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According to Wikipedia, "Many of the beliefs traditionally attributed to the historical Socrates have been characterized as 'paradoxical' because they seem to conflict with common sense." Two of these supposed paradoxes are as follows: "No one desires evil," and "No one errs or does wrong willingly or knowingly." (I would rephrase the second statement as "People only err or do wrong unwillingly or unknowingly," since that strikes me as a more accurate rendering of its meaning.) Oxford reference describes "Socratic paradoxes" as "surprising and unacceptable conclusions."

I had encountered the Socratic view of wrongdoing previously, and, as I understand the world, it's a true statement. I remember it as something of a revelation, in the sense that it clearly articulated something that had occurred to me previously, but that I hadn't actually directly articulated before. So I was surprised to find it viewed as surprising and unacceptable. In conflict with common sense, I understand a bit more. I understand that not everyone believes that no one desires evil or that people only commit evil acts unwillingly or unknowingly. But why that dissenting view should be labeled the common sense one seems arbitrary, although to be honest, the whole sorting of ideas into buckets of "common sense" and "not common sense" strikes me as arbitrary.

In any event, it reminded me of my father's old saying that "Obvious is something that is so crystal-clear that you are the only person who sees it." And while I don't claim to have anything in common with Socrates, it occurs to me that just as I found that the "paradoxes" fit well within my lived experience, I suspect that there was something within his lived experience that lead him to that conclusion. (Or someone, given the trickiness of proving that Socrates was a real person.) The thing about lived experience, however, is that it is personal, and that means that it can be difficult to truly share with others. So while I can ask what it is about my lived experience that leads me to agree with people, such as Immanuel Kant, who believe that humans are never motivated solely by the desire to do something wrong, I can never really answer that question; because even if I had perfect recall of my own lived experience, I have no similar access to anyone else's.

All of which, I suppose, is merely a long-winded way of noting that I often find my own understanding of the world to be as opaque as other people's understanding of it. Which then, leads to a fascination with understanding people and how they think; because I feel that I understand myself better. Of course, the flip side of that is that if understanding others is a requirement for understanding myself, I will likely never understand myself fully. I'm not sure yet what I think of that.

Monster Mash

Languages change over time. And, occasionally, in real time; or so it seems. For example, the definition of "racism" is in a state of flux. When I was young, it was more or less understood that racism referred to an active dislike, if not outright hatred of, one or more groups of people based on their, well, race. The actual number of races and their boundaries was never really all that well defined, but if someone felt that all Asians were shifty or all Jews were greedy and dishonest, they were a prime candidate for the label.

Presently, there is a sizable constituency, mainly on the political Left, for the idea that racism is a form of wrongthink about race. The actual number of races and their boundaries are still not at all well defined, but if someone feels that Black Americans are actually in a somewhat decent place, or that there are broad cultural concepts common to all Latin Americans, they're a prime candidate for the new label.

But the old definition isn't actually dead yet. Unlike "terrific" which has pretty much lost any connection to "terror" over the past 150 years or so, the shift of the term racism from active hatred of a group of people to a systemic social force isn't yet complete. And so for a lot of people, the terms racist and racism still conjure up monsters, like literal Nazis, the old Skinhead movement or Ku Klux Klansmen; people who one would expect to do genuinely terrible things to people, simply for the crime of being different.

And I suspect that this monstrosity that lingers on the term is a large part of the reason why it's become so difficult to talk about race in the United States. A person who considers themselves "woke" may call out someone else for being racist for their support of something seen as cultural appropriation, but that someone else hears themselves being lumped in with the 20th century's worst villains. There might be many degrees of racism, but in day-to-day language one word to rule them all simply makes for confusion.

Not to mention shutting down conversations. Two parties to a conversation may realize that one of them is simply defending what they've come to think of as a neutral meritocracy. But if the only way to describe that is with the same words one would use to describe someone who's open bigotry allows them to assault or even kill someone, it's going to lead to a lot of misunderstandings.

But it's the nature of the beast. Language refuses to remain static, otherwise, modern English might still bear a passing resemblance to it's medieval roots. Eventually, I suspect, the transition will be complete, and racist will have lost much of its sting, that having been loaded onto another term for monster. But in the meantime, an unwillingness to recognize that language isn't the same thing to everyone will continue to torpedo attempts to communicate.

Casualty Counts

When National Public Radio first launched their Planet Money podcast, they had a Flickr photo stream to go with it, and I contributed photographs. I thought of that today while looking through some recent photographs I'd taken. Like this one:

During the "Great Recession" small business closings were everywhere, and they were something of a big deal. Now, small business closings are everywhere, but given the general state of anxiety over the pandemic, they receive much less notice. Part of it is, of course, the pandemic sucking all of the metaphorical oxygen out of the room. People are very much concerned with their health, and its understandable. But I think that it's also that these sorts of business closings are considered a secondary effect. During the financial crisis that kicked off the recession, business closings and job losses were the primacy means that the situation impacted a number of people. Now, they're a side effect.

But one with lasting consequences. It's likely that some of these businesses will be replaced when things settle out, however that comes to pass, but many will likely be simply absorbed. Maybe Costco Travel broadens its portfolio a bit, and obviates the need for something to take the place of Cruise Holidays. If that happens, where do those former employees go?

Missed Messaging

The recently greenlit COVID-19 vaccines represent our best chance at ending the pandemic, so it’s particularly jeopardous to have the American public spending time fighting over a basic fact: vaccines are safe, effective and necessary for public health.
Kaleigh Rogers "Why Fights Over The COVID-19 Vaccine Are Everywhere On Facebook" FiveThirtyEight

While I completely understand the impulse here, there is one somewhat pedantic point I'd like to raise: "safe, effective and necessary for public health" are not part of the definition of "vaccine." And, as a result, it's entirely possible for something to lack some or all of those characteristics, and still be a vaccine. It's unlikely to be a vaccine that makes it to market, given the generally rigorous testing that goes into such enterprises, but it doesn't then become something else, in the same way that a car that doesn't start or that bursts into flames or that people don't like to drive doesn't suddenly transform into some other class of object. And to the degree that people don't trust the people and organizations making or administering the vaccines, simply repeating the idea that the vaccines themselves are fine isn't going to cut any ice.

I was out driving on Monday, and came across this guy on a street corner in Woodinville.

It's clear that whatever he thinks about vaccines in the abstract, that he's convinced that something nefarious is going on with this one. And likely, that he knows what it is. I don't know what to say to that guy to change his mind about that, but "you're putting the rest of us in jeopardy" likely isn't it. Because as far as he's concerned, getting the vaccine puts people in jeopardy as it is.

If part of the rift that's forming in the United States is a division into factions that fear and loathe one another, the fear and the loathing are what need to be tackled. And because those emotions were a number of years in the making, they're likely to take a number of years to unwind. In the middle of an emergency is not the time for trust-building measures. But that doesn't mean that it makes it possible to just demand people's trust, and have them comply out of some form of civic-mindedness. People desiring to see the SARS-2 coronavirus outbreak become a thing of the past may be angry that this guy and his ilk for pushing that time farther into the future, but he believes that he's doing everyone a favor.

The real problem with treating the idea that vaccines are somehow automatically safe, effective and necessary for public health as a fact is that it's a difficult position to defend against a knowledgeable attacker. All it takes is one valid counterexample, and one is open to charges of being ignorant, gullible or actively dishonest. Especially when one is viewed as defending people who are otherwise considered suspect. Part of the reason why anti-vaccine sentiment tends to cluster in affluent suburbs is that many people there are suspicious of corporate power and influence. Making the case that Facebook's shareholders are greedy and grasping but Pfizer's are upstanding and public-minded quickly becomes something of a stretch.

While there is a tendency to respond to fear with more fear, or sometimes anger, understanding may be a better option. If more steps had been taken over the past 20 years to address people's fears and distrust, there might be less of it to deal with now.

A Friendly Wager

"As Biden era begins, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to favor trying to forge compromises." Uh huh. If you've been around here a while, you might have read what I think about political attempts to forge things.

Often, the questions that Pew Research Center poses are fairly straightforward. Which isn't a problem in and of itself, but they sometimes leave me wondering what people were thinking when they answered. Consider the 7% of people who are Republicans or lean Republican and the 9% of people who are Democrats or lean Democratic who say that they want President Biden or Republican members of Congress respectively to "Stand up to [their side] on issues that are important to [the other side's] voters, even if it means it’s harder to address critical problems facing the country." I find myself dying to know what the thought process is.

To be sure, it being "harder to address critical problems facing the country" is not the same as those problems going unaddressed. And so part of me suspects that the wording of the question has a lot do with things.

To be sure, there likely is some sentiment in favor of bipartisanship. After all, the totals in favor of "reaching across the aisle" add up to 128% on the Republican side and 151% on the Democratic side. Therefore there seem to be a decent number of people who said "collaborate" to both questions, while it's possible (if perhaps unlikely) that no-one said "stand-up" both times.

But in the end, the whole thing comes across as an exercise in partisanship, with the answers being reliably skewed by political party. And I, for my part, really didn't need a Pew Research survey to tell me that. But understanding what people are really ready to give for that partisanship, that would be interesting. When people say they'd rather it be "harder to address critical problems facing the country," than that their man or woman should compromise, what problems do they have in mind, and how much extra difficulty are they thinking? And that, I think has value, because just knowing that people are going to side with their tribe isn't news. People willing see the SARS-2 CoV outbreak last six months longer than it otherwise would, for instance, would really communicate something that I don't think that I, and maybe others, currently really understand.

There was an article in The Atlantic that noted that a guy was making a small, if steady, amount of money by figuring out what Q-Anon supporters were willing to put money on an betting against them. Understanding the degree to which the public at large is willing to put their money where their partisanship is could be very educational.

Sunbathing

There's a pretty good-sized colony of cormorants that hangs out at the northern end of Lake Washington. And one can generally find a number of them on the old pier pilings of a long-removed dock. I always wondered about this behavior, and then I learned that unlike most waterfowl, cormorants don't have waterproof feathers, so they have to dry off  now and again.
 

Hack and Slash

I was watching a YouTube "Let's Play" video of a computer role-playing game (RPG), and in the specific episode I was watching, a major plot point is the suicide of one of the non-player characters (NPCs) who was driving the game's storyline. The creator of the video dutifully warned viewers in the video description of the event, and noted that it may be triggering for some viewers. Fair enough.

But RPGs, whether on computers/consoles or tabletop, are often remarkably violent in their overall presentation. One of the primary adventure types for fantasy tabletop RPGs, of which Dungeons and Dragons is the prototype, is the dungeon crawl, which, in a number of contexts, resembles nothing so much as a heavily-armed home invasion conducted against a community. Tabletop RPG players have coined the term "murderhobo" to describe this, since it evokes what many characters in Dungeons and Dragons turn out to be: itinerant wanderers with no fixed abode who tend to use wanton slaughter as a solution to every problem they encounter.

This over-the-top level of carnage originated early in the hobby. A measure of the blame may be laid at the feet of one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax. Between endorsing player characters operating in a medieval moral space that strikes us as bloodthirsty today and being a poor writer (and thus failing to adequately describe the risk-reward system he appears to have had in mind), he created a generalized milieu in which killing things was often the best (of not only) way to get things done. The puzzle and problem-solving aspects of the game quickly fell by the wayside.

And as video games have become more sophisticated, matching the increased power and memory of the systems they run on, more open gaming styles have become the order of the day. Gone, for the most part, are games in which killing non-player characters not specifically called out as enemies a one-way trip to a "Game Over" screen. Even games that enact consequences for random NPC kills tend to go easy on the players in such cases; after all, the point is for players to enjoy themselves in a fictional world where the consequences have no real-world bearing.

But unless a game has something particularly egregious in it, and that usually means some sort of link to current events that really bothers people (terrorism and school shootings come to mind), little attention is paid to the high virtual body counts. A player can while away the hours using magical powers to have NPCs literally eaten alive by rats, for instance, but it's one scenario in the same game in which the non-lethal option for a mission results in a woman being given over to a stalker that drives attention.

Of course, role-playing games aren't really the culprits here. In my estimation, the link between heroism and violence is a strong one and so what would otherwise come across as gratuitous violence in other situations is seen as acceptable and praiseworthy, and so it's not thought much about, especially when it's sanitized. Bad things happening to specific characters is often seen as upsetting to many, especially children, but more generalized gunfights and brawls are par for the course.

It all strikes me as strange. Maybe it shouldn't. Perhaps I'm simply more squeamish than most people, and so what's normal to them seems excessive to me. But still, I wonder if a less drastic model or heroism wouldn't be good for us.

Unintended

There is an internal "social media" platform at work, and a merry cast of regulars who inhabit the space. Part of it set aside for talking politics, and it's yet more proof that simply making people put their real names on things doesn't prevent conversations from turning into flame wars.

But recently someone posted snippets from a conversation they were having on a Discord server that mainly dealt with what has come to be called "Cancel culture." To put it briefly, it was generalized complaining about how they felt marginalized and threatened by a broader society that didn't recognize their good intent.

At first, I read the threat with amused detachment. The irony of these sorts of things always stands out for me. After all, "Cancel culture" isn't new. One could easily say that it was a thing seventy years ago. Back then, however, offending local social sensibilities could (and did) end in fatalities. But with the end of the work week, I spend some time this morning (you can see what an exciting life I lead) to unpack a couple of the statements people made. It was a disaster. But it was illuminating.

I was tempted to post the central thesis as an entry in "The Short Form" but it seemed that it needed context, so a standard post it is.

In a nutshell, one's subjective perception of the self as "a good person" is not a license to presume that no further evidence of this fact is needed, or useful.

Consider the case of Miya Ponsetto. It's been in the news quite a bit recently, but here's the recap: Ms. Ponsetto left her cellphone in a ride-share car. Realizing it was missing, she spotted 14-year-old Keyon Harrold Jr., who had the same model phone. Believing that young Mr. Harrold had stolen her phone, Ms. Ponsette attempted to that the phone from him. This was all captured on video by Keyon Harrold Sr.

Ponsetto insisted to CNN after the hotel clash that she always tries to do the “right thing,” and that she was the one assaulted — though neither video of the scene supported that.

Just hours before her arrest, Ponsetto, inexplicably wearing a cap that said “Daddy,” said on “CBS This Morning” that she considers herself “super sweet.”

But Ms. Ponsetto's self-perception doesn't change the fact that she was caught on camera assaulting a youth. And the legal consequences of that fact are no different, either. And, okay, maybe the problem is simply that Ms. Ponsetto is both flaky and has anger-management issues; those aren't defenses under the law, otherwise they'd likely be trotted out for a majority of the assaults in the nation.

Ms. Ponsetto wants to be seen as different from some random street criminal, not because she behaved differently, but because she intended differently. But intent cannot be seen in a video, only impacts. And so to the degree that people want to be seen in a certain light, they have to show themselves that way, not just tell people that they are.

#JobsIveNeverHeardOf

More than anything else, it strikes me as a strangely specific role. I would have presumed that they would post something broader, more of a bakery generalist, I suppose. Perhaps the doughnut frying equipment requires more a specific skill set than I would have given it credit for.

Oh, Go Away

Experts I spoke to also noted that removing bad actors from a platform can help prevent users who aren’t yet down the rabbit hole from being radicalized.

“We need to protect those normies, the normal users who don’t want to be radicalized into neo-nazism or whatever it may be. We need to protect them from being harassed and recruited,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies online extremism.
Kaleigh Rogers "What Kicking Trump Off Twitter Can — And Can’t — Do" FiveThirtyEight

Okay, I'm going to admit to being dubious about the idea that anyone who can't manage to protect themselves from unwillingly being radicalized into neo-Nazism has any business being on the Internet at all, let alone social media. Then again, I'm not 100% certain that they should be allowed out of the house, either.

But the whole idea of making the social media platforms safe from harassment and recruiting is that it's not going to be a blanket policy. And that raises the thorny question of who decides. It's easy to call out neo-Nazis. They're everyone's favorite whipping boys, precisely because they're considered morally unambiguous villains by nearly everyone who isn't themselves a neo-Nazi. The fact that it's considered somewhere between gauche and sacrilegious to defend them allows for calls to censor them (or have them shot, for that matter) to be easily rolled out without fear of pushback. But as with any low-hanging fruit, it conveniently leaves the difficult work for later.

Should, for instance, people who grew up atheist be allowed to call for the deplatforming of adherents of proselytizing religions? After all, it's not as if there is some magical force that disallows the religious from harassing and recruiting others who might at first find their attentions unwanted. And there are religious communities who argue that they should have a right to be free from missionaries spreading their messages among them, something that missionary groups say would be an unacceptable infringement on their freedom of religion.

The question regarding the freedom of proselytism, however, is still unsettled. This question, as elaborated above, involves two distinct freedoms: the freedom of the proselytizer to conduct proselytizing activities (the "positive" sense of freedom) and the freedom of the potential convert/proselyte not to be interfered in his faith by proselytizing activities (the "negative" sense of freedom).
Moshe Hirsch, The Freedom of Proselytism Under the Fundamental Agreement and International Law, 47 Cath. U. L. Rev. 407 (1998).

And sure, one could make the point that there is a fundamental difference between a neo-Nazi and an annoying Evangelical Christian. But what really matters in this context is the fact that fear of being lead into conversion to Christianity is considered too trivial to be taken seriously, while neo-Nazis are considered too dangerous to be allowed to speak to anyone. But these sorts of social agreements can change, and quickly. While neo-Nazis are likely to be consigned to the wilderness for just about any value of the foreseeable future, I don't know if it's wise for other groups to presume that they won't also find themselves there.

Wait Here

There is a bookstore, not terribly far from where I live, and I was driving past and decided to stop in. It's an interesting space; the upper floor of a small indoor shopping area of what is otherwise a split-level strip mall. The bookstore takes up one side of  the area, the other being what's left of the food court. (As one may surmise, many of the food sellers have closed up shop.) And there is no wall between the food court and the bookstore. There is a long, low row of shelves that semi close off the space, with two gaps that allow for people to enter and exit. Sight lines are clear and sounds carry.

When I entered the food court, I saw that there were a number of people waiting to enter the bookstore, perhaps as many as two dozen, standing in little clusters, distancing from one another. I looked onto the sales floor, thinking that the bookstore must have been fairly crowded. I could count five people. I presume there were others in places that I couldn't see because of shelves or other objects that blocked line of site, but at first glance, it seemed likely that there were more people in line to enter than were actually in the space. And it wasn't a small space; it's somewhere in the area of 15,000 square feet. Granted, it's not as large as the average Barnes and Noble, but it was still a pretty good size.

But here were some twenty-plus people, standing in a small area of the food court, waiting to enter a much larger space, where there would have been barriers between them as they moved through the shelves. It was a fairly unusual arrangement, but that's what made it stand out for me. If the line had been outside, one could make the point that the greater air circulation would have made it less likely that a sick person may have infected anyone else. But that wasn't the case here. And it drove home for me what could be one reason why despite everything that people are being asked to do, things haven't really improved. Maybe certain precautions are being enacted by rote, without any real understanding of what they're supposed to accomplish.

To be sure, I don't blame the bookstore owners. They were likely following state restrictions to the letter. But here was a circumstance where those restrictions were likely worse than useless. Of anyone in the line had been sick enough to be infectious, making them stand in one place and then forcing other people to wait near them and then pass through that same space seems that it would have the potential to cause more infections than just letting people into the space. After all, they were already in the building, and the store was more than large enough for the various groups of shoppers to keep their distance from one another.

 In the end, the whole thing struck me as illustrative of what has always plagued the United States as concerns this outbreak. The official response seems to always be just that, a response. Cobbled together as things unfold and then simply pushed out to everyone, rather than planned in advance and tailored to the circumstances as they are likely to be in certain places. Maybe it's unrealistic to think that it's possible to get ahead of all of this. Part of me hopes that's true.

Amnesia

Today, I was able to help a guy who needed to jump-start his car. It was a simple thing, but it brightened my day as much, if not more so, as it did his. I enjoy doing things like this for people; the short, one-time connections always cheer me up. And so when this one was done, I wondered: Why, given how much I enjoy these sorts of interactions, am I so bad at remembering them?

Back in April, I'd helped out a young woman who'd wiped out on her skateboard. She was pretty banged up, so I drove her to a nearby ER so she could be checked out. Again, being able to be of assistance like this had really brightened my day at the time. But I'd completely forgotten about it until today.

The fact that this sort of thing doesn't happen every day can't be the only factor. There are a lot of little events in my life that don't come along all that often, and don't have the same emotional resonance, yet I have much better recall of them. Or, to be more accurate, I recall them more frequently; ordinary, day-to-day events don't seem to be as able to crowd them out of my memory. I wonder if my memory of things in general is, in some sense, inversely proportional to the emotional content of them.

One's life is, in the end, basically the collection of memories that one has of it. I tend to understand my life as boring, and I realize that is, in large part, because I manage to remember the boring parts of it. Back in April, I spent an hour or so with the young woman skateboarder, and we spent a lot of time talking while waiting for something or another. I remember thinking at the time that she was a very interesting person, yet now I recall almost nothing of her.

So I wonder if I don't have it backwards. Maybe I've become so convinced that my life is boring that my memory simply dumps the interesting bits, even when those are the events, in the moment, that completely change the course of things?

The Wind Up

From "Madness on Capitol Hill"

One should, I think, beware those who wear "I have no empathy" as a mark of pride. That is when people feel free to be at their worst with one another. I suspect that people are naturally adept at being able to place themselves in another's position. When that is seen as a mark of weakness or failure of character, I think that dehumanization is what takes its place. And from there, cycles of violence are born.

Off Center

In the aftermath of the... events in Washington, D.C. (and a couple of our own here in Washington State), yesterday a lot has been made of the idea that Black protesters would have been met with a much more organized and heavy-handed response than the Trumpistas who swarmed the Capitol building.

For many, it was simply more proof that the Administration, if not the entire System, is deeply and irretrievably racist. (Although perhaps "Racist" might be more to people's thinking. But as I thought about it, and the ever-present fears of "Middle America," it occurred to me that perhaps the problem is one of distance. And I suppose there are a number of ways in which the term "distance" is applicable, so explanations are in order.

Some time ago, I was talking to an old acquaintance of mine, who happens to be a Trump supporter, about the dueling protest movements afoot in the modern United States, and came to an interesting realization. In his eyes, even if the Proud Boys faction of the Trump movement were to win the day, and be able to remake the nation to its liking, I would not be much, if any worse off than I am now, despite not being White myself. On the other hand, he reasoned, were the forces of Black Lives Matter or Antifascism to win, he would find himself much worse off. Of course, I saw it nearly the opposite way, but what I realized from yesterday's news coverage was that perhaps the "center" of America lies closer to him, than to me.

I don't normally look to critics of something (or someone) when I want an accurate description, but how the protest movements spawned by the Left and the Right are viewed by their critics is telling. While many Right-wing activists are considered dupes of anti-democratic or anti-American interests in Russia, a common criticism of Left-wing activists is that they are knowing, active agents of that old hobgoblin, the international socialist/communist conspiracy. Likewise, while violence from the Right criticized as people allowing their anger to get the better of them, violent protest on the left if seen as the work of people who simply enjoy being violent, even if they're understood as not really being part of the broad protests in question.

And in the case of Black Lives Matter, there is the general current of fear that's always run somewhat beneath the surface. I don't think of myself as being a particularly threatening person, but I've learned that it's not good for me to suddenly be somewhere that I'm not expected to be, or just show up suddenly in someone's field of view.

To the degree that the "average American" perceives distance between their interests, and those of a given protest movement, they also see the protestors as being less American, and less... civilized than they otherwise might. And I think this results in more people understanding that there is room for them (and by extension, those they approve of) in the Perfect World of the "Right-Wing Protester" but they don't see a place for themselves in the Perfect World of the "Left-Wing Protester." This disconnect results in the greater impression of dangerous foreign influences and the impression that this is something that is directed at them, personally. And thusly, support for a harsher response to otherwise outwardly similar actions.

And while racism might factor into it, I suspect that it's more the bigotry of the person who sees difference as destiny, and is blind to the role of greater social forces in determining who is, and who is not, allowed to enter the club. If everything is the result of the choices of an individual, then looking at those results becomes a useful proxy for understanding a person's otherwise unseen behavior and character. In the end, I think that the difference is that Right-wing protesters ask less of society at large than Left-wing protestors do. There's less apology demanded, less contrition expected. Less of a price to paid. And so they are seen as less of a threat.

Feeling the Need

I'd happened to swing by Slate again, to see if there was much of anything interesting there to read these days, and found this story about CUP Foods, the store where George Floyd had given the cashier what was suspected to be a counterfeit $20 bill. It turned out, that was a very ill-considered move on the part of the late Mr. Floyd, but the story was about the anger that local residents and activists harbored towards the store and the Palestinian family that owns the business.

Being the sort of person who is never content to simply read a news story and take it at face value, the whole thing came off to me as a tragic lesson in the effects of generational poverty on a community; in this case the Black community of South Minneapolis. I've written before about how I considered ethics to be something of a luxury, such that people who feel that they're in dire straits come to consider it something that's out of reach. I also think that a case could be made that many people consider following "the rules" (as a general principle) to be a luxury good; and again, something that can, and maybe should, be dispensed with if the cost goes too high. What Aymann Ismail's story communicated was that perhaps empathy and compassion should also be placed in the basket of expensive goods that many people feel are out of reach for them.

Stories of American decline are popular, and have been for some time, I think. Whether they are triumphalist or cautionary, however, I suspect that many of them miss the point. As the United States kludges its way into greater and greater inequality, the things that really hold a society marked by clear differences together, things like generally ethical behavior, commitment to the rules and a general understanding that everyone is on the same side, become luxuries. And when people feel that their survival is in danger, they jettison useless luxuries.

The promise of the United States, that it failed to live up to, was that it could be a place where people need not feel, for lack of a better word, needy. I suspect that it was an unrealistic promise from the outset. Because neediness isn't a objective state, but a personal one. The people that Mr. Ismail speaks to reveal the neediness of the South Minneapolis neighborhood. The worries that partisans have over the outcomes of today's elections for the United States Senate in Georgia reveal the neediness of Democrats and Republicans alike. The fighting over how the SARS-2 CoV outbreak, both here and in other countries, reveals the neediness of people, and governments, worldwide.

I don't know that it's possible to really remove neediness from the world. Perhaps that's the problem. People, in attempting to sate their own neediness, simply shift it onto other people. And at worst, they, well, infect other people with it, and neediness multiplies. And swamps luxuries in so doing.

Bridge to Himinbjörg

Bifröst was out today. No Æsir were in evidence, however. Perhaps they were undercover. They seemed to enjoy visiting Midgard on the down-low, so it wouldn't surprise me if it were standard operating procedure by now.
 

Unlead

Via an odd and winding road, I found myself at the New York Times website, reading what seems like yet another piece on the failure of President Trump to lead up to the standards of political leadership put forward by people whose relationship to the President is one of mutual hostility. I suspect that we'll see a lot of these, as people who have grievances with the President and his administration look for some time in the media spotlight.

In any event, the particular article I was reading is about the President's handling of the SARS-2 CoV outbreak, as it pertains to the United States. Or rather, about how the President's focus on his political fortunes and ambitions prevented him from effectively handling said outbreak. And so the piece overall is quite critical of the President. There are times when it seemed to become lost in that criticism.

For instance, the article is very clear that President Trump was not a fan of face masks as a non-pharmaceutical intervention. After the President is informed that his base of support wouldn't go for a "mask mandate" as they've come to be called, and that the President likely wouldn't have the legal authority to issue one, the story reports: "Aside from when he was sick, he was rarely seen in a mask again."

This is held up as one of many missed "opportunities to show leadership." And that prompted me to ask myself: What does it mean to "lead" in this situation?

The article dutifully makes the point that having the population cover their faces is "among the simplest and most effective ways to curb the spread of the disease." Okay, but the truth of that statement relies on a few other things being true, one of the big ones being that it's difficult to impossible to know who is and who is not infected. As a general rule, one wouldn't expect a doctor to say that someone who was clearly ill from a high-contagious respiratory infection that they could go hang out with people, so long as they wore a face mask. Rather, promoting masks comes across as the one tool that many public health authorities have in their kits, and so it's now the go-to intervention.

President of the United States is not a public health office. And, to the best of my knowledge, President Trump has no experience (or perhaps even interest) in public health. In that sense, he lacks the background required to lead in that sphere. So the criticism of him seems to be less about leadership than following. Someone else makes the recommendation to wear face masks, the President listens to this person and deems them credible, and then the President "sets an example" for other people by publicly obeying the recommendation. That strikes me less as taking leadership then surrendering it.

And so I wonder if, perhaps, the problem is the way we understand leaders and leadership. The term has always struck me as nebulously virtuous; it's good to be a leader, because leadership is semi-defined as having some kind of positive influence over other people. But leadership can also be the simple state of being in charge.

There are a lot of assumptions and counterfactuals that go into making decisions when it's not possible to formally determine which of several courses of action are best to take. For many people, the problem wasn't the President's lack of leadership, it's that he declined to direct people (namely his supporters) to a place where his critics felt those people should go. I don't know that there is a way of resolving that conflict.