Details, Details

There are lots of "laws" named after people that speak to random bits and pieces of people's lived experiences. One of them is "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy" which is as follows:

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Erwin Knoll (1931 - 1994)

When I first encountered this, I felt that it was amusing enough to take down, but I really didn't think much of it. Until I came across that rare story of which I did happen to have some firsthand knowledge. It wasn't that I considered the story untrue, but I found that the details weren't quite right. There were a couple of things that were said that weren't quite accurate. And it has turned out the same for every subsequent story that I've read in the meantime.

The most recent example was a piece on the recently released computer game Cyberpunk 2077. There was a story on the NPR webpage excoriating it for not being true to the spirit of the original tabletop game. The author of the story sets out to prove his bone fides vis-a-vis the tabletop games.

Fact: I played Cyberpunk back in the early 90's when it was just a tabletop RPG inspired by Blade Runner and William Gibson's sprawl stories. It was a product of its time, existing in a universe with space stations and cyberarms, but without cellphones.
Jason Sheehan "In 'Cyberpunk 2077,' The Only Truly Punk Move Is Not To Play"

Here is what the game itself has to say.

Cellular Phones
The phone of the future is mobile and cordless, allowing the cyberpunk on the go to talk from his car, office, or even on the street. These "cellular" phones operate by using a series of stationary transceivers which pick up your phone signal and relay it to the regular phone Net.
Cyberpunk. Welcome to Night City: A Sourcebook for 2013. p.5

Now, I know this because I too played Cyberpunk back in the early 1990s. (Yep. I'm still uncool.) And I still have my copy of the game, from which I transcribed the above. And remember the cellular phones because one of the peculiarities of the setting was that there was no understanding that phones would become smaller and more powerful. In the Cyberpunk universe, a computer powerful enough to run a sophisticated VR setup and allow hackers to brute-force their way into heavily-defended corporate networks (and the batteries to run it for hours on end) was small enough to be carried in one hand (think the size of an old Sega Genesis or original Playstation console), but cellular phone handsets didn't shrink a bit. And so it stuck with me. The second I read Mr. Sheehan's remark, I knew it was incorrect, and I knew where to look to prove it.

In the end, it's not a big thing. Mr. Sheehan misremembered a detail from a game that was released some 32 years ago (or, like a lot of people today, conflates "cellphones" with "smartphones") and whoever edited the opinion piece for NPR probably didn't know any better and let it go by. It's a minor point, and one that doesn't really take away from the overall point that he's making. (What does detract from the point he's making is that Mike Pondsmith, who wrote the Cyberpunk tabletop games series, feels that CD Projekt RED "nailed it.")

But it illustrates a problem with "the media" as an institution. To convey the facts to others, one must first know the facts oneself. The media doesn't need to be corrupt or biased to be, from time to time, simply incorrect. And if they're just as fallible as the rest of humanity, they're not always going to know what they don't know, just like anyone else. And that makes them less reliable than they like to think of themselves.

Outlawry

I've been listening to the Louder Than A Riot podcast on NPR. It's not a natural fit for me, since I'm not at all into Hip-Hop, and the podcast, for all that it's primary focus is the intersection of the criminal justice system in the United States and Hip-Hop, it comes across as by Hip-Hop fans, for Hip-Hop fans. And so, not really being a fan myself, it loses me here and there. Still, I've been working my way through the episodes. (As an aside, the podcast also revealed an interesting facet to the NPR podcast taxonomy. While Louder Than A Riot is listed as a "True Crime" podcast in its description, it's in the "Music" section of the NPR podcast page. The discrepancy is likely because on other podcast services, it's found with the "True Crime" keywords.)

I was listening to the third of three episodes on Bobby Shmurda. At one point, the hosts were speaking to one of Bobby's defense attorneys and a Law professor at Brooklyn College, Kenneth Montgomery. Mr. Montgomery relates a story from when he was a young man:

I remember all of the old guys that I looked up to who was fond of me had told me, like, I had to get somebody back for that. So it was a period after I got cut in the face where I definitely assaulted quite a few people with razor blades on the trains - A train, four or five line, definitely, as a form of getting back.

But, as one of the hosts notes, Mr. Montgomery had the chance to outgrow his upbringing. According to Montgomery:

I think Bobby - and the difference with me and him was that I think he embraced it. I knew all that shit would get you in trouble at some point.

It's the podcast's take on a very typical uplifting story for Black men in the United States. A young guy grows up in "the 'hood," runs with a bad crowd or otherwise is on a dead-end path, and then something happens, whether it's a flash of insight or gaining a mentor, that turns their life around, and they go on to make something of themselves.

But as I listed to the podcast, I found myself wondering how well that served anyone. One of the things that you come to understand with podcasts like this is that "the system" isn't really upfront about what its actual purpose is. And while I'm sure that a lot of people (like the target audience of Louder Than A Riot) would say that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to demonize, criminalize and "deviantize" (for lack of a better word) things that White Americans find too different from themselves, I would suspect that the system itself (as a system) "understands" its purpose as helping people to feel safe. Even when in order to do that, it must first menace people with imaginary hobgoblins, as a means of proving its value. In this, I suspect it's not much different than the political class, who play up threats to the public, be them crime, social change or economic collapse, and then hold themselves out as the solution. And to the degree that the "mainstream" public is already primed to fear Black people, and young Black men in particular, as criminals, how does portraying a now-successful lawyer as someone who simply avoided being caught and/or sent to prison for admitted assaults on people as a form of revenge at all change that? It dovetails into what always seems to be a subtext in these sorts of discussions; that what is of the most benefit to Black people is the system forbearing from prosecution, when the letter of the law warrants it. And this, too, I believe feeds into a narrative that Black people have much higher rates of criminality than is actually the case.

"The 'hood," like pretty much any place that has more people than legitimate opportunities, is going to have people who turn to crime to get by. And it's going to have people who simply understand that as the way of the world, rather than a (perhaps difficult) choice to be made. But I think that it's possible to over-focus on that aspect of things, and perhaps play into the very image that people are attempting to combat.

Half-Alarm

Even the Peanuts gang is getting in on the act.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm of the opinion that 2020 has received a bum rap. Not in the sense that it's been an awesome year, and is due some recognition for that fact, but in the sense that 2020 has been made into the fall guy for something that the world could, and perhaps should, have been prepared for.

I read an article from 2007 that discussed a pair of papers, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in mitigating the 1918 influenza pandemic. I mention this as a way of noting that the idea of a repeat of 1918, and the measures taken to contain the outbreak are not new. But the public wasn't prepared for what happened. In this interview from Marketplace, aired on December 10th, a Los Angeles cheese seller tells host Kai Ryssdal that she thought that the business closures and the like would last about a week. Mr. Ryssdal's response: "Right. Yeah, we all did."

But once it was clear that the SARS-2 CoV spread was expanding, why were people thinking that this was something that would have been contained in either a literal or figurative week? Part of it, I understand, comes from not wanting to panic people. But there is a problem that lies beneath that; that substantive changes spark widespread panics.

The world does not owe humanity anything. Earth was doing perfectly well for itself prior to our coming, and will likely continue to do so after we are gone. Perhaps, if we can work out the physics of it all, we'll be able to move the planet out of the way of the expanding shell of the Sun, when the star enters its expected red giant phase. This might be enough to be able to say that the Earth itself is in our debt. Until then, I suspect that humanity still has a lot to repay.

Generally speaking, American society is structured to be efficient, rather than resilient. Just-in-time is the order of the day. And this is a functional choice, not an ethical one. Neither of them is more or less "right" than the other. But they both have costs. And the way that 2020 has unfolded has revealed some of the costs of efficiency, by laying them in our laps.

I don't know if there will be a change. I suspect there won't. The American public, by in large, is actively disinterested in the systems that surround and support it. It's all somebody else's problem. But that, in the end, is what may 2020 such a difficult time. Suddenly, it wasn't just somebody else's problem, and people were unprepared for that that would mean. And given long enough, society as a whole will go back to being unprepared. It's the way of things, and most of the time, it works. And that's the downside to it all; that when things work, when they don't require constant attention, the time and energy that would be devoted to them becomes a form of dead weight loss, until things would have otherwise broken. The example that I like to use are fire extinguishers. The trouble, time and expense in buying and maintaining fire extinguishers is wasted; up until the moment that there's a fire. So far, I've never had a fire. And I might not ever. It's actually pretty likely that I'll never need one of the fire extinguishers I have on hand. And so they represent resources that I could have put to better things. But I can never be sure of that until I die without ever having needed them. So were they a good investment? I don't know. And there's only one real way to find out. But either way, the day, the month or the year won't be the culprit, or the hero.

Got It

It's an interesting enough idea: Voters Say Those on the Other Side ‘Don’t Get’ Them. Here’s What They Want Them To Know. And it's interesting to read. But, of course, it left me curious when I was done. And what I found myself wondering was how many of these statements would be people want to be delivered to the other side.

Sure, the message from the 60-something Trump voter that “I'm an ordinary citizen like them, working hard every day to pay bills and make a positive contribution to sustain and grow jobs in the U.S. ... I care about you and want us to openly communicate and be the answer, not the problem,” or from the 50-something Biden voter that “We all want the same things: To take care of our families, be financially secure as much as possible, and live in communities that thrive and serve our needs. I may not support your choice of candidates, but I will fight for your right to support them,” are broadly inoffensive. They strike that conciliatory tone that many people feel has become rare in American politics these days. And while I'm sure that there are some people in both camps that might find those messages a bit too conciliatory, I could see them winning the vote to be the letter in a bottle that is sent to the other side.

But on the other hand, there is the message from another 60-something Trump voter that informs the opposition “That I am for America and they are not. I am for freedom, they are not. I am for free elections, they are not. I am for giving a hand up, not a hand out. I am for legal immigration, they are not. I am for all races, they are not. I am for law and order, they are not.” Is this something that the Trump camp would endorse for being the one thing that the other side should know about them in order to truly "get" them? Or how about this from a 60-something Biden voter: “I would like them to understand that I believe that they’ve been brainwashed into being members of a cult. Thus, I have no regard for them or what they think of me.” What would the show of hands be that this is what Trump voters should understand about their opposite numbers?

According to Pew "about 3% of Biden and Trump voters took this opportunity to share personal, humanizing details about themselves." And, for me (and I suspect a lot of other people who read this), this is where the interesting bits were, even if there weren't that many overall. And that's because, as noted, the details were personal, even if some of them did come across as being cliché.

Most of the rest of the statements, however, left me with a question: "What makes anyone think that 'the other side' doesn't know this?" For example, one Trump voter's message to "the other side" was: “I want our country to retain our basic rights (e.g., religious freedom, freedom of speech, the right to life for all including the unborn).” I don't think that I'm particularly more informed than the average person who isn't a Republican, but aren't these standard Republican/"Conservative" talking points? Or this Biden voter who says: “That they are uneducated, so trying to push their beliefs on me is not going to go over well.” I'd dearly love to ask this guy why he thinks that Trump voters are unaware of what I'm pretty sure that most of them feel is the single most common stereotype of them among Democrats/"Liberals."

The more I read through the sample responses that Pew posted, the more it seemed that rather than addressing the reasons why Trump and Biden voters didn't understand one another, people were revealing them. So many of the statements that people were making seemed directed at stereotypes, if not outright caricatures, of the people they presumed to be speaking to, that neither side comes off as being particularly educated or thoughtful.

In the end, I found myself wondering what people would think, if they were given a list of the statements that their fellow partisans had made. Would they feel that it reflected positively on them? How many of them would they feel would really help other people to better understand them? The irony of the question "What does someone else not understand about you?" is the presupposition that the person being asked knows that someone else's understanding of the world well enough to accurately answer. And for me, the primary lesson of the Pew study is that it's quite likely that they don't... What I suspect they do understand, is that they don't see themselves in the "other side's" mirror in the way that they do in their own.

Silent Night

So some of the neighbors have a pretty serious Christmas display that they do every year. Interestingly, tonight it was dark. Perhaps some of the other neighbors were put out.

XIV

Hello. One of the general rules of Nobody in Particular is that it's not about me, directly. That is, this isn't an online diary. I'm a fairly boring person, and no-one wants to read about me. That said, I'm Aaron, and I live in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington... on the off chance that the pictures of the Space Needle and Seattle at night didn't clue you in.

I started this blog fourteen years ago, more or less today. The date's the same, in any event, but it was late on a Friday, back then. This was one of those things that had been kicking around in my brain for a few years before I actually got around to doing it. The original concept was going to be called The Help Files; I'd envisioned it as an online advice column. But I never did anything with the concept. A trip to London in 2004 gave me another idea: explaining the United States to people outside of it. President George W. Bush had just been elected to a second term, and people I met on the Tube or on the bus had questions. And I enjoyed answering them, so I thought it might make for a good topic. But I hadn't thought it out all that well... like where my initial set of questions was going to come from.

In any event, I kept talking about it, until one day, someone told me to shut up, and just do it. And so I did. The original concept, as laid out in the original post, was to talk about the interesting things that went on around me. But that would require me to get out and around more than I do, so I often simply post about things that I encounter in the news or in other locations around the Web. And that's really about it. Welcome to the page, and feel free to leave a comment, if you'd like. If you have a question about something, feel free to ask, if it's a topic, it might be interesting to run it down and write something up on it. The initial goal had been weekly updates, which quickly changed to thirteen posts per month. (That being the number of posts that went up in the first full calendar month of the blog.) I figured that I would have burned out by now, but I should hit 2,500 posts by spring.

Overall, Nobody In Particular is disconnected from the rest of the "blogosphere;" it's not part of any larger circle of blogs, and it doesn't have one of the popular themes. I'm not a "daddy blogger" or a food blogger or a travel blogger or anything like that. Whatever crosses my mind becomes the topic of the day. A lot of times it's something that grates on me in some way or another; I'm something of a critic of the world at large.

But, before I forget. Thank you very much for reading. If you're a regular, I appreciate you making the time to check in, and if you're new, welcome. I hope that you find it interesting. And yes, I do still use the term "weblog" from time to time.

Minding the Flock

Perhaps my favorite political analogy is that of a Good Shepherd. I use it often, despite a general concern about casting people as "sheep," given the highly pejorative nature of the comparison. And this is mainly because, despite my misgivings, I have yet to hit upon a better analogy. And so if you've read Nobody in Particular for a while, I suspect that you won't be surprised that I'm about to invoke it again.

Most elected Republicans surely disagree with Trump’s actions. They dare not say so. They will try to pretend it never happened—as Don Draper says to Peggy Olson in Mad Men, “It will shock you how much it never happened.” But to the extent that the pretense cannot be sustained, they will have to find ways to condone or excuse Trump’s actions. Along the way, they’ll push the Republican Party toward becoming a self-consciously post-democratic party, a party that accepts antidemocratic and anti-constitutional methods to advance its goals and protect its supporters’ interests.

David Frum. "How Long Can This Continue?"

I understand Mr. Frum's point, but I disagree with the precise framing that he has adopted. I don't think that the Republican Party is concerned specifically with its goals and its supporters' interests. Rather, I think that they're acting our of what they understand to be common goals and the national interest. And not out of some willful self-delusion, but the simple and widespread habit that many people have of conflating their own interests with those of the people and or things that they feel responsible for. President Trump, back when he was still candidate Trump, famously trotted out a list of what he felt were problems with the United States and proclaimed "Only I can fix it."

And at the risk of coming across a broken record (albeit one with a very long cycle time), when someone comes to view themselves as essential to the well-being of another person or persons, they view what is best for themselves as also being in the direct interest of those they are looking after. To fall back on my Good Shepherd analogy yet again, a shepherd may be utterly convinced that sacrificing one or two of the animals in the flock to save themselves is the best thing for the flock. After all, where would they be without the shepherd? And so even if the shepherd aids themselves at the direct expense of their charges, the flock is still better off than it would be under the alternative. And it's worth noting that this isn't a new way of looking at the world:

A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.
Thomas Jefferson

And if democratic and constitutional methods of means, rather than ends, then they may be set aside in favor of better means. And if there is a danger in searching for a Good Shepherd, or in someone feeling that they have been elevated to the role, it lies there, in the idea that at some point, following the rules is an absurd sacrifice of the ends to the means. While it's common to view politicians as some sort of alternate species of lifeform, the fact is that they are drawn from the very public that the rest of us live in. When asked, in 2018, "Would you say [Opposing party] are a serious threat to the United States and its people, or wouldn’t you go that far?" about 70% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats said they either strongly or somewhat agreed that they would actually "go that far." And under such a circumstance, it's not surprising to find that people might express support for throwing the rulebook out of the window.

In this light, the problem isn't that Republicans are somehow willing to place their own interests above those of the nation, it's that they're losing sight of the idea that the nation will be okay without their efforts. And I suspect that Democrats are losing sight of that, too.

The Family Business

I was on LinkedIn this morning, and game across the following post:

The rhetoric about a company being a family is unrealistic. Parents don't fire or furlough their children to cut costs.

Leaders would be better off calling their company a community: a place where people feel a sense of belonging and care about one another.

Point taken. But as someone who has worked with children who have been taken out of their homes for abuse and neglect and has been a foster care caseworker, I can say that parents absolutely do. We just call it, depending on when and how it happens, placing a child for adoption or child abandonment. And sometimes, the motive is precisely about finances.

And of course, to the broader point, while communities aren't often able to throw people out in the name of profitability, there are a lot of communities that defined by their physical locations, rather than the emotional bonds of the people who make it up.

We live in a society, that, broadly speaking isn't organized around large-scale communities. Once a group of people becomes too large for everyone to be easily acquainted with everyone else, that anonymity starts to erode any sense of mutual need that may have been there.

And ironically, this is how many companies are like families; not all contributions to the group are considered equal. Companies fire and furlough people because the contributions that those people bring are not considered necessary enough to retain. In most families, at least in the Western world, children are not expected to make any useful contributions at all. In some economics circles they're described as luxury goods. What sets businesses apart from families in this sense is that businesses aren't expected to have any members that would fit the definition of a luxury good. Highly-paid executives and board members generate worker resentment and shareholder scrutiny if they're seen as draining company resources and only providing good feelings, at best. Whereas parents are commonly allowed to argue not only that their children shouldn't be required to pay their own way, but that others should pay it, in consideration of the future work that those children might do.

In the end, it's a matter of feeling. "Leaders" in business use the language of "family" in often hackneyed attempts to evoke a certain feeling from their employees, even if they themselves would regard anyone on whom it worked as hopelessly naïve. The LinkedIn post deploys "community" in the same way, hoping to evoke a particular feeling about the group as a whole. But companies are businesses, or enterprises, or any of a host of other terms, that, while they lack a certain warm fuzziness, have the benefit of being accurate descriptors.

Sternly Worded

So nine Democrats, from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, have sent a letter to Google:

Citing MIT Technology Review’s coverage, the letter raises three issues: the potential for bias in large language models, the growing corporate influence over AI research, and Google’s lack of diversity.

Congress wants answers from Google about Timnit Gebru’s firing

These are three worthwhile issues. But I don't understand why Congressional Democrats are asking Google to answer for them. Actually, maybe I do. Perhaps what's going on here is one of the standard problems that governmental bodies have; doing things out of the public eye means that the public doesn't see them. Obvious, I know, but a problem nonetheless, as very public positions, like member of Congress, tend to need a certain amount of visibility. And so a public dressing down of Google is being performed, when there very well might be more effective means of addressing the points raised.

If there is actually an understanding of what an unbiased large language model would look like, the federal government could simply not allow its money to be used to purchase them. The potential shrinking of the potential customer base would prompt Google, and likely everyone else in the business, to make sure that their models adhered to the standard for lack of bias.

Likewise, the government could look to non-corporate sources, such as universities, for it's own artificial intelligence needs. Again this would prompt, not just Google, but the industry as a whole, to look for partners in government and academia to share in the research duties.

Forcing diversity is likely a bit more difficult, as this speaks to how businesses hire, and would smack of affirmative action, which tends to spark pointless fights. But this isn't to say that nothing can be done. If we understand a lack of diversity, or more accurately, disparities in hiring patterns, are the result of opportunity hoarding, ways to stimulate the economy to grow more jobs would likely make a dent in things. Personally, my go-to in this would be a relaxation of intellectual property laws, but that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.

I suspect that these would all be more effective than potentially grilling Google in a hearing. They're also all much less certain, since the nine Representatives and Senators can write letters without needing anyone else to support them in it. So I get it. But it doesn't seem to really solve the problem at hand, which is kind of a shame.

Infinite Replay

The company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit said in a redacted Oct. 23 court filing unsealed on Tuesday that the award to Microsoft must “be invalidated because it is the product of systematic bias, bad faith, and undue influence exerted by President Trump to steer the award away from” the company. It called it a “flawed and politically corrupted decision.”

Microsoft said in a statement Tuesday “career procurement officials at the DoD decided that given the superior technical advantages and overall value, we continued to offer the best solution.”
Amazon urges judge to set aside $10 billion cloud contract award to Microsoft

Party One: This contract/job/award/loan/et cetera was improperly given to Party Two, who does not deserve it, because the person(s) with the power to decide were behaving unfairly and with bias. A fair decision would have awarded it to us.

Party Two: We were clearly the better choice, based on the neutral and unbiased requirements of the selection. Party One refuses to acknowledge that they lost fairly.

How many different companies, people or groups can we slot into the roles of Parties One and Two and see this same conflict play out? How many times have we seen this same conflict? The groups are larger or smaller, the stakes vary and the disputants don't always wind up in court, but the dispute is the same. This Microsoft/Amazon case seems to be just another in a long series of iterations on arguments about privilege and merit. One side charges the other with receiving something unjustly and have been privileged by bias, the other side counters that the complaint comes from a sore loser and that no privilege was involved.

Once can see this play out when a man is given a promotion, and a woman charges sexism, or a woman is given a promotion and a man charges political correctness. A White person receives a scholarship and a non-White person charges racism, or a non-White person receives a scholarship and a White person charges diversity quotas. The list goes on, and who is in the Microsoft role and who is Amazon changes with the winds. Each side sees themselves wronged.

On the one hand, a charge of victimization by privilege offers another bite at the apple, on the other hand, calling the charges baseless protects a sense of accomplishment and merit. In the middle is a scarce resource (genuinely, or in perception); something that the two parties both want or need, are unable or unwilling to share, and that each feels that they clearly have the most correct claim to. Meanwhile people line up with either side based on their interests and/or preferences. And the conflicts continue. Because they're easier than dealing with the scarcity problem.

Repayment

Three quotes:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.
Notes on the State of Virginia (Thomas Jefferson, 1785)

I don't want to sound racist, and I'm not racist. But I feel if we put Obama in the White House, there will be chaos. I feel a lot of black people are going to feel it's payback time. And I made the statement, I said, "You know, at one time the black man had to step off the sidewalk when a white person came down the sidewalk." And I feel it's going to be somewhat reversed. I really feel it's going to get somewhat nasty. Like I said, I feel it's going to be - they're going to feel it's payback time.
New York Voters Express Post-Election Hopes, Fears

But political science research has shown that African American candidates often try to deploy deracialization strategies like this to protect themselves from widespread stereotypes about Black political leadership — stereotypes that tend to paint African American politicians as radical extremists who govern exclusively for the benefit of Black interests at the expense of white people.
Raphael Warnock’s Dog Ads Cut Against White Voters’ Stereotypes Of Black People

The first two I've used before; the second more than once. The third is new. But they all drive to a central point, the idea, held by Whites, that Black people are, basically, vengeful.

When White supremacists chant in the streets that they will not be replaced, one wonders if one of the futures that they have in their minds' eyes is one in which the shoe, worn so long in American history by non-Whites, is on the other foot. It's worth remembering that a time in which is was considered appropriate for White politicians to govern exclusively for the benefit of White interests at the expense of Black people is still within living memory; that age was waning when Black Baby Boomers were coming up, but it had yet to fade away for good. The 1950s have yet to fade entirely into the historical record by virtue of everyone with firsthand experience of them having died.

But what's interesting about this for me is how it recalls Thomas Jefferson's prediction that there would never be harmony between Black and White Americans. If there are, as he maintained ten thousand recollections of the injuries sustained, why not engage in some sort of trust or confidence-building measures to blunt those recollections? It's not as if this would need to be some grand, national effort that required millions of people to act in concert; this is what politics and elections are for. Someone proposes some sort of remedy, and people vote that person and others into office on a platform of supporting it.

There is, as I see it, a part of the American psyche that is deeply invested in avoiding fault and blame. I wonder if part of the problem in offering to make amends is that it becomes an acknowledgement of past wrongs. Or maybe it's seen as admission of weakness. I don't know. But it becomes the trap that, if I remember correctly, Ta-Nahisi Coates evoked when he said that the danger of having a foot on someone's neck is the fear that you deserve to, but can't, safely remove it. Perhaps this is why so many Black people feel that they're always called upon to be forgiving of the new provocations that Jefferson predicted. Black anger becomes the justification for maintaining a broken status quo.

There is a saying in social justice circles to the effect that for someone accustomed to privileges, equality feels like oppression. But maybe it simply feels like vulnerability, and America history is full of lessons as to where that lands one.

Pinch and a Poke

According to a survey taken in late November, by the Pew Research Center, about 42% of Black people surveyed said that "they would definitely/probably get a vaccine for COVID-19 if one were available today." FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon, Jr. notes this fact in his article on the groups in the United States that have said they were less likely to request a vaccine.

A lot is made of this reticence on the part of the Black American community, given that it doesn't lend itself to the factors that prompt other groups to opt out. As Mr. Bacon notes: "Instead, experts say there is long-standing mistreatment of Black Americans in U.S. health care research and lingering suspicion from that mistreatment about how the American health care system treats them." This is worth mentioning, because many of these articles are about the vaccine specifically. Women might worry that the vaccine isn't "safe" and people with less education might not have the same sense as others that vaccines will protect the population at large, but those are different concerns than the idea that the people whose job it would be to administer the vaccine aren't on your side. After all, whether the vaccine is safe and effective doesn't really matter if I'm given a placebo because someone at the CDC wants to collect data on how the disease impacts untreated populations over the long term...

There is a tendency to want to boil things down as far as possible, and then deal with the broad swaths. There was an article in The Atlantic that pretty much lumped all of the United States into vaccine supporters, vaccine skeptics and those who could use some persuading. That's likely not a useful level of granularity. People who are dubious about the vaccine itself are different than people who are dubious about the people and the systems that will administer the vaccine. That's an important distinction to make, again, because it doesn't do any good to convince someone that the vaccine will do the job asked of it, if their concern is that they won't be allowed to access it. Not going to the doctor to obtain the vaccine is different than not going out of a conviction they they won't provide it.

And this is the problem with waiting for a crisis to deal with what has been a festering problem of social trust. The need to gain trust quickly leads to an impulse to look for shortcuts. And flattening a myriad of different concerns into the catch-all of "vaccine hesitancy" is just such a shortcut. But a shortcut that doesn't actually get one to the destination isn't useful.

Boarded Up

The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this billboard was that true believers write terrible ad copy. Not that I'm in the advertising business myself, but I couldn't see this managing to sell Christianity to someone who wasn't already Christian. Despite that, I guessed that this was the exact reason for the sign. Back in the 1980s, researchers Rodney Stark "and William Sims Bainbridge (1985) described the entire West Coast as the Unchurched Belt," and Washington still lives up to that nomenclature, with a 2018 Gallop poll finding that 47% of Washington respondents described themselves as "not religious."

Typically, the billboards that I see that strike me as overtly religious in nature are the anti-abortion messages that wander around the area. They don't explicitly mention faith or religion, but I'm unaware of any secular anti-abortion groups that do large outdoor advertising buys. So this one stood out for the messaging itself as much as its content.

Being the curious sort, I searched the phone number online, and found an article about Christian Aid Ministries and a 2017 billboard campaign in the San Fransisco Bay area. According to the article "the organization puts billboards around a number of highly populated cities in the U.S. and Canada. Anywhere, he said, where people seem to be 'walking away from God and truth'." So maybe I was right about the reason for the billboard being up where it was. Although, neither this specific billboard nor its location are on the GospelBillboards map page. This may, however simply speak to its newness... the billboard seems to have gone up in the past week or two. Overall, the placement may have been something of a miss; the suburbs around Seattle have quite a number of large, conservative churches, so the city proper may have been a better location.

But even there, to return to my earlier point, I don't really see this message resonating. I get the basic message; if someone is worn down by anxiety, they could find peace in faith, but "Surrender to JESUS" strikes me as an odd way to get that across. But perhaps I shouldn't be too critical. After all, even in place like Washington, outright atheism is thin on the ground; most of the "not religious" are believers of one sort or another, they just don't belong to a specific church or congregation. And it isn't as if true unbelievers are any better at coming up with good advertising. Which raises an interesting question: What is good advertising in this instance? And how would one judge? A former roommate once came up with a religious riff on "Got milk?" that I found hysterically funny, and would have made for a entertaining advertisement. But it didn't sway me in the slightest. So was it "good?" Likewise for the billboard, while I suspect that Christian Aid Ministries would be happy to have me join a congregation, am I really in the target demographic? If not, does my skepticism of the ad's effectiveness stem from that fact, rather than any "objective" deficit in the message?

Like I said, I'm not in the advertising business. So I can't really claim to know a good advertisement from a bad one outside of my own experience. But in this case, here I am talking about a random billboard by the side of the road. And maybe that's all that was intended.

Uniformly Pale

I was texting back and forth with my niece; I'd asked her what she knew about Cyberpunk 2077. She doesn't really follow video games (understandable) and so the answer was basically not much. So I asked her this:

Did you know that the guy who created the world originally is Black?

She didn't. And I'm not really surprised by this. While Mike Pondsmith has had recent articles penned about him in both Wired and The Atlantic (among others) due to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 being one of the most anticipated titles in gaming, the fact that he's Black is never really mentioned. It's beside the point of the pieces, which are basically there to credit him for his work on the cyberpunk genre. A quick Google news search brings up nothing about him that appears to emphasize this part of his life.

I mention this because when I asked my niece if the world of Cyberpunk 2077 has been created by a Black man, it was because I wanted her to know that Black people were involved in such things, because it's not often mentioned. Race isn't often a big deal unless it's the focus of a story, and that means that it is easy to miss.

To a certain degree, I don't want all of her role models to be Black, because that's limiting. Part of the problem with the quest for role models is that it can put people into the position of waiting for others who can't have or don't themselves need narrow role models. If Barack Obama had needed a Black role model to demonstrate to him that he could be President of the United States, he never would have become the President himself. Being the first at something, or even the first person one knows, means not having a role model to show you that it can be done. But I didn't want her to think that if she went into the production side of the entertainment business, that she'd be there alone.

Sure, there are Black movie directors and the like, but they're mainly known for making things for Black people, rather than general audiences. And the fact that they are Black is a major part of the news stories about them. And I think that this creates the impression that they are rarer than perhaps they are. Which contributes to a sense that the worlds they live in are almost completely White. When I worked for Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, people would sometimes ask me what it was like to be the only Black person there.

"I wouldn't know," I answered, "there are a fair number of Black people there."

Not that Wizards was as ethnically diverse as the nation as a whole; it was significantly Whiter than that. But it was nowhere near exclusively White, despite the fact that tabletop roleplaying, like Dungeons and Dragons or Cyberpunk are considered to be the sorts of nerdy pastimes that are engaged in almost entirely by White people; with only a few Steve Urkel types to break up the monotony.

And part of this is due simply to the fact that the Black people in the industry simply aren't talked about that much, leaving the impression that outside of a few independent creators who are women and/or non-White, that the whole place is populated by Gary Gygax lookalikes. Understandable, but it does a disservice.

The Business

Recently, and by that I mean for some time now, LinkedIn has been chock-a-block with postings like this one. You know, the sort of vaguely feel-good stuff that's always permeated the Internet, because playing to people's need for validation generates "likes." Not to mention, in this case, the added bonus of of the never-ending Church of the Wonderful Leader rhetoric that clogs business internet sites. One of these days, maybe I'll put together a list of all of the supposed traits that "leaders" have and ask if it's actually a portrait of a leader, or a description of a confidence artist. But I digress.

When posts like this first started becoming popular on the platform, which by now was several years ago, there was a vocal minority of people who protested, long, loudly and often, that "LinkedIn is not Facebook! Keep LinkedIn Professional!" For a while, there were a few people who seemed to post nothing else. But since this tended to result in them spreading the very content they complained about, I stopped following them.

In the end, they were shouting into an uncaring void. What would change people's behavior on LinkedIn are professional consequences, since LinkedIn is supposed to be about professional networks. But since, as has been pointed out, open prejudice hasn't resulted in Cancel Culture taking root on the platform, it seems unlikely that vague platitudes would spark much of a backlash, either.

But I do wonder what the people at LinkedIn think of it all. Because the proliferation of the allegedly uplifting crowds out the genuinely useful business posts that would otherwise populate one's feed. Or do they? I'm starting to suspect that instead, they fill in the gaps. And this could be LinkedIn's problem, a dearth of useful, business-related content. Vague stories about how someone gave someone a chance and hired them for a job are far more common that posts announcing that someone is actually hiring, and this has been the case since well before the pandemic. Pleas from people desperate for employment are much more common than useful information on the most productive places for them to actually find something.

Even what's left of the news feed tends to be more about "driving engagement" than actually being useful. And since one would think that people would actually click on things that would be useful to them, perhaps this is an admission that those things are scarce. And so maybe being something of a under-the-radar pseudo-Facebook is what LinkedIn is best at being these days. If it's attempting to really be anything different, it doesn't show.
 

Questions

According to the first episode of the National Public Radio podcast Louder Than a Riot, "All conspiracy theories exist to offer a simple answer to a complicated question." In this particular case, the complicated question is the correlation between music and the carceral state, as Black people in America experience it. And the simple answer?

[Music] industry executives were asked to promote gangster rap in order to drive up the number of inmates and profits for the private prison systems, which funded the business.

The Black community has its share, and likely more, of conspiracies. The first being simple racism. The idea that "a Black person has to do twice as much as a White person to be considered half as good" is common to the point of being ubiquitous in the community. They don't receive as much airtime as QAnon or "Stop the Steal," mainly because they're specific to the Black community, and they don't make themselves public in entertainingly, if disturbingly, public ways. In short, most of the nation can safely ignore them. One of the first ones that I encountered was the idea that the Church's fried chicken chain put chemicals in the food that would sterilize Black people who ate it. I've written about this one before, a couple of years ago. Interestingly, while it most definitely a simple (minded) answer, I'm not sure of the complicated question that it would address. It's not as if there was ever a crisis of sterility in the Black community.

But what often strikes me about these conspiracies is the degree to which there seems to be a concern with secrecy and/or appearances. If the point is to manipulate Black people into committing crimes, so that they can be sent to prison and rented out as cheap labor, why bother with the "manipulate Black people into committing crimes" part? Likewise, if there is some chemical that can somehow only sterilize people of a given ethnic background, why not just put it in the drinking water? Why go through the effort of picking a substandard fast-food restaurant?

Sometimes, the conspiracies make White people seem like Star Wars' Galactic Empire. Unceasingly malevolent, yet hopelessly incompetent. And maybe that's part of the point, rather than answering questions, they simply bolster a person's self-image of a survivor in a hostile world. Or maybe the question is actually a really simple one: "Why do I feel that the world is out to get me?"

Under the Influencer

So I was on LinkedIn today, and someone in my network had commented on or responded to one of the ubiquitous posts from some yahoo crowing about how they'd hired someone off the street who seemed completely unqualified, but "just needed a chance."

"We hired someone with ZERO experience." said the posting. "We thought he would be a great fit with our culture so we took a chance. He has since been promoted twice. Sometimes people just need a chance. Agree?" And that's it. It's basically an invitation to back patting and "all the feels" as the kids say these days.

But I thought about it for a moment, and the posting doesn't say what they hired this person for. I mean, companies hire people with ZERO (the all-caps mean really, truly) experience all the time. The posting doesn't say when they hired this person either. But LinkedIn said that the average tenure of an employee of the company is four years. And that they hadn't added any headcount over the past six months.

So they hired a person into an entry-level role that didn't require any previous experience (if you recall, this used to be the definition of "entry level role" on the basis of a perceived culture fit, and he turned out to do the job well enough that he stayed on, and was promoted. This is worth shouting from the rafters precisely why?

I think I understand the influencer game a little better now. All this guy did was tell a mundane story, but one with all of the relevant details stripped out. The audience then filled in the blanks with their own assumptions and hey, presto! 4,300+ reactions and 600+ reactions over a 12-hour period for a story that might as well be: "We hired an a green guy into an entry-level role and he stuck around long enough to work his way up." There's an assumption that the story is being told because it's worth telling, and so people start embellishing the tale to make it seem like something wonderful. But there's nothing there. There's no actual indication that this guy was down on his luck. Or that anyone considered hiring them a risk. For all we know the role paid below market wages and the promotions were required to keep the guy around. And one of the most common pieces of advice that one gets about interviewing is "make a connection." And what is a great culture fit other than making a connection?

Now I understand why less can be more. All it takes is letting other people connect the dots.

Grüß vom Krampus

So this evening would be Krampusnacht, if that were a thing in most of the United States. While the character of Krampus was enough of a novelty to spawn a few movies over the past several years, it hasn't really caught on. Which is kind of too bad... Lots of kids seem to make the Naughty List their permanent residence, and a bit of Krampus lore might do them a bit of good.

In any event, I have a Funko Pop Krampus figure that I picked up a few years back, and I figured I needed the excuse to use my camera again.

Trustwordiness

So this is a rather clever issue advertisement by Patagonia. The primary text reads as follows:

We're all screwed
So don't tell us that
We can imagine a healthy future
Because the reality is
It's too late to fix the climate crisis
And we don't trust anyone who says
We need to demand a livable planet
Because we don't have a choice

Then comes the punch line (in case you haven't already guessed it): "Now read this bottom up."

To be sure, there's something of a straw man argument there. I'm not aware of any prominent faction in the anthropogenic climate change debate that says that no action should be taken because it's already too late. And while the day might come that it's too late to do anything to prevent the impacts, there will always be a constituency that advocates that some or another action will prevent the impacts from worsening. So I'm not sure who they're channeling with the "It's too late to fix the climate crisis" line.

But the line that caught my attention when I first saw this was "And we don't trust anyone who says." It sums up a lot of cultural and political debate in the United States rather nicely. It's also points to one of the fundamental problems of mindset that make cultural and political debate in the United States so fraught.

Being incorrect about something is not the same as being untrustworthy, and there are no words that may only be spoken by a liar.

If someone were to tell me "we need to demand a livable planet," that, in and of itself, is not reason not to trust them. Personally, last I checked, the planet was quite livable (even if the climate in my apartment can be difficult to manage), and I'm not really the demanding type, but demanding that the damage be mitigated, even if it can't be rolled back seems reasonable. Likewise, if someone were to tell me that "it's too late to fix the climate crisis," that also isn't sufficient reason not to trust them. After all, it might very well be too late. I'm not an atmospheric scientist. I can't even look at the sky and make consistently accurate predictions of what the weather will be like in an hour. That statement alone is no reason to presume that the person saying it is being duplicitous.

But therein, lies the rub. The climate debate (or shouting match, depending on one's viewpoint) has a fair number of people for whom certain statements or beliefs are taken as ironclad proof of an interlocutor's stupidity, credulity or ill-intent. And once someone has been deemed insufficiently intelligent or sensitive, it's considered legitimate to simply write them off and tainted by the wrongthink that lies at the heart of the problem.

Of course, this likely isn't what Patagonia had in mind. I presume that they hoped to spur people into thinking differently, and making different choices concerning their purchasing habits. After all, the thrust of the ad is to give clothing a longer life, and thus reduce the demand for new clothing, and the materials needed to construct it. But, the overanalyst in me came across their advertisement, and well, started overanalyzing it.

Repairing social trust isn't Patagonia's job. Selling clothing is. And while they took a detour from that mission to opine about what the public might do for the planet, they also pointed out part of the reason why the public isn't doing all that it can; the habit of making determinations of trust via ideology.

There Are No Others

“Any given movement's political enemies are all alike; every political ally is is an ally in its own way.”

This inversion of the concept that is sometimes called the "Anna Karenina Principle" often confuses people in the context of American politics, but it really has a simple origin, the concept that: "One is either with us, or against us." Take that, and apply labels to "Us" and "Not us," and that's really all you need. For people who disagree with this viewpoint, it's the root of false equivalence. But in a lot of ways, the charge of false equivalence is little more than a criticism that a difference between two things that is important to the critic is unimportant to the criticized.

For instance, I am acquainted with someone who styles herself a Progressive. The primary thing that matters to her about other people's politics is whether or not they fit within her definition of Progressive. If they do, she will acknowledge those items that they may differ on. Everyone else, like myself, is simply "a Republican." And this is all that then matters about them. And yes, this includes most Democrats. As far as she is concerned, it's all lies; people hiding their true political motives out of malice or having been mislead. Likewise, I have a Republican friend who attaches the label "Socialist" to pretty much any and everyone who disagrees with him on most policy points. In both cases, I've given up attempting to explain to them that I am not what they describe me as. There was nothing to be gained by it.

It's often about options. The more selective someone feels that they can be, the more freedom they have to make questions into a binary. Consider another example, an employer looking to hire someone. An employer who has applicants for an open role lined up around the block has more leeway to treat everyone with any criminal record as equally unsuitable than one who goes begging for workers. With a number of applicants to chose from, an employer is free to dump everyone with a record into one bucket and forget about them. then carefully consider the differences between the rest to determine who they feel is the best person for the job. With only a few applicants, that freedom is not there.

And so it goes with politics. People who understand themselves to be part of a large group believe that they have enough allies that they don't need to make room for others except on their own terms. And while groups might seem fringe to people outside of them, to people inside of them, they often seem expansive enough to win elections; or righteous enough not to care. And so why bother understanding the ways that other people see themselves, when there's no reason to actively appeal to them?

The mixing of ethics/morality and politics that gives rise to this sort of thinking is, of course, not limited to the United States. I suspect that it happens around the world. But, as it says on the tin, I'm an American, and so these are the politics that I can be said to have first-hand experience with. Here in the United States, as the tone-setting activists of the two primary political parties become more and more convinced that the other side's policies are actively bad for the nation, there is less and less room for third parties; anyone who isn't fighting for the right side is combatant for the wrong one.

Everybody Knows

Is American Healing Even Possible? is an interview with one Reverend William J. Barber II of Greenleaf Christian Church, in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The Atlantic's Adam Harris interviewed him to talk about, well, healing. In this case, "healing the soul of the nation."

Honestly, I sort of lost interest in the whole "healing" thing. Possibly because I've heard it a million times already, and am fairly convinced that it isn't going to happen. What did pique my interest was the subject of talking to people. Or, more precisely, telling them things. Before the actual interview section of the piece, Mr. Harris notes a speech by Vice President Pence that references the idea that there was widespread fraud afoot in the election. When Mr. Harris asks Reverend Barber about this, the reply was: “They have been sold a bill of goods that their way of life is being threatened by the others.” Not long after, in the interview proper, Reverend Barber says of Ezekiel: "There’s a scripture in Ezekiel where God says to Ezekiel, 'I need you to tell the nation the truth.' And they may not hear you, because they are stiff-necked people. But at least they will know there has been a prophet among them."

The thought that immediately crossed my mind was: And the obvious difference between Vice President Pence and Ezekiel is what, exactly? Why should it have been clear, or even simply a suspicion, to the people cheering the Vice President that they'd been sold a bill of goods, or to the Jews of antiquity that Ezekiel had some sort of special relationship to the divine? These things are generally presented as being the results of foolishness and/or willfulness, but the fact of the matter remains that human beings were not given any special faculties to discern truth from fiction. Otherwise, Eve would have caught on to the serpent. But more importantly, people wouldn't be willing to sincerely go to the mat for as many things as they do, because they would understand them to be false.

As an outsider, or simply reading a document after a couple thousand years, it's easy to decide what's true, and what's false. But I suspect that it's a lot more difficult on the ground, and in the moment. It's all a matter of faith, and what people place theirs in. And in a lot of ways, faith is nothing more than guessing. When prophecy is self-evidently correct, that usually means that the outcome is so clear that it's no longer prophecy; it's simply extrapolating current events. And when falsehoods are so transparent that they're impossible to believe, they cease to really be falsehoods. I understand the impulse to forget those things; but sometimes, I wonder if people do so more easily than circumstances warrant.