Eyes Front

I've gotten into the bad habit of looking back at the things that I've written over the past thirteen years, mainly because I'm either looking for something that I'd written about in the past, or checking to see that I'm not accidentally retreading old ground (I have, at least once, repeated a post after forgetting to update it out of "draft" status.)

I've come to regard reading my earlier writing as a bad habit because it always leaves me with the impression that I've failed at the primary point of starting this project in the first place: becoming a better writer. Despite the fact that I don't write this blog for a living, and nothing else particular important comes from it, I tend to see every mistake as an unforced error that should have been caught and corrected prior to publication.

Perhaps this doom me to always being an amateur author. I'm pretty sure that to make it as a professional, one needs the ability to, at some point, let go of the errors of the past. One chalks them up to learning experiences and proceeds onward. Which, to be sure, is how I tend to deal with my professional life. I've made errors at work before, and I suspect that I'm not done making them yet. But even though the stakes are higher, I find that I'm better about not stewing in them than I am when I'm doing something for my own personal enjoyment. I suspect that it's something of the serious teen that I once was reasserting himself. But I think that it's also the nature of work. On the job, we have managers and other people who will tell us how serious (or not) a specific error was. And for the most part, many of them aren't that serious, especially in the grand scheme of things; most businesses are robust enough that they can withstand someone having a bonehead moment now and again.

When I'm writing here, there's no-one to tell me that this error or that mistake is trivial. And so even though I understand that to be the case intellectually, there's always that little voice in my head that simply can't believe that I left out a word, or used a piece of punctuation wrong. And that points to the other reason I think that people can be harder on themselves in personal pursuits than in professional ones. For all that this weblog was intended to help me become a better writer, there's a part of me that stands firm in the belief that, as old as I am, I shouldn't need to improve. After all, pretty much every job that I've had as an adult has required me to convey information in writing to one degree or another. And I'm college educated at that. Why do I need to improve my writing, other than to do away with my own sloppiness?

In other words, I'm not at peace with the idea that what I'm doing can be legitimately difficult, even given that I'm an amateur. Which is strange, I think. I would have told you that of course I understood how difficult writing could be; after all, I started the project as a way to practice. But I think that what I didn't understand was the part of me that saw this as a means of confirming the "fact" that I was already a good writer. And the degree to which that part of me dislikes being contradicted.

Jingle-Bell Stop

It is now, finally, the Day After Christmas. And that means the End of Christmas Music until Black Friday of 2020. It seems more like a respite than the status quo, for some reason. But while attempting to guard my mental health against the constant onslaught of "Holly-Jolly Christmas" and "Silver Bells," it occurred to me that jingle bells, or perhaps more accurately, sleigh bells, have become entirely associated with Christmas, rather than winter more broadly.

As I understand it, the purpose of bells on a sleigh was not festivity, but safety. Horses may not be completely silent, but they don't make that much noise, even when in motion. And both hoofbeats and sleigh runners can be very quiet in deep snow. So while "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" presumes either murderous intent or negligence on the part of Santa Claus, a fast-moving sleigh will not stop quickly; an old woman who steps into the path of one that she didn't hear coming is likely to come to grief.

Returning to the point, the realization that there's nothing particularly "Christmas-y" about sleigh bells becomes a reminder that many of the songs that we associate with Christmas, such as the now-controversial "Baby, It's Cold Outside," are simply about Winter itself. And winter, here in the northern hemisphere, has just started. I admit to not being all that up on the modern music scene (I have a theory that holds that all of the music in a genre that you're not that into all sounds the same.), but it seems to me that Winter music is, effectively, a sub-genre of Christmas music, and thus locked into the same Black Friday to Christmas Day constraints that genuine carols inhabit.

So while Winter may be just beginning, songs about it are mainly an Autumn phenomenon.

Small Potatoes

So, I recently watched The Mandela Effect with some friends. Spoiler alert: the plot of the movie is basically as follows: Video game programmer Brendan must find a way to reboot the Universe in order to rebalance reality after the death, and subsequent non-death, of his young daughter.

The movie uses the Mandela Effect theory as a backdrop for a movie that seems intended to showcase the strength of parental love, although Brendan quickly starts to come across as a jerk who really only cares about two things, his daughter and himself, and this made it difficult for me to really care about the outcome. It also lent the movie a strange air of triviality. If a man could literally program the Universe to reboot itself from the moment of the Big Bang, changing the life outcome of only a single child seems like something of a waste.

The movie would have, I think, been much more engaging if the goal had been to radically remake the world. Had it been up to me, I would have aimed much higher, and likely delved into a bit more overt science-fiction. What would the world be like if, say, the Armenian Genocide had never happened? Or if the opening of North America to European settlement hadn't been such a disaster for the native people? Or if the Black Death had been contained? There are any number of large-scale historical catastrophes that one could imagine setting out to undo. Although I suppose that this is somewhat in line with the way people see the Mandela Effect operating in actual history; the name of a brand of peanut butter or of storybook bears aren't really pressing issues in our society. Even the date of Nelson Mandela's death, the namesake of the effect, doesn't have much historical heft, in the grand scheme of things. You would think that if the effect were actually caused by parallel universes or somesuch, that larger events would feature more prominently.

I presume that standard Hollywood sensibilities are at work here. I can see people being upset by the idea that some significant part of history is worthy of being erased, especially if that history were caused by direct human action at some point in the past. The Holocaust is an obvious exception, but it might be touchy to imply that it's not a universal reality. (Bringing the Mandela Effect and Holocaust denial together could quickly get out of hand, and spark a public relations disaster.) Which is kind of too bad. Applying The Mandela Effect's use of the Simulation Hypothesis to larger world events would allow people to explore a possible outcome of those events unfolding differently, or not at all. I'm not sure how well the concept would play in the box office, but it could be useful as something to discuss.

Mass Delusion

Beyond “media fatigue,” or what Soraya Chemaly, writing for CNN, called “profound societal misogyny,” or what the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino described as “the hardening of [her] own heart,” I detect something else at play in the underwhelmed response to Carroll’s allegation [that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her]. That something is at once more sinister and more jaded: We have stopped pretending, collectively, that we expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility.
Moira Donegan “E. Jean Carroll and the ‘Hideosity Bar’”

So this raises a question: If we understand that we don’t genuinely “expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility,” is there actually value in the pretense? Would E. Jean Carroll, Rose McGowan, Joan Tarshis, Chanel Miller or any of the other women who have alleged sexual assault on the part of men who have had tremendous power bestowed upon them, be any better off if society still pretended to have high expectations of those men?

But it seems to me that there is actually a broader collective pretending at work, one that’s been the standard for some time: That “value,” as applied to people, is an objective measure, and its universal equality is a matter of factual truth.

And even if one says that the value that is placed on human life and/or concepts of dignity are not subject to human choice, they are still subject to human perception. Accountability has costs. And if those costs are perceived to be greater than the benefits, then one can see why it isn’t pursued, even if there is legitimate disagreement over the accuracy of the calculus involved.

So while I take Ms. Donegan’s meaning, I suspect that the sinister piece wouldn’t be that “We have stopped pretending, collectively, that we expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility,” but rather that society originated and maintained the pretense for long enough that it often seems rational to behave as if it were true. (But this, is, of course, a cynical viewpoint. A more charitable one is simply that, collectively, the public has concluded that it does, in fact, expect that those who have had power bestowed upon them to behave responsibly and holds them accountable when they fail; and that there is no failure here. While a sizable and vocal minority may disagree with that understanding of the facts, it remains that the minority is incapable of swaying the collective determination, and so it stands.)

Ms. Donegan laments that “Laughter is, perhaps, also an appropriate response to the country that allows a man like Trump to maintain his status, his money, and the respect of his peers, a country that would allow a man like him to become president and still have the audacity to pretend that women are equals, in status or in law. In that sense, her story really is laughable.” But is there really audacity in telling oneself and others that one actually is the person, the nation or the society that one is expected to be, regardless of the reality? Is it really laughable that people will present themselves as the persons they are told they are supposed to be? Is it really unexpected that hiding the parts of oneself that are labelled as unacceptable is easier than changing them?

The difference between “there wasn’t a foul, so the referee didn’t blow the whistle” and “the referee didn’t blow the whistle, so there wasn’t a foul,” may seem clear when stated in as many words, but is often less so in practice. And I don’t believe that there is any question that part of the reason why so many people allow themselves to be convinced of the referee’s infallibility is that it makes it easy, and unaudacious, to believe that they live in a world where all people are equal, in status or in law, and that violations will be detected and punished.

But there is also another side the question of the expectations that we have of men, or people in general, “who have had tremendous power bestowed upon them.” It’s one thing to say that people have low expectations. It’s another to understand what their expectations actually are. Perhaps what social critics see as “more sinister and more jaded,” than misogyny or hard-heartedness is the fact that society’s expectations are more practical that moral. People expect celebrities to entertain them, political figures to advance their interests and businesspeople to provide worthwhile goods and services. And that may be the standard of accountability that is being applied, rather than an adherence to ethics or law.

Working For a Living

There was an Italian political philosopher, whose name I've long forgotten, who explained that his reasoning for preferring Fascism to Democracy was not that Fascism was a better form of government, but that he found it more honest. Democracy, in his view, required people to be educated not only in the functioning of government, but in the issues that government was expected to deal with. In any modern society, he reasoned, this body of knowledge was so vast as to be out of reach of anyone who could not devote themselves to it full time. Hence, there would be a political ruling class, as it were. And if that were going to be the case, one may as well be up front about it.

I am reminded of this whenever I find myself in a discussion of politics where the one point that everyone seems to agree on is that government is somewhere between incompetent and corrupt, yet at the same time, is not worth becoming directly involved in, or even knowledgeable about. People who can't manage to forge a consensus on what should be on a group pizza are nevertheless convinced that in a nation of 300+ million people, it is possible, even easy, to craft policies that everyone would find directly beneficial to them. People who become visibly incensed at the idea that some random person off the street could tell them how to better do their jobs think nothing of concluding that the only reason that government doesn't work in the way they think it should is rank corruption.

Perhaps the highlight of the discussion came when one participant confidently declared that any changes in taxation should only be made by a direct vote of the people, and that neither legislatures, executives or courts should have any greater say in the matter. When I then challenged them on why not simply make all laws subject to direct, rather than representative, democracy and simply do away with much of the rule-making apparatus of government, the answer was: "I'd like to have it done right, not to do it myself." There was a moment of silence. And then the laughter began.

For all that everyone found the sudden reversal of an old adage to be funny, that sentiment strikes me as common throughout the United States. Voting, whether it be for representatives or on citizen initiatives and the like, is the bare minimum amount of effort that participatory governance requests. Yet even that is beyond the desire of many people. For all that much has been made of what appear to be partisan efforts to suppress the vote by Republicans (or, much more rarely in my understanding, Democrats), many more people simply choose not to vote than have their path to the polls strewn with obstacles.

I have come to think that the biggest problem that self-government presents is that it's a job. And often, a full-time job at that. And for many people, two full-time jobs is simply too much to ask. Perhaps because of this, many people see themselves as the customers of government, rather than its managers. And so government tends to serve those people to do take the more active, managerial role, regardless of their goals and/or motivations. The function of representative government is, in large part, to lessen the burden of that managerial role. But it can't eliminate it. And as long as the management of government is uneven, the outcomes it produces will likely be the same.

Drving Clicks

How's this for a headline: "Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed To Sacrifice Pedestrians To Save The Driver"? Posted to Fast Company back in 2016, it was brought to my attention today after being the subject of a post. The article is subtitled: "Mercedes gets around the moral issues of self-driving cars by deciding that–of course–drivers are more important than anyone else." It goes downhill from there.

At issue is a quote that one Christoph von Hugo, an autonomous vehicle safety manager, gave Car and Driver: “If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car. If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that’s your first priority.” From this statement, Charlie Sorrel, the Fast Company columnist, presumes that Daimler-Benz is simply choosing to avoid hard moral questions to justify using pedestrians as airbags to protect the people who bought their cars.

But the moral calculus is actually more involved than it may appear. In effect, what Mr. von Hugo was saying is that the cars would be programmed to manage what they could actually control. Consider the following scenario: A driverless car has a blowout and suffers a partial loss of control at speed. Now, the car is going to hit a nearby wall, with a pedestrian standing in front of it; the car has control over how the impact occurs, but cannot prevent the impact. The car, in theory, knows enough about its own construction that it can determine what angles of impact would crush the passenger compartment and kill the driver. What the car can't know is what other external factors may contribute to the pedestrian being injured or killed. Say half the time, the car endeavors to save the driver and the other half of the time, the car attempts to spare the pedestrian. In situations where the car saves the driver, the driver survives, and the pedestrian is killed. In situations where the car acts to save the pedestrian, the driver is killed. But, and this is where things become interesting, because the car can't know the full set of external factors and variables, the pedestrian doesn't always survive. Because even though the car missed them when it struck the wall, there's no guarantee that something else doesn't happen that injures or kills the pedestrian that is a) a direct result of the accident but b) outside of the car's control.

And this leaves us with two scenarios: one where the car takes the sure thing, and another where it gambles. In situations where the car opts to save the driver, if things go as the car intends, there's always a 50% mortality rate. In situations where the care opts to save the pedestrian, the mortality rate will always be at least 50% but it may be higher, because there will be situations where the pedestrian is killed anyway. So the two situations are not equal. They may be close, but in the situation where the car gambles, and prioritizes the pedestrian, there is always a chance that both people will die. And if this is the logic that informed the programmers of the autonomous Mercedes, then one can see why they made the choice that they did.

A luxury carmaker makes for easy outrage mining. The headline is "shocking" enough that there are going to be some people who take it and run, without really digging any deeper. One day people will learn to be careful of clickbait on the internet, but it's going to take people being seriously burned for that to happen. Until then, class warfare will prove to be good, and easy to win.

Winter Rainbow

It was only part of a rainbow. It faded into invisibility not long after leaving the ground, which may be the reason that so few people seemed to take any notice of it. Or maybe people just thought that it was part of Barnes and Nobles' Christmas decorations.

Age of Truth

I will admit that I have tired of the phrase "post-truth." In part because I feel that it's become a jab at people's political opposition, but mainly because I think that it distorts, and hides, what is actually happening in modern society.

Depending on how one uses the words, there can be different varieties of "truth." Or, perhaps more precisely, there can be a difference between "truthful" and "factual." For example, one can (over)simplify Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative as stating that it is impermissible to treat other people as merely means to one's own ends. One can understand this to be true, but I submit that, like most philosophical positions, it does not follow from that the Categorical Imperative is factual, in the same way that hydrogen fusion produces helium is factual.

What has lead to what many like to call a "post-truth" society is, as I understand it, an attempt to link truthful and factual in contexts where the two may be better off remaining separate. To the degree that a person's subjective experience of the world is sincere, it may be regarded as truthful, although it would not be factual in the way the hard sciences are regarded as factual. Many people, however, understand their subjective experiences of the world to be the logical result of the objective state of the world, that is to say, based on the facts of the world around them. And this is fine. At least, until we call people on it. Then it becomes difficult, in part because there is an implied, if not explicit, challenge to the person's understanding of the world around them. And if facts are the currency that one must spend in order to be seen as comprehending, then people will do what they need to in order to find them. Releasing people from the need to justify their subjective experience of the world against objective reality, would reduce or remove the drive for them to find facts to buttress their feelings, and this would reduce the conflict with less emotionally-charged information.

While the idea of respecting personal truth is at odds with the idea that there is a single truth, this is because not all truth is itself amenable to a singular definition. Being at peace with that may allow people to be more at peace with one another.

Supposing I Gamble...

I've been doing some reading on Reddit recently and discovered r/Scams. It's an interesting forum, mainly populated, it seems, with people pointing out attempts (sometimes successful, usually not) to scam them or asking if some or another message or the like is a scam attempt.

There are, unsurprisingly, a wide array of different scams out there, making the rounds of the internet. While the ever-popular 419 scam is still alive and well, and run-of-the-mill phishing scams are common, human cleverness in seeking to defraud their fellow man is eternal, and this poses a problem for even the wary internet denizen. I am, I will admit, something of the suspicious sort. If something strikes me as being off about something, I simply delete or report it, and go about my business. But I realize, especially now that I've been exposed to some of the stories that r/Scams has to offer, that my willingness to always simply walk away is something of a luxury. In many cases, what the scammers are preying on is the poverty of their marks. For someone in need of a better paying job, an offer of an executive assistant role may seem like a stroke of good fortune. For someone low on funds, finding a virtual reality setup or a smartwatch at a significant markdown from MSRP appears to be a simple matter of finding a fortuitous sale.

But, having the sneaking suspicion that something isn't right, they turn to Reddit, and ask: "Am I being scammed?" Often, it's because they don't know how the scam would work. And if they can't understand how they would be cheated, they're more likely to hold out hope that they've stumbled onto something good. Triangulation scams, which I'd never heard of before, work on this model. A criminal offers an item for sale at a good price. When someone offers to purchase the item, the criminal buys it from an online vendor, using compromised credit card credentials, and stipulates the purchaser as the recipient. The purchaser receives the item they paid for, and it's not unless or until someone flags the payment to the vendor as fraudulent that anyone is any the wiser.

But the most interesting aspect of the "Am I being scammed?" posts is the number of them where it's fairly clear that they're hoping (against hope, as it turns out) that the community will tell them that whatever they've come across is, in this one case, legitimate. The number of posts that ask, at some point, "Should I risk it?" is somewhat surprising. To me, anyway. As I noted before, I'm not in a position where something that seems sketchy turning out to be on the level would be a significant benefit to me. It leaves me with the feeling that I should be doing more to ensure that more people can be in that position with me.

News of the Random

I was browsing through the BBC News wbesite, and came across this video story of a man stealing a woman's wheelchair. The woman is in the chair when the man approaches her, and he puts a fair amount of effort into dumping her out of it, before attempting to make off with it. Other passengers swarm out of the train after him, and reclaim the wheelchair for its owner.

My first thought was "Wow. Must have been a slow news day in Britain." But I'll admit it. I clicked on it. I think I was expecting something more substantial than some random guy attempting to steal some random wheelchair from some random person in a random part of the United States. After all, this is the BBC that we're talking about. Surely, there's enough important stuff going on in the United States and/or Canada that something this trivial wouldn't have made the newsworthiness bar. While there's a part of me that responds to that with "Silly me," I will admit to being somewhat disappointed. But I suppose that I shouldn't be. New of the weird is popular everywhere, now that I think about it.

And while odd stories like this are effectively harmless, I wonder what role they play in that fact that, as Pew Research Center puts it, "public perceptions about crime in the U.S. often don’t align with the data," something which seems to be a recurring phenomenon. I was recently reading an essay on the Web (one that I'd neglected to make note of) in which the author observed that her overall mood and opinion of humanity tracked negatively with her diligence in keeping up with the news. And it wouldn't surprise me if the culprit was, at least in part, this habit of holding up random crime stories as if they were somehow important.

But I guess this is a side effect of the fact that most of the public at large, the day-to-day news isn't anything that they can take action on. So while news is often billed as informative, I think that it's often more useful, if that's the right word to use, as a form of diversion and/or entertainment. And I suppose that the ability to "tsk, tsk, tsk," at events happening elsewhere counts.

Mythologizing

I'd been under the impression that the now-legendary "419" scam had always been something of a small-time operation. Sure, a particular scammer might have a dozen or so people that they were stringing along, but that was the extent of it. So color me surprised to learn that a lawyer in the Dominican Republic has managed to rack up nearly 30,000 "clients" in a scheme to lay hands on what is supposedly billions of dollars that is sitting in banks after an ancestor deposited gold some 150-plus years ago. The story, by Joe Nocera, is a fascinating read.

What I found to be most interesting about the whole thing is the power of the myth that lay at the bottom of it. And I don't mean "myth" in the often pejorative usage of a false narrative, but rather as a traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience. The belief that members of the Rosario family are heirs to an impressive fortune can be said the be the driving force in all of this; the current lawyer is not the only person to have formally looked into this, simply the only one to have told the family that they're correct, and that the money is waiting for them. They just have to pay some up-front expenses first...

Regarding the various Rosarios that have bought into this as stupid, greedy or naïve is easy. Perhaps too easy, since it does provide a convenient narrative for why they were taken in when so many other people have managed to see through this and similar ruses. Rather, I wonder what this says about the power of disappointment and disillusionment that people would go to what strikes me as such great lengths to avoid them. Maybe it's because I'm not desperately impoverished and wasn't raised with a narrative that says, in effect, "our current lot is not our genuine fate" but I find the tenacity with which the story of the gold, and the wealth that has since become, maintains its hold to be remarkable. I would have expected that everyone would have given up by now.

But I suppose that this is the reason why there is a reading of the Pandora myth that claims that Hope was just as much an evil as the other maladies that were in the wedding gift jar. I have a difficult time seeing how Hope isn't a curse for everyone except the lawyer.

Words

I think today, American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves―and if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.
United States Attorney General William Barr, 3 December 2019

So... What Did Barr Mean When He Said Ungrateful “Communities” Could “Find Themselves Without Police Protection?” Good question. Although I’m not sure that it’s a particularly relevant question. After all, it’s a safe bet that whether one reads it “as a not-so-thinly-veiled threat to communities” or as an oblique warning of the consequences of assigning low status to necessary services neatly (if not always exactly) tracks to a person's overall partisan affiliation.

And I wonder how much that partisanship impacted the speechwriting process. Not in the sense that Attorney General Barr set out to make a comment that Republicans would see as innocuous and Democrats would see as threatening, but in the sense that if the reactions to a speech are known beforehand, why bother being careful with one’s language? Peloton’s stock price dropped 9% due to criticism of a recent advertisement for its stationary exercise cycles. Maybe this is because it’s already at historic lows, but  currently, political stock simply doesn’t move in that way when something that can be taken badly is said. And personally, I think that it’s just as reasonable to claim that the Attorney General is treating policing as a “protection racket” as it is to consider the Peloton commercial “dystopian.”

It’s a safe bet that Attorney General Barr could have made the point that law enforcement is entitled to more respect and support than he feels that they’re currently receiving without having come across as threatening people. Then, if there were any discussion of the point at all, it could focus on whether or not one agreed with the premise that police officers are being disrespected and unsupported by the communities they serve and/or what their end of that bargain should be, outside of simply enforcing certain rules. (After all, being in law enforcement is a job. There are plenty of professions that one could make the point are necessary for healthy communities, but are constantly dumped on. Teachers come to mind.) But if the pump was already primed, with a belief that critics of the Trmp Administration and its members would find something critical to say regardless of the content of Attorney General Barr’s words, the effort that a different message would have required could be seen as wasted. And while it's possible to point fingers here, to say that the Administration’s critics are too strident, or the Administration is intentionally tone-deaf, at the end of the day, it’s the broader public that is going to have to be prepared to act. Political stock prices have to plunge when there are missteps (and then rise again when missteps are corrected) in order for people to feel the need to take more care.

Part of me wants to say that there is a problem with the Attorney General’s remarks, but the fact of the matter is that the problem is much bigger than that, and was well-entrenched long before Mr. Barr took to the podium. Good faith is going to be required to fix it. But as long as good faith is seen as a weakness to be avoided, it’s going to be in short supply.

BBS

I've been listening to several of my old CDs recently, revisiting music that I haven't listened to in some time. One thing that I've learned is that listening to songs for the music produces different results than when one listened to songs for the lyrics. I don't really know why I hadn't paid much attention to many of the lyrics to the music in my CD collection prior to this point. Maybe because I tended to use it more as background noise than anything else. But when I'm driving, I'm more in the market for something to actively listen to.

One thing that stood out for me is how many songs could be charitably described as "bitter breakup songs." I'm kind of surprised that they aren't considered a genre unto themselves, given how common they are. I was listening to one soundtrack album that appeared to have no less than four; which seemed excessive, given that the movie in question had nothing really to so with romantic relationships, let alone the breakup of one.

I'm perhaps fortunate in these songs not really speaking to me; I've never had an angry breakup with a former partner. But I wonder if the event is as common as music makes it out to be. After all, a common viewpoint is that there are so many bitter breakup songs because of the ubiquity of bitter breakups. Which would be something of a shame. Although I suppose that like anything else, songs about being okay with life wouldn't be very big sellers.