Freedom To Ignore

So I found myself at the Reason Magazine website this morning, came across the following article: Bourgeois Libertarianism Could Save America, by Reason senior editor Brian Doherty. If you understand the broad strokes of American Libertarianism, once you've read the introduction to the piece, you'll pretty much know exactly where it's going to go.

And in such, it illustrates the primary problem that Libertarianism has with reaching outside of the relatively affluent, older and white base that it has. It often appears to openly pick sides. Mr. Doherty notes: "As this year's urban unrest has shown, police power in the conventional sense can't keep cities secure if even a small number of people are unwilling to play by the nonviolent rules." My question is this: Why does "urban unrest" show this? There's also an article from the December issue, titled "Predictive Policing or Targeted Harassment?" Why not use a police policy that a former officer describes as: "Make their lives miserable until they move or sue," as an example of being "unwilling to play by the nonviolent rules?" Why not use the murder of Matthew Shepard for that example? Even if, as some at Reason did, one decides that his murder was not motivated by homophobia but by a drug deal gone bad, that's no better reason for violence.

The irony here is that this is what Libertarianism is supposed to be all about. If one understands the Black Lives Matter and Anti-Fascist protests as being reactions to the activities of a State that is "recalcitrantly evil," then the way to end the "vandalism, arson, and assault against bystanders," is to tell people what they can do in order to be allowed "to possess wealth and space and to use them to offer goods and services for a price, helping others while peacefully bettering ourselves," in the face of a system that they feel deliberately deprives them of this, and that many Libertarians seem intent on ignoring.

The problem with Mr. Doherty's conceptualization of "boring old bourgeois Libertariansm: the lived philosophy of peacefully enjoying life and property while mostly minding your own business" is not that it doesn't leave room for "attempts to enforce orthodoxies of thought and expression, no matter how good the cause," but that it doesn't offer any responsibility to assist those who are subjected to such enforcement efforts. As someone "minding my own business" I am completely free to ignore people's pleas for justice. As much as "no justice, no peace" is openly extortionate, it is so because of the widespread idea that all that is needed for injustice to triumph is for enough would-be Libertarians to do nothing.

As long as bourgeois Libertariansm is viewed as the lived philosophy of treating violent interference with others enjoying life and property as none of one's business, it's going to have trouble gaining traction with the very people it claims to be attempting to appeal to. An insistence that if the state can openly oppress Dick without troubling Jane that Dick's response must also leave Jane untroubled presupposes that Dick needs nothing from Jane and Jane has nothing of assistance to Dick. So how, then, does bourgeois Libertariansm help anyone, if it's to be applied at the end of a chain of injustice, rather than the start?

Fill In The [Blank]

Riggleman, a nonbeliever who was then a National Security Agency defense contractor, had come along for the ride, paying thousands in 2004 to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people – what kind of people – believe in Bigfoot?
What hunting Bigfoot taught a Republican congressman about politics

I always find stories like this interesting, because they're basically about social acceptance of certain beliefs, yet don't usually come out an say it. When the question of "Why do people – what kind of people – believe in [Blank]?" comes up, the allowable topics with which one can fill in the blank are circumscribed. If you use "crypitids" or "aliens" or "conspiracy theories" to fill in the blank, you're okay. Slot "the Resurrection" in there, however, and you're asking for trouble, despite the fact that, generally speaking, that there's about the same amount of evidence for all of them and when it comes down to it, they'll all about the same thing: how people want the world around them to work and/or what helps them feel a certain way about themselves and their lives. Society, however, demands a veto on certain means at arriving at understandings of and feelings about the world, and covers this with "facts."

And like most cases that are heard in the Court of Public Opinion, the verdicts are wildly inconsistent. Mainly because "Public Opinion" is something of a misnomer, in the grand scheme of things. The public is not really that unified. And so verdicts are never unanimous and are consensus less often than might be supposed. Instead, a number of them are the work of vocal minorities who care enough to go to the mat for them. And since there is no requirement that these groups be in sync about things, a particular set of feelings about the world may pass muster, and another set be shot down.

The belief systems that people use to buttress their subjective experience of (or desires for) the world tend to be most successful to the degree that they are not subjected to rigorous tests of proof in order to be accepted. Sometimes, this means that they're allowed to live in the gaps that standard measures of proof or knowledge leave and other times they're simply granted blanket exemption. This is, as I understand it, generally based on how they prompt others to feel. A person who is actively worried by someone else's belief system is likely to demand a higher burden of proof than someone who couldn't care less. Of course, cost is also a factor, especially when it comes to things like conspiracy theories; the expected burden of proof for a belief system tends to rise as the perception that there are individual or group costs to tolerance or indifference rises.

People who tramp around in the forests of the Olympic Peninsula looking for Sasquatch are, for the most part, considered harmless (if somewhat gullible and foolish) eccentrics. The belief in a resurrected Messiah is broadly-enough held that's effectively the default; it's defectors who are considered somewhat dangerous. Again, however, for the most part, seeing the atheistic as active threats to society as a whole is considered an extreme position. Being alarmed over the spread of Q-Anon or the idea that President Trump had a lawfully-won election literally stolen out from under him is more threatening to people who don't believe it (mainly because of concerns over the actions that believer's might take). These factors, more than the beliefs themselves, could do with more news coverage. But I suspect that the topic isn't particularly interesting.

Great Expectations

Apple head of security accused of offering iPads as bribes for concealed gun permits. Shocking, I know. But, as is often the case, the headline paints a different picture than the text of the article itself:

“In the case of four CCW licenses withheld from Apple employees, Undersheriff Sung and Cpt. Jensen managed to extract from Thomas Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff’s Office,” Rosen said in the news release.

An Ars Technica piece on the same story notes that this seemed to be a common pattern for the Sheriff's Office.

A June investigation by NBC Bay Area found that donors to Smith's re-election campaign were 14 times more likely to get concealed carry permits than those who didn't donate.
Apple security chief maintains innocence after bribery charges

I think that whoever wrote, and then whoever approved, the headline for The Verge understood that casting Mr. Moyer as the instigator would play better than "Sheriff's office tries to extract hardware from Apple head of security." The headline they went with confirms people's suspicions that corporate America is corrupt, in a way that a more nuanced reading does not. A headline casting the case as one of corporate corruption makes for better outrage mining and thus, shares and clicks.

The Verge, however, does not exist in a vacuum. It has an audience, and it has advertisers. And to the degree that it can deliver its audience to advertisers by playing to the biases of said audience, then that what writers and editors will be disposed to do; it's how they pay their bills. Whether the audience drives the media or the media drives the audience is an age-old debate. For people who feel that bias in media is the problem, there is often a perception of audiences as captive, and so if the supposed "élites" that run "the media" change the narrative, then the audiences would have no choice but to come along for the ride. But if we understand that The Verge and Ars Technica have different audiences, or, to be more precise, different expectations from their audiences, then the differences in their coverage make sense.

Click Here

The thing about the news business is that the product, for most people, is not very valuable. When I read the local, national or international news, I'm not doing so with an eye towards making some sort of investment that I expect to pay off for me at some point down the road. Sure, being informed is nice, but overall, it's as much about diversion as it is anything else. And so I'm not one to pony up for an online newspaper. I've thought about it, but generally, when I feel like paying for something, I'll buy a magazine from a bookstore. I prefer perpetual licenses to subscriptions that way. The upshot of this is that most news outlets rely on advertising to pay their bills. And that tends to mean clickbait.

What's interesting about this particular bit of clickbait is that the subtitle more or less immediately undermines it. While the top headline holds out the promise of a partisan fight, the subtitle is more in line with the article itself; it's not a pending Biden Administration that spells trouble for Coalstrip, Montana.

It's people like me.

I am, after all, one of the people who pays Puget Sound Energy to keep the lights on. (A job that they kind of suck at, to be perfectly honest.) And part of what is ailing Coalstrip is PSE's decision to accelerate the shutdown of two of the town's four production units. While I'm not a big environmental activist, I understand why a lot of people around here are. After all, the Sound is only a half-hour to forty-five minutes away from where I live. Coal might keep Coalstrip's doors open, but for a Puget Sound Area resident who is genuinely concerned about the prospect of sea level rise, renewables keep our feet dry. (Well, outside of the rainy season, anyway.) With both the Cascades and the Rockies between here and there, the sets of concerns are not the same. Coalstrip's mayor might have a valid reason to feel that PSE and other energy companies owe a softer landing to Coalstrip than what's being offered, but as one of the people who is going to wind up paying for it (after all, some of the "millions and millions" that he feels the company has made came from my payments), I'm a bit more dubious on what we owe them. After all, we paid them for their coal, presumably at a price high enough to allow for the "excellent schools, immaculate city parks and gleaming recreation facilities" the place boasts.

There's a lot more nuance there than "Could Biden's win doom this town?" suggests. And it all makes for an interesting read, especially for me, since I'm presumably a customer for the town's service. It's unfortunate that the BBC couldn't find something short that better directly carried the nuance that the caption hinted at. But that's the modern news business, it seems.

Think Fast

A week ago, Governor Inslee announced a second round of restrictions on gatherings. While it's not as severe as the set of restrictions that went into place earlier in the year, it has upended things somewhat. The last time I was at Costco, they were inexplicably sold out of Spam, of all things. I've given up on attempting to make sense of people's reactions. A lot of it, I would guess, comes from the surprise of it all. But, really, none of this should have been a surprise.

Not in the sense that people should have been expecting the Governor to stand up and make an executive order last week, but in the sense that this shouldn't have been a sudden executive order. Washington had established a phased reopening plan, with the idea that counties could move between phases as they were ready or as needed. And it was understood that infections would rise as fall and winter came on; there's a clear precedent for this, it's called "Flu Season."

So I'm not clear on why the state couldn't have published numbers well in advance laying out what they expected the numbers of SARS-2 CoV infections to look like, simply based on the seasons, and what excess over or under that would put a county into any given phase of being open. Then, as the numbers ticked up and projections were made, people and businesses alike could have made plans. The knowledge that increased closures would result in panic buying would have allowed retailers to lay in more stock, and the worrywarts could have gotten started on their retail therapy sooner.

I understand that the situation with the Coronavirus is supposed to be completely without precedent and sui generis, but it's basically just an infection respiratory disease. Sure, it's more random than a lot of other ones, but that doesn't mean that the response needs to feel random, too.

Need To Know Basis

So I was listening to "It's Been A Minute" on NPR yesterday, and Sam Sanders was speaking with comedians W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu. He asked them if they had a critique of the Progressive Left. Long story short, they didn't. Which is unsurprising. Messrs. Bell and Kondabolu are activists and comedians, not salespeople. They can be utterly convinced of the perfection of their product.

When Mr. Sanders posed the question, he asked, with something of a mocking tone, if the slogan should have been "defund the police." When Mr. Bell answered, he said:

If you're afraid of the idea of "defund the police" what you're telling me is that you haven't Googled it.

Even though I understand exactly what is meant by "defund the police," I decided to Google it. And one can make the case that Mr. Bell is absolutely correct. The Wikipedia entry that Google serves up explains, more or less exactly, the most commonly understood sentiment behind the slogan. So does the top link, which goes to a Brookings Institution article on the topic.

But when I looked, the first entry in "Top stories" was an opinion piece in The Guardian: "Here's what interviewing voters taught me about the slogan 'defund the police'."

We tried to explain the actual policies behind the slogan “defund the police”. We noted that many activists who use this phrase simply want to reduce police funding and reallocate some of it to social services. One woman interrupted us to say “that is not what defund the police means, I’m sorry. It means they want to defund the police.” “I didn’t like being lied to about this over and over again,” added another woman. “Don’t try and tell me words don’t mean what they say,” she continued. The rest of the group nodded their heads in agreement.

Fox News contributor and columnist Byron York seconds this. Note his wording when he speaks of "Defund the Police:"

But some Democrats worried that embracing such a radical proposal might hurt them politically, so they suggested that it actually meant re-directing some, but not all, funds from police to things like mental health treatment and affordable housing.

While it may not be possible to understand what Mr. York believes from his statement, he's pretty clearly telling audiences that the more nuanced understanding of the slogan is deliberate deception, aimed at mollifying spooked voters and hiding the actual intent.

This is, of course, the primary problem with sloganeering. It tends to put forward ideas as a shorthand. There is some necessity in this. "Narrow the scope of police departments and divert some of their funding to other public safety and community support resources," is much more nuanced (although in some ways still incomplete) but far too long to place on a protest sign. It's fine for people like W. Kamau Bell to insist that the problem is with these Trump voters and not with the slogan itself, but if winning elections is the goal, one has to, as the saying goes "meet people where they are." Insisting instead that people have a responsibility to move to where they are supposed to be doesn't get one anywhere.

It's also worth pointing out that there have been calls from activists to abolish police departments. I mean "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" is pretty unambiguous, even if the column itself isn't quite as strident as the headline makes it out to be. But this, of course, is one of the problems with headlines, while they're meant to be attractions to the articles they front, sometimes, they become substitutes. This, however, doesn't mean that the headline is misleading. There is a fairly vocal constituency for the idea that the very concept of policing in the United States is so racist and corrupted that it's beyond salvaging; doing away with it in favor of something new is the only path forward. The problem is that the slogans and chants don't explain what that something new would actually look like.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder.
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

And this is the problem that the activists have. Claiming that these people have some sort of affirmative responsibility to "educate themselves" so that they come to the correct conclusions may feel good, but it's often predicated on the idea that truths are self-evidently correct; that when accurate and inaccurate ideas are laid out side by side, the well-meaning will know which is which.

Vantage Points

There is an online forum that I'm a part of where people can go and talk politics. As you might imagine, it tends to be something of a dumpster fire (on top of a landfill fire in the middle of a forest fire) due to a tendency towards posts that are cheap shots in search of easy partisan points. The recent election, of course, did absolutely nothing to mitigate against this, and the place was rapidly degenerating into flame bait on top of flame bait.

And then, someone asked a simple question: "Do the (American) Left and Right actually understand one another?"

Which prompted another member to issue something of a challenge: To lay out "the other side's" arguments from the point of view of someone who actually believed said arguments, and to treat them as a sincere person who honestly believes that what they are doing is right.

This is, as one might imagine, easier said than done. In large part because for many people, "the other side" is self-evidently wrong, and the best that can be said for them is that they're not intelligent enough to get it right. But this isn't a side effect of malice, or intellectual laziness; it's simply that not all people are open to the idea of relativism. And not just in the sense of "Proposition A might be 'right' for Alice, while Proposition B is 'right' for Bob," but in the sense that Alice's and Bob's worlds are different enough that they logically arrive at two different propositions.

I can never remember whether it was Saint Augustine or Thomas Aquinas who put this concept forward but the gist of it is that even if one allows for the Socratic idea that people do not voluntarily engage in knowing acts of evil, getting it wrong is itself a culpable act. And if Alice both lacks insight into Bob's world and believes that only culpable negligence would lead him to believe that Proposition B is correct, it's going to be difficult for her to take his point of view in a way that Bob would feel accurately represents him and the world as he understands it.

And this becomes the stumbling block to understanding; the idea that objectivity isn't what it's often made out to be, and doesn't apply to everything that one might believe it does. That, I think, is a heavier lift than people give it credit for.

The Price of Victory

Thomas Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention penned a column for The Atlantic titled: "We Know How to Beat COVID-19. We Just Don't Do It." In it, he basically makes what I think is a debatable point; that through carefully targeted and calibrated non-pharmaceutical interventions, that the United States could completely control the current SARS-2 CoV outbreak, limit the economic fallout and avoid restriction fatigue. Personally, this sounds like a tall order, given that no-one seems to understand what these things would actually look like in practice, but I presume that Mr. Frieden is more knowledgeable about the subject than I am. But a couple of things he said stood out for me:

We’ve learned what people care about, and getting haircuts and holiday shopping are high on the list, so let’s try to keep salons and retail stores open but make them safer by requiring masks, eliminating crowds, increasing ventilation, and encouraging workers and customers to stay home if they have symptoms.

People should reduce the size of gatherings, spend less time indoors together, wear masks when not eating, increase ventilation, and make sure that no one who is feeling sick participates.

Mainly because he goes on to make this point:

Many clusters of cases come from people who go to work, school, or social get-togethers while ill. No testing, government, or health-care program can control COVID-19 if people continue this behavior.

So... if dealing with sick people is the key, why is that the last point in his recommendations for what businesses and people should be doing to control the outbreak? Why not lead with that? Because if society as a whole can do a halfway decent job of encouraging workers and customers to stay home if they have symptoms and making sure that no one who is feeling sick participates in gatherings, there doesn't have to be as much of a focus on the other measures.

For all that there is a tendency to treat SARS-2 CoV infections as sui generis, it spreads like any other disease; it starts out in a sick person and is transmitted to a healthy one. It doesn't spontaneously manifest in any situation in which two people come with six feet of one another without wearing some sort of personal protective equipment.

Perhaps the problem becomes that sooner or later, there will need to be an admission that perhaps the problem isn't in our present, but in our past. For all of the decades that the United States has cultivated social norms that fear malingering and missing out, encouraging people to stay home and miss work and/or rare or unique events is likely to great a shift to be pulled off in under a year. Maybe the fatiguing measures that governments seek to impose are preferred specifically because there is an understanding, on some level that forcing a reckoning with the choice of efficiency over resiliency simply won't end well, because as much as people may want things to have effective backups and fault-tolerance in place, consumer behavior shows that they balk at actually paying for it.

Here We Go Again...

So today the governor of Washington State basically announced "lockdown 2.0 lite." Stores were out of toilet paper before he'd finished the press conference. Seriously. The governor was still speaking when I did my usual Sunday Costco run, and there was a sign out front saying they were sold out. I've given up attempting to understand. I presume that people are predicting that another full "stay at home" order is on the horizon. But even during the last one, people could still go to the store. Maybe eating the stuff keeps one healthy. It makes as much sense as anything else.

Maybe the stuff's been made anti-viral when I wasn't looking. I can't think of a better explanation.

But it seems odd. Broadly-based restrictions are a very blunt instrument for dealing with this situation. And it's not as if there wasn't any indication back in the Spring that the onset of Fall would lead to a rise in case numbers, people have been predicting this more or less from the get-go. So... why hasn't there been a more calibrated plan put into place? Why is the state still responding as if it knows nothing about who may be ill and who isn't? Are we really still in a place where state health officials are playing it by ear?

Not that I have any insight into the process, but it seems that various sorts of enforced "social distancing" are the only tool that anyone has in their toolbox, and it will stay that way until a vaccine comes along. Maybe that's the only tool that would have ever been available, but it seems strange that "you're not allowed to have people from outside your household in your home" is really the best we can do at this point.

Terminal Case

A former children's clothing store, laid low by the pandemic, the restrictions and subsequent fall-off in shopping. Perhaps, when it is all said and done, a new business will take its place, and its employees will find other jobs, but for the moment, it's a net loss.
 

On the Other Hand

What, in a "perfect world" would the response to the SARS-2 Coronavirus outbreak look like, other than different than it does now? It's one of those questions that "everyone" seems to have an answer to, yet no-one can actually answer.

Every so often, I find myself back at this University of Minnesota page, reading it again. And every time I reach this passage:

But both Ferguson and the authors of the second [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] paper declined to speculate on how useful [nonpharmaceutical interventions] might be in a future pandemic, saying there is no evidence they can hold off infection indefinitely.

... I have a question. What counts as "indefinitely?" When the pandemic restrictions went into effect, I suspect that they were intentionally downplayed. I don't think that there was any real reason to suspect that the outbreak would be over any more quickly than the 1918 influenza pandemic, and as much as the use of nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing, wearing facemasks) was played up, the 1918 pandemic didn't end until 1920. But could public health officials really have sold restrictions for the remainder of 2020 starting from late winter? It seems unlikely. Even once masks were recommended, the broad range of what counts (along with the difficulty in getting formal ones) meant that a lot of the cobbled-together coverings people used were more theatrical than anything else. And given how porous the "lockdowns" needed to be in order for people to be able to stay supplied with necessities, how much did they hold off infections?

That's the unknown, and it's likely to stay that way. Critics of one or another government's (local, state/province or national) response like to point to the places where the outbreak was the least severe and claim that with the correct nonpharmaceutical interventions, everywhere could have been like that, but that sort of assessment presumes that all other things are equal, when they often aren't. The United States is criticized for having a death toll unbecoming a "first-world" nation, but the United States has also often been criticized for having a healthcare system unbecoming a "first-world" nation, too. One wonders if the decades that we've dealt with the latter didn't, at least in part, set us up for the former. I'd be willing to lay money on the idea that the general American fear that people who take off from work are malingering plays a large part in the current situation, as does a general Fear Of Missing Out that people bring to their personal lives. It's easier to convince oneself that some cold medication and everything will be fine if the alternative is missing a paycheck or a "once in a lifetime" event.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence in a hypothetical counterfactual, because the very unreality of the situation means that one can paint the grass whatever shade one wishes. Which can be aesthetically pleasing, but poor for real-world comparisons.

It's true that despite the fact that people were writing papers about the topic in 2007, the United States was unprepared to deal with a pandemic. It's been said that the United States doesn't work to prevent disasters, preferring to clean up after them instead. Given that, maybe even if this wasn't our perfect response, like it or not, it was the best we were going to be able to do.

Abnormality

While a lot is being made of President Trump's refusal to concede the Presidential race, this isn't anything particularly unusual. The way the election for President works can be broken down into three phases. Phase One was on November 3rd, the date of the general election. Phase Two is when all of the various state (and D.C.) level elections are certified. Phase Three is when the Electoral College meets and casts their votes on December 14th. And that's when the election official ends.

Looking at the popular vote, and then assuming the rest and starting the transition early is a well-established norm, because of the amount of time needed for the transition. But it's still a norm, rather than a legal or constitutional process, and President Trump hasn't shown much regard for norms in the past. Why expect him to start now?

President Trump is the sort of person who treats norms and other sorts of voluntary limits on one's behavior as self-imposed weaknesses; and he's pretty much been that way. His current actions are in keeping with that. I expect that he'll never willingly concede the race, rather waiting for it to be pried out of his grasping fingers. And in the end, it illustrates the limitations of norms. People might expect them to be followed, but there aren't any baked-in consequences, as there are with laws or regulations. And given that President Trump's base of support cared less about norms than they did about having a champion, it's unlikely he'll feel any heat for it this time.

Cancel Politics

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) fired off a Tweet heard 'round the beltway, calling for people to archive social media and other internet posts of pro-Trump people in the government. The expectation was that they would quickly start deleting "incriminating" materials in order to hide their associations with the Trump Administration in order to retain their roles in government.

In the wake of this call for action, the Trump Accountability Project sprang into existence, with a stated aim of disallowing Trump voters, funders and staffers from profiting "from their experience." It didn't take very long for accusations of "the Left" engaging in the "persecution of wrongthink" to start becoming virtual water-cooler conversation.

But what were people expecting to happen? Okay, the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy ended some 63 years ago, but that's not very long. If he could manage to get a good chunk of the nation behind him in trying to root Communism out of the United States government, why is anyone surprised that Representative Ocasio-Cortez has managed to round up a batch of activists to try and cancel Trumpists in politics?

I always find it weird when people profess to believe that other people hate them, yet don't seem to believe that those same people are willing to do anything more effective than stew in it. Partisanship in American politics is becoming less about different paths to a goal, and more about existential questions of Good versus Evil. In a Pew study from last year, a full 30% of respondents said that Republicans never govern honestly or ethically. Only 12% of self-described Democrats said that Republicans are somewhat honest and ethical. Is is any wonder that the Progressive wing of the Democratic party wants pro-Trump career politicians gone?

Given the degree to which the Democratic/Republican dynamic in the United States openly trades in the demonization of the other party, even committed partisans can come across as woefully unprepared to understand what that would result in.

Strange Fortune

The following came up in a discussion about the results from this week's Presidential election:

Honestly, [the] Democrats got extremely lucky. If it weren't for Coronavirus, Trump would have easily beat Joe Biden.

Grand scheme of things, this is a true statement. While committed Democrats were sure to turn out for whomever the Democratic nominee was, even if it had been the proverbial "ham sandwich," at the margins, it's not at all clear that enough sometime Democrats would have turned up at the polls in swing states without the perception of incompetence and indifference on the part of the President.

But as a figure of American speech, it's a different matter. Thought, generally speaking, is believed to model on language. The whole point of Newspeak in George Orwell's classic 1984 was to allow the party to influence and constrain thought by restricting the language that people had at their disposal. Of course, it's hard to know if such a scheme would actually work; whether "double-plus ungood" would manage to be different from "very bad" or merely a cumbersome semantic substitution is still unknown. But it's not particularly out of left field (to use another colloquialism) to think that there's not much difference conceptually between "The Democrats were fortunate to have a deadly pandemic occur during an election year" and "The deaths of a quarter-million people were in the Democrats' interests." And from there, the idea that the nationwide outbreak is a political hoax, or even that it was intentionally triggered because of the political impacts, isn't that much of a leap.

And that sense, that one of the "silver linings" of a worldwide disaster is the partisan advantage to be gained from it, leads to the idea that the people who lead political parties simply don't care about the well-being of the average citizen. (At best.) The saying "never let a perfectly good crisis go to waste," doesn't help, either. It is, I think, just another manifestation of the idea that people involved in politics are a separate class of people from the populace as a whole, with different, and often mutually-exclusive interests. It may only be one in a myriad of obstacles to a feeling of national unity, but it's no less important for that.

Choosy Voters

I've had better things to do than follow the election coverage, and so I'm a bit behind the curve. I understand that former Vice-President Biden appears to be leading and likely to win, but I'm not invested enough in the outcome to look deeper. Looking for something else to read about, I'd check out The Atlantic, and found the following: A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath. My first thought was "Of course they did. We are talking about people who run for President, after all." Sociopaths are something of an occupational hazard at that level.

But a bit less snarky, and more to the point was the thought that he headline may as well have read: "A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Person Who Said That He Would Advance Their Interests at the Direct Expense of People They Don't Like." Just as accurate, if not as click-bait. But also nothing new. This has been a habit of the electorate for a while now. And not simply because the American public has somehow become more evil when no-one was looking. Politicians buying into partisan animosity and offering to have one side win at the other's expense are common, because angry partisans require that as a precondition of voting and other voters aren't driven away by it. And I feel that I'm repeating myself here, because I'm sure I've noted this before.

Because the Electoral College system breaks down the Presidential election into 51 individual elections, one for each state and one for Washington, D. C., relatively small numbers of angry partisans in contested states can really make the difference, and so the candidates need those votes. And the primary system doesn't quite guarantee that the angry partisans will have a candidate who will listen to them, but it comes close. And so while the overall number of angry partisans may not be large, they tend to be the ones leading the parade. And for them a sociopath who shares their anger, or at least reflects it back for them, is miles better than an upstanding citizen who doesn't.

And for everyone else, a sociopath who is openly on their side, is better than an upstanding citizen who is likely to ignore their concerns, because he works for the angry partisans on the other side. Electoral math is like any other math, one doesn't have to like the answers for them to make the equations work.

And a Dollar Short

So I received a text message today, asking me to call three friends in swing states and remind them to vote for one of the major parties. Even if I had close enough friends in important swing states who I could call on, election day seems like a little late in the season for that sort of thing. This is a message that should have shown up two months ago, along with a link to resources (or more than likely, just talking points) that could be deployed to explain to people why a vote for Candidate X would be in their interests.

The best way to reduce the influence of money in politics is for people to be effective salespeople for the candidates they support. This doesn't seem to be that much of a secret, but there also doesn't seem to be much will to formalize it. Even the most politically engaged of the people I know come across as much more eager to talk politics when the next election is at least a year out. Perhaps they would be more involved in pitching their candidates if they they more information to work with in campaign seasons.

I think that part of it is that in a nation of hundreds of millions of people, coming up with reasonably detailed plans that might sway someone is difficult. Platitudes and attacks on the opposition are significantly easier to come up with, and they don't have that large of an attack surface in return. But it seems that there would be something of a payoff to political campaigns understanding how they would put their money where their mouths are, and sharing that information with their supporters early. Friends and neighbors will always be more trustworthy sources of information than random talking heads. It's strange that conspiracy theorists seem to have a better grasp of this than political organizations. Or maybe it simply didn't cross anyone's mind until the last minute.

Two Can Play

Fall during an election season always produces a bumper crop of signs. They pop up everywhere. But certain places reliably grow a new batch every season. The area across the street from the local Costco is one such area.

One thing that becomes evident with signspotting experience is that professional signs are easy to spot. The art of the campaign sign is well-established by now, and the guidelines are simple. Large fonts, limited text, high contrast. If the colors of a favorite local sports team can be worked in, so much the better. Slogans are best saved for very large signs, and even then, they need to be short; there isn't much time to read when cruising by at between 30 and 45 miles per hour. Of course, not all of the signs that embrace these rules were placed by professionals. But one can be fairly certain that those that don't follow the rules were not.

These two residents of the Costco-area sign patch illustrate the point. Even "Trump Weak" doesn't stand out very well, being red on black. Even in the Middle Ages is was understood that this brought contrast problems. And the broader message? There's no way that anyone who wasn't stopped right next to one of these signs was going to read it. (These signs are two sides of the same thing, one message to a side.)

In any event, what stood out about these signs for me was the messaging. It seemed to be little more than taking a Trump-style message and turning it back on the President. And this is another thing that marks signs as amateur for me. Who is really going to be swayed by this messaging? Who out there was thinking of re-electing the President, but now that they've seen someone engage in calling him "weak" is rushing to reconsider?

For all that they're definitely not professional-grade, someone likely spent a decent amount of money having this printed up. I wonder if they received the value that they hoped for.

Like Everyone Else

So, with the general election for President of the United States (among other things) being tomorrow, there has been quite a bit of rhetoric about how this is the "make or break" election that will forever define the nation going forward. Partisans on both sides seek to rally their supporters with the threat that if they don't make the one correct choice, their nation, as they knew it or as they want it to be, will be forever lost.

I don't know that there is any problem with the concept of "America," writ large, that cannot be solved by simply accepting that Americans aren't in any way intrinsically superior to anyone else on the planet. The population is not naturally smarter, more ethical, harder working et cetera, than anyone else. Americans are absolutely average specimens of humanity, and that's okay. The history of the United States may be full of exceptions to the rules as otherwise laid down by history, but the nation is not unique in this. There are many places around the world that are exceptions to some or another otherwise consistent rule. The degree to which there is a desire in the United States to predicate national worth on being genuinely exceptional people seems to produce more anxiety than actual good.

Hues of Autumn