Assume a Hypocrite

Can you imagine the outrage of [Wayne] Grudem and other Trump supporters if, in 2012, Barack Obama had coerced, say, China into announcing an investigation into and digging up dirt on Mitt Romney, and then justified it by saying that a president has the power to ask any nation to undertake any investigation?
Peter Wehner "There Is No Christian Case for Trump"

To borrow a line from Han Solo: "I can imagine quite a lot." But the problem with imagined hypotheticals is that they are just that, imagined hypotheticals. For all that Mr. Wehner believes that Professor Grudem and other backers of President Trump would have howled in outrage if President Obama had sought to coerce a foreign nation into assisting them politically through illegally withholding aid payments, the fact remains that because President Obama did no such thing, there's was nothing for them to be outraged about. And so while their political biases may appear to be obvious, there is no valid avenue for accountability. Claiming that, in the name of consistency, that people should behave in a real situation in a manner that comports with an imagined one is pointless at best.

Calls for consistency in matters of politics like this are almost universally wastes of time. In large part because most people don't start with a principle and then derive an understanding of whom they should support. Rather they start with their interests, and derive their principles in a manner than supports those interests, regardless of the compromises or inconsistencies that this causes. This is in large part, I believe, because people don't view concepts of right and wrong independently of what is good and bad for them. In other words, people tend to lean towards conceptualizations of right that align with their perceived interests, at least over the long term. I don't know of anyone who signs up for an idea of right that consigns them to a lifetime of uncompensated misery and loss.

If all is fair in love and war, it's possible that a lot of President Trump's support can be chalked up to the "Culture Wars" in the United States. And for all that the Culture Wars come across as a sideline in the broader contexts of American political, civic and economic life, for those people who see themselves as dedicated culture warriors, it's a high-stakes conflict where the consequences of losing are indistinguishable from fatal. And as the perceived stakes increase, so does the perceived need to come out on top of the conflict.

A general dislike of being open about one's interests, and one's willingness to do what it appears to take to protect or advance them, is perhaps the largest driver of apparent hypocrisy in public life today. A lessening of public piety concerning letting the chips fall where they may in the name of "principle" would do a lot to release people from the need to pretend that they have higher priorities than looking out for themselves and their futures.

In Session

According to The Daily Beast, back in the 1970s now-Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders compared working people to the Black slaves of the past. The site also notes:

[...]Sanders’ previously unreported comparisons between the conditions of Vermont workers and that of enslaved people evoke a different element of his campaign—assertions by critics that he tends to view systemic racism primarily through the lens of economic disenfranchisement.

This is nothing new. But it's also not completely unreasonable. The assessment that when resources are scarce, people turn on one another and scapegoat those different from them, while it may not be correct in many (or even any) cases, isn't obviously broken. So why beat Senator Sanders up for believing it?

Part of the problem is the referencing of "systemic racism." This can be understood as a sort of free-floating racism that's unmoored from any given individual's personal feelings. The fact that Black families have less wealth and tend to be in poorer health than White families, for instance, tends to be the sort of thing that's cited as systemic or institutional racism. But it's worthwhile to note that it's rational to view that phenomenon through the lens of economic disenfranchisement to the degree that the perpetuation of systemic racism can be said to rise from opportunity hoarding, which effectively results in "them that has" receiving still more. In the absence of malice or spite, it doesn't make sense for a person who is secure in the level of opportunity they can access to spend time and energy on simply preventing other people from accessing opportunities. And while it can be argued that disadvantaged people need a disproportionate share of the available opportunities to make up the differences between them and their better-off peers, if opportunities are common enough to be there for the asking and there isn't a specific drive to hold them back, eventually, one would expect that they'll close the gap.

And it's worth noting that Senator Sanders isn't the only person to push the idea that Americans should unite over class, rather than divide themselves over race. It's a fairly common argument. The band Arrested Development makes the point in Give A Man A Fish, and I've heard it repeated several times in the intervening decades.

I'm also uncertain that it actually matters how Senator Sanders views systemic racism. He leans substantially further Left than I do, so I have no plans to vote for him, but his views on racism aren't a factor in that calculation. If Senator Sanders were able to remake the nation into something more to his liking, I have little doubt that many Black people in the country would be much better off than they are now, even if he's incorrect about the nature of systemic racism.

This, however, is simply the nature of campaign season, especially one with so many currently viable candidates running for the Democratic nomination. Seeking to sow Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about other candidates becomes easier than attempting to increase support for one's own, and so critics are everywhere, and the media picks up their complaints because, well, the internet has a lot of room so there's always space for another story.

Water, Water, Everywhere

For all that the Seattle area is (in)famous for being rainy, it doesn't actually rain all that much. Locally, a quarter of an inch of actual precipitation in a day is considered a lot. For those of us who come from locales where rainfall is sometimes measured in inches per hour, it's merely a passive-aggressive drizzle.

One of the side effects of the fact that rain is often very light is that when it does actually rain for any length of time, whole sections of the place become waterlogged. The ground become saturated, and standing water can cover quite large areas. These tend to be out away from the city proper, but since the metropolitan area isn't very expansive, a twenty-minute drive can place you on the shores of a lake that hadn't been there a month or so ago.

Unending

This, I believe, should be funny. At least, that's the spirit that I believe motivated the post. I, however, simply find it to be sad. Or, to be more accurate, it makes me tired. I'm not sure that I can place a finger on why. This is, after all, simply one guy in an airport, interacting with someone I'd never heard of before reading this.

On second thought, maybe I do understand why. For all that this is a single interaction, it takes on the role of proof that some things never change. It becomes a link in what seems like a single chain of societal sexism, starting in the distant past and reaching beyond the foreseeable future. It takes all of the progress that people tell me that we've made and casually sweeps it aside, in favor of the bleak assessment that nothing ever actually changes.

Which is a dangerous thought, I believe. When something becomes permanent in the mind, does it acquire a sense of invulnerability? One that says that efforts at change are foolish, because they are futile?

For all that I appreciate "zero tolerance" sensibilities, I wonder if they also give rise to the idea that there is no such thing as progress towards a goal. That one is either past the finish line or still in the starting blocks. I don't know.

There will always be clueless guys out there. Detaching that cluelessness from history is difficult. In part, perhaps, because it feels like it allows a place in which the evils of the past can hide themselves to avoid destruction. But there is a chance that part of the way that we rid ourselves of the evils of the past is to refuse to grant them access to the present. And sometimes, this is done by not seeing them unless they go out of their way to make themselves known.

Torque

Seth Godin makes an excellent point today, in a blog post about the quote: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

But it’s not bending itself. And it’s not waiting for someone from away to bend it either.

His point is a simple one; the arc of the moral universe bends because people chose to bend it. And, as a result, it bends towards their understanding of what justice is. While Mr. Godin's point is to caution against passivity, thinking that since the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice that people need to nothing, it's also worth understanding that the universe has no understanding of what justice is. "Justice" is a concept, and not a physical characteristic of the Universe, either the material one or the moral one. The idea that our society is more just today than it was a century ago means only that we modern people agree with what we have now more than we do with what they had then. In this sense, the bend of the arc of the moral universe is automatic, it bends because it always points to the controlling (if not the prevailing) concept of justice for the time and place under consideration. The people who are capable of having their concept of justice prevail find that the arc of the moral universe has come to meet them where they are.

Our culture is the result of a trillion tiny acts, taken by billions of people, every day. Each of them can seem insignificant, but all of them add up, one way or the other, to the change we each live through.

This is simply how societies work. When thousands of firearms owners rallied in Richmond, Virginia, today to protest new laws working their way through the state legislature, they hoped to influence that set of a trillion tiny acts. Whether it was to inspire the like-minded to act as they had, or to encourage the opposition to give up on their goals, they understood that the moral arc of the universe is bent by the force applied to it via human action.

Funhouse Reflections

I was riding the Blue Line L, back in the day, and a woman was standing near the doors. I didn't really pay much attention to her; I recall her as appearing to be an average commuter, but little else about her. At one stop, just before the doors closed, a young Black man, likely in is early to mid-twenties, walked in front of her, grabbed the necklace she was wearing, and slipped out of the doors. It was clearly a practiced maneuver; the doors closed immediately behind him, cutting off any chance of pursuit. Clearly pleased with himself, he casually strolled towards the platform's exit, while the train pulled away, and the woman whose necklace he'd stolen flustered about, attempting to call attention to the crime.

My initial response to this was one of anger. I was also a young Black man in my early twenties, and as far as I was concerned, this jerk was making us all look bad; cementing in people's minds the negative stereotypes of Black men. Stereotypes that I was going to have to deal with. Although, to be sure, I was already dealing with them, which was part of the reason I was angry with this guy. In the moment that it took him to snatch a woman's necklace and slip off of the L train wearing a self-satisfied grin, he had gone, in my mind, from just another young person whose idea of "the hustle" was petty crime to the personification of all of the lawless losers whose behavior I felt that I was constantly being held to account for.

Were it not for people like him, I "reasoned," I could open my interactions with the people around me without having to first prove to them that I wasn't one of the people like him.

I was in a stage of my life where the constant pushback against the stereotypes that seemed to define me in the eyes of so many people had left me tired of being angry with the people that held the stereotypes. Being angry with the people whose behavior could be used as justification for those stereotypes felt like a refreshing change of pace. And I cycled between them for some time; a period of years, really.

But eventually, the anger drained away. It left an emptiness for a time, but then I realized that it had served no real purpose, other than to perpetuate itself. After a few years of working with children who had been taken out their homes for abuse and/or neglect, I'd repeated the words "life isn't fair," often enough that I'd actually started to understand what they meant.

This guy was taking the best path he knew to making life better for himself. Maybe he'd pawned the woman's necklace; maybe he'd purchased some goodwill by giving it to someone as a gift; in the end, whatever the outcome, it had nothing to do with me. Just like my quixotic jousting with a few centuries worth of racial stereotypes and animosity had nothing to do with him. Likewise, the people who looked at me, and placed themselves on guard weren't escalating to DefCon 3 in order to injure me, it was those same centuries of race relations working through them. What they saw when I stepped into their field of vision was mostly out of my control, and nearly entirely none of my business.

I don't remember when I finally lost the ability to describe the guy. The episode in question took place more than a quarter century ago. The world has moved on quite a bit in that time, and I'm glad that I was able to do so, too. I now understand that I don't actually see anyone that I encounter for who they actually are. The snapshots of people's lives that are my fleeting interactions with them can't hope to capture the complexity and nuance of a life lived out of my sight. Instead, I see an image distorted by our own history, education and experiences. A smirking face watching the L carry the victim of his theft away from him was distorted by my life before that point into the sum total of the lived experiences and expectations of every person whose dismissal of me as just another potential criminal.. He had become curvatures of the mirror in which people saw me; mainly, I think, because as a single individual, he was a more convenient target for an otherwise unfocused anger at the world around me.

Being able to let go of that particular thread of Respectability Politics has been refreshing. Laying debts at the feet of people who didn't know me was fatiguing. Releasing them of those debts, which almost always went unpaid, became a form of self-care that was long overdue.

All's Unfair

The headline, like most, is designed to be attention-grabbing: "Trump Is a Remorseless Advocate of Crimes Against Humanity." But it's nothing surprising. Slate is, after all, a left-learning commentary and opinion site; it's little wonder they would be at odds with President Trump. The article itself was also designed to preach to the choir, to remind people who don't like the President of why they don't like the President and to arm them with talking points to take into pointless debates with people who do like the President. While the point of the article is that the President is an amoral bully who doesn't care about the way things ought to be done, something else also comes out of the portrayal: President Trump is an advocate for the idea of American superiority, and the idea that entitlement comes with such superiority.

What counts as genuine proof of strength has always been in debate. One argument says that strength is the ability to take what one wants or needs without needing to worry about the consequences. Another says that strength is the ability to refrain from imposing on others. If there is a camp that says that American greatness has come from being able to get along in the world without stooping to the idea that might makes right, there is another that presumes that might is greatness, and weilding it strongly is one's right.

But for most people, that's all just philosophy. What matters to them is how do they do better for themselves tomorrow than they were doing yesterday. And they'll follow whichever path they understand is in their interests to follow. President Trump, to all appearances, believes that the strong prosper by using their strength against any who would interfere with that prosperity, regardless of their reasons, and irrespective of what anyone else has to say about it. And for the segment of the population that voted for him out of a sense of being left behind in favor of others who were less deserving, that resonates. Not because they would necessarily choose the same tactics and strategies that the President has, but because they understand that the result will be an improvement in their fortunes. And if this is the path that brings that improvement, so be it.

And this is worth understanding, because if one is going to say that the United States should be a kinder, gentler place than President Trump would have it be, one should be prepared to make the case as to how this serves people in the end. Telling them that they are wealthy enough that they are required to be magnanimous falls flat when people don't feel themselves to be wealthy. And we see this over and over again. Adam Serwer's article in The Atlantic, "Civility Is Overrated," is subtitled "The gravest danger to American democracy isn’t an excess of vitriol—it’s the false promise of civility." If, as Mr. Serwer, points out, "Civility, in other words, is treating Trump how Trump wants to be treated, while he treats you however he pleases," the case can be made that for the President, the rules of war, in other words, are treating the enemies of the United States how those enemies want to be treated, while they treat the United States however they please.

It's worth pointing out that if everyone always insists on playing the game at the level of the most ruthless and driven players, then it simply degenerates. But the problem with that analogy comes when people stop seeing the situation as a game, and instead as a matter of life and death, prosperity and poverty or equality and oppression. Then the stakes become too high for rules that people don't feel are in their interests. When winning is the only thing that matters, how one gets there becomes unimportant.

Of Utmost Importance

So I was clued into an interesting article about Boeing's recent woes by Joe Nocera in Bloomberg. The subtitle says it all: "Shareholder value eclipsed safety as a top priority, with catastrophic consequences." But then I started wondering if Boeing's apparent commitment to shareholder primacy was, in fact, the problem.

When one reads a statement like James Kee's: "If private property were truly respected, shareholder interest would be the primary, or even better, the sole purpose, of the corporation," it's not much of a stretch to see that as condoning any sort of corporate malfeasance, so long as the shareholder's interests were protected. But there's an assumption built into that, namely that the interests of shareholders aren't necessarily aligned with those of other stakeholders, such as employees, suppliers, local communities, creditors et cetera. But there's no reason why they shouldn't be, other than rent seeking. And so maybe that's the problem that we should be looking at.

Boeing was able to cut costs to the degree that it did not because of the fact that its top executives had managed to divorce themselves from Boeing's engineering culture, but because the Boeing Company had become, to borrow the old term "Too Big To Fail." It's the only aircraft maker of its sort in the United States; its collapse would mean that airlines would be obligated to buy planes from Airbus or other offshore manufacturers. It's a giant defense contractor and the United State's largest exporter. These things, taken together, mean that there is a degree to which many of Boeing's customers, not to mention the federal government, need Boeing as much as, or more than, Boeing needs them. Cue the rent-seeking.

Recently, Washington State governor and former Presidential candidate Jay Inslee put Boeing on notice that if they wanted to retain their generous tax status, that their next plane needed to be produced in Washington. We'll see if Boeing complies, or what happens if they don't. But the fact that Boeing felt free to move a number of jobs out of state even after winning the large concession from the state hints that the governor may have to back up what he says. But Boeing still has leverage.

Mainly because of a lack of domestic competition. And this insulates it from the complaints of many of its other stakeholders. Were McDonnell Douglas still an active player in the airliner market, customers could jump ship much more easily, meaning that Boeing would have to had paid more attention to their concerns.

Boeing has put a number of constituencies in a position where if Boeing goes down, they all go with it. That gives them more leverage than other companies might, in terms of being able to dictate the rules of engagement. It's not hard to imagine that the troubles with the 737 Max and the recent revelations of internal e-mails would have doomed other companies. That potential consequence, one expects, mitigates against ignoring everyone else's interests. But with Boeing being in the position of "what are they going to do?" the only needs it had to look out for were its own.

Change of Venue

It's movie awards season, with the 92nd Academy Awards coming up in the beginning of February. And now that nominations have been released, there has been something of a teapot tempest over the lack of women nominated for Best Director. The director of Little Women, Amy Pascal, suggested that part of the reason may be that most (some 72%) of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are men, and they are voting for the movie that appeal to them, personally. People are, she says, voting for the movies, the stories, that are important to them, rather than out of any deliberate bias. The BBC asks if the demographics of the people who give the awards has an impact on the stories they prefer, and thus the people who receive the awards.

All the movies nominated this year are good, and I can’t believe Bafta voters are inherently racist and misogynist, but the telling thing with lists is that they without doubt reflect the personality of the person or people compiling them.
Jason Solomons, Movie critic and journalist.

Georgie Yukiko Donovan notes that awards are something of a stamp of approval, one that allows moviemakers to move up the career ladder. But she also feels that the money needed to successfully campaign for an award means that "gender, race, money and class" are important factors. Critic Melissa Silverstein feels that the generally older White male perspective of the majority of awards judges invalidates the experiences of people outside of that demographic, and when all of the nominations for an award reflect that, then the award should not be given.

But maybe there's a better option. If the Academy Awards are too important to a filmmaker's career to be left to the whims of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, then the Oscars should be replaced with an award that better reflects the population that's important to the film industry. While the Oscars, and other major awards, are important because the press pays attention to them, they're also important because filmmakers compete for them. The time, effort and money that go into campaigning for the Oscars are representative of the prestige that they bring, but they also contribute to that same prestige.

Since awards season concentrates on movies that have already been released, there is a certain amount of sway that a new award can have. I don't know anyone who goes to a movie and then declines to make up their mind as to whether or not they enjoyed it until they find out how many Oscar nominations it received. The public can have very vocal opinions as to what they like or dislike in cinema, and are more than capable to disputing the choices that awards bodies make. So why not look to an award that selects a slate of candidates that matches the demographics one prefers and compete for that award? Sure, it will take some time to shift the public's attention to the new award. But change always takes time. And I suspect that it would be simpler than either expecting Academy or BAFTA or what-have-you voters to leave their own likes and dislikes at the door, or making wholesale changes to their voting memberships.

It's true that Oscars mean a lot to people, and a new award won't mean as much. But that focus on this particular award creates a neediness that threatens to eventually undermine it. If people understand that there is some sort of diversity quota built into the awards, will they retain the faith that the movies selected have earned their positions on the merits, or come to believe because someone else has determined the winners in advance, they awards are somewhat fraudulent. And if the current awards electors are simply middlemen, why not dispense with them?

To Feel Loved

I have changed my appearance and lowered my voice, even tried to believe that one of the worst days of my life never happened, all in service of loving this country. One day I hope this country will try as hard to love me back.
Farnoush Amiri "The Day That Never Happened"

I have encountered this sentiment, the idea of one's love of country being unrequited, here and there over the past several years. Non-white Americans, immigrants and native citizens alike, have expressed it, painfully and wistfully. On the one hand, the idea that one's country doesn't love one back is only to be expected. The United States of America is, after all, a nation-state, rather than a person. It can't love anyone any more than a car or a table can. But there are a lot of people who make up the United States, and they, as individuals can love. And in that sense, it is accurate to feel that their willingness to show apparent love for another person simply on the basis of being a fellow citizen is, as with most love, conditional.

The "United States" loves what, and whom, it sees itself in. Likewise, it sees itself in what it wishes to love (even when, sometimes, it isn't actually there). It loves to be loved, and, as such, sees love in the flattery if imitation. And because it sees everyone as having the capacity to be like it, to mirror its ideals back to it, it does not see the conditionality of its love. And the narrower the United States' vision of itself, the stingier it appears to be with its love.

But also, the narrower our vision of the United States, the less love that we feel from it. At one point, Ms. Amiri recounts her father telling her: "Because you are foreigners, they hate you." But who are "they?" If "they," as in the United States, are simply the White, relatively affluent citizens whose main understanding of those not like them is the threat that they perceive to their standing and material comfort, it is going to be difficult to feel that they have any love to share. The fearful and insecure, consumed by their own sense of current or impending poverty, rarely do. If they are the only people who represent the "United States" in the paragraph above, hoping that they will try hard to love one back seems a fool's errand.

We all have to be the United States. We cannot cede a fundamental sense of American-ness to a select group if we want to feel loved by our nation. Or that it loves others who attempt to make a life here. When we allow the nation to be defined by a particular group of people, when we judge ourselves legitimate citizens or not based on their whims, we allow ourselves to be set adrift, and cast as strangers (or worse, interlopers) in our own communities. For our country to love us as much as we love it, we cannot give up our place here, or allow others to tell us that we don't have one.

Lopsided

The economic system in this country a) is generally fair to most Americans or b) unfairly favors the most powerful interests?

As someone who doesn't really find the idea of "fair" to be all that relevant in day-to-day life, I'm kind of glad that I didn't have to answer this question. I'd still be mulling it over, I think. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans this question, about 70% of respondents answered said that the U.S. economy unfairly favors the powerful. Which makes sense. As Pew points out, the idea that the economy is "rigged" has been a common theme for the past four years.

And while I understand why people see it that way, I don't know that I agree. The Vanderbilt University Commodores won the College World Series of baseball in 2019. The Washington Nationals won the Major League Baseball 2019 World Series. The Commodores versus the Nationals would likely be a one-sided game. But it wouldn't need to be "unfair," in that the Nationals wouldn't need to cheat or to have the umpires on their side. The Commodores would simply be outclassed by the greater skill of the professional team and the resources available to it. The "rigging" or unfairness of the situation would come from the Commodores being unable to bow out of the game in order to play other teams in their own league and from the game being treated as between equals.

And this is the overall problem that a highly unequal economy brings with it. The Major League-level players can pick and chose who they go up against, and in so doing, set themselves up to win the games they play. And since winning carries benefits, and losing has penalties, "the rich become richer, and the poor become poorer." And, thus, the inequality increases. The system may not be actively rigger or unfair, but it is broken. I'm not particularly confident that we'll deliberately fix it, but fixes don't need to be designed. It's better that way, because an emergent fix is likely to be very violent. Either way, it's likely that a new equilibrium will eventually be achieved.

Look! Up In The Sky!

Why right now, as Donald Trump faces a potential impeachment trial in the United States Senate next week?
Senator Elizabeth Warren, quoted in "Democratic Presidential Candidates Criticize Trump For Ordering Soleimani Strike"

The implication is clear; President Trump understood that the strike against Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani would shift attention away from domestic political events. And I guess I can understand that logic, but it's always seemed to me that the President has always had ways of directing the media spotlight to himself. So if he decided that people weren't paying enough attention to him, there are plenty of avenues that he could have pursued without the risk of a broader conflict.

An effort to distract presupposes, by definition, that the person running the distraction thinks that there is something else that people want to, or should, pay attention to. But for the President, it often seems that the thing that everyone should be paying attention to is HIM. Full stop. The President is always looking to be the center of attention because he believes that he deserves it, that it's the best thing for everyone or whatever. In that sense, he's something like the class clown back in 3rd grade - the teacher may be convinced that he's part of a cover up for some other malfeasance, and some kids in the class may try to use his antics as cover; but in the end, the class knows that the clown operates on nothing more than the belief that their worth as a person is a direct function of their ability to keep all eyes on them.

The other thing about charges of intentionally "distracting" the public is that one wonders why anyone would think that it would work. Opposition politicians, not to mention activists among the public are always quick to jump on perceived attempts to distract the public and to wave the flag for whatever thing that the public is allegedly being distracted from. Therefore, in order for distraction to work as intended, everyone needs to be asleep at the wheel to begin with, and this, one supposes, would obviate the need to distract people.

But charges of distraction also presuppose that the public does a poor job of placing its attention. And this speaks to what events and circumstances "deserve" the public's attention. I tend to be of the opinion that the public does a fairly good job of attending to those things that it wants to attend to. And while a critic may come to the conclusion that such attention is misplaced, that argument is often based on the critic's idea of proper public priorities, rather than the public's. Charges of distraction tend to be self-referential in these cases; the reason why something should be the center of attention is that someone is attempting to distract the public from it... unimportant things don't merit distracting people from them. But the reason the public continues to apportion its limited attention as it does is because it works for their goals. And if the escalating situation with Iran captures a greater mindshare than impeachment, it will be because the public has chosen for it to be that way.

Explain This To Me, Again?

Okay, as I understand it, Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani was targeted by the United States in a drone attack because he was thought to be planning "imminent" attacks on American diplomats, interests and military targets.

Was he planning to carry them out himself?

Now, I'm not a soldier, but I didn't think that high-level general officers worked alone on things like this. And if an attack was actually "ready to take place" or "happening soon" how would killing General Soleimani have prevented it? One would have thought that the planning and logistics would have already been in place for an "imminent" attack, and that one of the General's direct reports could have given the go-ahead for things to proceed. Again, I'm not a soldier, but if you'd told me that the death of General Franks would have stopped "Operation Iraqi Freedom," I'd be skeptical of that claim. Military forces don't strike me as organized around the drive of a single person in that way.

Republicans and Democrats alike have lined up to call out General Soleimani as a villain with American blood on his hands, and thus deserving of death (even though many Democrats have taken issue with how it was done and/or the timing). Which is to be expected, I suppose. But no-one is holding up his past anti-American actions as the reason he was killed, and questioning of just how his death would forestall some future attack has not been raised, at least not in the media reports that I have come across.

According to the Department of Defense, "This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans." But I don't really understand how that would work out in practice. I suspect that I will never really know; that would likely require me to have a really high security clearance, and as, well, just another random American, I don't have one. Assuming that General Soleimani was guilty of the things that the Department of Defense says he was, it makes sense that he was a target. But it also makes sense that, rather than labeling the Quds Force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, the United States would have gone for a formal declaration of war or charges of war crimes/crimes against humanity. I suppose that it's felt that designating part of nation-state's military a terrorist organization allows the conflict to be better contained, but I'm not sure how effective that is. After all, this situation seems to be on the verge of getting out of hand.

I'm no more a historian than I am a soldier. But it's been my understanding that in many parts of the world, people have long memories for wrongs, slights and humiliations done them. And many people have come to understand the United States as a worldwide bully that does as it pleases, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. The anger that this generates tends to then push the United States into an even more wary and aggressive posture; viewing outside anger as illegitimate, the United States engages in further acts that stoke anger in the name of defending itself. And so the cycle continues. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been at odds for decades now, with no sign of the conflict fading. And there is no sign that either side will allow the other to have last licks. Ending the cycle will require one or both sides to swallow their pride. I have no expectation that it will ever happen.

Regulating Success

The title of the video is a bit misleading: "America's Hottest Black Market: Inside the Eel Gold Rush." The video doesn't really go all that deeply into the black market for juvenile American eels, know as elvers or glass eels. It's more about the local elver fishing industry, and some of the conflicts that have been created. It's an interesting video.

The part that most caught my attention is at about the 7:14 mark. A local elver fisherman is being interviewed and he says: "It picked up around here back in the early '90s, but people have been doing it for a long time and getting fifteen, twenty dollars a pound. But the minute it hit a thousand dollars a pound, it's 'Oh, well wait a minute, they're endangered'." The point is never revisited, which is kind of a shame, because I think that it speaks to the understanding that a number of people in agriculture have of environmental regulation; that it's a tool to prevent them from taking full advantage of the resources available to them to better themselves.

The way the Maine eel fishery works is roughly like this: The fishermen catch the small juvenile eels on their way into local rivers from the ocean, and ship them to the far east. According to the Maine state government's page on The Maine Eel and Elver Fishery, "In recent years, market demand has increased dramatically. Elvers are highly valued in the far east (Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea) where they are cultured and reared to adult size for the food fish market. Due to recent intense market demand, elvers have now become the most valuable marine resource in terms of price per pound which, in 2015, was over $2,000." One can see how this might be a problem for the local eel population, since the eels are never able to return to the Atlantic Ocean to spawn.

But for people with licenses to catch the eels, the sudden increase in demand, which appears to due to a combination of the destruction of Japanese eel farms after the tsunami in 2011 and the closure of the European eel fishery due to overfishing, has been a chance to cash in.

Now, fishermen can support their families, pay off taxes, help put their kids through college and buy new cars or tractors for their farms. “Elver fishing dumped millions of dollars into a poor state,” says fisherman Jeff Pierce, head of the Maine Elver Fisherman Association, “It’s a huge success story. It’s given people pride.”
Glass Eel Gold Rush Casts Maine Fishermen against Scientists

It's little wonder that they see attempts to prevent the overharvest of the fish as a threat to that pride and success. It's the idea that there is a deliberate intent to that threat that may be a problem.

Unliked

In "The Inverted Likability Test," Yascha Mounk makes the point that when voters believe that candidates don't like them (or, more broadly, people like them), they're also likely to believe that those candidates will be more willing to trade away their rights and interests in favor of voters whom they do like. Accordingly, voters are assessing whether or not candidates appear to like and respect them; and this may be as, or more, important than whether or not a given voter likes the candidate. Mr. Mounk puts it this way: "A politician who finds the idea of spending time with [a given constituency] unpleasant is not going to balk at selling them out."

Mr. Mounk uses Senator Warren as the "how not to" example, citing what she said she'd "say to a supporter who told her that his faith teaches him that marriage is between one man and one woman."

The problem with Warren’s response is not that she strongly supports same-sex marriage. (Biden, who publicly pledged his support for legalizing same-sex marriage before Barack Obama, does too.) The problem is that she gave the impression that she would regard anybody who disagrees with her—or is married to someone who does—as a loser.

Mr. Mounk sees this as dangerous for the Democrats' chances of regaining the White House.

Maybe Kerry did not lose to Bush because people didn’t want to have a beer with him, then; maybe he lost because he gave the impression that he didn’t want to have a beer with them. If Democrats don’t change their ways, they may, for some of the same reasons, fail to stop an even more deeply flawed president from gaining a second term.

But didn't that same "even more deeply flawed president" effectively campaign on telling his supporter that he despised the same people that they despised? Sure, one can make the point that Secretary Clinton lost in 2016 because of her "basket of deplorables" comment. But between talk of "drug dealers," "rapists" and "enemies of the people," President Trump appears to have built up a solid base of people who will support him, no matter what. And he has no problem with regarding "those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and experience—[as] stupid, or slow, or crazy."

If one understands that part of the appeal of President Trump is that he was, and is, willing to put down those who disagree with him, or with the people who support him, as losers, it stands to reason that among the Democratic Party's contestants for the Presidency, there would be people willing to call out others as unintelligent, gullible or intentionally unethical. As trying as this might be as a personal quality, if it comes across as a winning political strategy, someone is going to adopt it, especially in an election where there stakes are perceived to be remarkably high. When winning becomes the only thing, risking loss in the name of civility seems like a fool's game. Perhaps, someone has reasoned that the reason Secretary Clinton list isn't that she was too dismissive of people who she understood weren't going to vote for her; rather they've concluded that she didn't go far enough in channeling the disdain that her voter base felt for the "basket of deplorables."

While I understand Mr. Mounk's point, his failure to address why the strategy appeared to work for President Trump, or why it's incorrect to think of the President as having used it, left a hole in the argument. As the parties drift farther apart, and, more and more, come to regard each other as deliberately evil, I think that overt political attacks of the sort that Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney and Donald Trump have waged on their supporters' perceived enemies will become more commonplace. And if more people than President Trmp can ride them into the White House, I suspect that they'll become an enduring feature of the political landscape.

You Comin'?

I take a fair number of pictures over the course of a year, and normally, I would pick out a number of them and place them into an album. But Blogger removed its album functionality and Google + has shut down, and so I don't have the venues that I used to use to display pictures. But still, I went through many of last year's photos, and decided that I liked this one, so here it is.

Day One

So today is the first day of 2020. And for a lot of people, it's also the first day of a new decade. This has lead to a number of discussions of when a decade actually begins and ends. The common argument is that since there is no Year 0 A.D., the first year was 1, and so the end of the first decade was 10 A.D. Carry that forward for 2000+ years, and decades officially end on years ending in "0." And for that sets of ten that start with "1" would logically end in "10," that outlook makes sense, but this isn't the way that people normally use numbers. When people talk about the 1970s, for instance, they don't commonly mean the period from 1 January 1971 to 31 December 1980. Likewise, one's "Twenties" last from the point they turn 20 to their 30th birthday.

So, mathematics and year numbering aside, I'm siding with the idea that today is the last day of the decade. It fits in with how people use language, and in the end, it doesn't make a difference. There are people who find the perennial debate fun, and more power to them. But having come over to the idea of meeting people where they live, rather than expecting them to travel, Happy New Decade it is.