Genuineness

There are, perhaps paradoxically, a number of ways for a person to be authentic. They can show themselves to others as they really are, for example, or the way they present themselves to others can be real, for another. Of course, when written out this way, they appear to be the same, but when someone requests authenticity from another person, "I want you to show yourself to me as you really are," and "I want the you that I'm seeing to be real" can be very different.

And I think that many people don't really understand the difference between the two of them, leading others to engage in deception in the name of authenticity. I had a friend, some time back, who appeared to wear her emotions on her sleeves, in full view of everyone, yet was convinced that she was adept at hiding them. Her open responses to things that she didn't approve of or found unusual lead to people putting in quite a bit of work to convince her that the persons they presented as were authentic, even if, the moment she was out of sight and earshot, they became someone completely different.

Authenticity and judgement do not mix when there are consequences involved. If I need or desire a person to be a certain way, and they need something from me, I cannot hope to ask them to be authentic with much real hope of success. I am likely to communicate what I want from them, and they are likely to be attentive to the signs that I am doing so.

In this sense, perhaps the best practice in cultivating authenticity and letting people who they are is to surround oneself with people who need nothing from you, such that there is no punishment for failing to live up to standards.

Joining the Bandwagon

Some Black Americans Buying Guns: 'I'd Rather Go To Trial Than Go To The Cemetery'

I don't believe in the supernatural. As far as I am concerned there are no deities, spirits, ghosts or devils in the world. While my discounting of gods worries some people, my lack of belief in demons concerns others. "Satan's greatest trick," they tell me, "Is convincing people that he doesn't exist." To which I've started replying, "His greatest trick would be convincing people that he's their next door neighbor." The person who believes that evil is all around him is much more of a concern than the person who doesn't believe in evil at all.

When I speak to Europeans, they'll sometimes express wonder that our streets aren't constantly awash in blood, because of the high number of firearms in private hands (which is different than the firearms ownership rate, a distinction lost on many people) and a general America propensity for violence. When they ask why Americans don't see that, I answer "Of course 'we' do... why do you think there are so many guns?"

The general lack of social trust in the United States becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it can be difficult to appear trustworthy to those one does not trust. As people take steps to defend themselves, those steps are often seen as threatening. Likewise, as people turn inwards and seek to maintain what they have, the people who depended on them being more outward-looking are forced to do the same, and the spiral accelerates.

Pair this with a general despair of positive outcomes, and it's not that far to the quote at the top of this post. Attending one's own trial may be better than one's own funeral, but neither is an outcome to be hoped for. As other outcomes appear to be remote or closed off, defending oneself against assault or murder charges becomes a bright spot in comparison. That's usually en indicator that something isn't working the way we profess to want it to.

Of course, a lot of people don't believe that profession... which is one of the reasons for all the guns...

Relitigation

In February 1965, two of America's most towering public intellectuals faced off at the University of Cambridge in England. They were there to debate the proposition: "The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro."
Reimagining The James Baldwin And William F. Buckley Debate

Last week, Khalil Muhammad and David Frum reprised the debate, under the title: "The American Dream Is Still at the Expense of African Americans." I haven't watched the video yet. I'm not sure that I will, to be honest. But I do find the idea of the debate, and having it again, to be interesting. But I think that what I would want to see are two people from other groups having the same discussion.

Because I think that, for instance, a Native American and a Pakistani American could bring different perspectives to whether or not the American Dream comes at the expense of the American Negro/African Americans. And because they wouldn't be arguing it from the point of view of being a "combatant" in the White/Black conversation on race in the United States, it would have to be less about experience and more about a neutral view of the situation.

Come to think of it, I would even liked to have seen Mr. Frum argue in favor of the proposition and Dr. Muhammad argue against it. because this, too, would have been less about the direct experience of being White or Black in America, and more about understanding the "other side," as it were.

There is nothing wrong with speaking to, and about, experiences. But experiences can't really be debated. People tend to start arguing side points. When Mr. Frum noted that "when you tell people that they are powerless, that America is against them, that they are not part of the country, you don't teach action. You teach passivity," he makes a good point. But it's a point that's completely unrelated to whether or not "The American Dream Is Still at the Expense of African Americans." Likewise, Dr. Muhammad's contention that "[Frum] gives far too much credit to the American system as he explains it," doesn't get us to whether the proposition is true or not. But it's quite likely that both men were speaking from their sincere experiences. And while those experiences are always valid for the people who have them, and may be interesting for others, speaking of them in the context of what should be a factual question tends to lead to "feel-checking" (evaluating whether people are justified in feeling a certain way about things based on some factual standard), and that's not helpful in a situation like this. Having debate participants avoid arguing their own experiences makes for a more objective and more useful debate. One that I think would be interesting to see.

Estimated

I was on a video call Wednesday, when there was a "boom!" and the power went down. It came back up after a moment, was live for a couple of minutes, then flicker, flicker... and blackout. Again.

"Well, so much for cooking dinner," I said to myself, and prepared to go out. Before I left, I checked Puget Sound Energy's outage map. Sure enough, the neighborhood was in red. Cause: Under Investigation. Estimate for restoration, 7 pm, a little more than two hours out. At 6:25, while still away from the apartment, I checked again. Still under investigation, still estimated for 7. I get to the off-ramp nearest my place about an hour later. The traffic lights are out. And if those lights are blacked out, that means the apartment is still blacked out. Sure enough, home is dark when I arrive. New ETA: 9 pm, but the cause had been updated to "trees/vegetation." I checked again right about 9. At 8:50, the estimate had been pushed to 11 pm. I was starting to notice a pattern. Sure enough, an update at 10:40 pushed the ETA to 1 am. The power actually came back on at 11:30. (A remarkable number of things in my apartment make noise when they start receiving power...)

I've done three years of support escalations, and I understand what it's like to have angry customers wanting immediate answers. And so I understand the impulse to have something available for people, even if it turns out to be unreliable. It's a hard spot for a company to be in, because one can't please all of the customers all of the time. This is where flexibility comes into the picture, because PSE's problem was that it had one way to communicate with the public, and that one-size-fits-all communication winds up being a very poor fit for some. This is the sort of thing that customer profiling would be excellent for. While I'm the sort to be okay with "We have no idea how long this will take from this point, but past outages lasted an average of X," other people may actually prefer the rolling ETAs, even if the data turns out to be inaccurate.

But I expect that companies don't see as immediate profit potential in incident communication styles as they do in buying habits. It is, however, worth noting that the two can be linked. I'm honestly considering moving, simply due to the impression that PSE has difficulty keeping the lights on in even mildly inclement weather. I might have to, in order to communicate to PSE that I'm not confident in them.

Unhived

Seen on LinkedIn this morning: "If you ask a Black person today (or any decent human) on your Zoom/conference call how they're doing, just know they're not doing well."

Blow that. I'm a Black person, and I'm doing just as well today as I was this time last week. Perhaps that makes me an indecent human being. Fine, I'll cop to that. But I'm not into performative Blackness, especially when that seems to entail not understanding how the world I live in works.

What happened to Breonna Taylor shouldn't have happened to anyone. Many people find the lack of charges against any of the officers in her shooting to be another in a long series of miscarriages of justice. And maybe they're right. But to not be doing well because of that is to have one's sense of well-being tied to actions and decisions that one has no control over. That's a recipe for misery and stress, because the fact that one has come to depend on another for one's well-being does not, in and of itself, give that other person a felt obligation to nurture that well-being. In other words, when the grand jury was deliberating whether to indict Officers Cosgrove, Hankinson and Mattingly, and on what specific charges, the well-being of the Black community in the United States was not on their list of considerations. And yes, I understand that granting the grand jury the benefit of the doubt, but not investigating further (trust without verification, if you will), allows them to act with deliberate malice. And so while I find it unwise to be upset about this, it is neither unethical nor impermissible.

I am doing well, because that's my priority, and I take exclusive responsibility for it. People should be allowed to do that without having their ethnic, ethical or species bona fides questioned.

Partisanship, Defined

Lindsey Graham pledges GOP will support Trump’s nominee, despite not knowing who nominee is

Welcome to modern American politics. Assuming that one hasn't been paying close attention, anyway. Because this isn't new, and for many people, it's exactly how things should have worked all along.

Disconnect

Personally, I don't see the connection between supporting the police as an institution, especially as they are currently implemented in the modern United States, and supporting democracy. Especially given that it's not really the job of state and local police forces to do a lot of the work that people say "protects" democracy. If one looks at the Bill of Rights, or any other provision of or amendment to the Constitution, none of them are in the purview of what people normally think of as "the police." If Congress passes a law restricting, say, freedom of religion, the Washington, D. C. police department are not going to arrest them and haul them off to jail.

The fine print along the left hand side of the sign is an exhortation to free speech at the top, and the state laws that govern defacing or removing political advertising at the bottom. There is also a bit that reads "Placed by 'I support democracy' society." A secret society for certain, given that it appears to have no web presence.

Unidealized

The recent death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has resulted in exactly what many people suspected would happen; partisan bickering over whether President Trump should appoint a new Justice to fill the seat, and if Congress should move to confirm before the November election.

In the end, it doesn't matter. I suspect that very few people, looking at the process from outside, see anything other than the naked use of political power at play here. Judge Merrick Garland wasn't given a hearing by the Republican-held Senate of the 114th Congress. Not because there was something untoward about President Obama appointing a Justice to fill a vacancy during his term, but because the Republican Party was holding out for a chance to have "one of their own" (although one can debate how well President Trump fits that description) make the nomination. Remember that even the otherwise "maverick" Senator John McCain floated the idea that if Hillary Clinton had been elected, that the Senate may have simply refused to confirm any nominee while she remained in office. And with the 116th Congress having a Republican-held Senate of its own, the same logic is in play. Fill the seat with a Republican loyalist, who can (hopefully) be counted on to be a partisan obstruction to Democratic legislative initiatives. The process and the rationale aren't important here. The specific outcomes are.

As politics becomes more and more about seeking answers to questions of Right and Wrong, as opposed to social preferences, the system is going to become more and more broken. If there can be said to have been a fundamental problem with "The American Experiment" it was the assumption that an entire nation was always going to be in the same boat, but not always need to be on the same page.

That was a remarkably clunky metaphor... let me try again. Democracy is good for, say, everyone in the office (one people are back in the office, anyway) deciding where to eat for lunch, even if there are strong opinions and/or food allergies. A number of restaurants these days have expansive enough menus that people can get something that works for them. It might not always work for everyone, but if the group as a whole understands the limitations, it should do well enough. But Democracy isn't such a good option for deciding what to eat for lunch, if everyone must have the same meal. A dedicated vegan with a love of deep-dish and a gluten-intolerant carnivore are likely to have mutually-exclusive ideas of what makes for a good pizza. And a gluten-free, no-cheese, vegetarian pie might not strike anyone in the group as appetizing.

To the degree that the American political system, driven (intentionally or not) by voters, is attempting to legislate to the nation as a whole what everyone will have on their pizza, one understands why specific interest groups are attempting to lock the process into always being in line with their needs and wants. The pro-life voters who have flip-flopped on the propriety of last-minute Supreme Court nominations between the last election and this one aren't being directly hypocritical now such much as they were being dishonest about their priorities then. The process of appointing justices was never important. A solid majority that would, at some point, open the door for a nationwide ban on abortions was. And has always been. But it's always been considered somehow between impolite and openly criminal to simply own that. And it's the same on the pro-choice side of the ledger.

I suspect that Americans are not cynical about politics because of some inarticulately conspiratorial mindset. Rather, they know what time it is. They understand that the people pulling the levers of power have interests, and that when their stated rationales appear to conflict with those interests, that those rationales are fake. And when they share the interest in question, they're okay with that. Because they, too, buy into the idea that nations are supposed to be about ideals, rather than interests. In the end, however, ideals tend to take a back seat. Because eating is good, and ideals are inedible.

Visuals

In The Atlantic today is John Dickerson's The Slow-Fingered President, which is basically a piece that criticizes the President for being quick to take to Twitter when it comes to things that bother him personally or might damage his political fortunes, while holding off then it comes to subjects that of broader public interest. In this case, public heath messaging concerning the SARS2 coronavirus.

To go with the critical piece is a singularly unflattering photograph. To wit:

It's little wonder that politicians complain about "the media" being biased against them. There is no particular reason why this column needs a picture of the President being sour-faced. (Honestly, it doesn't really need a visual at all. There's nothing that need illustrating about this.) While there may very well have been a good reason for editors at The Atlantic to pick this particular photograph other than the fact that it makes the President look bad. And it seems to me, that for the average reader of The Atlantic, which leans noticeably (if not extremely) left, the President is more than capable of making himself look bad without any help from the print media.

But for the President's defenders, I wouldn't be surprised if this came across as a deliberate provocation, the media working overtime to sway people against someone who is entitled to more respect. In the end, I get it. The President has decided that "the media" is the enemy, and, to a certain degree, "the media" has decided to play along with that designation. But I'm not sure how useful the dance is.

You Break It

I am starting to read more and more essays to the effect that racism in the United States is a problem that White America needs to address, and fix, themselves. The drumbeat of Black writers, whether professionally published, or informally composing for small audiences, who note their fatigue and frustration with being asked to be an active part of the solution is growing.

And I understand that. I don't blame anyone who feels that they didn't make this bed. But that doesn't change the fact that we have to lie in it.

One essayist noted that concepts of race (and, in his mind, racism) date back to the 16th century. Personally, I would go back even farther, to the Inquisitions of the 15th century, at the latest (even if the term "race" wasn't in widespread use at the time). But no matter what date one picks, even if one pushes it forward to the 17th century, and the start of the trade in African slaves in North America, that fact of the matter remains that this is a system that has been in place for far longer than the living memory of anyone today. The final triumph of non or anti-racism will create a world that hasn't been seen in centuries, if at all.

And if White people have no more direct experience with the world as we want it to be than anyone else, and they will be perhaps the people who benefit from it the least, why place all of the responsibility for creating it on their shoulders?

It's tempting to see this as a problem that they, and only they, can solve, but that cedes the ability for Black America (who see themselves as the primary beneficiaries of the change) to bring about the world so many of us say that they want. That reduces millions of people to the status of beggars. Right and ethics may be on their side, but they are beggars nonetheless, and if world history has taught us anything about the fates of beggars, its that they rarely have their demands met.

"White People" are not a single, timeless, entity with a group mind and memory that stretches back centuries. They're mere mortals, like the rest of us. If we are asking them to make something new, something that they're as unfamiliar with as we are, then I don't know if anyone does themselves a favor by bowing out of the work involved.

You Could Cut It With A Knife

I always find it strange that smoke takes on this color.

I wouldn't recommend it, though. You would dull the blade.

While the sky never made it to the brilliant orange of other places, the smoggy brown that's settled over the Seattle area (and the rest of Western Washington) for that matter has been impressive in its own way. Just like a couple of years ago, it de-fanged what should have been a spike in temperatures, and lent the air an odd smell. But, this being Seattle, there is rain in the forecast, and that should scrub things clean.

Counter-Information

The public radio program Marketplace has a regular podcast called Make Me Smart. On Tuesdays, they do a "deep dive" into a given topic, and bring an expert on to discuss it. This past Tuesday, they spoke to University of Washington professor Jevin West about the QAnon conspiracy theory. I find conspiracies fascinating for what they tell us about people. But it turns out, the reactions are also pretty telling. At a couple of points in the discussion, they really hit on something; Beyond people "looking for simple explanations to all of this craziness that's going on in the world," (because of some the explanations are anything but simple) conspiracy thinking is a way of making sense of the world that allows people to assign motive and intent to the actions that they see others taking all around them. Political institutions and social trust breaking down are causing persistent crises is many people's lives, and some number of them have turned to conspiracies as a form of self-medication for a pathological world. And so I was kind of surprised when the discussion turned to solutions ("How do we stop this thing?" to quote the podcast), and there was no mention of addressing that pathology. The disconnect was pretty clearly stated, but at no point was the idea of addressing the dislocation and disenfranchisement considered.

I get that it's difficult when the remedy that people are flocking to seems dangerous, especially to people who aren't taking it. And that's perhaps why so little progress is being made, because it's easy to become caught up in policing people's reactions to their fears and anxieties. But if we want people to stop self-medicating for their feelings of disenfranchisement, powerlessness, uncertainty and social mistrust, the alternatives either have to do a better job of helping people feel better and/or actually ease the underlying causes of their anxiety. Simply attempting to shut down the sources that people have turned their trust to is not going to restore their trust in the institutions that they've come to understand have started lying to them. One of the problems that "the mainstream media" has in dealing with this phenomenon is that its members often speak of it as being an institution that is entitled to being trusted, rather than one that must always work to earn the public's faith.

It's sort of like being sick and taking a naturopathic remedy, which makes me feel better, but there are some side effects. And then I meet someone who tells me that the remedy is bunk, and I should be taking 50 milligrams of Dystopamine HCL twice a day. When I ask "Oh, does that work?" they say, "No, but it's FDA approved." They're attempting to counter unsafe, but effective, with safe, but ineffective.

The degree to which people sympathize with the plight of the self-medicating depends, I think, on whether they see the diagnosis as genuine, a misdiagnosis, hypochondriasis or deliberate malingering. Because it's not only followers of the QAnon theory that can be said to self-medicate with a persecutory worldview, and they aren't the only ones whose reactions to the stresses of their lives make other people feel unsafe. At some point, dealing with the stress is going to have to be the solution.

In the Name of the Law

I wonder how much of the way that policing operates in the United States stems from the belief, on the part of the general public, that every fearsome crime committed today can be traced back to a failure of the police to capitalize on an opportunity to detain the perpetrator yesterday. If heads are more likely to roll for the false negative of releasing a suspect who goes on to victimize someone than the false positive of killing someone who turns out to be innocent, that incentive alone can be called upon to explain the current situation.

But perhaps the more immediate concern is the perceived inability of police officers on the scene to accurately distinguish between people who constitute an immediate threat to their own lives and safety and people who do not. In a culture that would rather be "judged by twelve than carried by six" there is a clear incentive to ensure that all errors are false positives. And this is exacerbated by a reluctance to examine the role that police actions themselves play in creating scenarios in which the false negative condition becomes a matter of life and death.

For the Tribe

The danger of this [tribal] mindset—in which the means, however unethical, justify the ends of survival—is obvious.
Peter Wehner. "Why Trump Supporters Can’t Admit Who He Really Is"

So what is an unethical means to survive, I wonder? There are some "obvious" answers; many people would, I suspect, say that it's unethical to set fire to an orphanage to save one's own life, but that's one of those cases that outside of most people's lived experiences. I don't know of anyone who has ever had to make such a choice. As I remember it, Roman Catholic doctrine says that parents should be ready to give their lives for their children, and this is part of the reason why "health of the mother" isn't considered a legitimate reason for aborting a fetus. I also recall a college criminal-justice class where it was stated that a person threatened with homicide unless they commit a homicide themselves would still be guilty of murder if they went through with it. Those are the only "real world" situations that come to mind.

But it's a question that I'm not sure that American society is really well-equipped to answer. Especially when it comes to politics, rather than the actual act of ending a life (either born or unborn). The idea of a Just War certainly would allow for the deaths of others in self-defense, since, well, deaths are pretty much unavoidable in declared wars. And if a group of people who legitimately feel themselves threatened may go to war over that, surely otherwise shady political maneuvering is allowed.

And so I think that what Mr. Wehner is actually getting at is the idea that one's fellow countrymen are such a threat that any means of self-defense are justified is more cynical then genuine. We are still left with the question, however, of what is the ethical limit for someone who understands their survival is at stake. Commonly, power decides. The Native American population of the United States avoided extinction as much by luck as anything else, because it seems fairly clear that the federal government and citizens alike considered their attempts to defend themselves and what they had to be crimes.

And perhaps this is what drives the tribalism that Mr. Wehner references; the understanding that what has been done unto others in the past can be done unto people in the present. If the native people were displaced from their lands by a superior force, demographic change can create a superior force that would expropriate that same property from it's current owners in turn. And if the dead and displaced have no recourse to ethics, maybe there's nothing unexpected about people taking them to be an unaffordable luxury.

All Aboard

So I was watching this video on YouTube, posted by Wired, about this young woman who does indoor skydiving, and competes at it. I had not realized the remarkable things that people can do in wind tunnels. Then I made the mistake of reading the comments. While many of them were positive, there were quite a number of them slamming Wired for showcasing a young, attractive, White woman, many of them dismissing her because her family was "obviously" quite wealthy. (This, it seems, was based on the fact that indoor skydiving is fairly expensive.)

It struck me as an illustration of how perceived inequality erodes social trust, and how that erosion can quickly become self-sustaining. Nothing was said in the video about the young woman's finances, those of her family or how she funds her training and competitions. So people simply assumed a certain level of wealth, and proceeded to publicly (although mostly anonymously) look down on her for being born into it.

Signalling like this is a form of status seeking. It's a way that people seek approval from others whose esteem they value. And reading some of the comments on this YouTube video reminded me of the fact that being disdainful of others, if a way of seeking approval, and thus, status. And then, like any echo chamber, there forms a race to demonstrate to everyone else one's worthiness of approval by being the most trident. And so you wind up with a bunch of people taking pot-shots at a fourteen-year-old for having the temerity to be featured on YouTube for being good at something unusual.

Or I'll Shout "Stop!" Again

"Trump silent as world leaders call for answers from Putin on Navalny poisoning"

But who expects President Putin to actually give anyone answers? Or for Chancellor Merkel, Prime Minister Johnson or anyone else to take effective action to force the matter? What real impact are sanctions going to have?

I understand the idea that President Trump is too cozy with President Putin, and that the latter feels emboldened to commit bad acts, like poisoning opposition leaders, because of it. But what actions is the international community really expected to take to force the Russian Federation to "behave itself?" After all, North Korea has been operating under "crippling sanctions" for decades now. It's no closer to changing how it operates than it was at the outset.

Calls for nations, or individual politicians, to take what seem like effective actions come across as little more than virtue signalling. And there's a reason why virtue signalling is looked down on.