could understand how they felt that they were more precarious than it may have first appeared; a stance that cut no ice with a number of people.

Of course, it's unlikely that it's all the same people commenting now who were commenting then. After all, the initial piece didn't seem to have that broad a reach.

In the end, it doesn't make sense to expect societies to learn from past experiences. That simply isn't way the world works. But I'm curious to see, if Mr. Dogen repeats this exercise again in 2023, if a new, fresh round of outrage is triggered. Or, rather, what that round of resentment will look like.