Favoritism

It's a generalization, but overall, the economy of the United States is designed to favor Efficiency over Resilience. There is nothing particularly wrong with this; one is not necessarily better than the other. It has, however, resulted in the overall disparity in labor participation that we see between groups; when the goal is to satisfy demand with as little outlay as possible, keeping the labor force down is seen as a virtue. And in a society that historically had few to no qualms about determining both intrinsic and instrumental value based on appearance, social approval and similar qualities, this resulted in the labor force being noticeably skewed when compared to the population at large, especially in the higher ranks of management, where the returns on education and labor were the highest.

Now that society, or at least some rather vocal sectors of it, have determined that this should be changed, there are voices that wish to sound the alarm about what they see as "reverse" discrimination. (As an aside, I find the concept of "reverse discrimination" to be vapid, implying, as it does, that there is an appropriate direction for an inappropriate practice.) But what is really at work here is an attempt to solve an effect, without dealing with a cause.

For large, mature organizations, altering the demographics of the workforce organically while managing the size of that workforce is going to entail preferential hiring and promotion practices. There's no way around that. Going from, say, 25% of senior managers being women to something closer to 50% is going to mean that men will find senior management difficult to enter unless the pool of senior managers is greatly and rapidly enlarged. And in a society that begrudges "unnecessary" labor participation, that expansion is unlikely to occur unless some remarkable overall economic expansion takes place, and companies need to expand their labor forces rapidly simply to keep up.

This puts businesses in a difficult position. Activists for diversity, inclusion and representation are likely to be aggrieved at what they perceive as foot-dragging on the part of the business community, and the people who find themselves newly shut out of desirable jobs are going to be similarly upset at being blocked from opportunities in favor of those they find less deserving. To be sure, a lot of this is the business community's own doing. An intense and decades-long focus on shareholder value at the expense of all other considerations has siphoned off a lot of the wealth that could be used to fund labor force expansion. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a relatively small group of people at the top of the food chain has increased the price sensitivity of the majority of people lower down the ladder. This has resulted in an even greater push for Efficiency of production and delivery, and since labor is a large expense, corporations have turned to even more aggressive ways of cutting those costs. And when labor force participation is effectively capped by economic concerns, the quest for employment opportunities, especially desirable ones, becomes a zero-sum competition. (The drive to find ways to unemploy even more people through the use of automation isn't helping.)

The fundamental "problem" with societies is that decision-making doesn't scale up very effectively (when it can be scaled up at all). Casting diversity, inclusion and representation as civic virtues is easy. Deciding that they are civic assets, and therefore worth paying for is vastly more difficult. After all, the entire point behind opportunity hoarding (which is what leads to discrimination in the first place) is the perception that opportunities are scarce, and therefore precious. And in order to make employment less precious, it's going to have to be easier to obtain. And that's going to mean a broader social trend away from an Efficient economy and towards a Resilient one. But there's a reason why the social trend points the other way; unless that can be corrected, opportunity will remain scarce, and contention for them will go unabated.

It's Obvious

Online debates about the various accusations of corruption directed at both President Trump and former Vice-President Biden are, to be honest, not all that enlightening. They quickly tend to degenerate into naked partisanship, with people offering or debunking "evidence" based on which side they're on, rather than the content and quality of the material. Here's a snippet from one such conversation.

I'm sorry but if you're still ignoring Joe Biden's political corruption after the revelations, including recordings, in this interview with Tony Bobulinski tonight, I don't know what to tell you. Tucker Carlson is looking right in the camera and making devastating accusations, without any hedging. If these things aren't true, Joe Biden would own Fox News. Knowing Fox legal had to sign off on this, you have to accept that it's at LEAST credible enough for the other networks to investigate.

So here's the interesting thing. The fundamental premise, which is that some vetting of the accusations was required prior to their being aired, is false. The legal department of Fox News didn't have to sign off on anything. Tucker Carlson can make any number of "devastating accusations," that later turn out to be false or unsubstantiated. There would only be a problem legally if it could be proven that Mr. Carlson knew that he was making false statements when he made them. That is to say, Mr. Carlson would have to have been knowingly lying, which is not something that any corporate legal department would be able to determine (unless they also knew that 1. the accusations were false and 2. the on-air host had been informed of that). Given this, former Vice-President Biden wouldn't at all "own" Fox News if it were later revealed that the accusations were false, or even fabricated (unless it turned out that Mr. Carlson himself was in on the fabrication).

One of the drivers of a conspiratorial mindset, at least in my experience, is not understanding how something works, and then substituting a flawed belief. In this case, it's a variant on "they can't say it on television if it isn't true." And this may point to why conspiracy theories can be so difficult to combat. For many people they fall into the realm of things that they don't know that they don't know. Combine that with a dash of motivated reasoning, and that's pretty much all you need. And the modern world is remarkably complex. The intricacies of libel law may as well be Greek to most people, since it rarely comes up in day-to-day life. And this void leaves plenty of room for seemingly sensible inaccuracies to seep in, and then become a sort of "proof" that nefariousness is afoot.

Ersatz

A couple of hours away from Seattle is the tourist trap of Leavenworth, Washington. A good-sized chunk of downtown Leavenworth is done up as if it were a Bavarian village, and if pretzels, bratwurst and dirndls are your thing, the locals are ready and waiting to hook you up. Still, for all of the kitsch and accordion music, it can be a diverting place to spend a weekend afternoon, and the drive out through the mountains can be remarkably scenic.

Being a good distance away from Seattle, however, means that it's squarely in Trump country, and the day we went out, there were people standing on street corners with MAGA 2020 signs, and a couple of the businesses posted that if you weren't wearing a facemask, they'd assume you have a valid medical reason. Never let it be said that politics ever takes a holiday, even when the tourists are in town.

Debatable

Rachel Martin: So I want to ask about one particular moment. The moderator, Kristen Welker of NBC, asked President Trump what he would say to Americans who have not liked how he has talked about race or seemed to exacerbate racial divides in this country. And this is how he responded. Let's play this tape.

President Trump: Nobody has done more for the Black community than Donald Trump. And if you look, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln - possible exception - but the exception of Abraham Lincoln, nobody has done what I've done.

Ms. Martin then turned to Republican political strategist Scott Jennings, and asked him if Republicans actually believed that. And Mr. Jennings said he could do without the bravado of the answer, and then went on: "However, if you listen, that entire exchange, Donald Trump actually does have a story to tell. When you talk about criminal justice reform and his support of the historically Black colleges and universities, the economic numbers pre-COVID, he has a story to tell."

President Trump is often described as not speaking to minority communities in the United States, but about them, with the audience for his comments being those people among his base who want to see the President (and, by extension, their vote for him) as non-racist. Scott Jennings' characterization of the the story that the President has to tell plays into this description.

The problem, for the most part, isn't the Black incarceration rate or the Black education rate in and of themselves; it's the fact that there is a significant difference between those numbers and the White incarceration rate and education rate. A rising tide that lifts all boats is always nice, but if the question is what has been done for a specific community lately, there needs to be more of a focus on what closes the gaps. And since the President's audience isn't the people who would benefit from those gaps closing, this is rarely dealt with.

The economic numbers, pre-COVID, weren't doing a much better job. The recovery from The Great Recession has shown the unemployment rate for Black Americans closing the gap with White Americans, but this progress was leveling off under President Trump. And while the President disclaims responsibility for it, the massive disruption to the job market done by the pandemic erased some five years of that progress.

And that aside, Black people in America are not the nation's only, or even the most populous, minority group. Boiling the question of race to one of Black and White misses most of the point. And so does framing the answer in terms of criminal justice reform and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, because about 40% of the country falls outside of the category of "non-Hispanic White" Americans, while Black people are only about 12% of the population. And it's not as if the President has never had anything to say about any of the other 28%, some half or more of whom are Hispanic. For Republicans to decide that whenever one of their own is criticized about race, they can simply talk about what they've supposedly done for Black Americans is to presume that no-one else matters. But that is on-brand, I suppose.

Job Ill-Done

I use the radio for my alarm clock, and this morning, I heard the following, or something close to it.

Donald Trump says that he's going to protect oil and gas jobs, while Joe Biden says that he's going to create new "green" jobs.

"Jobs" has an interesting place in the vocabulary of American politics. While the overall number of jobs in the economy is pretty clearly an aggregate measure, the word "jobs" itself is often deployed as a sort of shorthand that means "well-paid employment for individuals," with those individuals often being undefined. Although in this case, a point can be made the both Messrs. Trump and Biden are referring to the same people; veterans of the fossil fuels industry; it's the audiences that differ.

Jobs have become a part of the Culture Wars, in no small part because fossil fuels and renewable energy tend to break down along the same urban-rural divide that drives the rest of the conflict. President Trump touts fossil fuel jobs because they've become a symbol of bygone rural prosperity; former Vice President Biden carries the banner for renewables because they're a symbol of an environmentally-friendly future. Of course, lost on neither candidate, nor their supporters, is who these jobs would belong to. American politics is rarely about lifting all boats, and this is no exception. Which explains the Culture War appeal; the choice that is made going forward has a distinct whiff of "to the victor, go the spoils." Fossil fuel jobs would tend to go to people in conservative areas, while renewable energy jobs would more likely benefit liberal constituencies.

Of course, none of this particular sort of campaigning around jobs is going to do anything to bring down the high rate of joblessness that currently plagues the United States; none of it deals with the demand for goods and services, which has been depressed by the pandemic and wasn't enough to absorb the whole of the American labor force in any event. At least, not at wages and working conditions that most people would find acceptable, let alone desirable.

This About That

One of the things that I find interesting about the media, as an institution, is the apparent power dynamic between specific media outlets and programs, and the guests that are invited to appear and/or speak on them. For all that many media outlets portray themselves as being in the business of informing the public, a number of them seem to be more in the business of providing their guests a platform to lay out their talking points.

Consider the following exchange, between National Public Radio's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro and Ashley Bryant, from the left-leaning activist group Win Black/Pa'lante.

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro: You call yourselves a progressive group. People on the right might hear this and say your aim is to discredit legitimate political speech on the right. How do you distinguish between disinformation and totally fair partisan speech?

Ashley Bryant: This isn't a partisan issue. What we're actually fighting is voter suppression. The right to vote shouldn't be a partisan issue. We should have people on both sides that want every single eligible voter to be able to show up and participate in this democracy. Anyone that is against that is against our country, is against the very values and the thread of our country. And so my response to that is it's quite insane to think that progressive issues are bad because we want folks to vote, right? That's more - you know, I beg to say put a mirror in front of any of those people that think it's a problem that we want everyone to be able to be civically engaged in this process.

Progressive Group Combats Disinformation Campaigns Aimed At Latino Voters

While I do think that Ms. Garcia-Navarro teed up the question poorly by opening with a comment about a partisan dispute, the thrust of the question was pretty clear: How does Win Black/Pa'lante separate "disinformation aimed at people of color" from partisan speech that they may find disagreeable or oppositional, but is legitimate political messaging? And, at least on the face of it, that doesn't seem to be particularly sensitive information.

But not only did Ms. Bryant completely sidestep the question in favor of a virtue-signalling talking point, but there was no follow-up or attempt at clarification. This may have been because it was at the end of what was intended to be a five-minute piece, but I suspect that with the magic of audio editing, something could have been done. While it's possible that Ms. Garcia-Navarro simply isn't that adept an interviewer and NPR was straitjacketed by their program timing, the impression that I was left with was that everyone involved realized that the target audience simply didn't care.

Because the pattern of a reporter asking a serious question and the guest responding with a talking point seems very common. Even the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates seem to suffer from this, with the moderators lacking the will and/or the authority to interrupt a candidate and steer them back to the question being asked, or even enforce the supposedly-agreed-upon rules of the program.

Because who cares? More than likely, any given listener had already made up their mind as to whether they supported Win Black/Pa'lante or the political candidates before they even tuned in. Nothing is riding on any one specific answer to a question. And this insulates the media organizations in question from consequences, too. People who are not tuning in to be informed aren't really going to mind if there's little in the way of informational content.

So journalists ask questions that they understand may or may not be answered and guests understand that if they'd rather respond with a talking point, it's okay and the audience understands that they're getting more or less what they signed up for.

Martyr In Chief

I'm sure that someone finds this inspirational...

For a number of years, I tried to be an Independent voter. Eventually, I gave up, and settled on my current political affiliation of Not Republican. Which, to be sure, is not really where I want to be. I'd much rather be a genuinely open-minded independent voter who plays the electoral field, as it were. Because if your vote isn't legitimately in play, then no-one will compete for it, and the field of independent candidates in this neck of the woods who might actually in something is pretty sparse.

So Jay Inslee, Democratic Governor and former longshot candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, is up for re-election. And to run against him, the Republicans found Loren Culp, small-town Chief of Police, veteran and author of a book on gun rights. And apparent anti-mask crusader. Which is fine for what it is, but that's about all I know about the guy. His candidate statement in the Voter's Guide for the general election is little more than a stereotypically Conservative biography; spent time in the Army, married his high-school girlfriend, kids and grandkids, wrote a book... and not much else. The only policy position of his that I had any inkling of is apparently that he'll end the state's mask mandate. Of course, the candidate's website has a little more detail, as one would expect.

But what I didn't expect was a billboard, on a major thoroughfare out of Seattle, of all places, to be mainly about masks. Is that really what the Culp campaign thinks is top of mind for voters in the Bluest part of a Blue state? There are parts of the state that I could see this playing very well in. The near suburbs of Seattle is not among them.

Sometimes, political parties put someone up to run for office because that person has a good chance to win the seat and from there, implement the policies that the party, and its supporters (hopefully) find worthwhile. But sometimes, it seems that parties put someone up for a run so that they can complain that they weren't given a fair chance when they lose. I suspect you know which I these groups I think that Mr. Culp might be in. And that's a shame. I'd love to see a moderate Republican run for Governor of Washington. Or for the Senate or for the district House seat. But it's normally an ideologue on the menu for those races. In Mr. Culp's case, his main qualification seems to be that he's not Governor Inslee. Which also, incidentally, qualifies me to be Governor. But if this didn't run this guy to certain defeat, what would Republicans have to complain about? I'm just not sure that's a worthwhile reason to seek office.

Break a Leg

I drove by the theater today, and, to my surprise, it was open. I knew that it wasn't going to remain closed indefinitely, but I really hadn't expected it to open now, given that there is a general increase in the SARS2-CoV infection rate expected as people head back indoors after the start of the rainy season. To be sure, I'd stopped paying attention to the reopening plan some time ago; the whole exercise struck me as opaque. It turns out that in the four-stage plan, theaters could reopen (at 25% max capacity) in Stage 2. Not that I'd realized that we'd moved to Stage 2...

As one might imagine, not everyone is pleased with this turn of events. I don't blame them, even though I don't really understand what the alternatives were; there are no systems in place to manage something like this. To some degree, the show always has to go on. People working various industries may become sick, but if they all go home and hide from the disease, the rest of society hits the wall, and hard. And while theaters don't fall into that category, living on unemployment benefits long-term is not a simple task; if they try to go home and hide from the disease, eventually they hit a wall, especially given that many of them are young people who haven't had the chance to build up months and months of savings.

The global pandemic is said to have revealed a lot of things about society. Which may be true, I'm not sure. A number of these things struck me personally as only hidden from people who never bothered to look for (or at) them in the first place. But one of the things that was revelatory for me was how people's understanding of the economy had become unmoored from how an economy actually works. While I'd always met people who didn't understand the difference between money and the economy more broadly, it suddenly went far beyond the odd person here and there, as it had been before. But in a society were the primary, and often only, barrier between a person and simply buying something that strikes their fancy is their checking account or credit card balance, it's easy to fall into thinking that money simply makes things appear on its own, nothing else required.

In any event we'll see how long it all lasts. If infection rates jump during the fall and winter, Stage 1 might be waiting in the wings, to be called out for an encore. I suspect that there won't be much applause.

And Then, There Were Two

Partisan politics in the United States is often an exercise in demonstrating that of all of the things that it's possible to protect human institutions from, humans are not among them. The general model of the United States, both at the state and federal level, is a tripartite separation of powers. The Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches are meant to be a system of "checks and balances" on one another.

Which is good, in theory. But in practice, that theory is breaking down, rapidly. Relatively recently the President of the United States has become the recipient of a new leadership position. In addition to being head of state, and head of government, they are also the defacto head of their political party. This had lead to what operates like a merging of the Executive and Legislative branches of the government. Given that these two branches then (often) control who is allowed into the Judicial branch, they can then oversee a merger of the entire system. Note that in some states, the Judicial branch is an elected body of its own; but to the degree that Governors are often seen as the heads of their parties at the state level, and partisan forces tend to align the interests of Governors and co-partisan Legislatures in the same way that a President and Congress of the same party have similar interests, those same partisan forces also directly act on elected judges.

So what we are witnessing is a replacement of the idea that checks and balances operate between branches of government with the idea that they operate between parties. The confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett are a pointless exercise in partisan bickering for this reason. She's being elevated to the Supreme Court as an explicit partisan; her role is not to work with other members of the Court to check out-of-bounds behavior by Congress or the President. Rather, it's to check behavior on the part of Democrats that upsets Republican ideas of right and wrong. This doesn't count as a dirty little secret or even an open one; it's pretty difficult to pay any attention at all to the process that's taken over here and not see this plain as day. I'm not even sure that it counts as hypocrisy; it's merely a continuation of a more general habit that many Americans can be said to have of insisting on being seen in a manner of their choosing, even when it flies in the face of demonstrable reality. And while American ideals do frown on the exercise of naked power, people's interests do not. This creates an interesting dichotomy; neither the United States as a nation nor a majority of Americans as individuals seem to be above using power that they have over others to insist on being seen as idealistic and principled.

Of course, the political parties don't see themselves as having chosen self-interest over idealism; I suspect that they are somewhere between honestly believing they've sublimated their interests and simply being unable to see a difference. In this, I understand that I'm swimming against a tide; conventional wisdom tends to hold that partisan leaders (especially on the "other" side, but sometimes on one's own) are deeply cynical to the point of villainy, knowing right, yet doing wrong. Personally, I suspect that it's more dangerous when people sincerely feel that the purpose of power over others is to enforce the right, rather than elide responsibility for intentional wrongs.

And as the two primary political parties in the United States entrench themselves ever deeper into mutually hostile ideological camps the problem will deepen. Although perhaps I shouldn't refer to the parties here, as common discourse tends to make a distinction between the parties and the public, and I think that everyday citizens are just as on board with this as the Vice President or the Senate Minority Leader.

Knocked Off

I don't normally read Buzzfeed. I'd developed an impression of it as trafficking in low-quality clickbait that isn't of any real value. But when I was trying to understand the market for China-based clothing retailers in the United States, this article of theirs from 2016 popped up: Say No To The Dress. It's a fairly straightforward piece, the subtitle pretty much sums it up: "Using images stolen from across the web, sketchy retailers are selling ultra-discounted clothes to women on Facebook. A BuzzFeed News investigation shows many are linked to one of China's richest men." It's not a particularly in-depth piece of journalism, contenting itself with recounting the deceptions of Chinese fashion resellers, dropping in a few human-interest stories from people who received shoddy clothing and pointing the finger at ShenZhen Global Egrow E-Commerce Company.

What I found interesting about it was the advertisements that were served along with it. Even while the piece excoriates Facebooks for allowing the ads to proliferate on the platform, there are advertisements from other, newer suspect Chinese online retailers displayed within the text.

And "Ninacloak" and "Zolucky" don't appear to have a much better online reputation than the various Egrow brands.

In any event, I was amused by the irony. Buzzfeed News was taking Facebook to task for running ads very similar to ones that they were running themselves. (I was also amused by the irony of the ads running against an article that was basically calling the companies out for being fraudsters. Welcome to the world of automated advertising buys.)

On the face of it, once could presume that one of a number of things was at work. But a couple of the possibilities jumped out at me more or less immediately. One was that for all its indignation, Buzzfeed didn't actually care who advertised on their site, so long as the checks cleared; Buzzfeed wasn't selective about who advertised there. Another was that just as Facebook didn't really have a good way of vetting all of the people who advertised on their site, neither did Buzzfeed, so the ads made it through whatever net was in place. A third possibility, and this is the one that I find the most likely, is that Buzzfeed simply doesn't hold itself to the same standard that they were holding Facebook to. After all, Facebook is the social media leader, at least in the Western world. Buzzfeed news barely makes the list of also-rans in the news business. And beating up on Facebook is always a reliable source of traffic.

In the end, I'm not sure that it matters. The people who read Buzzfeed news are unlikely to change their behavior based on whether the site runs dubious advertisements any more than they are to abandon Facebook. If this sort of thing drove reader behavior, it would have likely changed by now. But I think that's the problem that Buzzfeed shies away from; especially when it works in their favor.

Shelf-Life

A pair of quotes:

If in fact the shelf-life for vigilance in the U.S. is only about 3 months, new surges may occur in the fall in previously hard-hit regions such as the Northeast—unless residents remember to stay afraid.
Professor Robert M. Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken, In Defense Of Women.

I understand the idea that for many people "you should be afraid of this" is really just a way of saying "this frightens me." American English has about a million (give or take the odd hundred thousand) such shortcuts, and the fact that they may make it difficult to understand what someone is attempting to convey doesn't appear to be able to change that.

But people actively and intentionally calling for people to be afraid strikes me as a relatively new phenomenon. (It is possible, however, that I wasn't paying attention earlier.) In the environment of the SARS-2 coronavirus outbreak, fear of disease or death has taken on the aspect of a social virtue; people who are afraid are taking their responsibilities more seriously than people who seek to remain unfrightened. But even though the hobgoblin that is the pandemic is not imaginary, I'm not sure that keeping the populace alarmed is the best idea.

Fear might best be described as a state of negative anticipation due to a potential future event that a person believes that they can neither change nor accept. And given that, I understand why there is a desire for people to be afraid; it helps make the case for taking what often come across as extreme precautions. Here's the rub, though, as far as I'm concerned. Firstly, people don't have to be in constant fear in order to take precautions. While my current car will nag me if I pull out without my seat belt being fastened, my previous one did not, yet I routinely wore my seatbelt when out on the road. And even my current car often lacks the opportunity to nag me, since I put my seat belt on before going anywhere. And given my tendency to go for a drive at the drop of a hat, it seems dubious at best to cast me as always being afraid of being in a traffic accident. Secondly, constant anxiety is simply bad for people. If people need to fear for their lives every day until this pandemic is finally dealt with, that's a real problem.

There is also the fact that H.L. Mencken was not the only person to suspect that the political establishment uses fear for its ends, rather than those of the public. This mistrust (which is starting to become something of a regular thing around here) makes portraying the outbreak only in terms of the worst-case scenario is a high-risk strategy. Mainly because if the pandemic were as universally bad as it's often portrayed, it might no be such a problem. A serious respiratory infection that routinely places people in the hospital has a difficult time spreading. It's the randomness of the illness, the fact that for many people the term "illness" hardly seems to qualify, that is creating the problem. Not acknowledging that when people can see it makes it seem more credible when people allege that their government is conspiring against them.

Complacency and carelessness are concerns, to be sure. But those things are also baked into human nature. Expecting immediate fears, rather than longer-term behavior change to combat them seems like a dubious strategy.

Invalidity

The tone of the article, and to a certain degree, its purpose, is set just a few sentences in. The author, The Atlantic's Olga Khazan, is relating her reaction to one older woman telling another that wearing a mask could be dangerous.

“OK Boomer,” I thought. I dismissed her as a random neighborhood conspiracist and swam my laps.

This dismissiveness permeates the rest of the article. Possibly because the editors felt that it would play well with the well-educated, somewhat center-left readership of The Atlantic, or maybe because they didn't really see it themselves. Or maybe they feel, as a number of people appear to, that some level of mockery is the best response to apparent nonsense. Lost in the "aren't anti-maskers stupid?" theme of the article, however, is an important point from near the beginning of the piece:

The horror of the idea was apparent even to me: the feds, in their hall-monitor stupidity, forcing you to do something that’s actually bad for you.

When Ms. Khazan lays out the gist of many of the theories that are circulating, the idea seems even worse. The federal government isn't displaying "hall-monitor stupidity;" they're being somewhere between actively callous and openly malevolent. Stories that purport to be an insider's knowledge that some or another piece of conventional wisdom is untrue carry a pretty clear point with them; that insiders have definite knowledge that the information under consideration is false.

And it's this angle that nay better explain the staying power of anti-mask conspiracy theories. The stories continue to circulate because they validate people's belief that they have an accurate understanding of the world around them; that this world is run by powerful people who are both unaccountable to the public at large and happily willing deal out harm, misery and death in pursuit of their narrow, selfish interests. And "government officials," most of whom were never elected by anyone and who only seem to pop up when things are crazy, are little more than the willing mouthpieces of these powerful people.

And the same can be said for the media. At one point in the piece, Ms. Khazan calls out England’s deputy chief medical officer, Jenny Harries, for a claim "that masks could 'actually trap the virus'." (Personally, I thought that this was somewhat the point, but I suspect that the contention here was that airborne viruses from other people would live on in the mask, making the object a reservoir for infection.) Harries, we are informed in a parenthetical, "did not respond to a request for comment." Of course she didn't. What point would there have been? She either a) offers up a mea culpa and abandons or walks back her earlier statement, b) cites changing information and being wrong then but correct now or c) stands by her earlier statement; perhaps with a clarification, perhaps as stated. Are any of these options in Ms. Harries' interests? I'm not sure that they are. After all, if The Atlantic's "request for comment" struck me as having no upside for Ms. Harries, I wouldn't be surprised to find that someone in her office reached the same conclusion. But more to the point here, one can make the case that the intent was to hold Ms. Harries accountable for the current conspiracy situation. To the person who believes that insiders have knowledge that "the élites" don't want getting out, putting people on the spot for information that hints to the suspected malicious activity is simply proof that the powerful people who own media companies are in on the scheming, and Ms. Harries is valiant in her refusal to comment.

Information about the world, whether that's objective fact or subjective experience, may be a lot of things, but it's rarely, if ever, self-evident. In their quest for understanding, people draw connections and create narratives that allow them to feel that they have mastered the environment around them. But it's an imperfect process; the way someone understands the world is may not comport with the way that they understand that it should be. And a lot of people's worlds are not as they should be. Conspiracy theories help bridge that gap. Far more important than the confusing guidance on masks and the earlier u-turn on wearing one versus not wearing one is the simple conviction that the current SARS-2 CoV pandemic is not the unforeseen result of trillions of separate interactions that happened to all come together this way. Rather, things are bad because someone is making them bad, and there are people out there who know the truth.

There is a sense in which conspiracy theories are a form of conspiracy theory themselves. They offer a narrative of stupidity, ignorance and deceit when simple fear and mistrust can explain things just as easily. They allow for clear villains in people who knowingly either spread misinformation or fail to suppress it, and make the lack of social trust into something designed, rather than emergent. But the lack of social trust the United States currently labors under is not an effect of misinformation, it's a cause. And until that's addressed, people can dismissively "OK Boomer," all they want, but the whispers will continue to spread.

Mind the Gap

I was reading "How The Two-Party System Obscures The Complexity Of Black Americans’ Politics" on FiveThirtyEight, and one of the points that was being made is despite the fact that an overwhelmingly large majority of Black voters regularly vote Democratic, the politics of the Black community is much more nuanced. Which is something that I suspect is familiar to anyone who understands how socially conservative Black people can be.

In any event, information from American National Election Studies was referenced, and one of the survey items mentioned was a question about whether the Federal government should be in the business of guaranteeing that citizens have jobs. The premise was worded this way on FiveThirtyEight:

Jobs Guarantee "The government should see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living."

And there were two positions that people could take on this. A Liberal one: "Government should guarantee a living," and a Conservative one: "Each person should be on his/her own." When I first saw this, it struck me as odd to have these two options as the only choices. After all, it's not like they meet in the middle, or cover all of the possible options. And in looking at the graphic, this stood out for me: "On the jobs guarantee question, respondents were given a response scale, so we grouped responses."

I decided that I was better off finding the information myself, so I looked up American National Election Studies to get the information for myself. It turns out that they've been asking this question for quite some time, and in two forms. Interestingly, the first of them, Government Guaranteed Job and Standard of Living (1), yes/no 1956 -2002, is a simple agree or disagree (yes/no) formulation. The question had been asked this way back in the 1950s and 60s, before making a short comeback in 2002. Between 1956 and 1960, is was phrased as: "The government in Washington ought to see to it that everybody who wants to work can find a job." Presumably, Yes/No followed that. Between 1964 and 1968, the question was posed as was a two-parter, opening with: "In general, some people feel that the government in Washington should see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living. Others think the government should just let each person get ahead on his own. Have you been interested enough in this to favor one side over the other." If the respondent answered "yes," a follow-up determined which side of the fence the respondent came down on. For 2002, it had been restored to a one-part question, abeit with more than just a yes/no answer: "Some people feel the government in Washington should see to it that every person has A JOB AND A GOOD STANDARD OF LIVING. Others think the government should just LET EACH PERSON GET AHEAD ON THEIR OWN. Which is closer to the way you feel or haven't you thought much about this?"

From 1972 onward, a second form of the question was /is asked, the response scale question that FiveThirtyEight references: "Government Guaranteed Job and Standard of Living (2), 7 point scale," The question is/was posed as follows:

Some people feel that the government in Washington should see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living... Others think the government should just let each person get ahead on his/their own... Where would you place yourself on this scale, or haven't you thought much about this?

While I admit that the scaled version of the question allows for more nuance, it still comes across as an oddly binary choice; perhaps due to a need to keep the question similar to the one that had been asked starting in 1956. But it triggered a question for me... When we speak of the divide between opposing partisans, self-sorting into different areas and ideological echo chambers are the common culprits. But what if the way that neutral parties speak of partisans to other partisans is also part of the equation? If someone had told me that liberals believe that " the government in Washington should guarantee that every person has a job and a good standard of living," or that conservatives believe that "the government should just leave each person be on their own," I would have immediately suspected a straw man, especially given the weaselly "some people feel" framing. "Who are these 'some people'... precisely?" I can hear myself saying.

And while I hadn't really thought much of it before seeing this, it seems to me that a lot of descriptions of partisan positions works this way, phrased as stereotypically lefty/rightist, but also apparently divorced from any known policy platforms. I doubt that this is a serious problem, but then again, we don't really need any more minor ones, either. Political canvassing that's less inflammatory and more in line with the sorts of discussions that people actually have about the topics at hand certainly can't hurt anything. Of course, having partisans actually speaking to one another rather than sourcing their information second-hand would be ideal... But one can't have everything, unfortunately.

Okay, New Plan

So there's an off-ramp from the highway, where there is an island right where it meets the cross street. Left turns go to the left of the island, right turns to the right. Except for people who aren't paying attention and try to switch lanes at the last moment. They go into the barriers designed to protect pedestrians crossing the island. It seems that the barriers are replaced about once a month, someone is always running into them. If I remember correctly, there had been a bus stop there for a while... although I suspect that people quickly found it too nerve-wracking and/or actively dangerous to use.

There's a part of me that says it's only a matter of time until they redesign the intersection into something more standard, rather than constantly replacing the fences they've placed. But infrastructure can be stubborn, especially when tax receipts are are down. So we'll see how long it is until something is done. But it's going to have to happen at some point.

End of Year

I started Nobody In Particular back in the Winter of 2006. I'm not sure if that's not as long ago as it feels, or longer ago. It's a sign of being old, I guess. In any event, in my first full month of writing, January of 2007, I posted thirteen times. Which seemed like a reasonable number, so I decided that I would post thirteen times a month.

I don't claim to be the most logical person you'll ever meet.

In any event, for the first three years of the blog, I wound up with an average of 13 or more posts every month, but often feel short of that number on a monthly basis. July of 2007 was particularly sparse, with only 7 posts that month. For the record, I do go back and read some of them from time to time. Not the best idea in the world. I've changed a lot in the intervening timeframe, and late 2000s me wasn't always a pleasant person. Still, I suppose the only way to know how far one has traveled is to have a record of where one has been.

But back to the point. This is my first post for October 2020, and it's the one-hundred and fifty-sixth post of the year. Twelve times thirteen, or a bit less than a quarter ahead of schedule. I suppose that I could set a higher target cadence, but I will admit to liking being able to skip two days in a row now and again, even if I don't take advantage of it as often as I should.

The point behind Nobody In Particular was to make me a better writer. Or, to be more precise, to train myself to be better, and faster, as translating my thoughts into text. I've worked a lot of jobs that require me to write and/or maintain a good bit of documentation, and I've always thought of myself as a poor writer. And, to be honest, something of a poor typist. For all of my effort, I could never learn to touch-type. But it turns out that if one uses the hunt-and-peck method long enough, one gets to the point of having muscle memory for where all the keys are. I can type without constantly looking at the keyboard, while only using pretty much two fingers... well, as long as I'm on a "standard-sized" keyboard, anyway. I suspect that there's something farcical about that.

Has it worked? I have no idea. But I have learned what it takes to become better at something. Feedback. And I didn't really set myself up to get any on this platform. Back when Google Plus was still in operation, I would summarize things there, which did provide some feedback. But it was mostly of the "I like this" or "You're an idiot" variety, rather than commenting on how well or poorly it was written. But I keep at it. I'm not sure why. I don't know that I enjoy it as much as posting something nine days out of every twenty for well over a decade would seem to indicate. And, to be honest, I have no idea how much longer this will go. Not in the sense that I'll suddenly decide to stop, but in the sense that I don't have an end in mind; I don't know when the blog will accomplish what I want it to accomplish. I'll just have to see.