Standing Still

Okay... I know that I'm supposed to be on hiatus, taking a break from the complaining about the world that has tended to make up so much of Nobody In Particular for the past 15 years. But the following question came up as relates to the conviction of former Officer Kim Potter in the death of Duante Wright, and, for better or for worse, here is where I work out my answers to these sorts of questions.

Potter -- I mean, she has to go to prison, but... her story seems credible & if we believe it, should she still be going to prison? Is this progress (in the war against cops killing black people)?

My answer to it is likely overly long, but here it is.

Sometimes, people use the tools of legal process and punishment to push back against the temptation that life offers to deliberately act on the perverse incentives that pervade existence. It provides a counter to the impulse to take by force or deception what would require more effort to obtain within the rules (if it can be obtained licitly at all).

But sometimes, the role of the Rule of Law is simply to be cudgel against those who embarrass the society with their actions, intentional or not, or contribute to a sense of unease.

The "war" should not be seen as one against "cops killing black people," because that is not the point. Progress would be a reduced number of police shootings due to an understanding that people's lives (whether they are Black or not) are valuable enough that they shouldn't be casually ended simply out of an assumption of criminality or so that members of the majority don't have to question the constant fear they profess to feel.

(Note that in the trials of George Zimmerman and Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan, their defenses all more or less came down to "the fact that we confronted a Black person who didn't know us from a hole in the ground with lethal force shouldn't have given them a reason to see us as threatening to them, so their response was a reason for us to fear for our lives.")

Officer Potter does not have to go to prison. Officers have been breezily forgiven of much greater lapses than hers. (A lot of shootings can be traced to officers not following what they were supposed to have been trained to do. Officer Potter had the misfortune of her lapse being close enough to the death that the legal system decided it was deemed relevant in court.) She's being offered up as a sacrifice in the name of bad-faith appeasement: "We gave you Chauvin and Potter (to name two)... what more do you want?" Their convictions will be pointed to a "progress" when it's really little more than scapegoating. Police officers are not the problem; White America regarding the Black population of the country as agents of violence and anarchy is.

Shootings that later turn out to be unjustified are a problem, but they aren't the problem. In the case of Daniel Shaver, he was held at gunpoint by a number of police officers for a quarter of an hour or longer. In all of that time, they were apparently unable to determine whether he posed some sort of threat to them, and they continuously gave him orders, and even as he visible grew increasingly stressed, an officer said to him, and I quote: "Alright, if you make another mistake, there is a very severe possibility you are both going to get shot, do you understand?" There is something broken with a law-enforcement culture that sees lethal force as a rational reaction to a person under duress making what the officers on the scene acknowledged as errors, rather than attacks.

And sure, part of can be laid at the feet of gun culture in the United States. Officers are expected to behave as if any given random citizen they have reason to stop is armed and dangerous.

But officers are often allowed, or even expected, to treat pushback on the part of a person stopped as active disrespect of their authority, and, perhaps more importantly, a threat to their safety. And citizens are at a disadvantage; the Supreme Court of the United States, in Whren v. United States, allows officers to make stops on a pretext; one can be pulled over for a minor traffic infraction so that an officer can attempt to find a greater breach of the law. And in Heien v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that an stop is legal even when the officer is mistaken about whatever law they cite in creating reasonable suspicion. So if an officer pulls me over based on something that isn't even a crime, to give themselves a reason to attempt to incriminate me for something else they understand to have happened, I'm expected to lump it. And if things escalate and I wind up being shot, the officer can point to multiple precedents in establishing that they've done nothing wrong. A police officer can have a shitty day; citizens need to always be on their best behavior.

That imbalance of power is accepted, and so are its consequences, because of an implied social contract that states that the law is only weaponized against those who have done something egregiously wrong. As Alan Dershowitz puts it: "Criminal law is supposed to apply to bad people consciously making bad decisions, that they know or should know are in violation of the law." There is an assumption that those shot by police deserved what they received; this is mostly character assassination in the service of the belief that if one is "a good person," they won't find themselves on the wrong end of an officer's bullet for what turns out to be a bad reason.

And that takes us back to former Officers Potter and Chauvin. The video showed the violations of the social contract. Society looked at the video and decided that Daunte Wright and George Floyd, were,  if not entirely blameless, innocent enough that the power imbalance shouldn't have been used against them.

But the setup that the United States has now more or less guarantees more killings, and, as I noted before, not just by police officers. One of the implicit assumptions of allowing the use of lethal force is that some number of times the wrong people will be killed. That is not, strictly speaking, unjust. It's the nature of the beast. Where the putative injustice comes into play is where the determination of whether someone is the wrong person comes from some feeling about them, rather than a clear-eyed application of the rules. And in this particular instance, Kim Potter was on the wrong side of feeling.

XV

Today marks fifteen years since I started this little project, and to celebrate, I'm going to take a break from it. Mainly to give myself some time to look around and find new things to read, and thus, to write about. Current events have become something of a drag recently, with the same general stories circulating around. So I'm going to find something new, then pick up again. I'll likely have one more post before the end of the year, so that there are the requisite 13, but I don't expect to really come back to this before January. So it won't be a long hiatus, but it will be some time away nonetheless.

In any event, thank you for reading.

Tentcloth

Senator Joe Manchin D (well, depending on who you ask anyway) West Virginia is currently living life in the spotlight for being the man who has derailed President Biden's Build Back Better plan for the United States. And, okay, as a matter of Congressional process, there is some truth in this.

But it might also be worth pointing out that there are an awful lot of voters who don't really care for the Build Back Better plan, and not simply because they're partisan Republicans who would be loath to allow the current President to rescue them from a burning building. One of the really difficult jobs in front of the Democratic Party (and one that I think a lot of people would say that they're bungling) is making the case that the plan that they have is both better for everyone in the long run and sustainable. Again, partisanship plays a factor; once someone's convinced that the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is only s step removed from a force of supernatural Evil, it's hard to get them to consider the benefits of policy proposals.

The Democrats are in the position of having to bow and scrape before Senator Manchin because they were unable to pick up enough seats in the chamber that they could allow their less liberal members to buck the team to shore up their numbers back home. Presumably, Senator Manchin ran for office because he believes that he can do something good for the people of his state, and maybe the entire nation. Sacrificing his political career doesn't help him reach his goals, or he'd have done it already.

If the Democratic Party is going to have any hope of getting things done, they're going to have to attract more voters to their cause. Right now, their coalition may be broader than that of the Republican Party, but it's thinner, and right now, that means that it tears easily. Increasing polarization means that there are fewer people in play who can be convinced to join up. The Democrats are going to have to get out there and find them.

Unthreatening

I have, I will admit, grown weary of the assertion that Donald Trump, and those people who are willing to toady to him, are "threats to democracy."

The central threat to democracy in the United States is the impression that the system hasn't solved people's problems in the past, isn't solving them now and has no intention of solving them in the future.

All Donald Trump had done initially was tell Republican voters that this impression was correct, because the system had been captured by people who were intent on using it to enrich themselves and leave the public (or more specially, the average Republican voter section of the public) holding the bag. And for all that people point to the events of January 6th as evidence that then President Trump is an authoritarian at heart, again, the reason why so many people still back him is that even if they agreed that it marked him as an authoritarian, the authoritarian who has an answer to one's woes seems like a better ally than the democrat who's working on behalf of someone else.

For all that people may be of the opinion the democracy may be the best way to organize a government, democracy is still a means, rather than an end. And like any other means, it has no rights. Donald Trump pulled off two interesting political innovations: he freed himself from the need to appeal to the Republican donor class, through a combination of his own money and prodding the major news media to consistently keep his name in the headlines, and he was able to successfully make a case that his failures were not his fault. This second point is especially important. Despite it being a matter of public record that Republicans in Congress intended to oppose President Obama on pretty much everything they felt they could get away with, his inability to get certain things done was still seen as a failure of his own leadership. President Trump had no such problems. If the Democrats stood in the way of something he wanted he was able to make them into the villains, and plead victimhood (usually on behalf of his supporters) in a way that I don't think that other Presidents have been able to get away with. (Whether they'll be able to get away with it in the future remains to be seen.)

The idea that there is some sort of obligation to democracy has to be discarded. As much as salespeople often get on my nerves, I understand that many of them are good at their jobs, and I've come to understand a lot about politics through the lens of what I understand makes a good salesperson. And I have yet to be in a situation in which a salesperson attempted to sell something to me by making the point that I had an obligation to the item being sold.

As a matter of history, democracy in the United States would likely be regarded as an abject failure by many modern standards. From the outset, where it was designed with the idea that high-status minority (landowning White men) could be trusted to actively look out for the welfare of the rest of the stakeholder community, to today, where it's plagued by structural problems and the inability/unwillingness of the public to wield effective oversight, if one were to design a system from the ground up, it's unlikely that any incarnation of the one we currently have in the United States  would be the first choice. And something that's so clearly a kludge when things are working in its favor can hardly be expected to hold up well in the face of the social distrust that has come to dominate so much of the United States.

Even many of the defenders of democracy don't laud its affirmative benefits; rather they point to examples such as Russia and China as examples of what the authoritarianism they perceive will make things worse. But to the same degree that one man's trash is another man's treasure, one person's oppression is another person's law and order. People have often shown themselves willing to trade another person's interests in order to advance their own.

Democracy is not an effective way of mutually hostile groups deciding who will obtain spoils at the other's expense; otherwise, there would be no need for wars. American democracy has, at some point, to start clearly and openly bringing benefits to a broad swath of the overall public on their own terms. In the past, this has been accomplished by shifting the costs of those benefits to others. That's not going to remain tenable forever. But one way or another, it should be understood that if people don't feel that the current system of democracy is what best advances their interests, then they'll look for, and support something that will. Blaming the person that sells them on it is unlikely to change that.

Niche Humor

The tabletop gamer in me found this uproariously funny. While I have nothing against stick figure families (other than they've become a bit of a cliché), I do find the various ways in which they meet their ends to be amusing. The inroads that geek culture have made into modern society are also interesting. I suspect that many more people than one might initially think will get this joke, if for no other reason than Critical Role and other gaming-related media have become so popular.
 

Who's Keeping Score

Last week, I met with a few friends for a birthday dinner. One of the attendees didn't have a mask with him; he tends to keep them in his car, and this time, he didn't drive himself. I keep a few of the blue surgical-style masks in my car, so we walked over to pick some up. It was about two blocks there, and two blocks back. When we made it back to the restaurant, he put the mask on just outside the door. We then entered, walked the maybe thirty feet to the table, and then both proceeded to take off our masks to drink from the water glasses at our seats. Appetizers were ordered, and eaten, then the main course arrived, drinks were served and refilled, and then dessert came. Then, after the bill had been settled, everyone put their masks on, and we walked the thirty feet or so back to the door, and once out in the street, everyone took their masks off again.

I want to say "while I completely understand the reasons for all of this," I'm starting to realize that I don't. And so the feeling that the current iterations of the non-pharmaceutical interventions that governments have put in place to slow (I want to say "manage" here, but it all comes across as too haphazard for that) the progress of the infection through the population comes across as theatrical, in the sense that it's designed to project that something is being done, rather than to be strictly effective.

And it's not that I believe that all of the measures that have been put in place are ineffective. I have no way of knowing how effective they are or are not. So I suspect that they're doing something. I just can't tell you what that something is. And I can't tell you that it's worthwhile. While discussions of the Reproduction Rate for SARS-CoV-2 in a given location have long gone out of fashion what that number might reasonable be is still useful to know. It's understood that if the Reproduction Rate drops below 1, the disease will peter out at some point; not enough new people are being infected before the people already infected recover, presumably after having purged their bodies of the pathogen. So if measures can push the rate for a disease down to below 1, can keep it there for a sufficient time, they can effectively eradicate the disease in a given population. And for a disease of a given serious, the cost-benefit analysis of those measures will pencil out at some point, and a decision can be made.

On the other hand, there is a Reproduction Rate for a sufficiently serious disease such that the number of people ill enough to require some sort of high-quality care to avoid death or other serious consequences will outstrip the availability of such care, and this place serious strain on the persons tasked with providing such care, especially given that the level of training needed to provide such care makes the supply relatively inelastic. Since that number, whatever it is, doesn't have a set value, we'll just call it x. Again, it's understood that if non-pharmaceutical interventions can bring the local Reproduction Rate down below x, then the overwork of care providers can be avoided. But with this calculation, the idea is that at some point, some other factor, either time or pharmaceutical interventions will come along and push the local Reproduction Rate down even further, or at least stabilize it.

But if broadly applied non-pharmaceutical interventions aren't making the difference between being above a given threshold or below it, are they worth the costs? With the understanding that SARS-CoV-2 and influenza aren't the same thing, I'm going to enlist the flu as my example here. Once the Flu Pandemic of 1918 was a thing of the past, the annual flu season wasn't really seen as a reason to enforce interventions. Even in years where 50,000 or so people died from the disease and its complications, it was understood that the Reproduction Rate wasn't going to rise to x, and it would only be a few months before warming weather pushed it down below 1. Given that understanding, it wasn't seen as worthwhile to pay the costs of mandated interventions, even though it was understood, at least in some circles, that lives would be saved.

I don't know that anyone has ever considered a scenario like the world has at this point, where the lowering of the Reproduction Rate to 1 isn't happening anytime soon, and it's x that's worth looking at. I presume that there are people out there, likely in the public health field, who know what x is. I, for my part have no idea.

What I also don't know are a) what the current Reproduction Rate in my local area is, b) what the circumstances that create that rate are, and c) how much the current batch of interventions, pharmaceutical or not, are doing to it. Something tells me that I'm not alone in that, because a lot of people I know have come to treat a SARS-CoV-2 infection as some sort of roaming death warrant, just looking for someone to serve itself on. This viewpoint, I think, leads to an understanding that every individual instance of illness is something of an avoidable tragedy and unacceptable outcome; another in a host of frightening trees that completely obscures the forest and give things like mask mandates and a need to show proof of vaccination to eat in a fast-food place an air of being ends in themselves.

With the understanding that a certain amount of consistency and predictability are important, does it really make sense to require people who have to be demonstrably shown to be vaccinated to eat wear a mask for the walk from the door to the table and back again? A sick person in a relatively small area can easily exhale enough virus-laden air to reliably infect a number of people around them over the course of a moderate meal (Something I learned the hard way not long out of college.), so is really worthwhile? Or have things, at least in Blue America, where I happen to live, settled into a need to be seen doing something, and that's what's important?

Unlawful

"In his book ‘Mere Christianity’, C. S. Lewis speaks about the ‘Law of Right and Wrong’ or the ‘Law of Nature’."
C. S. Lewis and the Law of Nature

I first encountered this idea from Mr. Lewis when a co-worker posted a link to a YouTube video about the topic.

Just because we use the same word, "Law" for two different concepts does not mean that those concepts have anything in common. Language is capable of expressing analogy, as well as factual similarities. It is nonsensical to refer to gravity as a law that can be disobeyed, because in this context "Law" operates as such an analogy.

I'm not convinced that C. S. Lewis has managed to go from an "Is" to an "Ought" with the reasoning presented in this video, or, for that matter in his book. The overall goal appears to be to go from observed human behavior, through a "sensus divinitatis"-type mechanism, to the idea that morality is a objective facet of reality. But what's missing in the analysis as presented is how people respond to the reactions of other people. The person who never plans to speak to someone again doesn't always bother to make excuses to that person; how can one be sure that people always feel guilt and shame when they don't have to confront anyone? My rationalizing something to a person because I feel it's in my interests to maintain some sort of relationship with them is different than my rationalizing to myself over violating a rule that I've internalized. I think the latter, which Mr. Lewis does not really address, is more important to his argument (such as it is) than the former.

Personally, I think that moral rules tend to look similar across societies because human beings are social animals, and generally speaking, moral rules on the societal level are about allowing societies to stay together. I could imagine a morality that praised fleeing from battles (that one is easy, in fact) and double-crossing others. In the latter case, I would image people who are much better equipped to survive on their own than most of are today. Freed from the need to trust others to assist them, they could do as they chose. Myth, legend and superhero comic books have explored this in depth, I believe.

Thomas Nagel has made the case that mentally sound people will perceive harms against them to be wrong, period, and not just bad outcomes for them as individuals. I disagree with him on that, just as I disagree with Mr. Lewis. I am a believer in rules, but I do not presume that rules come from anywhere other than people. I keep promises to others because I understand the rules of the game, and I expect other people to understand them, too. But I do not believe that other people are required to follow them. They make a cost/benefit analysis that I am not privy to, and if they perceive dealing with me in the spirit of our agreement to be in their best interests as they define them, they will do so.

In the end, I believe that Mr. Lewis mistakes the biological fact of human interdependence for an indicator of some universal law of moral behavior rather than a simple trait of the species. Bats can fly, not because of some universal rule that grants all bats the power to "defy" gravity, but because, as an order, Chiroptera are set up in such a way that allows for this and they thrive in doing so. Likewise, it is not somehow "wrong" for bats to swim; they simply aren't set up to live well (or for very long, perhaps) if they attempt it.

While I think that Mr. Lewis isn't far off the mark when he notes: "We have failed to practice the kind of behavior we expect from other people," I would point out that this works both ways. It doesn't take a particularly astute observer of humanity to note all of the ways in which people use each other as means to ends, rather than, as Immanuel Kant demands, ends in themselves. And even though people are aware of this, they don't always reciprocate the "bad" behavior. I fully expect, for instance, people to be inattentive on the roads. But I still pay attention. The video's implied contention that our expectations are only in line with others supporting our interests is as false as it is one-sided.

I am not sure if the maker of the video is aware of what it called the Fundamental Attribution Error, but they are incorrect in their assertion that all of us invariably make it. Some of us are more than willing to understand the reasons why others place their immediate interests above our own to be the same reasons why we place our immediate interests above theirs, and we realize that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. The presumption that all of humanity is populated by hypocrites is tempting, and understandable, but also, I think, false.

When I first read, "The world owes you nothing. It was here first," attributed to Mark Twain/Samuel Clements, it resonated with me. When I understood that it also applied to everyone else in the world, it was liberating. The idea that there is some objective standard of behavior that people should be held accountable to has its benefits. But so does the understanding that there is no such standard. The benefits are simply different, and people choose which set suit them better.

He's Everywhere

Santa Claus, putting in an appearance at a local shopping center. I don't remember ever believing in Santa Claus as a child, so the fact that he was everywhere during the holidays never phased me; I understood the concept of acting. But I do sometimes wonder how children who do believe than Santa Claus is a real and singular person deal with his sudden ubiquity during this time of year.
 

Sense of Loss

Normally, when I come up with something for "The Short Form," I create it as an image, and share it that way. I don't really know why I started doing that, other than it seemed like a good, or at least interesting, idea at the time.

But the original idea behind "The Short Form" was that sometimes, what started out as a long and involved post (and some of these can be very long and very involved - if only they were as informative) can be boiled down to a sentence or two. Presenting them as large images really just makes them take up space. So today, I'm going to dispense with it, and just go for the simple bit.

It is a measure of how well off we actually are that certain things foregone due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are counted as serious losses, rather than trivialities.

As I've pointed out before, I've become fond of the saying from the older episodes of Doctor Who that "I didn't know when I was well-off," and I am reminded of that often by the way people speak of the things given up due to the pandemic. I don't mean to write these things off as "first-world problems," because for many people, they are legitimate problems. But I wonder if the focus on them blinds people to what life needed to have been like previously, for them to have become problems in the first place.

Underdeserved

Eric Deggans' NPR review of the new HBO mini-series "Landscapers" ends with the following: "But [Landscapers'] quality also encourages viewers to identify with a couple who may not deserve the empathy this show will likely generate."

What makes someone undeserving of empathy? Just what do people understand empathy to be for? Is there a shortage of it, such that it should be doled out judiciously? The main characters of Landscapers, Christopher and Susan Edwards, are murderers and thieves. And their targets were Susan's own parents, no less. It's pretty much a given that they are, as people often put these days "terrible people." And while people may always be the heroes of their own stories, the Edwards are not the heroes of this one.

Mr. Deggans points out that the HBO series does soft-pedal some of the details of the crimes; by not showing the Edwards actually performing all of the acts that they perpetrated in the service of stealing from the estate of Susan's parents. There seems to be a concern that the Edwards are portrayed as simply broken, when more attention should be paid to the fact that they were bad. But since, as the saying goes, mistreating bad people is still mistreating people, perhaps it's worth being cautious about the idea that empathy should be given out sparingly because it erodes our capacity to see others being mistreated.

But empathy should have more uses than just a wish to see people punished less harshly. (And haven't people learned yet that harsh punishments don't seem to deter the people that it's hoped they would deter?) Empathy is not about allowing people to opt out of consequences. It's about seeing them as something other than deliberately perverse. Granted, viewing people as deliberately perverse is often a useful justification for salving injured feelings by doling out an eye (and then some) for an eye. But even then, the punishments that people call for speak more to them, and what they want out of life, than they do to the person being punished.

Empathy is not a naturally scarce resource. It can be created from literally nothing, just from the will to do so. So there is no reason to only dole it out based on what we understand that people should deserve.

 

Shocked Squared

Dr. Ifeanyi Nsofor, the Human Health Education and Research Foundation's senior vice president for Africa and senior New Voices fellow at the Aspen Institute, has an opinion piece on the NPR website today: "I'm shocked by the racist cartoons and travel bans sparked by omicron."

Firstly, one should always repeat "shocked." If it's good enough for Claude Rains' Captain Renault in Casablanca, it's good enough for anyone. Secondly, I'd like to formally propose that people stop using the word shocked to describe how they feel after events that should be perfectly predictable and expected. A newspaper in Spain published a cartoon showing the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as Black people, curly hair, gigantic lips and all? You don't say...

There's something worthwhile in hoping that people will routine act in a way that one understands to be the best they have to offer, or even the median. Being surprised or upset when they don't, however, is pointless. While I understand why Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom tweeted that "It pains me that shows of racism like this still plague the challenges facing the world today," I don't understand what good it does. Surely the Director-General could have made the point that the cartoon was, at best, in poor taste, with less emotional language.

One of the things that my father taught me was that one of the side-effects of public displays of emotion at the actions of others demonstrates that one is not really in control of their emotions... the person acting is. And while there are times when this is a perfectly reasonable or expected (and sometimes even socially demanded) way to go about things, it's also become a go-to reaction for items that are fairly trivial.

Dr. Nsofor also takes aim at the travel bans that have been enacted by several nations in a vain attempt to keep the new SARS-CoV-2 variant outside of their borders. Unless a nation plans to completely close itself off from international travel, that horse has likely long left the barn. But what else does one expect from governments? While it's been said that the Congress of the United States only does two things well, ignore problems or overreact, they're far from the only government body for whom that is an apt description. Panic about SARS-CoV-2 had been the norm for nearly all of the past 24 months. Why would anyone expect that governments, especially those which have relied on fear to justify the restrictions and other headaches they've pushed upon their citizens, would suddenly show poise and thoughtfulness in the face of yet another unknown? There's always been more upside for false positives in the game of detecting "existential threats" than there has been for calmly taking the time to assess the situation, especially if that risks resulting in some short-term pain.

I've often been termed a nihilist or been described as "beaten down" for the habit of understanding that the world doesn't care what I think of it, so I may as well deal with it on its terms, but it's spared me a lot of headaches and stress. And when something or other isn't directed at me personally, there's almost always been a way to make the point that it was somehow sub-optimal without needing to engage in what would strike a lot of people as affected histrionics.

There is no group of people large enough to have entered the public consciousness that's also too small to have no jackasses in it. And the world press corps surely fits that description. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with a handful of depictions of people that are, frankly, little more than fear-mongering, why not focus on the people who are being the change that one wants to see in the world, and rewarding them for the service that they are doing for everyone? (Another nugget of wisdom from my father, by the way.) The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada are unlikely to simply be shamed into reopening their borders by people wagging their fingers. Pointing out that the nations who haven't enacted such bans are doing better, however, just might change something.

If all it took to make people courageous and wise was to begrudge them their fears and foibles, we have solved all of the world's problems already. That alone should be enough to encourage people to hold up those who exemplify the better parts of humanity higher than they do those they are disappointed in.

And Justices For All

After oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, it's been considered pretty much a given that the judicial precedent set in Roe v Wade will be overturned. Whether this is a good or a bad thing seems to largely depend on what one thinks about abortion rights. Which is fair, given that this case is about the state of Mississippi wanting to either substantially limit or do away with the practice within its territory.

But, of course, the Supreme Court of the United States is capable, within limits, of enacting much broader changes than this in the legal framework of the nation. And given that, maybe being clear-eyed about the role of the court in the nations government is in order.

While many people, Supreme Court Justices included, would argue that the role of the court is to be a non-political arbiter of whether specific laws and regulations fit within the limits that the Constitution and other laws set for them, the idea of a non-political Court doesn't really make much sense, given that the people who select the members of the court and ultimately empanel them are themselves politicians. The fight over whether President Obama should have been allowed to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia and, subsequently, whether President Trump should have been allowed to fill Ruth Bader Ginsberg's seat after her death, and indeed, the whole fact that people talk about filling vacancies on the Supreme Court when speaking of the importance of both presidential and congressional elections should have made clear that many people have, for some time, believed that the role of a Supreme Court Justice is to interpret the Constitution and the laws of the United States in accordance with the wishes of those who place them on the bench. So why not own up to that?

There is no such thing as a non-political branch in an inherently political institution. And pretending otherwise doesn't serve anything, other than, perhaps, people's desire to see their wants and needs as being in line with some higher standard than their own interests.

It's easy to see Supreme Court precedents going the way of Executive orders; a particular incarnation of the Court rules one way, and as soon as the Court's partisan makeup swings back the other way, activists and politicians create pretexts to push lawsuits to the Court in order to have that ruling overturned. Until the Court swings back the other way and the cycle continues. While a number of commentators that I've heard recently propose that such goings-on would lead to the Supreme Court becoming illegitimate in the eyes of the public, I think that such presumes that "the public" is somehow completely incapable of understanding what time it is.

As long as there is an understanding that part of the role of the United States government, of whatever branch, is to mediate between mutually hostile groups with an eye towards determining which of them will have their interests gutted in favor of the other(s), the institutions that make up that government are going to be seen as legitimate only to the degree that they appear to side with any individual's chosen group. There is no reason for the Supreme Court to be above this dynamic. So it's not really where the focus should be.

Surfaces

An acquaintance of mine asked me, not too long ago, if I'd grown tired of feeling that I "represented" Black people to the many White people that I encountered on a regular basis. It was an interesting question, and it gave me a moment to think about something that hadn't occurred to me in quite some time. My answer was that as far as most White people I encountered were concerned, I didn't represent Black people; rather I was an anomaly, and so was regarded as a somewhere between different, and the exception that proves the rule.

And that created an opening to talk about how people tend to see the people around them. I've related before how, back when I was still in my twenties, I regarded people who lived up to the stereotype of the casually criminal urban Black man as the enemy, people's whose wanton disregard for the rules of society threatened to make it impossible for me to build a life free from that selfsame stereotype. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that what other people think of me is, if not completely none of my business, far beyond my control, and learned to let it go. But I don't think that I'd ever put much effort into asking why, if someone observed both him, and me, that I should be tainted by said someone observing his bad acts, but he wouldn't be considered to have whatever non-stereotypical qualities that may have been seen in me.

Confirmation bias, it turns out, may very well result in nothing being actually seen at all. Instead stereotypes layer themselves over everything viewed, and become deeper and more comforting every time something can be considered to align with them. A person who is going to brazenly steal a necklace from a woman in broad daylight on a municipal light rail system is likely not all that concerned about how onlookers might take his actions and project them onto millions of people. The only reason I had that concern was that I'd been brought up to understand that the approval of the greater White society was important to have, yet difficult to obtain due to a combination of White prejudice and shiftless Black people who openly played into those selfsame prejudices. But those worries distracted me from what I should have been doing: understanding who I could interact with who was willing to see me for "who I really was" and shaping that into something that was of value to them. In other words, the best way to be seen as an individual is to find those people who see others as individuals, and hang around with them.

But that would have required me to do what I didn't expect others to be capable of. The central concept of the idea that I "represent" Black people to the White people I meet is that those White people are unwilling or unable to look past the surface traits of those they encounter. And my immediate answer, even though I had a couple of specific individuals in mind, betrayed that same thought process. Even after all this time, I've still bad at seeing beyond the surface. I suspect, then, that I shouldn't be so critical of others who have the same difficulty.

No Worries

There is a saying to the effect that there are no stupid questions. As much as I understand the sentiment, there are times when I'm inclined to disagree. Mainly, it turns out, when journalists are interviewing someone and they ask, about one or another topic "how worried should we be?"

I understand the impetus behind the question. But I think that it indicates that fear is, in and of itself, an appropriate or useful response to things.

Katherine Wu, over at The Atlantic, summed up my feelings on the matter when she was asked "How much should we be panicking [about the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant] right now?" Her answer: "Not at all. It’s never time to panic. It’s counterproductive. Reacting wisely and reacting sensibly and using the tools we have is always the best move." And I'd like to see more journalists take this tack in general. Rather than asking experts how frightened the public should be, they should be asking what actions the public can take, or what actions the public should be pushing their governments to take. And if journalists don't change course, maybe their interview subjects should.

I'm going to admit that I'm not terribly familiar with the genre of news that's been billed "Solutions Journalism," but I suspect that to the degree that it actually focuses on the solutions to societal problems rather than simply flogging what continues to go wrong, that it can't be any worse than the old "if it bleeds it leads" model. Since reactions that are wise and sensible are often in the eye of the beholder, the expectation that Solutions Journalism will focus on things that have been demonstrated to work is welcome. People can, and do, argue with results, but results give more to argue with, and for, than opinions about what should be done.

What will really drive a turn towards Solutions Journalism, or at least away from fear-mongering, is public demand. And, more than likely, the demand just isn't there yet. But if the news influences the public as much as people often say it does, maybe they would do well to lay the groundwork for a better product.

A Narrower Focus

NPR recently ran a story titled: "HBO's 'Black and Missing' offers an antidote to Missing White Woman Syndrome." The HBO series follows the work of The Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., as they attempt to bring more media coverage to the many non-White people who go missing in the United States in any given year.

At the end of the piece, one of the documentary's creators, journalist Soledad O'Brien offers eight ways of changing the media dynamic that leads to "Missing White Woman Syndrome." And they're fine for what they are. But it occurs to me that maybe something else (or something different is needed).

Letting local stories be local stories.

The NPR story lists four cases as representative of the problem: Gabby Petito, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and JonBenét Ramsey. These were all national stories. Perhaps it's worth asking "why?" There's an implicit assumption in discussions of Missing White Woman Syndrome, which is the assumption that more news coverage is likely to lead to some sort of better outcome, whether that means someone being found before something serious is done to them or a perpetrator being arrested and tried for the crime.

But I suspect that a lot of what feeds into Missing White Woman Syndrome is the understanding that these are stories that can gather attention (and thus, advertising dollars), but don't really use much in the way of local resources. If the Associated Press or ABC are offering up stories that people in the local news market will want to see, why bother reporting on less-interesting local items. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to look at a number of these stories as the exploitation of people's lives for the sake of easier ratings. I, for example, live just outside of Seattle, Washington. There was no reason at all why I needed to know anything about the Gabby Petito case. No law-enforcement agencies in the area needed to be spurred into action by the fact that she hadn't been found. Her story made international headlines because it was salacious, not because it was useful to an international audience. Violence against women and girls may very well be something that concerns everyone, but many of the individual stories that are trotted out as newsworthy would be just as well served if they only spread beyond their local areas in the aggregate.

When more than six hundred thousand people every year are reported missing, expansive nationwide coverage of even a small fraction of them would take up quite a bit of time. If it doesn't add anything of value, why bother? There's a section of the story headed "Forcing the world to see those long ignored," but there really isn't any way to force that. And if "the world" isn't the right audience, what does forcing them to see random people actually do?

...In One Chart

I don't know that it's as much of a problem as people make it out to be that partisans look to their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum when they are searching for monsters. What is a problem, I suspect, is their unwillingness to rest until they find one.

While I knew a lot of obnoxious people when I was younger, it dawned on me fairly early that they weren't motivated by malice. It took a few years longer, but I learned to extend that understanding of people to broader and broader groups, until my default position was that no-one, or almost no-one, ever acted simply out of some love of evil. And I'll admit that I take a certain amount of flack for that. For some people, there will always be monsters in the world that wear human faces.

As negative partisanship becomes more and more prevalent in the United States, it appears to feed on itself, as partisans not only whip up fear of the other, but take the fact that speakers on the other side are whipping up fear as proof of malevolent intent, and thus, a reason to be afraid.

A politically-engaged acquaintance of mine noted that as Democrats and Republicans grew more convinced of the need to defend themselves from some existential threat posed by the other, the nation was at risk of plunging into open conflict.

"That won't happen because people will be too quick to defend themselves," I replied. "It will happen because someone will decide that the best way to defend themselves is to shoot first." And to the degree that partisans do actually see one another as brainwashed, hateful, racist monsters, they're also likely to see one another as too much of a threat to be allowed to act first.

Keeping Dry

The Seattle area has a pretty significant number of homeless people, and at no point is this more evident than during the rainy season - especially when it actually rains, rather than simply drizzles. Mainly because I don't live in Seattle itself, lot of the homeless people I come across are transient; I'll see them in one spot one day, and maybe see them in another place a week later, or maybe I never see them again. But they don't manage to take up residence somewhere stable, where one might expect to find them week after week. At least, not nearby to where I live. The photograph doesn't really show it, but this was a fairly wet morning; it was terrible weather to be living out of doors without a tent.

I suspect that the man's choice of location was quite deliberate and well thought-out. He wasn't far from a pedestrian underpass that would have done a pretty adequate job of keeping him warm, but it would have also placed him away from the retail area where the people were. The next time I drove by the area, he was, as I expected, gone. I doubt that I'll ever cross paths with him again. But there will be someone else. There always is.

Equal Injustice

Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted, the recriminations have begun. Those, and the protests that will follow the verdict, are unlikely to change anything. Part of the problem is that the legal system in the United States isn't really structured in a way that allows it to treat some people unjustly simply because others have been (or will be) treated unjustly.

When someone is on trial for homicide, and their defense is self-defense, the examination of events tends to concern itself with the act and its immediate antecedent. Jack does something threatening, and Jill shoots him, so the focus of the trial is on Jack's action. Jill is more or less automatically assumed to have done nothing that would have warranted Jack seeking to kill, injure or disarm her. The racial history of the United States, however, has demonstrated that this presumption of innocuousness, is not granted equally to all people. And so when people point out that a Jill were Black, she wouldn't be treated as if she'd simply been minding her own business when Jack mounted an unprovoked attack, they're drawing on that history.

But the legal system does not. And it is unlikely to anytime soon. As much as I understand the problems that people have with verdicts like this, and the legal system that produces them, the problem isn't that Kyle Rittenhouse got away with something. It's that the legal system doesn't do enough to ensure that other people in his situation, but who don't happen to be White, are given the same set of supports that he was.

Laws, and I suspect that this is the case everywhere, are not simply about keeping the peace and protecting rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They're also about assuring people that the Good among them will prosper and the Evil among them will be punished. And people's general understandings of Good and Evil are suspect at best and wildly self-serving as a general rule. And this makes the law into a weapon, to be used against those who are different in a way that make the whatever segment of the society that becomes the mainstream uncomfortable.

Kyle Rittenhouse owes a great deal to the fact that he's not considered to be an ongoing threat to mainstream society. Society, therefore did not feel the need to assuage their fears by throwing the book at him. It's a less formal sort of innocence until proven guilty. The problem that activists point out is, in effect, that many Black people have already been "proven guilty," often simply by association, in the eyes of society at large. But putting Kyle Rittenhouse behind bars would not have changed that.

There is quite a bit to be said for legal proceedings taking a more expansive view of the events leading up to a homicide that is then claimed to be in self-defense. The current habit allows for too much thoughtless, if not downright aggressive, behavior. But that's a different concern than whether the United States, as a nation, can do enough about the deep-seated fears and prejudices that so many people harbor, and can't simply be made into felonies.

Predictable

I am not an entrepreneur. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that I have a generally low tolerance for acknowledged risks. The second is that I have a poor track record for being able to predict what the future might hold. And, given that these are the two traits that appear to best predict success as an entrepreneur, I've concluded that it is a path that I should stay away from.

But like any blind squirrel, I do, on occasion, find a nut. Last May, I was opining about the restrictions put in place to combat the growing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. And I noted that there was a high inflation risk associated with adding money to the economy when the overall basket of goods and services wasn't able to grow at a rate to match it. Now, a year and a half later, there's a certain amount of public heartburn over higher than normal rates of inflation. Now, I'm not going to take credit for being a seer or anything. Predicting that jacking up the money supply when output of goods and services is depressed may lead to inflation isn't exactly a difficult call to make. And I wasn't betting on the ongoing supply-chain problems that contribute to the current situation.

So instead, where I'm going with this is that I suspect that for many people, their conceptualization of money is what stands in the way of their understanding of how economics actually works. If I may be allowed to repeat myself, I'm unsure of the degree to which people understand that while modern economies work on the exchange of money for goods and services, money is not itself a viable substitute for those goods and services. And I think that the inflation worries that are driving economic unease (and perhaps worsening approval numbers for the Biden Administration) are an outgrowth of this lack of understanding.

Part of this may be the simplistic way in which people talk about inflation. National Public Radio's Greg Rosalsky, for instance, puts it this way: "We all know what inflation is. It's when prices go up. You know, companies charge you more for stuff." And while that's an easy explanation, I don't think that it really gets at the underlying mechanics of how inflation actually works, and it leads people to think that the choices that drive it are in the hands of a different group of people than they may actually be.

Given that the Trump Administration was still in office back in May of 2020, I don't know that a better understanding of what the government was seeking to do, and the potential aftereffects of those choices, would have been a reasonable expectation. Governments in general tend to be leery of openly noting the trade-offs that they make when setting policy, and the Trump Administration seemed to be downright allergic to it. And I suppose that they may have been right to have been. The general consensus is that the Biden Administration is taking the brunt of the blame for the current levels of inflation, despite the fact that very little of the causes are the Administration's doing.

I don't know that a better understanding of the causes of and contributors to inflation would have made the public more prepared for this. That seems to run counter to human nature. But even with my very shallow understanding of the economics of inflation, this wasn't a surprise to me. Perhaps people being better educated on what money is and how it functions in an economy could have made things better. But, more likely, it's just another item on the list of things that people are often too busy to think about.

Advantaged

 

Meant To Do That

Speaking from Sweden, [Greta Thunberg] said some "small steps forward" may have been made but the Glasgow Climate Pact was very vague and open to differing interpretations.
Greta Thunberg: ‘COP26 even watered down the blah, blah, blah’

Young Ms. Thunberg is 18 now, and that means that she likely has a few more years in her before she's going to to be expected to understand how the world really works. I don't really remember the death of my own childhood idealism. I've been a practicing cynic for a very long time now (long enough to have become quite good at it), and it's enough to cloud my memory of what I may have been like prior to that.

But I'm pretty sure I was young once, and so there would have been a time when it wouldn't have occurred to me that international agreements for things that no-one actually wants to do were quite intentionally vague and open to differing interpretations.

There was a radio story, noting the fact that activists had complained about nations and businesses with interests in the fossil fuel economy being at the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In the story, an executive of Russia's Gazprom noted that meeting climate goals was not going to be painless, with all of the costs borne by big businesses. It would mean less comfortable indoor temperatures, fewer vacations and alterations to people's diets. Of course, everyone knows this. It's just that the Gazprom executive was willing to say it out load. Everyone else simply signed on to a vague document, secure in the understanding that when they inevitably blew off their supposed commitments in the face of a recalcitrant public, they could fall back on an interpretation that would let them off the hook.

Because at the bottom of it all, Bill Maher is likely right.

I wish your generation was better than mine. I really do. The sad truth is, we’re completely the same. Lots of talk, and at the end of the day, hopelessly seduced and addicted to pigging out on convenience, luxury and consumption.

And I'll own some of this. I remember when my generation was freaking out about the National Debt and convinced that if the adults didn't start doing things differently, it was curtains for all of us. Then us Generation Xers became adults, and, on the whole, we didn't do anything differently. There was no push to either scale back government expenditures or set taxes at a rate that would pay for them. And when the tech bubble fell into our collective laps and showed us a path to actually having the economy generate enough revenue for the government to retire its debts, no-one acted to preserve that. Rather, the big companies that grew out of the internet revolution are now making sure that some upstarts don't do to them what they did to IBM, Sears and Eastman Kodak. And in the process, they're stifling the engine of innovation that brought about the late 1990s boom. And now, the Gen Xers in politics, on both sides of the aisle, have pretty much given up on the idea that borrowing can't last forever. They'll just force the other party's voters to bear the brunt of paying it back. Someday.

So the watering down isn't anything new. Because for all that people say that human beings are ruining the planet, human beings haven't managed to extract enough from it to feel comfortable with what they have. And so the convenience, luxury and consumption train rolls on. Not because "leaders" want it that way. But because "leaders" are beholden to their constituencies, and those constituencies don't want decarbonization enough to proactively take steps to bring it about. And I'll be honest, it's not a big deal to me, either. After all, I'm unlikely to see 2050 for myself. So I'm not out there, making sure that I vote for the greenest candidate, and pushing my friends to do so.

One day, today's young climate activists will have to make the choice; to become adult climate activists or decide that they would rather do other things. When I became an adult, I decided that I had more pressing concerns than the national debt, the greenhouse effect or the rights of humankind. And to be honest, I still do. The problem is that I'm not alone in that.

Arc

One of the nice things about the Puget Sound area is that rainbows are a fairly common occurrence here. They're rarely as bright, or as sharp, as one often sees them on television or in magazines, but the fact that the Sun seems to pop up at random even on rainy days means that there's always a chance that one will suddenly appear, right where you've come to expect them. It doesn't take long to develop a sense for them; an understanding of whether the Sun is in the right position and if the air has the correct amount of moisture. And for all that my Rainbow Sense has become fairly reliable in the years that I've lived here, I still enjoy the little tingle that it gives me to tell me that its time to go outside for a moment, and see something wonderful.
 

Unawarding

I suppose that it’s become somewhat clear that I have a fondness for both teapot tempests, and for coming up with other ways of describing same that carry the same connotation of people being worked up over (what I consider to be) trivialities. But part of what makes such coffeecup conflagrations interesting is what they say about the people involved in them, and sometimes by extension, the broader society around me.

Back in August, Nation Public Radio reported the story of a controversy surrounding the Vivian Awards, given out by the Romance Writers of America. To be sure, I have absolutely no interest in romance novels. I’ve understood myself to be Notoriously Unromantic since I was a pre-teen, and find absolutely nothing about the overall genre the least bit interesting. So this caught my attention because it struck me as classic case of people finding a reason to be outraged over something trivial. But, there is something deeper beneath that, and that’s what held my interest (albeit not long enough for me to work out an entire weblog post at the time.

The Vivian Awards are, like a number of such things, broken down into several categories, like “Best First Book” or “Historical Romance.” And what triggered the controversy earlier in the year was the award for “Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements.” The basic plot of Karen Witemeyer’s At Love’s Command is simple. An officer of the 7th Cavalry Regiment (the same 7th Cavalry Regiment once commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer) is involved in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek is what it now the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. After asking for God’s forgiveness and seeking redemption, he gets the girl, as they say, and the two of them have their happily ever after.

Ms. Witemeyer wins a Vivian for her book, cue the outrage.

But outrage, in and of itself, tends to be uninteresting. What stood out for me as NPR relating that author Jenny Hartwell had posted her letter to the Romance Writers of America to Twitter, including the following:

Romances have flawed heroes and heroines who find redemption through the transformative power of love. However, aren’t there some people who shouldn’t be redeemed?

Ms. Hartwell then goes on to list the Usual Suspects for being irredeemable, “Nazis. Slave owners. Soldiers who commit genocide.”

But my answer to her question is an unequivocal “no.” There are, as far as I’m concerned, no people who should not be redeemed. And in this, I’m going to invoke the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Professor Bryan Stevenson: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” And, I would add to that, “no matter how many times we’ve done them.”

I understand the impulse to divide the world into Good and Evil. But, to (screw it) appropriate the language of social justice, calling someone evil is simply a means of “othering” them. And it’s something that people do, in my understanding, as a way of describing themselves. In other words, people call out others as evil, especially irredeemably evil, as a means of marking those people as different from themselves, and not simply as less (or un-) deserving of empathy, understanding or, for that matter, love/being loved. The phenomenon of Whataboutism can be seen as a direct result of this sort of thinking. “If we Soviets are bad actors for the way in which we treat dissidents,” the logic went “are not you in the United States just as evil for the way that Negros are treated?” And to the degree that Cold War criticisms of the Soviets’ human rights record was intended as a means of casting said Soviets as bad people, they had a point. The United States couldn’t claim to be a nation uniquely interested in the rights of all people with Jim Crow being so obviously practiced throughout the South, and all sorts of racially unjust policies (such as redlining) liberally scattered around the rest of the nation. As a defense against the specific charges leveled, Whataboutism is patently pointless. But as a defense against the charge of unique moral deficiency, it’s spot on.

The point behind casting people as irredeemable for the choices of their past is to preclude them from being considered worthy for the choices they may make in their present or their future in a way that most people want for themselves. And that’s different from understanding culpability. While I personally don’t understand the zeal for tracking down and bringing to trial nonagenarians who worked in the prison camps and death houses of Nazi Germany, I understand the idea that as a legal matter, there is no recognized Statute of Limitations on their involvement. But attempting to justify their punishments by claiming them to be perpetually stained by actions that took place so long ago that people have been able to live full lives from end to end in the interim strikes me as attempting to make vengefulness seem like a form of righteousness. (Not that I have a problem with vengefulness, in and of itself. But when people won’t own up to it, then I become dubious.)

But maybe that’s just me. I’m an old man, and maybe I’ve simply aged out of the idea that perpetual grudges are a form of power, rather than simply a millstone around one’s neck.

Cookie Jar

One of the aspects of democracy that I often see people at odds with is the idea that representative government is not designed to produce policies in the best interests of the general public; it's designed to produce those policies that a majority of voters believe to be in their interests or at least will otherwise support.

When the populace tends to be disengaged (mainly because they are busy with things of more immediate importance to themselves), they tend to follow the lead of people that they understand (correctly or not) to have their interests at heart. This means that in order for politicians to retain their offices, they have to appeal to that smaller segment of the overall public. It's true that a politician can decide to ignore this more engaged group of voters and activists, and pursue different policies, but unless something turns out to be wildly popular, the next officeholder can always simply undo it. For all that the political class is perceived to hold the reins of power, persistent changes are more difficult to effect than is often given credit for.

I mention this because I was reading yet another litany of complaints about Texas Governor Greg Abbott. While Texas is often held up as an example (although sometimes, only one of many) of Republican partisanship run amok, I'm not sure that Governor Abbott is as much in control of things there as he is often painted. Whether it's Governor Abbott issuing an executive order that bans any entity within the state, government or private from requiring employees to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, or the legislature's "anyone can sue anyone else who helps women obtain abortion care after 6 weeks" law, the fact of the matter remains that these measures appeal to a certain constituency that the Governor and Republican state legislators feel they need to have support them if they are going to stay in office. And so even if they personally thought that these things were bad ideas, they push them. Because otherwise, they won't have the ability to enact any good ideas.

And I understand that I'm coming down on the side of "well, if the public decides that they want cookies for dinner, then they can have cookies for dinner." And that's because while democracy is a form of government, enlightenment is not. And while enlightenment may mean that people consistently make the "correct" choices on matters of justice or injustice and right or wrong, democracy operates, as one author put it, on sentiment. And so policymakers have to work within what they understand the current public sentiment to be. Columnists, pundits and journalists can claim that as members of "the élite," that politicians have a certain amount of power to dictate to people what their sentiments should be, but I suspect that if this power were as strong as it's made out to be, much of the world would look very different than it does.

Disinterest

I've never been a fan of the trope of "People voting against their economic interests." There are just so many things wrong with it, that it strikes me as patently thoughtless. For starters, economic interests are not everyone's end-all and be-all. Declaring groups of citizens non-people and allowing others to simply take their homes and possessions is certainly in the best interests of people outside the groups voted out; this is basically what happened to the Japanese in the United States during World War Two, and it's now considered a blot on America's record, rather than a rationally self-interested action on the part of those persons not of Japanese ancestry. And American history is full of such examples where, looking back, modern Americans see placing economic interests above legal and/or ethical ones as failings.

But, perhaps more salient to the current American electorate is the fact that turning to other people for one's economic interests requires trust. And this bring up another circumstance in which people are, on the surface, constantly acting against their economic interests, and no-one bats an eyelash. There is a common confidence trick called "money flipping." The basic gist of it is this, some person offers another person, generally a stranger on social media, the chance to invest some amount of money for a short period of time, and, at the end of that time, they'll be returned some multiple of the amount invested. Anyone who understands anything about how investing actually works doesn't even entertain the thought that these sorts of schemes might be legitimate, even though, technically, they aren't outside the realm of possibility. But one is considered gullible, if not simply stupid, for going along with something like this, because invariably, the person who the money was invested with simply vanishes without a trace.

And that brings me to politics. Here in the United States, the Culture Wars are never very far away, and I think that I'm starting to understand a reason for this. The Culture Wars have the effect of divorcing politics and policy. Two politicians can espouse roughly the same policy, and decent-sized groups of the public will embrace or dismiss them based on perceived positions in the Culture Wars, rather than on the substance of policy. Mainly by making other people out to be liars and confidence artists. While its common for people to decry a lack of support for some policy or another as "people voting against their economic interests," that assessment presupposes that a certain level of trust exists. People trust that a jobs plan proposed by a member of the opposing party will raise their own standards of living about as much as they trust a money flipper to actually come through with a supposed investment. And since, in a time of partisan-induced government gridlock, policies are unlikely to produce widespread and unambiguous benefits that don't have costs for anyone, it's hard to point to the evidence of success as a means of swaying people.

And since the Culture Wars (at least as they exist in the United States) are there to be fought, rather than to actually be won, there's never any real expectation of victory, or, it seems, even measurable progress. The fight is the end in itself.

It's rather clever, really. It nearly removes any and all expectation from politics, by changing the interest calculation from one of tangible benefit to one of an endless conflict with people whose only defining characteristic is that they are not be trusted.

Show and Tell

I was reading through the NPR homepage this morning when I came across this story: "A girl was rescued by police after she used a distress signal popularized on TikTok." It's pretty much what it says on the tin: A teenaged girl was rescued by police after she was able to signal another motorist with a hand signal shown in videos posted by the Canadian Women's Foundation. It's not, as the headline hints, just a TikTok thing; it's just that TikTok is the current name synonymous with "social media" these days, and as such is a handy journalistic shortcut.

In any event, after a quick run-through of NPR's headlines, I figured I would see what had caught the BBC's attention, and, lo and behold: "Missing girl found after using viral TikTok sign." Of course, by this point, I knew how the story went, but I read it anyway; it's interesting to see how differing new outlets cover the same story.

But what caught my attention in the coverage was the imagery. Both stories lead off with a stock image of a smartphone with the TikTok logo on it. There must be a rule or something. It's an image for the sake of having an image, and it adds nothing to the story. And for the NPR story, that was that, what folowed was the text of the story, and that was it. The BBC, however, went further. They devoted some page space to the Laurel County (Kentucky) Sheriff's Department's Facebook post on the arrest, but they also showed a diagram of the hand signal the girl used.

Both stories describe it, and it's fairly simple. One holds up their hand, palm facing the camera, tucks in the thumb and then traps the thumb by curling their fingers over it. But the diagram makes clearer what one would be looking for without needing to demonstrate it oneself.

It's the age-old idea of a picture being worth a thousand words. Like I noted, it's pretty easy to describe; after all, it's only two steps. But I suspect that even after having read it, had I seen someone make the sign on a video call (which is what it was first design for) or from a car window, it wouldn't have been clear to me what I was looking at. The illustration makes it very clear.

The BBC then goes on to show a video from the Canadian Women's Foundation of how the sign might be used in action. Again, very helpful. And I started wondering why NPR hadn't presented a graphic of the same sort. It's not like NPR is allergic to illustrating its stories. They went to the trouble of having someone draw a picture of someone freaking out at a karaoke bar that the singer might infect them with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, so it's not like they didn't have the resources.

What the NPR story did instead was links. There were five links in the story: to the Laurel County Sheriff's department, to the Signal for Help campaign, to a story about the spread of the campaign on TikTok, to the Canadian Women's Foundation and finally to another NPR story about the surge in domestic violence that lead to the Signal for Help campaign in the first place. A number of NPR stories are like this, with the potential to lead one off into a rabbit hole of other stories. The BBC story felt, in that sense, much more self contained, bringing into itself the context that a reader would want to see. I suppose that it could easily be a matter of policy or of audience tastes, but in this case it came across as better journalism. But I'll have to be on the lookout for more stories like this on both sites, to see if a pattern emerges.

Right Speech

I was listening to the podcast "Right Mind - What does the Republican Party stand for?" from The Economist. Part of the podcast was an interview with one Patrick Deneen, a conservative political philosopher. When talking about how he thought that conservatism might create new coalitions, he mentioned that he thought that conservatism would be less about dictating to people how they should live (an odd understanding of what a movement lead by social conservatives would prioritize, in my view) and more about providing incentives and government support for the traditional ways of living that social conservatives favor. During this section, the following stood out for me:

What can we do to make up for the loss of the one-person income; enough income for one parent to be able to stay at home if they wish. Uh, he or she wishes, sorry.

Emphasis in original - seriously. I found myself asking, what's wrong with using "they" as the singular gender-indeterminate; a formulation that a lot of us had been using long before it became a pronoun for people who found themselves uncomfortable with the standard binary? It epitomizes part of the problem with the Culture Wars in the United States; the idea that one or the other side will cede some silly point, and then cast that as a victory for the other side that represents an existential threat.

There is no valid reason to believe that the term "they" must only refer to those persons who chose it as an alternative to he or she. "I see a person over there, but do not know what they are doing," has not suddenly become grammatically incorrect over the past few years. If a person with a strong gender identity wants to stay home with their children, let them. English has not demanded that one list out all the possibilities in the past, and it doesn't demand it now.

Conservatives love to deride Liberalism as demanding fealty to trivialities in speech and expression. Pot, kettle, black, fellas.

Prepare For Liftoff

A kite surfer, starting their run out on Puget Sound.

 

One Of Us Is Crazy...

Am I the only person who has the feeling that some of these conspiracy theories are actually carefully choreographed trolling operations? John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing that he faked his death and becoming Donald Trump's running mate in 2024? Seriously? This definitely falls into the category of "you can't make this stuff up."

But I suppose that it's a sign of how desperate people have become that things like this make sense to them. After all, people who have a sense that they've mastered their world don't tend to fall for tales that a secretive cabal of Satanist politicians have wrecked the place and need to be stopped at all costs. As much as I tend to find people's supernatural fears to be bizarre, I understand the sense of order and predictability that they bring, and the feeling of control, or at least understanding, that comes from that. It's like the idea that if one simply checks around their car for plastic bottles stuck in the wheel wells, one will be safe from carjacking. Still, I'm glad that I don't life in a world so chaotic that Robin Williams and Michael Jackson need to be the ones to set things right.

Naptime

I am not a fan of "Woke." Mainly because I have no facility with African-American Vernacular English (also known as "Ebonics") and grew tired of being hassled about that when I was in college. So I will admit to a contrarian streak that will happily claim to be sleeping for no other reason than it annoys people who annoy me.

But I've found the rather heated hostility to "Woke" culture on the part of many American conservatives to be more than a little mystifying. Mainly because I have no Earthly idea of what they actually understand "Woke" to mean, and what they have attributed to it that makes it such a threat. It's like watching a person desperately climb a tree to avoid someone teacup dog. It's pretty clear that they're deathly afraid of the animal, but one wonders what they could possibly see in it that would justify such a reaction.

As near as I can tell, to be "Woke," is to be little more than constantly aware of prejudice, discrimination and whichever of the myriad forms of social inequality that humans are capable of visiting upon one another. Personally, it's never really appealed to me because there is a sense of looking under each and every stone to find yet more injustice. And if a given stone doesn't have any injustice underneath it, then one hasn't looked hard enough. It plays into a sense that, more than the world simply being an unjust place (and I, for my part, expect nothing different from it), everyone who isn't one's ally is an active agent of injustice. And that sort of "if you're not with me, you're against me" logic has never really been attractive to me: I'm perfectly fine with a world in which being neutral in a conflict of mine is not aiding and abetting the forces of injustice.

But maybe that's why there is such a strong "counter-Woke" culture. After all, "if you're not with me, you're against me" logic is pretty common on the American Right, too, and many people see pernicious evil in nothing more sinister than not seeing them in the way they wish to be seen (or, for that matter, see themselves). Most people, it is said, are the heroes of their own stories. Wokeness, with its propensity for finding villains, can be understood to be a challenge to that ideal. But I think that there's another piece to the puzzle, namely the way Americans tend to deal with history. Generally speaking, Americans have short memories, historically speaking. The difference between 50 years ago and literal ancient history is often perceived as purely academic. But in its focus on how current patterns of injustice have their roots in history, Wokeness can often look like holding a very long grudge. And in a culture that sees intentional wrongdoing in not allowing bygones to be bygones, one can see how mutual hostility would come out of that. As an aside, I also think that American Christianity plays a role in this, in presenting forgiveness as something that one does for the benefit of the people who have wrong one, rather than for the self. And to the degree that Americans expect to be forgiven for past transgressions, and those transgressions forgotten, constant vigilance feels like a violation of a social contract.

In any event, it all strikes me as yet another symptom of a society that has lost (or discarded) the ability to empathize and trust. It's a function of neediness, I think, and Americans of all stripes are very good at seeing themselves as needy.

Woodpile

A combination of high tide and brisk onshore winds dropped a surprising amount of wood on the beach at Carkeek Park in north Seattle. There was quite an interesting variety of items, including what looked to be the top post of a bannester from someone's home. I suspect that a pile of junk wood was washed into the Sound with the rains last week, and it was now being deposited. Although some of the wood, like the log in the upper right, had apparently been in the water for some time.
 

One, Two

Many Americans fervently believe that the Second Amendment protects their right to bear arms everywhere, including at public protests. Many Americans also believe that the First Amendment protects their right to speak freely and participate in political protest. What most people do not realize is that the Second Amendment has become, in recent years, a threat to the First Amendment. People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives.
Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick, The Second Amendment Has Become a Threat to the First, The Atlantic. Wednesday 27 October, 2021

"Many Americans," it seems, don't understand what the Bill of Rights was actually about. One can argue with the intent of the Bill of Rights, and, for that matter, with the intent of the Constitution of the United States as a whole. And one can certainly argue with their efficacy in practice. As much as many Conservative Americans have a sense that the Constitution made the United States into a uniquely free and fair society from the moment the last quill left the parchment, there's a valid counter-argument, and one with plenty of support in the historical record, that it was at least 190 years before the lofty ideals laid out were seriously enacted.

But back to the opening quote, which is the beginning of the cited article. The First Amendment does not create a absolute privilege to practice a religion, speak freely or petition the government free of any potential consequences. It simply says that governments, whether they be at the federal, state or local level, may not criminalize or otherwise punish such behavior. If an ill-tempered next-door neighbor takes exception to someone's choice of words and starts a fistfight, that's not a violation of the Constitution. It's simply assault and battery. Now, if a government decides that it will decline to prosecute assaults on its critics, with an eye on allowing ordinary citizens to do what it cannot, that would be problematic. (And this is why the Texas abortion law has been making a number of people worried, regardless of their stands on abortion rights.) But the First Amendment does not require governments to treat threats of violence made with the aim of silencing people more seriously than it treats other threats of violence.

Likewise, the Second Amendment is not a blanket license to walk around with a weapon wherever one pleases. If a property owner, including government property owners, says that weapons are not allowed on the premises, then they are not allowed on the premises. Again, no Constitutional right has been violated. Whether or not a government may effectively declare ownership of any and all public spaces within its jurisdiction, and effectively criminalize bearing arms in those spaces may be a matter of debate, but it's also a slightly different question. There are people who believe that the right to keep and bear arms should be limited only to the home, and the reasoning behind that is easy to understand. But so is reasoning that says that people were intended to be allowed to bear weapons more broadly.

Part of the problem with the idea that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights represent the best ideals of humanity (outside of the fact that such a claim certainly leaves room for debate) is the sense that no trade-offs were involved. But personally, I find it rather difficult to believe that the people who wrote the documents didn't consider that someone might use the processes and freedoms listed within to bad ends. It also seems unlikely that someone would believe that granting the general public the right to keep and bear arms would never result in someone being injured or killed inappropriately. And the common argument that people during the founding of the nation didn't envision military weapons in the hands of civilians sort of falls flat. A well-made musket of the time was basically a military-grade weapon, and many members of the Continental Army had brought their own weapons. This practice continued even up to the Civil War, when the Union and the Confederacy alike had too few weapons to equip all of the troops they had recruited.

But that's beside the point of this posting. Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick lay out beliefs about the Constitution that, even if "many Americans" think are true, are not the way the document actually works. As concerns free speech advocates, the problem is not the Second Amendment, but the age-old difficulty that arises in judging when someone intends to threaten another person. There is a mindset in the United States that associates violence with guns, because that's what tends to attract the media coverage. And while guns are a weapon of choice for a large number of violent encounters, they aren't the only choice. Just the rate for stabbings alone in the United States is about half of the entire homicide rate for the United Kingdom. At some point, the idea that violence is a good way of solving problems is going to have to be dealt with. And I don't think the Constitution will be much help there, even if people have come to understand what it says.

Clean Sweep

Washington State's Secretary of State, Kim Wyman, has been hired to be election security lead for the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. I have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed by this. I liked Secretary Wyman, and was hoping that she'd run for Congress, or maybe Governor (not that I'm sure she'd have won; the state hasn't had a Republican governor since the mid-1980s). But instead, she's off to the Biden Administration, and while I wish her the best in her new role, that does leave the state without any Republicans in statewide office.

And I have a sinking feeling that I know what that means.

During the last Governor's race, the Republican Candidate, Loren Culp, had little going for him other than not being Governor Inslee. Other than that he was basically a Trumpist no-hoper. The fact that he managed to outperform the former President's numbers means that he had a bit of support from outside of President Trump's base, but despite that, the race wasn't even close. Mr. Culp's insistence that he'd lost due to voting irregularities made him look like someone who hoped to ride the Trumpist bandwagon, rather than a serious candidate.

I have a bit of worry that this is the kind of candidate that the Republican Party will run for the next Secretary of State election. On the one hand, it makes sense that this is what they would wind up doing. After all, there are a fair number of Trumpist Republicans in Washington, and so it's likely that a fellow Trumpist will be the only one with a chance of surviving the primary. Of course, the top-two primary system complicates things somewhat, but it's unlikely that the Democrats will allow themselves to wind up in a position where they have no-one on the podium. And pretty much any Democrat is going to beat a Trumpist Republican, leaving Washington effectively a one-party state for state government.

Which is far from the worst thing in the world, but I'd rather a bit more of a mix to elected officials. But I'm not a Trumpist, and if the past few years have shown me anything it's that those who are Trumpists don't care what I think.

Tipping the Scale

I was talking to a friend about the general state of the world around us, and we came to a simple conclusion: Humanity does not scale well. It was something of a triviality at the time, a basic aphorism that arose out of a conversation because it neatly explained the central theses of that particular conversation, but in the intervening years, I've noticed that it seems to be more generally applicable.

It is, however, not a particularly obvious conclusion to come to. After all, by some measures, humanity is a remarkably successful species, mostly due to its spread across the globe. While people are sometimes given more credit than they are due for the impacts that humanity is capable of having on the environment, the fact of the matter remains that human beings have the capacity to deliberately create a mass extinction event that rivals any of those in the fossil record. And for quite some time, the fear was that this would come about because of rivalry and hostility between different groups.

People are, it seems, expert at not getting along with one another. But that, I think, ignores the fact that all animals compete for resources, and not necessarily only when said resources are scarce. Humans  have come to inhabit every ecosystem on Earth that is even marginally livable, because for many people, time and again, the answer to competition was to look elsewhere for sustenance, if not always prosperity. The human migrations that have produced the phenomena people refer to as race and foreign languages were all driven by the fact that human groups could only grow so large before they found themselves incapable of meeting the challenges of their local areas through cooperation. It's built into the basic architecture of the species.

Of course, there is a problem with the idea that humanity does not scale well because there are legitimate barriers that mean that it cannot scale well. Humans, like all animals, are driven to reproduce. While there are large numbers of people for whom being parents is a sub-optimal choice, for many others, it's simply the thing to do. Sometimes that's for reasons of economics and other times out of reaching for a form of joy, but whatever the reason, there are a myriad of reasons that people seek to multiply.

I don't know how that tension will ultimately resolve itself. It's possible that it never will. But I suspect that eventually, the limits of humanity's ability to scale will catch up to humanity's ability to use technology to expand those limits. This will not result in the end of humanity, more than likely. But it will be highly disruptive, even though it's become more and more clear to me that the inability of humanity to scale indefinitely is known, if not always understood.