Thoughts and Actions

So over the weekend, I was chatting with some friends online. Normally we get together in person about once a month, but, "stay at home orders" and all that. In any event, the topic of conversation was the wearing of masks when outside of the home. As is conventional wisdom, the consensus was that it was somewhere between unserious and irresponsible to not wear a mask when out in public.

I replied, more than a little facetiously, that I was somewhat concerned about wearing a mask in public due to my persistent allergy to bullets. This was greeted with the idea that I should be granted an exception to the general practice of being masked in public.

And thinking about that. something occurred to me. People are being asked to make some fairly substantial changes to their lifestyles. In some cases, at the cost of their livelihoods. And this could continue for a significant (although not unlimited) time. And the general expectation is that people are going to put up with it, willingly, if not happily. And when people complain about it, the general response tends range from incredulity to anger. But when it comes to racism, the reaction is closer to simple resignation. It's interesting to think about what people understand that they can change, or, perhaps more accurately, play a part in changing, and what things they consider to simply be immutable parts of the landscape. Of course, attitudes are different from behaviors. It's possible to use social disapproval to push someone into behaving a certain way, but one can't use that same method to drive them to think a certain way.

Perhaps it's the lack of expert advice. As pertains to the coronavirus, the desired actions are simply laid out by trusted authorities, and all people are really expected to do is what they are told. They don't have to think about it (and there is a strain of thought that says they shouldn't, because this is too important to allow people to come to the wrong conclusions). When it comes to dealing with racism, there no such clear guidance. For many, this is because the "expert" class is not themselves interested in finding a solution to the problem, but it seems more likely that this isn't really a problem that's amenable to being solved by the instructions of a few learned people.

Social will in the United States is often a fleeting thing. Stay at home orders, social distancing and wearing masks and the like; none of them will continue forever. While the individual, day-to-day costs may be small, the overall cost is high, and if it doesn't bear fruit on a relatively short schedule, people aren't going to stick with it. Everyone realizes that. I don't think that people believed that putting this sort of effort into combating people's prejudices would have a fast enough payoff to the worthwhile.

Of course, part of it is fear. COVID-19 has engendered a level of public fear that racism simply can't match. As much as my friends, perhaps mistakenly, understand that racism may be a problem for me, it's not really a problem, in the same way, for most of them. It's a suboptimal feature of society, but not really the same level of threat. And in a culture that often relies on fear to get things done, that can be important.

Monsters in the Closets

As I've mentioned before, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games quite a lot in my younger days. I only really stopped playing fairly frequently about a decade ago. I've been meaning to get back into the hobby for some time now, but I have a habit of allowing things to get in the way. Not the least of which being a general exasperation with the community of gamers in general. The reasons for this are twofold; one is that, like any other group large enough to have entered the cultural consciousness, the gaming community is too large to not have a sizable number of assholes in it. The other reason is that despite years of working to be a less judgmental person, assholes still get on my nerves.

But I also find that I have a relatively low tolerance for drama. And while I don't find cross-generational drama to be worse than any other flavor, I can still do without it. And so when the "Orcs are racist" drama ramps up (which it does on a seemingly annual basis), I find myself rolling my eyes and wondering why I ever put up with this nonsense.

Part of the problem with Orcs is the way that people portray them in their individual games, and have for nearly the entirety of the hobby. Orcs are basically the equivalent of Stormtroopers in Star Wars, or other garden-variety Faceless Minions. The only real purpose they serve, from a narrative point of view, is to be mown down like grass so that the heroes can look like super-tough guys (and gals) in the process. This tends to mean that they have two basic traits; they're utterly incompetent and they're aggressive to the point of vacuity. While Orcs are, from time to time, portrayed as cowardly and willing to run for the hills with the least provocation, the image of waves upon waves of Orcs climbing over the bodies of their fallen comrades, seemingly each somehow thinking that they're going to be the one who brings down the guy who killed the last fifty who just tried the same thing, is common. And so Dungeons and Dragons, which, the complaints of same gamers notwithstanding, does actually respond to the player base, had tended, over the years to describe Orcs in the game manuals in ways that line up with them being Chaotic Vicious.

Because it's common for cultures, Western and otherwise, to portray out-groups in dehumanizing terms, the dehumanization of Orcs (who, recall, are not human to begin with) is often seen as a parallel.

There is always a tendency for the more activist holders of a given worldview to understand the wrong-thinking to be unintelligent, credulous or immoral. Feeling that the unintelligent and the credulous can be saved, or at least rendered less harmful, if the information they can access is controlled, leads to an understanding of the immoral as devious puppetmasters who must be censored, or possibly silenced, for the good of society at large. People who view themselves as intelligent and discerning, however, view their own thought leaders as visionaries.

Accordingly, with the benefit of enough distance, you can see similarities. And the "Orcs are racist" trope reminds me quite strongly of the Satanic Panic of the early 1980s, just without the media coverage. Both presume that somewhere in the Dungeons and Dragons design bullpen, one or more hateful people are dedicated to using a pseudo-medievalist adventure game as a means of subverting the morals of the trusting or dim-witted. In 1980s it was Satanists, looking to recruit more Witches and Warlocks to the cause via the in-game use of magic spells. In the 2010s, it's racists, looking to keep alive the idea of "they're different, and that's bad" through uncharitable portrayals of fictional monsters. Both look ridiculous to those outside the worldview, and both see the ridicule as a tool of the immoral other to hide their nefarious schemes.

Frustration

So these have appeared around the neighborhood since yesterday. There were a number of them; one could be found on pretty much any and every surface that was large enough. I wonder if they feel they made their point. Or if anyone who wasn't receptive before will be listening.

Blunted

Just a bit, to take the edge off...

I don't know how accurate it is as a concept, but I believe that one can tell a lot about a society from the random things that people leave simply laying about. Of course, an empty liquor bottle can be seen as a bit of random garbage. But given the stay home orders that most of the nation is laboring under, and its effects on alcohol sales, it's possible to see something more to this. Not mandatory, but possible.

Have Faith

One of the interesting things about the actions that state governments are currently undertaking is the degree to which they rely on people having faith in them. For instance when Governor Inslee says "that health modeling will play a role in guiding decisions about lifting Washington's current emergency restrictions," there's no detail on what that actually means. What the models need to show, and for how long, et cetera is effectively a mystery.

So what remains to be seen is how well governments can maintain, live up to and potentially repay faith that is placed in them. The partisan aspect to this is already in play. While it would be a stretch (or simply inaccurate) to say that everyone who shows a certain level of suspicion in Governor Inslee is a Republican, or that all Republicans distrust him, the partisan divide is making itself know. And so is a general distrust of government. Conspiracy theories were rife from the start, but now there are more voices claiming that the "emergency restrictions" are simply a power grab, and concerns that today's emergency measures are tomorrow's status quo have been borne out time and again.

Former Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna believes that governors have clear discretion to suspend the Constitutional rights of the public in cases "where the need is significant enough; when there's is a dire threat to the public." What tends to be lacking is any objective measures of significance of need or direness of threat; and for many people, this lack of objectivity is effectively a giant loophole. How does a government convince people that it will only use broad discretion in ways that a person finds appropriate?

In the end, it's unlikely that there will ever be enough generally-available information to adequately assess whether the response was justified by the situation. In the absence of controlled experimentation or broad differences in otherwise similar situations, this is usually the case. Therefore, this is going to remain a matter of faith, and thus if argument, as faith rarely provide the facts that a neutral starting place for a debate needs.

In the Affirmative

While affirmational signs have been a thing around here for a while now, the recent disease outbreak seems to have triggered an uptick. The signs are of various quality. from the obviously homemade (see above) to the slickly professional and mass-produced. There lifetimes are random; some I see day after day, others disappear not long after the first sighting. But this is proving to an interesting form of social communication.

Set Break

There is a man who panhandles at the off-ramp not far from my home. He puts a pillow on a bucket and sits and plays guitar. I've never heard him play; the traffic is always too loud, whether I'm in my car or on foot. A few days ago, when I walked by his usual spot, he was taking a break.

No Question

The Slate article that is headlined above opens with a photograph of President Trump, I think, because despite the fact that it is ostensibly about suicides, it's mainly about the President. It's well known that the President is not a fan of most leisure and other discretionary activities and businesses being shut down in the name of either (depending on who one asks) slowing or stopping the spread of Coronavirus Infectious Disease 2019. His willingness to advocate for his position on this has not endeared him to may in the public health community, who feel that the current pseudo-isolation/quarantine measures are clearly, and perhaps even self-evidently, best for everyone involved.

The President doesn't help his case in doing what he usually does; namely go with his gut, rather than marshaling the factual case for whatever argument he's making. Therefore, when, late last month, he claimed that "a really horrible recession" would lead to increases in depression and suicide, thus blunting the lifesaving effects that enforced distancing was enacted to capture, it was a safe bet that, if pressed, he wouldn't have been able to produce any concrete information to back that up, outside of his assertion that it was "common sense." (A concept that I've had more than enough of by this point.)

But the article came across a somewhat contrarian, disagreeing with the President out of some combination of partisanship and disagreement on the best way forward. While it likely true that "There is no evidence to suggest that suicide will increase as a result of the global pandemic," perhaps because it's too early to have done any studies, that isn't what the President actually said.

It’s common sense. You’re going to have massive depression … you’re going to have large numbers of suicides, take a look at what happens in a really horrible recession or worse, so you’re going to have tremendous suicides, but you know what you’re going to have more than anything else? Drug addiction.

And there IS evidence that suicide risk is higher in economic downturns. Back in 2015, there was a paper in the World Journal of Psychiatry, namely: Systematic review of suicide in economic recession. The conclusion was thus: "Economic recession periods appear to increase overall suicide rates, although further research is warranted in this area, particularly in low income countries." In all, of the thirty-eight studies that met the paper's selection criteria, "thirty-one of them found a positive association between economic recession and increased suicide rates."

Mesdames Betz and Gold seemed to conclude that the President was creating a "narrative to push an agenda." And while I don't doubt this, that doesn't mean that the narrative is unsupported. The use of "agenda" as a synonym for false, immoral or otherwise wrong-headed policies has taken on a life of its own, and I think that it often leads people to want to shoot the messengers. When an 891% increase in calls to the Disaster Distress Helpline is brushed off as meaningless because "the majority of callers to crisis lines are not suicidal at the time of their call," it begins to strain credulity, even if one accepts that the increase in calls likely doesn't map to a similar increase in suicidal ideation.

The conflict here is not between harmful actions (business as usual) on one side and a harmless action (enforced distancing and the widespread closing of businesses in support of that) on the other. It is appropriate to ask which is the lesser evil and if the response is being calibrated properly. Even if the final determination is that business as usual would be so bad that no level of economic damage could outweigh it, that's different from saying that the effectively self-inflicted recession that many see coming has no other downsides. I understand the desire to deny ammunition to those who would question the measures in place. But arguments so labored as to see disingenuous don't seem to serve even that dubious purpose.

Head of the Parade

I was pointed to an essay in the New Statesman that proposes: "Leadership should be defined by consensus not coercion in a time of crisis." The central point is what it says on the tin; that in emergencies, governments should strive for citizen compliance with recommendations rather than seeking to force citizen obedience to coercive directives. Part of the reason for this is that governments are empowered by the support of the governed.

"When we say of somebody that he is 'in power'," [Hannah Arendt] writes, "we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name."

This is true. So in the end, the question is what fraction of the overall population is "certain people," and what is the nature of that empowerment. According to the author, Christopher Finlay, that empowerment comes in the form of "active buy-in," but I would argue that for most societies, indifference will serve equally well. And while I understand why Mr. Finlay believes: "In short, instead of focusing on coercion and issuing wholesale threats of 'stronger measures,' the government must convince as many people as possible to empower it through their voluntary support," in practice, "as many people as possible" is unnecessary. Once a certain critical mass is reached (and that number is a variable based on the society as a whole) the unconvinced have little choice but to more or less go along to get along. The actively convinced can choose to shut them out of access to important resources or activities, and the indifferent, more or less by definition, are not going to go to bat for them. So the unconvinced go along with the program, or they suffer for it.

But I really didn't get the impression that the unconvinced, or other dissenters, were really the people that Mr. Finlay was concerned with.

When sports bodies, universities and other organisations began cancelling in-person events ahead of any government ban, they demonstrated the public’s willingness to come together and be led by scientific expertise and pragmatic common sense.

But none of these groups are consensus-driven in the way that governments are said to be. I am not aware of any sports body or university that announced their measures due to public polling. The simple fact that they are not granted the coercive power of government over the general public doesn't mean that they needed popular support for their actions (something we see time and again). These are organizations that are openly empowered to dictate to their employees, they didn't need the public to come together, willingly or not.

The broader point that Mr. Finlay was making is that governments should not risk the good will of the governed by threatening punishments for non-compliance with measures that the public is already demonstrating that they are willing to comply with. Which is a fair point. But it's one that misses "a central part of political reality and the operation of the state." Namely, that people often see the actions of others, especially those who dissent from the usual understanding of "pragmatic common sense" as threats.

According to Hobbes’ argument in Leviathan (1651), the human condition is dominated by the almost inescapable fear of violent death.

I would remove the word "violent" from that sentence. Hobbes' viewpoint, as put forward by Mr.Finlay, is that people create states, and give them a monopoly on legitimate violence, to give them a way out of the fear of violent death that doesn't require they themselves to always stand ready to deal it out. So if people fear death more broadly, I would expect that many perceive the role of the modern nation-state to be larger than simply protecting them from the depredations of their neighbors. To the degree that, especially in the West, the role of the nation-state is often viewed as protecting citizens from all threats, foreign or domestic, the state is also often expected to protect people from their own "bad" decisions. And once an question has been determined to have an objectively right answer, it's no longer considered appropriate by many to place it up for a vote to people who can't be trusted to answer correctly. Especially when acting in accordance with "incorrect" answers is seen as actively dangerous. If the foundation of the state is surrendering the legitimate use of coercion to a centralized party to wield on "everyone's" behalf, part of the expectation is that it will be used against threats to "everyone" created by people's "poor choices."

And this, in the end, becomes the point. Governments are often empowered, and commonly expected, by a certain number of people to ensure that the right things happen. True, the reliance on at least the absence of open revolt often means that the governed have some sort of check on government. (This concept that is sometimes referred to as "Chinese Democracy," for the idea that as authoritarian as the Communist Party of China is, were the entire nation to adamantly decide to "throw the bums out" as we say here in the States, they'd be unable to maintain their hold on power. It might be bloody, but out they would go.) But depending on the ratio of active support and passive indifference versus active dissent, the size of the "certain number" of active supporters does not usually need to reach a majority. Sometimes the "war of all against all" ends because it stops being "every person for themselves" and one faction is united enough to impose its will.

And when faced with an epidemic, effective leadership relies on the authority that comes from showing that the government’s policies are based on the best available scientific expertise.

This is not an instantaneous process, nor is it guaranteed. "The best available scientific expertise" is neither infallible, nor does it always align with what any given section of the general public understands its own interests to be. It also ignores the overall difficulty in explaining things to people who lack expertise in the subject. (As an example, most of us believe that E = MC squared. But to really understand why that is the case {that is to say, to do the proof yourself} you'd need a background in mathematics/physics that couldn't be adequately conveyed in a conversation or hour-long webinar.) Making it out to be a simple matter for governments to secure the enduring faith of their constituents is disingenuous, at best. And when faithlessness is considered an active threat, on a par (or at least of a kind) with violent death, governments turn to coercion not because they see a need to take what would be freely given, but because those who freely give fear the results of allowing others to hold back.

First, There Was

There is a saying from Mark Twain: "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

To be sure, I haven't read whatever book or collection that this is from, and so I have no idea of the broader context behind it. Still, it speaks to me. Having expectations of life, and how things "should" be is easy. Effectively holding the world responsible when it doesn't do as desired, however, is impossible. And if we think of the world as a thing, rather than a collection of people, it can't owe us anything. It has no capacity to recognize, or repay, anything that may be given to it. Its various and sundry systems and processes are simply out of anyone's control. People need things from the world in a way that the world, whether that be planet Earth or the whole of the population that lives on it, do not not need things from any given individual. True, if we are speaking of people, it is possible for any given individual to structure their lives so that they need nothing from the greater collective. But the greater collective is always independent of any given individual.

When there is need, the understanding that such a need creates an entitlement is not uncommon. I am told that the philosopher Thomas Nagel said: "We all think that when we suffer it is not just bad for us, but bad, period." While I am inclined to disagree with the inclusion of "all" in that statement, I do think that it's somewhat pervasive. And presuming that Mr. Nagel's statement is true for even a sizeable minority of people, the idea that the world should be invested in our outcomes would be widespread.

But in the grand scheme of things, the world is effectively random. Things happen. In much the same way that they did before we arrived on the scene. I'm not going to say that people should simply make piece with that, because it's easier said than done. But I do think that it's often better than the alternative.

Beauty

Some street art, done in sidewalk chalk.

Can I or Kant I?

Immanuel Kant thought the fundamental moral question was a different one: what if everyone did that? Kant thought it was right to act only in ways that could be a universal law. We know that if everyone picnicked in the park, no one could do so safely.
Alison Hills. "'Can I sunbathe in the park?' is now a deep moral question"

But this presumes that "everyone" also includes the currently infectious. And so that raises a question. Should, post the current epidemic, we expect that no-one sick with any sort of respiratory ailment be allowed out in public? It's common to reason that our reactions to COVID-19 are due to its specific dangerousness, but if it's that much of an outlier, it's a poor candidate for invoking universal moral imperatives. And the fact of the matter is that there are other respiratory diseases that show disparities in symptoms from person to person and can be fatal for some people.

In this sense, "Can I sunbathe in the park?" has always been a deep moral question, especially in this age of medications that can suppress symptoms while leaving one infectious. Because if we presume the Kantian imperative in this case deals with "the conflict between individual choice and the common good," that's true in a much broader set of cases than just the current COVID-19 outbreak.

And, note, the idea here isn't to try to create equivalencies between COVID-19, seasonal influenza, viral pneumonia et al. It's to ask: "What is the universal imperative being posited?" Because I think the problem that we actually have is that this particular risk is being presented as infinite orders of magnitude greater than risks that we routinely ignore. But I don't know that people actually experience it that way. And I think that disconnect is what is causing the difficulty, because what normally stops people (at least in the United States) from being out in public with dangerous infectious diseases is incapacitation, rather than concern for public health.

And in this sense, sunbathing or picnicking in the park may be bad examples, because they are considered trivial fripperies that anyone should be willing to forgo. But not long ago, I encountered a worker at a juice bar in a grocery store who was clearly unwell. In his case, being out in a place where they could pass their disease (and other than being a respiratory ailment, I don't know what it was) along wasn't a matter of personal luxury, but of maintaining a paycheck.

And this becomes the problem with attempting to come up with universal imperatives in the modern world. Attempting to configure them so that they cover certain things, exempt others and don't devolve into moral absurdity is more difficult than it is given credit for. Sunbathing and picnics are low-hanging fruit that are often chosen because it's easy to slam people who would defend them as uncaring and selfish; such people are often considered to be not entitled to understanding and kindness. But I think that selecting somewhat more difficult cases, and working through the logic of those selections, would make essays like this more useful for everyone involved.

Spare the Rod

To err is human; wanting to punish those who err is, unfortunately, also human. And at the moment, the U.S. economy is threatened not just by the coronavirus, but also by the American obsession with making sure that people don’t end up with more than they deserve.
Mehrsa Baradaran, The U.S. Should Just Send Checks—But Won’t

It's a simple enough premise for a straightforward essay: the idea that a certain level of sanctimony, coupled with the human tendency (as shown in "the Ultimatim Game") to reject deals that they perceive as unfair, even if that means forgoing a free benefit, has lead American policymakers to place the whole of the economy at risk in the name of only offering aid to "upstanding" citizens. Fair enough. Professor Baradaran describes it this way:

Our desire to punish bad actors may have given humans evolutionary advantages, but it has led to punitive economic policies that harm us all. Policies built to punish supposed freeloaders above all else end up punishing society as a whole. Shutting out the unworthy may feel good—but not for long, if doing so pushes our economy into an ice age.

But then, the professor goes on to describe how large companies are not being held to the same stringent moral standards: "The larger and more complicated the corporation," we are told, "the harder it is for policy makers to enforce justice and fairness."

But my recollection of the 2008 financial crisis, and the logic of that event that has been carried forward to this one, is that large corporations, whether they be large banks, or a certain large aircraft and aerospace manufacturer, are fundamentally important to the overall health of the economy, regardless of their prior bad acts. The reason why they weren't (or won't be) saddled with the full results of their poor decision-making and/or adherence to moral principles that that allowing them to fail would push the economy into the ice age that Professor Baradaran warns against.

The reason why pornographers and former felons are being shut out and major corporations are being let in isn't because the former are more unworthy than the latter. It's the realization that shutting out the latter has consequences that shutting out the former does not. In other words, its understood that thoughtlessly building policy simply to punish freeloaders punishes everyone. But not all freeloaders, supposed or not, are created equally.

And it is this point that the article wordlessly assumes, but never takes the time to address. The problem isn't simply one of a sanctimonious public looking to cut off their noses to spite their faces. The invocation of "the Ultimatim Game" is somewhat out of place, because in the game, the sum of money to be divided up between the players comes from the researchers, not either of the players; or their credit balances. For all that the United States is widely touted, and touts itself, as the wealthiest nation on the face of the Earth, many individual Americans that I encounter in my own life are acutely aware of their own poverty. While comparisons to Scrooge (Ebenezer or McDuck) abound, the truth may be closer to Americans are simply a people who are very much tuned into the scarcity that they see (correctly or not) all around them. And those for whom access to resources is a concern are unlikely to simply give for the sheer enjoyment of giving. Instead, they're looking to invest. Generosity is not the point; relieving a sense of privation is. Giving money to "banksters" and corporate leaders may also lack a return on investment, but it avoids a punishing increase in scarcity that a loss of jobs (that typically American obsession) and international competitiveness would bring.

Given this, I think that the audience may have been better served is Professor Baradaran had laid out the rationale for making the point that not treating people "whose work is of a 'prurient sexual nature'" or "small business owners who have been convicted of a felony" as essential to avoiding the economic Ice Age that they warn of. When CNBC's Rick Santelli ranted about how bailing out people who had taken out unwise mortgages was promoting bad behavior through moral hazard, he wasn't approaching this from the point of view that his viewers should be willing to suffer economic privation, rather than assist them. Rather, he was calling for the privation to be limited to those people who made the unwise choices. And this isn't a wholly irrational outlook. I live near Seattle, and the homeless population is disproportionately large for the overall population. This has yet to cause an economic ice age here. Tents under bridges and along expressways have yet to chill the local business climate. And when people call for assisting them, the arguments I hear are not that we need the greater economic output that they could theoretically create.

I suspect that many Americans understand that several big businesses have an effective gun to their heads. They may not appreciate that they are being held hostage, but they understand that they are. And this leads to something altogether different than an understanding that "we're all in this together." Given that, even though I note that Professor Baradaran says that the line of potential extortionists should be considered longer, I don't know that even if that case were made, that it would be appreciated.

No Surprises

Coronavirus infectious disease 2019 is causing proportionally more illnesses and deaths in the Black community than in the White community.

And this is surprising to people?

It was understood when the epidemic was still confined to China that people in relatively ill health and with potential aggravating conditions were more likely to die from the disease (and/or the immune response to the disease) than other people. Some recent data from here in the United States points to 89% of people hospitalized for treatment had one or more underlying health conditions. And it's not as if the knowledge that, here in the United States, that Black Americans have more aggravating conditions than the population at large is new. It's been widely known, and accepted as true (almost to the point of earning the label "common knowledge") for decades.

So the question that I'm curious about is why didn't anyone appear to see this coming? Part of it, I suspect, is that the disease spread models that were being used simply didn't capture that sort of information. I don't know what sort of information went into them, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was basically information on population density and how many contacts any given person would reasonable be expected to have in a day.

As for myself, it occurred to me that this could be the case (I am Black, after all), but I'll admit that I was more concerned with how the infection would play out in the local unsheltered homeless population. A stay-home order is one thing. But when "home" is in a large encampment of homeless people along the side of an expressway, it becomes quite another. So I was expecting to hear about the disease tearing through that community. Which likely would have resulted in a racial disparity of its own, given the demographics of homelessness here in the greater Puget Sound region.

I wonder if part of the problem that the United States is having with this outbreak is an inability to look ahead. And what the next predictable facet of this to be missed will be.

Self Deception

A question: Do people set their standards for themselves so high, that sometimes the only way to reach them is through self-deception?

Some time ago, an acquaintance of mine noted the following:

We do like our see-no-evil self-deceptions, though. I mean, we wear clothes made in sweatshops by children, and believe ourselves good, ethical, enlightened people (and by 'we', I mean 'me').

It should be remembered that positive self-regard (or self-esteem, self-love, positive self-image, or whatever it's being called this week) is learned. People learn this from the others around them whose opinions of them that they have learned to value. Despite what they might say, their own positive feelings towards others are conditional, to one degree or another. Those conditions might be very easy to fulfill ("I love you because you're my child."), or they might be more difficult ("I admire you because you made top earner at the company last year."), or they could be somewhat extreme ("I respect you because you've won the Nobel Prize for Physics."). This conditionality is what prevents many people from having certain positive feelings about everyone they may encounter, as a default state.

But that conditionality filters down to the persons regarded, and the end result is that people, as human beings who have learned from others, tend to have a certain number of conditions that they feel the need to fulfill before they can see themselves as worthy of love, respect, et cetera. And it can be argued that people often expect that others live up to certain conditions before they allow that they be able to respect themselves. But the real question becomes: do people set their conditions realistically, given the lives that they lead, and effort that they're willing to put forth?

If I'm going to predicate my self-image on the idea that I don't contribute more than my "fair share" of greenhouse gasses to the environment, do I know what I'm letting myself in for? Am I willing to move to the desert, and live in an "earthship" so that I can go "off the grid?" Am I willing to forgo career opportunities, so that I can avoid having to commute? Will I limit my diet to things that don't have to be moved more than 100 miles, so that you don't have the effects of transporting things long distances? (Some folks in Seattle tried the "Hundred-Mile" food lifestyle - and found that the Puget Sound area has no local production of salt.) Am I actually willing to put the work into really understanding what things truly help, and what things just make me feel good? Or, I am simply going to buy a Prius and some Owens-Corning, call it good, and plug my ears when some obnoxious radical starts spouting off about it isn't enough?

In the end, the question is a simple one - do one set themselves up for intractable conflicts between the facts on the ground, and the conditions that they set for their self-esteem through carelessly adopting standards that are too stringent for the day-to-day infrastructure of most people's lives to support? And, in doing so, put themselves is a position where the path of least resistance is one of hiding - if not from the truth as they know it, then from the truth as they fear it to be?

Aftermath

A few weeks ago, before the "shelter in place" orders started coming down, I was out with my camera. Even though, in theory, people could still be on the streets, they were, for the most part empty. "Ghost town" seemed an apt descriptor. I was reminded of the old History Channel show: Life After People. Except that there was an absence of wildlife. I wonder if the animals will find time to investigate before the next normal arises.

Nonplussed

So it's been just over a year, although it seems like quite a bit longer, since Google+ was shuttered for the general public. And I've been looking through some of the notes that I had taken in the run up to the closure.

Google has officially started the process of shutting down and deleting all consumer accounts on its Google+ social network platform, bringing an end to the company’s attempt to directly compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

If the goal was to legitimately take on Facebook, Google+ faced dire odds from the very beginning.
Google begins shutting down its failed Google+ social network

These two statements don't jive with one another. One presumes that it knows the end purpose of Google+, while the second questions that premise.

For Google, Plus was just the latest and most high-profile failure in social networking. Once the company decided it wasn't going to be a billion-dollar product with a massive user base, it diverted resources elsewhere.
Google+ is shutting down, and the site's few loyal users are mourning

And maybe this was the problem. Google plus was never going to be a gigantically profitable business venture. But it needed one to keep it afloat.

If Google+ was an unmitigated failure, it's hard to see how other platforms, like MeWe, Diaspora and Mastodon, will ever be considered successes. They have pretty much no chance of ever directly competing with Facebook or Twitter. But, as near as I can tell, no-one expects them to. In the past year, I haven't heard anything about any of them, aside from the occasional mention from those people I knew from Google+ that I'm still in contact with. And it is only the fact that no-one expected much of anything from them that allows them to avoid the mark of shame that the technology press insisted that Google+ wear.

One thing that may be worth keeping in mind is that there are no social media businesses. There isn't a business model in the world that makes giving a resource-intensive service away at no charge viable. Facebook's business isn't social media; it's providing information about, and access to, the social media profiles that people create on it. That's what businesses, Facebook's actual customers, pay for; and that's how Facebook maintains its revenues. Alphabet has a similar model, based around its advertising services and the like. Perhaps the problem that Google encountered in making Google+ into a billion-dollar business was that it already had more than one of those, and social media didn't present an obvious path to a new one.

For the technology press, however, this was the only benchmark that meant anything. While CNBC proclaimed that Google+ was simply one of a string of failed not-Facebook platforms, there doesn't appear to have been the same drumbeat of pointlessness sounded for other extant platforms that bear and even greater resemblance to "ghost towns" than Plus did.

Places, Everyone

Coronavirus: The young doctors being asked to play god. How's that for a grabby headline? The story is mostly a tale of the stress that attempting to deal with the influx of very ill patients is having on one young doctor. It's not until the very end of the piece that the "playing god" part of the story comes into play.

She described a patient being brought in from an old people's home. He was already on a ventilator - and was "chronically vent dependent". His prospects were never great. But all she could see before her was the ventilator - and not the patient.

"When he came in we were so desperate for vents," she told me, "all I wanted to do was get the ventilator off him. I wanted to get that vent off him to allow it to go to someone else."

Playing god is not what this young woman thought she would be doing at this stage in her career.

Interestingly, the emergency medicine resident in question never uses the phrase "playing god," herself. She, instead, describes it in less grandiose terms: "The issue is giving up on people we wouldn't normally give up on." And in this sense, there's nothing about this that says that medical professionals are taking on the role of gods, or God, as the case may be. If there is a divinity in charge of these situations, they have already decided that without the heroic measures of humans, and the technology that their disposal, these people would die. Seeing the ventilator on a person with a poor prognosis as a needed resource is not the same as usurping the role of the divine.

It is not in the nature of humans to leave questions of life and death up to whatever forces one understands control the universe. In that sense, humans, as a species, have been "playing god" since the beginning of recorded history. But the charge, and it often is an accusation, comes out when the choices to be made are difficult. Staking steps to prolong a life, even if the chances of failure are great, does not intrude on the mandates of the heavens. Only having to make difficult decisions carries that stigma. Perhaps it is time to change that. Giving up on people because others have what is understood to be a greater need should not be labelled as "playing god," if for no other reason than it is far from "playing." (In any sense of the word.)

Deciding that no-one should ever die because the resources needed to prolong their life were unavailable is easy. Making sure that those resources are there, however, is not. And if that responsibility has not been taken, accusing those who now have difficult choices to make of overstepping their stations won't fix that.