Proof of Fear

The problem with this last election cycle was not misinformation, in the sense that the fears and anxieties that people are displaying, and that others are responding to, are quite real. Therefore, they believe that they are fighting back against immoral, criminal or otherwise harmful activities directed at them. The misinformation lies in the various proofs that are offered of deliberate malfeasance; that the changes being proposed and made to society have disadvantaging them as a goal, rather than being the result of either the reality or perception of limited resources. But those proofs are not the things that allow such conspiratorial thinking to thrive. The malfeasance is taken on faith. The proofs are merely bludgeons to be applied to doubters.

To the degree that the concept is framed as one of good against evil, this is to be expected. And so is the combative response. If Evil does as Evil is, then it becomes rational to see evil people as always planning criminality and harm, and to take steps to thwart or incapacitate them before such plans come to fruition.

But again, this is a response to people's fears and anxieties, and perhaps one of the design flaws of the modern United States is the idea that fear and anxiety are intended to drive people to industry and creativity; it was not anticipated (or perhaps is was denied) that fear and anxiety undercut the belief in the efficacy of work and inventiveness. After all, American society understands that for some 200-plus years, the labor and ideas of many natives and imported Africans were summarily expropriated for the benefit of the ruling White majority. While the "peculiar institution" may have come to an end, the human impulses for intraspecies predation and parasitism didn't end with it, and I expect that many people are fully aware of this.

Tales To Astound

Imagine all the good that the tech industry and venture capital could do if they just had different shared visions of what the future looked like. What if, instead of space travel and virtual worlds, our tech billionaires had been raised on exciting stories of a future with fast, efficient mass transit or a living wage for all workers?
David Karpf "Virtual Reality Is the Rich White Kid of Technology"

Okay... I'll bite. Who, exactly, was writing these supposedly exciting stories of the perfect lefty future back in the 1950s through 90s, when many of "our tech billionaires" were young and supposedly reading futuristic stories? I did a good amount of science-fiction and fantasy reading back in the day, and I don't recall a single tale where excellent bus service or corporate bosses sharing the wealth were the keys to the princess being saved and the space villains being defeated. Even utopian space opera like Star Trek simply presumed a post-scarcity society, rather than hinge stories on finding pat solutions to pedestrian, if pressing, problems.

Making life better for poor and working-class people through the simple expedient of everyone else giving up some of their own standard of living simply doesn't strike me as an interesting plotline to repeat over and over. The one story of the sort that I recall reading, in a science-fiction anthology magazine, seemed like little more than a take of class warfare where the correct class won, due to some actions that people had taken in the past that the story didn't even bother to describe. In effect, control of the robots that factories used to produce goods have been given over to Unionized workers and had become proxies for them. It was apparently illegal for companies to own their own robots, but what had brought this about wasn't part of the story. Rather than change society in any interesting way, the author had simply moved the labor versus management battlefield to a slightly different venue. The story was not exciting, or worth keeping for that matter; I wound up dropping the anthology into a "take a book, give a book" type of box at work.

I'm not going to say that such stories can't be exciting. In the case of the unionized robots story, someone had found the concept worth writing about and someone else found it to be worth including in an anthology for publication. So the fact that I found the story boring and heavy-handed is clearly more of a problem with me than the writing itself. Not everyone is going to like everything that's published. And so I suppose what I'm noting here is a lack of breadth in the sub-genre. If we're going to postulate a genre of science-fiction where the shared vision of the future consists of poverty reduction, municipal transport and exciting plotlines that rely on those things, there are going to have to be enough of those stories, and for them to varied enough, for the technology thinkers of tomorrow to have a good chance of reading them today.

And this is what I find to be missing often in lamenting what people weren't reading in the past. That sense that if the 1950s through the 1990s was the best time for people's imaginations to be captured by stories that are exciting due to a focus on social, rather than technological, progress, the second best time is right now. "Virtual Reality Is the Rich White Kid of Technology" complains about what technology entrepreneurs weren't ready when they were young, but it doesn't name any titles for people to be reading in the here and now. And so it comes across as another in a long series of laments of the omissions of the past that doesn't concern itself with remedies in the present.

Working For A Living

So I was reading this LinkedIn News post on restaurants contacting people up to four years after they'd initially applied for roles, and asking them if they were still interested.

Among the various comments was this bit on living wages (note: not "family wages"):

The idea of paying everyone a living wage sounds like a great idea, but not so in practice. Certain jobs should not pay living wages because they aren’t careers - they are meant as a stepping stone to something higher skilled, for people just entering the job market to get entry level experience.

(I'm not linking directly to it, because it's not my goal to rain on someone's parade.)

I understand the sentiment. Heck, once upon a time, I thought that way. But if you reformulate that, it basically says: People with low skills, or just entering the job market, should not be paid enough to afford food, housing and other essential needs such as clothing. But those needs don't go away simply because someone doesn't have skills. So someone has to pay for them. Now, one can make the point that low wage jobs aren't meant to be able to fund an independent life: people can have roommates or whatever. But "independence" is not part of the definition of a living wage, just that people be able to feed, house and clothe themselves and manage other required costs of living... like transportation to and from work.

And so the idea that there should be jobs that don't pay a living wage, because the value is in the experience offered makes these roles into something more akin to internships. And those should be treated not as work, but as a service that businesses provide to individuals and/or their families.And if we're going to treat low-wage work and/or internships as something that either people's families or society as a whole is subsidizing, when there should be some evaluation of these programs based on their supposed goals; either giving people a useful direct experience, or giving them skills that they can market for a living wage later. And if these roles are not providing this service, then companies should either be sanctioned for offering them, in the same way that any other deceptive business practice is sanctioned, or simply be disallowed from such offers. If people are being asked to pay for something, they should be able to demand appropriate value for money.

Get Yours

"If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it," [ESPN reporter Rachel] Nichols said in the recording. "Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away."
Maria Taylor Is Leaving ESPN After A Colleague's Remarks About Race Went Public

I don't know that I would leave a job that I liked over finding out that a coworker was a jackass, but perhaps that's because I'm of the opinion that not having any jackasses among one's coworkers is too much to ask for.

But more to the point, this illustrates the difficulties that the United States is going to have with reaching a broadly equitable society; people who are desperate to hold on to what they have, especially when they themselves might phrase it "what little they have," see sharing with others as an unjustified imposition. And so even when people understand that others have been denied opportunities or the like, their concerns about holding on to what they have push them to ensure that whatever the costs of equity, someone else needs to pay them.

For all that the United States is touted as being the wealthiest nation on Earth, Americans have a remarkable skill at seeing themselves as impoverished, even when they are relatively well off, since the only valid subjects for comparison tend to be those who are higher up on the income, wealth of status ladder than oneself. And this is going to be the biggest impediment to change.

Whip It Good

The same month, Pat Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and the host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s flagship show, The 700 Club, said that militants are telling “people of color … to rise up and overtake their oppressors.” He worried that, “having gotten the whip handle—if I can use the term,” people of color were now in a position “to instruct their white neighbors how to behave.” Robertson warned that if this trend continues, “America is over. It is just that simple.”
Lawrence Glickman “3 Tropes of White Victimhood”

It's tempting to tackle Mr. Robertson's impression that non-Whites being in a position to instruct their White neighbors how to behave would be the end of the United States, but it's so laughable that it's something of a gimme. So, instead, let's take his concern that taking hold of the whip handle and overtaking oppressors is such a terrible thing.

If it is believed that someone, of necessity, will (if not perhaps must) always "have the whip handle" then the only question is in whose hand should it be. As the article points out, the throughline from Reconstruction to modern grievance politics is that White people deserve to wield the whip. Whether it's because they will be gentler with the it than Black people, because they have learned the lessons of their prior irresponsibility or due to their innate ethical superiority, it's best if the whip stays with them. Whether Black America (or Latin America) was or was not deserving of slavery, second-class pseudo-citizenship and deprecation, Whites have never deserved such treatment, then or now. And while commentators may argue whether or not Whites wield the whip in a way that preserves human dignity, liberty and freedom to the greatest extent possible, conservatives are in agreement that Blacks and Latinos would simply degenerate into a regime of vicious vindictiveness, powered by an unwillingness to allow the bygones of ancient history to be bygones (leaving aside the fact that the 1950s and 60s are still within living memory for Baby Boomers).

On the other hand, if non-Whites take the whip handle, and refrain from wielding it in the way that Whites did, this would point to something that Conservatives, everyday people and pundits alike. may find unsettling: the abuses of power that characterized much of American history are not facets of human nature, frailty or corruptibility in the face of power, but were specific flaws in the people who built, maintained and supported the intentionally unequal society. Listen to these arguments long enough (and I had heard them plenty prior to this article) and it's not hard to conclude that there are people with an interest in the presumption that all of humanity indulges in rampant oppression when given the chance.

In any event, one can see two unpalatable options facing conservatives; to risk having done unto them as their ancestors had done unto others, or to risk learning that said ancestors were uncommonly unjust people. A third option, which is to avoid the question by remaining on top of the heap, can seem very appealing under the circumstances, despite the risks. When vulnerability is seen as a high price to pay for a just society injustices continue, if only because they're less expensive.

While it's clear that Mr. Robertson believes that "radicals" are leading non-White people away from an idea of everyone being free and equal in the United States, many conservatives have a vision of equality that, in the minds of many other people, simply leaves the old status quo, and its associated inequities, intact. Social justice types like to say that to the privileged, equality feels like oppression. But the force of this comes mainly from the sense that all privilege is unearned, and thus, unjust. To people who understand that they have earned their exalted place in the world, a forced leveling is oppressive, just as much as a forced tilting of the playing field is considered oppressive to the people who find themselves having to play uphill. American conservatives have difficulty in seeing any changes to the current system as being fair to them. And this makes sense, given the standard view of the world as being zero-sum. Any gains for non-Whites must come at the direct expense of Whites, and to the degree that they understand that the deserve everything they have, those gains are seen as a form of aggression.

Changing that view is going to be hard. Triggering people's loss aversion, and the accompanying anxiety is a quick means to influence and leadership. Mr. Robertson knows that he's playing to the fears of his audience, as well as their self-image as good and just people. That's a dangerous combination, because few people who have wielded the whip felt wrong in doing so, regardless of the gusto they brought to the endeavor.

Reasons

I'll admit to being a touch surprised by the fact that "They assist in public health" somehow didn't make the cut. Because, as much as I think that most masks don't do much to limit the spread of airborne respiratory diseases, that was kind of the point of wearing them. I suppose that is may be assumed, but I think that I wouldn't have left is as as assumption, given how polarizing an issue it became.

Most of the face masks available these days are what are termed breath deflectors; the basic point is to stop the direct transfer of air from a potentially infected person to a presumably uninfected person. And so wearing masks, on the assumption that one was infectious, became a substitute for actually knowing whether or not one was infected.

And that created something of a paradox. Personally, if I suspected that I might be carrying a potentially fatal respiratory infection, showing people that I cared for them would entail completely staying the heck away from them. After all, breath deflectors (and all of the masks I have fall into this category) don't prevent exhaling pathogens; they simply prevent one from blowing them more or less directly into someone else's face. And so a lot of masking worked under the convoluted premise that one was infectious enough that one shouldn't breathe on another person, but not so infectious that doing one's best to remain isolated was called for.

For me, this contributed to a sense that masking was primarily a form of public health theater; the important thing was to be seen doing it, to be seen showing that one cared, rather than actually understanding the circumstances. Of course, with the public health infrastructure (or lack thereof) in the various states, ubiquitous testing was never going to happen; once things fell behind, there was no catching up. And eventually the project was simply abandoned. Maybe that's where things went wrong.

Dirty Tricks

I came across a political cartoon on the website for The Week that purports to describe "How to get Red America vaccinated." It shows President Biden (conveniently labeled in case the caricature isn't clear) standing at a podium marked with the Seal of the Office of the President and surrounded by journalists with microphone, cell phones and video cameras. "Vaccines are bad," the President says.

Part of the problem with political cartooning is that one is never sure of the apparent point is serious or not. But, assuming that what one sees is what is intended, this piece by Bill Bramhall is off the mark, because it misunderstands the nature of the partisan divide.

President Biden saying that vaccines are bad is unlikely to spur reluctant Republicans to take them, even if President Trump's anti-vaccine stance moved Democratic-leaning voters to receive shots. At this point, it would be seen as an admission that the Biden Administration had been acting in bad faith when it sought t increase vaccination rates.

Were I to counsel President Biden on a means to spur residents of Red states to seek out the vaccine, I would suggest withdrawing it from their communities completely. Vaccines for Blue America only. The idea would be to give the impression that President Biden was willing to sacrifice Republican voters while protecting Democrats. (Some intentionally "clumsy" attempts to "hide" infection and death statistics in such areas might also help.) If Republican voters came to understand that the Biden Administration was moving against them in this way, it would not only push them to see out the vaccine, but would give Republican lawmakers cover to urge their supports to receive shots. It's also more or less a given that President Trump would take the bait, especially given that his administration funded the R&D for the vaccines in the first place. And with him telling his supporters that the Biden Administration was out to get them by withholding life-saving vaccines, it's a safe bet that they would ignore his earlier opposition and seek out shots.

Not that any of this would be remotely ethical, of course. But then again, the President badmouthing vaccines wouldn't be, either.

Digression

I was talking about the concept of Determinism with some people, and one of them sought to prove that Determinism was impossible through a simple thought experiment. I won't go into the whole thing here, but the initial premise was that in a Deterministic universe, with the right information one could predict what they were going to do the next day.

And I thought about that. And I wondered if perhaps the common way of thinking about it was incorrect. If, as in a deterministic universe, the state of things at some point in the future were predetermined by the state of the universe in the past and natural laws, would, if one had enough information to predict up to a certain point, the future still seem like the future?

In other words, if I had the raw data and the computational horsepower to consistently predict what would happen a week in advance, would speaking of next Tuesday feel like talking about the future, or like recalling the past? Would I say "This is going to happen next Tuesday?" Or would it feel more accurate to say "This happened next Tuesday?" Is understanding the inner workings of a deterministic universe a matter of moving one's temporal point of view to the point where uncertainty reigns? And if so, would a being that understood how it all worked effectively experience everything as a memory? Quite some time ago, I was discussing matters of religion with a co-worker and he used a similar concept to describe his understanding of God. He posited that God effectively sat at the end of time, and so everything was in the past. Prophecies were simply a matter of God traveling back in time, as it were, to relate memories of events that were still in the future of the particular prophet.

I suppose that like a lot of philosophical thought, it's of limited, if any, utility. But it's interesting to ponder.

Damaging Words

I was pointed to yet another article purporting to explain why there should be limits on speech in modern democracies/republics. Having read a number of these now, I've come up with a general set of points that all of them seem to hit.

1. Free Speech absolutism presupposes that speech in and of itself is not harmful.

2. In a partisan environment, people are liable to see intrinsic harm in the more strident speech of opposing partisans.

3. In a partisan environment, Harm Reduction absolutism is considered a valid trump to Free Speech concerns.

4. Arguments as to whether speech is harmful in and of itself or as an intrinsic characteristic of the speech itself are difficult, since the harm caused by speech is fundamentally different than the harm caused by more material interactions. (Two people may bleed identically when cut the same way with the same knife, yet may have very individual responses to the same speech.)

5. In a partisan environment, partisans are liable to see Harm Reduction absolutism on the part of opposing partisans as a cynical ploy to erode human rights, as they generally do not find more, or even the most, strident speech of co-partisans as intrinsically harmful. This is exacerbated by the fact that claims of harm are often, if not always, self-serving when viewed by an outsider.

6. Partisan authors tend to pick a side, and then argue that the idea "that speech in and of itself is not harmful" is not only wrong, but objectively and self-evidently so (another cynical ploy to erode human rights), and then pick only speech by opposing partisans to showcase as inappropriate, setting up a rebuttal that will invariably fall into the trap of "Whataboutism."

7. A reader with low partisan attachment will find the repetition of the same points over and over by opposing partisans, who appear to be talking past one another and/or preaching to their respective choirs, tiresome.

What's needed is a focus on the supposed harms and why they are there. This is what can be used to buttress arguments that claim that certain speech should be suppressed in the name of reducing that harm. Policing speech is neither trivial nor inconsequential; it's unlikely to meet a test as the least intrusive way to get the job done unless it's very carefully justified. And picking partisan sides doesn't come across as exercising the required care.

Hearing

I am unconcerned with people who justify themselves by saying “This is the right thing to do - therefore I am going to do it.” And I expect that many people agree with me in this, even though in some cases, they do not share the speaker’s understanding of the right thing to do. Who is of concern to many people is the person they perceive as saying “I am going to do this thing - therefore it is the right thing to do.” And part of the problem with today’s political climate (although, to be clear, this is nothing new) is that no matter what has actually been said, one’s allies will hear only the former, one’s critics only the latter, and both will be absolutely convinced of the accuracy of their perceptions, and of the willful deafness of those who heard otherwise.

Public Market Center

Otherwise known as Pike Place Market. It had been some time since I'd been downtown (more than a year, no surprise), so I picked up my camera and went one morning. And was reminded that I suck at being a photographer. I know that I just need to get out an practice more, but I think I might need to get away for a while in order to do that. Or maybe change the way I see the world. Most of the things that it occurs to me to photograph, I've already done to death.

Just Look For The Armbands

To the surprise of no one, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) is back in the news. This time, she compared a statement by President Biden that "We need to go community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood and ofttimes door-to-door, literally knocking on doors" to increase the number of people in the United States who are vaccinated.

To which Representative Taylor Greene responded (in part) "People have a choice, they don't need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door order vaccinations."

Which, in turn, prompted Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) to ask "Why does the Republican Party continue to embrace someone who thinks the Holocaust was so insignificant it deserves to be compared to public health efforts?"

Because the Republican voters of Georgia's 14th district, and Republican voters more broadly, see their own fear and loathing of Democratic voters and politicians echoed in Representative Taylor Greene's comments. I would have thought that much was pretty clear. Nazis are a pretty low-hanging stand-in for "evil people," and so partisans make comparisons between political figures and constituencies that they dislike and Nazis pretty much all the time. In fact, I don't think that it's far off the mark by this point to say that "Nazi" has stopped meaning a member of the now-defunct National Socialist German Workers' Party or a would-be revivalist of same and is simply a term for a person whose politics the speaker finds frightening and deliberately wrong-headed. It's much the same with "Fascist," which for a long time, had come to mean anyone the speaker finds both old and politically odious.

And this likely is the reason why Representative Taylor Greene makes parallels to Nazi Germany so casually. Her references have nothing to do with the state-sanctioned killings of Jews, or anyone else, during the 1930s and 40s. It's simply about conjuring up an image of an implacable, totalitarian evil that must be resisted in all things and at all costs. Were the Biden Administration to announce a scheme to provide free ham sandwiches to everyone in the United States, I would not be surprised to find that Representative Taylor Greene had a Zyklon B reference in her back pocket, ready to be deployed. And it would have nothing to do with downplaying the Holocaust or any of the systematic killings perpetrated by the Third Reich; it would simply be another way of making it clear that she considered the Democratic party to be the current face of evil on Earth.

Because this is what people want to hear. That their current political situation, which is nothing more than a political party they don't favor holding the White House and a tenuous majority in Congress is the same as an organized program of persecution and repression aimed at them because of their fundamental righteousness. Representative Taylor Greene's invocation of Nazism and the Third Reich are reinforcing a narrative of victimization at the hands of the wicked and depraved. Never mind that there have been no concentration camps or gas chambers. They're coming, because that's just how bad governments are when the just and pure don't fight back. Conservative Americans who have come to see their outlook as being the correct one want to be told that they are suffering the travails of the just in an unjust world, Representative Taylor Greene sings on command and the rest of the Republican establishment backs her, because if they don't, they know precisely who will be on the next list of supposed Nazis to be denounced.

Uncritical

One of the books [Robin Steenman, head of the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty] specifically referred to was "Ruby Bridges Goes to School," written by Ruby Bridges herself. Bridges, when she was age 6, was one of the first African American students to integrate New Orleans' all-white public school system.

Steenman said that the mention of a "large crowd of angry white people who didn't want Black children in a white school" too harshly delineated between Black and white people, and that the book didn't offer "redemption" at its end.

[...]

She said she disapproves of guidance for teachers to teach words like "injustice," "unequal," "inequality," "protest," "marching" and "segregation" in grammar lessons.
Here's what to know about the debate over 'Wit & Wisdom' curriculum in Williamson schools

This gets to what, for many Black people in the United States, the conservative anger over "Critical Race Theory" is all about; the idea that White Americans are okay with children understanding that slavery, Jim Crow and segregation were a thing (even if the details are off-limits), but that the United States should must still be presented in the way that many conservatives want the nation (or, more specifically, the White population of the nation) to be seen, as a country that had done bad things in the past, but had fully atoned for them, been redeemed and was now an objectively just and fair place, whose current inhabitants have nothing to ask forgiveness for. And "Critical Race Theory" has become a catch-all term for a way of looking at the United States that doesn't admit to this "correct" way of viewing history.

Ruby Bridges Goes to School fails, in the eyes of Ms. Steenman, because it is specifically the story of Ms. Bridges and her individual experience, rather making room for, or even being the story of, the United States and its progress towards (or achievement of) equality. And if one views Ruby Bridges Goes to School as being the sort of historical narrative that's commonly taught to grade-school children, one with clear heroes and clear villains, it's understandable how White segregationists who aren't shown as embracing Ms. Bridges at the end of story should be the villains, and that this casts "good" and "evil" along racial lines.

It's an interesting situation, because it does represent progress in its own way. After all, there was a time when the insistence would have been that the United States had never done anything warranting atonement; that slavery was an affirmative good because it took primitive people out of Africa and brought them to a first-world nation where, even as second-class citizens, they were better off than they would be otherwise. And that segregation, which kept "like with like," was a benefit to everyone.

In any event, the need for redemption points to a problem in the way people see the world. Redemption arcs are elements of fiction, not recurring themes in history. Viewing history as the stories of heroes and villains, as if they were fables or adventure stories, hides the fact that history is about normal, even if important, people. And people don't always conform to the moral roles that observers might like to place them in.

Conservative media outlets like Fox News and political bigwigs like President Trump have all hit upon the realization that the framing of American history as a narrative prompts people to view it as just another sort of fiction, and subject to many of the same tropes. And while people may like to cosplay as the evil Galactic Empire, because the bad guys are always cooler, they don't like to see themselves as actually evil. And if history is going to be a contest of Good versus Evil, if people can't start out on the right side of history, they want to be shown as having seen the error of their ways, repudiating it and ending up where they ought to be. It's one thing to want this; it's another to feel that one is entitled to it. And in the anti-"CRT" mindset, Critical Race Theory violates that entitlement to be seen as just and righteous, as living up to the promises made in the Declaration of Independence.

Where things went wrong with the Declaration, however, was not that it was a cynical statement, penned by men who had no intention of living up to its provisions. It's that living up to those provisions required more resources than they felt they had access to. And so the compromises started even before it was formally signed. But there was never a commitment to saying "here is what we will need to fulfill this promise and here is the plan to get it." Instead, the can was kicked down the road, again and again, because the costs of picking up were understood. As late as 200 years after the signing of the Declaration, there still hadn't been a genuine accounting of the price that was demanded. And it's not clear that the accounting has happened yet. People like Ms. Steenman may object to even small parts of the bill coming due, but they don't lay out a path for showing how to pay it later.

An Object At Rest...

...Gives one more time to take the photograph. I took this a number of years ago, and I'm impressed with how sharply it came out, considering I was using a pretty large telephoto lens from not all that far away. Bright sunlight will do that for you, I guess.

You Don't Say

John McWhorter has a rather snarky column in The Atlantic that takes aim at the Brandeis University Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center’s "Oppressive Language List." And I agree with his overall dismissive tone, as I myself find the list ridiculous. In no small part because one can see how it would spiral wildly out of control (after all, I've already used at least one idiom that could reasonably be placed on the list, and possibly two, and this is only the third sentence of the post) and the explanations that they give speak to specific people's specific sensitivities.

For example, according to the "Identity based language" sub-list, "African-American" can be oppressive because:

For Black folks born in the United States, hyphenating their identity can be interpreted as othering. Some folks do prefer to use African-American, particularly in connection to their ancestral roots, while others may identify with other ethnicities. We recommend using Black as a default, but being open to adjusting if asked to.

I don't at all relate to this. I use "Black" instead of "African-American" because in American English, the term African-American is, first and foremost, a descriptor of appearance, rather than place of (presumed) origin. Despite the fact that Tunisia and Egypt are both in Africa, Tunisians and Egyptians living in the United States are not considered African-Americans. The term is reserved for people from Sub-Saharan Africa, or, as they used to say, Black Africans. So if the term groups by visible characteristics, why not use a visual indicator?

One of the things that Mr. McWhorter points out, in the service of describing the entire exercise as more or less a fool's errand, is the "euphemism treadmill," coined by Steven Pinker. The basic gist of the treadmill, if it isn't obvious, is that negative connotations of words are not actually attached to the words themselves, and so when one term, like "moron," is replaced with another, like "retarded," the negative connotation follows, and becomes attached to the new term. In this way, terms that were once neutral, or even embraced, like "having special needs," acquire the same negative connotations of the terms they replaced.

So here (some four paragraphs in) is where I get to the point. Words become loaded by mutual consent. If someone calls me an African-American with the intent to "other" me, and I then feel set apart from other Americans, we've both agreed on that usage of language. If I shrug it off, and work to prevent myself from internalizing the supposed difference, then the speakers intent no longer carries any weight. If they don't intent to set me apart, then how I feel about their words relies on what I believe about what they've said.

There is nothing inherent to the term African-American that makes it oppressive. It's not a riot baton or water cannon wielded in anger. The Oppressive Language List says as much. "Can be interpreted as" does a lot of the heavy lifting. There will be people that tell me that an interpretation as "othering" is the correct one, there is a different group of people who will say otherwise. How I will feel about that word rests on which group of people I choose to believe. And it's that choice that imbues language with power. If someone intends to use language to oppress me, and I refuse to cooperate, what error have I made? What responsibility am I shirking when I decline to be offended?

And this is the genuine failure of projects like the Oppressive Language List. The PARC claims to recognize "that language is a powerful tool that can be used to perpetrate and perpetuate oppression." But what other "powerful tool" can operate only with the consent and cooperation, tacit or express, of the subject it is used on? If wood were able to say "yeah, I'm not feeling it today," and render saws impotent, would we still regard them as worthwhile? The power of language comes from the way we are taught to interact with it. Education and emotion, not linguistics, are what drives the euphemism treadmill. If "fetch" can be prevented from happening, "rule of thumb" can have its bogus folk etymology ignored.

Testing

So it's another Fourth of July, marking 245 years of "the American Experiment." The idea of the United States as an experiment is a common one. And, like a number of common ideas, it means different things to different people, and so has lost a more generalized, broadly understood definition.

According to Merriam-Webster online, an experiment is "an operation or procedure carried out under controlled conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law, to test or establish a hypothesis, or to illustrate a known law." It's understood that there's nothing "controlled" about any of this, but that still leaves the second half of the definition, namely, what is "the American Experiment" intended to inform us of?

I get the impression that for many people, the United States illustrates a known law. People look at the country and find in it confirmation of what they want to understand about themselves and their place in the world, whether that's the idea that "hard work and playing by the rules leads to success" or "wealth and power run the world at the expense of the masses." And as happens from time to time, even in more formal scientific research, there is a tendency to pick and choose from the available evidence in the service of supporting one's chosen conclusion.

And this is an obstacle to the United States simply being a place. A fairly large chunk of real estate with people on it. People who, really, aren't much, if any, different from people in any other part of the world. They respond to many of the same incentives, and have many of the same goals. Casting the nation as an experiment freights it with something to prove, whether that's something that people already believe they know, or something new and different. Either way, I don't know that it can live up to that, or even if it should live up to that.

What's In a Name?

In news that should surprise no-one who has actually met a human being, people named Alexa have been the targets of consistent bullying, such that the popularity of the name had plummeted and parents are renaming their children. Of course, children being bullied or harassed because of their names is nothing new. Children are often no less desperate to find meaning in their lives by making themselves out to be better than other people than adults, and if a name offers an avenue of attack, it's going to be exploited. Part of the reason why one sees #peopleareawful so often is that they start young.

And so while I understand the complaints of parents, who would like for Amazon to alter the devices default wake word, the chances of that are slim. Mainly because the branding that Amazon has already built up around the devices is likely worth billions, and between members of the public calling for some consideration and shareholders looking for value, it's a given which of those groups Amazon is more beholden to.

Not to mention the fact that the damage has already been done. The name "Alexa" will be toxic for people for generations to come. Any move by Amazon to change the branding now would likely result in anger among the public, as well as shareholders, as people who have come to enjoy their Alexa units, and their names, accuse the complainers of ruining a good thing through being unwilling to take being treated as something less than human with a smile. For all that the United States is considered a wealthy nation, it's people are often unwilling to suffer the loss of even items of trivial importance. Leave them no other choice and one will have a front row seat to #peopleareawful. So while it would be a gesture of goodwill (and an expensive one, at that) I don't know that it would actually fix anything.

In the end, I suspect that the people behind the name "Alexa" in the first place didn't really understand what they were letting people in for. With any luck, this will be a learning experience, although it's unlikely that there will be another entrant into the voice-activated assistant market for a while. Microsoft's Cortana system (which eventually became an unfortunate naming choice for other reasons) never really caught on, and while I could see a Chinese company taking a shot at it (using their protected home market to catch up technologically), I think that concerns about the Chinese Communist Party using it as a tool for direct espionage would limit adoption in a lot of Western nations, if it wasn't simply banned outright.

It's too bad. Alexa is a nice name. But sometimes we just can't have nice things because that takes more cooperation between people than is realistic.