Choices

I was reading a review of the new Netflix science-fiction movie, Stowaway. The review was unusual in how little time it spent on Stowaway itself. Instead it's mostly a second-hand takedown of The Cold Equations, a clear influence on the plot of Stowaway. What little time the reviewer spent on Stowaway was mainly to point out the parallels.

Unsurprisingly, there was a mention of the Trolley Problem, and as I read through the review, I realized that a lot of what was going on was shaped by the author's opinion of the problem. While the Trolley Problem is said to highlight the difference between deontological and consequentialist ethical systems, it also highlights the difference between people who accept, and those who reject, hard choices. One of the critiques of The Cold Equations, the Trolley Problem and Stowaway is that they are contrived to force a choice that technically should never arise in the first place. For the two science-fiction stories, the contention is that the spacecraft involved should, and therefore could, have been designed in such a way that the unexpected presence of another person on board should have been solvable by the crews in each case. Likewise, a common line of attack on the Trolley Problem is that no-one would ever be in a situation in which the only viable choices concern who dies, in reality, saving all of the supposedly at-risk lives would be simple.

I was reminded of this story that I'd read a year ago, in The Atlantic: My Husband Would Not Survive a Triage Decision. Oregon State Philosophy Professor Kathleen Dean Moore, faced with the realization that the brand of utilitarian ethics that she taught her students would mean that in a shortage medical care, her husband would not be selected for treatment, laid out a simple conclusion:

Deciding who lives or dies is a false dichotomy. There’s a third path: a proper health-care system that doesn’t require these terrible choices.

And you often see this in people's reactions to the Trolley Problem. There are those people who embark on the task of attempting to come to a rational conclusion as to which life or lives to safe, and these are those people who refuse to concede that there is any terrible choice to be made. And perhaps, they see the whole exercise as nothing more than a means to push people into denying that all lives are worth saving, and thus can be saved.

I tend to draw a distinction between the intrinsic value that we place on human life, and its instrumental value in practice. Every individual may be infinitely precious, but when push comes to shove, a life is worth precisely what someone will pay to preserve it, and no more. And part of the pushback against the Trolley Problem, made explicit in the critiques of The Cold Equations and Stowaway is that we have the resources to preserve lives, and that is only forced contrivance that constrains people from simply doing what needs to be done to keep people alive; whether that's interfering editors or governments that a certain professor of philosophy believes are too stingy to avoid unnecessary triage decisions.

I was watching a playthrough of the video game The Banner Saga, and there was a character in it, Rugga by name, who struck me as a stand-in for that person who makes the case that decisions in favor of the greater good are all simply covers for depriving others of what is rightfully theirs. Resistance to the Trolley Problem (and its many and varied incarnations) seems to be in the same vein. Why, one might ask, should people learn how to make life-or-death decisions, when the actual question is how does our society structure itself such that those decisions need not be made.

For my part, I'm dubious that the instrumental realities of life can ever be made to line up with our desires for the intrinsic value of all people. But maybe that simply means that I'm part of the problem.

Odd Bloom Out

Acculturated

Given that the end of the Derek Chauvin trial has been in the news, it came up online. And one member of an online forum that I participate in triggered a heated, long-running argument when they submitted (among other things) the following:

[George Floyd's] parents split up when he was 2. He got into college on a football scholarship, but dropped out. He was involved in several rap groups. Between 1997 and 2005 he served 8 jail terms. In 2009 he pled to 5 years for being part of an armed home invasion. After prison he joined a Christian rehab group and church. He was apparently addicted to an opioid called fentanyl. He was arrested for passing counterfeit money. He had 5 children--wikipedia doesn't mention him ever being married.

If many Q conspiracy theorists and Marjorie Taylor Greene seem to fit within a certain American culture, it's because they do. George Floyd appears to fit into another one. It's just that it is very risky to mention that he does. But he does.

So this raises some interesting questions. What is "culture?" How are cultures defined? What defines a person as "fitting within" a specific culture?

Part of the problem with speaking of culture and Black America is twofold: First, for many White Americans, Black people are all the same; they're effectively a monoculture. This has the result of coding "culture" directly with "all Black people." And it's a strange thing to be on the receiving end of. I am considered to have more in common with people I've never met from the other literal other side of the continent than I do with people I've known for decades, on the strength of a perceived similarity in our skin tones. People may talk about "East-coast hip-hop" versus "West-coast hip hop," but the idea that Black people living in Seattle's Rainier Beach might have a completely different culture than, say those living in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn neighborhood seems unintuitive to many Americans. At the same time, the idea that people from Broadmoor in Seattle and Buckhead in Atlanta would have similar cultural experiences would strike many people as ridiculous.

Secondly, concepts like "Rap culture," "Hip-hop culture," "Gang culture," "Street culture" and other terms that for the reason I noted above tend to be considered synonyms for "Black culture" are defined mainly in terms of how they differ negatively from what one might call "Mainstream White culture." (Something that I'm not sure actually exists, except as a concept used to compare other cultures.) To be sure, this tends to be the nature of comparisons with the mainstream, almost any deviation from the accepted norm is considered a negative in one way or another, with only a few exceptions. But when was the last time you heard someone refer to "R&B culture" to refer to a subset of the Black community? Or used any sort of "culture" designation to refer to something positive in a non-White group of people?

This tends to lend discussions of "culture," as pertains to Black Americans a cast of "all Black people." This creates the sense that "it is very risky to mention that George Floyd appears to fit into a another 'American culture'," because if there is no perceived difference between "another 'American culture'" and "the Black population of the United States" in the Venn diagram, the former is very easily taken as simply a code for the latter. And once culture is seen as merely a coded means of racist speech, the big guns come out.

Now, to a degree, this is also due to the fact that, generally speaking, culture is a subset of race; common discourse in the United States does not typically recognize any cultures, outside of perhaps some professional cultures, that cross racial definitions. Even though the definition of "gang" is not itself racially coded, a list of "Famous People That Openly Display The Gang Culture" from this Annapolis, Maryland, web page is exclusively of Black and mixed-race Black people. Likewise, while I'm pretty sure that there are Black people who live in New England, for instance, "New England culture" is generally considered the exclusive province of White New Englanders. This subordination of culture to assigned racial identity exacerbates the problem.

The person who wrote this noted that "it is very risky to mention that he," meaning George Floyd, fits into a specific culture, because lacking the words, or the willingness to define the culture they were referring to with any sort of precision, they simply came across as racist. Hence the argument that promptly started, which, in the end, was born of someone feeling a need to comment on something that they couldn't (or didn't bother to) be specific about. There should be nothing "very risky" about simply acknowledging the fact that the United States has a number of different cultures within its borders. But until the average person on the street to speak about the cultures that include non-White Americans with the same level of nuance and detail that they can bring to White American cultures that they aren't personally participants in, they're going to continue to sound as if they're clumsily blowing into a dog whistle.

Scarecrow

I came across a couple of articles in the aftermath of the trial of Derek Chauvin, namely “Why A Guilty Verdict For Derek Chauvin Doesn’t Change The Reality Of Police Violence” and “There Will Be More Derek Chauvins.”

The basic theses of each piece are, respectively:

In short, Chauvin’s indictment is not evidence that police violence will stop or that police reform will suddenly be widespread.

and

There will be more Derek Chauvins, because his conviction alters nothing about this system.

It's clear when one reads them that both of these articles have, as their central premise, the idea that there should be no expectation that, for all that it was a public spectacle, the trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin will lead to a reduction in, let alone the end of, police killings of civilians that are, or are widely believed believed to be, unjustified. To which my question is: Who honestly thinks that it will? The lack of an answer in either article left me with the suspicion of a straw man, but I presume that I can imagine someone who might think that some momentous corner has been turned. I’m simply unaccustomed, I suppose, to major news and commentary outlets catering to imaginary readers.

What struck me as odd about these pieces, from the moment I read their headlines, was how uncontroversial the point seemed. Why would anyone expect that this one conviction, in this one case, would noticeably move the needle? Consider this quote, from Alex Samuels’ FiveThirtyEight piece:

“Criminal prosecution is not an effective way to change policing,” Rachel Harmon, a professor of law and director of the Center for Criminal Justice at the University of Virginia, told me. “It’s individualistic, whereas most of the problems in policing are institutional.” In short: An individual verdict “doesn’t particularly contribute to broader reform,” she said.

But isn't this true of all other crimes? The United States has consistently been at or near the top of incarceration statistics worldwide for years, if not decades. I am not aware of any single sort of criminal activity that the nation has managed to eradicate by convicting people of crimes. If “you can't arrest your way out of [fill in the blank]” has effectively become a mantra in criminal-justice circles, why would any expect that poor police practices/police brutality would be an exception? The clearance rate for bank robberies is pretty good; Arizona State University reported it as being in the area of 60%, with many bank robbers being caught the day of the crime. Despite this, there are a couple thousand attempts annually. And criminal prosecution for bank robbery is an individualistic attempt to answer a broader societal problem. While many of the bank robbers that make their way into the news might be relatively well-off people looking to score large amounts of money for some or another reason, most people who try to rob banks are simply hard up, and banks are where the money is. If a better-than-even chance of being caught and sent to prison isn't a deterrent there, why would it be for anything else?

As I said before, I can imagine people who would attach some great significance to the trial of Derek Chauvin and its verdict. But there are always going to be people who look at progress in combating a long-standing problem, and eager to put it behind them, declare victory. When I was in high school some of my classmates were so quick to declare that the Civil Rights Movement had put an end to racism and so willing to repeat the claim that I started to wonder what planet they were from. (And where I could book a tour of the place.) But are there really so many people out there that believe this, and read left-learning news and commentary sites, that they’re going to encounter one of these articles? It seems more likely to me that both of these stories are preaching to the choir, telling a group of people something that they already know to be true. Whether they’re useful as reminders is a different question, one that I don’t have the answer to.

Impassed

It occurs to me that there are times when a conflict boils down to neither person wanting to take the first step, out of fear of being taken advantage of. Consider the following impasse.

I will forgive you, once you have shown genuine repentance for the harm you have done me.

I will repent the harm I have done you, once you have shown genuine forgiveness.

I've come to understand a lack of social trust to lie at the root of any number of problems in the United States. To be certain, I've become somewhat suspicious of the concept, given how easily it explains things, but still "seems a bit too easy" and "lacks explanatory power" are not one in the same, and one shouldn't do things the hard way, just for the sake of expending effort, if the destination is the same.

Still, I think that something a bit more complex is at work here, because of another favorite hobgoblin of mine, insecurity. If the person who cannot afford to be cheated cannot afford to be trusting, social trust might explain a lot of things, but it also has an explanation itself.

For living in what is described as one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, many Americans, regardless of their social and economic status, strike me as desperately insecure. People have enough to realize that they could be much worse off, but not enough to understand themselves as safe from that happening. And, seeing themselves in a zero-sum game, they jealously guard what they have and see the benefits that others receive as coming at their expense.

But if insecurity feeds distrust, distrust also feeds insecurity. I don't think that many people understand themselves to be completely able to weather their vagaries of life entirely on their own, as individuals or as nuclear families. Thus, a feeling that others are competitors, rather than compatriots can heighten that sense of ever present danger. Which leads to a mode of dealing with other people that tends to request the other be the first to show vulnerability. Something that itself can sow distrust.

There are millions of people who understand the way things work in the modern United States to be completely, and self-evidently, broken. This also sows distrust and insecurity, especially when there is a conclusion that things can't become "this bad" on their own, so some malicious party must have engineered it for their own benefit. But I've come to think that maybe the kludgy system that exists here endures specifically because it can function (at least after a fashion) in a society where distrust and insecurity are the norm. It may not make the best of a bad situation, but it isn't terrible, either. And so it sustains itself because it doesn't disturb the status quo; American society and politics don't make citizens more trusting and more secure, and so the don't open the avenues for their replacement with something that might serve everyone better, but at the same time require more from everyone in the bargain.

Therefore, the impasse remains, and is the only winner.

Processing

There are many ways to think of justice, and not all of them are mutually compatible. One element of the concept of justice is procedural justice, the application of theories of justice to the processes that are themselves designed to produce or enforce justice. This is often contrasted with substantive justice, or the justice of outcomes.

The philosopher John Rawls breaks down procedural justice into three categories, perfect, imperfect and pure. Perfect procedural justice entails a process that, when it is followed, guarantees a just outcome (as measured against an independent standard). Imperfect procedural justice, by contrast, creates high, but not perfect, odds of bringing about a just outcome when the process is followed properly. Pure procedural justice is different from the other two in that there is no independent standard to compare against, only the process itself.

One of the problems with public forms of justice procedure, like jury trials, is that they're often held to a standard of perfect procedural justice, with members of the public at all levels understanding themselves as informed enough as to what the correct outcome should be that they can judge whether or not the procedure is working properly by whether it returns a result that matches their individual understanding of what the outcome should be.

This BBC article about the trial of Derek Chauvin illustrates that. They selected three people here in the United States, and among other questions, asked them: "What do you think the outcome of this trial will be?"

These were the first part of the answers:

The evidence is there. The facts are there. The testimonies are there. Everything is there and we need to come out with a conviction for sure. I hope the jury is going to come back with the fastest verdict in history and find him guilty of the highest charges.

I think Derek Chauvin should be found guilty. He's got three different charges against him and I don't know the nuances of these different charges, but it's up to the jury to find the perfect charge to find him guilty.

It's difficult to predict, given the political correctness and extraordinary amount of pressure this jury is under.

Guess which of the three is a retired police officer. And I throw that in not to be snide, but only one of the answers doesn't openly presuppose the "correct" verdict. (Not, to be sure, any of the respondents failed to make it clear what they thought the verdict should be.) And police officers, one would expect, would have a different view of the trial process than most other people.

Given that in a jury trial, the jury is, by definition, the finder of fact, a jury trial is, realistically, much closer to pure procedural justice in intent. As a practical matter, determining substantive justice requires knowing the facts of the matter. And that's the jury's role. If facts were never in doubt, there would never be a need to try cases; they could all simply move to acquittal or sentencing. Whether it's due to some natural human habit for narratives or the influence of their social circumstances, people have a habit of forming conclusions and then expecting that the procedures of justice are intended to agree with them. For instance, when asked "What moments stood out to you the most?" one of the respondents (I'll let you guess which one) answered:

The testimony that George Floyd had no carotid artery damage was very compelling to me. This would indicate that he was not suffocated via the neck.

That assumption, that all suffocation would necessarily result in carotid artery damage, jumped out at me, so I decided to look it up. And found a National Center for Biotechnology Information article on Strangulation Injuries. In the Etiology section, it notes the following:

Many “submission holds” within the world of martial arts are known to place direct pressure on cervical structures and can result in strangulation injuries. Along similar lines, police and military combatants are given training on "vascular neck restraint." This effective, but controversial, approach to subduing a target can result in permanent and debilitating injuries or even death.[22]

(And note 22 reads as follows:) “Stellpflug SJ, Menton TR, Corry JJ, Schneir AB. There is more to the mechanism of unconsciousness from vascular neck restraint than simply carotid compression. Int J Neurosci. 2020 Jan;130(1):103-106.”

Based on this, I don't believe that it's true that a lack of carotid artery damage is an indication, in and of itself, that Mr. Floyd didn't not suffocate due to neck compression. Now, I don't know if the trial was televised in its entirety (I'll admit to not following it that closely.) but this could be a reason to avoid such coverage; members of the public are not the finders of fact, and giving them the impression that they should be can create problems (among which can be cherry-picking of testimony).

It's a safe bet that those people who regarded former officer Chauvin as innocent will suspect that the verdict was reached effectively under duress, to avoid social unrest, while had the verdict gone the other way. much of that very unrest would likely have been predicated on the idea that the fix was in from the start.

I suspect that there never will really be 100% acceptance of the idea of pure procedural justice. It's much the same with elections. While an election, by it's very nature, cannot have its final result compared to some independent outcome to see how well they match, time and again, people have protested election results because they believe they understand how it "should" have turned out. I think that a case can be made that what's commonly labelled "anti-democratic impulses" among many national Republicans is merely the sense that elections are broken when they don't return the "correct results," and that anyone who seeks to compare elections to some preconceived notion of right and wrong is liable to fall into the same tar pit.

But this is the problem with the fact that people are neither "angels" nor robots. People expect the processes of justice to serve their needs, and they don't always see the distinctions between their interests and perfect justice, even when those distinctions are pretty significant.

Last Flower Standing

 

This Time With Feeling

This is one of those posts that would normally start with "maybe it's just me..." but in this case, I suspect that it might actually just be me, so there's no need to be coy about it. A couple of years ago, I noted that, as a teenager, I'd had my first run-in with kidney stones, and due to my own ignorance, spent a very long night convinced that I was going to die after a nurse was late with replacing an IV drip that I'd been placed on. Quite obviously (I think), I didn't die. And, interestingly, I didn't find that I was really afraid of dying anymore. Not that I ran out to take up base jumping or alligator-wresting or anything crazy like that, but the idea that dying, in and of itself, was something to be afraid of, had just quietly left the building.

A side effect of this is that certain topics (recent police shootings and the pandemic, for starters) don't really have the emotional resonance for me that they appear to for other people. I've understood this or a while, but I never really took the time to really consider the upshot of that. I was out walking in the woods today, and I was considering the idea that people are rarely motivated to make major changes in their lives minus the presence of strong emotions. And this lead me to think about what drives the mechanics of change.

Not being a fan of constant solicitations, I tend to avoid donating to charities unless I can do so anonymously. After all, I went to a single political fundraiser (where anonymity is not allowed) back in 2004, and I'm still receiving pitches for donations, despite not having ever written a second check or answered any of the messages. But still, I like to find ways to help out worthy causes. And one day I asked myself how I made the determination of worthiness. So, as an experiment, I set out to find a charity that struck me as worthy, yet was engaged in work that I otherwise didn't care about. Or, perhaps more accurately, was engaged in solving a problem or engaged with a constituency that I wasn't at all invested in. It didn't take me long to find a local charity that fit the bill, and make a one-of donation. It was a process that seemed oddly flat, if that word makes any sense in this context. While I'm not the sort to become worked up at the prospect of saving the world, I tend to derive a certain sense of satisfaction from being helpful to others. But in this instance, while I understood that I was helping, it didn't feel particularly useful. It was just a thing that I was doing because I'd told myself that I was going to do it.

Now, to be sure, that's a perfectly legitimate reason to do things. There are times when I'm not particularly motivated to write anything here. But I wind up working something up because I'd told myself that I was going to maintain a particular cadence of posts and so I post, even when, looking back on the post later, I definitely have the feeling that I phoned it in. I can tell which posts I was really engaged with, and which ones I likely could have completely skipped.

And maybe that's why emotion is such a powerful driver of action; it bypasses the need to create a certain discipline about things. Someone whose reaction to a particular event is: "Must. Denounce. Now." is going to have a much easier time writing about it, or taking other actions, than someone who sees it as perhaps regrettable, but otherwise takes it in stride. And this might be a reason why so many people are attached to their emotional responses to events; the whirlwind of activity that a strong emotional response can produce is something that valuable to them.

For myself, I think I value the time and effort that I put into pushing myself to keep up with this. While there are times when it feels less like discipline, and more like an unwelcome compulsion, I like to think that I'm still able to approach it rationally. But I understand that there are times when my lack of emotional connection to certain events or possibilities leaves people with the impression than I'm completely disinterested. Sometimes, that even includes me.

I Don't Know About That

A number of years ago, I don't remember when, I was looking at a map, and it occurred to me that I didn't know if the map was, in fact, accurate. I hadn't heard of the "paper towns" that mapmakers would place in random spots on the map to catch plagiarists; this was just more the realization that I was assuming that the map was accurate, but didn't really have a way of proving it to myself, outside of using the map to find and visit the locations depicted on it. My belief in the accuracy of the map, I realized, was a matter of faith. The more I thought about this, the less I realized I knew for myself. Most of the things that I take to be true about the world are simply matters of faith, predicated on the idea that the sources of information are both honest and accurate.

Once my beliefs began to fold in on themselves this way, they underwent a rather rapid gravitational collapse, finally condensing down into the singularity of "I think, therefore I am," and leaving everything else as a matter of belief, based on one or more assumptions.

It's an interesting space to find myself in, although it does get me into trouble from time to time. And perhaps the most troublesome aspect of it is not being able to live up to people's expectations of conviction and certainty. A general attitude of agnosticism is sometimes welcomed by people who see a lack of certainty that they're wrong about about something to be an opening, but it wears out that welcome when it doesn't allow itself to be replaced by a certainty that they're correct. It also sometimes rubs people the wrong way when they look for support against another viewpoint. While "I don't know what works, I only know what works for me," strikes me as an honest way to approach the world, it's not one that makes for a deep willingness call other people out as mistaken, and support those who would push past their objections to implement their favored policy positions. And in circumstance where a lack of commitment to the right side is taken as a commitment to the wrong side, it can result in simultaneously being on a remarkable number of mutually-exclusive wrong sides.

But I understand that, in many cases, I don't have to be positive. I need just enough belief to navigate my day-to-day life. If Kyrgyzstan turns out to be a completely different place than it says on the map, that's not ever likely to be a problem in my life. It's a lot like the fact that since I don't rely on the daily news for anything of importance, I don't need any of it to be accurate.

Of course, most of it is likely accurate, or accurate enough, in any event, and I can go through my daily life secure in the knowledge that I know a lot of things that are going to line up with what other people know, since there is so much overlap in our sources. But still, I wonder what I would perceive the world around me to be, if I understood it in a different, and perhaps less intermediated, way than I do now.

Matter of...

There is something that I find myself wondering whenever I see a "Black Lives Matter" flag, sign et cetera.

Matter to whom?

As a Black person myself, I understand that our lives matter to ourselves (although I understand why so many people are willing to argue that). But who else do they matter to? What brought Black Lives Matter into existence in the first place was the perception that the lives of Black people were expendable when it came to White America's perceptions of crime and safety. And while the movement has pushed back against the mindset that allowed for Black people to be killed so that White people could feel that they were being protected, actually changing the factors that led to it in the first place is a much thornier problem.

As an Intrinsic matter, human life can be said to be priceless. People are unique and non-fungible; once someone loses a partner, child or other loved one, it's not possible to simply find another person with the right age, ethnicity et cetera and simply slot them in. But from and Instrumental viewpoint, things are quite different. Human lives are worth what people are ready, willing and able to pay to preserve them. And the United States has, generally speaking, never been particularly willing to make large outlays for that purpose. The broadly-based economic slowdown that has been imposed in order to combat the now-waning SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is something of an outlier in this case, and it's something of a unique instance; were the disease less random in the way it impacts people, it would have been unlikely to have engendered the response that it has. As a counter-example, consider influenza. While the flu can easily claim 50,000 lives over the course of a year, it's generally ignored; none of the measures in place to contain the pandemic are in place for the flu, even though some much more limited version of them would likely be effective.

Part of the reason for the unusual response to pandemic was a sense of its universality; anyone could become sick, anyone could become a carrier, therefore, no one was "safe" from the disease. But when it comes to things like the killing of George Floyd or the recent shooting death of Daunte Wright, there isn't a sense that they can happen to anyone. While people may understand that cases like those of Daniel Shaver happen, it's unlikely that most people one might meet on the street take the protracted, and eventually deadly, game of "Simon Says" that Mr. Shaver was forced into as something that might happen to them.

And there is no other consequence.

The President Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta might have come to the conclusion that eliminating bias and racism would boost GDP, but precious few other people seem to agree. And so, in the grand scheme if things, the lives lost are not missed. People in general are expendable, in no small part due to the level of effort that's gone into making it that way. Death happens, and organizations that suddenly collapse due to the death of an important person are seen as unprepared. If CEOs can die and the world goes on, then why can't some random Joe on the street be gunned down without any broader consequence?

And this is why lives don't matter. People don't miss them when they are ended. Families may grieve and friends may bear sorrow, but the rest of us never notice unless someone tells us what happened. My life is no more difficult this morning because Daunte Wright is dead than it was on Sunday. And I suspect that tens, if not hundreds of millions of people are in the same situation. The deaths that Black Lives Matter protests are tragic, but in an instrumental sense, they have no impact. The Sun will still come up tomorrow, millions of people will go to work by "commuting" from their bedrooms to their living rooms and they will do their jobs reasonably secure in the knowledge that death will not come for them; and in the fact that it has come for others is, in a very real sense, not their problem.

"Black Lives Matter" may be a powerful slogan, but in the end, it is just that; a slogan. It's not something that the majority of Americans feel and experience in their day-to-day lives. And until that changes; until the value of a Black Life moves from the Intrinsic to the Instrumental, the inherent expendability of people will mitigate against any and all efforts to make it reality.

Misplaced

I came home on Sunday to find an Uber Eats bag on my doormat. Knowing that I hadn't ordered it, I resolved to find its actual destination. But there's no good way to do this. The receipt on the bag didn't have any information about who ordered it, and didn't have any information about the restaurant that it had been ordered from. A bit of canvassing my apartment building resulted in me being out and around so that when the young woman who had ordered the food came looking for it (from a few buildings away) we bumped into one another, so all was well that ended well.

But it's been an interesting recurring pattern. Of the two packages that were supposed to come my way since the beginning of the year, only one arrived. On the other hand, I've had four packages show up for me that should have gone somewhere else. Not a particularly good accuracy rate. Yet the companies that do the shipping don't provide a way for people to contact them and let them know that they've been the recipient of someone else's delivery. It's an interesting oversight.

Portal

 

A carved stone circle, used as a bench in the Bellevue Botanical Garden.

The Only Thing

Plus, who wouldn’t feel a bit more comfortable venturing into the world knowing that everyone around them isn’t a vector of disease?
Yasmeen Serhan "The Futility of Vaccine Passports"

Okay. So I have a question. Since when does a vaccine, or other immunity, against the SARS-2 coronavirus mean that a given person "isn't a vector of disease?" Did all other human communicable diseases drop dead while I was away? Because I know, for my own part, I've had some nasty respiratory bugs in my day, not to mention the random pain in the butt that is the common cold. (Although, perhaps strangely, I've never had influenza.) Have all of these pests been eradicated in the past year? This would be huge news, so I'm impressed that I haven't heard about it.

This transition of the SARS-2 coronavirus over the past fifteen or sixteen months, from being a new disease to being the only disease worth having any concern over is somewhat remarkable, and so I'm a bit surprised that more hasn't been made of it. Granted, formulations like the one I quote from Yasmeen Serhan, which imply that proof of SARS-2 immunity can be taken as a sign that a person is free of any communicable disease, are likely rare; I don't believe I've seen it put quite that way before. But broader implications that the virus is the only, rather than a different, threat to one's health are out there.

And the outbreak dominates the news. The BBC, for instance, has added a section for Coronavirus to its home page. And this article on a new Utah law aimed at making men pay for half the costs of a partner's pregnancy has a link to a video captioned "Coronavirus: 'Pregnancy during a pandemic is terrifying'," and the "You may also like:" headlines are "In pictures: The babies born into a pandemic", "From boom to bust - why lockdown hasn't led to more babies" and "'Raw and inspiring': Tales of pandemic motherhood." This, for a story where the SARS-2 coronavirus is never mentioned. And other sites that normally have some sort of paywall, like The Atlantic, have elected to allow their pandemic-related stories to be freely available.

There's nothing particularly inappropriate in all of this. The pandemic has come to dominate the news cycle for the past year, and news outlets haven't been shy in making room for it. And, being the sort to see the news media as a business, I'm of the opinion that pandemic coverage takes center stage because people are interested in it. After all, this is something that seemingly came out of nowhere to become the third leading cause of death in the United States. It's responsible for a significant majority of the increase in deaths from 2019 to 2020. But unlike heart disease and cancer, which hold the top spots, many people feel a sense of agency concerning the SARS-2 coronavirus.

But it's not the only thing that people might have to be careful of. And the implication that "safe" from the pandemic equals safe overall hides that fact. Deaths from the flu may have been completely swamped by the SARS-2 CoV pandemic, but some forty-thousand or so deaths annually is still worth taking into account.

If there were one thing that would change about the overall reaction to the pandemic, it would be to more firmly place it in a context of public health more generally. As much as vaccine hesitancy and opposition to mask mandates make headlines and offer convenient villains to boo, I suspect that it's likely that a culture that sees staying home while sick as socially-dangerous malingering is also a culprit. Back when the pandemic was just starting to ramp up in the United States, I had a couple of encounters with visibly ill people working in grocery stores. I doubt that either of them had come down with a SARS-2 CoV infection. But they were disease vectors nonetheless. Maybe keeping that in mind will help the nation make some changes that will blunt the inevitable next disease outbreak.

The Power Principle

One of the enduring falsehoods of American politics, and likely human civilization, is "principle." I am of the opinion that very few, if any, people have genuine principles. Pretty much everyone, on the other had, has interests. And if one knows another person's interests, one will be much better able to predict that person's actions than one will by knowing their stated principles. Part of this, I suspect, is that interests never go anywhere. People always have to eat, find shelter from the elements and a place to sleep, et cetera. Principles, on the other hand, as statements of intent, can be thought of as plans. And plans have a way of needing to be revised upon contact with the reality of the situation.

Given this, I'm sometimes impressed by the tenacity with which people hold on to the idea that they are acting on principle and/or that they expect others to act on principle. Politics in the United States is rife with accusations of hypocrisy, broadly defined as pronouncing one's principles at point in time A, and then proceeding to act in one's interests at point in time B. This happens often enough that no-one comes across a genuinely surprised when it happens. Take, for instance, the refusal of Republicans in the United States Senate, lead by Senator McConnell, to fill a seat on the United States Supreme Court that came open at the end of the Obama Administration, citing the nearness of the next election, and then the rush to fill a seat that opened even closer to the general election at the end of the Trump Administration. Democratic politicians, activists and media sympathizers lobbed charge after charge of hypocrisy. But I'm not aware of a single person who actually found the behavior of Senator McConnell the least bit unexpected. And note here that I'm referring to a person, Senator McConnell, and not the Senate Republicans as a body.

As a layperson, I suspect that the charade is maintained mostly due to the idea that it's somehow inappropriate for people to openly act on their interests. In other words, to use the example above, while Republican voters in Kentucky were completely unperturbed by the about-face on filling Supreme Court vacancies, Senator McConnell seemed to think that coming out and saying "We have the ability to do this, and so we will," would have been unacceptable to them. It's possible that people expect others to live up to principle, even when it's (clearly) not going to be reciprocated, and so Senator McConnell admitting to using power in his possession openly would have been seen as a justification for Democrats doing the same. Not, honestly, that it seems to make any sense to expect that they wouldn't, invitation or not. Again, I don't really know who anyone expects is legitimately being fooled by this.

But I guess this is the point of people being told what they want to hear. In reality, people don't tell themselves that they want to hear something that is untrue or concocted for their benefit. Rather they understand that it's true to some degree or another, and even if it's being spun or embellished, it's not because that's what they requested. And in the United States, the open wielding of power, either oneself or on one's behalf, is frowned upon. Which is perhaps odd, in a nation what so often seeks to openly wield power on the international level. And so a choreographed dance has built up, in which higher principles are said to be the driving forces. It appears to me that everyone actually knows better, but then, I'm an admitted cynic, even if I do tend to believe that people act sincerely, even when they aren't being open about it.

And so principle seems like just another in the long series of things that people tell themselves, because they want them to be true, and they don't examine for that same reason. Even when it doesn't seem to matter. But maybe that's unfair. The point behind the story of The Emperor's New Clothes was that while only the guileless child was willing to say the Emperor was naked, the only other people who failed to compliment his clothing for fear of being inept or unintelligent were the swindlers. Everyone in the story, other than the child and the criminals, acted out of fear of the judgments of others. Perhaps in politics, the public's fear of judgment or harming their interests is so great than even when the Emperor is suspected of being a swindler, no one says anything. Or maybe it's due to convincing themselves that's its true, rather than living in fear that it isn't.

Dauntless

The tradition of armed resistance persisted even as the civil-rights movement succeeded by rejecting this fearful symmetry: Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis showed that Black people without guns were much more formidable.
Graeme Wood. "A Black Army Rises to Fight the Racist Right"

I call BS. I think that White people in the United States found (generally after the civil rights movement has ended) these figures to be non-threatening, and thus more acceptable. While civil rights icons like Reverend King and Representative Lewis are often credited with forcing White America to make concessions to racial equity and equality, it's likely more accurate to say that they wheedled and cajoled. If power concedes nothing without a demand, the demand did not come from the peaceful protests of Black Americans, but from the willingness of White Americans to push their will on their recalcitrant colleagues.

"Unfortunately, Jay’s answer—create a parallel, quasi-fascist race army with its own flag and homeland—strikes me as a particularly bad case of becoming that which you hate." Mr. Wood relates. And okay, I won't argue with that. Mr. Wood is allowed to rate ideas however way he likes. But that's not a particularly good justification for saying that a less-threatening path would be more effective. If "acknowledging that Black people are uniquely menaced, is to be expected," then it stands to reason that the icons of the civil rights movement were not formidable enough to get the job done. Would one really expect that if Reverend King were alive today, he'd have concluded that he'd attained his goals?

Generally speaking, the point behind the threat of violence is to affect change that the threatened find unwelcome through presenting the potential for even more unwelcome change. In effect, it's offering a choice between paying a little and paying a lot. Mr. Wood reveals a confidence that power can be convinced to pay a little without the threat of paying a lot. Sometimes, people cultivate that confidence because they genuinely believe in the goodness of people's hearts, and sometimes, people cultivate that confidence because while power might not be frightened of what happens if a revolutionary attempts to make good on their threats, they are. When some of my more radical friends speak to the need for revolution to change America, my pushback comes from a place of noting that revolutions really suck. If a revolution is what's needed, then so be it, but if one can find a less bloody way to make the world a better place, I'd like to try that one first.

But that's different than having some magical confidence that it's the more formidable option. Mr. Wood's piece in The Atlantic is calibrated to present its subject as a clown whom no-one should be following. Which is nothing new. His piece on Kyle Rittenhouse paints the young man as a deluded inhabitant of a fantasy world. But he makes an interesting point in that article: "Training yourself to imagine something makes it seem more likely to happen, and primes your instincts to react to it—and, I suspect, initiate that violent reaction and overdo it when circumstances could be resolved more peacefully." Do Black people in America have to train themselves to imagine being uniquely menaced? Are their angry reactions overdoing it?

One aspect of a commitment to peace that is often overlooked is that outside of someone who is simply intent on homicide, acquiescing to injustice is as peaceful a resolution as say. Part of the ethos of peaceful civil disobedience is that people will see the injustice being perpetrated and withdraw their support for the unjust actor, and that said actor desires that social support more than they crave whatever benefits accrue to them from their acts of injustice. I am not a student of history, and so I can't offer any analysis of the overall effectiveness of non-violence. And at the same time this means that I can't contest the people who critique it in the same way that they critique "civility," as something that allows power to avoid concession by refusing to present it with a workable demand.

People turn to violence for any number of reasons, but in the end, I suspect that most people subscribe to what a Libertarian acquaintance of mine terms the "Non-Aggression Principle," which, put simply, is the idea that violence is only justified in the defense of rights. It's one thing to say that any given right can be defended without recourse to violence. It's quite another to demonstrate that any given right is best defended without recourse to violence. For my part, I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a terrible shot, have no intention on spending the range time that it would take to remedy that and am squeamish. I have too much of a distaste for fighting to see it as anything other than a last resort. But more importantly, I'm at a place in my life where I don't have to call upon my last resorts. So I have the luxury of considering violence to be an unpleasant option where others are available. Not everyone believes themselves to be so affluent. If one believes that they are, helping them to come to the same conclusion is more useful than a blind faith in their ineffectiveness.

Stacks

Went to the beach with my camera today. The specific park I found myself at has a surprising amount of driftwood, enough so that I suspect some sort of human intervention. But in any event, there were a number of these scattered around the place today. I suspect that  number of people had quite a good time building them.
 

Breaking the Links

"Mass shootings" have made their way back into the American news cycle, with the shootings in the Atlanta area, then in Colorado and now a shooting in Orange, California. And again it's triggered a debate about "gun control" and "assault weapons." These debates are predictably partisan by this point, because of the various constituencies that the parties represent. Affluent city-dwellers and suburbanites who tend to feel themselves threatened by random acts of violence perpetrated by people with guns tend to vote Democratic, and people who live in rural areas and enjoy shooting sports, fear the breakdown of society or fear the tyranny of (Democratic) government tend to vote Republican. This polarization in the voter demographics tends to drive a similar polarization at the legislative level. (And yes, I did leave out the various non-white groups that have interests here. Mainly because I don't feel that their concerns are at all driving the broader conversation. Republicans may use gang violence in Black and Hispanic communities as something scary to motivate their voters, but neither party is showing publicly any investment in dealing with that particular problem in a way that would drive lasting change.)

The two blocks have divergent interests, brought about by their divergent visions of what a safe (or safer, anyway) world looks like. In broad strokes, the Democratic idea of a safe world is one in which people who wish to be violent lack certain tools with which to commit violence, while the Republican idea of a safe world is one in which people can meet force with greater force, and thus suppress the viability of violence as a tool. As one might have guessed, these are more or less mutually exclusive with one another (as are so many other things in American political discourse), mainly because they understand the problem very differently. And each side understands their particular viewpoint as being backed up, not by some facts, but by the facts. Which, despite the fact that it's often seen as cherry-picking, is reasonable; the entire set of relevant information is quite vast, and most people obtain their information from people who have already chosen a side, and media outlets that understand the desires of their audiences (even if they don't always intentionally cater to them). Information, like water, seeks its level, and in so doing, tends to find those who are most receptive to it.

Where things become muddied is when there is an understanding that rather than a set of facts, allowing or rationalizing a certain set of policies, the facts demand certain policy prescriptions, such that accepting that some given set of facts is accurate is considered an endorsement, if not a mandate, for the policy positions one favors. So, for example, an activist might hold that if one accepts that shootings with guns that were covered by Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act are often mass shootings, then one must also accept that the Act should be reinstated. And this (just like it does for anthropogenic climate change) adds a level of motivation to the differing understandings of the facts, since facts that mandate unwelcome policy changes must be contested.

This stems in part, I would guess, from the idea that there are right and wrong ways to respond to particular facts. So tobacco companies sought to sew doubt about the links between tobacco smoking and cancer, because "I'm willing to accept some risk of a bad outcome in order to partake of this activity" was not seen as a legitimate viewpoint, whereas "in the absence of convincing evidence, this activity may be viewed as risk-free" was. So the question, at least for me, becomes: If it had been more acceptable to smoke, despite the risk of cancer, would there have been a perceived need to cast doubt on the level (or even existence) of risk? Likewise, in the current back-and-forth on firearms and public safety, would a decoupling of facts and policy allow for people to more readily accept different sources of facts?

Not that I think this likely. The last time I had a discussion with someone concerning climate change, they were adamant that someone who acknowledged the changes to the Earth's climate was ethically obligated to accept whatever changes to the economy and people's lifestyles were required to reverse the changes. And while I understand the position, I believe that it makes the discussion over what's actually happening higher-stakes than is useful. And this, I think, lends itself to the idea that people's perceptions of the facts are tainted where they have an interest in certain policy outcomes.

The outcome of all of this is that the status quo becomes the norm, because neither side can marshal broad support for facts that can be evaluated to support change. Each side focuses on the facts that they presume support their case to the exclusion of others, and considers those facts that the other raises to be suspect; either taken out of context, or completely fabricated. Can decoupling facts from policies prevent this? I have no idea. But I suspect that it can't make things worse.

Worry, Worry

There is, I believe, a genre of news story that can be described as speculative nonfiction. In this particular case, National Public Radio rounds up a bunch of experts to basically guess at what the future is going to look like. The story feels like prognostication disaster porn, with its focus on a catastrophe that may or may not come to pass.

I would suspect that a more straightforward piece on why it's still useful to continue the precautionary measures that people have adopted to mitigate the SARS-CoV-2 would have still gotten the point across without appearing to indulge in fearmongering. But in a media environment where clicks are everything, being straightforward doesn't seem to cut it very often.