Our Brothers' Keepers

The news today comes and goes, and I find it interesting how quickly what would otherwise appear to be important stories drop off the radar and disappear into the ether. Like the case of Sarah Everard, a young woman who was abducted and murdered, with a London police officer being charged with the crime. It was a big deal at the start, and it's still a going concern in the United Kingdom, but here it's mostly been forgotten. Which makes sense, I suppose. I doubt that news outlets in the UK really keep up all that closely on individual killings in the United States. (Not that they'd have time for anything else if they did.) In any event, it suddenly occurred to me that I remembered the case, and decided to see where things currently stood with it.

One story that came back had a straightforward enough headline: "Sarah Everard case shows men need to take collective responsibility." Curious as to where it would go, I decided to read it. The author, Jasper King, notes that "If Sarah was doing everything right, it is time for men to take collective responsibility and make sure our streets feel safe for women." Not that I understand what Sarah Everard could possibly have been doing that was so wrong as to bring her fate upon her. In any event, the high-profile (or simply mediagenic) murders of women sometimes brings about this soul-searching on the part of commentators. I just have one question.

Given that men (and I count myself in this) are apparently completely unable to look out for one another, why does anyone think that we'll be able to look out for women?

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting, in the United States in 2019, 10,908 men and 2,991 women were murder victims (along with a further 28 people of unknown sex). To be sure, not all of them were killed by men, but the clear majority of them (in cases were the sex of both victim and offender are known) were. If men have a collective responsibility to make sure the streets feel safe, we're failing miserably.

I suspect that it's due, in large part, to the fact that many men tend not to see the problem, perhaps in part because while violence may be the end of many men, sexual violence against men is much less of an issue that it is for women. When I was of an age that homicide was the leading cause of death for people like me, I was acutely aware of that fact. (And I sympathize with women who feel unsafe on the streets, the feeling that one might be killed at any moment when out and about is remarkably stressful.) But now that I've survived long enough that things like cancer and heart disease are the main things looking to kill me (strangely, this feels an accomplishment), I'm less inclined to be concerned about being shot or stabbed when out of my home. And so hearing about murders doesn't spark the same concern that it used to. I have other things to deal with now.

But by the same token, I understand that violence is always going to be present. It's not the looming threat that it was as a 20-something living in Chicago, but it hasn't gone away either. I don't have a criminal record, or a history of gang involvement (which are the real risk factors for death by homicide, in most cases), but I understand that I live in a culture in which violence is often seen as a ready solution to problems. I understand why describing people like Robert Long or Samuel Cassidy as having a bad day results in other people being up in arms, but there's something to be said for the idea that when shooting people to death is seen as a legitimate answer to "temptation" or a problem with ones coworkers something has clearly gone off the rails.

Bottomless Well

Back in 2013, one Dr. Tung Thanh Nguyen penned a blog post for the White House titled: "Our Land of Limitless Opportunities." It's pretty much what it says on the tin, a tale designed to support the notion that "America offers everyone the hope of limitless opportunities."

Recently, I've been wondering about that idea, and just how literally it's taken. It's not a secret that even when people in the United States say they want change of one or another sort, that wanting only lasts as long as it takes for the price tag to appear. My own impression of why "Generation X," of which I am a member, didn't change the world after so many of us swore that we would was that the bill came due, and our collective response was: "Too rich for my blood." We then went on to other things.

I was reading an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the activist/author who made a name for herself with her book In Defense of Looting, and at one point the interviewer asked her this:

Isaac Chotiner: If you’re taking from a store owner who needs to pay her daughter’s hospital bills or whatever it is, that could have an effect on someone’s health. This seems to be a type of connection that people on the left often want to make, no?

Vicky Osterweil: Sure, but there’s no really clean or easy way to struggle without ever hurting anyone.

Later in the interview, Mr. Chotiner went to the well again, noting:

We saw some property destruction in Brooklyn and elsewhere, where I would not be surprised at all if the people who were rioting or looting were of more means than the people whose stores they were looting. But it feels like you’re getting close to saying you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelette.

At this point, I wanted to ask him what part of "there’s no really clean or easy way to struggle without ever hurting anyone" he hadn't understood.

But in a "land of limitless opportunities," perhaps it makes sense that there shouldn't be any external costs. The people who want change should be able to gather up enough of the limitless opportunities and convert them into the resources they need to bring about change without ever having to bother anyone else for them. And while I'm sure that very few people would, if asked, say that the United States has literally limitless resources, there is a degree to which everyday rhetoric and thought would imply that it does.

The maxim that anyone who works hard enough can get ahead or even make themselves wealthy presupposes that the nation has an inexhaustible and unmediated ability to convert work into material gain. To be sure, there are some people who understand that hard work is the only input needed. But even this presupposes effectively infinite demand for unskilled labor such that it pays well enough to allow for unimpeded upwards mobility. And where are the resources that fund that demand?

Even if there's a suspicion that the reasoning here is at least somewhat motivated, there's no reason to presume that people are being insincere here. The idea that the United States was well-resourced to the degree that it would simply never run out has been there from the beginning. It's perfectly reasonable to presume that at least some people have bought into it. And it provides a workable explanation for a social attitude that disdains paying costs for things that are primarily important to others. How does one take more than their fair share of limitless opportunities? How does someone lack a fair chance to get ahead if there are always more opportunities, there for the taking? If the perception of agency limits sympathy, being seen as capable interferes with being seen as worth of assistance. Yet being seen as incapable comes with its own pitfalls. Altering the narrative of infinite opportunity might help. But it's no less difficult a sell.

The Second Stone

Illustration by Matt Smith

I like this picture on a couple of levels. One is just the simple idea that Smurfette as a Viking shieldmaiden is pretty awesome. If this were the basis for a new Smurfs cartoon, I'd watch it.

But more seriously, Smurfette's statement "I did not begin it," resonates with me, because it's such a common viewpoint. She ignores Papa Smurf's warning, and can be seen as having decided that he doesn't know what he's talking about. She's not starting anything. The first stone is not hers.

Papa Smurf's words make it fairly clear that he wouldn't hold inaction against her. This is not a situation in which Smurfette is being pushed into a fight that she'd rather not engage in. While it's unstated what the other Smurfs think of the situation, if Papa Smurf speaks of the community, then Smurfette is acting on her own need to act; the pride at stake is her own.

And I think that this is common. Here, Smurfette stands in for a person wants to see themselves as simply being responsive to something that has happened to them, rather than making something happen. There is a certain comfort, I think, in being reactive as opposed to proactive. And this is why the events that Smurfette is setting in motion will, as Papa Smurf understands it, will have no end. Smurfette's opponent will also see themselves as not having thrown the first stone, and the cycle of retaliation and payback will roll on, because both sides will find themselves in a position where letting the conflict die will feel like weakness. Which also means that for both sides, taking the responsibility for starting the conflict will feel like weakness. And I suspect that many of the supposedly intractable conflicts of the modern world operate this way.

This End Up

Frani also thinks it's a bit obtuse to zero in on people being “overly cautious” when the pandemic is still causing so much loss around the world. “It’s obnoxious, the sort of glee and readiness of which we’re abandoning masks when we see what's going on in India,” she said. “Of course we're all happy that things are going well here. But it’s so cringey to me that in the same breath someone would have the audacity to say, ’You're being too safe,’ when they are people praying for anything resembling this sort of safety that we have here in other parts of the world.”
Shayla Love “People Aren’t ‘Addicted’ to Wearing Masks, They’re Traumatized”

I came across this story when it was offered up as proof (or maybe that should be “proof”), by a story in The Week, that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has resulted in “Real trauma.” Now, I’m going to admit that I’ve come to the conclusion that, while I’m not sure that this makes the definition of “trauma” too broad, that it all strikes me as a certain rejection of resiliency in modern American society.

I know that this sounds a bit mean-spirited, so bear with me for a moment. Consider glass. Glass can be fragile, enough so that it’s almost the very definition of fragility. In the 2019 movie, Glass, Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price has such fragile bones that he’s nicknamed “Mr. Glass.” But even with that fragility, glass is still used for a number of applications. Mainly because it offers advantages that more durable materials can’t really match. There’s a trade-off to be made. And I suspect that as social groups, sections of the American public have decided that there are traits and attributes that are valued more highly than resilience (or “anti-fragility,” if you will). And there’s really nothing wrong with that. But American society comes across as disliking actively acknowledging when trade-offs are being, or have been, made. And that’s especially true when the risk-reward calculation comes across as anything less than perfectly predicted.

There is the way a given individual expects the world to be, and there is the way the world actually is. These two things may be very similar or there may be a significant gap between them, but they’re always there. For many people the past year or so has been a disaster beyond anything that may have occurred to them previously, driving home just how different the two can be. And this, in turn, touched of a scramble to realign.

When I came across the quote from the pseudonymous “Frani” in the Vice article, it stood out for me for its sheer strangeness. Why should what is happening in India have any bearing on how we behave here? It’s like saying that it would be obtuse for policing in Europe to be different than that of the United States, based on the fact that American police officers are more likely to encounter armed people than their counterparts. Because the article sits in the context of an identity war between two groups of people that have been shaped by what were likely different choices made when they were children, if not before they were born, it’s about taking sides, rather than understanding why there are sides.

Technical and social progress creates options that didn’t previously exist before. Sometimes those options are clear and present, and other times, less so. It’s generally understood that careers in computer science are a relatively new thing; no-one expects to come across a coding manual from 1921 in a used bookstore somewhere. But the ability to prioritize other traits above resilience is inobvious; I suspect that a lot of people believe that Americans of the time had the same degree of difficulty managing the 1918 influenza pandemic that the country is having today. If one can’t find the stories of traumatized people and lingering Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in the news stories of the time, it’s because people then were ignorant of the signs or looked the other way. But perhaps the simple fact of the matter is that the social consensus of the time mandated that people simply be more resilient? (And suffer the opportunity costs of being so.)

When designing organizations and procedures, like supply chains, it’s understood that making the subject more resilient makes it less efficient. A store that has a stockroom filled with goods ready to be rushed to the shelves will be less likely to find themselves facing a shortage, but will have higher operating costs than a store where things are delivered daily to meet expected demand. Why wouldn’t a similar dynamic work for people? People who are more prepared for a number of things to go sideways will be less impacted by things going sideways, but less efficient in situations where things are happening as expected.

There is, I think, I widespread impression that one can have that particular cake and eat it, too. That people can be both resilient and efficient and so that when circumstances illuminate a split, rather than being something real, it’s due to a lack of compassion and understanding by whichever group holds most strongly to the idea that they’re doing it right.

But a tradeoff between resilience and efficiency, or resilience and anything else for that matter, is always about a risk-reward calculation. Going hard on efficiency pays off handsomely when things go as planned and going hard on resiliency does the same when things turn out to be unpredictable. But an emphasis on resiliency looks unnecessarily wasteful if shocks to the system never materialize; just as an emphasis on efficiency seems short-sighted when a significant, or even extreme, shock presents itself. And while it may be possible to split the difference, obtaining all of the upsides of both while accepting none of the downsides of either is a pipe dream.

Societies tend to emerge more than they are designed and so the shadings that one sees in the modern United States were not planned into it. And people don’t always see the choices they make; and often don’t even understand them as choices in the first place until well after the fact. (I am reminded of the stories that people tell of living with people who lived through the Great Depression and the habits that were instilled in them as children that seemed out-of-step with the world that they emerged into as adults.) But choices were made, and people are living with them. People are also defending them. But when they don’t see them, those defenses become part of a conflict between people, as opposed to a difference in choices.

Swingers

It's conventional wisdom in the political press that "independent" voters are something of a mythical creature. People say that they're independent, but their voting behavior tends line up solidly behind one party or the other. For myself, I dropped any idea that I was an independent some time ago, in favor of describing myself as a "not Republican." And this mainly because while I don't really identify with either party, in the grand scheme of things, I do consider it important to vote in every election in which I can manage it. And since there are very few Republicans in the vicinity who come across as something other than a cheerleader for social conservatism, business primacy or just opposing whatever the Democrats happen to be for this week, I rarely find one worth voting for.

And I wonder if, from the point of view of the parties, themselves, that's a feature, not a bug. As the two parties move farther and farther from one another, the idea that it's possible to find people on both sides of the divide that one can agree with becomes more and more remote. And so voting means finding the people that one agrees with the most, and picking them. And to the degree that the parties cluster closely with co-partisans, but at a substantial distance from everyone else, an increase in straight-ticket voting would seem to be almost inevitable.

Maybe it makes it easier for the parties to garner votes when they can get low-motivation citizens to the polls, because they'll vote for one party all the way across, rather then splitting their votes. I don't really know. But the once-lauded "swing voter" seems to be a thing of the past, primarily because the gulf between partisans has become too wide to easily swing across.

Ask Questions Later

A District Attorney in North Carolina has declined to pursue charges against Sheriff's Deputies in the recent shooting of Andrew Brown Jr., in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The rationale is fairly simple; when the deputies attempted to arrest Mr. Brown, he attempted to escape them in his car, putting the officers' lives at risk, so they were entitled to shoot. Tragic, but justifiable.

Fair enough. But for me, it raises a simple point. A matter of perverse incentives, of a sort. If police officers can shoot someone to death to extricate themselves from a dangerous position, should they be expected to exercise more care about getting into them?

Brown puts his car in reverse and backs up, and deputies move on foot to surround it. Boxed in, Brown turns the wheel and puts the car in drive.
Laurel Wamsley "Prosecutor Says Deputies Were Justified In The Fatal Shooting Of Andrew Brown Jr."

It's understandable that a deputy might feel that their life was in danger with a moving motor vehicle coming their way. But the deputies made a choice to surround the car. Had they allowed Mr. Brown an avenue of escape, or simply used their vehicles to block him in, would they have needed to feel so at risk?

There is a lot of focus on the moment at which a suspect or other person of interest does something that a law enforcement officer needs to respond to. It is more or less expected that an officer is going to consider someone who is non-compliant to be dangerous. But should officers be in a position where a person's non-compliance places them in immediate jeopardy? It's more or less understood by pretty much everyone that cars move in two directions, forwards and backwards. One would expect that the Sheriff's Deputies were also aware of this fact. So why would officers move to the front or back of the motor vehicle of someone who they understand wants to flee from them? Especially when it's also more or less understood that a human body won't stop a car?

I don't know that public piety does law enforcement officers any favors by making them out to be heroes for placing themselves at risk, but then allowing them to claim fear for their lives as a reason to end the risk by shooting someone. An expectation that law enforcement would be more careful about placing themselves in jeopardy could make a lot of lives longer and better.

Unpolled

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, an influential conservative activist, said in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Sam Levine "Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote”

This 40+ year-old quote has become the basis of an understanding that Republican efforts to change early-voting and vote-by-mail laws, along with a host of other items, was born out a realization that the Republican party is, at it's core, a minority party. And so the only way it can win elections (and thus hold on to power that isn't due them) is by attempting to narrow the voting public enough that its motivated voters are enough to carry the day, even though, in the grand scheme of things, they're outnumbered. Hence the current conventional wisdom that:

And these new laws point to an even more troubling problem that threatens to undermine our democracy: the GOP’s eroding commitment to democratic values, like free and fair elections.
Geoffrey Skelley “How The Republican Push To Restrict Voting Could Affect Our Elections” FiveThirtyEight

It's worth noting that journalists are citizens, and thus voters, too, and the general negative partisanship and lack of social trust that the United States is currently grappling with can influence them as much as it influences anyone else. And to the degree that people who aren't themselves Republicans tend to see Republican's negatively, journalists who aren't Republicans can do the same.

But there's also another thing in play: a "democratic value" of listening to one's constituents and acting on their concerns. Sure, a lot of people might say that those concerns should be subjected to tests of accuracy and ethics before being brought to the floor of a legislature, but isn't saying "people can only have what they want if it passes some test independent of them" also capable of undermining democracy? I don't think that everyone believes that a commitment to democratic values means that the will of the people, however that's defined, should always prevail, no matter where it goes. While conservatives are more likely to be vocal, especially recently, in their rejection that the outcomes of elections should determine what society treats as right and wrong, liberals have their own version of this.

That said, the current monster that the Republican party has to contend with, namely a voter base that sees itself as forgotten at best and actively persecuted at worst, is one of their own making. As a candidate for President, Donald Trump tapped into sentiments that, for all that the Republican Establishment ignored them, were quite real and animating for people. And perhaps more to the point, were widespread. But one of the things at work here is the idea that they're even more widespread than they're given credit for. The rank-and-file Republicans who turn out with their Stop the Steal signs, or suddenly found themselves adrift after the Biden inauguration don't have anything against free and fair elections. What they have is a conviction that in free and fair elections, untainted by partisan dirty tricks or foreign interference, they would usually, if not always, win. They're convinced that, if elections are a game, they don't need to play to find out what happens; they know what the outcome should be.

And its that sense of rightness, whether natural or motivated, that's boxed the Republican party into the position that they're in now. Paul Weyrich's quote has become a proof that the leadership of the Republican party is desirous of power at the expense of democracy, but it's an open question of the degree to which the formal leadership of the party is actually in charge.

If one assumes that President Trump is an enthusiastic and deliberate liar, it may also be worthwhile to assume that he understands the first rule of lying: start with things that people want to believe. And for all that "take Trump seriously, rather than literally" was panned up one side and down the other. most of the whoppers that he told while in office, starting with the size of the crowd as his inauguration, were about telling the people who supported him that they were on the right side of things. And it worked. It took the President's obvious mishandling of a global pandemic to mute his support enough for him to lose the election, and even that required record turnout from Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. (Turnout that, it seems, fed into Republican paranoia that cheating was afoot.)

While it's easy to see the actions of Republican lawmakers, especially at the state level as anti-democratic, it's likely more accurate to say that they're anti-Democratic. In a Pew survey from 2019, 53% of Republicans surveyed said that the Democratic party had few to no good ideas. Only 15% of Republicans viewed Democrats as governing at least somewhat ethically. And back in 2016, 45% of Republicans felt that Democratic policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”

And this isn't a one-sided phenomenon. I suspect that a lot of Democrats would say that Republican backed legislation to limit voting isn't a good idea, isn't even somewhat ethical and is so misguided that it threatens the nation's well-being. No-one believes that the evil are innocent. To say that the Republican party has abandoned free and fair elections is to attribute to them the knowledge that elections were, and if they did nothing would remain, free and fair.

And sure, it's become popular to describe the idea that the election was stolen as "baseless." But for billions of people worldwide, the claim that one Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, sent by the god of Abraham to be humanity's messiah, is also baseless. I suspect that few people have stopped going to church because that was pointed out to them. This is, in the end, a matter of faith. A large segment of the Republican base takes it on faith that they are in a high-stakes battle for their survival, and the survival of the nation, and they're bringing Republican lawmakers, believers and cynics alike, along with them. Because whether they want other people's votes to count, theirs still do.

Bloom

I have no idea what flower this is, but it's certainly striking in color.
 

Just This

As I've noted before, I subscribe to the Mark Twain quote "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." I've also noted that I tend to extend this to people, in the sense that I understand that everyone I meet, not matter how old they are in relation to me, had a sense of themselves before they had any sense of me. And in that regard, they were "here first." And as such, they also owe me nothing. Society might institute rules to different effect, and people themselves may decide that they have some debt to me, but in the grand scheme of things, I hold that it I shouldn't go around saying that people owe me something. Other people owe me nothing. They were here first.

One day, I was reading the entry on Justice in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and came across the following: "In other words, if justice is to be identified with morality as such, it must be morality in the sense of ‘what we owe to each other’." And that raised an interesting question. If I understand that people do not intrinsically owe anything to each other, can I still believe in justice as anything other than a label that people apply to things? There's a part of me that's unsure that I do. I understand that I don't place any real stock in the idea of fairness as an objective concept. And if life isn't, and is not required to be, at all fair, does it make any more sense to believe that life is, or is required to be, at all just?

I will admit that I'm never sure that I've managed to avoid falling into a variation of David Hume's "Is-Ought Problem," in the sense that I understand that the world is not objectively just, and from there I have reasoned that there is no reason that it ought to be objectively just. By the same token, I also admit to never being certain that I'm progressing towards a sense of equanimity, as opposed to simple resignation. Be that as it may, however, I lack any sense of telos for the universe, or for humanity, independent of the goals and ends that people set for themselves. And thus, there is no greater point than people's own wants, needs and desires to judge their actions against. So a homicide is defined as a murder because it offends the sensibilities of whomever is empowered to make such decisions, whether judge or jury, and not because it goes against some cosmic plan that required the deceased remain alive.

The upshot of all of this, perhaps obviously, is that I am only a just person to the degree that other people find me so. And their determinations are fundamentally arbitrary, based on their personal understandings of the world around them. Ant determination that I might make as to whether I am just or not only matters to the degree that I can convince (or perhaps coerce) someone to behave as though it is true. I am owed a specific answer on that question to no greater degree than I am owed anything else. People have their own lives to lead, and how they choose to do so is not for me to say.

The realization that the world cannot be just leaves me with the understanding that all the world can be is to my liking. But if I am to make it so, then I must take ownership of things... and the consequences that come with them. Appeals to justice are often appeals to others. Either to make things "right" some way that one wishes them to be, or to look the other way when makes things right via a path that would otherwise invite sanction. If the world owes me nothing, and the people in it owe me nothing, than anything I want, I must make for myself, and if I cannot do that, I am better off letting it go.

On The Water

Enjoying some leisurely kayaking on the weekend.

 

Funny, Ha-Ha?

I fail to see the humor...

For what were billed as "5 scathingly funny cartoons about anti-vaxxers jeopardizing herd immunity," there wasn't a laugh in the bunch of them. And so I find myself wondering just what "The Week Staff" decided was so "scathingly funny" about the whole thing, especially because the cartoons don't come across as even attempting to be humorous.

And, in my estimation, this is true of a lot of political cartooning. Not that political cartoons cant be funny. Local cartoonist David Horsey has done some pretty hysterical bits over the years. This one on people over 65 deciding to loosen up after being vaccinated is a good example. And while some his portrayals of conservatives and Republicans veer into carricature, one can see the punch line that's being set up. And that's what was missing in all five of the cartoons that The Week put forward as somehow "scathingly funny." Partisan punch lines may not be funny to the people at whose expense the joke is being made, but at least there's a joke being presented.

It's also a curious headline. What, exactly, would be funny about the nation failing to reach herd immunity? Although, since herd immunity isn't dependent on how, precisely, one becomes immune, I'm not sure that the headline is even accurate. It's become something of an article of faith for many on the American Left that immunity via vaccination is somehow the only way to become genuinely "immune" from the SARS-2 coronavirus, despite the fact that a) it hasn't been show (at least, not that I can find) that having been infected confers no protection and b) the currently available vaccines don't convey 100% protection themselves. In theory, any virus that spreads through a population more quickly than new people are introduced into that population will eventually run out of people in infect if people's immune systems adapt properly. So vaccine refuseniks cannot, by themselves, prevent a population from reaching herd immunity. (Besides, calculating herd immunity on the scale of a nation the size of the United States seems like a bad idea, since neither vaccinations or infections are likely to be evenly distributed across such a large landmass and population.

Presenting the fact that there are people in the United States who are, for various reasons, unwilling to be vaccinated humorously doesn't come across as an impossible task. So I wouldn't be surprised if someone had done so. But if the five cartoons offered were what the staff at The Week had to work with, perhaps a different headline is in order.
 

Eating Out

Outdoor dining on Main Street, Bothell, Washington.

I went for walk downtown with my camera today, and came across a section of Main Street that's been closed for more than a year now. I'm not sure if it was closed to allow the local restaurants to have outdoor seating when their indoor capacities were slashed, or if had happened before then, in the name of making the area more pedestrian friendly. This, of course, is common, with a lot of places allowing restaurants to expand onto sidewalks, or into the streets.

Personally, I'm not really one for eating formal meals out-of-doors. Not that I relish crowded restaurants, either, but eating outside always felt like a picnic. Maybe this is because I've only gone to the wrong sort of picnic. In any event, it will be interesting to see what sticks around once people can go back indoors for meals out, and what will become a new trend.

What Was The Question?

Colloquial language is full of phrasings that aren't quite idiomatic, but nevertheless can be meant to convey something slightly different than a literal reading would suggest. For example, I found myself tripped up on a few occasions, about a year ago, when people would ask me if I was afraid of contracting the SARS-2 coronavirus. My standard answer would be "no," and then the follow-up question would be something along the lines of "So you don't think that you can become infected?" Despite the fact that an irritated little voice in my head would immediately hiss "That wasn't the question you asked!" that was the question that they were intending, and so I resigned myself to needing to give a more complicated answer. And I think that a lot of questions operate this way.

FiveThirtyEight notes, in a recent article, that "Americans’ perceptions of the national economy have changed wildly depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House," and the chart below, from Civiqs, appears to show that, especially for Republicans, whose gloomy view of the national economy hovered at about 70% until Donald Trump was elected, whereupon it promptly plunged into the single digits and remained there for almost the entirety of President Trump's term in office, before rebounding back to the 70% range when President Biden took office. Democratic respondents show a much different trajectory, but their understanding of a worsening economy died just as suddenly come Inauguration Day 2021.

According to Civiqs, the question was "Do you think the nation's economy is getting better or worse?" and there are four options, "Getting better" and "Getting worse," natch, but also "Staying about the same" and "Unsure." The extreme partisan disconnect between how Democrats and Republicans prompts FiveThirtyEight to point out that "political scientists have found that how we think about the economy is increasingly rooted in how we identify politically rather than in actual economic conditions." Which is entirely possible, especially given that most people don't really appear to pay any attention to actual economic conditions on the national level.

But part of me wonders if the people who responded to the Civiqs tracking polls were actually taking the question at face value, or if a number of them were reading it as "Do you think the nation's economy will become better or worse?" This interpretation can explain the wild swings that appear to have trailed the last two (Presidential) Election Days, yet doesn't require large segments of the population to appear to be completely out of the loop on what's genuinely happening with the economy.

Political rhetoric is known for a continuous stream of anything from insinuations to outright declarations that electing The Other Party into any position of real authority will bring about the immediate end of the world and everything good within it over the course of mere days, if not hours. Given this, it's reasonable to presume that some of this doom-and-gloomsaying works its way into how voters see the world. And as negative partisanship grows, so too does the conviction that officeholders are seeking to wreck the place, simply out of spite. For Democrats, who were large part convinced that Donald Trump was either a hopeless buffoon or malicious monster, it makes sense that they expected the national economy to go south for more or less the entirely of his term. They may have started out willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but by the time the looming restrictions to control that global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic shellacked the stock markets, those voters who defined themselves as in opposition to the President were done with any pretense of expecting things to improve while he was still in the White House. Likewise, for Republican voters who had decided that Joseph Biden was at worst a cheat and at best an incompetent, their Sudden Onset Pessimism can also be viewed as a deep and abiding conviction that any day now, the bottom will drop out of things on his watch.

I think that there can be real value in understanding what people responding to questions believed their being asked, since I suspect that many people understand as well as I do that not all questions are asking what a literal reading of them would indicate. It wouldn't change the fact that this is all opinion polling, but it would shine a better light on what people are giving their opinions of.

Think About It

"Millions Are Saying No to the Vaccines. What Are They Thinking?" Good question, so The Atlantic's Derek Thompson simply asked some of them to tell him what, exactly, they were thinking. It's an interesting piece, and near the end, Mr. Thompson notes:

From my conversations, I see three ways to persuade no-vaxxers: make it more convenient to get a shot; make it less convenient to not get a shot; or encourage them to think more socially.

One thing was conspicuous to me in its absence. Convincing people that society was also thinking about them. Mr. Thompson notes, quite astutely, in my estimation, that "The United States suffers from a deficit of imagining the lives of other people." But in this case, I don't know that it requires much in the way of imagining; one of his correspondents came straight out and said: “The fact that there is no way to sue the government or the pharmaceutical company if I have any adverse reactions is highly problematic to me.”

So if "Vaccinated liberals" want more people to join them, why not take affirmative action to either allay their fears, or reassure them that if something does go sideways, they won't be left out to dry. Administration of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine was temporarily suspended because of about a half-dozen instances of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, one resulting in death. And while a lot was made of the blood clotting and low platelet count, along with just how rare a situation this was, very little was said about the treatment that the impacted women received, or who footed the bill. It's not difficult to imagine that they were on their own if/once their insurance was maxed out, leaving them with medical debt that could easily be quite substantial.

On this week's episode of "It's Been A Minute," guest Aarti Singh makes the following observation: "So I don't want to say it's, like, naive or came late in life, but I consistently am telling my parents that - stop relying on any system for, like, accuracy. Like, just know that it's our responsibility to protect ourselves, our families, our communities and everything we can do. I just feel like, over and over again, systems fail us." Sam Sanders repeats this to the audience thusly:

You heard Aarti say just now that when it comes to the coronavirus vaccine, you're kind of on your own. You can't count on institutions or governments to help. They might be able to - maybe, but don't rely on it.

"Thinking more socially" shouldn't simply be a matter of "One for all." It's not unreasonable for the One to expect that if they take one for the team, that the All will step up to help them out. When people have the understanding that if something goes wrong, they're on their own, asking them to take perceived risks on behalf of others falls flat. While ideas of people frivolously suing their way into a life of luxury and ease is the stuff of which a million lawyer jokes are made, the fact of the matter remains that for many people, the legal system is supposed to be about some combination of delivering justice and making them whole. And, okay, in the name of getting a vaccine out and administered to people as quickly as possible, the federal government absolved both itself and the pharmaceutical companies of liability for harm. They have that right. But it doesn't have to end there. There are other ways of making sure that people who step up and take a risk, even a minute one, understand that if that risk comes to pass, they won't be left out to dry. Expecting people to place their faith in institutions or governments that even people who support and trust them feel are unreliable seems unrealistic. If people who are signing up to take whatever risk there might be don't honestly believe that they'll be well cared for if something goes wrong, it stands to reason that people who feel those risks even more acutely would be even less inclined to take the plunge.

Of the three ways of persuasion that Mr. Thompson notes, only the first "make it more convenient to get a shot" comes close to the understanding that "be vaccinated against the current coronavirus" may be better posed as a request, rather than a demand. The point at which one person's perceived need becomes another person's obligation has never been settled, and realizing that is the difference between requesting cooperation, and demanding compliance. And agreeing to at least some of the other party's terms, whether one likes them or not, is always part of the deal when making a request. Of course, there are people for whom this is a "no compromise" situation. Those who do not bow to the clear necessity of action are knowingly doing wrong, and so they have no right to having their interests considered. That's fine when one has the power to command, and enforce those commands. But the low level of social trust in the United States is specifically  fueled by the perception that people are pursuing power, so that they can enforce their interests on others, to the detriment of those others. Perhaps it's better to cultivate the attitude of a beggar, even when one feels entitled to be choosy.

A Good Cause

I was part of a casual conversation about the social control measures that have been implemented in the fight against the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic as an alternative to a comprehensive testing infrastructure and regime. Well, as casual as this sort of conversation can reasonably be, anyway. To oversimplify, under discussion was the fact that support for things like mask mandates, enforced distancing and "shutting down the economy" tend to have greater support among Democratic politicians and voters than among their Republican counterparts.

The American Right more broadly has cultivated a distrust of and dislike (hatred?) for "Big Government," and often openly resists what they understand to be government "overreach" or impositions on their freedoms. And since nothing in life is free, this often comes at a cost. During the conversation, the point was made that there have been some high-profile deaths among Republican politicians, activists and the families thereof, generating a certain amount of schadenfreude among the group. This is, I suspect, only to be expected in an age of negative partisanship. But then the subject of regrets came up, and the schadenfreude went up a notch.

I pointed out that it was more likely that these people would be seen as heroes, people who gave their lives in order to live freely in the way that they would have wished to. Not the most popular thing that I could have said. Someone else responded that throwing one's (or someone else's) life away in the name of freedom was a fairly pointless exercise. While the whole thing was being debated, another thought came to me. Do people look at Canada, and decide that the American Revolution was a tragic, and senseless, waste of human lives? Okay, so Canada is still a part of the Commonwealth, and didn't formally adopt its own constitution until 1982 or thereabouts, but it's not like the descendants of the European settlers that founded the place found the British Crown to be this harsh overseas taskmaster for the entire time that the United Kingdom had more direct control over the place. With a population roughly the size of California, it ranks 17th in the world in terms of the size of its economy. Perhaps not amazing, but nothing to sneeze at, either. Would the United States really have been so poorly off had it followed Canada's trajectory? Sure, the United States would be different, were it more like Canada, but would it be so different?

The difference between someone who dies a hero in the cause of freedom and the person who is a fool or a chump is a very subjective thing. I don't pretend to understand how people make that distinction for themselves. But there does appear to be a distinction. And I suspect that part of it has a lot to do with whether or not someone agrees with (or has a use for) the freedoms being sacrificed for.

Generally speaking, the American Left has been more in favor of broad measures of social control than the Right, and this plays out in how people see those who have died of respiratory infections during the pandemic. Republicans view themselves (or at least claim to) as fighting for freedoms and liberties that Democrats generally have little use, and even less empathy, for. But I wonder how this same debate would have played out back in the 1700s. It's generally understood now that all of the American colonists were united in thinking that the Crown was tyrannical, but this conveniently glosses over the fact that there were large numbers of Loyalists around. Did they see the war differently than their Revolutionary neighbors? In some ways, they must have, but I wonder if conversations of the time had the same sense of schadenfreude at the other side's misfortunes.