Hook

I have to admit to a certain curiosity about things like this. What "Pfizer vaccine reward" does the party than sent this e-mail think that people are expecting, or hoping for? While it's fairly clear that they're attempting to keep up with the times, and capitalize on current events, I find myself wondering what they think they mean.

I suspect that most of these sorts of e-mails are simply cast out into the void on a wing and a prayer. With the costs of sending them being effectively zero, even a desperately poor person in some stricken part of the world can hope that someone clicks on a link and renders themselves vulnerable to ransomware or is drawn in to an advance fee scam. Maybe they're counting on finding one of the ten thousand people who are new to internet fraudsters and criminals. I was wondering aloud to a friend if, perhaps, a lot of the illicit e-mails that land in people's inboxes are just the output of abandoned scripts that people wrote, deployed, gave up on and then never shut down.

For all that people think of cyber-criminals as masters of their craft, most of what's out there is stuff just like this. Sure, the venerable 419 scams live on, with people claiming to be bankers in Africa saying that they're looking for someone to help them smuggle millions off the continent, with only a few up-front fees to be paid, but they seem to have been long overtaken by messages that just seem random.

I supposed that there stereotype of the wealthy, but easily gulled, westerner persists in other parts of the world. And it likely doesn't take all that many people flashing money siphoned from scam targets to entice the world's poor into trying it out for themselves. After all, they only need that one big score, right? And with modern automation able to blast e-mails around the globe in short order, it's not a lot of work. I suppose that everyone likes a get-rich-quick scheme.

Au Naturel

The weather was nice yesterday, so I went out for a walk in the "woods." It's really just a reasonably large park, but the place was large enough, and the foliage dense enough, that you could spend a good deal of time in places that seemed reasonably natural. Or would have, were it not for the broad, groomed trails and the fact that every tree that fell in proximity to one of the trails had been chainsawed into small sections.

But, for all of the artificial naturalism, it was a nice break from the reminders of what we fondly term the rat race. Even if it was someone else's rat race.

Inside Out

According to philosopher Thomas Nagel, people tend to see their own interests and harms in moral terms.

Someone could escape from this argument if, when he was asked, "How would you like it it someone did that to you?" he answered, "I wouldn't resent it at all. I wouldn't like it if someone stole my umbrella in a rainstorm, but I wouldn't think there was any reason for him to consider my feelings about it." But how many people could honestly give that answer? I think that most people, unless they're crazy, would think that their own interests and harms matter, not only to themselves, but in a way that gives other people a reason to care about them too. We all think that when we suffer it is not just bad for us but bad, period.
"What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy" 1987

Professor Nagel's general point is that this works both ways. The "argument" he posits someone attempting to escape is that people should see others interests and harms as matter in a way that creates a reason to care about them. But I think that people might work "from the inside out" on things like this. Just as children are often keenly aware of when people disregard their personal interests and harms, yet are less attuned to those of other people, I think that even people grow out of that, they still start with themselves and work outward.

Immanuel Kant rejected the idea that people were motivated by the sole sake of doing something wrong. Instead he identifies two primary motivations: the love of self and the moral law.

And while I'm not sure that either Mr. Kant or Professor Nagel would approve, I'm going to link the two of them. Kant's love of self can be thought of as people's understanding that their own interests and harms create moral imperatives for other people, and the moral law can be thus linked to people's understanding that others persons interests and harms create binding moral rules for the self.

If we presume that most people do work "from the inside out," their first considerations would be what they understand that other people owe them; care for their interests and harms. And while they're focused on this need, they have less, or even no, bandwidth for other concerns. And I think the United States, with it's generally low level of social trust, illustrates this. Not just in the fact that Americans are notorious for acting in their own interests at the expense of other considerations, but also in the sense that many people seem to have difficulty understanding that this is what other people are doing, too.

I started this with a quote from Thomas Nagel, because of Professor Nagel's offhand remark about a person being crazy not to think that their own interests and harms should matter to other people. It irks me a bit, since I think that a person can be of the opinion that other people don't owe them anything and not have any mental health or ethical problems in need of addressing. But I understand that what's really at work here is an understanding of ubiquity. As far as Professor Nagel is concerned, pretty much everyone subscribes to that theory of moral obligation. And I don't think I blame him for that. Because that's the way our society behaves. In the end, Professor Nagel is attempting to put a more formal framework around "treat others as you would wish to be treated," and so he starts by defining how he understands most people wish to be treated.

The problem arises, I think, because for many people, it also ends there. People understand how they wish to be treated, see other people acting in accordance with that the moral law, and only once they are satisfied can they really flip the script, as it were. I suppose that one can think of it as a variation on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People may have a need to act in accordance with the moral law, but until they satisfy the love of self, they're not really positioned to act on it. And maybe this is why one can say that people don't scale well, in the sense that larger communities have difficulties that smaller ones do not. Put enough disparate people together, and people are likely to find someone who they don't feel respects their personal interests and harms, and therefore. And this lack of social trust becomes as reason to act out of the love of self. After all, if others won't do it, then the individual has to, in order to have their needs met.

Of course, this is a remarkable hodgepodge for what should be a simple concept of people wanting others to treat them well, and then returning the favor; and the resulting waiting game where no one wants to make the first move. But it's interesting to posit, given how much of philosophy is about how people can, or even should, break the impasse.

Barrel Vision

The horrific mass shooting events in the Atlanta area and Boulder, Colo., just days apart have once again shown a spotlight on how frequent this type of violence is in the United States compared with other wealthy countries.
Gun Violence Deaths: How The U.S. Compares With The Rest Of The World

The article goes on to compare the United States to several other nations around the world in terms of gun violence, rather than mass shootings. Which raises the interesting point that despite the relatively small number of deaths due to mass shootings, for many people, they are the face of firearms violence in the United States.

The Gun Violence Archive, which maintains a database of shootings in the United States, defines a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people other than the shooter(s) are shot. (So there are mass shootings on their list with no fatalities.) In 2018 they listed 373 deaths in such incidents. There were 14,414 gun homicides that year. So about 2.6% of shooting homicides were the result of mass shootings. Why doesn't the other 97-plus percent of shootings shine a spotlight on things? For that matter, why is there such selectivity about which mass shootings become the face of gun violence? When one Malik Halfacre shot his girlfriend and four members of her family (killing the other four) "because he wanted a share of her federal COVID-19 relief money" why not that hold that up as the face of mass shootings in America?

As I've noted before random guys with "assault weapons" shooting up stores or spas represent a sort of random, portable violence that can't be mitigated simply by moving to the right neighborhood or being careful about who one enters into a relationship with.

The people who were shot and killed by 21-year-olds Robert Aaron Long and Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa were "righteous victims," people randomly gunned down somewhere that they, and society at large, deemed should have been "safe." That's what made their deaths shocking, and prompted flags being lowered to half-mast, despite the fact that many more people killed by guns are like "J.M." and her family members or Angel Anthony Faz or True Vang.

Every time there is a mediagenic mass shooting in the United States, the new media goes into full swing, the hand-wringing begins anew and someone in Congress starts in with legislation. People in the United States and other parts of the world ask why the problem can't be solved, and cast accusatory looks at gun owners and conservative politicians. But when has any culture been able to define, let alone solve, a problem when it ignores more than 95% of it?

When people's fears are the immediate problem one is attempting to solve, when the fear subsides, the need to find a solution subsides with it. And mass shootings of the sort that Robert Aaron Long and Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa simply aren't common enough to keep people motivated for long enough to do something about the immediate fear they create, let alone try to tackle the bigger problem. And the bigger problem, which is typified by gang and domestic violence, doesn't drive enough eyeballs to advertisers to dominate the news cycle. It's little more than background noise. Lives are shattered and people left to grieve, but the rest of the public chalks it up to random chance or people's poor life choices and the broader culture of violence as a means of solving personal problems rolls on unabated.

The FBI has a couple of interesting statistics on their website concerning 2019:

• In 2019, 28.3 percent of homicide victims were killed by someone they knew other than family members (acquaintance, neighbor, friend, boyfriend, etc.), 13.0 percent were slain by family members, and 9.9 percent were killed by strangers.
• Circumstances were known for 58.8 percent of murders for which supplementary details were reported in 2019. Of those, 43.2 percent of victims were murdered during arguments.

Allowing rare events to define the view of a phenomenon results in a skewed picture. And a skewed picture of the problem results in misplaced efforts. I've heard people say that changing the laws in an effort to eliminate mass shootings by strangers with "assault weapons" is a necessary first step in tackling the greater problem. But if for many people, the intrusion of violence into only a certain subset of "safe" places is the whole of the problem, it seems unlikely that the intense focus will allow for a step two.

Heroism

Karen Lincoln: So it’s not the brand, it’s not the manufacturer. It’s more whether they’re getting, what I’ve heard many seniors say, the real thing, or something else. And so the something else could be a number of things — it could be a placebo, or it could be something that’s more harmful. And both some of the mythology that is sort of circulating in the community has to do with, ‘Well, you know, it might cause infertility, it might give me COVID.’ And I’m not sure how to even address that, because that is prevalent, that even though the message is that it’s safe, and that it’s effective, there’s still a heightened level of concern about what they would be getting as an African American versus what someone who’s white might be getting, even if it’s in the same facility.
How To Get Vaccines To People Who Aren’t Going Out Of Their Way To Get Them. FiveThirtyEight

The more I hear of the various conspiracies that wind their way through the Black community in the United States, the more I become convinced that the point behind them is for Black people to remind one another of how threatened they are, and, accordingly, how strong they are to have survived in the face of such malevolent intent and overwhelming resources. Because the idea that there is some form of shadow distribution system that manages to deliver faked vaccines to facilities where Black people will receive shots, and keep them straight to that they don't accidentally give the wrong dose to the wrong person seems ridiculous. The sort of doomed-to-fail plan that Cobra Commander might have come up with, back in the day. Although, in the end, I guess it makes a certain level of sense. When one casts an enemy as ten feet tall and bloodthirsty, it makes for much more heroic story than simply surviving the neglect that people often visit upon outsiders.

Maybe it shouldn't. Maybe people would do well to regard the indifference of their fellow humans as something that requires strength, resiliency and stamina to survive. Or, perhaps, simply not placing a price tag on one's own positive self-regard would do the trick.

Of course, I suspect that it's not as easy as that. Were casting off the weight of needing to live up to expectations (self-imposed, or otherwise) so simple, one thinks that people would have done it by now. I've spent a lot of time working to always think well of the person who looks back at me from the mirror, and I'm still terrible at it. I'm still caught up in the idea that if I can control my outward presentation, that I can control how other people will see me, and thus, think of me. Even thought I've "known" for years that what other people think of me is none of my business. I've done a slightly better job of silencing my Inner Critic, but even so, I'm well acquainted with their voice.

And part of the reason for that, I realize, is that I don't think that White people are out to get me. They have their own problems to deal with, and I'm not important enough for them to put time and energy into sabotaging me. I don't rate inclusion in their headlines. So my stumbles and missteps are just that, mine, and not the result of "the dominant culture" throwing stumbling blocks into my path. I can understand the temptation to have a villain to blame.

But I wonder if it does as much harm as good. There may be a story of survival that comes out of all of this, but it can't ever be a story of thriving in the face of the adversities of life as long as people are convinced that their thriving is in the hands of others. When someone else holds all the cards, I suspect that it can be difficult to avoid sliding into a form of learned helplessness, where putting forth the effort to succeed becomes pointless. Or perhaps worse, simply a matter of hoping that the powers that be will smile upon one. (I recall a story of an inner-city man who bought a lottery ticket every week. He was convinced that the game was rigged, and the winners chosen in advance. But he'd convinced himself that the appearance of fairness was important to the operators, and so he played, hoping that one day, he'd be chosen to win by the very people who had rigged the draw against him and so many others.)

There are, of course, a lot of stories that relate how people are being held back, and held down, by the machinations of others. And not all of them are told simply because they're egosyntonic. After all, there are genuine conspiracies in the world. It's understanding the relationship of the self to the story that's harder than it looks.

Still Going

Yesterday morning, I went down to Lake Forest Park, to see if the demonstrations were still happening. I've been doing this, irregularly, for some time now, my second post here was about the weekly gatherings. The "Support the troops" group that originally waved the flag from 10 to 11 AM was not in evidence yesterday. Whether they're taking the winter off, or eventually jsut wound down, I don't know yet.

But the 11 AM peace protesters were still there, about a half-dozen old white men with a banner, some signs and literature they would hand to anyone who would take it. A few people honked as they drove by. But otherwise, it was just a quiet time in a grassy strip near city hall, the bank and the local strip mall. There was no shouting, no altercations and no-one deciding that this would be a good place for some petty vandalism. There were no news cameras, no police officers onsite and no "free speech zones."

It's probably the very model of American demonstrations; a small group of people with something to say and the hope that other people will hear the message and maybe take some small action.

When all of this started, I lived about a mile and a half or so down the road, and would see them sometimes, when I drove by. One day the BBC put out a call for photographs of interesting things in one's neighborhood, and I decided that this was close enough, so I took my camera and went down to get a few snaps. I never got around to finding one I liked enough to send in.

But I kept going back. Not with any sort of regularity, but often enough that the regulars recognized me and would stop to chat. At first they were suspicious, but before long I was just that guy who took enough of an interest to see if they were still at it.

Are they doing any good? In the end, I suspect not. But I don't think that's on them. I mean, I haven't exactly done anything to advance the cause, myself. Sure, I've written about them here, but I have to remind myself to even go down and check on them once in a while. I'm not writing letters to Mesdames Murray, Cantwell or DelBene, or pushing my employer to avoid working with the military. Were I any more of an inactivist on this issue, I'd be a stone.

But they're still at it. Their numbers have faded, and when I go, I'm usually the youngest person in attendance. Eventually, the last of them will stop coming, and in time, everything will be forgotten. It's the nature of humanity, I guess. So much of what we do is fleeting and ephemeral. One day, someone will flip a switch on a server, and this record, too, will disappear. But in the meantime, I'll drop in on them from time to time, take a few pictures and post one here once in a great while. If for no other reason than to remind myself that remember them.

Lockdown

I have to admit that I find the practice of putting locks on fences to be a curiosity, although I do admire the creativity that people sometimes manage to bring to the practice. In this case, however, it was he lock itself that caught my eye. These are made by a blacksmith, from Oregon, if I remember correctly. He comes up for the local Renaissance Faire every summer, with last year being an exception, of course. I have one of these locks myself, purchased several years ago, and never actually used to padlock anything.

It's a unique take on what has become a ubiquitous practice, and I have to admit that I enjoyed coming across it.

Standing

I saw this on LinkedIn today:

Check in our your Asian friends and let them know you care and that you stand with them.

Check in: Got it.

Let them know you care: Got it.

And that you stand with them: What does that mean, exactly?

Honestly, it somewhat smacks of "thoughts and prayers," a once-sincere remark that has been reduced to a meaningless platitude, not due to overuse, but out of a lack of the ability to put it into effective action. Now in the specific case of thoughts and prayers, the fact that I don't believe in deities is what undermines things. Praying does no good when there is no entity capable of responding to prayers. But even if I were a believer, is there enough evidence that any deity responds to make it worthwhile?

Of course, I get the point behind "thoughts and prayers:" it's meant to show someone that we care for them, in the lack of the ability to do anything more effective. Accordingly, I'm more in favor of asking people if there is anything that I can do for them, or, perhaps even better, simply offering something, like bringing a meal or sending a check. Honestly, now that I think about it, I should do the latter more often; it's likely easier on someone who simply accept or reject something that's offered, as opposed to having to think about what might make for a reasonable request when under stress.

But I think that a sincere "How can I help you?" is still better than simply telling someone that "you stand with them." If one actually has the opportunity to go and literally stand with someone, in a vigil, or a protest, or what have you, it makes sense to take it. That's actually doing something, rather than simply saying something.

If one has nothing of substance to offer, then one has nothing of substance to offer. Such is the way of things at times. I understand that it can be difficult to own up to that. But perhaps things would be better off if that shame were put aside. And things would be much better if people were more broadly willing to share what they do have to offer with one another. I understand why platitudes have become such a common currency. But I think that there are better things to offer. And I know, for my part, that I have to do a better job of cultivating the understanding that I have those things, so that I can move from generalized offers of assistance to more concrete statements.

Circle

So, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) isn't afraid of pro-Trump protestors, but he is afraid of anti-Fascist and Black Lives Matter protestors. Color me surprised. While the Senator's comments have created yet another teapot tempest, I wonder how much of this, if not exactly intended, is working in the senator's favor. The Republican Senator was speaking to a Republican audience, and one of the ways that politicians keep themselves in office is by leaning into the current environment of negative partisanship. And that means backing them up in their fear and loathing of people they perceive as being opposed to their values.

In this sort of environment, caution with one's words isn't always a benefit. After all, it's likely that the people who voted for Senator Johnson are going to perceive the fact that he's coming under attack for his words as proof that he's on the right side of things. And that creates an incentive for the Senator to place himself in the line of fire. And other politicians have learned this same lesson.

While a lot of people feel that certain things just can't be allowed to go without comment or challenge, and that's understandable, it's worth keeping in mind whether those comments and challenges will be worthwhile. For elected officials, people who are outside of the bounds of the jurisdiction in question just don't matter. The people whose opinions Senator Johnson cares about are his constituents. And if they perceive the attacks on him to be attacks on them or their interests, they are likely to reinforce, rather then change, his behavior.

Undefined

I was reading NPR when I came across a review of a new book by Laura Bates, Men Who Hate Women. According to the review, Ms. Bates "spent a year immersed in what's called the 'manosphere,' a vast online world in which incels rub elbows with an assortment of other misogynists — from 'pickup artists' with little respect for the concept of consent, to the male separatists who call themselves Men Going Their Own Way (but who can't seem to stop talking about women)." I salute her for that; I don't have five minutes to spare for these guys, spending a year in their online hangouts is dedication.

In setting up the review, the author, David Futrelle, asks an interesting question: "Is it too much to call what [Alek] Minassian did 'terrorism'?" He then goes on to note that Ms. Bates thinks that it is not.

Part of the reason we as a society cannot seem to acknowledge incel mass murders as the terrorist acts they are, Bates notes in her new book, is that:

"...misogyny and violence against women are so widespread and so normalized, it is difficult for us to consider these things 'extreme' or 'radical,' because they are simply not out of the ordinary. We do not leap to tackle a terrorist threat to women, because the reality of women being terrorized, violated and murdered by men is already part of the wallpaper."

Because of this fundamental failure of understanding, the government and non-governmental organizations that define "terror" for us don't even bother to track the murder sprees of men like Minassian and Elliot Rodger, the California man whose murderous rampage in 2014 brought the first widespread media coverage of the incel movement — and earned him the adoration of incels around the world.

I was disappointed, though, that Mr. Futrelle doesn't actually define "terrorism" in the review. Nor does he relate Ms. Bates' definition of the word. The passage that he quotes would seem to indicate that terrorism can be defined as violence that is "extreme" or "radical." But is that a common definition of "terrorism" among the government and civil organizations that track terrorism and terrorist activities? I found the formulation "organizations that define 'terror' for us" to be interesting. Who is "us" in this formulation? The public at large? How does "us" abdicate the defining of "terror?" And if the organizations in question do own the definition of terror, is the problem that they ignore their own definition when it comes to killings by misogynists or that their definition is somehow wrong?

Terrorism, like many emotionally loaded words, can be difficult to define in a way that garners broad consensus. The fact that American society, among others, has a heightened response to and increased fear of terrorism, and therefore, greater sympathy for the targets of same, creates an incentive for people to seek to define what happens to them as terrorism. The greater punishments for terrorism, including a willingness to suspend due process and other rights due to the accused, also make the accusation of terrorism into a potent weapon. This leads to what I perceive as a bifurcation of the definition. While the academic definition of the term appears to have stabilized in the vicinity of "the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change" or "a violent attempt to produce political or other forms of change," there is also a "folk definition" (also encouraged by politicians and politically-minded prosecutors) that might be articulated as violent action that makes some group of people afraid that it might happen to them, and/or is perpetrated by Moslems or other people with Middle-Eastern sounding names.

My point with my folk definition of terrorism isn't be cynical (although, I admit to being quite good at being cynical) but to note that people's definitions of words tend to line up with their worldviews and interests. And so it's useful to state definitions (and acknowledge the differences between different ones) when invoking them.

The question of whether or not "involuntary celibates" turning to violence should count as terrorism is both legitimate and interesting. If there is a organized group of men out there who seek to ensure satisfying sex lives for themselves through acts of violence against society, authorities ignoring that is something of a scandal; even if, it's also somewhat par for the course. But if there is also a consensus that the formal definitions of terrorism are too narrow, that's also worth discussing. Of course, it's a somewhat fraught debate, for many people, calling something terrorism means that it's taken more seriously than it would be otherwise. (Although in this case, the label of hate crime may also be able to do the heavy lifting.)

Personally, I'm a bit dubious of labeling incidents such as Alex Minassian's and Elliot Rodger's as terrorism. Based on what I understand of their motives, it seemed more like violent acting out to me. But I understand that for many people, that dangerously understates things. Which, I suspect, points to a bigger problem that American society has, and that often pops up elsewhere; the idea that violence is a solution to problems. Seeing violence as a useful tool tends to result in a lot of violence, and the inability to manage all of it can leave people looking for ways to push the violence that most concerns them to the head of the line. And that often means seeking to attach certain labels to it. It becomes a contest that shouldn't need to happen.

Newsy

I am of the opinion that most news isn't very informative, in the sense of providing useful information about people, places and things around us, because it's not really expected to be. In the wake of the Oprah Winfrey interview with ex-British royals Harry and Meghan, that story held four of the top 10 most read stories on the site, and was edged out of the number one slot by news that Mackenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex-wife) was marrying one of her children's teachers. And it's not like the BBC is a fluffy tabloid gossip site.

For all that I understand the push by "good media" sorts to lever "the media" into creating an informed and educated public, I'm not sure that this is what the public itself turns to news media outlets for. And I think that there's something to be said for understanding, and acknowledging, that point. The saying "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink," presumes that one has some level of control over the horse to begin with. Without that control, one can't even lead the horse.

I wonder if it's time for an approach that doesn't treat entertainment as the equivalent of "empty calories" and "real news" as unseasoned vegetables. I (sometimes) take the time to wade through the diverting news to find other items because I'm not really all that interested in the lives of celebrities. As much as I can't understand most of what I find there, I've come to find PubMed to be a much more interesting place to spend time. But I'll be the first to admit that it's also diverting - I read articles there because I enjoy it. The fact that they're sometimes understandable to me, and so I feel better educated is a side effect, although a welcome one.

Understanding why people read the news articles they do, and catering to that, might be the way to give people the education that some activists want them to have. It might not come across as uplifting as one might want it to be, but if the people won't come to you, then one has to go to where the people are.

Both Ways

For all that I like to think of myself as an observer of the world around me, and at least somewhat attentive to it, I am left with the realization that because I can't ever genuinely know what other people are thinking, I won't ever actually understand the world. And that's something of a frustration, I think, because I have difficulty letting go of the idea that the world is an understandable place. At least in part.

I am, more or less, at peace with the idea that the world around me will often present as "random." The myriad interactions of people and organizations that shape the world occur mostly out of my sight, and so when their impacts reach me, I understand that I am seeing the effects of hidden causes. But it's more difficult than it should be, I think, to shake the idea that the effects link strongly enough to the causes that I should be able to work backwards and paint the picture.

It's strange, to understand that one both believes something and understands it to be false at the same time. I realize that one of those impulses is fictitious, but I can never seem to settle on which one. I suppose it's because I've never really needed to. It's a hedged bet where I've never actually been forced to commit one way or the other. And I think that a lot of things in life work this way. On theory, they don't make any sense, but in practice, it doesn't really matter.

The Shame Game

Racist: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.
Antiracist: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.

This popped up at work and promptly started a "debate," which I declined to have any part in. Dropping decontextualized Ibram Kendi quotes on people isn't generally an invitation to a calm discussion. The above are from Mr. Kendi's book: How To Be An AntiRacist, and, I will admit the sort of thing that I find more about virtue signalling than honestly helping people change.

Part of the problem is the nature of the discussion of the topic itself. "Racist" carries some very nasty overtones in everyday American discourse, and, contrary to what it appears that some people like to think, hasn't really been rehabilitated into a neutral term (regardless of how useful such rehabilitation would generally be). And so it doesn't strike me that people are drawn to such works because they feel a need to change who they are for the better. Rather, they're looking for what other people should be doing. Which is fair enough, I suppose. For many people, being the change they want to see in the world isn't an active enough viewpoint.

While I'm not sure that I'm 100% on board with, say, Mr. Kendi's definition of a "racist policy," namely "any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups....By policy I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people," what bugs me about the definitions of "racist" and "antiracist" is that only the "racist" definition includes inaction.

I've never been a fan of "you're either with us or your against us" formulations, for the simple fact that it encourages seeing everyone who has things that are more important to them than some set of personal interests as living in the "against" column. Which is a terrible way to see the world. As far as I'm concerned, it's not terribly far off from a persecution complex. And from everything I know about those, they suck out loud, and I'm glad that I don't have one. But the other downside of an "us versus the world" mentality, is that if everyone is the enemy, then a lot of things can be seen as self-defense. And constant fighting doesn't really make the world a better place in my estimation.

In my old age, I've come to the conclusion that Mark Twain was right when he opined: "The world owes you nothing. It was here first." I also tend to extend that to people, and for the same reason. And casting inaction as opposition flies in the face of that, implying that people do owe something, simply because someone exists and believes they need something from them. I've never been one for the "attitude of gratitude" and the like, because it often comes across to me as fawning. But I'm a big believing in being appreciative of what other do for me. So long as they have a choice. Thanking someone for something that they had no choice but to do has always struck me as unpleasantly dishonest. And if "antirtacism" is really going to mean something, it has to be engaged in freely, rather than under the threat of a one-sided shaming.

Hey, Slick

I was listening to Stevie Wonder's Living For The City today. It's a song that I've heard a thousand times. It received fairly regular airplay when I was growing up, and I have it on CD. The song itself has a narrative arc, with an interlude in which an unnamed protagonist (whose voice reminds me of one of my uncles) arrives in New York City. Things start going sideways the moment he disembarks from the bus, and he winds up being sentenced to prison for ten years.

While the main thrust of the song is about the difficulties of being Black in the United States of the late 1960s into the early 1970s (the song was released in 1973), one part of it stood out for me today after listening to parts of a recent episode of the NPR podcast It's Been A Minute. Sam Sanders was talking about the tendency, in Black art, to avoid negative portrayals of Black characters, hoping to avoid giving racist critics ammunition for attacks on the broader community.

In Living For The City, someone offers the protagonist $5 to "run this down the street for me." That someone, judging from their voice, is also Black, and since the sirens can be heard closing in even as the person presses the unspecified package on the protagonist, it's a safe bet that it was understood that being caught with the goods would mean going to jail. Paying closer attention to the song today than I had in the past, I realized that Stevie Wonder was also pointing out another pitfall for Black people in the United States; the willingness of other Black people to use them as fall guys and patsies.

Sure, this habit can also be laid at the feet of American racism, but I think to do so absolves people of the responsibility that is required to actually take advantage of how far they've come. It's an interesting tightrope that I sometimes observe people walking, attempting to retain a sense of Black agency while avoiding a general sense of blameworthiness. I once read an article about some research into how reading about White Privilege lessened sympathy among social liberals for poor white people. It takes a careful reading of the piece, but I think it's valid to guess that the effect that the researchers were seeing comes from the idea that a perception of agency lessens sympathy. In this case, it would make sense for people to seek to limit the perception of the agency that certain groups possess. Yet casting them too much as victims runs the risk of portraying them as unable to make use of any tools that might be given them.

But I think I'm getting away from the point. Once I was paying attention, I found Stevie Wonder's inclusion of this bit to be a subtle, but incisive commentary, given that it wasn't strictly necessary for the whole narrative to work. The protagonist could have simply run afoul of racist police officers and courts, and the story would have still come together and made the broader point.

I Think, Therefore...

One day, I was perusing an atlas (one of my favorite sorts of book) and it occurred to me that I didn't know if any of the places I was looking at actually existed. Although I suppose it's more accurate to say that I realized that I had no good way of knowing, in the moment, if any of the maps I was looking at were genuine. Not in the sense of the paper towns that mapmakers add to maps to catch out plagiarists, but in the sense that the whole exercise could have been an elaborate fake. After all, it's not like I've ever been to Karagandy, or am likely to ever go in my lifetime. Or Paris, for that matter. The realization that much of what I believed about the world came from lacking reasons to disbelieve, rather than reasons to believe, was striking. Of course, it's possible, at least in day-to-day life, to be too skeptical; and I, for my part have to be careful of that. Still, it's oddly freeing to understand how much one understands of the world is second-hand, if not even more distantly-sourced.
 

No Difference

It's no wonder about the timing – tragic events, such as pandemics, often cause us to question the existence of God: if there is a merciful God, why is a catastrophe like this happening?
Monica Grady "Can physics prove if God exists?" BBC Future. Tuesday, 1 March 2021

Perhaps, as someone who does not themself believe in deities, the point should be utterly irrelevant to me, but I've come to find it strange when people question the existence of their god because of an alleged failure to hold so some or other single characteristic. As a parallel, take me. While I like to drive, I have never done so competitively, and have no plans to start any time soon. But if someone were to describe me as a race car driver, it would seem strange to declare that on the basis of that fact being in error, that I didn't exist.

And so once I started thinking about it, I realized that I didn't really understand why, or how, people would become so attached to the idea that the Abrahamic god as "merciful" that calling that mercy into question would be a reason to discard the whole entity. It's an odd non-severability clause, of a sort.

Of course, as an atheist, I have a simple answer that I can fall back on; the idea that people create their deities with a certain set of characteristics, and once that set of attributes becomes the accepted form of the deity, the thought of removing one or more of them is simply anathema. But that's pat, and frankly, unsatisfying for that. As people are complex and their religions are complex, the reasoning that creates and sustains those religions is also complex. Presumably, there are thousands of years of religious evolutionary pressure that has gone into people's thinking about their gods. (And note that this holds even if the gods are real. I have yet to find a religion {as opposed to a sect or a denomination} of any size that boasts nothing in the way of splits and differences of opinion. So it stands to reason that even real deities wouldn't necessarily appear the same to all of their many adherents. But still, the ideas that managed to survive the constant competition for followers would be the ones that survived and continued.)

In the end, I don't have any answers to the question of what can a deity be and what can't one be. To me, a deity could be anything; I don't really understand why, conceptually, the concept would have specific limitations. And as a deity often characterized as omnipotent, the Abrahamic god would have no specific limits, either. If, as Professor Grady says, "God can do everything, even travel faster than light," then it stands to reason that it could also be merciless on occasion.

In the end, I suppose, deities are containers, and they hold things that people wish to be true about the world, or the universe, around them. A merciful deity, therefore, is a stand-in for the idea that, somehow, the Universe itself cars for human life, and if that idea of mercy or caring is jettisoned, then perhaps there's no real need of a deity to contain that idea.