Will You Two Cut It Out?

So it was a remarkably hot weekend here in the Seattle area, with temperature records being kicked to the curb for three straight days. Technically, the excessive heat continued into today, but 92° (33°C) is pretty low-key when compared to 108° (42°C). The weekend saw the highest temperatures recorded in the Seattle area, and literally doubled the number of days that the region hit high temperatures above 100° over the past 125 years.

Predictably, there is a chorus of voices holding this event out as incontrovertible proof of anthropogenic climate change. Which is unfortunate.

Not that there's anything to be done about it. People will hold out this or that even as either validation or refutation of anthropogenic climate change as it suits them and aligns with their viewpoints and interests. So I expect the next dumping of snow that lands on the area will inspire a counterargument based on that single event. (Although proponents of anthropogenic climate change will likely also point to it as proof of their own viewpoint.)

The bickering over which side is right misses the point. Mainly because it boils down to pitting the interests of different groups against one another in what basically becomes a zero-sum game (albeit one where both sides could lose). While policymakers and experts often speak of things in terms of their impacts on the aggregate, people live their lives as individuals. Promises of more and better new energy or fossil-fuel jobs aren't draws for people who don't see themselves as every qualifying for them, at least, not if they're going to earn the salaries that they're accustomed to. And given the United States track record of leaving people out in the cold when their primary skills are not (or are no longer) of use, it's understandable that people would place their individual livelihoods above more abstract concerns.

Accordingly, the best path to a solution likely doesn't lie in one side browbeating the other into submission. A solution that is designed to best meet the needs of all parties involved will likely be more useful. Of course, this is easier said than done, especially in an environment where the opposed parties feel that the other is acting in deliberate bad faith. But even where that is not the case, seeking compromise where questions of justice are involved is always a difficult task. But, in this case, the expected benefit would be the removal of an incentive to deny or otherwise dismiss the problem being solved.

Given that a runaway greenhouse effect, one that would turn the Earth into something akin to Venus, is unlikely, anthropogenic climate change is unlikely to be an extinction-level problem. At least, not for humans. Rather, it will simply become expensive to remediate. Whereupon there will be a new argument over who will pay the bill. Which is unfortunate, but a common facet of human nature.

Duck and Weave

Jones added that while he didn't think [Derek Chauvin's] sentence would spark "outrage," he argued it was still a "punch in the gut" because "this guy's life was worth more than 15 years," and he hoped the sentence would send a message to law enforcement that "you can't do this type of stuff [or] you're never going to come back home."
CNN's Van Jones disappointed by Chauvin's sentence: 'A punch in the gut'

While I understand Mr. Jones' perspective on this (as well as those of local people who felt "That's not justice"), I am of the opinion that looking to others to validate one's own value judgements is a recipe for such disappointments. Judge Cahill is beholden to neither Mr. Jones nor the aggrieved protesters.

Value is always personal. The statement "this guy's life was worth more than 15 years," may have been heartfelt, but it is not, and will never be (at least as I see it now), a truth-apt statement, any more than "war is wrong" could be. Whether someone finds 15 years in prison to be too little for a man's life or war to be a crime against humanity is a personal understanding, not a realization of some invariant universal truth.

On the broader social scale, Black (or any other) Lives Matter to the degree that people treat them as important and are willing to give up other things to preserve them. But societal decisions cannot be forced my individuals, no matter how much they disagree with the choice that's made. As individuals, all people can do is show others how much they, personally, value(d) a life. And while anger and hurt can communicate the value of one life, it doesn't restore that life; and does little to communicate the value of other lives.

Being hurt by the choices of others does not, in and of itself, change those choices. And the actions that people can take to bring about change do not require that one be angry. So perhaps the best thing to do is to understand that personal choices of value are not required to be reflected. This may allow people to sidestep punches, rather than taking them to the gut.

What's Love Got To Do With It?

The article started thusly: "Sara met her future husband when she was 18. He struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, but Sara thought marriage would change him for the better. It didn’t."

Why, I wondered, did she think it would? And "Sara" isn't alone in thinking this way. An acquaintance of mine that I've know for some time also has the understanding that marrying "the right woman" would be the solution to aspects of his personality and behavior that he finds difficult. I'm just as unclear on why this seems to be the best solution to him, too.

To be only slightly snarky about the whole thing, I'm not always sure what two happy, well-adjusted and high-functioning people receive from being married. The idea that marriage can fix preexisting addictions or other conditions that have otherwise withstood the relationship itself (not to mention all of the other connections of a person's life) strikes me as odd, even though I perfectly understand the public commitment aspect of the entire enterprise. I also understand the idea that making a public commitment to self-improvement can be a driver of said improvements. But most people aren't really all that good at living up to a commitment, just because they made it in public... otherwise, one suspects that there would far fewer failed marriages.

But this, I suppose, is the thing about not being anything approaching a romantic. For me, outside of the massive cakes and the intricate bridal dresses, a wedding is simply another ceremony, not much different than a graduation or a ribbon-cutting. They're simply life events, rather than life-changing events.

But it's not as if the belief that marriage can change a person markedly for the better is rare. Holding on to that belied serves a lot of people, and it must be serving some of them quite well, otherwise, they wouldn't so readily teach it to others. And I don't want to rain on that particular parade, even if there seems to be difficulties at the end of it for most people. But still, it's something that I'd like to understand more about, even if only to understand if people find it to be worthwhile in the end.

Nothing Good To Say

I'd prepared a somewhat long post for this evening, critiquing an NPR story about online petitions asking that when Jeff Bezos takes a sub-orbital spaceflight next month, that he not be allowed to return to Earth.

But after thinking about it, I realized that it's just another thing that bugs me, and as much as I dislike hearing about what bothers other people, why should I waste people's time grousing to them about what bothers me?

But I understand about why people don't talk as much as could be hoped about what they want and like out of life, rather than a constant litany of complaints and worries. After all, according to the BBC, political trolling gathers twice the engagement that being positive does. Putting people and institutions down pushes people to respond. It's a rehash of the old statistic that people were more likely to complain about a business that they felt hadn't served them well than they were to praise one that had. (Although, if I remember correctly, the ratio was 7 to 3, as opposed to 2 to 1, but its close enough.)

Nobody in Particular will have been around for 15 years by the end of 2021, and none of the complaining that I've done in all that time has changed anything. And I know this. It's part of the reason why I stopped labeling things as "Rampant Idiocy" three years ago. Simply running around calling people stupid wasn't making anything seem to be any smarter. It was just me telling myself how smart I was, at other people's expense.

I suspect that in order for Nobody in Particular to develop a more positive outlook, I'm going to have to read less news and commentary and more, well, other stuff. Develop a new hobby, as it were. I suspect it will do me good.

Barren

 

Name Blame

I fully support creating a day to celebrate the abolition of slavery, a dark portion of our nation's history. However, naming this day 'National Independence Day' will create confusion and push Americans to pick one of those two days as their independence day based on their racial identity.

Why can't we name this Emancipation Day, and come together as Americans, and celebrate that day together as Americans: black and white, all colors, all races, all ethnicities, and then come together on Independence Day, which celebrates the creation of our country throwing off an oppressive government.
Representative Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky

Firstly, I have difficulty understanding why "National Independence Day" and "Independence Day" are going to be that confusing to anyone older than eight years of age. Sure, had someone consulted with me, I myself would have recommended "Emancipation Day," but then again, were it not in September, I'd have been in favor of making the date coincide with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation itself, rather than the date that news of it finally made it Galveston, Texas. And the idea that people are going to be pushed to chose between them strikes me as vapid. Once employers start offering the day as time off from work, I'm pretty sure people will be happy to have both of them.

And so, secondly, what stops Americans of "all colors, all races, all ethnicities" from having one party on or around June 19th and then a second one on or around July 4th? One would think that it would take more than similar names to do that.

In the end, this strikes me as the problem with ignoring open political pandering. When it seems stupid to people who aren't being pandered to, the supposed audience of the pander seem stupid, too. When Representatives Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) and Matt Rosendale (R-Montana) mount their soapboxes to make claims about "racial divisions" and "Critical Race Theory" it's easy, I think, for people to conclude that their constituencies eat this stuff up because they're racist, backwards and hostile. Especially, when out of 262 Republican members of Congress (Senators and Representatives) only 14 of them voted against the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. Clearly opposition to this wasn't a priority for national Republicans. The fact that this small group of Representative chose this particular hill to die on likely says something, even if I'm not exactly sure what.

But here's the thing. This bill needed to make it out of a House committee. Surely Representative Massie, Representative Chip Roy (R-Texas) or Representative Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) could have caught someone's ear and made their suggestions for a name change. And if these guys are far enough out of step with the rest of the Republican caucus that this wasn't an option for them, maybe they should do a better job of making contacts of their fellow Republicans.

Ahead of the Curve

The proposed unintended consequences start to get a lot darker, too, like the idea that there might be a sudden drop in organ donations when all those car accidents go away.
Five reasons for a self-driving car slowdown

As far as the unintended consequences of autonomous vehicles go, I can imagine a lot darker. But it does bring up one of the things about modern life that people don't often talk about; the fact that there are a lot of things that more or less rely on bad outcomes for some or another group of people. A significant portion of the American consumer economy relies on poverty in other parts of the world, reality television often relies on people being willing to be debased or humiliated on screen... and a significant number of organ donations rely on people making driving errors that cost lives.

Speaking of circumstances that would prevent people from being killed as having the unintended consequence that other lives would not be saved sound callous, but maybe that's a side effect of the fact that it's only rarely discussed. I wonder if a greater willingness to admit to the undesirable circumstances that certain limited good rely on would lead to lowering the need for those undesirable circumstances. Not that I know what, at this point, would allow people to create new organs from scratch so that they wouldn't need to rely so much on otherwise healthy people dying suddenly, but I'm given to understand that lab-grown organs (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/growing-organs) show promise for the future.

And, of course, so do autonomous vehicles, which haven't yet made it into general production much less taken over the everyday vehicle market. So there is still time. And if it's understood that shortages of transplantable organs will only grow deeper once driving becomes orders of magnitude safer, then perhaps that calls for prioritizing research into creating organs. There is a difference between unintended consequences and unforeseeable consequences. And perhaps more open discussion of the unintended, but predictable, is the key to avoiding them.

Invitation Only

(Apologies in advance. This one is long. Perhaps I should learn how to subdivide these sorts of posts.)

The central premise of The Myth of a Majority-Minority America is that the definition of "White," and thus the group of people who Whites in America will feel comfortable sharing resources, with will expand. This renders projecting forward with the current understanding of "White" as inaccurate, and undesirable, as it provokes anxiety in a certain subset of the White population. It's an interesting piece, but I'm not on board with it.

First off, I'm unconvinced that the perceived divisiveness of "the narrative that nonwhite people will soon outnumber white people" has anything to do with the "narrative" itself. The things that readers are informed drive conservative White Americans' anxieties and resentments, are, in fact, external to it.

The majority-minority narrative contributes to our national polarization. Its depiction of a society fractured in two, with one side rising while the other subsides, is inherently divisive because it implies winners and losers.

I take the point here, but doesn't American society already have pretty clear groups of winners and losers that break down along racial lines? I don't see where this division into large groups, based on overall levels of prosperity relative to one another, needs to be implied. There's no shortage of hard data to back it up. The general statistic that "net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family" is well-known. And Brookings goes on to note that neither differences in educational attainment, indebtedness nor even income explain the gap. Meanwhile "inadequate investments in the public goods that facilitate economic mobility" help to perpetuate it. Yet we're told by Professors Alba, Levy and Myers that it's a change in what has long been seen as a zero-sum game that's divisive, despite the current highly unequal state.

It has bolstered white anxiety and resentment of supposedly ascendant minority groups, and has turned people against democratic institutions that many conservative white Americans and politicians consider complicit in illegitimate minority empowerment.

Again, fair enough. But isn't the idea of "illegitimate minority empowerment" itself a serious problem? I know someone who might be considered an anxious and resentful conservative White American, and he has no qualms about telling me that the greater empowerment of minorities (and women, for that matter) is a problem. But here's the thing, he doesn't start from the premise that all people are currently equally empowered. As he sees it, minorities and women are less empowered than White men, and not only should it stay that way, but gains that have been made over the past several decades should be rolled back. Whether Professors Alba, Levy and Myers currently believe that conservative White Americans understand the nation to be equal as of this point (and therefore the disadvantages of minority groups stem from their failings) is unknown, and the resulting leaving open of what "illegitimate minority empowerment" means becomes a problem. There are plenty of people who would make the case that many conservatives consider equality to be illegitimate. And in such a case, why should they back down from the idea that growing numbers of people not considered White will lead to a change that they consider positive? Why repeat what many would consider the nasty compromises of the past, compromises that openly traded away the rights of non-Whites to assuage the anxieties of those who believed that their national origin entitled them to the better share of the nation's resources.

At the extreme, it nurtures conspiratorial beliefs in a racist “replacement” theory, which holds that elites are working to replace white people with minority immigrants in a “stolen America.”

There is a part of me that would term this as "history repeating itself." The article mentions, specifically, three non-White demographic groups: Hispanics, Asians and Blacks. Missing from this list are Native Americans. And one can make the case that a significant portion of American history is comprised of the replacement of the native people with European immigrants in an America where oftentimes, "stolen" doesn't belong in scare quotes. There's a reason why the closest community of Leni Lenape to their ancestral lands live in Ontario Canada; the Delaware Nation is in Oklahoma. (While most Americans are not experts on Constitutional law, I suspect there's little chance that a new Indian Removal Act would be seen as passing muster by anyone lacking a direct material interest in native lands.) And there is nothing about the Census Bureau's population projections that requires that Americans see Whites becoming a minority (if still a plurality) of the overall population as betokening political, cultural, and social upheaval. The fear of having done unto one as has been done unto others is a thing in itself.

And this, to me, is the driver of the fears and resentments. And the divisiveness. There is a case to me made for the existence of a narrative of American History that basically says that White America has historically used its numerical advantage, if not dominance, to shift the costs of its prosperity onto others, and that at any given point in that history it was people whose ancestry came from Africa, Asia, Latin America and pre-colonial North America (and sometimes, all of the above) who paid those costs. From here, things can go a couple of different ways. If the White people who engineered and/or benefited from this cost-shifting did so out of deliberate malice, one would expect that when the demographic shoe is on the other foot, it's going to be payback time. I've used this quote from New Yorker Leah Moreland a few times before, but I think that it's especially relevant here:

I don't want to sound racist, and I'm not racist. But I feel if we put Obama in the White House, there will be chaos. I feel a lot of black people are going to feel it's payback time. And I made the statement, I said, "You know, at one time the black man had to step off the sidewalk when a white person came down the sidewalk." And I feel it's going to be somewhat reversed. I really feel it's going to get somewhat nasty.

It's President Jefferson's understanding of the "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained," carried forward into the twenty-first century. Ms. Moreland's prediction failed to come to pass, but White fears of Black anger and resentment have neither subsided, nor driven a broad making of amends.

By the same token, if racial competition is simply par for the course, and one should expect dominant groups in a democracy to use their power at the ballot box to vote themselves a better place in society than others, one is still in the same boat. Minorities are going to use the advantage that was handed to them, in the same way that Whites did. Of course, this presumes that Whites and non-Whites alike are monolithic groups and subject to a high degree of groupthink, but I don't believe that fear, resentment and careful thinking are known for their coexistence.

As for the other primary point of the article, the idea that intermarriage will result softening and blurring racial lines, and thus, an expansive understanding of Whiteness, I'm not really a fan of it, either. For all that it's intended to be a message of inclusion and tolerance, it runs into trouble from the jump. The piece notes that the practice of classifying people as either entirely White or non-White is misleading. Granted. That doesn't mean that this isn't what happens, especially given that race in America is more a visual marker than anything else. The piece explicitly notes that mixed-race children of Hispanic and White or Asian and White couples, "tend to start life in more economically favorable situations than most minority groups, are typically raised in largely white communities, have above-average educational outcomes and adulthood incomes, and frequently marry white people." Meanwhile, "children with Black and white parents face greater social exclusion and more formidable obstacles to upward mobility." The piece goes on to note "But their social experiences are more integrated than those of Black Americans who identify as monoracial." The link there goes to the Amazon page for Lauren Davenport's Politics Beyond Black and White, carrying a description that concludes "Overall findings suggest that multiracialism is poised to dismantle some racial boundaries, while reinforcing others." The description of Professor Alba's own book on the topic notes: "Nevertheless, there are also major limitations to mainstream expansion today, especially in its more modest magnitude and selective nature, which hinder the participation of black Americans and some other people of color." Yet the authors say that the public deserves the narrative of racial diversity expanding definitions of Whiteness to the point that "Journalists, subject-matter experts, and political leaders have an obligation to tell Americans the full story about rising diversity and racial blending." (Emphasis in original.)

The support for this rosy picture comes from the idea that "White" has come to include Europeans more broadly, rather than simply Nordic peoples and Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Again, it's a point well taken. But it's also worth noting that this expansion of the mainstream didn't include everyone. And Professor Alba notes that the current expansion, due to mixed-race families, is unlikely to include Black people and those with clear sub-Saharan African ancestry in their features. Changing demography may well have united European Americans, but it stopped well short of uniting all Americans.

In the abstract for Racial Population Projections and Reactions to Alternative News Accounts of Growing Diversity, by Professors Myers and Levy, we find the following:

We conducted an experiment that randomly assigned whites to read alternative news stories based on 2014 Census Bureau projections. One story emphasized growing diversity, a second emphasized the decline of the white population to minority status, and a third described an enduring white majority based on intermarriage and inclusive white identity. Much higher levels of anxiety or anger, especially among Republicans, were recorded after reading the white minority story than the alternative stories of diversity or an enduring white majority.

I don't understand the distinction that's being made between "growing diversity" and "inclusive White identity." The piece in The Atlantic spends very little time on it. Expanding the definition of "White" to include Hispanics and Asians (while presumably leaving Black Americans behind) seems to fall into the category of "an enduring White majority." I presume it's in the paper itself, but I don't intend to pay $37.50 to find out.

But there's a subtext in this outlook that Professors Alba, Levy and Myers seem to shy away from. Namely that a driver of While anxiety, anger and resentment might well be the perception that they wouldn't be in control of the doling out of benefits. The story of the integration of formerly excluded European nationalities into American "Whiteness" was something of a devil's bargain. Sure, Germans, Italians and Slavs are now considered "White" in the United States, but the main result of that was to create "an enduring white majority" that helped to ensure that cost-shifting continued to fall upon the shoulders of Asians, Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. If this new trend of treating the children of Hispanic and White or Asian and White couples as "White enough" is in the service primarily of ensuring that those too dark to be seen as White remain the bearers of shifted costs, is that really "bringing Americans together?" Is this simply going to be another implicit compromise, with multiracialism simply being a reason to let dismantle the racial boundaries for some, in return for them helping to reinforce them against those left behind?

The authors note that "discussions of demographic change must not fuel complacency about the unequal opportunities that minority groups, especially Black Americans, continue to face." I'd say that's exactly what happened in the past, but the "melting pot" of European peoples allowed for indifference to unequal opportunities, rather than simply complacency. And I don't think that there's anything about "the full story about rising diversity and racial blending" that's going to change the perception of a zero-sum game. There's nothing in the story about equal opportunities for everyone. Rather, it's just another reshuffling. The number of chairs still leaves significant numbers of people out. It's only being increased enough to encourage defections in the constituency for broader change, and even that is effectively being done under duress.

Truth of Power

Power, in a society, is little more than the ability to request peoples' cooperation, and then be able to give them reasons, positive or negative, to agree. What often goes unseen is the fact that the ability to give others reason to cooperate is itself built on the cooperation of others. Laws, regulations and even social mores are all built on a foundation of cooperation at some point. On the individual and some small group levels, an individual may be able to threaten force as a means of coercion, but at larger scales, there needs to be an agreement to fulfill requests or instructions. As an example, the President is the Commander in Chief of the United States military, but if commanders refuse to carry out or relay his orders, he would be unable to personally force compliance. His ability to command the insubordinate to be arrested is itself predicated on military or capitol police following his orders.

While in organized and mature societies, it is irrational to expect an abrupt, unanimous, rejection of the authority of any given person, a gradual erosion is reasonable, and in fact has happened over and over in human history. People decide of their own accord to reject the norm of obedience to a particular rule, institution or individual, and over time, that entity moves from being powerful to powerless.

This makes the ability to give people reasons to cooperate the foundation of social power. And it means that powerlessness is really a function of not having anything to share with others as an inducement. It becomes something of a vicious circle in that sense. Having resources can be enough to purchase cooperation in taking resources from others. Those people who don't have enough to purchase cooperation have difficulty in protecting their resources from those who do.

By the same token the cooperative nature of power both simplifies and complicates accountability. In the end, people are held accountable because some group of people wish them to be so, and no-one else is ready, willing or able to muster a countervailing pressure to shield them. Or vice versa. And so the forces that drive accountability in society are independent of the law, to the degree that the law, in and of itself, cannot compel people to cooperate with it.

In the end, power tends to be a historical artifact. It attaches to people who are perceived to have gained it by legitimate (enough) means from those who had it in the past. And it remains there for as long as people understand that some interest of theirs is served by  it being so, or for as long as they have no pressing interest to change it. And while this may be deeply unsatisfying to some, I do find it to be a useful thing to keep in mind.

The Devil Made Them Do It

I've heard it said that conspiracy theories provide simple answers to complicated questions. I don't know about that, a lot of conspiracy theories that I've come across are remarkably complicated. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that conspiracy theories provide simple villains and straightforward motives.

A former co-worker shared a link to a YouTube video that could best be described as nonsensical. Not in the sense that it flies in the face of accepted science or conventional wisdom, but in the sense that I couldn't really make heads or tails of what was being put forth. I think the idea was that the mRNA vaccines were some sort of toxin or were viral infections themselves, but I can't be sure. The poster, attempting to evade YouTube's efforts to suppress medical disinformation, was being quite cryptic. Or maybe I simply lacked the requisite background to follow her. In any event, the poster self-identified as a Christian, and so identified Satan as the source of the trouble.

I was raised Roman Catholic, although I never managed a sincere belief in God. What put the final nail in the coffin of what was basically paying lip service to a Faith that I never really felt was the question of Satan. I'd come to the conclusion that Satan was a scapegoat, sometimes, it seemed, quite literally, for the fact that people were sometimes just jerks. Once I'd decided to stop pretending I believed, I set both deity and adversary aside and went on about my business.

But while watching this video, it struck me that Satan was making one his occasional forays into everyday life again. After all, the whole Q-Anon conspiracy posits that a number of high-ranking Democratic politicians and their supporters are Satanists and indulging in that old bugbear of the ritual abuse, rape and murder of children. Despite having been there for the Satanic Panic over role-playing games (Dungeons and Dragons, specifically) in the early 1980s and the Satanic Ritual Abuse moral panic of the 1990s, I'd never really thought about how much real estate that Satan takes up in the American psyche. Like perhaps a lot of people who thought of themselves as educated and sophisticated did, I tended to see Satan as the province of people who'd been rendered backwards by being such devout Christians that they'd lost touch with the world around them. And that simply wasn't a large population of people, as I experienced things. At least not in the United States. Sure there were plenty of people who spent a lot of time worrying about Satan in places like Latin America and Africa. But these were places that barely had schools, and so it made sense. As I grew older, I started to understand that "Satan" could be a legitimate answer for some questions, even if I had come to different answers for those same questions; or didn't need answers for them in the first place.

But Satan can be a simple answer to what really is a complicated question: Why do people want to enact policies that the faithful see as not only harmful, but Evil? While the Salem witch trails had taught me to regard people "being in league with the Devil" as something between a joke and a tragedy, it occurs to me that there is a sincere belief in a divine conflict that has human beings fighting on both sides. Of course, that's likely not news to very many people, but I'd never really looked deeply at it until just recently. Because, well, the topic bears about as much on my daily life as fights between unicorns and dragons.

The term "American myth" is tossed about a lot, but never in terms of people's belief systems. Whatever the technical definition of "myth," the connotation of "ignorant and/or outdated false belief in something supernatural" renders the term offensive when used in reference to modern religion. But, from a technical standpoint, Satan is a myth, and one that does a lot of heavy lifting in people's worldviews. I wonder if that's appreciated in proportion to the impact that the belief in Satan has on people's lives.

Trust No One

A bit of simple, if fairly imprecise, math.

There have been about 33.4 million cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States to date. The most recent information I came across estimates the basic reproduction rate of the virus at about 2.5 with people remaining infectious for about 10 days or so. This means that over a 10-day period of being infections, that one sick person would spread the infection to two or three people. Although the math doesn't really bear this out. The 14 months or so the epidemic has been running in the United States would be a little over 40 10-day periods, and it only takes 2.5 to the 19th power to get to 36.3 million cases. So for all the surges and slowdowns that have happened, the disease hasn't actually spread as quickly as one might think.

But about a year ago, things were ramping up and governments were taking action. Masking requirements were set to go into effect (despite the fact that formal masks were next to impossible to obtain), there had been stay-at-home orders and businesses had been ordered to close. Even though the number of infected people wasn't that large, even as a percentage of the population. If even 25% of the current total are currently infectious, that's still about one in forty people. A year ago, to be where we are now, the numbers must have been fairly small. Still, the general mindset was that people who might be infected, and infectious, were to be treated as if they were infected, and precautions were to be taken. People were expected, if not required, to treat anyone who didn't live under their own roof as not only a threat to themselves, but to their broader families and social groups.

Given that, I wonder why it seems out of place for police officers to do the same; understanding that anyone they deal with might be a threat and therefore interacting with them as if they were an immanent threat until they were certain otherwise. Of course, part of the broader problem is that officers, as a group, tend to be selective with this; if officers used lethal force in every situation in which the rules allowed them to do so, the number of injuries and deaths would likely be some multiple of what it is now. And the disparities in whom lethal force is used on are fairly clear. But still, if it's understood that American society generally tends to work under an ethos of "threatening until proven innocent," then it only makes sense that police officers, who are, after all, also members of that same society would approach things in that manner.

And while the point can be made that police training reinforces the understanding of being surrounded by threats, the rapidity with which that attitude was adopted nationwide once the pandemic broke out would seem to indicate that it's a more generalized thing than just being a matter of training. People quickly internalized the "stranger danger," and even now that things are calming down, it's proving difficult for some people to let it go. It is any wonder that people who are taught to understand that they're dealing with the most dangerous elements of society are also jumpy?

Well, Isn't That Sweet

 "What happened when two strangers went on vacation together." Well, pretty much exactly what one would expect: they hit it off, started dating, married and had children together. I'll admit that when I clicked over to CNN after encountering the headline on Google News I was hoping for something more interesting, but didn't have high expectations. And yes, I realize that I likely shouldn't have had any expectation of anything different when there was a potential feel-good love story, however simple, on offer. Although, I understand that this is mainly because it was in the Travel section. Had it been in the Crime section, it would have been a completely different, if still utterly predictable, story.

So my question is this: Was the story of Rodrigo Leal's and Irma Cáceres' meet-cute one of the better alternatives that CNN had for a positive news story, or simply one of the easier ones? And what I mean by "better" here is not was it a "better" news story, because as far as I'm concerned, the story is of absolutely zero news value. But does it best meet whatever goal CNN has for these sorts of stories? Without knowing that goal, I have no real means of addressing the question, which is why I'm curious about it, but I suppose that all I'm left with is conjecture. It's more or less understood that many people find the news depressing. I suspect that it's sort of calibrated that way from the outset. There's not much in the story of a man who throws his infant son at police officers in an attempt to escape pursuit that's going to lead anyone to feel better about the state of the world. And there's no reason for this to even make the front page of Google's U.S. coverage other than the point-and-stare aspect of it. "Random guy with criminal record endangers child in failed attempt to escape police." That's what qualifies as national news? This happened in Florida (go figure). Of what possible relevance is it to me, here in Washington. I'm pretty much as far away from this as one can be without leaving the contiguous 48 states. This is little more than criminal-justice gossip column material. Likewise stories on District Judge Roger T. Benitez's decision that the California Assault Weapons Control Act violates the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution tend to be more about the partisan reactions to the decision than the legal reasoning behind it. And for media outlets that appeal to generally left-leaning audiences, as CNN does, one can guess how that's turning out.

So the supposed antidote to the relentless negativity of the news is for random love stories to be elevated to the front page. And if the goal is to make the point that not all of the news is bad, that's reasonable. But with all of North America to work with, the best that could done was a story of two people meeting that wouldn't even make for an engaging romantic comedy? (One shudders to think of all of the contrived complications that screenwriters would feel compelled to add.) Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the Leal-Cáceres family and all, but this seems like something that happens more or less every day.

In the end, there's nothing wrong with stories of people finding love, even if I'm dubious that they rise to the level of international news. They strike me as fairly clear examples of news as narrative, where the narrative is that beautiful things still happen in the world, but even that doesn't really strike me as news so much as it does a momentary reprieve from media outlets seeking clicks and attention by portraying the world as going to Hell in a handbasket. It becomes fluff designed to cushion the perhaps unnecessarily sharp edges that tend to come with information about the world.

Okay, And...?

Corporate Landlord Evicts Black Renters At Far Higher Rates Than Whites, Report Finds. Hmm. Okay, let's read the article and see what it says.

It's unclear why the report on Pretium's eviction filings apparently found an even higher disparity — more than four times the rate in mostly Black counties as in mostly white counties.

What good is a study that doesn't provide any information that helps contextualize the finding? This article is something of a missed opportunity, mainly because it reads like a press release from the outfit that put it out. "PANDEMIC EVICTOR: Don Mullen’s Pretium Partners Files to Evict Black Renters, Collects Billions From Investors" seems like the sort of thing that's calibrated to get a response, as people on the prowl for racial injustice pick up on the headline, but without any real information beyond the raw numbers, I suspect that there's a different story here.

Presuming that the story that NPR opens their piece with is accurate, one could make the case that Pretium Partners companies are pretty quick on the trigger to evict people from rented homes, but maybe the real story here is the lack of money available to Black renters to weather job losses and other emergencies. Of course, either way a story like this tends to be journalism about problems, but if the focus is on why Black renters are in less stable positions, rather than "Private Equity Bad," perhaps it can inform policies that might be helpful in improving things.

The thing about human interest stories with clear villains is that they pretty much write themselves. Single mother with a child in school versus an evil private equity company that's bought up houses and is now kicking people out of them as quickly as it can is a simple narrative and will easily appeal to the left-of-center National Public Radio audience. But it's the sort of piece that allows people to mistake anecdote for useful information and righteous anger for actually doing something.

Beware Falling Objects

The local CBS affiliate ran the following story. "More reports, video show uptick in heavy objects being dropped from downtown overpasses onto I-5 traffic." And that's about it. If you actually read the story, there isn't much more information than that. There are a couple of personal testimonials, we're told that the police arrested, and then released, a guy who said he was homeless, and that's about it. You can watch a video of a Lime e-scooter being dropped from an overpass onto southbound Interstate 5 near downtown Seattle, but there's no actionable or even genuinely informative content to be found. Okay, so there's an "uptick." What had the rate been, and what is it now? What's being done about it? The Seattle Police Department knows what's happening, and at least one short-term arrest had been made, but is anything else in the works? Is there anything that people can do? It seems unlikely, but otherwise, what's the point?

People dropping scooters and rebar onto the expressway while there's traffic on it is bad. And the case can be made that drivers should be aware that there may be falling objects crashing onto the road, or their vehicles, while they're driving. But there's little more than a scare story here. It's the kind of thing that garners clicks and shares (which is how it first came to my attention), but the overall effect is to drive fear and worry. It's the kind of thing that people point to when they talk about the collapse of society or are seeking to demonstrate that mankind has become so sinful that the end of the world would be a welcome development.

One of the problems that arises from the news having become a form of entertainment is that it's judged by how well it validates its viewers' understandings of the world. As people feel the world is more dangerous, news stories that validate that perhaps seem more credible than the alternatives. And the sense that it's a problem that some or another authority needs to deal with leaves people with, I think, a reduced sense of agency. While Solution Journalism can devolve into vapid "feel good" stories (especially when there is a focus on children and/or trivial situations) the overall concept, that of presenting as newsworthy what actions are being, can be or have been taken to improve things seems that it would be very useful. And stories that give people some sense of scale are also useful. One of my general gripes with the coverage of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is that there was almost never enough information in standard news stories to adequately access the risks involved. This is the same. Without any real idea of the frequency of incidents, it's hard to know if one should do things differently or what level of urgency an official response might require.

But I don't think that anything more is being asked of the news. I suspect that this is the first thing that needs to change. But, like a lot of things, it's difficult to change alone. Maybe it would be worthwhile to see what the market for change looks like, and go from there.