Woodpile

A combination of high tide and brisk onshore winds dropped a surprising amount of wood on the beach at Carkeek Park in north Seattle. There was quite an interesting variety of items, including what looked to be the top post of a bannester from someone's home. I suspect that a pile of junk wood was washed into the Sound with the rains last week, and it was now being deposited. Although some of the wood, like the log in the upper right, had apparently been in the water for some time.
 

One, Two

Many Americans fervently believe that the Second Amendment protects their right to bear arms everywhere, including at public protests. Many Americans also believe that the First Amendment protects their right to speak freely and participate in political protest. What most people do not realize is that the Second Amendment has become, in recent years, a threat to the First Amendment. People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives.
Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick, The Second Amendment Has Become a Threat to the First, The Atlantic. Wednesday 27 October, 2021

"Many Americans," it seems, don't understand what the Bill of Rights was actually about. One can argue with the intent of the Bill of Rights, and, for that matter, with the intent of the Constitution of the United States as a whole. And one can certainly argue with their efficacy in practice. As much as many Conservative Americans have a sense that the Constitution made the United States into a uniquely free and fair society from the moment the last quill left the parchment, there's a valid counter-argument, and one with plenty of support in the historical record, that it was at least 190 years before the lofty ideals laid out were seriously enacted.

But back to the opening quote, which is the beginning of the cited article. The First Amendment does not create a absolute privilege to practice a religion, speak freely or petition the government free of any potential consequences. It simply says that governments, whether they be at the federal, state or local level, may not criminalize or otherwise punish such behavior. If an ill-tempered next-door neighbor takes exception to someone's choice of words and starts a fistfight, that's not a violation of the Constitution. It's simply assault and battery. Now, if a government decides that it will decline to prosecute assaults on its critics, with an eye on allowing ordinary citizens to do what it cannot, that would be problematic. (And this is why the Texas abortion law has been making a number of people worried, regardless of their stands on abortion rights.) But the First Amendment does not require governments to treat threats of violence made with the aim of silencing people more seriously than it treats other threats of violence.

Likewise, the Second Amendment is not a blanket license to walk around with a weapon wherever one pleases. If a property owner, including government property owners, says that weapons are not allowed on the premises, then they are not allowed on the premises. Again, no Constitutional right has been violated. Whether or not a government may effectively declare ownership of any and all public spaces within its jurisdiction, and effectively criminalize bearing arms in those spaces may be a matter of debate, but it's also a slightly different question. There are people who believe that the right to keep and bear arms should be limited only to the home, and the reasoning behind that is easy to understand. But so is reasoning that says that people were intended to be allowed to bear weapons more broadly.

Part of the problem with the idea that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights represent the best ideals of humanity (outside of the fact that such a claim certainly leaves room for debate) is the sense that no trade-offs were involved. But personally, I find it rather difficult to believe that the people who wrote the documents didn't consider that someone might use the processes and freedoms listed within to bad ends. It also seems unlikely that someone would believe that granting the general public the right to keep and bear arms would never result in someone being injured or killed inappropriately. And the common argument that people during the founding of the nation didn't envision military weapons in the hands of civilians sort of falls flat. A well-made musket of the time was basically a military-grade weapon, and many members of the Continental Army had brought their own weapons. This practice continued even up to the Civil War, when the Union and the Confederacy alike had too few weapons to equip all of the troops they had recruited.

But that's beside the point of this posting. Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick lay out beliefs about the Constitution that, even if "many Americans" think are true, are not the way the document actually works. As concerns free speech advocates, the problem is not the Second Amendment, but the age-old difficulty that arises in judging when someone intends to threaten another person. There is a mindset in the United States that associates violence with guns, because that's what tends to attract the media coverage. And while guns are a weapon of choice for a large number of violent encounters, they aren't the only choice. Just the rate for stabbings alone in the United States is about half of the entire homicide rate for the United Kingdom. At some point, the idea that violence is a good way of solving problems is going to have to be dealt with. And I don't think the Constitution will be much help there, even if people have come to understand what it says.

Clean Sweep

Washington State's Secretary of State, Kim Wyman, has been hired to be election security lead for the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. I have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed by this. I liked Secretary Wyman, and was hoping that she'd run for Congress, or maybe Governor (not that I'm sure she'd have won; the state hasn't had a Republican governor since the mid-1980s). But instead, she's off to the Biden Administration, and while I wish her the best in her new role, that does leave the state without any Republicans in statewide office.

And I have a sinking feeling that I know what that means.

During the last Governor's race, the Republican Candidate, Loren Culp, had little going for him other than not being Governor Inslee. Other than that he was basically a Trumpist no-hoper. The fact that he managed to outperform the former President's numbers means that he had a bit of support from outside of President Trump's base, but despite that, the race wasn't even close. Mr. Culp's insistence that he'd lost due to voting irregularities made him look like someone who hoped to ride the Trumpist bandwagon, rather than a serious candidate.

I have a bit of worry that this is the kind of candidate that the Republican Party will run for the next Secretary of State election. On the one hand, it makes sense that this is what they would wind up doing. After all, there are a fair number of Trumpist Republicans in Washington, and so it's likely that a fellow Trumpist will be the only one with a chance of surviving the primary. Of course, the top-two primary system complicates things somewhat, but it's unlikely that the Democrats will allow themselves to wind up in a position where they have no-one on the podium. And pretty much any Democrat is going to beat a Trumpist Republican, leaving Washington effectively a one-party state for state government.

Which is far from the worst thing in the world, but I'd rather a bit more of a mix to elected officials. But I'm not a Trumpist, and if the past few years have shown me anything it's that those who are Trumpists don't care what I think.

Tipping the Scale

I was talking to a friend about the general state of the world around us, and we came to a simple conclusion: Humanity does not scale well. It was something of a triviality at the time, a basic aphorism that arose out of a conversation because it neatly explained the central theses of that particular conversation, but in the intervening years, I've noticed that it seems to be more generally applicable.

It is, however, not a particularly obvious conclusion to come to. After all, by some measures, humanity is a remarkably successful species, mostly due to its spread across the globe. While people are sometimes given more credit than they are due for the impacts that humanity is capable of having on the environment, the fact of the matter remains that human beings have the capacity to deliberately create a mass extinction event that rivals any of those in the fossil record. And for quite some time, the fear was that this would come about because of rivalry and hostility between different groups.

People are, it seems, expert at not getting along with one another. But that, I think, ignores the fact that all animals compete for resources, and not necessarily only when said resources are scarce. Humans  have come to inhabit every ecosystem on Earth that is even marginally livable, because for many people, time and again, the answer to competition was to look elsewhere for sustenance, if not always prosperity. The human migrations that have produced the phenomena people refer to as race and foreign languages were all driven by the fact that human groups could only grow so large before they found themselves incapable of meeting the challenges of their local areas through cooperation. It's built into the basic architecture of the species.

Of course, there is a problem with the idea that humanity does not scale well because there are legitimate barriers that mean that it cannot scale well. Humans, like all animals, are driven to reproduce. While there are large numbers of people for whom being parents is a sub-optimal choice, for many others, it's simply the thing to do. Sometimes that's for reasons of economics and other times out of reaching for a form of joy, but whatever the reason, there are a myriad of reasons that people seek to multiply.

I don't know how that tension will ultimately resolve itself. It's possible that it never will. But I suspect that eventually, the limits of humanity's ability to scale will catch up to humanity's ability to use technology to expand those limits. This will not result in the end of humanity, more than likely. But it will be highly disruptive, even though it's become more and more clear to me that the inability of humanity to scale indefinitely is known, if not always understood.

Now See This

While the general point of news (or "news") stories online is to read them, a number of them come with photographs, often licensed from outlets such as Getty Images and the like, designed to add more context.

In "File Under: It was only a matter of time," we have the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine being linked to the Biblical "Mark of the Beast." Because why wouldn't it be? As was noted in an article I read in Slate several years ago (2005, to be exact): "There's something in the bloodstream of American Christianity that looks for, and reacts to, signs of the apocalypse." And since the supposed mark is one such sign, I suspect that a lot more people than might be admitted to see it as a hopeful sign that a world they view as hostile, and are hostile to in turn, is coming to an end.

I'm always unclear on the rationale for selecting photos like this to accompany a news story. The people in them tend to come across as appearing to be something between disingenuous and actively mentally unbalanced, and since there was no-one involved in the production of the news story involved in the photography, there's no context. It's just seems to reinforce this idea that conspiracy theories are running amok and being used by shady people who somehow have something against public health. The story, which ran on the National Public Radio website, was about people choosing to leave jobs that required vaccination rather than have a vaccine, and photos like this simply don't speak to that.

In other news, the shooting of two people on the set of the new Alec Baldwin movie "Rust" has generated a renewed flurry of interest in how firearms are simulated (and used) in motion picture production. This is, to be sure, something that most people really don't pay attention to. There's the common idea that it's all special effects or something like the starting gun at a track and field meet; and, of course, the reality is much more complicated. As The Atlantic's entry into the fray noted: "A variety of different guns are used in film productions. Those include rubber guns that don’t function at all, airsoft guns with simulated blowback, blank-firing props, and even real functioning firearms." And while this covers a variety of the sorts of not-actually-real-firearms out there, it doesn't cover all of them.

This photograph, also sourced from Getty Images, is a simple, spring-loaded airsoft gun. The bright orange tip and the thin magazine are dead giveaways for anyone familiar with the type. I could see using one of these in moviemaking (mainly by poorly-resourced enthusiast filmmakers), but it would require a decent amount of clean-up if the "weapon" were ever removed from a holster. After all, the orange muzzles are designed to be highly visible specifically so people seeing the object understand that it isn't a real firearm. (Not that this always works, but still...) Honestly, if one were making a movie where a gun simply needed to be visible, there are much better choices. And while one should wear eye protection when using these things, they're not particularly dangerous; this isn't the sort of prop that winds up somehow having live ammunition loaded into it.

This, to me anyway, speaks to the lack of familiarity that many people, even the media have with firearms, real or simulated. A photo editor who knew what they were looking at would likely have selected a different image, one more appropriate to the story being told.

I am left with the feeling that for a lot of news outlets, pictures are simply a requirement. As long as it seems close to the topic at hand, run with it. And I understand that. There's also the fact that sometimes, people don't know what they don't know. And, of course, the fact that I'm just nit-picking. This sort of thing is the result of there not being much concern with it, in the end. I'm looking closely, but I don't think that I'm just one of many.

Unmeaning

Articles on “the meaning of life” tend to avoid defining their terms clearly, and this tends to make them less than useful. Professor Brooks’ “The Meaning of Life Is Surprisingly Simple” falls into this trap, although not in the way one might think. About midway through the piece Professor Brooks notes that psychologists Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger defined meaning as being made up of Coherence, Purpose and Significance. Fair enough. But in their paper, they are quite clear on the fact that they were looking at meaning in life, as opposed to the more philosophical question about the meaning of life.

And so when Professor Brooks exhorts readers to “Go find the meaning of life!” and then says “People who believe that they know their life’s meaning enjoy greater well-being than those who don’t,” as far as Professors Martela and Steger are concerned, he’s referring to two different endeavors, the first philosophical, and the second psychological. And I think that this is something of an important distinction, because one can be an existential nihilist, and believe that there is no meaning of life, and this is the very reason why one should look for meaning in life. And so the statement “All of this advice relies on one very strong assumption—that life actually has meaning,” isn’t necessarily so. Life, and an individual’s life, are not synonyms.

The other reason why I think that the distinction between the meaning of life and meaning in life (or the meaning of one’s own life) is important is that the psychological question allows for individual answers. According to Professor Brooks:

For example, Christians believe that life is significant because God loves us; that our purpose is to love and serve God and other people; and that God has a coherent plan for our lives, whether it is clear to us or not.

But a follower of Shinto, or a Hindu, would have been taught a completely different outlook on things. Their answers to the questions of Coherence, Purpose and Significance would (if not should) likely be completely different. On the scale of a meaning of life, to the degree that their answers are mutually exclusive with those of Professor Brooks’ hypothetical Christian, then one or another party (if not both) must be mistaken. But if those answers are personal, then everyone is free to find whatever ones best suit them. The Christian and the Hindu may find different meaning in life, and understand the facets of that meaning differently. And I note the phrasing that Professor Brooks used; it’s much more universal than finding meaning in life would lead one to. I suspect that this comes from attempting to make the facets that Professors Martela and Steger identified fit the broader philosophical question that they had declined to engage with.

Professors Martela and Steger note: “In order to live in the world as reflective beings, humans seem to need three things: they need to comprehend the world around them, they need to find direction for their actions, and they need to find worth in their lives.” I will confess that I don’t understand what they mean by “reflective beings.” As I understand it, I am perfectly capable of reflection, despite not feeling (or presumably, having satisfied) their three needs. I’m unclear on why living in the world as a reflective being and having found meaning in one’s life should be synonymous. But their broader point is one that I find tends to pop up a lot in discussion of meaning – the idea that there is a certain, better, way to live, and that meaning will come out of that. A “meaningful life” and “a life without meaning,” aren’t just different, they exist on a value hierarchy. And I think that sometimes, attempting to support those value judgements becomes the point. Maybe that’s why clear definitions are sometimes scarce, because objective language and subjective valuations don’t always work well together.

All For One

It's legitimate to say that once an emergency has started, there is no time to worry about building trust. But that, more than anything else, is the reason to worry about building trust when there isn't an emergency going on.

The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic exemplifies this. Because of the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant (which may still be the one that's currently ascendant in the United States) the level of immunity, natural or vaccine-induced, that's needed to impede infections from easily moving to new hosts is pretty high; therefore, interventions designed to slow disease spread (whether pharmaceutical or social) have a high sensitivity to defections. And it's not difficult to find columnists from a number of different backgrounds calling for measures to mandate, if not compel, greater cooperation.

Somewhat harder is finding people willing to comment about the overall lack of trust that drives the defections. It should not be taken as given that people understand that vaccination is safe, effective and low (or no) cost. It's a bit disingenuous to presume that, and from there label people as somehow anti-social for looking out for themselves. In the end, people take care of societies, because they expect that societies will take care of them. If people were willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater good that they themselves would never be able to participate in, the world would look much different than it does.
 

Camped

A small homeless encampment on a sidewalk in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood.

Everyone has an opinion about the fairly large population of homeless people who live in the greater Seattle area. Whether they're viewed as slackers, victims of corporate greed or threats to public safety and health, no one wants to do the one thing that would actually help the situation; increase the amount of local housing stock to the point that prices come down. The Puget Sound region, like a lot of urban areas populated by the well-educated and reasonably affluent, has significant regulatory restrictions on where housing can be built. In this case, the goal was preserve open spaces and rural communities. But the side effect was to keep the housing supply from growing with the demand. And that mismatch has made a number of people quite "house rich," as they like to say. Lowering home prices is a direct threat to their property values, and thus, home equity. And so people complain about tents in the street, secure in the knowledge that they won't be asked to lose a dime to remove them. And no lawmaker is going to create the circumstances that removes them at the cost of billions of dollars of paper wealth being erased. People would rather scowl all the way to the bank.
 

Playing Pretend

I encountered Eminem's "Stan" yesterday. (Although, to be sure, I don't make a career of living under rocks.) I'm not really into hip-hop and rap, and have always tended to pass on artists who built reputations as being intentionally transgressive, so I'd never really paid any attention to Mr. Mathers' work or the controversies he sparked. But when listening to "Stan," I found it really interesting, and so set out to learn more about it. And from there I learned that the video for it was pretty heavily... redacted for general consumption.

But the Internet being the Internet, it wasn't hard to find what I'm given to understand is an original release version, and watch it. And, as I'm sure you've guessed, I'm not really sure what all the fuss is about. Okay, I'm old enough to understand that one person's cautionary tale is often viewed as another's how-to video. When I worked with children, back in my twenties, one of the more senior staffers once told me that the problem with telling kids "don't do drugs" was that all they would hear was "do drugs." And it's a legitimate concern, to be honest. After all, there are people who use the word "stan" to proudly self-define themselves as superfans of something, despite the fact that Stanley Mitchell is clearly not intended to be a role-model for anyone.

But for all that the story of "Stan" is that of a obsessive fan whose anger at perceiving themselves to be ignored by a celebrity who they feel owes them something culminates in a tragic murder-suicide, the eight-minute video is more poignant than over-the-top. There are Lifetime movies that are more disturbing.

Watching Stan's disintegration over the course of the video (which is a really excellent exercise in short-form storytelling, both visually and lyrically), I started to wonder if a general sense that the rough edges of society must never see the light of day leads to people feeling alone in what are really common situations. While I'm sure that people driving themselves from bridges with their pregnant girlfriend locked in the trunk is far from an everyday occurrence, abusiveness that escalates to fatal violence isn't. And a general attitude that children need to be kept within a world that pretends that this doesn't exist renders them unprepared for the eventuality.

It was an debate that simmered constantly when I worked with children. While policy was to limit their exposure to things that adults deemed too distressing or unpleasant, for the population that we were working with, many of them had already experienced abuse of some form or another, and were likely to experience it again once they aged out into the world around them. And it's hard to prepare someone for something while maintaining that its entire existence is fictional.

There is something about American society, I think, that prevents it from looking itself in the mirror on a regular basis. I don't claim to be above being put out when the person who looks back at me in the mirror is the person who I am, rather than some person I might wish to be, but I understand that if I am to have any hope of reconciling the two, I have to know my starting point. This is simply how it works. I think. But maybe I'm incorrect about that. After all, humanity has made it this far and the pretense shows no sign of going away.

Jumping the Gun

So I know that I mentioned the bow attack in Kongsberg, Norway yesterday, and I really hadn't intended to beat that drum again. But when I saw the headline: "Kongsberg: Bow and arrow attack appears to be terrorism - officials," I figured I'd take a look.

A deadly bow and arrow attack in Norway which left five people dead appears to have been an act of terror, Norway's security service (PST) said.

The suspect, a 37-year-old Danish citizen named Espen Andersen Brathen, had converted to Islam and there were fears he had been radicalised.

However a motive has not yet been determined.

Um... if "a motive has not yet been determined" how can the attack appear to be terrorism? Just because the guy converted to Islam? That's shouldn't be enough to mark someone as a terrorist. Terrorism is supposed to be violence with a political motive, not simply violence by someone of a certain religion.

A police lawyer told public broadcaster NRK he would be assessed by psychiatrists. During a press conference PST head Hans Sverre Sjovold said the suspect had been "in and out of the health system for some time".

Chris Rock might seem to be an odd choice to quote here, but "Whatever happened to crazy?" Here's a man whose has apparently been treated for mental illness or instability on more than one occasion, and when he start walking around shooting people with arrows, he'd judged a terrorist because he converted to Islam?

A couple of years ago, someone once asked me, if I had to chose a religion, which would I select, and I said: "Islam." And this was my reasoning: Unlike other Americans, one never hears of a Moslem being mentally ill, or even simply criminally inclined - only radicalization, it seems, can prompt them to step out of line. Given that, as a closeted non-believer, I'd be unlikely to ever become devout enough that the more radical elements would hold any appeal to me, I could simply assure myself both of living an upright life, and being proof against the mental diseases and defects that have visited themselves upon various members of my extended family. And now it appears that even Europeans, for all that they're supposedly more enlightened than us here in the United States, buy into that same logic. It's bizarre.

It really should take more than someone deciding that it's time to avenge the Crusades to sustain the suspicion of terrorism. Especially when their mental health is in doubt. To do otherwise waters down the concept to next to nothing, and contributes to the idea that all of Islam's many and varied adherents are capable of becoming a threat for no other reason than their specific view of the face of the divine.

Means to Ends

In Kongsberg, Norway, a man has killed five people and wounded two others with a bow. This has the potential to become a big story over on this side of the Atlantic, as part of our ongoing "debate" about gun control. Which is a shame, because I suspect that political opportunism involved will leave little room for giving a rip about the dead and injured.

And for me, it becomes another bit of evidence that perhaps the focus on firearms is misplaced. While Americans tend to associate guns (especially semi-automatic rifles) with violence, the fact of the matter is that there are any number of things that one can use to injure or kill another human being. And in the end, it's not possible to ban them all. And a lot of the violence in the United States is one-on-one; two people getting into a fight that escalates, or a man (usually) attacking his partner for some or another reason. While episodes of mass violence perpetrated against strangers make the headlines, because they convince people that something bad could happen to them at any time, in any place such that nowhere is "safe," the fact of the matter is that they are the exception, rather than the rule.

What really needs to change is the general idea that violence is a workable solution to problems. Some guy on your turf who doesn't belong there? Violence will take care of it. Your partner not living up to whatever random standards you've set? Violence will sort them out. The local school board not on board with your preferred teaching methods? Send death threats via text or e-mail. These are all commonplace activities. And sure, a lot of people hide the fact that they've engaged in this sort of behavior, because it tends to come with jail sentences, but I'm not sure that it comes with the level of social disapproval that it should. Because there are people who will stand up in support of all of these activities. And that support buttresses people against the disapproval of the broader society.

Putting the blame on the tools for causing injury is easy. Making the broader social changes to reduce the support for violence as a method of problem solving is extremely difficult. But I don't know if that validates what sometimes seems like a complete disinterest in doing the work.

In Need of a Hero

When we're young, it's easy to imagine ourselves as always being on the right side of history. We like to think that, if we were trapped in cruel or barbaric societies, we would be the brave ones stepping in to stop injustice.

Yet as we grow older, we realize that heroism can exact a daunting price.
John Powers "Heroism Exacts A Daunting Price In 'Wife Of A Spy' And 'Azor'"

When I was young, the general consensus was, as Mr. Powers points out, that stepping in was all that was needed to stop injustice. By my early twenties, I'd come to view that as false. The forces of injustice, I presumed, had the will and the way to deal with those who opposed them, and that they were willing to use murder and fear to keep people in line.

I eventually came to see that rather conspiratorial mindset as itself false, because I realized that cruelty, barbarism and injustice are all subjective. Very few people are intentionally cruel, in the sense that they inflict pain primarily for the enjoyment of seeing others suffer unnecessary torment. When the Greeks coined the term that is now the English "barbarian," it was out of a sense of cultural superiority over those who spoke languages that, as far as the Greeks were concerned, were simply babbling. English still uses the term to denote those less "civilized" than the speaker's in-group, often crediting them with a love of the backwards and unenlightened. Robert Howard's critiques of "civilized" people from his Conan the Barbarian stories are lost on most, it seems. And most injustice is simply another person's idea of justice. Again, few people are willfully unjust. And the determination of whether standing up to one's society is a brave stand for justice or an ill-conceived rebellion against it is made after the fact. Not to mention that such determinations are often fickle. Today's heroes can be tomorrow's villains as standard shift.

The youthful ideal that justice is as easy as stepping forward comes from the common storytelling trope that posits that true justice is a self-evident thing; something that everyone is naturally aware of. People are born wanting "to do the right thing" but due to a lack of communication, feel that they are the only ones who yearn for something different. And so while it may be brave for the Special Chosen Person to make that first stand, the change is autocatalyzing as people realize that they aren't alone in wanting change.

But it may be more accurate to understand justice as a broad consensus of social norms, traditions at various scales and personal understandings. While this may be unsatisfying to a moral realist outlook, it is, as I experience it, much more in line with how the world actually works.

Given this, "the right side of history" is something that's unknowable in the present; it's determined by people who may not even have been born when an individual feels called upon to make a stand. Here in the present, standing up to one's "cruel or barbaric" society in order to be the brave one that steps in to stop injustice is simply rocking the boat. When heroism exacts a daunting price, it's because it's not seen as heroic. One person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist, and one person's smart fighting is another person's atrocity for a reason. Even a secular saint such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn't widely regarded as a hero until after he became a martyr. It wasn't until the bend in the arc of history was clearly evident that people rushed to proclaim their support.

And for many, the price of heroism is daunting because people, especially affluent people, tend to be easily daunted. For all that people like to dream of being willing to face prison or execution in the name of standing up, the most common barrier is simply the disapproval of family and friends. Sometimes, the threat of being lonely is all that it takes to prevent someone from attempting to drive a change.

Framed

It can be difficult to win a debate (or, for that matter, an argument) if one starts out with buying into a hostile framing.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have seen and heard (one in print, and other other in a podcast) a couple of journalists sparring with people over whether Black Americans were disproportionately targeted by the American criminal justice system. And in both cases, the person being interviewed fell back on the "who commits the most crimes" canard.

Here's the problem with that. It only known who committed a crime in situations where the crime was recorded by something. It's understood that eyewitness, and even victim, testimony isn't 100% reliable. People have been exonerated after other people swore that they were the perpetrator.

So the answer to "who commits the most crimes" is almost always "We don't know." Especially in situations where the clearance rate (let alone the reporting rate) is low. Across the board, the clearance rate in the United States for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, the single best category of those tracked, is just under 62 percent. And note that the FBI considers a case "cleared" if someone is arrested, charged and turned over for prosecution. By this standard, every acquittal is still a cleared case. Presumably there is some way for departments to report that a case previously considered cleared had become un-cleared, but it's already understood that departments are lax about (if not outright opposed to) deleting the arrest records of people who aren't later convicted of a crime. Why should we expect that they would report to the FBI that a case should no longer be considered cleared?

But a potentially bigger problem with attempting to deflect charges of racial bias among police agencies with "who commits the most crimes" is that it's police records that people are falling back on. So the argument becomes circular. The records of who police arrest across demographics is assumed to be representative of the population of people committing crimes, because it matches the demographics of those arrests. It's a tautology.

And so rather than attempt to argue with supporters of generally understood police practice, journalists and others should reject the framing, because that framing presupposes that police have never acted with any biases, something we understand to not be true.

Jump Scared

It's neither surprising nor news that millennials are having fewer children: The economy is screwed; the environment is doomed; there's a raging pandemic; and we've culturally moved beyond the heteronormative go-to-college-get-married-have-babies pipeline.
Jeva Lange "Lamb is the bonkers new A24 horror film you won't stop talking about"

Perhaps it's just me, but pointing the finger at Facebook for making people angry and depressed seems a little like scapegoating when a review of a horror film seems to go out of its way to paint real life as just as bad as any fictional dystopia.

So, while I haven't been to a haunted house in literally decades, I still remember them as fun, and understand the wanting to be somewhat scared yet understanding that there's no real danger. And I think that a lot of people look for that. The posts that people have lifted from Facebook and shared with me are often all about people expressing their anger or depression at the state of the world, and these posts can rack up large numbers of "likes."

Of course, "the algorithm" serves up these posts like toxic candy, but on some level, people eat them up. This how "the algorithm" learned that this is what it should serve people. An old co-worker once posted on LinkedIn that one should always think prior to responding to something that pushes one's emotional buttons. Of course, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to take that advise, but there's still a lot of daylight between that and casting people as broadly incapable of understanding that it's maybe good to stay away from something that they've concluded is bad for them.

And that would lessen the number of news stories that lean heavily on promoting anger and despair, too. Making the case that Millennials tend to find the world dismal has nothing to do with Lamb. It's not not necessary to help a reader understand either the film or it's themes. It's just a random bit of doomsaying; maybe it was hoped that someone would share it on Facebook.

What People Want

A California man is suing a psychic who he says falsely claimed she could remove a curse put on his marriage by a witch hired by his ex-girlfriend.
US man sues psychic who 'promised to remove ex-girlfriend curse'

This, for me, is a clear illustration of the phenomenon of "news as entertainment." While there may be something about this story that points to a something interesting and newsworthy about American society, I'm not sure that this 250-word piece from the BBC actually gets at any of it. There's certainly nothing that one can take action on in the story. While I'm not sure that a source that appears to take itself as seriously as the BBC would ever implement a "News of the Weird" or "Fluff" section, that's really where this story belongs. It's a moderately interesting diversion, nothing more.

Of course, the BBC is in something of a bind here. Because, lets face it, the reason why someone made the decision to run with this story was that person decided that it would be good for page-views. After all, the BBC does run advertising. And a corollary to giving the people what they want is calling it what they want it to be called. For all that people may advise otherwise, human beings have a tendency to place conditions on their own self-esteem. And, as a result, people can be fairly reliably counted on to gravitate towards things that confirm that they are acting within the conditions that they set for themselves.

And so the BBC doesn't label as such a story that is little more than random gossip about a man who believes in the supernatural to a greater degree than people in developed Western nations are "supposed" to. This story, rather than delving into the cultural makeup of the United States and interrogating the degree to which beliefs in things like psychic powers and witchcraft exist and are tied to certain cultural forces and/or groups, is a short "puff piece" that reads like an invitation to point and laugh at a foolish man who was blatantly hoodwinked by an obvious charlatan. And while "point and laugh" media does nothing for me, personally, it's a pretty big business, if the number of cable and streaming television shows that appear to hold their subjects up as objects of derision is any indication.

I don't know if there is anything to be done to help people become more at ease with the people who that are, and less concerned with presenting themselves as who they feel they should be. Exhortations for people to "be authentic" or "bring their 'genuine selves' to work" seem hollow in societies that appear to regard telling people "you're different, and that's bad" as something of a national pastime.

And perhaps that's the irony of this story. It holds up a man to scrutiny for being out-of-step with the picture of what a modern American should be, while allowing the reader to hide from the fact that they're perhaps being less serious in their news consumption than they believe a modern educated Westerner should be.

In The Air

The sightseeing balloons are still at it. But it's late in the season, and as Fall really settles in, it will become too cold and wet to keep doing this. Still, it's nice to see that people are still having the chance to get above it all for a while, and go where the winds will have them.

October Showers

... Bring Autumn flowers. No, I'm not turning Nobody In Particular into a photo blog, because I still suck at taking pictures. But I'm somewhat burned out on politics and whatnot for right now, and so I'm turning to photography as something of a break. But I suspect that I'll return to grousing about the state of the world before not too much longer.